SOURCE: Prendergast, Maria Teresa Michaela. “‘Unmanly Melancholy’: Lack, Fetishism, and Abuse in Timon of Athens.” Criticism 42, no. 2 (spring 2000): 207-27.

In the following essay, Prendergast notes the lack of female characters in the play and examines the work in terms of the misogynistic practices of early Jacobean culture. Prendergast contends that Timon represses women and displaces his desire for women with a desire for gold in order to establish “absolute male autonomy.”

Since at least 1678, when Thomas Shadwell adapted the script for the earliest recorded performance of Timon of Athens, critics, directors, and playwrights have responded to Timon as an unfinished play—lacking dramatic tension, complex characterization, or compelling rhetoric.¹ But for early adapters like Shadwell, it was above all the lack of female characters that marked Timon as unfinished. Timon's adapters apparently noted that, in sharp contrast to Shakespeare's other plays, women appear only twice here: in...