"Oh, those Athenians!"

I decided that I would do a very narrow search using the Shakespeare Concordance. Since I liked Timon of Athens a little bit more than other people seemed to, I thought I'd search the word "Athens" in the concordance and see what it returned. (Note: I did not modify my search to include words such as "Athenian", which could refer either to the characteristic of a person or thing or to a person who comes from Athens. I wanted to limit my search to the city itself.)

I expected that the most references to the city to come from Timon and I was right--of the 54 times that the word "Athens" is used in Shakespeare's plays, 28 of them come from that play (that's more than half of them, to save you math). Of the only three other plays in which the word "Athens" is used, 20 of those uses come from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I was surprised by this at first. It took me a moment to remember that AMND is also set in and around Athens, at which point it made sense. After this small connection between Timon and AMND was made, I made a bigger one soon after--both plays involve the protagonist(s) fleeing the city of Athens. In Timon, the titular character leaves the city scorned after none of his friends from the Athenian upper class would lend him financial support when his money ran dry because of his generosity towards them. In AMND, Hermia and Lysander run leave Athens because Hermia's father demands that she marry a man that she does not love instead of Lysander, who she does love. In both cases, injustice leads the protagonist and protagonists, respectively, out of Athens.

If I were to build this small search into a research paper, I believe I could focus my research on Shakespeare's and his English contemporaries' attitude towards Athens and perhaps Greece in general, looking for a potential pattern of negative representations of Athenian and Greek culture and society, and finding out the reason for such a pattern. This could be an especially rewarding study as Shakespeare wrote after the Renaissance, in which the works of the ancient Greeks were given renewed interest and reverence, begging the question of why, in a world where Greek culture was being revered, did the epicenter of that culture get such a bad name in the two plays of Shakespeare that it is the setting?