ABSTRACT
Admirers of Timon of Athens have responded to it in rather the same way. An impression of structure, of construction, would be suited to plays that come from classical sources, but in the plays other than Timon of Athens the appropriate construction seems at some stage of the play to give way before a natural pressure of life, the life that cannot be kept out of the events in Shakespearean drama. But the ‘big idea’ does not go with Shakespearean tragedy. In Timon, however, the idea seems so tyrannical that the construction process has to be continued all the way. Though it is difficult to judge from the state of a probably uncompleted script, the poetry of Timon has none the less all the marks of late Shakespearean mastery – it is terse and elliptic, leaping between word and idea with arbitrary and yet persuasive power.
