I
TIMON OF ATHENS
Leeds University Union Theatre Group, December 1948; repeated for the National Union of Students Arts Festival at Leeds, January 1949 and for the British Drama League, The Royal Hall, Harrogate, June 1949. My first production was given in Toronto, February and March 1940. Excerpts from the later scenes were presented in This Sceptred Isle at the Westminster Theatre, London, July 1941 (p. 14). Press notices and other particulars are included in my ‘Dramatic Papers’ (p. 14 above). My account here follows the Leeds presentation, in which I would record the help given me by Mr. Peter Tillott and Mr Trevor Lennam as production assistants.1
Problems are raised by Timon of Athens unlike those to be faced in any other Shakespearian tragedy. Its effects are studied and planned, and its structure is in simple blocks: it is, within Shakespeare’s scale of values, a kind of morality play. Its later scenes forecast the Romantic period. It has generally been supposed that the play as we have it is an uncompleted or unrevised version. Perhaps it is. It seems that Shakespeare was pushing beyond his own time, interpreting his tragic vision as the Romantics were to interpret theirs, and he may have found the experiment disquieting. Timon of Athens is a peculiarly self-conscious work.
Our setting and costuming were vaguely those of ancient Greece. We had two intervals. For our first two acts we used front-scenes before a down-stage curtain; a full-stage area backed by two strong, white, pillars decorated at the tops, between which steps rose C to a platform, forming an inset alcove, with a balcony, a rich cloth sometimes thrown over it, against the cyclorama; and sometimes a medium-stage area backed by an up-stage curtain which when drawn obscured the pillars and steps. At Toronto the costumes were Byzantine, the pillars richly coloured, and a dome visible against the cyclorama.1
ACT I
We open with a front-scene. The Painter L is holding a picture; the Poet crosses to him and they talk; grandees enter and go out C between the curtains, drawn aside for them by servants. The Merchant and Jeweller are now talking R. More grandees, senators, enter and go out as before. The Poet’s long speech on Fortune, which serves as a prologue, gains from being spoken in a front-scene.
Trumpets sound and the curtains disclose a glittering assembly. Timon enters on the platform up C, coming from L, and begins to descend the steps, his descent interrupted as he greets suitors on either side. Coming down, he moves about the stage, greeting his friends and looking at the picture. At Apemantus’ entry down R people are grouped behind Timon who becomes the apex of a wedge looking down R as he addresses Apemantus whose words are greeted by the rest with amusement, scorn or anger. Afterwards Timon meets Alcibiades and takes him up the steps C and then off up L. The crowd dissolves and Apemantus comes downstage so that the lower curtain can close behind him for a front-scene.
For the following brief conversation we replaced the ‘lords’ of the text by the two ladies to appear later as Phrynia and Timandra. The building up of the two female parts has obvious advantages.
The curtains draw to disclose the Banquet. The pillars are wreathed with leaves. One long table,2 its cloth elaborately festooned, crosses the stage, and there is a small one down R for Apemantus. Timon will sit C, Alcibiades at the table’s end and Flavius dominates with a staff of office on the steps behind. Timon rises for his speech. Before and during this speech the guests must express amusement, approval and sentimentality in ways appropriate to a dinner speech. Soft approving murmurs can be richly effective. The lords should show no obvious flattery; to perform them so is as foolish as to make Cressida an obvious minx in the early part of Troilus and Cressida. Timon’s friends are not to be regarded as flatterers; rather we watch a friendly meeting of fine people in mutual trust. They drink freely.
For the Masque we used a dance done by girls with tambourines, working up excitement, the guests grouped around the table, some high on the platform and steps, and some down-stage at the sides, the whole company a glittering spectacle as the Bacchanalian music and dance work to a crescendo. This dance, excellently arranged for us by Mrs. Olive Hewetson to music from Moszkowski’s ‘Spanish Dance’, gave lift and impetus to the occasion. People are near intoxication from wine, music and mutual affection. They touch each other freely. Cheeks are flushed and eyes sparkle. From such a soil Timon’s exaggerated presentations flower naturally. Even so, the guests receive their gifts with an honourable diffidence. The darker notes sounded by Flavius’ aside can be punctuated by laughter from a group talking to Timon who are unaware of his words. Timon’s brief dialogue with Apemantus makes an ominous conclusion.
ACT II
The Senator’s interview with Caphis is done as a front-scene, and we next turn to Timon’s hall, the table removed and a chair down R. Flavius enters and after him retainers with demands for money. Timon enters C on the platform from R with Alcibiades and is confronted by the demands. He comes down. We cut the dialogue with the Fool and went straight on to Timon’s interview with Flavius, the others temporarily dismissed.
Timon has the full stage for his anxious movements; he strides up, stands silent, back to audience, and turns again; being gradually made to realize the truth. He decides to send out requests for assistance and moves down-stage with Flavius, the curtains closing behind. In the front-scene he hears of the Senators’ refusal; servants are dispatched to his friends.
We now disclose a medium-stage scene for the interview with Lucullus, a curtain obscuring the steps and pillars. We return to a front-scene for Lucius and the Strangers; then back to medium-stage for Sempronius. Acting details for these Jonsonian miniatures need not delay us, their satirical nature being of a kind likely today to be readily projected. The responses of the three friends must be as admirably differentiated in performance as they are in the text. The effect needed is the disclosure of a natural, if ugly, selfishness from within the externals of conviviality and affection previously shown. We should recognize a dramatic compression of what would probably be our own change of attitude if we heard that one of our friends or a distant relative had suddenly fallen from affluence to penury; or it might be a question of wanting help in the literary world. Our refusals might be more gradual and camouflaged, but a suppliant is always on a lower plane; the old easy contact would be gone; and few of us would go out of our way to restore it. In these scenes the choric commentary of the Strangers and Timon’s servants must be underlined as pointers enforcing our sympathy for Timon. Everything possible is done to direct our response.
We return to our full stage, lights darkened. Servants cluster with their masters’ bills. Flaminius enters, they push to him like a pack of hounds, he eludes them. Next comes Flavius ‘in a cloak, muffled’; they corner him; he replies, and tries to get away; some of them cut off his escape; he half fights his way out. The creditor-servants’ movements should be crisp, official, jerky, having an almost military, team-like, or pack-like, precision.
Timon enters C on the platform from up L and comes down the steps, not as at first attending to suitors, nor as afterwards brushing interruption away, but being attacked and hampered; impeded as before, but very differently. Such cross-references made of similarity in position and difference of action are often helpful. The shouts of the servants, crying their amounts, rise to a crescendo. Their insistence draws, pulls, Timon down among them, to their level; he is tall and splendid, they are bent round him like yapping curs. Timon’s ‘tear me’ suggests a great stag or bull, baited by hounds. He breaks from them and goes off L.
Immediately the front curtain draws and he enters L, breathless, for a brief front-scene, Flavius following. His broken phrases—‘I’ll have it so’—suggest something terrible to follow. At his concluding rhymed couplet
I charge thee, invite them all; let in the tide
Of knaves once more—my cook and I’ll provide
he strides swiftly off, crossing the proscenium from L to R. This move had a precise effect. Timon has hitherto always entered from the platform up C, coming in, except after his hunting with Alcibiades, from the left. This vivid down-stage move from L to R indicates his entry into a new world, leaving his ivory-castle consciousness for recognition of the world of human viciousness; it cuts across the stage like an attack.
The Senate scene that follows is on medium-stage, curtains obscuring the steps. Our second Banquet scene is set like the first, but without Apemantus’ chair and table. The nature of Timon’s speech is only gradually revealed. The guests expect conviviality; at ‘lest your deities be despised’ one or two attempt a laugh, thinking a joke may be intended, and break off, nervously; comedy is in place. They grow embarrassed: ‘What does his lordship mean?’ Timon’s purpose is at last revealed. The speech gathers to its crest. The splashing of water is not enough. Timon hurls a heavy dish-cover, and another. There is a general tumult, the guests rise; the table tilts and Timon deliberately hurls it over, the whole long table, plate and crockery crashing. In real life the breaking of crockery always arouses a peculiar shock, depending in part on the reversal of so fundamental a life-joy as food and its careful preparations, so that we experience a poignant pathos; even tears may be awakened. In our play this normal experience is raised to a fearful power as the long table, like a breaking wave, crashes over. The effect is more nerve-racking than thunder or an explosion.
This is the kind of climax that must at all costs not be underplayed. The professional theatre here will use all its dangerous resources to get through the awkward moment smoothly with the minimum amount of trouble, making an easy transition of what should be a cataclysmic terror. That, to transpose Hamlet’s phrase, is ‘villainous’.
The table overturned, Timon leaps on to the steps, seizes Flavius’ staff, and raising it appears for an instant a gigantic, towering, figure of judgement well lit, though lights elsewhere have lowered; then he descends, moving about the darkened stage as he speaks the lines
Live loath’d and long,
Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites …
and closing at ‘a welcome guest’; we reserve the final couplet for a later use. As he speaks Timon wields the staff, making as though to beat his victims, driving them off down-stage this side and that, sweeping round in a curve, the tall staff causing him to loom darkly gigantic, while the guests cower, some on hands and knees, ludicrous, hiding behind objects. The effect should resemble that we imagine of Christ when He belabours the temple money-changers.
Timon goes out L, and the guests have a few brief speeches. Timon returns from up L, up-stage C on the platform, the lights picking him out, to speak the lines ‘Let me look back upon thee …’ He is visually alone, a cameo, the rest of the stage quite dark. The strain on the actor of Timon from these violent actions and thundering speeches has been severe, and lines must be cut. We cut from ‘matrons … parents’ eyes’, ‘Maid … brains’, ‘Instruction … laws’, ‘Thou cold … merely poison’, and instead of the concluding ‘Amen’ used the couplet (III. VI. 115) omitted earlier:
Burn, house! Sink, Athens! I Henceforth hated be
Of Timon, man and all humanity!
Timon goes out on the platform R. He has broken with Athens.
Timon’s embracing of ‘nakedness’ (IV. I. 33) during this speech is important, but his clothes are not such as can be effectively unwound before the audience. After belabouring the guests, he has only a few moments off-stage: in those his upper robe is removed and his long under-dress lifted over his head. He wears underneath a kilt of similar rich style and now wraps his main robe loosely round him. When he returns on the platform he can unrobe easily; but the action is to be done with deliberation and artistry. Timon is facing L, catching a vivid light from L. He is clasping the robe round him with both hands in front. He unwraps the robe with his left hand holding its corner out, and letting his right unwind it behind him, so that his body from the waist is shown against the robe, stretched between the two hands across his back. Then, with a sweeping movement, he hurls it away in front of him L with his right hand, after having loosened the grip with his left, so that it curls round him as it falls away. For ‘take thou that too’ he throws a chaplet worn on his head (at Toronto it was a metal circlet), with both hands. The sudden appearance of the naked body, picked out by the wing-light, makes a vivid cameo.
From Timon’s address to the guests till this last exit the strain in speech and physical action, including the swift costume-change, has been unrelieved. The cutting of his long speech is technically forced; and anyway, spoken as it is in the up-stage inset, it is better abbreviated.
We go straight on to the parting of Timon’s servants, using the full stage, among the debris. To conclude our second main movement at a climax would be un-Shakespearian and this scene makes the correct end. It should be spoken with a measured, elegiac, solemnity. During this scene Timon’s discarded robe will be visually vociferous.
ACT III
Our third movement must be preluded by music of appropriate elemental force, and demands a strong setting. Shakespeare’s ‘Timon will to the woods’ must be amplified by recognition of his subsequent references to the sea. The conception is from now on Promethean and romantic, and the obvious choice will be a background of rocks, making a rhythmic line rising from R towards C, broken low at C, and rising highest at L, the sea imagined behind. L will still be Timon’s area, R for other persons. Our blocks at Leeds (Picture 22) scarcely got the line needed; at Toronto we used a simple ground-roll. Perhaps more successful was the painted setting for these scenes in This Sceptred Isle at the Westminster Theatre. Suggestion of a single vast tree-trunk down R corner might help (e.g. for IV. iii. 224–5). The lighting must be so arranged that the cyclorama does not tire the eye. Sea-surf sounds intermittently from now on.
We are to watch a succession of visits to Timon, and we arranged them in this order: (i) Alcibiades and his army; (ii) Apemantus; (iii) Poet and Painter; (iv) Flavius; (v) the Bandits; (vi) the Senators. These were given lighting as follows: (i) morning; (ii) and (iii) day; (iv) sunset; (v) moonlight; (vi) starlight. Our order is not quite that of the text but there is some authority for a change, since Apemantus’ ‘Yonder comes a poet and a painter’ (IV. iii. 358) is not followed by their entrance, though it is dramatically pointless if they are not to come next, for such remarks are made to stimulate immediate expectance; and once we start transposing, the advantages of having the Bandits by moonlight are sufficient to justify our placing. The text of Timon of Athens may not be reliable.
Suggested setting for the second half Timon of Athens (drawing by Michael Wright)
Timon’s curses need cutting. They are unlike Shakespeare’s long speeches elsewhere in that they do not gather and accumulate; his curses are lists of items, ungraduated additions, not organic growths. For this there is a reason. Timon of Athens appears to have been written as from the sophisticated consciousness of a later period, intellectually patterned and purposeful; the poet knows what he means his spokesman to say instead of giving him the chance to work it out for himself; conscious manipulation replaces natural flowering. In this respect Timon of Athens resembles the dramas of the romantic period—Professor Allardyce Nicoll aptly calls it ‘Byronic’ (Shakespeare, 1952; 61)—and speaking is the more difficult: the actor has to make his own structure from speeches that lack rhetorical organization. Much of the difficulty may be remedied by cuts. The problem only applies to some of the longer speeches as units; the shorter ones and the scenes as scenes work up to their climaxes well, and have all the organic flowering we expect. So does the whole later movement.
Our coast scenes open to show Timon up R among the rocks, darkly silhouetted against the cyclorama. Surf sounds. He wears a loose, leather loin-cloth, devised with falling folds, longer one side than the other; his hair is long and beard wild. It is dawn. Timon’s silhouetted body is gradually gilded by light from the wings R as he lifts his arms to the dawn: ‘O blessed breeding sun …’ During the speech Timon comes C, speaks a while from there, and ends up digging for roots down L, which is to be his own natural area from now on. We imagine a cave off-stage L. He finds gold.
This gold is to take on symbolic properties and must look worthy of them. Historically Timon is said to have found ‘treasure’, but whatever the original meaning our text is concerned with gold, as gold, and solid blocks are needed, heavy nuggets. One of these Timon raises, and addresses.
Alcibiades enters R between Phrynia and Timandra, with his soldiers. The dialogue needs no commentary except to say that at the lines
Put armour on thine ears, and on thine eyes,
Whose proof nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes,
Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding,
Shall pierce a jot
Timon’s speaking should give full value to the pathos and sanctity which is being repudiated. He is moving beyond these softer values; but they still exist in him and their existence must be pointed. Alcibiades and his company leave R.
Then follows Timon’s soliloquy to the earth, to be given from where he digs down L in a measured utterance against a monotone of surf, his calmness when alone contrasting with his anger when interrupted. Apemantus enters R. The following dialogue can be made to act better than it reads. During his long verse speech Timon rests on his spade. He stands strongly, one leg advanced and the spade planted vertical, not too near him, almost as a third leg. Strong, elemental positions with firm limbs and torso must be preserved, or Timon’s nakedness lacks stage power; certain positions, natural and good in costume, will look weak.
The effect of Timon’s dialogue with Apemantus should weigh the balance strongly in Timon’s favour. Some of his reasoning, based on the aristocratic values, may not appear to us valid, but all we need to understand is that Timon’s hatred is being shown as motivated and noble whereas Apemantus’ is ingrained and ignoble. Timon’s is an agony to him, Apemantus’ an enjoyment. Some of the interchanges are subtle. Timon at one point dismisses Apemantus with ‘Get thee gone’, but then shows him his gold with a touch of pride, as though assuring Apemantus that his own spiritual worth has been maintained: the stage gold visually helps to build and therefore symbolizes his new, semi-prophetic, status. Apemantus, rationalistically impervious to imaginative or spiritual radiations, observes that there is here ‘no use for gold’, and offers Timon instead a medlar, or apple: food is all he, as a materialist philosopher, can understand. He is tempting Timon to come down to his own level. We are reminded of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Timon is going to accept it, then refuses: ‘On what I hate I feed not’. He proceeds, with a pun, to associate the ‘medlar’ with Apemantus himself. He turns away. Apemantus pursues him, following up with a more subtle temptation as he invites Timon to discuss his wrongs, and here Timon meets him for a while on equal, philosophic, terms, only to recover himself, recognizing that Apemantus’ philosophy is bestial and Apemantus an ‘ass’. His escape infuriates Apemantus. Timon’s wrath rises. They part.
Timon stands C, alone. We postpone his lines on the sea and go straight on to his address to the gold: ‘O thou sweet king-killer’. He speaks to it as to a living person. The gold essence, which is close to his own essential nobility, must be good; and yet it leads in practice to evil. Its significances are accordingly ambivalent; it is a great and living power, a ‘visible god’, a ruler of human ‘hearts’. That Timon still possesses gold has a significance, which means nothing to Apemantus, that must be vividly put across.
The Poet and Painter, to whom Apemantus has recently referred, enter R; Timon is down L, eating. The satire against these two is here strong, and the actors should burlesque their parts slightly in contrast to their earlier courtly behaviour. They are now obvious flatterers. The full stage is used for Timon’s play with them, leaving him C after beating them off with his spade, so that he can go up C to the gap between the rocks for ‘I am sick of this false world’ and his lines on his death:
Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat
Thy grave-stone daily.
These are the lines split off and postponed from the earlier speech, the advantage being that in this way we maintain another strong soliloquy between visits from the outer world. Timon speaks them looking sideways out to sea, the surf sounding, this position up C being Timon’s position of ultimate authority, where he communes with the eternal.
The lines set the note for Flavius’ entrance. Lighting on the cyclorama L suggests sunset. After his first distrust Timon softens: ‘I do proclaim one honest man’. His following ‘no more, I pray’ indicates a certain weakness, a desire that his all but universal condemnation be proved right. He kneels down, picks up some gold, and offers it, still kneeling, to Flavius, the position indicating his temporary loss of dramatic status: Flavius is momentarily his superior. The words ‘the gods out of my misery have sent thee treasure’ hold a suggestion well beyond the obvious meaning: we may call the gold ‘tragic’ gold, the wealth of a great soul’s suffering, mysteriously beneficent.1
Timon quickly returns to his uncompromising hatred, but even his most terrible lines, his
Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,
But let the famish’d flesh slide from the bone
Ere thou relieve the beggar
somehow stimulate their opposite. One is the more, not less, Christian for having heard them. The lines serve to throw into relief a goodness which we all recognize but have no right to while our falsities, the falsities which the play has been defining, persist.
Timon has been dramatically reduced, almost deflated, since Flavius has shown his philosophy to be relative and not absolute. He goes up C, back to the audience, meditating. The lights change, darkening, and a spot from above C begins to suggest moonlight. The Bandits enter R and move about, crossing to Timon’s area L as they search for the gold. Suddenly they see him silhouetted up C. They are down L of him as he approaches them C, where he speaks to them, rocks behind and moonlight faintly picking him out from above: ‘Behold the earth hath roots …’ The lines are spoken wearily. He comes down, and breaks through them L while they, fearful, step aside out of his way. Timon picks up some gold and offers it. Things are coming rather too easily for safety, and the Bandits back away, afraid of Timon’s power. They are now variously down-stage or R, Timon a little up L. He is still speaking dully, ironically. But suddenly he moves to his position up C and turns, so that he is again moonlit, the light stronger, the Bandits now down-stage of him on either side. This is his position for the following elemental lines, which must be given with a sudden access of force and fling, the fantasy built up, stressed eerily by what he calls the moonlight’s ‘pale fire’ on Timon’s body. From ‘I’ll example you with thievery’ onwards his gestures are fantastic, conjuring up the great cosmos, sun, moon, sea and earth:
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 stol’n
From general excrement: each thing’s a thief …
He points to moon, sea, and earth in turn; surf sounds strong before ‘The sea’s a thief’. The sun itself cannot be indicated, unless a gesture L can be made to suggest its earlier setting, as though it had escaped, like a thief. During Timon’s lines the Bandits, now thoroughly uneasy, look across at each other, or follow Timon’s gestures and indications, as though fearful of magic. They are being magically attacked, by poetry and all its cosmic contacts and extensions, far beyond their ken: the effect on them can be comic.
After ‘each thing’s a thief’ Timon, still violent, comes down, breaks through, and gathers more gold, urging the Bandits to engage in riot and murder. And now we find clear evidence for what we have already hinted, that Timon’s anarchic poetry contains in itself, as Apemantus’ dour philosophizing does not, a saving grace that acts on others not for their harm but for their good. Of this good the new-found gold may itself be regarded as the symbol: it, together with Timon’s poetry—they are aspects of the same thing—makes Timon still a princely figure, a mine of bounty, an outradiating power more strong in his new life-way than in his earlier ease. The Bandits have been offered gold. One of them remarks: ‘He has almost charmed me from my profession by persuading me to it’; another will ‘give over’ his ‘trade’. As to whether the Bandits actually take the gold, we have a choice: we could show them as afraid to touch it, feeling unworthy.
The stage darkens. Timon has gone up C, and is now a dark silhouette only. It is starlight. Flavius and the Senators enter. Despite our night setting, Timon’s ‘Thou sun, that comfort’st, burn’ can be allowed, if spoken in an off-hand manner, though we shall find a difficulty a little later. The visit of the Senators, coming to implore Timon’s aid to save the city from Alcibiades, is our climax. What has happened is this: Timon has been recognized by the community that had rejected him as a magical power, like Sophocles’ Oedipus in the Oedipus Coloneus. The plot of neither play may seem, to our minds, adequate to the impact expected. We cannot feel all the significances which Oedipus’ story held for ancient Athens, and the lustre held by the aristocracy of Shakespeare’s time is to us alien. These themes were however no more than a rough basis for Sophocles and Shakespeare to develop far beyond their first content. On the stage all we need is a production which follows what is demanded, and the audience will respond. In any age personal greatness, or genius, is likely enough to find itself at first rejected and subsequently wooed as a saving power. This is all that we need to recognize.
Timon, lit by a steel or blue-steel light, remains unforgiving: his stand is firm, and must not be softened, except that the lines
And take our goodly aged men by the beards,
Giving our holy virgins to the stain
Of contumelious, beastly, mad-brain’d war …
must be spoken with full regard to the excellences which the viciousness of man has given over to desecration. Timon has moreover—his speech to the Bandits recognizing relativity as implanted in the universal scheme suggested as much—passed beyond particularities, beyond ethic and satire. Life is now a ‘sickness’ and death’s ‘nothing’ brings him ‘all things’. So he, who had first aimed at love’s perfection, can now see only one wholly satisfying solution to the human enigma: death. If the Athenians really wish to avoid the agonies of mortal existence, they can always commit suicide. Timon’s thinking has gone beyond mortality; the words are spoken from his position up C, touched by gleams of starlight, the surf as a low thunder. For his last lines he moves to a position higher than ever before, as though on the edge of a precipice falling to the sea. Then he turns to face us:
Come not to me again: but say to Athens
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover: thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.
Lips, let sour words go by and language end:
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be men’s works, and death their gain!
Stars, hide your beams! Timon hath done his reign1.
Again, death is Timon’s panacea: he is already there, or nearly there, within a sort of Nirvana the presence of which is realized by the sound of the surf and the suggestion that has run through all these last scenes of a vast ocean of mysterious being beyond the line of rocks. The others go. Left alone, Timon’s gaunt figure stands majestic, silhouetted against a purple cyclorama, the surf his only music. The curtains close.
It will be observed that we have changed Shakespeare’s ‘Sun, hide thy beams’ to ‘Stars, hide your beams’. If the words are spoken at all, our lighting precludes a second use of ‘sun’, and to speak the text in a setting which contradicts it is an example of the type of mis-placed idolatry of which modern producers are too often guilty. If the changing of words seems sacrilegious, the couplet must be cut; but that leaves a poor ending. Besides, this adjustment is less important than our use of rocks and surf, for neither of which have we any explicit directions. We must oppose objections which hamper an honest deviation. Provided that the producer has first penetrated inward into the deepest spiritual mechanics of such a work as Timon, which as we have it looks like an uncompleted, at the least an unpolished, work, we may allow him a certain liberty of adjustment.
The two following brief scenes are better cut: the first merely reports what we already know, and the second, by bringing Timon’s grave too near to us, arouses awkward questions as to how he buried himself instead of letting us bring to his death the kind of acceptance which we bring to that of Sophocles’ Oedipus. So we pass on directly to Alcibiades’ entry before the walls of Athens, set effectively as a front-scene. This is the finest ritual conclusion in Shakespearian tragedy, and should be done with full civic and military conviction.
Produced according to the directions we have been outlining, the greatness of Timon of Athens as a stage-piece becomes apparent. The masterly structure of the Athenian action in all its simplicity and strength needs no advertisement and raises no unusual problems. Afterwards more spiritual and philosophic categories are involved, and they, as the romantic dramatists found, are less easy to put across. These difficulties we have countered by a free exploitation of hints already in Shakespeare’s poetry: by a bold use of Timon’s nakedness, usually shirked, driving home under a free play of varied lighting—for the elemental significances of an unclothed body demand such effects (see p. 165 above)—the Promethean and cosmic part assumed by the protagonist; and also by the recurring sound of surf, which is best made by tilting a trough filled with lead shot. In addition, we must throughout the play preserve a sense of certain stage areas as possessing this or that significance. Stage left is Timon’s side, stage right is for the rest of humanity. In the later scenes we have three main areas: L for Timon’s cave entrance, and his digging; R for the entry of visitors; and up C, at the break in the rocks, for Timon’s communing with the sea-as-Nirvana. Respect to these areas should never result in moves or groupings that do not seem realistically natural; all should go smoothly and inevitably and the audience should not necessarily be aware of any particular significances being driven in by them, though it will do no harm if they are. The effect of such a production on a reasonably intelligent audience will be strong.
A caution may be expressed. Should any producer wish to follow the plan we have been describing, much will depend on close attention to details. The avoidance, through anxiety to save labour, of the crashing table, will affect all the subsequent scenes; the shock is essential. Again, if we give Timon tinkling little coins for his new-found treasure instead of weighty ingots—as was done in a recent Old Vic production—his address to it
Think thy slave man rebels; and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds that beasts
May have the world in empire
falls limp. If Timon, fearing the impact of a naked torso, wears a drape that covers one shoulder, the elemental challenge is gone. Success in Shakespearian production will only mature from an honest piling up of various effects in exact attunement to the drama’s inner meanings.
2
SHYLOCK
The Leeds University Union Theatre Group; February 1960
There is perhaps no other of Shakespeare’s heavier parts so rewarding to the actor as Shylock. The great tragic roles are conceived as a series of poetic adventures which only Shakespeare’s skill prevents from being too refined for stage production. So many problems are raised. Othello is a superb enigma, and the readily appreciated Iago only makes the actor’s problem worse, like Mercutio beside Romeo; Macbeth, even when he is supposed to be talking to another, is generally soliloquizing; Lear as a tyrannic old man is easy to characterize, but elaborate resources are needed to make the last two-thirds of the play grip; and Timon will, if care be not taken, only too easily look less superman than fool. In all these both producer and actor have to lift the audience; sometimes, it seems, drag them. The response has to be won. Hamlet certainly is easier, because of the variety and because we have enough prose in the main part to re-engage contact when it might be lost.
Behind these great personal conceptions lie two precursors: Falstaff and Shylock. In them the greater powers are felt bursting the bounds of an otherwise normal drama. I wish here to record some experiences in the acting of Shylock.
The actor can rely on a number of assumptions: the audience all know, roughly, what kind of a man Shylock is, and what is his relation to a Christian society. This made Shakespeare’s task easier, and the actor has today an even greater advantage than the actor of Shakespeare’s time in that the racial problems are the more vividly present to us. Shylock is from the start a recognizable and convincing figure. He does not need to be built up for us gradually; he is already there, and the dramatist and actor can get down to the important matters without diffusion of their poetic or histrionic energies. This is why it is possible for so comparatively short a role, and one scarcely holding ‘protagonist’ stature—and in a ‘comedy’ too—to assume so great a tragic power. There is a compacted force in Shylock made from the fusion of local realism with spiritual pointing that is like nothing else in Shakespeare.
I did not play the part until 1960 when I was invited to do so by the Leeds University Union Theatre Group in a production by Mr. Frederick May. I record my gratitude to both. Portia was Miss Susan Lee. The experience convinced me that Shylock’s dramatic status should be rated even higher than it normally is.
Though a compact study, Shylock develops; his every entry marks a step in his progress in a manner which Shakespeare was to repeat with the very similarly compacted Caliban in The Tempest—the details I have analysed in The Crown of Life—who resembles Shylock in that he holds protagonist quality without protagonist status. At Shylock’s first entrance we are introduced to all those facets of his personality which are to be our subsequent concerns. He wears a Jewish cap, an underdress bound by a coloured sash and a rich gown or ‘gaberdine’ above. He carries a stick. As the scene unfurls, we become aware of his slightly off-centre, Jewish idiom; his Jewish faith and customs and the Biblical background to his thought; his ugly hatred of Antonio and expectance of revenge countered by evidence of the wrongs and insults that he has endured. Shylock has a Hebraic dignity alternating with moments of obsequious respect ingrained from centuries of oppression. A difficulty occurs in his proposal of the bond. Somehow it must be made to look like a ‘merry sport’. The lines starting ‘If you repay me not on such a day …’ may be spoken quickly, half-carelessly; there is a pause before ‘an equal pound’, which comes with a shrug and a gesture, as though it were the first thought to occur; and the conclusion is almost thrown away, off-handedly.
Shylock’s stick is slightly above walking-stick length, yet not a staff, so that it rests on the ground with the hand holding it reasonably high. During his description of Jacob’s tricking of Laban he can use it to illustrate the peeling of the ‘wands’. Shylock’s gestures suggest his nation. Normally a Shakespearian actor has to use expansive gestures unhabitual to modern behaviour; Shylock’s are a natural element in a ‘character’ study. The basis of them will be made by turning the hands in, palms up; for normal ‘poetic’ parts, Othello or Macbeth, the basic position will be palms down, as when one points at something. Shylock will, of course, on occasion break free from character gestures into the wider range of poetic acting.
On his second entrance the note to be struck is racial dignity. He may be a hard master to Launcelot Gobbo, but he is not conscious of it and genuinely sees himself as a kind one. As he talks to Jessica his ‘I am not bid for love’ has pathos and his sense of foreboding has tragic radiations. Depth is conveyed by his dislike of popular music and the ‘shallow foppery’ of masques in comparison with his own ‘sober house’. The grand phrase ‘by Jacob’s staff’ sums up these weighty impressions. Shylock still has his stick. The scene is short but pregnant.
We do not meet Shylock again until after his daughter has absconded and he has been robbed of his wealth by her and Lorenzo. His entry is, however, prepared by Salanio’s earlier account of his passionate misery and the mockery being made of it by others. This account serves a dual purpose: if the audience is going to find Shylock’s passion amusing they have been given authority for it, but authority of so dubious a kind that it is more likely to work the other way. On Shylock’s entry Salarino and Salanio maintain the mockery until Shylock’s power bears them down.
Shylock has shed his main over-robe and wears his simple underdress and the coloured sash. His Jewish cap has gone and his hair is wild. He does not have his stick, for gestures must be free. The passion is such that he must move about freely, going up-stage, turning round, and coming down, the movements underlining his thwarted anger, like a torrent searching for a channel.
The famous ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ was spoken less for power than for pathos, avoiding too strong a climax at the end: ‘and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction’. We want to save our climax for later, and Shylock has not as yet found his way: he is blindly threatening, and the threats come almost through tears, certainly a catch in the voice. The note is pathos; but, the conception following the inevitable rise of a Shakespearian hero, we shall not stop there. Shylock is to tower beyond all claims to pity.
The dialogue with Tubal is the hardest part to perform. It has the intensity of Hamlet’s ‘nunnery’ scene with Ophelia: in both, prose is used to forbid, as it were, the flow and freedom of Shakespearian verse. Passion is thwarted, half-choked. We are up against real life, whereas poetry is an interpretation of life, a conventional medium for a fluent expression of what would in actuality be a series of half-smothered, volcanic, eruptions. That is what we find here; the changes will be sudden, though—and this is where the acting becomes difficult—the poise and grace of the actor’s technique must be preserved.
Shylock has met Tubal up-stage R. He hears that his daughter has not been found:
Why, there, there, there! a diamond gone, cost me two
thousand ducats in Frankfort! The curse never fell upon
our nation till now: I never felt it till now: two thousand
ducats in that, and other precious, precious jewels.
Shylock’s grief for his wealth, which is for him his soul’s symbol, as Timon’s new-found gold is his, his integrity and power against an alien community, becomes one with his nation’s tragedy throughout the ages. The word ‘nation’ elevates the speech. The words are deep and quiet, holding the sob of a race’s agony. Then there is a pause. Shylock is quivering, the bow is strung, and now, in sudden abandon, turning away from Tubal a step down-stage, and speaking frontally:
I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the
jewels in her ear! would she was hearsed at my foot, and
the ducats in her coffin!
At ‘my daughter’ one hand is raised, as though proclaiming an invocation, a reversed blessing; then, like a hawk’s plunge, it comes down, pointing almost vertically to the ground. Shylock is acting a solitary drama, Tubal forgotten. The anathema is the more terrible for the family love and loyalty ingrained in Shylock’s nature. The use of ‘ear’ marks an absurdity like some of Othello’s prose agonies; the meaninglessness is wanted. The awkward repetition of ‘foot’ is of similar type. The lines are dramatically overpowering, and the more frightening for being on a realistic rather than a poetic level.
After this fearful outbreak Shylock is exhausted. He turns L, makes a weak circling movement, back to the audience, and comes completely round to face Tubal again, and with a changed, tremulous voice and a pitifully weak, Jewish, gesture asks plaintively:
No news of them?
Tubal is silent, or shakes his head. Shylock turns away, and now, all loose in his abandon, arms falling limp and body swaying, makes a long circular move across from up R to up L, down L, and across to down R while he speaks the despairing lines:
Why, so: and I know not what’s spent in the search:
why, thou loss upon loss! the thief gone with so much,
and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no
revenge; nor no ill luck stirring but what lights on my
shoulders; no sighs but of my breathing; no tears but
of my shedding.
Again, he is a figure of pathos. But at Tubal’s hint of Antonio’s ‘ill luck’, his eye and voice quicken:
What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck?
Hearing of Antonio’s lost argosy, he answers:
I thank God, I thank God!
A dark paradox lies in his finding of God’s grace in another’s misfortune; the thought descends from the Old Testament, from the Psalms, seeing in God the protector of a single race.
From now on the dialogue see-saws from the height of ‘good news, good news’ down to ‘thou stick’st a dagger in me’; and again from ‘I am very glad of it: I’ll plague him; I’ll torture him …’ to ‘I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys’. Tubal acts as tempter; Shylock is being goaded into the position he is shortly to take up, and maintain. The scene towers up to culminate in his request for an officer and ‘I will have the heart of him, if he forfeit’. It is typical of Shakespeare that our nobler sympathies are immediately countered by ‘for, were he out of Venice, I can make what merchandise I will’. The stage brilliance of the exit lines ‘Go, good Tubal; at our synagogue, Tubal’ needs no underlining, except perhaps to observe that the conclusion on ‘synagogue’ drives home the thought that for Shylock his intended course has religious sanction.
For the short scene where Shylock confronts Antonio and the gaoler Shylock has again his full gaberdine, Jewish cap and stick; he has a new kind of authority; he is feared. As for the underlying emotions, we note that his words are not those of one to whom implacability comes easily. He repeats himself, is afraid of listening to pleas, reasons in self-justification:
Thou call’dst me dog before thou had’st a cause;
But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.
His repeated ‘I’ll have my bond’ marks a fall not only to a too absolute trust in a thing, the bond, apart from all human considerations, but also, in its repetition, to a kind of subhuman level, like that of Aeschylus’ Erinyes, who are impervious to argument and similarly repeat themselves. His statement that he has sworn an oath that he will have his bond marks the will to bind himself for fear of his kindlier tendencies. Shylock is, not without an effort, giving himself over to a demonic power. We watch him doing it:
I’ll not be made a soft and dull-eyed fool,
To shake the head, relent, and sigh, and yield
To Christian intercessors.
Clearly, as we found in Timon’s curses, the rejected tendencies are still present. Shylock is trying to say, like Milton’s Satan, ‘evil be thou my good’. True, he cannot, and that is part of his problem, see what he is doing as evil, but his nature does not find cruelty easy. All this the actor can convey if he feels it. At ‘therefore speak no more’ he can turn from Antonio and speak the lines ‘I’ll not be made …’ almost as an aside, self-troubled, turning back for ‘Follow not …’ He is afraid of Antonio’s pleading.
In the Trial scene Shylock has surpassed his uncertainties and become a wholly dedicated and unitary force. There is now no pathos, nor any temptation to weakness: he has given himself over to the demoniac course, and the audience, knowing the situation, should be dramatically impressed.
He now accordingly speaks fluent poetry, and in Shakespeare such poetry, if closely inspected, may often reveal self-diagnosing contrapuntal subtleties of considerable importance. These represent the elements that have been incorporated into the one flow. In his opening speech Shylock first reminds himself and those present of his oath, but does not say a word of his wrongs and makes no mention of Lorenzo’s theft of his daughter and his jewels. Instead he speaks directly from the demoniac consciousness to which he has given himself up, confessing that his actions spring from an antipathy that does not lend itself to rational definition; from, that is, what we might call some ‘complex’ in the ‘unconscious mind’. We can, if we like, trace the ‘complex’ to centuries of oppression, but Shylock himself does not; and there may be some yet deeper, racial, antagonism at work antedating, and perhaps itself originally causing, or helping to cause, that oppression. That Shylock finds this dark force repellent even while he identifies himself with it is witnessed by his use, which must be spoken with a full sense of disgust at its sickening quality, of repellent imagery: ‘carrion-flesh,’ ‘rat’, ‘gaping pig’, the ‘bagpipe’ singing ‘i’ the nose’, ‘urine’. For such antipathies as his there is ‘no firm reason to be render’d’; the cat some people loathe is really ‘harmless’ and ‘necessary’; and the sufferer is forced on, he freely admits, to
yield to such inevitable shame
As to offend, himself being offended.
Shylock has with full consciousness given himself up to a course of action which he himself recognizes, not as evil, but as ugly.
The speech is beautifully composed, the impressionistic argument unfurling and rising. Shylock’s vocal expression and Jewish, explanatory, gestures and shrugs, witness his struggle to express a difficult thought as well as his dislike and disgust at the whole situation in which he has become protagonist. But from these anxieties his final certainty breaks free. At ‘So can I give no reason’ his hand is raised, well before the reason for its raising, and gradually and remorselessly falls to level finally at Antonio, as his name is uttered. The words ‘a losing suit’ mark Shylock’s recognition that it is, in the deepest sense, a ‘losing’ suit. The speech is a notable example of that gathering and rising power which Shakespeare’s longer speeches regularly show.
His brief stichomythic interchange with Bassanio must be given with venom: ‘serpent’ and ‘sting’ carry on the earlier vein of repellent imagery. For Shylock’s
If every ducat in six thousand ducats
Were in six parts and every part a ducat
I would not draw them; I would have my bond
a peculiarly pleasing effect can be gained by speaking the first line explanatorily and the next line and a half unemotionally and quickly, the speed from the opening at first gradually and then swiftly increasing till there is no pause whatever at the end of the second line, all sense of metre and even syntax deliberately broken by the run-on. The movement is halted after ‘draw them’, and ‘I would have my bond’ spoken slowly and with weight.
Shylock’s second long expository speech ‘What judgement shall I dread, doing no wrong?’ is more rational than the first. He is growing impatient and wants to clarify the issue. Rationally, he is, from his view, ‘doing no wrong’ and is consequently in no fear of ‘judgement’. It is a simple matter of law and possession, and no one but he need concern himself with those darker issues of unmotivated loathing which he has already handled. The imagery is still denigratory: asses, dogs, mules. The reference to slavery serves to assert that all society is built on suffering, and that absolute standards cannot be adduced by his opponents without self-condemnation. The lines are spoken with expostulatory gestures, and shrugs. This speech of thwarted impatience ends on a strong climax: ‘I stand for judgement: answer: shall I have it?’
Shylock’s interchanges with Portia need no comment: the obvious reading and relevant actions come easily. After the reversal, Shylock registers his reaction in face and eyes. This is not easy but to have him turned up-stage is a weak expedient. There is however a limit to what can be done, and during Portia’s long speech ‘Tarry, Jew …’ and its staggering content Shylock can, at an appropriate moment, cover his eyes with his hands, his head well up, not lowered. At ‘Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the Duke’ Shylock, half-driven by the crowd, kneels. As he hears the Duke’s sentence of confiscation, he slumps lower, lying on the ground. For his following lines, he lifts himself a little, palms on the ground, still half lying but his head and shoulders raised;
Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
It is not easy to account for the extraordinary stage power of these lines.
They were spoken in a long, slow, wail with the vocal contrasts simple and strongly modulated; up on ‘all’, and changing to a deep note on ‘pardon’; a measured utterance for the next line and a half; a rising wail on ‘life’, sinking again, like a corpse into the earth, at ‘whereby I live’. The modulation fixed, the actor’s main business here is to make every syllable exaggeratedly clear, if only because, being on the ground, his figure and even face may not be clearly visible to everyone. This is what he should be thinking about himself, while the audience is being emotionally transfixed. The thoughts and rhythms are simple, and may be called either universal or platitudinous, according to taste; but their impact is terrific. We can say that they drive home the nature of Shylock’s central life-way wherein his wealth is all but his soul; but we knew all that before. What really happens is this. The situation is before us; we already feel with Shylock to the limit, and need no new thoughts. At this point intellectual concentration would blur the feeling, and that is precisely why they must be spoken so clearly; not that the thoughts are in themselves important, but that the audience should expend no jot of psychic power in listening, inquiring or thinking; they must simply be allowed to feel, and these four lines exist mainly to fill out space for their feeling, without raising irrelevant issues. This is masterly stage-composition.1
Shylock rises, pauses, and says ‘I am content’, hesitating after ‘am’. Before ‘I am not well’ he almost falls, no one coming to his aid. ‘Send the deed after me and I will sign it’ is spoken weakly before the attorney’s desk, a pathetically weak, Jewish gesture of both hands made towards the desk while his face and voice register a horror away from it. At the last of our ten performances I found myself emphasizing the horror by actually withdrawing a step while the hands were out, using an even more strongly contradictory action than before; but since this seemed to me very effective while it was being done, I suspect that it was overdone. Shylock’s exit is made cowering, followed by jeers. He is back where he started, or lower; his bearing has the repellent humility of a pariah.
What we find here is a maximum of external humiliation supervening on our sympathy and our clear sense of a richness in Shylock’s personality beyond anything apparent in his dramatic associates. The darker elements have not been diluted by the author and must not be diluted by the actor; but if played as we have described, the effect is, in its own way, deeply tragic. Such disasters in real life will often enough be accompanied by condemnation and humiliation, but we should seldom allow ourselves to feel that such an outcome covers the human problem. After Shylock Shakespeare develops a series of tragedies wherein the inward soul-worth of Shylock, even his soul-worth while submitting to the demoniac powers, is given a more poetically explicit formulation in heroes whose possession by such powers is an accepted element in a purposive scheme, and who are accordingly not humiliated. In them the Dionysian principle takes over, at least for a while, and has its fling; we are subtly made to accept its provisional authority, as an inalienable part of the universal structure; and condemnation becomes irrelevant. The great tragedies are metaphysical explorations of that which lies behind, or within, the human enigma; Shylock is a study drawn more directly from that enigma, from life itself, as we know it. Neither is more ‘true’ than the other, but having regard to the high degree of tragic sympathy aroused by Shylock we can perhaps suggest that in him Shakespeare has left us, brief though the treatment be, a more convincing and perhaps even a more comprehensive reading of man than in the more famous works. Ethic and society have more rights, and it is just because these rights so violently and even crudely assert themselves against our tragic sympathies that the end of the Trial scene appears so deeply shocking. The shock, made of the crushing together of two seemingly incompatible and yet unavoidable truths, should leave the audience disturbed.
3
The problems posed by Falstaff and Shylock forced Shakespeare on to his more metaphysically patterned dramas; he had, as it were, to attempt deliberate interpretations of the mystery, to render the sympathy which we accord Shylock more central. In Shylock many elements intrinsic to these later dramas are contained, swirling like electrons in an atom. Shylock has atomic quality, compact yet explosive.
His motives, like those of the tragic heroes, are complex. He himself asserts at his first entry that he hates Antonio not only because he is a Christian
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
Later, as we have seen, he repeats, at a climax, this same ugly thought. At Belmont Jessica tells the company that Shylock has often ruminated on the thought of gaining his pound of flesh. On the other side, we must realize that his wealth is his only safeguard against social enmity, and remember the persecution he has endured, the shameless robbery of his house, and the whole tenor of the action forcing a revenge which his own religious beliefs, as expressed in the Trial scene, underwrite:
An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven!
Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?
No, not for Venice.
We have seen moreover that he does not find actual revenge as easy or palatable as in fantasy he had expected, and our final definition of his motivation is given in terms of an uncontrollable, and to that extent in itself forgivable, antipathy. We find compactly presented just such a vagueness of motivation as we are to find in Hamlet (‘I do not know why yet I live to say “This thing’s to do”’; Hamlet, IV. iv. 43); in Iago’s various explanations and self-diagnoses, so like Shylock’s, his ‘I hate the Moor’ (Othello, I. iii. 373) corresponding to Shylock’s admission of a central loathing; Macbeth’s willing submission to powers he repudiates; and Lear’s volcanic irrationality.
Timon’s actions, which exist on yet another level of dramatic composition, have a greater rationality. He sees the truth of the human heart and his course is fixed. But here again, Shylock is a precursor. The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens are Shakespeare’s two dramas on gold, playing very similarly on its ambivalence as both money and soul-symbol. Now in the later scenes of Timon of Athens, Timon as denunciatory prophet might well be called ‘Hebraic’; he is also, like Shylock, an outcast; and yet both are finally sued to in vain for favour, as was Sophocles’ Oedipus, by the community that had scorned them. It would be to lay too limited an emphasis on the fictional surfaces to fail to see in these dramas signs of poetic genius taking a mighty pleasure in putting the community in its place. Despite obvious differences, Timon and Shylock show a common emphasis which persists across the centuries, and it is no chance that Byron, in a Timon mood, should in a letter to John Murray on 6 April 1819 address the British public with an adaptation of Shylock’s
I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk
with you, and so following: but I will not eat with you,
drink with you, nor pray with you.
This letter I have discussed in my lecture ‘Byron’s Dramatic Prose’ (Byron Foundation Lecture, 1954; to be reprinted in my study Byron and Shakespeare). For both Shylock and Timon riches—I refer especially to Timon’s new-found gold—are important symbols. Timon’s becomes a symbol of his soul-worth and Shylock’s may be called at the least a symbol of his own personal integrity, his safety and power as a personal unit in a hostile world. The nature of such symbolisms I have often discussed (see my note on p. 182 above).
It is accordingly hard not to see in Shylock the essential elements of subsequent heroes compactly defined and balanced neatly against social necessity; and in that he is more closely localized and defined as a recognizable person and part of a dramatic pattern that not only envisages the inevitable revenge of society but even envisages that revenge as humiliating the hero—though there is no degradation such as we find in Marlowe—he is more, in the obvious sense of the word, ‘realistic’. Were Shakespeare’s genius not such that critical rulings are left at a loss, it would be, from a strictly ‘critical’ standpoint, a tenable judgement were we to conclude that in the general handling of the two parts of Henry IV and in the semi-tragic conception of Shylock Shakespeare had his masterpieces. Fortunately, our concern is not here with literary, or any other, criticism, but with acting. The actor should love his part and the producer his play, and should make the best of them, slurring or hiding any technical slips and bringing to fruition the strength; and so I suspect that it may be the actor in myself who is letting his interest in his most recent dramatic adventure tempt him to an honourable extravagance.
1 Accounts of my various Timon presentations and their reception are given below, Appendix C.
1 The costumes were made by Patricia Card Costumes and the pillars, which had been used for his Macbeth the previous week (p. 134, note), were generously loaned and painted by Mr. Brownlow Card. See Pictures 11, 17, 18.
2 As our picture shows, at Toronto we used small tables.
1 The spiritual significances of gold and other rich metals I have discussed in the 1962 reprint of The Christian Renaissance, Epilogue, 288–92; Christ and Nietzsche, 156–7 and 193–4; The Golden Labyrinth, 249–50; and in ‘Timon of Athens and its Dramatic Descendants’ in A Review of English Literature, II, 4; Oct. 1961.
1 As on pp. 52 and 279 I put accents on the syllables ‘-ed’ to assure a correct pronunciation. Elsewhere in this book I follow the Folio by assuming pronunciation except when the ‘e’ is omitted. In this matter I fear that some of my books have been misleadingly inconsistent.
1 My thoughts on these lines which in performance I found so strangely interesting have been both stimulated and clarified by a subsequent conversation with Mr. John Boorman.
