For reasons which are understandable enough, Shakespeare's modern editors have decided that of Athens play in which, as David Bevington puts it, dramatic situation also unusually static for Shakespeare. Frank Kermode, in the most widely used college text, comments that a tragedy of ideas, much more schematic than Hamlet and adds that play was evidently designed to consist of two halves illustrating contrasting modes of excess. In spite of a cunning diversification of texture . . . the series of interviews between Timon's servants and false friends which constitutes the bulk of Act III shows how simple the scheme of the play is; and the second half consists of procession of visitors to static More recently, in chapter entitled Big Idea, John Bayley has been even more emphatic; claiming that 'big idea' does not [generally] go with Shakespearean tragedy, he considers to be an exception. There nothing in the least elusive about Timon. He the centre of his play and his point and function are equally unmistakable . . . the idea seems so tyrannical that the construction process has to be continued all the way. Two 'states,' of generosity and misanthropy, are necessary for displaying the point and drama of Timon: he moves from one to the other, and that the end of the matter. The language of the play brilliantly rhetorical, but mechanical nonetheless, while himself lacks inwardness, although his hurt touching. His violence, Bayley concludes, is never quite convincing, never rings and, instead of subtle character, we are left with a 'case'-of special sort-but sort that Shakespeare's sympathy can make us see and feel with.' Because Timon's dramatic structure has seemed to many as oversimplified as the character of himself, the play has often been called Morality, written possibly for an academic occasion. Timon [Shakespeare's] true morality play in the straight sense said A. S. Collins in 1946, and his argument has been elaborated by Anne Lancashire, Michael Tinker, Lewis Walker, and others.2 Yet the immediate source of Shakespeare's ideas about bounty and generosity has not been identified, although Geoffrey Bullough came close when he discussed Cicero's epistle to Laelius.3 More than any other play of Shakespeare's, indebted for its ideas
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Jan 1, 1987
Eric Crozier 
Open Access