Timon of Athens

The Life of Timon of Athens, originally spelled Tymon, though only on the title page, is a play by William Shakespeare written around 1607 or 1608. The play is oddly constructed, with several lacunae, and for this reason, it is often described as unfinished, multi-authored, and/or experimental. It is usually grouped with the tragedies, though some scholars have placed it with the problem comedies despite the death of its title character. Its source materials include Plutarch's "Life of Alcibiades" and Lucian's dialogue, Timon the Misanthrope, both of which are excerpted in the Arden Shakespeare edition. There is no evidence the play was actually performed during Shakespeare's lifetime; however, this is true of more highly regarded plays like Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus as well.

Authorship

Since the nineteenth century, suggestions have been made that Timon is the work of two writers, and it has been argued that the play's unusual features are the result of the play being co-authored by playwrights with very different mentalities; the most popular candidate, Thomas Middleton, was first suggested in 1920. A 1917 study by John Mackinnon Robertson posits that George Chapman wrote "A Lover's Complaint" and was the originator of Timon of Athens. These claims have been rejected by other commentators, including Bertolt Brecht Frank Harris, and Rolf Soellner, who claim that the play was an experiment. They argue that if one revised the other's play it would have been "fixed" to the standards of Jacobean theatre, which it clearly is not. Soellner believes the play is unusual because it was performed at the Inns of Court, where it would have found a niche audience with young lawyers.

Nonetheless, in the past three decades, several linguistic analyses of the text have all discovered apparent confirmation of the earlier theories: the play contains numerous words, phrases and punctuation choices that are common in the work of Thomas Middleton and rare in Shakespeare. These linguistic markers cluster in certain scenes, apparently indicating that the play is by Middleton and Shakespeare, and that it is a collaboration rather than a revision of one by the other. The editor of the Oxford edition, John Jowett, describes this evidence and stresses that Middleton's presence does not mean the play should be disregarded: "Timon of Athens is all the more interesting because the text articulates a dialogue between two dramatists of a very different temper" (p. 2).

It has been theorized that Shakespeare himself performed the role of the Poet.

Dramatis personae

• Timon (Ti-'?m?n): a lord of Athens, and at one time, an unusually wealthy one. Some scholars think him an old retired soldier, based on an ambiguous reference to armor in Act IV, and comparison with the play to King Lear. Others consider Timon to be a young man whose wealth is largely generational. The text states that the bulk of his wealth was in land. Peter Brook's French language production in the 1960s presented Timon as a young idealist in a white tuxedo. Paul Scofield played him as an old soldier in the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1981.
• Alcibiades: Captain of a military brigade and good friend to Timon. Often seen in the company of two prostitutes, Phrynia and Timandra. Based on the historical Alcibiades, but not necessarily historical in depicting him
• Apemantus, a philosopher and churl, very influential on Timon, but also critical of him. His speeches frequently begin in poetry, switch to prose, and end in poetry, as if he feels poetry is a wasted effort for those he might generate it for. Most productions present Apemantus as an old man regardless of Timon's age, though Brook's production presented him as a young Algerian and likely homeless.
• Flavius is Timon's chief Steward. He handles all of Timon's accounts and manages his household. He genuinely cares about Timon, and is unfazed when Timon vents at him.
• Flaminius is one of Timon's servants. His name may be derived from a hot temperament he displays with Lucullus.
• Servilius is another of Timon's servants. He is passive and perhaps illiterate.
• Lucilius is a romantic youth and Timon's servant. He is in love with a woman above his station.
• Ventidius is one of Timon's "friends", and in debtors' prison.
• Lucullus is Timon's "friend". He would rather bribe Flaminius than help Timon.
• Lucius, Timon's "friend", and the most brazenly hypocritical.
• Sempronius is Timon's most jealous "friend".
• Poet and Painter are friends; artists (and implictly not very good ones) who seek Timon's patronage. They appear several times in the play and always together, but the play's opening dialogue says they have not met in some time. A Jeweller and a Merchant appear briefly in their company (also a Mercer, a ghost character).
• The Senators of Athens. There are numerous unnamed senators in the play, some with rather large roles, but all of them turn their backs on Timon and Alcibiades. One has a servant named Caphis. Athens had no Senate in the time of the legendary Timon.
• The Fool is briefly a companion to Apemantus and is employed by a prostitute. Likely he was written to give Robert Armin something to do in the play, as his appearance is quite brief.
• Three Strangers, one named Hostilius; friends to Lucius.
• The Old Athenian is the father of the woman Lucilius loves. Some productions have put his daughter on stage as well, but Shakespeare does not note her appearance.
• Four Lords. False friends of Timon. One of them receives a jewel from Timon, and the same numbered lord references it later. Productions typically conflate these characters with Timon's named false friends.
• Servants to Timon, Lucullus, Lucius, Isidore, Varro (2), Titus, Hortensius, Philotus (the latter five being the names of Timon's creditors)
• Banditti, Soldier, Page, Cupid and Ladies at the Masque.

Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Act I

Timon gives a large banquet, attended by nearly all the characters. Timon gives away money wastefully, and everyone wants to please him to get more, except for Apemantus, a philosopher whose cynicism Timon cannot yet appreciate. He accepts the art from Poet and Painter, and a jewel from the Jeweller, yet even that he has given to one of his friends by the end of the act. An Old Athenian is angry that Timon's servant, Lucilius, has been wooing his daughter, but Timon pays him three talents, because the happiness of his servant is worth the price. When he first makes his appearance at the party, he is told that his friend, Ventidius, is in debtors' prison. He sends money to pay Ventidius's debt, and Ventidius soon arrives at the party. Timon gives a speech on the value of friendship, and the friends view a masque followed by dancing. As the party winds down, Timon is giving away his horses (in preparation for a hunt the next day) and other possessions to his friends. The act is divided rather arbitrarily into two scenes but the experimental and/or unfinished nature of the play is reflected in that it does not naturally break into a five-act structure.

Act II

Flavius is upset that Timon has spent all his wealth, overextending his munificence by showering patronage on the parasitic writers and artists, and delivering his dubious friends from their financial straits. Timon, returning from the hunt, is upset that he has not been told this before, and begins to vent on Flavius, who tells them that he has tried repeatedly in the past without success, and now he is at the end; all of his land has been sold. Shadowing Timon is his opposite number, the cynic philosopher Apemantus, who terrorizes Timon's shallow companions with his caustic railery. Along with a Fool, he attacks Timon's creditors when they show up to make their demands for immediate payment. Timon sends out his servants to make requests for help from those friends he considers closest.

Act III

Timon's servants are turned down, one by one, by Timon's false friends, two giving lengthy monologues as to their anger with them. Elsewhere, one of Alcibiades's junior officers has reached an even further point of rage, killing a man in "hot blood". Alcibiades pleads with the Senate for mercy, arguing that a crime of passion should not carry as severe a sentence as premeditated murder. The Senators disagree, and when Alcibiades persists, banish him forever. He vows revenge, with the support of his troops. The act finishes with Timon discussing with his servants the revenge he will carry out at his next banquet.

Acts IV and V

Timon has a much smaller party, intended only for those he feels has betrayed him. The serving trays are brought in, but under them the friends find not a feast, but rocks and scalding hot water. Timon throws the contents at them, and flees his home. The loyal Flavius vows to find him.

Cursing the city walls, Timon takes himself to the wilderness and makes his rude home in a cave, sustaining himself on roots. Here he discovers an underground trove of gold. The knowledge of this spreads, and Poet and Painter, Apemantus, and three bandits are able to find Timon before Flavius does. He offers most of the gold to the rebel Alcibiades to subsidize his assault on the city. Accompanying Alcibiades are two prostitutes, Phrynia and Timandra, who trade barbs with the bitter Timon on the subject of venereal disease. When Apemantus appears and accuses Timon of copying his pessimistic style, the audience is treated to the spectacle of a mutually misanthropic exchange of invective.

Flavius arrives. He wants the money as well, but he also wants Timon to come back into society. Timon acknowledges that he has had one true friend in Flavius, a shining example of an otherwise diseased and impure race, but laments that this man is a mere servant. He invites the last envoys from Athens, who hoped Timon might placate Alcibiades, to go hang themselves, and then dies in the wilderness. Alcibiades, marching on Athens, then throws down his glove, and ends the play reading the bitter epitaph Timon wrote for himself:

Here lie I, Timon, who alive, all living men did hate

Spoilers end here.

Commentary

Many scholars find much unfinished about this play including unexplained plot developments, characters who appear unexplained and say little, prose sections that a polished version would have in verse (although close analysis would show this to be almost exclusively in the lines of Apemantus, and probably an intentional character trait), and the two epitaphs, one of which doubtless would have been cancelled in the final version. However, similar duplications appear in Julius Caesar and Love's Labour's Lost and are generally thought to be examples of two versions being printed when only one was ultimately used in production, which could easily be the case here.

An anonymous play, Timon, also survived. Its Timon is explictly hedonistic and spends his money much more on himself than in Shakespeare's version. He also has a mistress. It mentions a London inn that did not exist before 1606, yet it contains elements that are in Shakespeare's play but not in Plutarch or in Lucian's dialogue, Timon the Misanthrope, the other major accepted source for Shakespeare's play. Both Jacobean plays deal extensively with Timon's life before his flight into the wilderness, which in both Greek versions is given little more than one sentence each.

Major motifs in the play include dogs, breath, gold (from act IV on), and "use" in the sense of using a person, then seen as a euphemism for usury. One of the most common emendations of the play is the Poet's line "Our Poesie Is as a Gowne, which uses From whence 'tis nourisht", to "our poesy is as a gum, which oozes from whence 'tis nourished" (originated by Pope and Johnson). Soellner says that such emendations erode the importance of this motif, and suggests a better emendation would be "from" to "form", creating a mixed metaphor "revelatory of the poet's inanity".

One odd emendation that often appears near the end of the play is Alcibiades commanding his troops to "cull th'infected fourth" from the Senate, as if he intends to destroy a fourth of the Senate. The word in the folio is, in fact, "forth", suggesting that "th'infected" are simply the ones who argued strongly against the cases of Timon and Alicibiades's officer, and that the troops are to leave alone those who just went along with it.

The play in performance

In 1678, Thomas Shadwell created a revised version titled The History of Timon of Athens, The Man-Hater, which made the play more broadly melodramatic and asociated Timon with one of Alcibiades's whores.

Rarely performed, Timon was produced for TV as part of the BBC Television Shakespeare series in 1981 with Jonathan Pryce as Timon, Norman Rodway as Apemantus, John Welsh as Flavius, and John Shrapnel as Alcibiades, with Diana Dors as Timandra, Tony Jay as the Merchant, Sebastian Shaw as the Old Athenian, and John Fortune and John Bird as Poet and Painter. The production is done in Jacobean dress rather than in Greek costuming, but Shakespeare's Greece in this play is as fictional as his Illyria, so this is appropriate. It has not been made into a feature film, although several unproduced film adaptations are circulating.

Appreciation of the play often pivots on the readers' perception of Timon's asceticism. Admirers like Soellner point out that Shakespeare's text has Timon neither drink wine nor eat meat: only water and roots are specifically mentioned as being in his diet, which is also true of Apemantus, the philosopher. If one sees Timon's parties not as libations but as vain attempts to genuinely win friends among his peers, he gains sympathy. This is true of Pryce's Timon, whose plate is explicitly shown as being perpetually unsoiled by food, and he tends to be meek and modest. This suggests a Timon who lives in the world but not of it. Other versions, often by creators who regard the play as a lesser work, involve jazz-era swinging (sometimes, such as in the Michael Langham/Brian Bedford production (in which Timon eats flamingo) set to a score that Duke Ellington composed for it in the 1960s), and conclude the first act with a debauchery. The Arkangel Shakespeare audio recording featuring Alan Howard (with Rodway reprising his television role) also takes this route: Howard's line readings suggest that Timon is getting drunker and drunker during the first act; he does not represent the moral or idealistic figure betrayed by the petty perceived by Soellner and Brecht the way Pryce does.

Information provided by Wikipedia

Summary

At Timon's house in Athens, a poet, painter, and jeweler compare the gifts each plans to give to Lord Timon. He appears and a messenger informs him Noble Ventidius is in need of money. Without hesitation, Timon promises it to him. Then, an Old Athenian appears and complains that Timon's servant Lucilius is wrongly courting his daughter. Timon convinces the man to let Lucilius marry his daughter, provided Timon provides Lucilius with sufficient money to support the marriage. Next, Apemantus, a "churlish philosopher" enters and all enjoy trading insults with him. Timon holds a great feast and all attend and eat much, while Timon, who is simply content to be surround by "his friends", eats little. After supper, all dance with women and Timon showers jewels upon everybody. Timon's steward Flavius complains that Timon is too generous and already he begins to go into debt. Apemantus echoes this feeling in private.

At a senator's house, he tells his servant Caphis to go to Timon and demand he repay his debts to the Senator. We learn the senator fears Timon will soon be unable to repay his debts, and so he wants the money now. Caphis arrives at Timon's house and demands the money; Varro's and Isidore's servants also arrive demanding their master's money. Timon promises Flavius will pay them, but Flavius finally convinces Timon that he is beyond broke and is in fact deep in debt. Timon sends Flaminus and Servilius to ask for loans from Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius, then asks Flavius to visit the senators. However, Flavius explains he has already seen the senators, and they have all denied him money. Timon, although growing fearful continues to believe that his "friends" will help him since he has always helped them in the past, particularly Ventidius.

Flaminus comes to Lucullus asking for 50 talents, but is quickly denied any money. Lucullus actually (falsely) claims to have told Timon to behave less lavishly in the past. A servant of Lucius' relays this event to him, and Lucius vows to help Timon. But when Servilius appears to Lucius and asks for 5500 talents, Lucius quickly goes back on his word and claims (falsely) that he himself is nearly broke. Another servant approaches Sempronius for money. He asks about Lucius', Lucullus', and Ventidius' gifts and is told all have refused Timon money. Sempronius refuses also, claiming he is insulted that he is the last one to be asked for money and was not approached first. At Timon's house, all of Timon's "friends'" servants are there to demand Timon repay his debts. Flavius tries to explain they are beyond being broke, but the servants will not listen. Timon scares them all off in a fit of rage, then declares he will hold one last feast for all the "knaves". At the Senate house, the senators decide Timon should die for his debts. The captain Alcibiades valiantly plead's for Timon's life, but is ignored by the senators. Eventually, they tire of his pleadings and banish him from Athens, effective two days hence. Alcibiades decides privately to muster his armies and attack Athens. At Timon's house, he holds his final banquet. He ends up serving the lords pots of warm water and throws it in their faces causing them to flee. The lords report to the senators that Timon has gone mad.

In a mad speech of rage, Timon vows to flee to the woods and quickly grow to hate mankind. Remaining in his house, Timon's servants gather and Flavius gives them some money, then departs in search of Timon. At Timon's cave in the woods, he rails against mankind then, while searching for food (roots), he finds buried gold, placed there by the Gods for Timon. Alcibiades, on his way to Athens, comes across Timon. He, having no need for gold, gives what he has to Alcibiades, but chides him still, simply because he is a man. Next, Apemantus appears and decides he likes Timon now since he hates mankind. Timon instructs him to tell the nobles of Athens he has new-found gold. Apemantus leaves and three thieves/bandits appear and ask for some of his gold. However, seeing Timon in his misery causes the thieves to let him be and leave. Next, Flavius appears while searching for Timon and finds Timon as he grows sicker. Timon soon declares Flavius to be the one honest man left in the world. Yet, Timon sends Flavius away and retreats into his cave.

The poet and the painter then appear, having heard rumors of Timon's gold. Initially Timon leads them on by claiming they are honest men, then he chases them off in a rage. Lastly, Flavius appears with two senators from Athens who tell Timon in return for his money, he may return to Athens forgiven, and help fight off Alcibiades. Timon pretends to agree, then shuns them all and tells them he hopes Alcibiades sacks Athens. Later, a soldier comes across Timon's cave and finds he is dead, leaving his own epitaph, which he brings to Alcibiades. At Athens, Alcibiades overtakes the city and the senators make payment to him to keep him from sacking Athens. He agrees to only seek reparations from Timon's "friends". He then reads Timon's epitaph and asks all to remember him.