Perhaps the most profoundly Shakespearean moment--a dramatic move far beyond the capacity of Peele--comes when Titus is confronted with the dismembered ruins of his family and his brother Marcus tells him that it is time to "storm," to rend his hair and explode into a great tirade of words, to rant in the style of a ham actor. But he does not cry or curse. He laughs. In times of extremity, you have to throw away the rulebook. In real life, tragedy and comedy don't live in different boxes. William Wordsworth once wrote of thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Only William Shakespeare could have dramatized the astonishing but profoundly human idea that the place you get to when you go beyond tears is not silence but laughter.
TIMON OF ATHENS
In thirty-seven of Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays, there are representations of family and sexual relationships--parents and children, siblings, lovers, married couples; usually in multiple combinations. The bonds of family and desire are the very DNA of his dramatic world. Timon of Athens is the unique exception that proves the rule. Nobody in the play has a blood relationship to anyone else. The central character has no family and no lover.
The play seems to have been written around the time when Shakespeare was creating his most demanding female roles--Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra--and yet it almost entirely banishes women. Two whores have walk-on parts in one scene, delivering forty words between them. Some Amazons dance in a masque, though they may be intended as cross-dressed men, like the masquers in Love's Labour's Lost and Henry VIII. There are no children either: the boy actors in Shakespeare's company can seldom have been so underemployed.
Cupid, the mischievous god of love, presides invisibly over all Shakespeare's comedies and several of his tragedies: Timon is the one play in which he actually puts in an appearance, speaking the prologue to the masque. But ironically, he has no part in the action. No character in the play is struck by the dart of love. Cupidity, however--the desire for money--is the heart of the matter.
"In Timon of Athens," wrote Karl Marx of his favorite play, "Shakespeare attributes two qualities to money. It is the visible deity, the transformation of all human and natural qualities into their opposites, the universal confusion and inversion of things; it brings incompatibles into fraternity. And it is the universal whore, the universal pander between men and nations."1 In simpler language: we worship money, it distorts our view of what is important in life and it turns all relationships into commercial exchanges. As Lucius' servant puts it, "Ay, and I think one business does command us all, / For mine is money." No other Shakespearean play gives so much attention to servants: by focusing on the master-servant relationship, as opposed to parent-child or man-woman, Shakespeare and his coauthor Thomas Middleton (a master in both the comedy and the tragedy of commercial exchange) bring home the Marxist point. Money as the universal whore: that is the symbolic significance of having prostitutes as the only female roles. It is also why the play begins with a selection of unnamed characters selling their wares: jewels, silks for fine clothing, poems, and a painting.
The presence of a Poet is especially interesting, in that it gives a glimpse of Shakespeare's conception of his own art. He knew from his experience of dedicating his early poems to the Earl of Southampton what was involved in the pursuit of patronage, and as a leading member of the King's Men he was a firsthand witness of the rush for favors in the febrile atmosphere of the Jacobean court. The Painter at the beginning of Timon assumes that the Poet is assiduously preparing "some work, some dedication / To the great lord," but the Poet's reply suggests that Shakespeare conceived of his own art in terms of sprezzatura, the air of seeming artlessness. It takes effort to strike fire from a flint, whereas poetry may slip out "idly" and "as a gum, which oozes / From whence 'tis nourished."
The opening scenes of the play offer a superb presentation of how culture, both in classical times and Shakespeare's, operates through an elaborate system of ceremonies and rituals in which hospitality and respect are key elements. The granting of favors and the lavishing of gifts are equally essential to the system.
Gift-giving was not a spontaneous act of generosity (is it ever?): it was, as one historian of the early modern period puts it, "an integral part of the package of obligations and indebtedness which accompanied any transaction of services."
In order to maintain the position in which he commands respect, Timon has to spend vast amounts of money throwing parties. As only the wise steward Flavius perceives, the continuance of the show has exhausted his master's financial resources. On a smaller scale, Shakespeare himself had probably witnessed a similar process in his youth when his father reached a position of eminence in the community, but then overstretched himself, borrowed money and ran into trouble because he could not pay his debts. It is a familiar enough story, though in Timon of Athens the scale of the wealth is inflated to an extreme and the spiral into poverty is accompanied by a philosophical commentary.
Generally speaking, Shakespeare is skeptical of the claims of philosophy. He is more interested in how people behave in extreme situations than in what they profess to believe. He only used the word "philosopher" ten times in his complete works. Four of these usages are in wry contexts in the comedies, while the other six are confined to two tragedies, written in close proximity to each other early in the reign of King James I. They are two tragedies which follow a similar pattern of a man going from high to low estate, out from city or court to forest or stormy place where there's scarcely a bush. In this "outside" space, the protagonist is filled with fury at his fellow humans. One of those two plays is King Lear, the other is Timon of Athens. The resemblances have often been observed.
VARRO'S SERVANT What is a whoremaster, fool?
FOOL A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. 'Tis a spirit: sometime't appears like a lord, sometime like a lawyer, sometime like a philosopher with two stones more than's artificial one. He is very often like a knight; and generally in all shapes that man goes up and down in from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks in.
VARRO'S SERVANT Thou art not altogether a fool.
A snatch of dialogue such as this could easily change places and handy-dandy with the voices of Lear and his Fool.
Jaques in As You Like It may fancy himself as a philosopher, but it is in the cast of Timon of Athens that we meet the only professional philosopher in Shakespeare: Apemantus. "I come to observe," he says during Timon's first banquet, and he will remain to offer his tart observations throughout the play. He is an extreme embodiment of the philosophy embraced by Jaques: Cynicism. A Cynic takes Stoic rejection of worldliness to an extreme; a Cynic, the saying had it, was a Stoic without a tunic. The paradigm was the outspoken and shameless Diogenes, who rejected "civilization" and returned to the "natural" life by becoming a vagabond. Apemantus is "the philosopher" in Shakespeare. Yet for Apemantus, as for Jaques, Cynicism is a pose. They both actually rather enjoy company and food. It is Timon who becomes the real thing.
In Act 2, the Fool goes off with Apemantus, saying, "I do not always follow lover, elder brother and woman: sometime the philosopher." As on many occasions in King Lear, a line spoken by the Fool is at a deeper level applicable to the main character. Timon is the one who follows the way of the philosopher instead of lover, brother, or woman. "I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind," he will later announce. He becomes a Diogenes, rejecting all possessions and all worldliness, dying in his cave by the seashore.
The first half of the action is closed with a second banquet, in which with studied irony Timon offers his guests nothing instead of everything. Disgusted with mankind, he retreats to the woods. The general Alcibiades goes into exile at the same time: the point seems to be that both the military hero and the civic benefactor are victims of the system's ingratitude, scapegoats of Athenian political arrogance. Like the exiled Coriolanus in another classical play written a couple of years later, Alcibiades marches against the city that has mistreated him. The Athenian senators respond by calling on Timon to perform the role of the r
econciler that Volumnia plays in Coriolanus; he does so indirectly by committing suicide, symbolically removing hatred from the city and allowing Alcibiades to make peace with the state. The parallel plot is, however, sketched briefly in rather than worked fully out.
The core of the play is the massive third scene of the fourth act in which a succession of visitors comes to Timon in the forest, giving him the opportunity to vent his misanthropy. There is an elegant symmetry between the series of suitors seeking favors in the first half of the play and the series of visitors gawping at Timon's misfortunes in the second. Among them is Apemantus, the professional philosopher. He has dealt Timon a few home truths in the opening scene, along the lines of "He that loves to be flattered is worthy o'th'flatterer." Now he says, "The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mocked thee for too much curiosity: in thy rags thou know'st none, but art despised for the contrary." Athenian moral philosophy, embodied for the Renaissance in the figure of Aristotle, extolled the virtues of the middle way, the golden mean. Tragic drama is about people who will not follow that way, who go instead to the extreme. Considered thus, Timon is the exemplary tragic figure.
With its paucity of female characters and absence of familial bonds, this will always remain one of Shakespeare's least known, least loved, and least performed plays. Its exposure of our enslavement to money is too close to the bone. Why would large numbers of people who have the financial comfort that allows them to benefit from the public art form of theater want to spend an evening being beaten up on the subject? The harsh beauty of Timon's angry arias in the second half of the play, the exemplary loyalty of the steward Flavius, the incisive wit of Apemantus and the Fool: none of these are quite enough to compensate for the absence of an amorous or heroic countervoice. Perhaps it would have been a different story if the character of Alcibiades had been more fully developed. It is small wonder that critics have persistently speculated--without any direct evidence--that the play was unfinished or unperformed.
Yet for intellectual muscle, the second half of the play is as powerful as anything in Shakespeare. It directly addresses one of the great questions in both his time and ours: the relationship between culture and nature. The home that Timon leaves and excoriates is the city of Athens, the birthplace of democracy, philosophy, and theater, the epitome of culture. When he goes into the woods, he is returning from culture to nature, reversing the process by which human cultural evolution has led to ever-greater alienation from our environmental origins. Initially, the angry exile believes that the order of nature is no different from that of the city he has left. He perceives natural forces to be in the same kind of relationship of exchange and deception as those of human society:
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From gen'ral excrement: each thing's a thief.
And he blames the earth for yielding up the precious metal which is the origin of that commodity which is the root of all evil.
But in his downward spiral, Timon also makes a kind of spiritual ascent. His trajectory is not after all so very different from that of Antony and Cleopatra in the subsequent play that Shakespeare based on the same source in classical literature. Throwing away the gold, he finds peace in the imminence of death: "My long sickness / Of health and living now begins to mend, And nothing brings me all things." He makes "his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood." His road from fickle worldly prosperity to the nothingness of death goes via the wood and peters out at the edge of the sea. The nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt suggested that Timon ends by "seeking in the everlasting solemnities of nature oblivion from the transitory splendour of his lifetime."2
Though the play is couched in the ancient ascetic language of contemptus mundi, there was for Hazlitt, and there should be for us, something profoundly enduring about the image of a human soul contemplating the vastness of the ocean and being brought to the realization that money is not everything and indeed that nothing may bring all things. Like King Lear and his godson Edgar, Timon is one of a tiny handful of tragic characters who are brought to a place that we might call ground zero. The difference between the two plays is that in Lear the meaning of love is discovered amidst the apocalypse, whereas in Timon a man dies alone, without any community save that of the elements of earth, sea, and sky.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format "Quartos" published in Shakespeare's lifetime and the elaborately produced "First Folio" text of 1623, the original "Complete Works" prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare's fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. Titus Andronicus was printed in a Quarto version in 1594 which was reprinted two more times before its appearance in the 1623 Folio. The Folio text contains an entire scene (Act 3 Scene 2) missing from the Quartos, which presumably indicates that the Folio text was set with consultation to another source, probably a theatrical promptbook.
Timon of Athens was first printed in the Folio in a text that is rife with problems, most likely in large part due to the collaborative (and therefore untidy) nature of the manuscript rather than the printing process itself.
The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is Timon of Athens, but not Titus Andronicus, for which the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus "TITUS Andronicus, a noble general" or "APEMANTUS, a churlish philosopher").
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, but not for Titus Andronicus or Timon of Athens. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations ("another part of the forest/city"). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Titus Andronicus the action takes place in and around the city of Rome, while Timon of Athens unfolds in the city of Athens and the woods outside the city.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse the King's Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. No
wadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare's fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentarily bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
Speakers' Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus in Titus, LUCIUS, QUINTUS, MARTIUS, and MUTIUS are always so-called in speech headings but often referred to simply as "Sons" or "Titus' Sons" in entry directions; in Timon, FLAVIUS is always so-called in speech headings but often referred to simply as "Steward" in entry directions.
Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction ("turnd" rather than "turned") to indicate whether or not the final "-ed" of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus "turned" would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, nor did actors' cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker's sentence.