"Timon of Athens and the Reformation Ethics of the Gift," George Moore

In an article illustrative of the “turn to religion” in Shakespeare studies, Ken Jackson presents Timon of Athens (1605-6) as a meditation on religious passion. Timon’s spiritual quest, Jackson argues, is figured forth in his hubristic desire to achieve the impossibility of true beneficence—to give gifts that miraculously escape the logic of exchange and reciprocity. Timon’s tragic nobility consists largely in this pursuit of selfless beneficence that none but Christ may truly achieve. Whereas Jackson reads Timon primarily through the lens of late Derridean philosophy, I rethink (and build upon) his argument by attending more closely to material experiences of the gift depicted in Timon, and, further, how such experiences undermine philosophies of gift-giving set out in Reformation theology.

As part of its overall attack on works-righteousness, the Reformation placed special emphasis on the need to forget oneself in the act of giving, to recognize oneself as merely a conduit through which divine beneficence flows in a larger cosmic cycle. I argue that Timon can never fully achieve this ethic of selfless giving because his beneficence is underwritten by usury agreements that memorialize his name. The second half of the play, however, juxtaposes such human dilemmas with a vision of nature as a true gift that appears without a demand for reciprocation. Through such contrasts, the play suggests that the rise of a credit economy alienates would-be givers from participating in larger ecological, cosmic, and divine cycles of beneficence.

Works Cited

Bailey, Amanda. “Timon of Athens, Forms of Payback, and the Genre of Debt.” English Literary Renaissance 41 (2011): 375-400.

Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. The Culture of Giving: Informal Support and Gift Exchange in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

Hawkes, David. Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580-1680. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Jackson, Ken. “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and the God of Timon of Athens.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 34-66.