SOURCE: "Tragical Satire," in The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance, Yale University Press, 1959, pp. 192-246.

In the following excerpt, Kernan, calling Timon of Athens "the most penetrating analysis ever made of the satiric sense of life," argues that the title character represents an aberration of nature whose "diseased outlook" stems from a perversion of goodwill.

In Timon of Athens (c. 1605) Shakespeare … turned his attention to the satiric sense of life and the satiric character developed in the new satire. But Timon takes quite a different direction than does Troilus, for here the satiric character occupies the center of the stage and the play is primarily a search for the causes of this diseased outlook. Where Thersites is simply a given, a dark energy who has no final explanation, Timon the satirist is a mutation, a distortion of a nature which was originally one of love and...