In Timon of Athens Shakespeare returned to the woods outside of Athens a decade or more after writing A Midsummer Night's Dream, deciding some time between 1605 and 1608 – perhaps in early 1606 as John Jowett has recently argued – to dramatize the story of the proverbial misanthrope Timon. As was the case in A Midsummer Night's Dream, he explores in Timon aspects of an unnamed concept of the aesthetic, but in a very different aesthetic mode, a satirical one that situates the aesthetic within the day's system of commodity exchange. Timon is thus linked with plays with similar concerns – The Merchant of Venice, for example, and his other Greek play, Troilus and Cressida – all three plays with an interest in the corrosive effects of mercantile capitalism and other negative aspects of emerging modernity. Timon takes up the difficult formal problem of how to integrate these disparate impulses, the meta-aesthetic and the socially satirical, and achieves a kind of disjunctive aesthetic solution to this problem through an ending which has puzzled and challenged generations of critics.