[In the following excerpt, Oliver argues that Timon of Athens lacks dramatic conflict and that the title character lacks depth, but agrees with William Hazlitt's praise of the play's intensity and unity.]

Dedicating to the Duke of Buckingham his revision of Timon of Athens, Shadwell wrote: "it has the inimitable hand of Shakespear in it, which never made more masterly strokes than in this. Yet I can truly say, I have made it into a Play" [quoted in The History of Timon of Athens the Man-Hater (1678)]. So extravagant a claim, one would have thought, was likely to be laughed at by twentieth-century readers: it has in fact often been quoted with approval. Although convinced that Timon is unfinished, I think that it is a far finer play than Shadwell imagined, and that Hazlitt was not so far wrong when, after making the rather odd remark that it is one of the few plays in which Shakespeare "seems to be in earnest throughout", he added [in Characters in Shakespeare's Plays (1817)], "He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design".

The "design" is announced most succinctly in the opening dialogue of Jeweller and Merchant, Poet and Painter. In a few brief lines, the atmosphere of hypocrisy is established (in, for example, the false modesty of the Poet's "A thing slipp'd idly from me"); and after a glimpse of the Senators who are paying court to Timon, the Poet describes his allegorical poem in which he has pictured one "of Lord Timon's frame" betrayed by false friends when misfortune overtakes him. Before the entrance of Timon himself, then, there is a clear announcement of what W. M. Merchant has called [in "Timon and the Conceit of Art," Shakespeare Quarterly (1955)] "the dual theme of the false appearance of friendship and the un-certainty of fortune".

The second premise is the noble generosity of Timon; and this too is established with remarkable economy of means in two brief interviews. The first (and it is all the more cogent in that it is also our first glimpse of Timon) is the conversation with the servant of Ventidius who comes asking Timon to send a letter of credit for a considerable sum to release his master from prison; and Timon's immediate answer shines out, like Portia's candle, as "shines a good deed in a naughty world":

  Noble Ventidius. Well,
I am not of that feather to shake off
My friend when he must need me …

The second is the discussion with the Old Athenian who for purely mercenary reasons (the background of corrupt Athens is being filled in all the time) objects to the marriage of his daughter to Timon's servant Lucilius. Here the brevity of Timon's comments is most telling: "What of him?—Well; what further?—The man is honest—Does she love him?—Love you the maid?" and then the immediate decision to endow Lucilius with an equal fortune. There is certainly in this nothing "ridiculous" [quoted in O.J. Campbell's Shakespeare's Satire (1943)]; there is nothing that is even open to criticism.

The first note of warning that there is nevertheless a lack of discrimination in Timon's choice of friends is sounded very gently indeed in his few words with the Poet, Painter and Jeweller; and then it is sounded loudly in the first "flyting" with Apemantus. It should be noted that Apernante' cynical judgments of the Painter and Poet and then of the Athenian Lords are all later to be proved right and to be accepted by Timon himself: Timon later speaks of them in identical terms, agreeing that the Painter is fouler than any man he can paint and that the Poet's feigning is only lying. An audience which has absorbed anything at all from the opening section with the Poet and Painter will surely already sense which way the wind will blow. In an opening scene of under three hundred lines, then, bright with the exchange of wit and alive with the constant coming and going of characters on the stage, all the necessary data have been given.

Ventidius next offers to repay the money "from whose help I deriv'd liberty". I cannot see this as a false start. All Timon's alleged friends are prepared to give, when they know they will receive more in return. The audience cannot have forgotten from only four lines earlier (the modern scene division obscures the continuity) the Second Lord's

  No meed but he repays
Seven-fold above itself: no gift to him
But breeds the giver a return exceeding
All use of quittance

and the policy is later re-affirmed by a Senator:

If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog
And give it Timon—why, the dog coins gold;
If I would sell my horse and buy twenty moe
Better than he—why, give my horse to Timon;
Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight
And able horses …

Even if Ventidius' offer is interpreted by an audience as meant in good faith, the play is to demonstrate that an offer of money to a man when he does not need it and the giving of money when he does are two different things. The alleged inconsistency is a figment of the critical imagination.

Indeed, it is interesting that as sensitive a critic as Hazlitt saw no inconsistencies in Timon: one wonders how many of its difficulties have been read into it by later commentators. In particular, I wonder whether those twentieth-century critics who have brought to the play their knowledge of the Elizabethan "background" have not sometimes been blinded by such knowledge—blinded to the facts of the play. Hardin Craig, for example, writes [in his An Interpretation of Shakespeare (1948)] that "Timon's spending was set down as a mark of his nobility in the ancient world and was so understood in the Renaissance. Let us not intrude any bourgeois parsimony into the tale of Timon of Athens. It was noble to spend, and Timon was a spender". J. W. Draper and E. C. Pettet carry the same reasoning further and see in Timon "a straightforward tract for the times" [quoted in Pettet's "Timon of Athens: The Disruption of Feudal Morality," R.E.S. (1947)], an attack on usury; Draper even writes [in "The Theme of Timon of Athens," Modern Language Review (1934)] that "The play, indeed, is Shakespeare's Gulliver, a fierce and sweeping indictment of the ideals and social ethics of the age, an indictment largely consonant with popular opinion of the time. In Lear, Shakespeare depicts the social chaos consequent upon the abdication of royal authority; in Timon of Athens, upon the economic ruin of the nobility". The argument is that usury was in Elizabe-than eyes a sin; and that in the story of Timon, Shakespeare is dramatizing the fall of the feudal nobility who, borrowing to keep up their state, put themselves in the hands of usurers. Lending without interest, it is alleged, was the very symbol of the older feudal morality, the passing of which Shakespeare was lamenting. I think it should be suggested that the economic history on which such views are based is itself none too sound: Wilson's Discourse on Usury, from which so much is quoted, was published in 1572 and deplored an already changing situation, so that Shakespeare's supposed lament of, say, 1608 would hardly have been topical. The more important point, however, is that such theories as those of Draper and Pettet force their authors to see Timon as a symbol of an ideal, the feudal ideal. They have one advantage over those who speak of the play as an allegory of love and hate, in that they do see it as a dramatization of a particular situation; but they misrepresent the situation. In my judgment, they oversimplify. Could not Shakespeare hate usury and still not admire without qualification the kind of man who put himself into the hands of usurers? Timon is, in fact, not presented as an ideal, any more than are the other tragic heroes:indeed, ideal heroes probably do make tragedy impossible, and to this extent Draper and Pettet are at least being consistent in seeing the play as something less than tragedy. But perhaps the old-fashioned critics, for all their moral preoccupations, sometimes saw straighter; and it is illuminating to find Gervinus describing Timon as "refined in speech, brief, plain, select, but never deep" [quoted in Shakespeare Commentaries, translated by F. E. Bunnett (1892)]. That, surely, is the point—the point which Timon himself makes in his confession "Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given" (II. ii. 178).

We must stop short of saying, as J. C. Maxwell said [in "Timon of Athens," Scrutiny (1948)], that Timon's regular giving is a form of presumption; but we must agree that there is a shallowness in his "complacently accepting" praise for his generosity as he does. (Campbell similarly detected "self-satisfaction at the display of his own munificence".) The crucial passage here are Timon's self-conscious speech to his guests (I. ii. 86-105) beginning "O no doubt, my good friends, but the gods themselves have provided that I shall have much help from you" and ending "O what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes … Mine eyes cannot hold out water, methinks. To forget their faults, I drink to you" and the later lines:

Methinks I could deal kingdoms to my friends,
And ne'er be weary (I. ii. 219-20)

Timon has not the wisdom to see that the people who say most about their affection do not necessarily have the most (here the parallel with Lear is perhaps closest). He is deaf to the unctuous hypocrisy of the First Lord's

Might we but have that happiness, my lord, that you would once use our hearts, whereby we might express some part of our zeals, we should think ourselves for ever perfect (I. ii. 82-5)

and prefers this kind of company to that of Apemantus who, like his Steward, tries to warn him of the truth. Apemantus is one whose friendship cannot be won by giving:

No, I'll nothing; for if I should be brib'd too, there would be none left to rail upon thee, and then thou wouldst sin the faster. Thou giv'st so long, Timon, I fear me thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly. What needs these feasts, pomps, and vainglories? (I. ii. 240-4)

What need they indeed? Timon, who will not listen to Apemantus now—and it is partly at least because Apemantus lacks the social virtues and will not flatter—is to learn that even unattractive cynics may be right. Apemantus, in his grace, prays that he may never judge by appearances or even trust his friends if he should need them; Timon, who scorns such cynicism now, is later to utter a far more savage grace himself. The counterpointing of the two graces should not be overlooked, nor should the ironical contrast of

Timon Thou art proud, Apemantus.
Apem. Of nothing so much as that I am not like
  Timon (I. i. 189-90)

with the later:

Apem.    Art thou proud yet?
Timon Ay, that I am not thee (IV. iii. 278-9)

—which perhaps establishes the further point that however low a Timon may sink, he will always have reason for thinking himself above an Apemantus. But it is essential that Apemantus should be seen correctly as the Jaques of the play—that is, not as a fully likeable person (Alfred Harbage once remarked that whenever Shakespeare provides commentators, he seems always to make them in some ways unlikeable, as if to prevent our fully identifying ourselves with them) but as one who is often right and is at least a very useful check on those who find sermons in stones and good in everything. Fittingly, then, Apemantus closes the first act with the lines

O that men's ears should be
To counsel deaf, but not to flattery.

Shakespeare must, I think, have started from the "fact" of Timon's misanthropy, a misanthropy for which he was proverbial and, incidentally, not admired; and to the question "What might conceivably have reduced a man to this condition?" he offered the answer "the shock that betrayal might give to a noble but not profound mind". It would not do to have some arbitrary cause, such as the loss of Timon's ships; the shock must come from a situation for which Timon himself was partly responsible, in however worthy a way, namely the gradual dissipation of his estate. Act II, then, shows the tide flowing out. Creditors like the Senator of II. i—a perfect sketch of the purely mercenary mind—send for their money, and the Steward at last makes Timon understand the position. (The only break in the continuity comes from the interlude of Apemantus and the Fool.) Timon, still not comprehending the situation as he should—although, ironically, he knows that "these old fellows have their ingratitude in them hereditary"—sends to his alleged friends for enormous sums of money, to stem the tide.

In the early scenes of Act III, the greasily confidential Lucullus, the heartily evasive Lucius and the hypocritically indignant Sempronius refuse. Timon in turn. Of these scenes, particularly praised by Hazlitt also, Una Ellis-Fermor has justly commented [in "Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play," Review of English Studies (1942)]: "The masterly skill of long experience lies behind the treatment of the parallel episodes of Lucullus, Lucius, Sempronius and Ventidius, so handled, in different ways, as to avoid repetition while building up the impression of accumulation, to reveal at once the individuality of characters and the monotony of their behaviour. No dramatic novice wrote this". Nor is it certain that Shakespeare originally intended to dramatize the repudiation of Timon by Ventidius. There would have been something mechanical in a refusal by Ventidius as a climax; as it is, by letting us hear of Ventidius' refusal only casually, Shakespeare achieves a far finer effect: in the rising tide of ingratitude, even the baseness of a Ventidius becomes relatively insignificant. The bustle of the servants clamouring for their money (III. iv) and the scene of Alcibiades' pleading before the Senate then precede Timon's famous mock-banquet and his withdrawal from Athens. His tragedy, as Peter Alexander well says [in his Shakespeare's Life and Art (1939)], "is not that he is reduced to poverty and cast off, but that the godlike image of man in his heart is cast down, and his dreams of human fellowship destroyed".

"To say that Timon took his trouble too much to heart", the same critic continues, "is just what the senators said of the soldier". This is true but, with respect, not quite the point. As Wilson Knight has said [in his The Wheel of Fire (1930)], "We are given no chance to sentimentalize Timon's hate. Its nobility derives solely from its utter reversal of love". Shakespeare is not saying that Timon ought not to have taken his troubles so much to heart; he is saying that noble natures do take their troubles to heart and so their very virtues count against them because those virtues leave no place for such worldliness and practical efficiency as those of Alcibiades, worthy but less so than Timon.

The scene in which Alcibiades pleads before the Athenian senate is therefore perfectly placed to introduce this contrast between the ways in which two men of honour meet a given situation. The oration of Alcibiades is apparently of Shakespeare's own invention (as were many of the orations in his other plays) and in its development of the theme of the necessity for mercy is comparable with the speeches of Portia in The Merchant of Venice ("The quality of mercy is not strained …") and of Isabella in Measure for Measure (" … Why, all the souls that were, were forfeit once …"), and not far inferior to them. What has been found faulty here is the lack of "connection" with the Timon plot. Sir Walter Greg went so far as to say [in The Shakespeare First Folio (1955)] that "there is no clear link between the story of Timon and that of Alcibiades … They might almost belong to different plays"; Shadwell and Cumberland in their versions of the play tried to link the two men through female characters, Cumberland by having Alcibiades love Timon's daughter Evanthe; and Una Ellis-Fermor suggested that Timon was perhaps the man for whom Alcibiades was pleading. I think that all these theories place in sufficient emphasis on the dramatic principle on which Timon of Athens is constructed—that of counterpoint.

The play is indeed, as Miss Ellis-Fermor has herself implied, a most interesting experiment in dramatic technique; and the technique used is far in advance of its own day and is very like that of certain modern novels, those of which Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point is the proto-type. With an absolute minimum of chronological narrative, Shakespeare has set off against each other the reactions of one man to different situations, and the reactions of different men to the same situation. Timon's response to prosperity in one half of the play is counterpointed against his response to adversity in the other; the hypocritical flattery of Poet and Painter and the Athenian Lords is counterpointed against the unflattering cynicism of Apemantus. The third act sets against each other the refusals of the various creditors; and then in the unbroken second half ("Acts IV and V") the visits to Timon of Poet and Painter, Apemantus, Alcibiades and the Senators are counterpointed against each other and also against the visits which each of them paid to Timon in the first half of the play.

Any plot-link between Alcibiades and Timon, then, would have been gratuitous; it would have cut across the constructional principle of the play. Act III, Sc. v may be a trifle abrupt, as it stands; but what the dramatist needed to do, and what he has surely done, was to give each of the men justifiable reason for resentment against an un-grateful and corrupt state. In the remainder of the play their responses are set one against the other.

It would be easy to compile from the criticism of Timon an anthology of contradictory remarks about Alcibiades, and their very number is no doubt some indication that Shakespeare has not made his intention perfectly clear. Suffice it to say that to one school of thought Alcibiades is "young and fair" [quoted in Henri Fluchère's Shakespeare (1953)], "really noble" as against the "seemingly magnificent Timon" who "lacks greatheartedness" [quoted in B. L. Joseph's Elizabethan Acting (1951)]; to the other he "is of much grosser grain than Timon and much inferior to him in spiritual worth, but nevertheless he has ability to meet and overcome hostile forces in the world whereas Timon can only let himself be crushed by them" [quoted in Willard Farnham's Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (1950)]. Can there be any real doubt that the second opinion is correct, even if it needs to be modified? The appearance of Alcibiades on the stage with retainers and harlots, while Timon digs for roots, itself makes the point clearly enough (and, incidentally, shows that the Alcibiades of Timon is not as far from Plutarch's as some critics would maintain). He is the Fortinbras who restores order only after the tragic hero is dead; still more, he is the Octavius, the Aufidius—the man who survives partly because he has a clearer view of things and is more efficient, but partly because (it is the thought that recurs most often in Shakespeare) efficiency has been bought at the price of a certain loss of sensitivity. Timon, like Hamlet, Coriolanus and Antony, has a greater soul than the man of action with whom he is contrasted.

Timon's wrongs, then, have to be avenged by Alcibiades, while Timon, in a series of dialogues that are magnificently varied but still perhaps disappoint theatrically in that they give little sense of rising or falling action, hurls his incomparable invective against the hypocrites who come to see him, and against the world. I suspect, however, that the finest exchange in the last two acts is that between Timon and Apemantus. Even in his new-found misanthropy Timon feels superior to Apemantus, in not deriving from a refusal to love mankind a certain satisfaction or even enjoyment. But why Fluchère speaks of Apemantus' "fundamental villainy" I do not understand. To the end, Apemantus has something on his side; he rightly tells Timon: "the middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends". He has been right also about the Poet and Painter, of whom Timon now speaks in Apemantus' very words (v. i. 30-1); he has always been content with the roots which Timon truly appreciates only now (compare I. ii. 71 and 130-I with IV. iii. 23 and 187-98). That he is also not without a certain regard for Timon is implied in the first act: "I fear me thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly"; and the audience's knowledge of this must prevent it from accepting without modification Timon's charge that Apemantus comes to him later only to flatter misery. The philosopher might well have answered with Jaques "Out of these convertites / There is much matter to be heard and learn'd" (AYL., v. iv. 190-1); and Apemantus and the Steward are, notably, the only characters in the second half of the play as in the first who cannot be bribed in any way with Timon's gold. The cynic's last interview with the misanthrope ought to be played with a certain half-amused tolerance: in the attitude of the philosopher (whose view that men cannot be trusted is at least based on a lifetime's disinterested observation) to the misanthrope (who is cursing all mankind simply because his own limited experience has found some men false) there is something of the contempt of the professional for the amateur.

The final impression of the play, however, is not determined by the attitude of Apemantus or even by Timon's misanthropy. "How fain would I have hated all mankind", Timon cries (IV. iii. 503)—but he cannot hate them all, for the Steward stands there to make such hatred impossible. The presence of the Steward among the characters, then, so far from being the puzzle or contradiction that Chambers found it, is essential to the meaning of the play and expressly forbids us from identifying our judgment (or Shakespeare's) with Timon's. Ivor Brown's comment [in Shakespeare (1949)] that "in Timon of Athens there is no affection left for man or woman, fair or dark" is mis-guided. Timon's misanthropy, like everything else in Shakespeare's plays, is part of a dramatized situation and is in no sense a lyrical statement of the poet's own belief; and Timon's invective, for which the play has received most of such praise as has generally been given it, is all the more remarkable when one pauses to reflect that it states an attitude from which, through the presence of the Steward, Shakespeare has dissociated himself completely. The mood of Timon, it may be said, is akin both to that of Lear, in its portrayal of complete despair and yet its refusal to believe that suffering is all, and to that of the romances.

It remains to ask the question to which any answer is presumptuous: why then did Shakespeare leave the play unfinished? Unless my interpretation is very sadly astray, it was not, as Chambers and Brown believed, because the dramatist was "in a mood verging upon nervous break-down" [quoted in Brown's Shakespeare] nor, as G. B. Harrison insisted [in Shakespeare's Tragedies (1951)], because of "sheer boredom". More probably Shakespeare was influenced by dramatic difficulties inherent in the subject. There are, it seems to me, two difficulties in particular. One is the problem of making a great tragic hero out of a man who by hypothesis lacks depth or profundity; and so it is not that Timon was "the wrong character to support his theme" [quoted by Una Ellis-Fermor], I suggest, but rather that he was the only right one—right for the given situation, that is to say, but not right for great tragedy. The other problem is similarly created by the fact that the story does not lend itself to treatment in drama. As Hardin Craig has said, "there is no drama in mere non-participation, where it arises from avoidance of the conflict or from definite refusal to participate". In the second half of Timon, indeed, there is no true dramatic conflict; and neither the series of debates between Timon and those who seek him out in his solitude nor the contrast between Alcibiades and Timon can quite make up for this deficiency. This absence of conflict no doubt explains why so many critics have inferred wrongly that the play was intended as a parable or morality or something less than true drama, and why others have thought that Shakespeare was interested only in the lyrical possibilities and have assumed Timon to be only "a moral voice censuring humanity" [quoted from Hardin Craig]. Could it have been because he felt a certain failure to overcome these weaknesses that Shakespeare turned from it, if he did, to not dissimilar themes which lent themselves more readily to treatment in drama, the themes of Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra?

But these weaknesses, if they are such, are so only by Shakespearian standards. One might still say of Timon of Athens, as Swinburne once said of another work, that whatever in it is not good is also less than important.