[In the essay below, Baldo argues that Shakespeare develops the rhetorical practice of generalizing to a new height in Timons of Athens, unprecedented in renaissance literature.]

How little connection there is between money, the most general form of property, and personal peculiarity, how much they are directly opposed to each other was already known to Shakespeare better than to our theorising petty bourgeois.

—Karl Marx¹

You schal … confound the nobyllys and the commynys togeddur … that ther schal be no differens betwyx the one and the other.

—Thomas Starkey²

The very shadow of levelling, sword-levelling, man-levelling, frightened you, (and who, like your selves, can blame you, because it shook your Kingdome?) but now the substantiality of levelling is coming.

The Eternall God, the mighty Leveller is comming, yea come, even at the door; and what will you do in that day. …

—Abiezer Coppe³

Timon of Athens is sometimes regarded as Shakespeare at his most unshakespearean. The play strikes many as uncharacteristically abstract, containing as it does numerous characters identified only by the profession, class, or kind to which they belong. More than one critic has labelled it “schematic.”⁴ To several others Timon is an “allegorical” play, and evidence of the influence of the Moralities on Shakespeare's dramatic practices.⁵ It is also indisputably rough-hewn, like the Poet's “rough work” he awaits to present to Lord Timon (1.1.43).⁶ Almost universally giving critics the impression of being unfinished, a draft that for no known reason Shakespeare never bothered to revise—a play, in other words, in need of fine brushwork—Timon may be its author's most thoroughgoing inquiry into Renaissance tragedy's generalizing practices and the relation of those practices to notions of sovereignty. Though Timon holds no office, his play may be as political as any that Shakespeare wrote.⁷ It may offer the most thoroughgoing challenge to Renaissance sovereignty to be found in the Shakespeare canon.

Franco Moretti has written of sovereignty as it is represented in Renaissance tragedy that it is a “universal power, reaching and defining every part of the body politic, whose destiny is therefore enveloped within it. … Universal, the decision of the king will gradually affect his person, his family, the nobility, the people, and all society: In event after event, the royal act resonates over the entire political body.”⁸ Supporting the conception of sovereignty as a universal power is a varied range of generalizing rhetorics in Shakespearen tragedy. Quite a lot is at stake when Shakespearean characters generalize: for instance, when the Roman plebeians hurl their proverbs in the teeth of that snarling generalizer—but in many ways the least general or universal of Shakespeare's tragic protagonists—Coriolanus. The patrician-plebeian rhetorical skirmishes over the prerogative to generalize and the legitimacy of generalizing also entail an important battle over political representation.

Renaissance tragedy presupposes a confidence in the legitimacy of certain kinds of generalizing and universalizing rhetoric that for the most part we no longer share. The prevailing assumption of both the New Criticism and new historicism has been that literature and its criticism serve a counter-generalizing or particularizing mission.⁹ As a result, the critical tradition has tended to overlook rather than engage questions that might arise from the generalizing practices of Shakespeare's characters and the genre of Renaissance tragedy alike: for instance, the relation of generalizing rhetoric to the question of sovereignty, and the ways in which the very practice of generalizing so fundamental to Shakespearean tragedy is subjected to criticial scrutiny in the later tragedies, particularly Coriolanus and Timon of Athens. In those plays generalizing becomes a harsher, more suspect, more visible, and more contested discursive activity than it is in the earlier histories and tragedies. Both plays have frequently struck readers and critics as anomalies. The allegorical qualities of Timon and the imaginative spareness of Coriolanus have seemed to many critics hard to reconcile with Shakespeare's earlier practice of tragedy, particularly the “infinite variety” of speech and characterization. What makes these two plays seem less than anomalous to me as the final developments of Shakespeare's practice of tragedy is the extremity of their critical reflection on the related generalizing tropes of Renaissance tragedy and Renaissance sovereignty. They merely take to extremes an interrogation begun in the famous quartet of tragedies stretching from Hamlet to Macbeth, but missing, I think, from his earlier Elizabethan tragedies and history plays.

The specific argument I will make here about generalizing as a contested rhetorical practice in Timon of Athens is the following. Often Renaissance defenses of absolutism staged a confrontation between two opposed species of generality: one associated with the levelling of degree and the dissolution of social order, the other supporting if not instituting a hierarchical order. One is confounding, the other universalizing. After glancing at two works—the beginning of Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke named the Gouvernour and Shakespeare's Henry V—which illustrate how the phantom of a social levelling is employed in the service of absolutist monarchy, I will try to show how in Timon of Athens the confrontation between a universalizing and hierarchizing mode of generality on the one hand, and a levelling or confounding on the other, becomes considerably more unruly and ungovernable than it is in Elyot's treatise or the earlier play. Elyot expunges the levelling mode of generalizing; Henry V employs it more subtly in the service of a universalizing mode of generality having clear affiliations with Renaissance sovereignty. Timon complicates both these patterns, not only by allowing the levelling mode of generalizing to run riot, in almost carnivalesque fashion, through the play, but also by confounding the very difference between the two modes of generalizing in the opening exchange between the Poet and Painter. In Timon of Athens, the confrontation of two modes of generalizing, the levelling and the hierarchizing, that are no longer sharply differentiated fails to yield a clear image of social order.

OPPOSING GENERALS

In The Boke named The Gouvernour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot conjures the fantasy of a confounding of all social rank that Timon speaks to in so many guises. More explicitly than Shakespeare in Timon, Elyot raises the specter of ancient Athenian democracy. In the second chapter of the Boke, Athens makes an appearance as an instance of the orderless republic “where a multitude hath had equal authoritie without any soueraygne”: “An other publique weale was amonge the Atheniensis, where equalite was of astate among the people, and only by theyr holle consent theyr citie and dominions were gouerned: whiche moughte well be called a monstre with many heedes.”¹⁰Coriolanus, probably contemporary with Timon of Athens,¹¹ offers another explicit association of Athens with indiscriminating democracy. Coriolanus warns of the drift of Rome toward the catastrophic example of Greece:

Whoever gave that counsel, to give forth
The corn o’th’storehouse gratis, as ’twas us’d
Sometime in Greece— …
Though there the people had more absolute power—
I say they nourish’d disobedience, fed
The ruin of the state.

(3.1.112-14, 115-17)¹²

Shakespeare's contemporaries were notoriously partial to ancient Rome over ancient Greece. In part this was due to the claim of the English of Shakespeare's day to be descended from the Romans. In addition, the period of Roman history stretching from Julius Caesar to Augustus was frequently cited as evidence supporting the argument for monarchy, as it was by Elyot.¹³ Ancient Greek history could also be so cited, but only in derogatory fashion, as offering an inverted image of order, the misrule that follows when power is given over to the many-headed monster, the people.¹⁴

Elyot summons the possibility of a confounding of all degree so as to imply that the sole alternative to the absolutist state is an absolute levelling.¹⁵ Elyot writes of the designation commonwealth or “commune weale,” it “semeth that men haue ben longe abused in calling Rempublicam a commune weale.” At least some who insist on that mistranslation suppose “that every thinge shulde be to all men in commune, without discrepance of any astate or condition,” such a supposition being motivated according to Elyot “more by sensualite than by any good reason or inclination to humanite.” “Commune weale” is a misnomer implying either an inversion of rank or a confounding of rank and degree altogether: “if there shuld be a commune weale, either the communers only must be welthy, and the gentil and noble men nedy and miserable, or els excluding gentilite, al men must be of one degre and sort, and a new name prouided.” A new name besides “commune weale” would be required since the English “commune,” like the Latin “Plebs,” is a word “made for the discrepance of degrees, whereof procedeth ordre.” A “publike weale” on the other hand—the accurate translation of the Latin Respublica according to Elyot—is “compacte or made of sondry astates and degrees of men, whiche is disposed by the ordre of equite and gouerned by the rule and moderation of reason.”¹⁶ The alternative to a social order based on degree and hierarchies is “perpetuall conflicte” and “uniuersall dissolution.”¹⁷ Elyot's Broke, at its outset, performs a representation followed by a ritual expulsion of the “other” of absolute monarchy, the democratic confounding of degree—what Timon calls “the sweet degrees that this brief world affords” (4.3.255).

When King Henry disguises himself on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V, the two types of generality succeed one another in the same order and to much the same effect as in the opening pages of Elyot's Boke.¹⁸ In what many critics regard as a supremely democratic moment, Henry, under a borrowed cloak, purports to uncloak himself in a soul-baring rhetoric. But the democratic reflections both in conversation with the common soldiers Williams, Court, and Bates, and later in soliloquy are as contrived as everything else in Hal's career from 1 Henry IV onward. They act as an innoculation against the levelling impulse. To the soldiers the disguised King says, “For though I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me. All his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man, and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing” (4.1.98-109).¹⁹ In the soliloquy that follows, rank is reinstated and safeguarded under the cloak of denying it. “And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?” the famous lines go. “Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form, / Creating awe and fear in other men?” (4.1.228,234-5). Were the reflection inverted—What are place, degree, and form but idols?—the total effect of this speech would be quite different. As it is, these lines and the speech as a whole actually enlarge the scope of ceremony. The reflection “What is ceremony but place, degree, and form?” suggests that ceremony is just about everything, another term for Renaissance Order itself. Like Elyot in The Boke, Henry strengthens the claims of place, degree, and form by entertaining the possibility of their virtual levelling. The generality of the king who is but a man is subsumed within the generality of the single man who “must bear all” (4.1.221). The democratic and levelling touches in Henry's speeches actually support rather than contradict or limit the representativeness and therefore the claim to universality of the king. Henry strengthens the legitimacy of his claims to represent common soldiers like Williams, Court, and Bates by temporarily effacing all degrees in rank separating him from them.

With the reinstatement of place, degree, and form under the guise of their erasure, Henry becomes the universal watchman. The peasant's “gross brain little wots / What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace, / Whose hours the peasant best advantages” (4.1.270-2). One type of generality is fully within the orbit of the other. Levelling is made to serve the end of universalizing the central figure of the monarch. Even more than in Elyot's Boke, the levelling mode of generality is disabled. In Elyot, it is ritually banished, but like all banished figures—like Bolingbroke, for instance—remains a threat from the outside. In Henry V, it is absorbed into the ideology of absolutism, and thus can no longer pose an exterior threat to that ideology.

The threat to order and degree in Elyot and Henry V strikes me as a particularly theatrical kind: that is, of a kind that the Renaissance stage seems particularly suited to explore. Rather than the gradual rise or slippages of degree so often explored in novels, Renaissance plays are prone to imagine precipitous and absolute shifts of identity—from shepherdess to princess, for example, or from monarch to common man, which are quite unlike the more gradual identity formation explored in novels like Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Similarly precipitous are shifts of identity through levellings of degree, whether in absolutist treatises or in plays, as when Hamlet ruminates on the levelling power of the grave, or Macbeth on the levelling power of the stage (“life's but a poor player”), or Henry in Sir Thomas Erpingham's cloak on the false distinctions conjured by ceremony. The abruptness of such shifts in identity has a lot to do with conditions of performance. The relative brevity of a theatrical performance requires sudden rather than gradual changes of identity, and the ending of a theatrical performance could suggest an even more precipitous and massive shift of identities from characters to players. The many disguisings and removals of disguises on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stages also echoed and supported the notion of identity as shifting precipitously rather than gradually.

That absolutist thinking tended to conceive disorder in terms of similarly abrupt and radical, “theatrical” shifts of identity does not mean that Renaissance plays necessarily supported rather than criticized or challenged the ideology of absolutism. For many scenarios could be constructed from the confrontation of two orders of generality, not simply the absolutist one from degree to its sudden effacement and back again. Among alternative scenarios is the subversive one staged in Timon of Athens, where, as I shall argue in the next section, the two orders of generality, the confounding and the universalizing, are themselves confounded.

Playgoers in Elizabethan England would have experienced, if not recognized, a tension between two orders of generality informing Renaissance plays and their modes of production similar to that informing Elyot's treatise or the scenario in Henry V on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. The type of generality that empowers a single person to reflect the world at large is equally implicit in the monarch's status as universal representative or symbolic embodiment of the entire body politic and the player's practice of representing, in play after play, a virtual world of characters. Audiences following the season of a small company of actors like the King's Men would likely have seen the mode of representation of those actors—a player embodying in play after play a world of parts—as analogous to the only form of political representation they knew, the symbolic re-presentation by the king's body of the body politic. Often in Shakespeare it is within the scope of a single play that such a concept of representation comes into play: Rosalind, Hal, and Hamlet are persons (or personae) of many parts in more ways than one. Each of these figures of Shakespearean theatricality, these brilliant players within Shakespeare's plays, is in part analogous to the comprehensive, representative, and universal figure of the monarch.

But the Renaissance theater bore equally powerful testimony to the levelling type of generality: so much so that the theater could function as a trope for levelling, as it does, for instance, in Macbeth's “tomorrow” speech or, in more dilated form, in this memorable exhange between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza:

“Tell me, have you not seen some comedy in which kings, emperors, pontiffs, knights, ladies, and numerous other characters are introduced? One plays the ruffian, another the cheat, this one a merchant and that one a soldier, while yet another is the fool who is not so foolish as he appears, and still another the one of whom he has made a fool. Yet when the play is over and they have taken off their players’ garments, all the actors are once more equal.”

“Yes,” replied Sancho, “I have seen all that.”

“Well,” continued Don Quixote, “the same thing happens in the comedy that we call life, where some play the part of emperors, others that of pontiffs—in short, all the characters that a drama may have—but when it is all over, that is to say, when a life is done, death takes from each the garb that differentiates him, and all at last are equal in the grave.”

“It is a fine comparison,” Sancho admitted, “though not so new but that I have heard it many times before. It reminds me of that other one, about the game of chess. So long as the game lasts, each piece has its special qualities, but when it is over they are all mixed and jumbled together and put into a bag, which is to the chess pieces what the grave is to life.”

“Every day, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “you are becoming less stupid and more sensible.”²⁰

This bit of conversation between the mad knight and his would-be squire, firmly linking the theater to various orders of generality, sets on a collision course two different types of generalizing. Quixote elaborates the medieval and Renaissance commonplace of the world as stage in such a way as to suggest that the theater itself is a potent generalizing instrument in at least a couple of ways. The end of a play, where actors become again what they were before the play's beginning, teaches us our own generality. No matter how we are particularized in this life, we are “all at last equal in the grave.” Furthermore, the ending of every theatrical performance, no matter what its particular and immediate subjects, teaches the same general lesson about generality. Not only do plays teach their audiences the practice of moral self-generalization, but they themselves embody generalization in a rather extreme form, since each play is implicitly interchangeable with every other, conveying the same ultimate object lesson.

Quixote invests an idea that could have been sketched more briefly and abstractly (especially since it was familiar even to Sancho) with ample particularity, enumerating the parts of a play whose temporary differentiation gives way to generalized undifferentiation in the end. The effect of such seemingly superfluous particularizing is to establish as strongly as possible the sway of the general over the particular, both on stages and on the stage of the world. He is also playing the hypocrite. Like the old counsellor Gonzago in The Tempest, who imagines himself king of a commonwealth without degree, Quixote aims to reinforce the difference in rank between himself, the master, and his pupil-servant Sancho, by means of a lesson whose very object is the effacement of degree. Like Henry V in a way, Quixote subordinates the levelling trope of the stage to universalizing ends. By imagining the annihilation of place, degree, and form at the end of life as at the end of a play, Quixote resuscitates himself, in Henrician style, as universal watchman of the world's stage.

Against his master's salubrious moralizing, Sancho rejoins that the comparison his master has elaborated has been in general circulation for so long that it has lost some of its patina. The ubiquity of this particular commonplace, Sancho's reply intimates, limits rather than extends its authority. Furthermore, the obtrusion of Sancho's unmistakable voice also serves as a quiet challenge to the sobering generalizing of his master. By rephrasing in his own idiosyncratic and particularizing accents the commonplace to which Quixote has just given rather conventional expression, Sancho unwittingly resists the authority of the theatrum mundi topos his master has just elaborated.

The most important point for our purposes is that the Renaissance version of the commonplace of the world as stage could and did frequently impute a potentially redical levelling and confounding force to the stage. A single performance of a Shakespeare play could therefore suggest to a Renaissance theatergoer two opposed types of generality: one type tending to concentrate representative power, like a monarch, the other tending to efface order and rank altogether. The relation of these two types of generality in individual plays by Shakespeare is usually a good deal more fluid than it is in a monarchist tract like Elyot’s. Plays like Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens, I believe, grant the levelling or confounding type of generality a greater and more independent voice, and make the outcome of the confrontation between the two types of generality more uncertain. Furthermore, the last two plays I have mentioned make especially clear the political implications of this clash of competing rhetorics.

FREE DRIFTS AND EAGLE FLIGHTS

The confrontation between competing orders of generality begins early in Timon, and underlies the paragone of the play's opening, the stylized debate between Painter and Poet over the relative merits of their crafts.²¹ The Poet is to present Timon with an allegorical poem in order to curry favor. His work doubles as a piece of flattery as well as a warning to Timon of Fortune's shifts and the effects such shifts will have on his admirers. It is an abstract of the play, encapsulating its argument. It is also general in that its theme is one of the most widely known of all medieval and Renaissance themes, the fickleness of Fortune. And it is delivered by a generalized character without a proper name. In addition, the description he gives to the Painter is fairly sketchy and devoid of visual detail.

Directing the Painter's and our attentions to the groups of anonymous senators amassing onstage (and passing offstage in this instance, to prevent the need for too many actors), the Poet speaks of his “rough work,” not unlike the “rough work” that is Timon of Athens, in which he has “shaped out a man” (1.1.43):

My free drift
Halts not particularly, but moves itself
In a wide sea of wax; no levelled malice
Infects one comma in the course I hold,
But flies an eagle flight, bold, and forth on,
Leaving no tract behind.

(1.1.45-50)

The Poet implies that “levell’d” verse—targeted at particular individuals—is of an inferior species. Owen Feltham, in his nearly contemporary Resolves, expresses a similar sentiment when discussing jests. One of the two “great errors” of an “offensive truth” or bitter jest is that “we descend to particulars, and by that means draw the whole company to witness his disgrace we break it on. The soldier is not noble, that makes himself sport with the wounds of his own companion. Whosoever will jest should be like him that flourishes at a show: he may turn his weapon any way, but not aim more at one than at another.”²² Feltham's analogy with the actor (“him that flourishes at a show”) is telling, and suggests an understanding of the theatre as an institution that “halts not particularly,” though we know of course that much in Shakespeare's plays as well as those of his contemporaries was targeted at particular figures and timely issues.²³ Like the poet's work, Shakespeare's plays, including Timon of Athens, though characteristically riddled with topical allusions and commentary, may give the appearance of trackless eagle flights.

The Poet's use of just the word “levell’d” to apply to targeted and topical verse raises a complication, since “levelled” also might apply to the erasure of all difference or distinction. In fact, in 1608, this would have likely been the primary association of words like “level,” “levelled,” and “levellers.” In 1607, rioters in the midlands protesting enclosures and the subsequent rises in food prices were called “levelers,” and their destruction of enclosures “leveling,” words which already suggest the radical proposals of the 1640s for social levelling, for the abupt transformation of a vertical and hierarchal society.²⁴ The Poet's word “levell’d” therefore manages to suggest at once two opposite but equally unsatisfactory kinds of verse: verse that is highly topical and too particular, and verse that is so exceedingly generalizing that, like the social levelling proposed by radicals of the 1640s, it would level all difference. Apemantus and Timon deliver levelled verses in this sense.

The Poet's claim to write untargeted verse soon proves to be misleading, for the work he writes for presentation to Timon has a precise target in mind, namely Timon himself. As frequently was the case with Parliamentary rhetoric, James implied in a speech to Parliament in 1607, general rhetoric may serve as a smokescreen for particular or private interest. After defining the role of Parliament, stating “the matters whereof they are to treate ought therefore to be generall,” James warned, “Nor yet is it on the other side a conuenient place for priuate men vnder the colour of general Lawes, to propone nothing but their owne particular gaine, either to the hurt of their priuate neighbours, or to the hurt of the whole State in generall, which many times by vnder faire and pleasing Titles, are smoothly passed ouer. …”²⁵ Like Parliamentary rhetoric, the Poet's work that “halts not particularly” has a decidedly “particular” motive. Not only does the Poet aim at a particular target, the bounteous man he is presuming to warn, but he also has a particular motive: lavish recompense from the munificent Timon. It is no wonder then that he should favor a generalizing poetry that resembles the eagle's trackless flight, since by that means he covers his tracks. The Poet places generalizing discourse in the elevated position and the particularizing discourse—presumably bound to the land rather than moving in a “wide sea” or in the air, crawling and leaving tracks unlike the trackless generalist—in a subordinate one. As the opening scene develops, the hierarchy will be destabilized, hinting at the more massive challenges to be issued to that hierarchy later in the play.

As the conversation develops, a choric cry of “all” can be heard. “All conditions,” “all minds,” “all kinds of natures” are to be found at the base of Fortune's hill (1.1.52f.), setting the stage for the many “alls” that follow, the tendency of so many of the play's characters to speak and think in terms of “all.” In the Poet's lines “all” designates a comprehensiveness embracing, not cancelling, a multitude of degrees and ranks. It will be quite otherwise with the levelling “alls” or generalities uttered by Timon and Apemantus later in the play. The Poet includes in the undifferentiated mass of Timon's flatterers a character, Apemantus, who deplores Timon's indiscriminate bounty, and who repeatedly celebrates his own singularity: “—even he drops down / The knee before him and returns in peace / Most rich in Timon's nod” (1.1.61-63). It is an appropriate fate for the misanthropic Apemantus, who likewise doesn’t “halt particularly” or traffic in distinctions any more than Lord Timon. In other words, even the generalizer Apemantus, who characteristically exempts himself as a possible subject of his own Cynical generalities, is generalized by the Poet's description of the present scene, the amassing of “all conditions,” “all minds.” This subduing of one inveterate generalizer by another, Apemantus by the Poet, shows a clear affiliation of generality with power. By generalizing the generalizer Apemantus, the Poet disarms him in advance of our acquaintance of him, subverts Apemantus’ generalizing rhetoric as an alternate center of authority to the Poet's own.

Apemantus and Timon, both generalizers in their own ways, are generalized in the Poet's description and work in opposite ways. Apemantus is confounded, Timon universalized.²⁶ Apemantus is one of three characters in the play who should not be confused with the mass of ungrateful and covetous Athenians, the other two being Flavius, Timon's loyal steward, and the general Alcibiades. By contrast, Timon is universalized, not simply by being imagined as singled out from the ranks of men (“all deserts, all kinds of natures,” [1.1.65]) but also because the Poet's work eventually makes of him a universal object lesson about the “quick blows of Fortune” and about the human ingratitude those blows serve to reveal (1.1.91).

Twinned with the Poet's claim for Timon's universality is a parallel claim for the universality of his poem, an “eagle flight” that “halts not particularly.” But the Painter, who intially seems to be playing along with the Poet, begins subtly to undermine the Poet's claim to universality, first by praising the work not for its wide and comprehensive range of reference, but for precisely the reverse, for its specificity, and then by reinterpreting the generality of the poem as a sign not of the universal but of the common. There is also a hint of complicity as the painter tacitly sings the praises of both artists. But ultimately the aim (or “scope”) of the Painter's interjection is to begin subtly to deflate the Poet's claims for his work. Interrupting the Poet's description of his work, the Painter affirms,

’Tis conceived to scope.
This throne, this Fortune, and this hill, methinks,
With one man beckoned from the rest below,
Bowing his head against the steepy mount
To climb his happiness, would be well expressed
In our condition.

(1.1.72-77)

The word “scope,” while embracing our modern sense of “range” and “breadth” (and therefore one meaning of “general”), has as its primary sense in this passage its original meaning of “target,” “aim” (Gk. skopos, target), as well as its derivative meaning of “aim” in the sense of “purpose.”²⁷ The word connotes precision, accuracy of aim. What the Painter means is that the poem hits our own situations as artists, like a target: it is especially apt to describe us, Painter and Poet. Presumably he also means that the poem has scope in the sense of breadth enough to apply to its maker and his interlocutor as well as to its thinly veiled subject, Lord Timon. “Scope” seems especially well suited to evoking both the particular and the general, or perhaps the particular in the general and the general in the particular. Attention to the phrase also raises the question of the “scope” of Shakespeare's play: that is, whether it has scope in the sense of breadth enough to comprehend all members of its audience; whether in fact, as many critics have suggested, it was composed for a more specialized and aristocratic audience—a more specific target group—and therefore did not need the broad scope of Shakespeare's other tragedies (it is almost universally held not to possess scope in this sense);²⁸ and whether the play, like many others he wrote, did not have scope in the other sense, a topical reference or particlar target in the contemporary political scene, like the munificent King James, for instance, as Coppélia Kahn has recently argued.²⁹ Just as the word “scope” may subtly challenge the hegemony of the general in the poet's work by bringing in the idea of particular “target” or “aim” which the Poet's description conceals, and by complimenting the poet not for the generality but for the particularity of his work, so does his repetition of “this” surreptitiously challenge the Poet's refrain of “all” for the purpose of limiting his rival's claim to universality.

As the colloquy unfolds, the Poet must redefine his “scope” or aim. The Poet's reach for a wide and universal view really gets into trouble when the Painter inverts the values attaching to particular and general. Having already praised the poem for its precision or scope, he now begins to mock it because of what he now perceives to be its commonplace generality. In a way he is thoroughly consistent, but simply working from a different set of assumptions than the Poet’s, assumptions that degrade the general and elevate the particular in art. Stressing the emblematic aspect of the poem, the Painter nudges it toward a generality that the Poet is now anxious to deny; the Poet's stress on the narrative element of his poem—wait, there's more besides an all-too-familiar and static moral emblem—is an implicit claim for its particularity. In a way he has retreated from his early claim not to halt particularly. Poet and Painter reverse roles. It is now the Poet who is eager to claim a certain particularity for his work. The Painter, taking the offensive, seeks to limit its importance by insisting on its generality. The role reversal takes place because the “generality” of the poem has been devalued, being no longer the sign of a rare highmindedness but rather of an all-too-common vision. Upon hearing the Poet describe that segment of his poem where Fortune, and in turn the fortunate man's suitors or “dependants,” spurn the man formerly favored by Fortune, the Painter responds,

’Tis common.
A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s
More pregnantly than words.

(1.1.89-92)

With the deflationary phrase “ ’Tis common” the Painter shakes considerably the hierarchy of general and particular so carefully established by the Poet. Seeking one kind of generality—a high-mindedness or generosity that flies too high to take note of particulars—he achieves quite another: the crawling, not soaring, generality of platitude. From being the mark of a certain nobility of mind, capable of eagle flights so high that individuals become a blur, generality becomes a sign of the flat or even flatulant. From eagle-ité to égalité, you might say. A second demotion of generality will occupy the latter end of this scene. Following the demotion of the general from poetry to platitude, it falls (as if to presage the fall of the generalist Timon, who in his perfectly indiscriminate generosity at the beginning of the play also “halts not particularly”) from commonplace to curse, from ineffectual but harmless platitude to Apemantus’ and Timon's indiscriminate raillery.

We have already been prepared for such a demotion of the general and the generalizing turn of mind in the very first lines of the play, of which this segment of the Poet's and Painter's colloquy is in a sense a reenactment. There it is the Painter's wide and commonplace remark that is deflated by the Poet, who is soon to be repaid in kind.

Poet.
Good day, sir.
Pain.
I am glad y’are well.
Poet.
I have not seen you long; how goes the world?
Pain.
It wears, sir, as it grows.
Poet.
Ay, that's well known.
But what particular rarity, what strange,
Which manifold record not matches?

(1.1.1-5)

These opening lines set the stage not only for the large-scale generalizing that goes on throughout the play but also for the massive challenges issued to the “general” in this play, including challenges to the authority of the general Alcibiades, to the heady generalizing rhetoric of Apemantus and Timon, to the generalizing tropes of the Renaissance stage itself, nowhere more evident in the Shakespeare canon than in Timon, and to the universalizing that helped support Renaissance absolutism.

More subtle than the repeated demotion of the very category of the general in the Poet's and Painter's dialogue is the confounding of the very distinction between a generalizing that levels differences of degree, and a universalizing that establishes rather than undoes a hierarchial order in the same manner that the monarch, according to Hobbes, served to give form and order to the (hypothetical) riot of particularity of an ungoverned multitude. To recall a passage from Leviathan, “And be there never so great a Multitude; yet if their actions be directed according to the particular judgments, and particular appetites, they can expect thereby no defence, nor protection, neither against a common enemy, nor against the injuries of one another.”³⁰ Hobbes imagines a people without a sovereign representative, a universal figure who will unite the shapeless multitude into a body politic or commonwealth, as a nightmare of unrelieved particularism. A similar association of generality with sovereignty and a stable political order lies beneath Sir Edward Coke's pronouncement, in the Institutes, “It is to be observed though one be chosen for one particular county, or borough, yet when he is returned, and sits in parliament, he serveth for the whole realm, for the end of his coming thither as in the writ of his election appeareth, is generall.”³¹ The Poet's privileging of the general would seem consistent with and accommodating to the dominant Renaissance political rhetoric, which likewise tended to privilege the general over the particular and the public over the private.

The other mode of generality is precisely that which sovereignty acts as protection against: without sovereignty, a preacher warned in a sermon at Paul's Cross in March, 1642, “the honourable would be levelled with the base … and all would be … huddled up in an unjust parity.”³² Or as the Homily of Obedience of 1547 imagined the abolition of private property, “Take awaye kings, princes, rulers, magistrates, judges, and such states of God's order no man shal ride or go by the high waie unrobbed, no man shall slepe in his owne bed unkilled, no man shall kepe his wife, children and possessions in quietness, all thynges shall be comon.”³³ This second form of generality—generality as the levelled and confounded—is roughly the one familiar to Apemantus the Cynic and to Timon in his misanthropic phrase. A memorable and emblematic instance of it is to be found in Timon's instructions to the Lords at the feast in which he serves up warm water instead of food. Immediately before delivering a kind of anti-grace, Timon instructs his false friends, “Each man to his stool, with that spur as he would to the lip of his mistress. Your diet shall be in all places alike. Make not a City feast of it, to let the meat cool ere we can agree upon the first place” (3.6.64-67). The abolition of differences of degree is imagined throughout the play, as in Timon's instructing the Senators,

Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree,
From high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe,
And hang himself.

(5.1.207-11)

But the most disturbing challenge to degree in the play is issued by the Poet, who undoes the very difference between a generalizing that undoes difference and one that helps to support it. Our estimate of Timon as well as of the Poet's work hinges on this difference, which is confounded by the Poet's description of Timon.

The dialogue between Poet and Painter invites us to make the distinction between two types of generality, even as the Poet's description of his work frustrates that task. Timon, “one man beckon’d from the rest below,” is singled out not from a shapeless mass as Hobbes imagines the unrepresented multitude (and also unrepresentable, possessing no shape or form, not yet constituting a body). Rather, he is beckoned from what is already a hierarchically ordered sphere, more Elizabethan than Athenian: the base of Fortune's mount “is rank’d with all deserts.” It is not a chaotic and democratically levelled swarm at the base of Fortune's hill, which is instead “lined in ranks by men of all degrees and worth,”³⁴ all laboring to improve their states. Conversely, Fortune's beckoning of Timon from the ranks of men threatens to obscure difference, erasing old ones and establishing new differences where there once was parity. When Fortune beckons Timon to her, his

… present grace to present slaves and servants
Translates his rivals. …
All those which were his fellows but of late,
Some better than his value, on the moment
Follow his strides.

(1.1.73-74, 80-82)

The anxieties these lines would most likely have evoked in the men of rank that might have viewed the play (there is no evidence that it was ever performed in Shakespeare's lifetime) would be exactly those produced by the newly wealthy of Shakespeare's day created by an emergent capitalism. Essentially, Timon in his two phases, philanthropic and misanthropic, speaks to closely related anxieties about rank in Elizabethan England: the fluidity of rank produced by a sometimes impoverished nobility and enriched gentry and yeomanry;³⁵ and the less and less implausible effacement of rank trotted out in monarchical tracts as a nightmare fantasy that only monarchy can avoid, but soon to be advocated by radical preachers and pamphleteers of the middle of the century, like Gerard Winstanley.³⁶

In the Poet's colloquy with the Painter, order (based on rank and degree) and orderlessness (imagined as a confounding of all degree), and the two modes of generalizing rhetoric associated with them, are difficult to extricate from one another's grasp. Like the beckoning of the newly wealthy of Elizabethan and Jacobean England by Fortune's hand, the singling out of one man from a multitude in the Poet's work—on first glance appearing to be a primal scene of the establishment of social order and hierarchy—produces, paradoxically, an effacement of social difference. The difference between the two modes of generalizing, and the two senses in which Timon is general—universal or a summation of mankind, and one who following his downfall becomes bent on confounding all differences—that difference is both proferred to the reader in the exchange between Poet and Painter and withdrawn, like a hand tantalizingly filled with gold. His being singled out at the hands of Fortune—the very thing that makes him potentially a figure of some universality, the subject of a poem (or play)—produces a partial levelling of social rank. It is as though the distinction between two opposed forms of generality, hierarchizing and levelling or confounding, is itself in danger of being confounded. Though the scene of Timon's election is decidedly vertical, Fortune's high hill, the scenario described by the Poet is largely one of levelling. In this respect Fortune's hill is like another promontory, the human nose, which similarly becomes a scene of levelling. Asking Alcibiades’ whores Phrynia and Timandra to spread venereal diseases far and wide, Timon inveighs,

Down with the nose,
Down with it flat, take the bridge quite away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal.

(4.3.159-62)

The rhetoric of the play everywhere exhibits the friction and contestation between two orders of generality enacted in the Poet's exchange with the Painter. The play's predominant style is decidedly epigrammatic. If the epigram is a rhetorical form whose boundaries, far from confounded, are exceedingly clear, then the epigrammatic style, even during Timon's scenes of misanthropic rage, may work to give the impression of order. No discursive form is ostensibly more self-contained and protective of its boundaries than the epigram. Many of Timon's epigrams, whose aim is to confound or deny differences, assert a kind of order even as they attempt to deny it. The largely epigrammatic Timon therefore counteracts at a rhetorical level the confounding that repeatedly takes place at the level of the referent, so that the sense of order restored at the end of the play seems to have been present all along in latent form.

The internal resistance of Timon's epigrams to their own purposes may account for their ceaselessness and energy, their tendency to be emitted in volcanic eruptions—as if Timon were trying to batter down the all-too-distinct boundaries of the epigram. The satirical epigram exhibits very well the difference between two orders of generality: a confounding of difference on the one hand, and an assertion of authority—a centralizing of discursive power—on the other. In a sense, each of Timon's satirical epigrams reenacts the situation described in the Poet's verses: through the epigram, Timon lays claim to an Olympian vista, even as the epigram acts to erode or efface the differences of those laboring down below.

A PARTICULAR GENERAL

When a soldier addresses the practical Alcibiades in the penultimate speech of the play as “My noble general,” the phrase has a peculiar ring to it, quite unlike the sound of Brutus’ being addressed with the title of “general,” both in the sense of military leader and in the honorific sense of the only man among the conspirators who entered upon the action without private or particular cause, but only for the “general good.”³⁷ “Noble general” seems almost an oxymoron in the context of this play, as generalizing is so often connected with confounding and the dissolution of order. Also, Alcibiades is the play's pragmatist, quite unsuited to generalizing or theorizing in the manner of the philosopher Apemantus or the misanthrope Timon.³⁸ Nevertheless, Alcibiades comes across in the final scene in large measure as an image of the ideal Renaissance sovereign, tempering punishment with mercy, avoiding the excesses of Timon's rage, and above all articulating the strategy so characteristic of the monarchical exercise of power: the reliance on the force of the example, subjected to a spectacular punishment.³⁹ Those whom the Senator “shall set out for reproof” shall “fall, and no more” (4.4.57-58). His refusal to indiscriminately punish is notable not so much as an expression of mercy but as a promise to reinstate difference, including the all-important differences of rank and degree banished by the satirical generalities of Timon and Apemantus.

Where Alcibiades differs from the Renaissance sovereign is in his prominent lack of investment with any symbolic generality or universality. In part he denies himself that universality, because of his aggressively pragmatist orientation. It is therefore appropriate, but ultimately disturbing to the ideology of absolutism, that the ending of the play features rhetoric that insists on a return of the banished particular. Shakespeare's tragedies and histories usually move up to a generalizing register in their final moments, both to impart a sense of closure, of summing up, and also to support the sense of political continuity which the endings of those plays are so concerned to establish through figures like Richmond, Bolingbroke, Malcolm and Fortinbras.⁴⁰ The interests of political continuity and stability are served by a generalizing rhetoric that implies political reunification and an end to faction or particularism under the succeeding sovereign, and that exerts a centripetal force, reversing the dispersions of both accidents and meaning and restoring a strong and centralized rhetorical order.

But the ending of Timon lacks anything like a universalizing voice commonly provided at the end of a Shakespearean tragedy or history play. Instead, a sustained campaign is waged on behalf of the particular, or the exception to general laws or rules.⁴¹ This inversion of the Shakespearean pattern might seem appropriate on the grounds that the setting of the play, ancient Athens, represented the polar opposite of monarchy and civic order for the Elizabethans. Lacking a sovereign, it is also appropriate that such a people lack a soveriegn voice. Having no political order mirroring what the Renaissance perceived to be the universal order, ranked in every sphere in all “The sweet degrees that this brief world affords” (4.3.255), ancient Athens may have no figure of universality, no generalizing voice of the universalizing kind, but only two of the levelling kind (Timon and Apemantus).

A more complex way of putting this, consistent with the argument I have been building, would shift the play's criticism from Athenian democracy to Jacobean absolutism. The play refuses the cathartic expulsion (as in Elyot) or the appropriation (as in Henry V) of the democratic levelling of “sweet degrees” by substituting for the orderly and carefully staged confrontation of the two generalizing tropes, levelling and universalizing, their confusion or confounding. The play could then be read as a disabling of the mechanisms for universalizing that were so important for Renaissance sovereigns and Renaissance stages alike. Indeed, Timon's and Timon’s lack of a wide appeal may tie into the play's political subject. The play may be said to be about its (apparent) failure as a play. Translated into political terms, Timon's lack of the universal and representative qualities of Shakespeare's other tragic heroes may imply a criticism at the least of other stage representations of the sovereign as universal, though such a lack is also fully appropriate to what most Elizabethans would have perceived as a disordered political context in which sovereignty rested in that many-headed monster, the people.

Of course, this play moves so insistently in a generalizing register that it is hard to imagine a movement toward a higher level of generality at the end of the play having the same effect as it would in Shakespeare's earlier tragedies, or providing even the shadow of closure. Instead of a choric generality (usually invested in a particular figure of authority, like Prince Escalus, Richmond, or Marcus Andronicus), the ending of Timon features solo voices all speaking on behalf of the exception. Timon's is the first to be heard. Of his faithful steward Flavius he says, “Forgive my general and exceptless rashness, / You perpetual-sober gods! I do proclaim / One honest man. Mistake me not, but one” (4.3.499-501). Similarly, a messenger bringing news of the strength of Alcibiades’ army. At the end of his report he provides a personal detail, whose subject is the particular amity that overcame the general enmity of opposed forces:

I met a courier, one mine ancient friend,
Whom, though in general part we were oppos’d,
Yet our old love made a particular force,
And made us speak like friends.

(5.2.6-9)

And in the final scene, the Senators let go a chant of “not all” to the general Alcibiades, who begins to look like yet another generalist, another Apemantus or Timon, in his hesitation to make the effort to cull out those who have offended. The Second Senator protests, “We were not all unkind, nor all deserve / The common stroke of war,” and the First Senator urges, “All have not offended … like a shepherd, / Approach the fold and cull th’infected forth, / But kill not all together” (5.4.21-22,35,42-44). The entreaties on the behalf of exceptions are made in such a way as to respect the sway of the general. “We were not all unkind,” the Second Senator says to Alcibiades. In itself, the Second Senator's appeal seems to reverse the expected pattern of generalizing at the close. But it is delivered by a character who is generalized by virtue of his designation only by his position, not by his proper name. And the phrasing itself respects the precedence of general over particular. Besides its obvious meaning, “We were not all unkind” means something like the following: General, we were not all ungeneral, we did not all act in violation of our common nature. (The line builds upon a continual play on the meanings of “kind,” that word of category or class that summarizes the play's interest in the kinship between kindness, or benevolence, and “kind”-ness, or general types and universal claims.) In other words, the protests on the behalf of the exception leave unchallenged the sway of the conquering general, whose power and influence, I noted earlier, dominate nearly every aspect of this schematic and allegorical play.

APEMANTUS’ APE

Timon's lack of tragic universality is also apparent in the idiosyncratic way in which Shakespeare employs the figure of the double in Timon of Athens. Shakespeare's doubling of the figure of the misanthrope is an instance of a common form of generalizing in Shakespeare: the doubling of character, usually tied to a doubling of the plot. Of course, double plots may serve the function of particularizing as well as generalizing. Clearly Shakespeare is at least as interested in the distinctions between Lear and Gloucester or between Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, Pyrrhus, and Fortinbras as he is in a widening circle of resemblances that helps to generalize the protagonist. But there is no need to decide whether doubling in Shakespearean tragedy is primarily of a particularizing or a generalizing cast. For ordinarily the two form part of a single process: the tragic hero is differentiated from all the others but only to be generalized, to become the exception who is, like the absolute sovereign, most representative. Thus, Brutus is singled out because of his absolute and overriding concern with the general at the expense of the singular and particular: “He only,” Mark Antony eulolgizes, “in a general honest thought / And common good to all, made one of them” (5.5.70-72). The Elizabethan double plot, with its double suggestion of sameness and difference, its double movement of differentiation and generalization, like two strands of the double plot's double plot, is an effective device for fostering the end of particularizing in the service of universalizing. But Timon of Athens doesn’t sufficiently differentiate its two misanthropes to serve the characteristic purpose of doubles in Shakespearean tragedy: to help universalize the tragic hero.

In Timon, the close working relationship between the generalizing and particularizing functions of Shakespeare's doubles falls apart. Timon (in his misanthropic phase) and Apemantus are too similar in speech and attitude. And rather than reserving for the audience or other characters the task of gauging the degree of their sameness and difference, the playwright leaves it largely to the characters themselves to insist on their difference. Needless to say, they doth protest too much, like the endlessly interchangeable lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream. For Timon, Apemantus isn’t the real thing, the authentic misanthrope or true-blooded generalist, because his misanthropy is contingent, conditioned rather than freely chosen. It is caused, Timon maintains, by his permanently low social position, which hasn’t allowed him to taste other “sweet degrees” or stations and the points of view that frequently go with them (4.3.251-77). For Apemantus, Timon is not the true article because his misanthropy is contingent, caused by the temporary and presumably reversible condition in which he now finds himself (4.3.240-43). Each sees the other's misanthropy as enforced by conditions: in the one case stable and more or less permanent, in the other temporary. The Shakespearean theater as a whole would more likely ratify Timon's understanding of what it takes to have the credentials to generalize. It is implied that Apemantus cannot legitimately generalize because he hasn’t played more than one role of the many possibilities open to the human actor. Apemantus’ is close to a generalizing by default. He generalizes on a slender foundation, growing out of a dearth, not a wealth, of particulars. For Apemantus, Timon's is a generalizing too conditioned by particulars, the contingencies and accidents of his fallen social condition. For Timon, Apemantus is a leveller, lacking a universal perspective and instead indiscriminately applying the conditions and outlook of his own low degree.

Witnessing two addicted generalizers insisting on their singularity as generalizers, each desperate to differentiate himself from the other, has a comic edge to it. But it is not merely comic hypocrisy that causes them to mutually insist on the distance between them. For ordinarily in tragedy, the protagonist must be sharply differentiated and particularized before s/he can become general in the sense of widely representative. Of course, neither Timon nor Apemantus wants to become representative in the sense that Richard II or Hamlet or even Lear hungers to be. That is, they express no desire to become universal themselves, but only to establish their credentials to generalize. Generality for this latter protagonist of Shakespeare's is a decidedly scriptive or discursive pursuit. Both Timon and Apemantus—and they are similar in this respect to their near-contemporary, Coriolanus—want to be able to represent the people through their general propositions, but decidedly not to function as the people's representatives.⁴² In a sense they are striving for the more impersonal, ambitious, and absolute generality of the playwright rather than the generality of a tragic protagonist. Timon, in other words, may not be as different from Prospero as he would at first appear. He may be prologue to the great wizard of Shakespeare's final play.

Also, in a curious way, Timon's specific variation on the theme of the tragic hero as generalist may be traced to differences in Elizabeth's and James's rules. Elizabeth, like Shakespeare's earlier tragic protagonists—Richard II and Brutus, for instance—embodied a sovereign generality through the ubiquitous theatrical pageantry of her reign, and in the elaborate Tudor myth woven around her by others. The authority of the more removed James, on the other hand, was established by less theatrical, less bodied, and more discursive or scriptive means, by means of his career as an author. In this respect he is closer to Timon and Coriolanus, for whom the pursuit of generality takes the specific form of a discursive rage to generalize, not the impulse to theatrically embody the general or universal. In a sense, Timon is the symbolic embodiment of the general or universal in his early philanthropic phase; in his misanthropic phase, he becomes more like James, insofar as his persistent claims to universality have a predominantly discursive foundation. Shakespeare's earlier heroes, though skillful enough at speaking generally (a requirement for traversing the boards of the Elizabethan stages), were also the theatrical embodiments of generality. For his later protagonists, the claim to generality resides increasingly in rhetoric, and in a rhetoric that seems monochromatic compared to that of Shakespeare's earlier heroes.⁴³

Not only Shakespeare's tragic protgonists but the plays themselves have a considerable investment in the legitimacy of generalizing. This is especially true of a play like Timon, which features so many representative characters or types, where every character is a walking generality, and where so much of the expression in the play is formal or conventional.⁴⁴ What makes Timon a far more estimable play than most critics would allow (the play has a way of making churls of us) is its willingness to take rather extreme measures to interrogate the faith in speaking generally on which its own claims to authority ultimately rest. Timon doesn’t exactly shake that faith in generalizing, as Hiram Haydn has argued that leading skeptical figures (Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bruno, Agrippa) of what he has termed the Counter-Renaissance were engaged in doing.⁴⁵ Rather, it gives surprisingly free reign to a mode of generalizing, levelling, whose shadow once supported monarchical order but would increasingly come to threaten it, especially in the more radical political rhetoric of the English Civil War. Timon comes closer than any other play by Shakespeare—closer even than its nearest kin, King Lear and Coriolanus—to entertaining the fantasy of a levelled humanity before reinstating difference.

To end, as Shakespeare so often does, where we began: how Shakespearean is it? Those very qualities that have caused many critics to brand the play as unshakespearean seem to me to situate it well within Shakespeare's tradition of writing plays that reflect and comment on the theater, including the ideological underpinnings of Renaissance theater. Though Timon of Athens features no magician-playwright in command of the stagelike space of an island, no drunken fool as audience for a troupe of actors like Christopher Sly, no itinerant players, and no tragical comedy put on by a group of unlettered Athenian artisans, Timon’s generality and abstractness help make it one of Shakespearean tragedy's most vigorous acts of self-examination.⁴⁶ Timon, as well as his doubles in the play, Apemantus and Alcibiades, falls within the tradition of generalizing hero, or hero as generalist, stretching at least from Brutus and Hamlet through Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.⁴⁷ Like its contemporary Coriolanus, Timon makes the generalizing practices of the Shakespearean hero suspect and open to contestation, and thereby subjects to close scrutiny what might be called the generalizing tropes of the Renaissance stage. Were we to concentrate less on the striking differences between Timon’s quasi-allegorical characters and what appear to be the studies in individual motivation in his other tragedies, and more on the generalizing practices shared by playwright and characters in both Timon and its predecessors, then the place of this apparently anomalous play in the family of Shakespearean tragedy would, I think, become clearer.

Notes

1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, with selections from Parts Two and Three, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 102. Marx seems to have been attracted to Timon of Athens because of its concern with the enmity between general and particular, and the role of money as instrument of generalizing in the sense of confounding. He objects to the way that money in a capitalist system stubbornly asserts itself as a god-term, refusing to yield up its generality to the particularity of that for which it may be exchanged. In “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society,” a sort of gloss on Timon of Athens, he writes, “He who can buy bravery is brave, though he is a coward. As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every property for every other, even contradictory, property and object: it is the fraternization of impossibilities. It makes contradictories embrace” (The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan [New York: International Publishers, 1964], 169). Money in Marx's Shakespearean characterization is not tied to the division of property but to the erasure of the “proper,” and of distinct “properties.” Marx cites Timon's address to his gold approvingly:

   Thou visible god,
   That sold’rest close impossibilities,
   And mak’st them kiss; that speak’st with every tongue,
   To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts,
   Think thy slave Man rebels, and by thy virtue
   Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
   May have the world in empire!

   (4.3.389-95)

   Marx's protest against the generalizing (in the sense of confounding) effects of money resembles many another protest in the romantic tradition on behalf of particulars. A hardheaded version of such a protest takes place in this remarkable passage from The German Ideology, where he picks a quarrel with the sentimental preachiness of the work of the young Hegelian Max Stirner: “Communism is simply incomprehensible to our saint [Stirner] because the communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or self-sacrifice against egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its highflown ideological form. … The communists … do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are well aware that egoism, just as much as self-sacrifice, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want … to do away with the ‘private individual’ for the sake of the ‘general,’ self-sacrificing man. … Theoretical communists, the only ones who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have discovered that throughout history the ‘general interest’ is created by individuals who are defined as ‘private persons.’ They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, the so-called ‘general,’ is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and by no means opposes the latter as an independent force with an independent history …” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, ed. Arthur, 102). What might be termed the economic nominalism of this passage, its insistence that so-called general interest is a creation and projection of private interest, places it at a considerable distance from the ideology of Shakespeare's plays, including this one which he admired so much for its analysis of money.

2. Thomas Starkey, England in the realm of Henry the eighth, a dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (London, 1538).

3. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll (London, 1649).

4. David Bevington refers to the play as “schematic” in Hardin Craig and David Bevington, eds., Shakespeare: The Complete Works, rev. ed. (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1973), 1018; Frank Kermode writes that Timon is “a tragedy of ideas, much more schematic than Hamlet,” in The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1443-44. Many descriptions of the play use similar if not identical language. More recently, Ninian Mellamphy, in the collection of papers entitled “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988), has written of Timon himself as an “abstraction” (173). For Melamphy, the play is also marked by thematic abstraction and by a monotonous tone of opprobrium directed “at the too generalized target of ungrateful man” (173). For Lesley Brill, Timon’s plot and characterization are “markedly spare” (“Truth and Timon of Athens,” Modern Language Quarterly 40 [1979]: 21). I do not mean to suggest that responses to Timon and to the play as a whole have been largely unanimous. On divergent opinions toward characters and the play, see the useful summary in Brill, 17f.

5. On Timon as a Morality play, see Lewis Walker, “Timon of Athens and the Morality Tradition,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 159-77; Anne Lancashire, “Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Dr. Faustus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 35-44; A. S. Collins, “Timon of Athens: A Reconsideration,” Review of English Studies 22 (1946): 96-108; and Michael Tinker, “Theme in Timon of Athens,” in Shakespeare's Late Plays, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974), 76-88.

6. See H. J. Oliver's Arden Shakespeare edition (London: Methuen, 1959), pp. xxv-xxviii, for a summary of the evidence for incompleteness. All citations from Timon of Athens refer to this edition.

7. Howard B. White makes a similar claim in Copp’d Hills Towards Heaven: Shakespeare and the Classical Polity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 36: Timon is “quite possibly the most complete political tragedy in Shakespeare.”

8. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988), 54.

9. I develop this argument in a recently completed essay, “Generally Speaking: The Rhetoric of Shakespearean Tragedy and Modern Criticism.” For New Criticism, literature had the function of balancing or opposing the generalizing discourses of science. The new historicism, though it certainly doesn’t position literature in this way, has inherited much of the New Critical rhetoric of the “particular.”

10. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke named the Gouernour, vol. 1, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (1880; reprint, New York, Burt Franklin, 1967), 8-9. For the metaphor of the multitude as the many-headed monster, see Chapter 8 of Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 181-204.

11. The date of Timon is more conjectural than it is for Shakespeare's other plays, since no performance of it was recorded during Shakespeare's lifetime, and no text of the play prior to the posthumous First Folio exists. Nevertheless, primarily on the basis of “internal” evidence, most critics date the play at about 1605-8, roughly contemporary with Coriolanus.

12. Coriolanus's lines are a faithful echo of North's Plutarch, in which Coriolanus similarly denounces the view that “corne should be gevern out to the common people gratis, as they used to doe in citties of Græce, where the people had more absolute power: dyd but only nourishe their disobedience, which would breake out in the ende, to the utter ruine and overthrowe of the whole state.”

13. See the discussion in James Emerson Phillips, Jr., The State in Shakespeare's Greek and Roman Plays, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature No. 149 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 172-73.

14. Leo Paul S. de Alvarez has suggested that the Athens of the end of the play, embodied in the figure of Alcibiades, is an imperial one, more Roman than Greek. See “Timon of Athens,” in Shakespeare as Political Thinker, ed. John Alvis and Thomas G. West (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1981), esp. 178-79. Throughout most of the play, however, Athens, with all of the levelling rhetoric and Timon's failure to discriminate both in his philanthropic and misanthropic phases, seems a democratic one, roughly equivalent to the Rome of Coriolanus, which seems a similar “demonstration of the dangers of democratic government” (Phillips, 147).

15. There were, in fact, political alternatives between absolutism and a levelling democracy, though absolutist tracts like Elyot's had an interest in suggesting otherwise. See the discussion of David Norbrook in “Macbeth and the Politics of Historiography,” in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 78-116. According to Norbrook, analysis of Shakespeare's plays, including the most sophisticated of recent political criticism holding that “subversion in fact subtly reinforced the very power structures that were being challenged,” tends to “reduplicate the stark oppositions presented by absolutist propaganda: either monarchy or anarchy; ‘take but degree away. … ’ Such a focus fails to do justice to the many Renaissance thinkers who had a conception of political order which involved neither hereditary monarchy nor total anarchy” (79). My analysis of Timon of Athens shows Shakespeare not exactly offering alternatives to the “stark oppositions of absolutist propaganda,” but rather complicating and mutually enfolding those oppositions that absolutist thinking tries to polarize.

16. Elyot, 1-3.

17. Ibid., 3-4.

18. There are many other places in Shakespeare where a similarly orchestrated sequence of levelling and universalizing may be found: for instance, in Richard's prison speeches at the end of Richard II, or in Macbeth's “tomorrow” speech taken together with Malcolm's closing lines.

19. This and subsequent citations from Henry V are taken from the Oxford Shakespeare edition of the play, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

20. Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter XII; Samuel Putnam translation.

21. For extended discussions of the paragone in Timon, see John Dixon Hunt, “Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of Timon of Athens,” in Images of Shakespeare, Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988), 47-63; and W. M. Merchant, “Timon and the Conceit of Art,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 249-57. The connection between the dialogue of Painter and Poet and the Renaissance paragone was first pointed out by art historian Sir Anthony Blunt, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 2 (1938-39): 260-62.

22. Owen Feltham, Resolves, 4th ed. (London, 1631), No. 38.

23. Recent Shakespeare scholarship has witnessed a renaissance of interest in topical readings, perhaps best represented by Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Among earlier critics, G. B. Harrison is most closely associated with promoting a topical Shakespeare.

24. See Janet Adelman's celebrated essay, “‘Anger's My Meat’: Feeding, Dependency, and Aggression in Coriolanus,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 129-49, especially p. 145, note 4.

25. The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 288.

26. Among critics of the play, G. Wilson Knight, who has extensively performed the role of Timon as well as written about him, is remarkable for attempting to universalize Timon, making him the type of the romantic and solitary hero. To most critics, Timon has been as difficult to universalize as Coriolanus, seeming instead to be a general character of another sort: abstract, allegorical, or two-dimensional. Knight's works on the play include The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Sombre Tragedies (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); Shakespeare's Dramatic Challenges: On the Rise of Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 147-66; “Timon of Athens and Buddhism,” Essays in Criticism 30 (1980): 105-23; and “Timon of Athens and Its Dramatic Descendants,” Review of English Literature 2 (1961): 9-18.

27. See the gloss of H. J. Oliver, 9, following K. Deighton's gloss in the original Arden edition of the play (1905, 1929). A similar ambiguity is expressed by “levell’d,” meaning “targeted at particular individuals,” but also prophesying the levelling of degree repeatedly enacted and prophesied in the play.

28. Among others, E. A. J. Honigmann has suggessted that Timon of Athens, like Troilus and Cressida, may have been written for performance at an Inn of Court. See “Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): 14.

29. See the stimulating article by Coppélia Kahn, “‘Magic of bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, Maternal Power,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 34-57. As Kahn notes, David Bergeron made passing reference to Timon of Athens as providing a “literary analogue” for James's prodigality,” in Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 45.

30. Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), 224.

31. Sir Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1809), chap. 1, p. 14. It was not until after mid-century that MPs were thought of as representing particular locales and constituencies.

32. Cited in Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 187.

33. Certayne Sermons or Homilies (1547), Homily X, Sig. K, i v.

34. The gloss is that of Oliver, 8.

35. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). Stone has been criticized for extrapolating from what seems to have been an urban or London phenomenon to all of England. Nevertheless, the main outlines of his argument still seem legitimate.

36. The best account of Winstanley and his influence is to be found in the works of Christopher Hill: for instance, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking Press, 1972). See also Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (1973; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

37. In his eulogy over the body of Brutus, Mark Antony affirms, “All the conspirators save only he / Did that they did in envy of great Caesar; / He only, in a general honest thought / And common good to all, made one of them” (5.5.69-72).

38. Richard Fly's discussion of Alcibiades strikes me as particularly useful, in “The Ending of ‘Timon of Athens’: A Reconsideration,” Criticism 15 (1973): 242-52, especially 249. See also Brill, 19.

39. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); and the interview “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 146-65.

40. Shakespeare's middle and later tragedies, like his early ones, all supply such a voice, although the tendency becomes increasingly to ironize that voice, to make the act of summation seem inadequate to the action that preceded it. Macbeth, for instance, features its main character supplying a bewitching summation which is clearly specious as a generalization, since it is so intimately linked to his own condition. The acts of summation at the end of King Lear, to take another example, are so inadequate as to seem poignant, as Stephen Booth has detailed in King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

41. A very useful discussion of the particularizing or discriminating interest in Timon may be found in R. Swigg, “‘Timon of Athens’ and the Growth of Discrimination,” Modern Language Review 62 (1967): 387-94.

42. In his important essay “Coriolanus: History and the Crisis of Semantic Order,” Leonard Tennenhouse argues that the play marks the transition between an old patrician order based on the body and action, and a new one based on words, associated with the tribunes (Comparative Drama 10 [1976]: 328-46).

43. Hamlet seems a pivotal figure in this regard as in so many others. A potent theatrical generalist precisely because of his unprecedented ability to play any part (and therefore, at least symbolically, to serve as political head and representative of all the people, like Prince Hal), Hamlet also rests his claims to generality to an unprecedented degree on his generalizing rhetoric.

44. See Brill, 24.

45. Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950).

46. It is arguable that Apemantus is the most self-consciously theatrical element in the play. Specifically, he is a reflection of the critical spectator at his or her most daunting. “Let me stay at thine apperil, Timon. I come to observe; I give thee warning on’t,” he says in the banqueting hall of Timon's house (1.2.31-32).

47. See Bernard McElroy, Shakespeare's Mature Tragedies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 17-20, for commentary on the tendency to universalize as a prominent quality of mind shared by Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth.