Timon of Athens -

William Shakespeare

Penguin Classics

2015

304 páginas

10h 8m

ISBN-13: 9780141396491

A tragicomedy, a satire on materialism and a scream of pain and injustice, Timon of Athens depicts Shakespeare's greatest optimist and his most vehement pessimist in its central character, the wealthy and deluded Timon. This Penguin Shakespeare edition is edited by G. R. Hibbard with an introduction by Nicholas Walton.

'What viler thing upon the earth than friends,
Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!'

After squandering his wealth with prodigal generosity, a rich Athenian gentleman finds himself deep in debt. Unshaken by the prospect of bankruptcy, he is certain that the friends he has helped so often will come to his aid. But when they learn his wealth is gone, he quickly finds that their promises fall away to nothing in this tragic exploration of power, greed, and loyalty betrayed.

This book contains a general introduction to Shakespeare's life and Elizabethan theatre, a separate introduction to the play, a chronology, suggestions for further reading, an essay discussing performance options on both stage and screen, and a commentary.

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

"I had the priviledge, in my youth, of attending Wilson Knight's performance of selected scenes from 'Timon of Athens'; the critic-actor invested Timon with all the sublimity of Lear, but the reverberation did not follow me out of the theater, and was heard no more. 'Timon of Athens' is an amazing torso, powerfully expressionistic, yet Shakespeare evidently concluded that it was a mistake, and he was right.(...) He never staged it, and parts of it are less finished than others. (...) I suspect that Shakespeare experienced a personal revulsion at what he was finishing, and turned away from it to do some play doctoring upon what became 'Pericles', thus inaugurating his final mode of visionary dramas, or romances. (...) As Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics, I do not hesitate to find an immense personal bitterness in Timon of Athens'."

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare - The Invention of the Human, c. 29