Timon of Athens (The Pelican Shakespeare) - Softcover

Shakespeare, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140714871 ISBN 13: 9780140714876

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2000

Synopsis

The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel

The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

About this title

Review:

A messy, uneven and disillusioned play, Timon of Athens is rarely studied or performed because of scepticism regarding both its authorship and completion. Like Pericles there seems little doubt that Shakespeare wrote the majority, but quite what he was trying to do is another matter.

Timon of Athens is rich and generous, happy to provide his friends, servants and acquaintances with money whenever they require it. Only the cynical Apemantus questions the soundness of Timon's actions, and the motives of his supposed friends, wondering at "what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood." When Timon's creditors ask for payment of their loans, Timon goes to his friends, but they all refuse to help him. Even worse, Timon's one loyal friend Alcibiades is exiled from Athens. After renouncing all his friends at one last banquet, Timon retires to a misanthropic life as a hermit in a cave. As he rails against "yellow, glittering precious gold", he completely renounces mankind, to die alone in his cave, his epitaph claiming that "Here lie I, Timon, who alive / All living men did hate". One of Shakespeare's more puzzling plays, Timon of Athens is unusually bleak and unforgiving, with Timon behaving like an unsympathetic version of Lear (they were both written within a couple of years of each other). --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"Working with Omar Pound, an expert on Lewis and controller of rights to his estate, and using my own understanding of Lewis' work, I have attempted to create the work that he would have done. It is bound on boards with a clamshell box covered with Italian Linen book cloth."--Charles D. Jones

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0140714871
• ISBN 13: 9780140714876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Dolan Frances E.