Timon of Athens - Collaboration

Collaboration

Since the nineteenth century, suggestions have been made that Timon is the work of two writers, and it has been argued that the play's unusual features are the result of the play's being co-authored by playwrights with very different mentalities; the most popular candidate, Thomas Middleton, was first suggested in 1920. A 1917 study by John Mackinnon Robertson posited that George Chapman wrote "A Lover's Complaint" and was the originator of Timon of Athens. These claims were rejected by other commentators, including Bertolt Brecht, Frank Harris, and Rolf Soellner, who claimed that the play was a theatrical experiment. They argued that if one playwright revised another's play it would have been "fixed" to the standards of Jacobean theatre, which is clearly not the case. Soellner believed the play is unusual because it was written to be performed at the Inns of Court, where it would have found a niche audience with young lawyers.

In the past three decades, several linguistic analyses of the text have all discovered apparent confirmation of the theory that Middleton wrote much of the play. It contains numerous words, phrases and punctuation choices that are common in the work of Middleton and rare in Shakespeare. These linguistic markers cluster in certain scenes, apparently indicating that the play is a collaboration between Middleton and Shakespeare, not a revision of one's work by the other. The evidence suggests that Middleton wrote around one third of the play, mostly the central scenes. The editor of the Oxford edition, John Jowett, states that Middleton,

wrote the banquet scene (Sc. 2), the central scenes with Timon's creditors and Alcibiades' confrontation with the senate, and most of the episodes figuring the Steward. The play's abrasively harsh humour and its depiction of social relationships that involve a denial of personal relationships are Middletonian traits

Jowett stresses that Middleton's presence does not mean the play should be disregarded, stating "Timon of Athens is all the more interesting because the text articulates a dialogue between two dramatists of a very different temper."