Critical Comments. I. Argument. 1. The lavish generosity of Timon, a great lord of Athens, draws to him a throng of sycophants and hangers-on who profit by his careless extravagance. With his frank, cordial nature he does not suspect their true mission, but esteems them all his friends. They flatter him assiduously, and he showers gifts upon them or does them various good services. He gives a costly banquet at which the favours are precious stones. The reckless waste is a matter of much concern to his steward, who foresees speedy impoverishment. II. Presently Timon's creditors begin to suspect his true financial state and press him greatly with bills. The steward at last succeeds in acquainting his master with his bankrupt condition. Timon is thunderstruck, but consoles himself with the thought that he can draw upon all the men to whom he has been liberal in time past. He therefore despatches his servants to request from them loans. III. The false friends desert him in his hour of need; nor will they advance him money. Instead they make specious excuses and even go so far as to importune him in turn for certain sums. Timon's eyes are opened to their ingratitude and unworthiness. To express his contempt he gives a final feast, at which nothing is set forth but warm water. While uttering the bitterest reproaches he dashes the water in their faces, and ends by throwing the dishes at them and driving them out of the banqueting-room. IV. Timon now abjures the society of all mankind, and seeks refuge in a cave in the woods outside the city, where he subsists upon the roots of the earth. In digging them he discovers a hidden treasure of gold, but takes no pleasure in it, for it brings him only heavy recollections of his folly. He bestows a portion of the gold upon Alcibiades, a former friend of his who honestly desires to aid him, and who is now marching against Athens to humiliate that city for its unjust banishment of him. Though Timon wishes Alcibiades success, it is not because he is reconciled with him, but because he desires the punishment of Athens. The only man whom the misanthrope will acknowledge to be honest is his faithful steward, who seeks him out and remains true to him in adversity. Upon him Timon bestows a liberal gift of the treasure, enjoining him never to come within his sight again. V. The near approach of Alcibiades to Athens causes the senators to bethink themselves of the neglected Timon. They visit him in the forest to pray his aid, promising a restoration of fortune and honour. But Timon greets their advances with taunts and curses. They return bootless to the city, which they are shortly after forced to surrender to Alcibiades. While the conqueror is singling out his own and Timon's enemies for punishment, he receives word that Timon is dead within his forest cave. MCSPADDEN: Shakespearian Synopses. II. Timon. It marks an approach to hardness and formalism in Shakespeare's conception of character that his Timon is adequately summed up in the label he adopts: "I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind." Lear is on the whole his nearest Shakespearean analogue. The sting of ingratitude is the common provocation of both; and in both its maddening effect is enhanced by naïve ignorance of men and equally naïve exaggeration of their own claims. Both are simple natures, finely gifted, but quite without subtlety and penetration; a single shock throws them off their balance. But Lear is testy, self-indulgent, arrogant and exacting from the first; while Timon is quixotically generous, and thinks his honour concerned to give more than is asked, and to repay tenfold what he receives. Lear's most imperious ethical instinct is that of the primitive Northern tribe-the duty of children to parent; Timon's is that of the philosophic schools and society of Athens the duty of friend to friend. In the Athens of Timon this noble communism is as dead as the duty of children in the heart of Regan. His disillusion, as terrible as Lear's, and far nearer, in kind, to common experience, is far less real, and is worked out with gravely diminished dramatic resource. His monologues, close packed, knotty with phrase, but unbroken in their sombre monotony, take the place of the wonderfully varied and modulated temper of Lear. His anger pursues its way like a torrent without pause or change. It is more penetrated than Lear's with the hunger for moral retribution, and the discovery of the gold puts the instrument of it in his grasp the damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put'st odds Do thy right nature. Of Timon's series of vindictive encounters before his cave, little but the idea is probably ultimately due to Lucian. The poet may be foreshadowed in Gnathonides, the envoys of repentant Athens in Demeas. But Flavius, the one honest man, is Shakespeare's characteristic creation, and in Apemantus and Alcibiades he adapted to the In scheme of Lucian the suggestive hints of Plutarch. Plutarch both figure only as the companions of Timon's misanthropic days, the one his fellow cynic, the other his destined avenger upon Athens. Shakespeare introduced both into the picture of Timon's prodigal festivities. The misanthrope by nature was thus set in sharp contrast with the misanthrope by disillusion, and the ground was laid for their encounter in the second part (IV. iii. 198 et seq.) with its profoundly imagined discrimination between the set hatred grounded in habit and creed and that kindled by fresh conviction, the misanthropy which is a form of intellectual self-indulgence, and that which is goaded with poignant memories. HERFORD: The Eversley Shakespeare. III. Timon and Shakespeare. With few exceptions, those portions of the play in which Timon is the speaker can have come from no other hand than that of Shakspere. If such conjectures were allowed to possess any worth, one might venture to assert that by the time this play was written, Shakspere had mastered the impulses within himself to mere rage against the evil that is in the world. The impression which the play leaves is that of Shakspere's sanity. He could now so fully and fearlessly enter into Timon's mood, because he was now past all danger of Timon's malady. He had now learned to strive with evil and to subdue it; he had now learned to forgive. And therefore he could dare to utter that wrath against mankind to which he had assuredly been tempted, but to which he had never wholly yielded. It would seem that about this period Shakspere's mind was much occupied with the questions, In what temper are we to receive the injuries inflicted upon us by our fellow men? How are we to bear ourselves towards those that wrong us? How shall we secure our inward being from chaos amid the evils of the world? How shall we attain to the most just and noble attitude of soul in which life and the injuries of life may be confronted? Now, here in Timon we see one way in which a man may make his response to the injuries of life; he may turn upon the world with a fruitless and suicidal rage. Shakspere was interested in the history of Timon, not merely as a dramatic study, and not merely for the sake of moral edification, but because he recognized in the Athenian misanthrope one whom he had known, an intimate acquaintance, the Timon of Shakspere's own breast. Shall we hesitate to admit that there was such a Timon in the breast of Shakspere? We are accustomed to speak of Shakspere's gentleness and Shakspere's tolerance so foolishly that we find it easier to conceive of Shakspere as indulgent towards baseness and wickedness than as feeling measureless rage and indignation against them-rage and indignation which would sometimes flash beyond their bounds and strike at the whole wicked race of man. And it is certain that Shakspere's delight in human character, his quick and penetrating sympathy with almost every variety of man, saved him from any persistent injustice towards the world. But it can hardly be doubted that the creator of Hamlet, of Lear, of Timon, saw clearly, and felt deeply, that there is a darker side to the world and to the soul of man. The Shakspere invariably bright, gentle, and genial is the Shakspere of a myth. The man actually discoverable behind the plays was a man tempted to passionate extremes, but of strenuous will, and whose highest self pronounced in favor of sanity. Therefore he resolved that he would set to rights his material life, and he did so. And, again, he resolved that he would bring into harmony with the highest facts and laws of the world his spiritual being, and that in his own high fashion he accomplished also. The plays impress us as a long study of selfcontrol of self-control at one with self-surrender to the |