Timon of Athens: Ethical Anxiety in Early Modem England

This article reads Timon's tragedy against the social background of Renaissance ethics, economics and politics. While examining the connections between Timon's "generosity" together with the subsequent "fall" and the cultural forms that constituted patronage and usury in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the article suggests that in Timon of Athens Shakespeare explores the conflicts between feudal ethics and the ethics of contract which is closely associated with the rise of the bourgeois in city and voices ethical anxiety experienced unconsciously among the general public.