Dependent Contractors: Timon of Athens, Collaborative Writing, and Theatrical Capitalism

abstract:William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton's Timon of Athens is not only a co-authored play but also a play about co-authorship. Timon contrasts the stultifying effects of artistic patronage with the exchange of alienated labor, explaining in the process both the peculiarities of the Alcibiades subplot and the significance of Middleton's comedy. Engaging and assessing recent scholarship on collaboration, this article argues that Renaissance theatrical collaboration represents not an original state prior to the imposition of individualist Romantic ideology, but rather an innovative result of newly flexible, complex, and capitalist theatrical economies. Thinking of collaboration in economic terms foregrounds its links to alienation and to exploitation, accounting for inequalities and asymmetries between writers. Using this approach, we can see that Timon charts the collapse of patronage relations and the emergence of a newly impersonal, capitalist basis for exchange.