SOURCE: “Wormwood in the Wood Outside Athens: Timon and the Problem for the Audience,” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluation of the Shakespeare Canon, edited by Maurice Charney, Associated University Press, 1988, pp. 166-75.

In the following essay, Mellamphy identifies the inherent problems in Timon of Athens by analyzing the Grand Theatre Company of London Ontartio's performance of the play in 1983.

In the 1960s and throughout the greater part of the 1970s one of the problems that faced the instructor who wished to discuss Measure for Measure before or with an undergraduate audience was how to elicit from that audience some sympathetic appreciation of Isabella's response to Angelo's “most pernicious”¹ proposition. Product of the new morality, champion of sexual permissiveness, that fabulous being, The Typical Undergraduate of the Time, found it difficult to understand Isabella's dilemma: the choice between head and maidenhead, between life and virginity, was not really so difficult...