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This chapter examines Timon of Athens alongside handbooks that teach readers how to interpret the fictionalized credit world that surrounds them—a world full of false surfaces, which invite misconstrual. It focuses on the portrayal of a particular hard-to-read figure: the “rich beggar,” an outwardly wealthy person whose debts invisibly outstrip his assets. While handbook authors simply warn readers against lending to such persons, Shakespeare and Middleton go further, probing the conditions that produce this paradoxical figure. Their co-authored Timon of Athens suggests that rich beggary results less from poor estate management than from the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play suggests that the fiction-making power of debt and credit extends from the individual “rich beggar” to the fabric of society. Credit here appears as an agent of universal falsification: a demiurgic power that upends hierarchies and rewrites identities.

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