ABSTRACT

In the final act of Timon of Athens, Shakespeare and Middleton stage a scene in which Athenian senators visit the self-exiled Timon to persuade him to return to Athens. When the senators arrive at Timon's cave at the end of the play, they are the last in a comically extended series of visitors to ask something of the would-be recluse. Notions of human value are both central to that history and notoriously elusive. The figure of the human itself notoriously resists definition and categorization. The relationship of the human to various nonhuman worlds has become one of the most exciting areas of inquiry in literary studies generally and early modern studies specifically. The story goes like this: Philoctetes, a Greek in the Trojan War who carries with him the bow of Heracles, is bitten by a serpent at a sacred shrine on the island of Chryse.