Timon of Athens
Timon of AthensThis bitter, schematic fable of bankruptcy and misanthropy—which enjoys the dubious distinction of being perhaps the least popular play in the Shakespeare canon—shares many concerns, and a good deal of rare vocabulary, with King Lear, and was probably written shortly before it, in 1604–5. It may have been influenced by an anonymous academic play, Timon (acted at one of the Inns of Court c.1602), and by the depiction of Timon found in William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (1566), a work on which Shakespeare drew for the plot of All's Well That Ends Well (1604–5). However, there is no external evidence to help date the play, which went unmentioned in any extant document until its appearance in the First Folio in 1623.
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It is quite possible that Timon of Athens would have been omitted from the Folio had its compilers not experienced last-minute difficulties in obtaining Troilus and...[The entire page is 2246 words long]
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