Timon of Athens Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John M. Wallace

Critical Essay by John M. Wallace

SOURCE: "Timon of Athens and the Three Graces: Shakespeare's Senecan Study," in Modern Philology, Vol. 83, No. 4, May, 1986, pp. 349-63.

In the following essay, Wallace analyzes Timon of Athens from a Senecan perspective, suggesting that Shakespeare was influenced by the philosopher's De beneficiis and his ideas on gift-giving.

For reasons which are understandable enough, Shakespeare's modern editors have decided that Timon of Athens

is a "schematic" play in which, as David Bevington puts it [in Complete Works (1973)], "the dramatic situation is also unusually static for Shakespeare." Frank Kermode, in the most widely used college text [The Riverside Shakespeare (1974)], comments that Timon...
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