Timon of Athens - Performance History

Performance History

“Timon of Athens” is believed to have first been performed between 1607 and 1608, whereas the text is believed to have first been printed in 1623 as a part of the First Folio.

Licensed, 18 Feb.. 1677/8. Ro. L'Estrange. LONDON, Printed by J. M. for Henry Herringman, at the Blue Anchor, in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1678.

Performance history in Shakespeare's lifetime is unknown, though the same is also true of his more highly regarded plays such as Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus, which most scholars believe were written in the same period. The play's date is uncertain, though its bitter tone links it with Coriolanus and King Lear. John Day's play Humour Out of Breath, published in 1608, contains a reference to "the lord that gave all to his followers, and begged more for himself" – a possible allusion to Timon that would, if valid, support a date of composition before 1608. It has been proposed that Shakespeare himself took the role of the Poet, who has the fifth-largest line count in the play.

In 1678 Thomas Shadwell produced a popular adaptation, The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater, to which Henry Purcell later composed the music. Shadwell added two women to the plot: Melissa, Timon's faithless fiancee, and Evandre, his loyal and discarded mistress. James Dance made another adaptation in 1768, soon followed by Richard Cumberland's version at Drury Lane in 1771, in which the dying Timon gives his daughter Evadne, not present in Shakespeare's original, to Alcibiades. Further adaptations followed in 1786 (Thomas Hull's at Covent Garden) and 1816 (George Lamb's at Drury Lane), ending with an 1851 production reinstating Shakespeare's original text by Samuel Phelps at Sadler's Wells.

It has played once on Broadway, in 1993, with Brian Bedford in the title role. This was a production of The Public Theater, which revived the play in February 2011, citing it as a play for the Great Recession.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater first staged the play in 1997. It was the company's first modern-dress production. In April 2012, C.S.T. again staged the play with the Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid playing Timon. The play was given a new ending by director, Barbara Gaines.

In July 2012 the British National Theatre produced a version of the play set in modern dress and in the present time of scandal and fraud in the City of London and the British media. The play was directed by Nicholas Hytner.