ABSTRACT
All too often, to think about hospitality is to become affronted by the inhospitable. According to Marx’s famous reading, inhospitality in Timon of Athens is brought into effect by gold, what he defines as “the alienated ability of mankind” and what Timon rebukes as humanity’s “common whore … that puts odds / Among the rout of nations” (4.3.43-44).1 Recent stagings channel such Marxist anxieties. The National Theatre’s internationally broadcast 2012 production, for example, has been hailed as “a parable of the crisis of the modern business elite.”2 I would suggest, however, that the anxieties levied within Timon in both its contemporary and early modern stagings go deeper than Marxism and our own fiscal anxiety alone can gloss. As G. Wilson Knight writes, Timon of Athens “is far more than an economic extravaganza.”3 If it is not the specter of the Market, then what in Timon do we continue to find so haunting?
