SOURCE: “The Shadow of Levelling in Timon of Athens,” in Criticism, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, Fall, 1993, pp. 559-88.

In the essay below, Baldo argues that Shakespeare develops the rhetorical practice of generalizing to a new height in Timons of Athens, unprecedented in renaissance literature.

How little connection there is between money, the most general form of property, and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each other was already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorising petty bourgeois.

—Karl Marx¹

You schal … confound the nobyllys and the commynys togeddur … that ther schal be no differens betwyx the one and the other.

—Thomas Starkey²

The very shadow of levelling, sword-levelling, man-levelling, frightened you, (and who, like your selves, can blame you, because it shook your Kingdome?) but now the substantiality of levelling is coming.

The Eternall God, the mighty Leveller is comming, yea come, even at the...