Thoughts on why Timon of Athens points toward King Lear

Because friend AW is working on a project involving translating Shakespeare into contemporary English - and I do have some concerns about that concept, but will let that lie for the moment - I've been reading a "translation" of Timon of Athens, which, to put it bluntly, is not the play that brought Sh. immortality. It's clearly an immature work, with a schematic plot that whose twists and reversals one can see from the first moment: Good-natured citizen in ancient Greece, the eponymous Timon, is generous to a fault, an absurd fault, and bestows lavish gifts and entertainments on all of his so-called friends, but when Timon suffers a reversal of fortune his "friends" abandon him and come up w/ all sorts of excuses as to why they can't loan him a dime (so to speak); this sends Timon into a nearly psychotic rage, and he, improbably, becomes the epitome of misanthropy, embittered toward all of humanity. In his rage he opines about the evil of money - gold specifically - how it corrupts all who touch it, how gold can do damage in creating debt and want, how people are judged and evaluated simply by the amount of gold they possess rather than by any intrinsic qualities or by what they do and accomplish in the world - these passages are famously cited by Marx in Das Kapital, one of the few places where M and Sh intersect (though not in a sophisticated way - there are other "Marxist" elements in Sh's work aside from direct quotations). Obviously this play is seldom performed today and is in the province, primarily, of Complete-ists, but there's one reason in particular why it's worth at least reading: Clearly (to me, but others must have written about this), Timon is an attenuated, early version of King Lear: what in Timon is caricatured and schematic in Lear is subtle, evolving, rising to a crescendo, and resolved in sorrow and pity: the old man giving everything away, behaving rashly, suffering from the ingratitude, at best, or his older daughters, going mad, raging against the elements in futility, guided by a loyal friend whose vision helps us see the lineaments of Lear's tragedy, recognizing too late his pride and his folly. In both plays the eponymous hero gives up his property in what they mistakenly believe is a reciprocal exchange of love and friendship.