Victor Kiernan, University of Edinburgh
If the unrestricted competition, the struggle of each against all, that was taking hold of Shakespeare's England may be seen through a glass darkly in earlier plays of his, in Timori of Athens it comes openly, raucously, into the foreground. Here the new social system is firmly established: it is in control of the State, able to dictate its own laws and mould social conduct. A story to crystallize this new mode of life could not be easy to find, and the one Shakespeare hit on gave him a poor drama, though a good enough platform for social criticism. Not all the text we have can be from his pen, though agreement is hard to reach about what is authentic and what is not. If critical opinion of late has favoured a view of the Folio text as derived from 'a not-quite-finished manuscript of Shakespeare' probably dating from 1607 (Soellner 186, 201), it has surely been too easy-going. Many have thought it, with its frequent unmetrical lines and crudities, and its prose in particular, a rough draft only (e.g. Muir, Sequence 187-8). If so, it tells us something of Shakespeare's working methods, and indicates that composition did not always come easily to him. One suggestion has been that a good deal had to be cut out because the Essex rising of 1601 made the staging of any kind of revolt indiscreet (Jorgesen 279-80). But Alcibiades' coup d'état is shown in full and given the author's blessing. Essex has probably been blamed for too many things.
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