Timon of Athens - Date and Text

Date and Text

The play was entered into the Stationers' Register in 1623. There are no contemporary allusions to the play by which its date of composition may be determined; nor is there an agreed means of explaining the play's "loose ends and inconsistencies". Editors since the twentieth century have sought to remedy these defects through conjectures about Shakespeare's emotional development (Chambers); hypotheses concerning the play's "unfinished state" (Ellis-Fermor) and "scribal interference" (Oliver); and through statistical analyses of vocabulary, stage directions, and so forth. The editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, having concluded that Middleton and Shakespeare were jointly responsible for the play, assign the play to 1605, on the basis of previous analyses of colloquialism-in-verse and rare vocabulary.

Shakespeare, in writing the play, probably drew upon the twenty-eighth novella of William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, the thirty-eighth novella of which was the main source for his All's Well That Ends Well. He also drew upon Plutarch's Lives, and perhaps Lucian's Dialogues and a lost comedy on the subject of Timon, allusions to which survive from 1584.