1. There is some doubt about the exact status of this “inscription” since the couplet is not marked as a quotation in F, and the precise stage action is quite uncertain. See Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 317–18, and note to 5.4.3–4 in Timon ofAthens, eds Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (Arden Shakespeare, 2008).
2. The whole issue of the relation between the living and the dead was painfully contentious during the sixteenth century in the wake of the Reformation and various attempts on the part of reformers to curtail ceremonies for the dead and the assumptions they gave shape to. The voices of those who had died were choked but not quite silenced by the many attempts to separate the community of the living from those who had passed beyond it. I have dealt with this issue at more length in “The Arithmetic of Memory,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 54–67; see also Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
3. Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1997), among others.
4. Coppelia Kahn, “Magic of bounty: Timon of Athens, Jacobean patronage, and maternal power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 34–57
5. David Bevington and David L. Smith, “James 1 and Timon of Athens,” Comparative Drama 33, no.1 (1999) 56–87.