Shakespeare: A Complete Introduction

Timon of Athens

Timon of Athens is not a particularly popular play in production and it is only periodically performed by the major companies. At the RSC, the performances by Paul Scofield (1965), Richard Pasco (1980) and Michael Pennington (1999) stand out, as does Jonathan Pryce’s Timon for Jonathan Miller’s BBC TV Complete Shakespeare series. Simon Russell Beale (2012) at the National Theatre, London, played the role as amiable and pleasant with a heart of gold in the first half and a heart truly broken in the second. But when you can see the play on stage or on TV or in the cinema, you’ll note not only some rather laboured speeches and the episodic nature of the play but the sheer bitterness of the work.

A BITTER PLAY

Is this bitterness deliberate on Shakespeare’s part? Anthony Holden, in his sympathetic biography of the dramatist, searches for a reason for the bitterness in Shakespeare’s life at this time but can find nothing in the evidence of the period. That doesn’t mean to say that there wasn’t anything. Critics also note that the script we have is ‘rough’, as if it were an early draft in which Thomas Middleton most likely had a hand as a collaborator. Not published in quarto, it appears only in the First Folio of 1623.

Why, therefore, spend time on an incomplete, unreliable text that was apparently only partly written by Shakespeare and not published in his lifetime? The reason is because of its differences in tone, structure and approach from the majority of Shakespeare’s plays. There are, for example, no major female roles in the play at all. This bitterness is of a male world where the only females that appear, and then just briefly, are prostitutes. Love is nowhere to be found, but money, or the lack of it, is everywhere, even more so than in The Merchant of Venice. As for the gods, their presence is acknowledged in the curses that Timon rains down on an ungrateful and inhospitable Athens, but there is no regenerative energy to be found in a recognition scene or in the reconciliation of the protagonist with his fate:

The gods confound – hear me, you good gods all –

Th’Athenians both within and out that wall;

And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow

To the whole race of mankind, high and low!

Amen.

(4.1.37–41)

It is a bitter ‘Amen’ to his prayer that is directed towards a society that has shown him no love, no mercy, no kindness.

Spotlight

This is a secular condemnation of a secular society, at the centre of which is money and its uses. Perhaps that is why Karl Marx was attracted to the play, in that it exposes the obsession with goods, whether they are being generously given away or withheld. It is almost a manifestation of the emerging, secular, monetarily obsessed society of early capitalism, which was being ruthlessly satirized on the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage of the time by Ben Jonson, in plays such as Volpone (1605–6) and The Alchemist (1610).

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PLAY

Jonson in his satiric comedies is sometimes seen as severe but his plays are quite different from those of Shakespeare in this respect. So what has Shakespeare done? He has divided his play into two parts. In the first we see the generosity of Timon, who takes delight in giving, to the point of recklessness – which his servant Flavius tries to point out. In the second part his appeal for loans is turned down by those to whom he had formerly been generous. Consequently, he loses faith in his fellow man and retreats to the woods, railing against the city and humankind.

‘Where Othello loved “not wisely but too well”, Timon is free with his fortune “unwisely, not ignobly”. In the remarkable character of Apemantus, that “opposite to humanity”, a true Cynic of a philosopher even more churlish than Thersites (in Troilus and Cressida), the dramatist is at his boldest, creating a human yardstick for the sheer violence of the change in Timon, the reversal of his outlook on the world and his fellow-men. He it is who bludgeons Timon with a personal truth as telling as any from Lear’s Fool: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” [4.3.302–3].’

Holden, A. (1999: 253–4), William Shakespeare: His Life and Work. London: Little Brown

MISANTHROPOS

In Act 1, the malcontent cynic Apemantus, a grimmer figure than Jaques in As You Like It, will have none of Timon’s munificence. As the ‘opposite to humanity’ (1.1.292), he intones a grace at Timon’s feast:

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf;

I pray for no man but myself.

Grant I may never prove so fond,

To trust man on his oath or bond;

…

Or my friends if I should need ‘em.

Amen. So fall to’t:

Rich men sin, and I eat root.

(1.2.63–6, 70–72)

The prayer presages what Timon is to become, devoid of friends and wealth and searching for roots in a barren ground that will ironically yield gold but only rarely the roots that will keep him alive.

Spotlight

As it progresses, Timon of Athens appears to be a secular morality play. In the medieval morality plays such as Everyman, death is the enemy. With death approaching, all man’s friends, senses and intimates gradually leave him. You might recall Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech, which concludes in the seventh age with ageing man, ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’ (As You Like It, 2.7.166). You will recall that in King Lear, Edgar, when rejected, flees out to the barren heath – as Timon does to the Athenian woods – and there, dishevelled, finds a means, through helping his blind father, to provide some redemption for himself and eventually, re-establish his identity. But Timon resolves that ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’ (4.3.54), railing earlier in this particularly grim scene against gold, which makes:

Black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right;

Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

(4.3.29–30)

Timon’s friend Alcibiades, in a subplot, turns against Athens, which has also rejected him, and with the help of Timon’s money discovered in the woods defeats Athens, but then shows mercy. But for Timon there is ignominious death and, for the audience, no relief from the character’s situation or pain, no catharsis, no anagnorisis – just the report that he has gone. It is as bleak a play as anything that was to come hundreds of years later from the Russian writer Maxim Gorky or the Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett. Perhaps Shakespeare left the play rough and unfinished because the bleakness was too extreme, the experiment too emotionally draining or, perhaps, the market was not ready for such a work. But that would be to speculate, which, as we have already seen, Shakespeare so often tempts us to do. You realize you have become a connoisseur of Shakespeare when you begin to be fascinated by this play, Timon of Athens.

‘…when Timon and Apemantus meet before the cave, each has strong grounds for priding himself on his own version of self-contempt and despising of others. Nobody pretends that Timon is a very good play, but given the Malcontent theme, this is the cleverest treatment of it ever written.’

Empson, W. (1985: 180), The Structure of Complex Words. London: The Hogarth Press

THE DYSTOPIAN VISION

In his recent paper ‘Shakespeare and Greece: Hospitality, Friendship and Republicanism in Timon of Athens’, John Drakakis provides an insight into the play by referring to Ulysses’ often-quoted speech from Troilus and Cressida. In this speech, Ulysses, frustrated at the lack of progress of the war and similar lack of commitment from Achilles, articulates the dangers to the structure of a model society, which can unravel through a failure to recognize and respect the principles of order and degree:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy.

…

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey

And last eat up himself.

(1.3.109–11, 119–24)

‘To service his own munificence, Timon, a bankrupt “Lord”, is forced to mortgage his own lands in order to finance the “hospitality” that he dispenses to artists, poets, merchants and senators. As his substance diminishes, so he becomes more conscious of the devaluation of language, the medium through which he articulates his friendship and his hospitality. What was primarily and constitutively a means of sustaining and reinforcing the bonds that hold society together now becomes hopelessly entangled in quicksands of Athenian power. The consequence of this diminution is the emergence of a vision of Athenian chaos that echoes the dystopian vision outlined by Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida.’

Drakakis, J. (2016: 29), manuscript

Drakakis’s insight neatly links these two bitter plays written within just a few years of each other. The devaluation of language, the reference to sexual disease, the railing against ‘women as purveyors of that disease’, the distasteful images of the body and flesh, all permeate Troilus and Cressida as much as they do Timon of Athens. What holds them together in Troilus and Cressida in describing such a similar dystopian society is the Trojan War.

Troilus and Cressida

This discussion of Troilus and Cressida will concentrate on Shakespeare’s narrative, since it is precisely through the story – from the relationship that is interwoven between what occurs within and immediately outside the walls of Troy – that we find the social and political environment of a dystopian world emerging.

THE NARRATIVE

The play focuses not on the story of Paris and Helen, but of Paris’ younger brother Troilus, and Cressida, the daughter of Calchas who defects to the Grecian camp. These two lovers are brought together by Pandarus, Cressida’s uncle – hence the term ‘pander’ meaning a procurer. But after a wooing and one night only together, Cressida is exchanged by the Trojans for one of their generals, Antenor, who has been captured by the Greeks. Troilus and Cressida swear undying love to each other but when Cressida arrives at the Grecian camp, she finds that her only safety is to enter a relationship with Diomedes, which will protect her against the advances of other soldiers.

Love itself is reduced to a commodity to be transferred apparently from Troilus to Diomedes. Despite Cressida’s protestations, when Troilus has secretly entered the Grecian camp and finds out the truth, any explanation of her conduct is rejected. Cressida’s ‘unfaithfulness’ is a symptom of the breakdown of society, and of a piece with the unheroic death of Troilus’ brother Hector at the hands of Achilles’ Myrmidons, and of Troilus’ own resolve to continue fighting, even though there remain no ideals for which to fight.

Within the framework of the war, Achilles, the famed warrior of the Greeks, is in a dalliance with Patroclus and is spurned by the Trojan generals for his refusal to fight. The great warrior of the Trojans is Hector. Eventually, when Achilles, taunted by the foul-mouthed Thersites, is shamed into fighting Hector by the Greek generals – who pretend to favour the bullish Ajax – he has Hector butchered by his followers, the Myrmidons. Hector’s death is indicative of the fall of both civilizations, but in the narrative is a crushing blow for Troy and King Priam. The distraught Troilus, who has lost both Cressida and his brother Hector, vows revenge:

Hector is gone.

Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba?

Let him that will a screech-owl be called

Go into Troy, and say their Hector’s dead.

…

And, thou great-sized coward,

No space of earth shall sunder our two hates.

I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,

…

Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe.

(5.11.14–17, 26–8, 31)

Spotlight

Cressida unfaithful and lost, Hector dead, Troilus enraged with grief: the play concludes pessimistically with Pandarus promising to bequeath his sexual diseases to the audience.

CYNICISM

Throughout the play the character of Thersities, in the role of the Fool, who in Shakespeare’s plays provides a commentary on the follies of others, does so here in obscene terms fitting for the degeneration of the world that the war has created (see, for example, 5.4.1–17). Meanwhile, in Troy, Cassandra, King Priam’s daughter, prophesies the death of Hector, and, although this worries Priam, the Trojans do not heed her warning (5.3.80–94). Of course, the root cause of the war is the abduction of the Greek Menelaus’ wife, Helen, by the Trojan Paris, so that the origin of the war lies not in a chivalric ideal but, as Thersites indicates, unrestrained sexual desire or ‘lechery’.

So this play is no Romeo and Juliet, with its romanticizing of the lovers and its move from comedy to tragedy, but a hard-hitting, cynical account of human conduct, accompanied by betrayal and the degradation of language as indicative of sexual decadence and social disintegration.

IMAGERY

‘Troilus and Cressida is distinguished by its image clusters of diseases, animals and food…the imagery of disease and animals…serve to caricature and degrade the activities of the dramatis personae…Eating and tasting…construct a profound metaphor for human activity, and its exploitation in Troilus and Cressida goes far to establish an intellectual critique of the actions recorded there…The vehicle is food, but the tenor is Time: Time viewed as an inexorable determined process in which the end is contained in the beginning, the conclusion in the premise.’

Berry, R. (1978: 75–6, 80), The Shakespearean Metaphor: Studies in Language and Form. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan

Some critics have been tempted to suggest that the images of sexual disease in the play indicate that Shakespeare may have contracted syphilis around this period. The later sonnets take up the theme, as do Timon of Athens and the later Pericles, but this is conjecture and speculation and it cannot be validated. It is also an inadequate explanation for what this complex play is imagining and how it works as a play, the process of which draws a landscape of malign humanity. The Trojan Hector remarks to the Greek Ulysses:

…The end crowns all,

And that old common arbitrator, Time,

Will one day end it.

(4.5.224–6).

For the present, the deadly war continues. The images of flesh, animals, food and disease work through the play, creating an overall image of a foul unsavoury society, one that is no longer dependent on itself to bring an end to the misery but rather on that ‘old common arbitrator, Time’. It is a refrain we meet in various manifestations throughout Shakespeare in his comedies, tragedies and histories, but rarely as bleakly and terrifyingly as in this savage conflict.

THE LANDSCAPE OF WAR

In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare paints the landscape of war. He introduces a revolting, foul-mouthed commentator, Thersites, to rail at and taunt the Greeks from within. There is decadence in the war itself, exposed by Thersites in his railing at Ajax or Achilles and, however foul-mouthed he is, the picture of war as a metaphor of human conduct seems brutally realistic.

Although the story of Troy and the manner of the war’s end was and is well known, the story of the Trojan Horse is ignored by the dramatist. He chooses rather to focus on a story within war, creating a pattern of images on which we may impose our own understanding and knowledge of war. The arbitrator ‘Time’ places the issues beyond the age of Classical Greece or Elizabethan England. For the twentieth or twenty-first century, this might mean the First World War, the Second World War, the Falklands War, the invasion of Iraq or, on the very day I am writing this chapter – 2 December 2015 – the debate in the UK Parliament leading to a vote to bomb Syria in order to help eradicate the barbarity of the so-called Islamic State.

I recall that Terry Hands produced this play in 2004/5 at Clwyd Theatre Cymru, in North Wales, following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It was performed as the text dictated. There was no overt reference to the war in Iraq, no gimmicks but just the reality of war itself. The production spoke volumes. Hands’ sensitivity to the text was all that was needed for the audience to realize that what was being said 400 years ago was being re-enacted yet again in the real politics of the contemporary world. In conversation with me on 21 January 2016, Hands told me that he never discussed the Iraqi War in rehearsals. He didn’t have to. He did, however, point to the relationship between the two sets of lovers Paris and Helen and Troilus and Cressida in the play and their correspondence, a statement which takes us back to Empson’s concept of the double plot.

‘The political theorising in Troilus (chiefly about loyalty, whether to a mistress or a state) becomes more interesting if you take it as a conscious development by Shakespeare of the ideas inherent in the double-plot convention…Troilus compares the sexual with the political standards, and shows both in disruption. The breaking of Cressida’s vow is symbolic of, the breaking of Helen’s vow is cause of, what the play shows (chiefly by the combat between Hector and his first cousin Ajax) to be civil war; Shakespeare’s horror of this theme…may in part explain the grimness of his treatment.’

Empson, W. (1935, repr. 1950: 34–5), Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto & Windus

As noted from the start of this book, Shakespeare doesn’t mean what we mean by Shakespeare. Anthony Holden wryly notes that ‘we do not read Shakespeare, he reads us’ (Holden, A. [1999: 2]). Like Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida is a confrontational play, and its structure allows its narrative consistently to provide glimpses of the ‘present’ in the experience of war. In one sense the play has no ending, since its subject can provide no revelation or relief. It is the process of the play that engages us, without tempting us with any expectation of closure. To use a Shakespearean tautology, it is the play that is. His focus is on the insistence on the process of the narrative, rather than on a structure that will conveniently produce a satisfactory ending. In this, Troilus and Cressida presages some of the issues and structural incongruities we have already found in our discussion of King Lear. It is a play designed to disturb.