This bitter, schematic fable of bankruptcy and misanthropy—which enjoys the dubious distinction of being perhaps the least popular play in the Shakespeare canon—shares many concerns, and a good deal of rare vocabulary, with King Lear, and was probably written shortly before it, in 1604–5. It may have been influenced by an anonymous academic play, Timon (acted at one of the Inns of Court c.1602), and by the depiction of Timon found in William *Painter’s Palace of Pleasure (1566), a work on which Shakespeare drew for the plot of All’s Well That Ends Well (1604–5). However, there is no external evidence to help date the play, which went unmentioned in any extant document until its appearance in the First Folio in 1623.
Text: It is quite possible that Timon of Athens would have been omitted from the Folio had its compilers not experienced last-minute difficulties in obtaining Troilus and Cressida: Charlton *Hinman’s study of the Folio’s printing showed that this play occupies space originally intended for Troilus and Cressida. The reasons for the play’s near-exclusion are not known, but they may relate to its status as a collaboration. The Folio text is a highly unusual one, full of loose ends of plot (notably the virtually irrelevant episode in which Alcibiades pleads in vain on behalf of a soldier guilty of manslaughter, 3.6), and anomalies in its lineation and in its use of pronouns. Although some commentators have preferred to think of it as an ‘unfinished’ work by Shakespeare alone, many editors since Charles *Knight in the 1830s have regarded it as a collaborative work, and it is now widely accepted that about a third of the play was composed by the young Thomas *Middleton. Careful independent studies of language, oaths, spelling, rare vocabulary, and other forensic details have identified Middleton’s share as 1.2, all of Act 3 except Timon’s devastating appearance at his mock-feast in 3.7, and the dialogue between Timon and Flavius at the end of 4.3. It is clear from the Folio text that the play was set from foul papers, with each playwright’s share written in his own hand and betraying quite different habits with incidentals.
Sources: The principal source for Timon of Athens is a digression in *Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony, from which the play takes Timon’s epitaph almost verbatim. Shakespeare and Middleton must also have known *Lucian ’s dialogue Timon misanthropus (either directly or indirectly, perhaps through the anonymous Timon play), which supplies Timon’s discovery of gold during his self-imposed exile in the woods and its consequences.
Synopsis: 1.1 Outside the rich Timon’s house a jeweller, a merchant, a mercer, a poet, and a painter cluster in hopes of his patronage, and he is visited by senators; the Poet, discussing all this with the Painter, has composed an allegory warning Timon that Fortune is fickle. Timon, arriving, speaks courteously to all his suitors, pays his friend Ventidius’ debt to free him from prison, and gives his servant Lucilius money to enable him to marry an old Athenian’s daughter. He accepts the offerings of the Poet, the Painter, and the Jeweller, and welcomes Alcibiades, 20 of his fellow knights, and even the snarling philosopher Apemantus, who rails at his fellow guests as parasites.
1.2 At Timon’s great banquet Apemantus continues to satirize the flatterers around him, who shower Timon with gifts but receive larger ones in return. A masque of Amazons is performed. Flavius, Timon’s steward, knows his coffers are almost exhausted.
2.1 A senator is calculating the sums Timon owes, and hurriedly sends his factor Caphis to call in his own debts before Timon is bankrupt.
2.2 Flavius is besieged by Timon’s creditors, on whom Apemantus vents his satirical wit while Flavius is finally able to convince Timon that he has given away his entire estate. Timon confidently sends servants to three of his friends, Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius, in order to borrow money from them. Flavius reports that the senators have already declined to make such a loan, but Timon sends him to borrow from Ventidius, who has recently inherited a fortune.
3.1 Lucullus at first assumes Timon’s servant has come to bring him another gift, but when he learns he has come for money he attempts to bribe him to tell Timon he has not seen him. The servant throws back the bribe and curses him.
3.2 Lucius, hearing from three strangers of Lucullus’ conduct, is indignant on Timon’s behalf, but when he is himself asked for money he makes elaborate excuses: the strangers reflect on his hypocrisy.
3.3 Sempronius, too, refuses to lend Timon money, affecting to be too offended at not having been asked first.
3.4 Timon’s house is besieged by his creditors’ servants: eventually he himself emerges and rants at them.
3.5 The furious Timon tells an uncomprehending Flavius to invite Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius to dinner once more.
3.6 Alcibiades pleads with the senators for the life of one of his soldiers, who has committed manslaughter, and grows so angry at their refusal that they banish him: he vows to rally his troops and attack Athens in revenge.
3.7 Timon’s friends, convinced his apparent bankruptcy must have been a test of their loyalty, gather eagerly for the feast. Covered dishes are brought in: Timon recites a satirical grace before their lids are lifted, revealing only stones in lukewarm water. He rants at his guests and beats them, vowing eternal misanthropy.
4.1 Outside Athens Timon curses the city, tearing off his clothes to live in the woods as a beast.
4.2 Flavius bids a poignant farewell to his fellow servants, sharing his remaining money with them: he sets off loyally to find and assist Timon.
4.3 Timon, still cursing mankind, digs for roots but finds gold. When Alcibiades arrives with two courtesans, Phrynia and Timandra, Timon gives them gold, to encourage the women to infect the world with venereal diseases and to help Alcibiades destroy Athens and then himself. After their departure, Apemantus arrives, and in a long philosophical dialogue points out that Timon’s extreme misanthropy is merely the inverse of his former pride. After Timon finally drives Apemantus away, three thieves arrive, to whom Timon gives gold in order to sponsor their profession, but his sermon and his money in fact convert them to a love of peace. When Flavius arrives, however, Timon is moved by his fidelity, though he nonetheless insists that he stay away in future.
5.1 The Poet and the Painter also come in the hopes of obtaining gold from Timon: he drives them away with blows and curses.
5.2 Flavius brings two senators to Timon’s cave, who beg him to return to Athens in honour and lead their defence against Alcibiades, but he professes indifference to his country’s fate and suggests that to avoid death at Alcibiades’ hands the citizens should all hang themselves. He says he has been writing his epitaph, and means to be buried between high and low tides on the beach.
5.3 The news of Timon’s refusal to help Athens reaches the city.
5.4 A soldier, seeking Timon, finds only a gravestone: unable to read its inscription, he takes an impression of it for Alcibiades to interpret.
5.5 The senators surrender to Alcibiades, who promises to kill only his own enemies and those of Timon. The Soldier brings the news of Timon’s death and seaside burial, and Alcibiades reads the misanthropic poem he composed as his epitaph. Though he knows Timon would scorn his grief, Alcibiades mourns Timon, and enters Athens with promises of peace.
Artistic features: Constructed more as a series of emblems than as a narrative, and falling sharply into two very distinct halves—the first three acts depicting Timon’s fall from grace, the last two his invective and death outside Athens—Timon of Athens is more remarkable for its poetry than for its drama, in this, perhaps, resembling the late romances. Timon’s final vision of the tide washing his grave (5.4.99–108) certainly suggests a near-religious perspective beyond the reach of an ordinary play—let alone one so cynical about human motivation as this otherwise appears to be.
Critical history: Although Samuel *Johnson valued the play for its clear moral lesson against trusting in false friends, most commentators have found its remorseless insistence on this point crude, and even Johnson felt the play was deficient in structure. *Coleridge, influentially, considered it an ‘after vibration’ of King Lear, ‘a Lear of the satirical drama, a Lear of ordinary life’. *Hazlitt was unusual in his unqualified enthusiasm for the play, which he valued for its unrelenting earnestness, but generally the play has been valued for individual passages rather than as a whole: Karl *Marx, for example, was deeply affected by Timon’s moralizing against gold (4.3.25–45), initiating a reading of the play’s vision of capitalist economics later developed by Kenneth *Muir. Much discussion of the play has been devoted to explaining its perceived incompetence: around the turn of the 20th century, it became fashionable to attribute the melancholy of the ‘problem plays’ and tragedies to a personal crisis above which Shakespeare finally rose to produce the romances, and Frank Harris’s view that Timon’s ranting vents Shakespeare’s own ‘scream of suffering’ (developed in Shakespeare the Man, 1909) was even echoed by E. K. *Chambers, who decided that Shakespeare must have suffered a nervous breakdown while drafting the play and never completed it thereafter. More recent criticism has returned to the play’s relations to the other works within the canon, whether the problem comedies, the romances (towards which Timon’s sea-poetry seems to reach), or Coriolanus (whose hero’s military campaign against his own city is prefigured by that of Alcibiades, while his proud refusal of a reciprocal social contract is anticipated by Timon’s absolutist generosity and absolutist misanthropy). The play’s most enthusiastic modern champion was G. Wilson *Knight, who regarded it as one of Shakespeare’s supreme achievements, and was given to performing Timon’s speech of self-exile (4.1) in public lectures, complete with the removal of his clothes.
Stage history: No productions of Timon of Athens are recorded before the première of Thomas Shadwell’s adaptation, The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater, in 1678. Shadwell shared the view of the Folio text adopted by many modern critics, declaring in a preface that ‘it has the inimitable hand of Shakespear in it, which never made more masterly strokes than this. Yet I can truly say, I have made it into a play.’ Shadwell’s main contribution, filling a deficiency perceived by many readers since, was to add a love plot, extending the play’s opposition between loyal servants and false friends by supplying Timon with a loyal mistress, Evandra, and an affected, mercenary fiancée, Melissa. With Thomas *Betterton as Timon and masque music composed by *Purcell, this adaptation established itself in the repertory, frequently revived down to 1745. It was succeeded by another adaptation in 1771, by Richard Cumberland, who deprived Timon of his rival girlfriends (times had changed) and instead provided a virtuous daughter Evanthe, whose amorous complications with Alcibiades and Lucius fill out the plot. Spranger *Barry played Timon in a grand Drury Lane production staged by *Garrick, but it lasted for only eleven performances. A subsequent reworking of Shadwell’s adaptation by Thomas *Hull (1786) achieved only one. In 1816 George Lamb attempted to restore Shakespeare’s text, though he left some of Cumberland’s changes to the ending and cut Alcibiades’ mistresses: the result was an all-male Timon of Athens, which succeeded thanks to Edmund *Kean’s terrifying passion in the title role. Sporadic 19th-century revivals followed: Samuel *Phelps was successful as Timon (1851, 1856), and Frank *Benson rearranged the play into three acts for a Stratford revival in 1892. Since then, however, it has only occasionally been produced, and has rarely been fully convincing: Nugent *Monck’s 1935 production is remembered chiefly for its incidental music by a 21-year-old Benjamin *Britten, Barry *Jackson’s post-war modern-dress production of 1947 for the bomb crater that was the set for the second half. Ralph *Richardson and Paul *Scofield, however, each found an other-worldly quality in the title role, and in 1999 Michael *Pennington played Timon sensitively in Gregory *Doran’s RSC production. Timon’s ruin and rough-sleeping was given an extra poignancy in the intelligent parable of capitalist natural selection staged by Cardboard Citizens, a theatre troupe run by and for the homeless, as part of the RSC’s 2006–7 *Complete Works Festival, and Simon *Russell Beale’s interpretation of the role at the *National (2012) was justly celebrated for its power and affect.
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
On the screen: The only screen version on record is Jonathan Miller’s BBC TV production, 1981. The cast included Jonathan Pryce as Timon (who delivered his last speech in a disconcerting upside-down close-up), Norman Rodway, Sebastian Shaw, and Diana Dors.
Anthony Davies