SOURCE: "'Magic of Bounty': Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 34-57.

In the following essay, Kahn employs the techniques of feminist psychoanalytic theory and new historicism to examine Timon of Athens, providing an analysis of power during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and King James /.

This essay is inspired by two approaches to Shakespeare: feminist criticism that employs psychoanalytic theory toward a critique of male subjectivity and social norms of masculinity, and "new historicism," which reads cultural practices and literary texts contiguously as representations of political structures and social differences. Both feminists and historicists have produced fresh, invigorating interpretations of Renaissance texts. They tend to work separately, the feminists writing about gender, sexuality, marriage, and the family; the historicists about power, ideology, and politics. Theoretically, however, they ought to share the same terrain, for questions of power cannot...