SOURCE: Cartelli, Thomas. “The Unaccommodating Text: The Critical Situation of Timon of Athens.” Bucknell Review 29, no. 2 (1985): 81-105.

In the following essay, Cartelli contends that Shakespeare deliberately refused to accommodate the conventional expectations of tragedy in Timon of Athens, and calls the play a “radical experiment in the psychology of theatrical experience.”

I

The “corrupt text on the subject of absolute corruption” that is Timon of Athens has attracted a disproportionately small number of sympathetic scholars to the task of making dramatic sense of the play's own disproportionate blend of “icy precepts” and “sweet degrees.”¹ The text's very corruption has, moreover, provoked even some of the play's most fervent supporters to attempt the critical transformation of this obviously unpolished play into an image and likeness that accords with prevailing standards of Shakespearean dramatic integrity and decorum.² It has also led others, equally sympathetic but more interested in what the...