Thank you for coming. This is the last of my Shakespeare lectures this term, and it's on Time and of Athens.

Talk about Time and of Athens as always in a sense a kind of afterthought or something that you might do at the end of the series.

It's a late play, although probably not as late as people have tended to date it.

The most recent dating of title is probably about 1605 to 6.

But the thing I want to focus on about the play today is that we pretty much unanimously

recognise it now as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton.

So what I want to try and do in the lecture, and I hope this will be useful both for thinking

about Timon but also for thinking about a large number of collaborative plays in the canon,

is to try to think about what to do with Middleton.

How should the fact of collaboration in the history of this play affect our interpretation?

What kind of critical methodologies have we got for thinking about collaborative playwriting?

And how might they be helpful or not?

Okay, so firstly, this is what the play is about.

A party of petitioners gather at the house of Tyman a wealthy Athenian. They all want

his patronage. Timon is a generous philanthropic host who welcomes all of them, pays off their

debts, gives them money to marry and all those kinds of things.

This is a great scene of sort of conspicuous consumption,

showcasing Tyman's generosity, the greedy self-interest of the guests,

and a kind of mask-like celebration, a dance of Amazons.

Tyman's steward, Flavius, knows that Tyman is actually almost bankrupt.

He sends to try and get some of the money back or some repayment for Tyman's generosity,

but no one will give Timon any money, and he is besieged by his creditors.

...