SOURCE: "Timon of Athens, " in Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence, 1972. Reprint by Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, pp. 187-96.

In the following essay, Muir provides a general assessment of Timon of Athens, maintaining that its "last two acts are Shakespeare's most powerful statement of what he seems to have regarded as the worst of sins—ingratitude."

I

Timon of Athens presents a number of insoluble problems: its date, its text, even its single authorship have been questioned. It has been regarded as 'a first sketch of King Lear set aside unfinished', as an 'after vibration' of King Lear, as a close neighbour of Troilus and Cressida—Apemantus echoing Thersites—and as the last of the tragedies, the subject of which being suggested by the account of Timon in Plutarch's life of Antony, and by the account of Alcibiades in the life of Coriolanus. The text of the play given in the Folio...