Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions

This chapter examines Timon of Athens alongside handbooks that teach readers how to interpret the fictionalized credit world that surrounds them—a world full of false surfaces, which invite misconstrual. It focuses on the portrayal of a particular hard-to-read figure: the “rich beggar,” an outwardly wealthy person whose debts invisibly outstrip his assets. While handbook authors simply warn readers against lending to such persons, Shakespeare and Middleton go further, probing the conditions that produce this paradoxical figure. Their co-authored Timon of Athens suggests that rich beggary results less from poor estate management than from the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play suggests that the fiction-making power of debt and credit extends from the individual “rich beggar” to the fabric of society. Credit here appears as an agent of universal falsification: a demiurgic power that upends hierarchies and rewrites identities.

Ecological Adaptation in Montana: Timon of Athens to Timon of Anaconda

In this article Gretchen E. Minton describes her adaptation of William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton’s 1606 play Timon of Athens. This adaptation, called Timon of Anaconda, focuses on the environmental legacy of Butte, Montana, a mining city that grew quickly, flourished, fell into recession, and then found itself labelled the largest Superfund clean-up site in the United States. Timon of Anaconda envisions Timon as a wealthy mining mogul whose loss of fortunes and friends echoes the boom-and-bust economy of Butte. The original play’s language about the poisoning of nature and the troubled relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds is amplified and adjusted in Timon of Anaconda in order to reflect upon ongoing environmental concerns in Montana. Minton explains the ecodramaturgical aims, site-specific locations, and directorial decisions of this adaptation’s performances, which took place in September 2019. Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University, Bozeman. She has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the dramaturg for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and Bozeman Actors Theatre, and her directorial projects include A Doll’s House (2019), Timon of Anaconda (2019–20), and Shakespeare’s Walking Story (2020).

Evil is the Root of All Money: Performing Usury and Homosocial Credit in Elizabethan/Jacobean England

Performing Usury and Homosocial Credit in Elizabethan/Jacobean England. Elizabethan and Jacobean usury plays bear witness to an evolving sensibility regarding usury, money and social relations surrounding the turn of the 16th Century. A survey of plays reveals a tendency to vilify the usurer in an increasingly comic way until he becomes a trope or stock character-type void of any deep critical characterization. However, framing the cycle of plays are The Merchant of Venice circa 1597 and A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1625. These two plays present a higher level of tension or anxiety in the characterization and plight of the usurer in less comic terms than many of the plays with which they were contemporary. The monetary commerce of the usurer is polarized against a network of homosocial credit which the usurer is barred from entering in a binary opposition. There seems to be an anxiety that monetary increase poses a threat to the aristocratic birthright. It only makes sense then, that the all-male playing companies would portray any threat to the necessary social trade-trust in a negative light. Of particular interest is the larger number of asides in the so called usury plays, both marked and apparent, which are clearly aimed at the audience and act to gain complicity with a largely plebian audience for an aristocratic homosocial sensibility that requires all levels of society to participate in order to defend itself. If the exchange of money and social credit are closely followed in The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens, and A New Way to Pay Old Debts, homosocial credit is aligned with virtue while monetary credit is depicted as a rising threat worthy of risibility or punishment.

Friendship and Justice

Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens are both read, in this chapter, as questioning the place of friendship in political societies and states. Classically, friendship, or friendly relations at least, between citizens has been understood as a condition of political stability; but in the early modern era an idea of friendship as a transcendent tie, indifferent to politics, and in tension with it was developing. Republican thought also questions the relationship between friendship and commerce, with some critics seeing these as antithetical, others seeing them as bound up together. Both of these plays problematize the dilemmas of exchange, of contract, of bonds in the sense of agreement and promise, in relation both to intimate ties, and to the authority of sovereign institutions. Merchant of Venice considers these matters in particular in relation to a society fissured by religious antagonism—by anti-semitism; both plays consider them in relation to a society marked by clear sex and gender distinction and exclusion.