This division rests partly upon glaring diversities of style, partly on inconsistencies of treatment. Thus Apemantus in Timon's house plays in i. 2. the cynic he is; whereas in i. 1. 58 the poet tells how 'even he drops down the knee before him and returns in peace most rich in Timon's nod.' The unknown writer was a capable playwright, and a facile, even brilliant writer. But it is generally easy to distinguish his rhetorical verse—which tends to run sporadically into rhymed couplets-from the close-packed, pregnant verses of Shakespeare. Contrast, for instance, the two pieces of declamation not dissimilar in moodTimon's in iv. 1. and Flavius' in iv. 2. 30-50.

These discrepancies did not escape the critics of the last century. But they were commonly satisfied to attribute them to careless printers or copyists. The view that it was an incomplete drama, with certain scenes fully worked out, others left in the first draft, was urged with great ingenuity by Ulrici and Kreyssig.1 Knight first put forward the hypothesis that Shakespeare was reworking an old play; and Delius, after demolishing this view in his first critical essay, resuscitated it twenty years later (1866) with all the resources of his mature scholarship. But Delius' acuteness only brought out the difficulties of his hypothesis. For the more glaring

3

1 Cf. also an elaborate but somewhat uncritical paper by W. Wendlandt, Jahrbuch, xxiii. 107 f.

2 Die Tieck'sche Shaksperekritik, 1849.

3 Über Shakespeare's Timon of Athens' (Jahrbuch, ii. 335).

the incongruity, the harder it became to explain how Shakespeare had permitted it to pass. Two years after Delius' essay, accordingly, B. Tschischwitz came forward with the opposite view that Timon was a Shakespearean sketch subsequently completed. This view has been developed, in his own way, by Mr. Fleay, and now prevails in England. In Germany, though widely accepted, it has less completely triumphed over (i.). The defenders of (i.) have successfully maintained the general coherence of the plot against the disintegrating analysis of Delius; but they fail in the discrimination of style. Whole scenes of Timon show no vestige of Shakespeare's manner at any period. The defenders of (ii.) had an apparently strong argument in the fact that Timon betrays a knowledge of classical sources not then translated into English, as also that there are slight signs of an older Timon play accessible to Shakespeare.1 But an argument founded on Shakespeare's ignorance of Latin. and of French must always be extremely hazardous, and Lucian's Timon had been translated into both. Lucian's influence is apparent (as will be seen below) not only in isolated passages, but in the fundamental features of the plot,-in the conception of scenes absolutely Shakespearean in execution; while he foreshadowed far more nearly than any other accessible

1 Timon the man-hater was a popular by-word some years before Shakespeare's play. Cf. Guilpin's Skialetheia (1598): 'Like hate-man Timon in his cell he sits,' and Jack Drum's Entertainment (160): But if all the brewers jades in .he town can draw me from the love of myself they shall do more than eer the seven wise men of Greece could. Come, come, now I'll be as sociable as Timon

of Athens.' Shakespeare himself had spoken of 'critic Timon' in Love's Labour's Lost, iv. 3. 170. The MS. play Timon (about 1600) was evidently written for an academic audience. It is most unlikely that Shakespeare ever heard of it. It was edited by Dyce for the Shakspere Society, and reprinted in Hazlitt's Shakspere's Library, vol. vi,

version the character of Shakespeare's Timon. No one can assert that Shakespeare had not an older Timon play before him; but the hypothesis explains nothing that is not as easily explained without it. On the other hand, there are evidences that while Shakespeare probably shaped out Timon for himself, he left it incomplete. Notably, the epitaph of Timon (v. 4. 70-73) is an agglomerate of two separate epitaphs recorded by Plutarch, which Shakespeare cannot have intended to combine without change,— the one (v. 4. 70, 71), written by Timon himself, the other (v. 4. 72, 73), according to ancient tradition, by Callimachus. However this happened, it is evident that our text reproduces an unfinished draft MS. of Shakespeare's (for this scene is certainly his) with the two inconsistent epitaphs jotted down together as alternatives for a future decision never made.

Of the revising 'second author' nothing definite can be said; 1 and of the circumstances of the revision equally little.2 But he cannot be shown to have introduced any motive not implied in Shakespeare's work. The banishment of Alcibiades (iii. 5.) is the ground of his hostile return (v. 4.). The futile missions of Timon's servants to his friends (iii. 1.-4.) only carry out the operations already arranged in ii. 2.

The date of the Shakespearean Timon can only be conjectured from somewhat insecure æsthetic

1 Mr. Fleay, by exhausting the list of contemporary writers of requisite ability, identifies him with Cyril Tourneur. The temerity of this procedure needs

no comment.

2 It has been variously suggested that Shakespeare's fragment was completed for stage

purposes, and for publication in the Folio. Irregularities in the pagination of the Folio have been thoug. to point to hurried insertion of this play, and so perhaps to delays caused by literary manipulation of the MS. But the pagination of the Folio is far too irregular elsewhere to justify such inferences.

criteria. It belongs, in the cast and temper of its tragedy, as also in verse structure, unmistakably to the period of Macbeth and Coriolanus (1606-8); its fragmentary condition, and the decay it evinces in purely dramatic vigour, suggest that it was the last of the Tragedies, and marks the exhaustion of Shakespeare's tragic vein. Pericles, which was printed in 1609, and Cymbeline, which appeared later still, though classed as tragedies, adventure into totally different regions of tragic effect: it is plausible to suppose that Timon preceded this new departure, i.e. was not later than 1608. This is supported by its close connexion in subject with the Plutarchian tragedies of 1607-8; Timon and Alcibiades being Plutarchian parallels to Antony and Coriolanus.

Plutarch told the story of Timon as a digression in his Life of Mark Antony. Shakespeare also knew it as told by Painter in the Palace of Pleasure (Novella 28). Both versions are little more than anecdotes, and relate only to the second phase of Timon's career, the morose seclusion of the misanthrope near Athens, his encounters with Apemantus and Alcibiades, his ironical invitation to his countrymen to hang themselves on his fig-tree 'before it be cut down.' Plutarch alone intimates in passing that his hatred of men arose from 'the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto, and whom he took to be his friends.' Apemantus is a man of the very same nature' whom he 'sometimes would have in his company.' When the Athenians held festival the two cynics feasted together by themselves. Apemantus said: 'O here is a trim banquet, Timon.' Timon answered, 'Yea, so thou wert not here.' Alcibiades on the contrary Timon would 'make much of, and kissed him very gladly.' When asked why he singled him out for favour from the rest of men: 'I do it,"

said he, 'because I know that one day he shall do great mischief unto the Athenians.' He died a natural death, and ordered his body to be buried upon the sea-shore, 'that the waves and surges might beat and vex his dead carcass.'

There is little doubt that in addition to these meagre anecdotes, Shakespeare knew, directly or indirectly, the lively dialogue in which Lucian makes Timon's story the vehicle of a satire upon ill-used wealth.1 Here also his prodigal days are only referred to: we see him at the outset, a ruined man, squalid, ragged, unkempt, on the slopes of Hymettus, hurling maledictions, as he stoops over his spade, at Zeus, who, in spite of the praises of poets and the sacrifices of the devout, allows his thunderbolts to rust while crime grows rampant. Hermes explains that this Timon is one who has been ruined, one may say, by his honesty, generosity, and pity for the poor, but in fact by his foolish heedlessness in choosing, as the recipients of his bounty, crows and wolves and vultures.' Zeus recalls the bountiful sacrifices offered by Timon, and resolves to send Plutus ('Wealth') to his aid. Plutus finds him in the company of Poverty and Wisdom, and is at first rudely dismissed, but finally persuades him to accept riches once more. His pick presently unearths a mass of treasure, he buys a plot of land, and builds a tower to hold it. Having thus secured a financial basis, he proceeds to shape his life on the principles of misanthropy. His code of morals includes such precepts as 'to be his

1 Lucian's works were not translated into English in Shakespeare's lifetime. But Latin, French, and Italian translations were available. Tschischwitz (Jahrbuch, iv. 196) has pointed out a sign that

a French or Italian text lay before the English dramatist (or one of them) in the term solidares for the coins offered by Lucullus to Flaminius (iii. I. 46).