Abstract
For Bradley, the tragic hero was a man responsible for his fate: a man with a tragic flaw who learns, too late, to know himself.1 If this view has come to seem old-fashioned, there are, I suggest, two main reasons. In the age of Beckett and Stoppard, the assertion of human dignity in defeat no longer looks like the central theatrical experience; in the age of African famine, ethnic cleansing and nuclear weapons, the claim that each man is responsible for his fate has a hollow ring. To a modern audience, bred on implausibility, Timon’s volte-face from splendid generosity to ‘Uncover dogs, and lap!’ will not seem too odd.
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Notes
Bradley, A.C., Shakespearean Tragedy (Macmillan, London, 1904), lecture 1, passim.
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (1589), Book I, chapter XI. In Gregory Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1904), vol. II, p. 27.
Thomas Lodge, Defence of Poetry (1579). Ibid., Vol. I, p. 80.
G. Wilson Knight, ‘The Pilgrimage of Hate: an Essay on Timon’ in The Wheel of Fire (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1930).
G.R. Hibbard, Introduction to Timon of Athens (New Penguin Shakespeare, London, 1970), p. 43.
E.A.J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies. The Dramatist’s Manipulation of Response (Macmillan, London, 1973), p. viii.
O.J. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Satire (Oxford University Press, New York, 1943), p. 192.
Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1976), p. 198.
Sir John Davies, Orchestra (1596), stanzas 39,40,41. In Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Gerald Bullett (Everyman’s Library, J.M. Dent, London, 1947), p. 326.
A.D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens (Harvester Press, London, 1989), p. 99.
E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Timon of Athens’, Shakespeare Quarterly (1961), Vol. XII, p. 16.
Quotations are taken from Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. John D. Jump (Edward Arnold, London, 1967).
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Lerner, L. (1997). Timon and Tragedy. In: Batchelor, J., Cain, T., Lamont, C. (eds) Shakespearean Continuities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26003-4_10
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