A quick blast from the always informative and entertaining Oxford University Press (yup, the folks behind my fave, the Oxford English Dictionary)…
A couple of days back, they published a blog post outlining “10 crisp facts about money during Shakespeare’s time.”
Most of it’s pretty straightforward. But there were two pretty cool items regarding Timon of Athens that caught my eye:
3. Shakespeare was Karl Marx’s favorite author, and when Marx moved to England in 1849, he read Shakespeare every day. Timon of Athens proved to be an influential source in Marx’s critique of capitalist money economy, as seen in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and in Capital, Volume 1.
and
7. The word ‘gold’ appears in Timon of Athens far more frequently than in any other Shakespeare play. It is mentioned 36 times.
ah, number 7… you know how I love a good concordance study…