Timon of Athens and the Collapse of the Gift Economy: Ethics, Affect and Allegory in Shakespeare's Most Neglected Tragedy

This article is a reassessment of Timon of Athens as a cynical critique of the ethics of economy and the destruction of human relations. Contextualising the play in early modern gift economies and indebted patronage, the play states that Shakespeare plays out the disappointment of mutual trust in a culture that relied on symbolic exchange and the display of virtue. The moral and philosophical price of betrayal in a morally bankrupt society is dramatised when Timon falls in a civic ideal as a misanthropic exile. The paper combines the insights of Stoic philosophy with economic anthropology and affect theory to analyze the disintegration of moral coherence and social definition, as indicated by the formal fragmentation of the play, its allegorical characters and its rhetorical surplus. Through following the tension between the spectacle of the mass and inner disillusionment, the article reveals Timon of Athens as an incredibly contemporary tragedy, one that reveals the weakness of generosity and the destructive possibility of an economy in which generosity becomes meaningless and insignificant like something under control.