Abstract:The gift and the denial of charity can sometimes occur simultaneously. I once read a review of a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest (1993); the critic found many virtues in the show, but also a few poor performances “which charity forbids me to name.” That kind of alleged generosity diminishes the recipient and giver at once. In Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens, the protagonist’s problematic charity—at once too generous and too self-centered—is something of this ambivalent sort; it comes to haunt him when his friends, who had received his bounty, later reject him in his hour of need. Timon is also haunted, however, by an ideal model of charity: the work of Phrynia and Timandra, the battletrain prostitutes who visit the self-exiled man in Act 4 of the play. Through the whores’ interaction with Timon, and the once-rich man’s furious curses at and then agitated alliance with the women, we can detect the lack that has always damaged Timon’s social relations. The women play a minimal role in the dramaturgy but an immensely important part in the symbolic centrality of charity in the play, the proper meanings of which had always remained opaque to Timon and many of his readers.

中文翻译：

---

雅典蒂蒙的慈善与妓女

摘要：赠与与施舍有时会同时发生。我曾经读过皇家莎士比亚公司制作的《暴风雨》（1993）的评论；评论家在节目中发现了许多美德，但也发现了一些“慈善机构禁止我说出的糟糕表现”。这种所谓的慷慨同时减少了接受者和给予者。在莎士比亚和米德尔顿的《雅典的丁门》中，主人公的慈善问题——既过于慷慨又过于以自我为中心——就是这种矛盾的类型；当他收到他的赏金的朋友后来在他需要的时候拒绝他时，它就会困扰他。然而，Timon 也被一个理想的慈善模式所困扰：Phrynia 和 Timandra 的作品，他们是剧中第 4 幕中拜访自我放逐者的战列妓女。通过妓女与丁满的互动，曾经的富翁愤怒地咒骂和煽动与女性的联盟，我们可以看出一直破坏丁满社会关系的缺乏。女性在戏剧中扮演的角色很小，但在戏剧中慈善的象征性中心地位中扮演着极其重要的角色，其正确含义对丁满和他的许多读者来说一直是不透明的。