SOURCE: "Blackfriars: The Pageant of Timon of Athens" in Shakespeare the Craftsman: The Clark Lectures, 1968, 1969. Reprint by Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 144-67.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1966, Bradbrook contends that Shakespeare wrote Timon of Athens for the new indoor theater at Blackfriars, where the critic suggests the play was staged in late 1609.

When an Elizabethan craftsman printed off a volume, painted an inn-sign or erected a gorgeous playing place in the fields, each took traditional forms. Adapting to local need, adding fine touches, he followed what as an apprentice he had learned, so that we recognize at once the proportions of an arch that Ben Jonson might have pointed, the shape of embroidered gauntlets that John Shakespeare of Stratford might have cut and sewn. John's eldest son too was a craftsman; his models, though not defined by classical rules, might be recognized and...