AUTHENTICITY AND DATE

The Life of Tymon of Athens was first printed in the 1623 Folio, in the space in the Tragedies left by the temporary withdrawal of Troilus and Cressida. It is at least possible that it was not originally intended to print it at all, and the rough condition of the text has given rise to many speculations. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the blame was generally laid on actors, transcribers and printers, and Charles Knight in the Pictorial Shakespeare (1838) seems to have been the first to suggest the presence of a second hand other than that of a mere garbler. His view was that our text represents Shakespeare's partial rewriting of an earlier play, and since his time all possible variations have been devised on the disintegration theme. Some have agreed with Knight; others, following Verplanck's edition of 1847, have thought that an unfinished or mutilated play by Shakespeare was botched up by a later hand. The two views can even be combined. Thus G. Kullmann solemnly argued that Shakespeare began to rewrite an earlier play, that the manuscripts of both versions were somehow preserved together, and that a ‘redactor’, the real villain of the piece, conflated them and added further confusions of his own. Almost all dramatists active in the first decade of the seventeenth century have at one time or another been called in to take a hand in the making or marring of Timon.