Timon of Athens, Forms of Payback, and the Genre of Debt

Abstract

A joint endeavor of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Timon of Athens has been summarily dismissed as an ambitious failure. The advent of the New Economic Criticism has cast this play in new light. Economically inflected readings have dominated recent assessments of Timon's sudden shift from altruism in the first two acts to misanthropy in the last three. While analyses that foreground the exigencies of early modern England's culture of credit go far in elucidating the historical backdrop of this obscure play, they presuppose that the key to the mystery of Timon lies in its protagonist. This essay moves away from treating Timon as an exploration of character and investigates instead the relation between its socio-economic context and generic contrariness. By approaching this play as a formal engagement with the problem of the penal debt bond, I show how it functions as a conceptual exercise in competing notions of justice in exchange. In an economy marked by uncertainty in the meaning of money, the debt bond anchored value—but it did so at a price. The bond that bestowed bounty set in motion the wheels of retribution. This play's particular investment in the uneasy divide between distributive and rectificatory modes of justice cannot be fully understood until it is situated in a theatrical enterprise that revolved around debt. (A. B.)