TIMON OF ATHENS INTRODUCTION In a very unsatisfactory text Timon of Athens, as far as we know, was first printed in the folio of 1623, where it bore the title The Life of Tymon of Athens. The position of Troilus and Cressida, as originally intended, had been altered, and Timon was chosen to fill the blank. It is a short play, and certain irregularities in pagination and signatures resulted. The editors of the Cambridge Shakespeare suggest that the manuscript may have been imperfect, and that the printing was stayed till it could be completed by some playwright engaged for the purpose. This would account for the manifest imperfections at the close of the play'. Few critics question that the tragedy, as we have it, contains work which is not from Shakespeare's hand. The notion that he completed some scenes, and that others, as we find them, exhibit his unfinished sketches may be dismissed as untenable. That he may have worked upon an old play now lost is possible, and this theory may be held by those who also believe that he left his work unfinished; but we have no evidence of the existence of any play that could have supplied the basis from which this tragedy has risen. Dyce, indeed, edited for The Shakespeare Society' a Timon, of which the date may be about 1600, in which appears a kind of prototype of Timon's faithful steward, and in which the wronged Timon flings at the guests who are invited to his pretended banquet stones painted as artichokes; but this dull, academical exercise in the form of drama was assuredly not the original upon which Shakespeare founded his play. It seems more probable that Shakespeare wrote portions of the tragedy, but for some reason never completed the work; and that his manuscript was developed by some inferior dramatist, about whose name- -Wilkins or anotherwe need not anxiously inquire, who brought it to such completion-perhaps with half-understood notes of Shakespeare to guide him- -as it now possesses. Attempts, showing much critical acuteness, have been made by Knight, Grant White, Mr. Fleay, and several other students to distinguish the Shakespearean from the non-Shakespearean parts, but such attempts are in a high degree hazardous. Perhaps the main part of the opening scene from the entrance of Apemantus, and a great part, if not the whole of the second scene are non-Shakespearean. In the second scene of Act II we may suspect the prose dialogue in which Apemantus and the Fool take part. The third Act, except the fierce invective of Timon towards the close, may perhaps be dismissed as work of the inferior playwright. In the fourth Act there is certainly much of Shakespeare's writing, but parts of the dialogue between Timon and Apemantus and the earlier speeches of Timon and the thieves seem to lack the impress of his mind. There is considerable agreement among critics in rejecting as non-Shakespearean the whole of Scene iii of Act v, and certain other scattered fragments. But to be definite or positive is rash. Swinburne's statement in A Study of Shakespeare, which abstains from entering into minute detail, supplies at least a valuable basis for consideration: In Timon we cannot assert with the same confidence in the same accuracy [as in The Two Noble Kinsmen] that just so many scenes and no more, just so many speeches and none other, were the work of Shakespeare's or of some other hand. Throughout the first Act his presence lighters on us by flashes, as his voice peals out by fits, from behind or above the too meanly decorated altar of tragic or satiric song: in the second it is more sensibly continuous; in the third it is all but utterly eclipsed; in the fourth it is but very rarely intercepted for a very brief interval in the dark divine service of a darker 66 Commination Day: in the fifth it predominates generally over the sullen and brooding atmosphere with the fierce imperious glare of a bloody sun " like that which the wasting seamen watched at noon "in a hot and copper sky There is here no more to say of a poem inspired at once by the triune Furies of Ezekiel, of Juvenal, and of Dante.' A poem Swinburne calls Timon, and portions of the poem are among the greatest things that ever came from Shakespeare's genius; a poem terrible in its declamatory power; but it was impossible to make Timon a good play. Why, unless to relieve feelings which were in part his own, he chose the subject, it is hard to imagine. We may perhaps style the most impressive Shakespearean parts an afterclap of the thunders that volley in King Lear. Shakespeare's sources-setting aside the notion of an old lost play-appear to have been a passage in North's translation from Amyot of Plutarch's Life of Antonius; Paynter's tale 'Of the straunge and beastlie nature of Timon of Athens, enemie to mankind, with his death, buriall, and epitaphe'; and Lucian's dialogue concerning Timon the man-hater. It is said, indeed, that Lucian's Dialogues were not to be read in English in Shakespeare's day, but we cannot tell at what date the version by Francis Hickes (born 1566) was made. A folio French translation of the works of Lucian, by Philibert Bretin, was published in Paris in 1583; Latin and Italian translations were also extant. It has been supposed by some that in studying Antony's Life in Plutarch for his play of Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare was struck by that digression in which the historian tells of Timon. We read in it of Timon's converse with young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth' whom the misanthrope would greatly feast, and make much of', because he knew that one day he would do great mischief to the Athenians. Here, too, Timon has acquaintance with the churlish Apemantus. The bitter jest of the fig-tree on which many citizens had hanged themselves is recorded; Timon's burial upon the shore; and the two epitaphs which the writer of the last scene of the play has merged, or jumbled, into one. Little more than this was to be learnt from Paynter's tale, but from Lucian's dialogue and the suggestions of his own imagination all that the play adds to the meagre notice by Plutarch might have been derived. A detailed comparison of the dialogue with the tragedy may be found in Augustine Skottowe's Life of Shakespeare, &c., vol. ii, pp. 278-88 (1824). There is no decisive evidence which determines when the play was written. We have to rely entirely, or almost entirely, upon such proof as is offered by its spirit, style, and versification. The application of the verse-tests is rendered difficult by the fact of its double authorship and the uncertainty which attends any attempted division of the work of the two writers. It has affinities with King Lear in its representing the tragic effects of ingratitude and in its invective against mankind. Dr. Bradley would place it between King Lear and Macbeth; the reader may be referred to 'Note S' in his volume Shakespearean Tragedy. But it is by no means certain that Shakespeare on the completion of King Lear would immediately repeat the same strain of declamatory invective. There are also points of resemblance between Timon and Coriolanus in the revolt from the city and its citizens, and the action of both Timon and Alcibiades towards Athens. Nor should we forget the possibility that the dramatist had never been impressed with the passage on Timon in Plutarch until he was studying the Life of Antonius with a view to the drama of which Antony is the hero. Upon the whole we may regard 1606 or 1607 as a not improbable date, and regard 1605 or 1608 as not impossible. Certainty is here unattainable. The primary theme of Timon and the secondary plot of Alcibiades are too slightly connected from a dramatic point of view; but they belong each to the other in the conception of the play. We are never permitted by Shakespeare to forget that the illusions of Timonillusions of reckless generosity, illusions of passionate despair-are those of one whose nature is noble. Of such illusions Alcibiades is incapable. He is a practical man of action framed for material success; but Shakespeare through his tragic heroes was in sympathy with those men who can err greatly, and who become the impressive ruins of life, great fallen fragments of manhood with perhaps a desert surrounding them. The dramatist maintains a high impartiality. No doubt he who carefully built up his worldly fortunes could not approve of Timon's magnificent prodigality; no doubt he whom man delighted and woman also could not approve the revolt of the misanthrope against humanity. But he states the fact; the well-to-do householder of Stratford was the creator of Lear and of Othello; he saw that the limited, practical nature escapes the great risks, the vast errors, to which the man who, in Brown-ing's phrase, would 'love infinitely and be loved', is liable. His good sense respects Alcibiades, and his imagination expands itself in sympathy with Timon. Alcibiades has known life in the middle sphere; Timon has dwelt unwisely in the extremities. When he sees all things through the illusion of generosity he can make no distinctions, nor can he make distinctions when he sees all things through the illusion of despair. Timon perishes and Alcibiades prospers. Gold massive and weighty is dross to Timon because he has turned in frenzy from love and hope. Gold will provide Alcibiades with pay for his soldiery, and in the end he will know how to punish and how to pardon : Bring me into your city, Make war breed peace; make peace stint war. This surely is better work than to make one's everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood. Yet the followers of Alcibiades attend on him for gold; and the foiled steward of Timon would fain serve his noble master for love. Some moments, some hours or |