SOURCE: “Shakespeare and the Paragone: A Reading of Timon of Athens,” in Images of Shakespeare, edited by Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 47-63.

[In the following essay, Hunt discusses the role of the paragone, a historic comparison between and art and poetry, in Timon of Athens.]

It is almost fifty years since in the Journal of the Warburg Institute Anthony Blunt noted that the opening of Timon of Athens signaled Shakespeare's acknowledgment of a Renaissance commonplace, the paragone or comparison between the arts.¹ But we have been surprisingly slow to do anything much with his observation.² It is not simply a question of why Shakespeare would alert his audiences to the paragone at the beginning of that particular play, but why the paragone would concern a dramatist at all. This essay will address itself to answering the question about Timon and will suggest some constituents of an answer to the question of Shakespeare's larger interest in the rivalry between poetry and painting by glancing briefly at other plays, a fuller discussion of which must be reserved for other occasions.³

1

The title paragone, signifying comparison, was given by one of its nineteenth-century editors to Leonardo da Vinci's manuscript on the relationships of the liberal arts and sciences.⁴ This treatise sought to exalt painting at the expense of poetry, which in Leonardo's time at the court of Milan had significantly declined since the days of Dante and Petrarch; the converse, of course, held in Shakespeare's England, when painting had not yet the scope or prestige of continental schools and was clearly inferior to poetry. I do not need to claim, even if it were possible, that Shakespeare would have known Leonardo's treatise; the debate about the rival capabilities of each art and specifically about the status of painting as a liberal art was known in England by the end of the sixteenth century. Spenser alludes to it in the proem to book 2 of The Faerie Queene, with characteristic emphasis upon the verbal potential for platonism (“Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre / In picturing the parts of beautie daint”). And the theme of an entertainment presented to Queen Elizabeth at Mitcham in 1598, is the contest between poet and painter.⁵ But since Leonardo addressed himself most sensitively to the problems of this debate and coincidentally because his manuscript actually envisages a poet and a painter presenting examples of their art to a Renaissance patron, King Matthias of Hungary (see (pp. 67-68 and note), just as Shakespeare does at the beginning of Timon, a few of its ideas will serve as a springboard into my discussion.

Leonardo's determination to separate the spheres and achievements of the arts, in one or two emphases even anticipating Lessing (for example, see p. 60), was exceptional at the time. It was much more usually the coincidence or collaborative enterprise of poetry and painting that was stressed in Renaissance texts. Certainly many Renaissance creative artists including Leonardo and Shakespeare displayed a concern for the separate achievements of each of the five senses, but this is largely translated into the theme of potential harmony when their resources unite, which endorsed and sustained the sisterhood of verbal and visual arts. But Leonardo's main effort is put into arguing the superiority of the sight, a traditional claim, and of the visual arts that honor and mirror its skills. This case for the arts that “present the work of nature to our understanding with more truth and accuracy than do words or letters” (“La pittura rapresenta al senso con piu verita e certezza …” p. 28) is identical to a large part of the concern of anyone engaged in theater work. As dramatist and actor—let alone as an associate of someone like Burbage who was also a painter—Shakespeare had to attend to what his audiences saw. Of course, Shakespeare was by no means as complacent as Leonardo about the unproblematical nature of seeing; if the latter affirmed the exactness (p. 55), the lack of error (p. 33), the speed with which we securely grasp visual images (p. 60), and their need of no interpretation (p. 27), Shakespeare frequently questions or, rather, represents challenges to the seen: we have only to think of the ways in which the final scenes of The Winter's Tale, while seeming to hold up visual rather than verbal eloquence (“I like your silence”) as the more authoritative, also dramatize the very limitations of seeing.⁶ But equally no man of the theater could neglect the vital contribution of what audiences saw or could be made to think they saw to his larger endeavor. This must have been especially so at about the time Shakespeare wrote Timon of Athens, when the new theatrical possibilities of Blackfriars⁷ and the related development of the masque⁸ put much more emphasis than had the public theaters upon scenery and costume and upon the framed experience of the action.

Other parallels between theater and painting, in the light of Leonardo's praise of the latter's separate and superior achievements, may be noted briefly. Both share a uniqueness of performance that “cannot be reproduced indefinitely (questa non fa infiniti figlioli) as is done in the printing of books” (p. 28). Neither theater nor painting could be accomplished without what Leonardo calls manual operation (“la manuale operatione”: p. 27), a language of gesture that Leonardo also allows by implication to oratory, an art closer to the actor's than the poet’s.⁹ And perhaps most important of all parallels was that theater partook of painting's concern to communicate inward states via outward gestures. Indeed, the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater increasingly came to unite with great sophistication two major concerns of Renaissance poetics—action and character. These two modes were actually seen as quite distinct by another champion of the radical difference between the arts, Benedetto Varchi: his Due Lezioni of 1549 distinguished between istorie that describe the visible world and poesie that imitate the conceptions and passions of the soul; narrative poetry was like the former and therefore was comparable with painting, but poetry that sought to reveal what lay within—concepts and passions—was like sculpture.¹⁰ In this Varchi is close to Leonardo's praise of painting's adaptation of figures to express mental states (pp. 37, 57), made despite Leonardo's acknowledgment of the traditional literary objection that portraits could not picture the soul of a sitter (p. 50). Any claim that visual art can depict a person's inner state is relevant to theatrical art and to the eloquence of its gestures. So it is perhaps no accident that (as the modern Arden editor notes) the poet's praise of his rival's picture (“this comes off well”) in Timon 1.1.29 echoes Hamlet's advice to the players (“Now this o’erdone, or come tardy off …”). Finally, painting may be seen to align itself with dramatic representations by the use of inscriptions—words actually written on or about portraits, which may be compared to the essential feature of theater, its glossing of outward gesture by verbal attention to inward. Interestingly, Leonardo's rare enthusiasm for literary strategies in the Paragone is saved for poetry's ability to represent “the words created by the human voice [which] are natural phenomena in themselves” (p. 51).

2

Let me now turn to the one Shakespeare play where these comparisons and rivalries between the arts are explicitly addressed. Timon of Athens opens with an encounter between a poet and a painter.¹¹ On this edgy scene whose problematical text is not solely to blame for its gnomic tone, I think four comments are crucial.

First, the Poet and Painter are not at first the action so much as a medium through which we view the actions of Timon's suitors, “this confluence, this great flood of visitors” (1.1.42). Their role as watchers is established before we reach the actual paragone debate by their discussion of the other suitors. Poet and Painter are our surrogates upon the stage as well as themselves the objects of our gaze and hearing. They teach an audience from the first, what it might otherwise of course take for granted, that its function is to watch and hear in order to judge or come to some opinions about, in this case Timon, and that only through the double focus of sight and hearing does it function fully as beholder. Both verbal and visual modes constitute theatrical action. Of course, the visual is essentially what is arranged upon the stage for us to behold rather than any painterly images, but the mere presence of a painter must signal the role of sight in the representation of Timon that is just beginning.

Furthermore, since we watch the Painter together with the Poet watching the crowds we are instantly involved in a perspectival situation to which our attention is drawn by the dialogue between Jeweller and Merchant set, so to speak, behind that of the Poet and Painter. This is a fundamental theatrical device that Shakespeare often uses,¹² and it surely derives from the widespread Renaissance fascination with optics and in particular with perspective.¹³ Leonardo noted the relationship of painting and perspective (“prospettiva [è la] figliola della pittura,” p. 31); and I would suggest that Shakespeare's frequent invocation of perspectival structures for crucial scenes is his acknowledgment of this painterly device. After all, sonnet 24 had celebrated “perspective it is best painter's art.”

My second point arises from the absence of any actual painterly activity in the visual component of this scene: the Painter is not even given any opportunity to describe his own picture, for it is the Poet who speaks of it—“this comes off well and excellent,”

How this grace
Speaks his own standing! What a mental power
This eye shoots forth! How big imagination
Moves in this lip! To th’ dumbness of the gesture
One might interpret.

and finally, “It tutors nature. Artificial strife / Lives in these touches, livelier than life” (ll. 30-38). But while the Poet clearly gestures to an actual, specific image that the Painter is showing to him (“this grace … This eye … this lip”), he barely describes it; rather he moves quickly to what words might say of it, what his own art could extrapolate from the painted images (“One might interpret”). All visual descriptions in poetry ambiguously honor their own medium as much as that of the visual art they offer to represent: “Poetry,” wrote Leonardo, “eloquently sings her own praises” (p. 52); Shakespeare clearly engages in that enterprise when he describes the painting in The Rape of Lucrece. This imbalance in Shakespeare's presentation of the painter—in his later appearance he is also unable to tell us what image he proposes—might be used to argue that it is poetry that Shakespeare wishes to promote over painting; but since seeing is of such importance to this play (as later analysis will show) it also suggests that Shakespeare maybe is elevating his own stage pictures at the expense of the Painter’s.

A third crucial point is that the Painter is showing a portrait, perhaps (since it is evidently portable) a miniature; whereas what the Poet invents for his verbal representation of Timon is some allegorical scene. In other words, the Poet makes his poem from the kind of implied visual imagery where interpretation depends upon seen items with a largely precoded significance, whereas the Painter must articulate his larger ideas via the individual features of his sitter rendered lifelikely. And indeed the Painter's comment is derisive:

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

[1.1.90-92]

The latent antagonisms of their very first social exchange (“Good day, sir,” answered by “I am glad y’ are well”) suddenly surface at this point, and the rivalry of the verbal and visual artists is revealed: exactly the paragone that Blunt diagnosed.

A fourth point concerns the absence of Timon himself from this preliminary scene. Poet and Painter compete to represent somebody who is not on the stage nor has yet appeared so that we have nothing to compare with their endeavors, a not-infrequent Shakespearean device but one that I shall suggest dominates his later plays. Or, to put it differently, the Painter's portrait is not seen by us and therefore its skill at likeness cannot be judged at the point when Timon enters; while the Poet's utterances are directed more at Timon's situation than at his character, which is therefore only considered by implication. Yet both artists are involved in an effort of representation, as is Shakespeare himself, who similarly uses verbal and visual imagery: explicit or direct like the Painter’s—the actors on stage in their roles; indirect or situational like the Poet's vision of Timon courting Lady Fortune (ll. 65-74). The delayed entrance of Timon until about line 100 serves to foreground the play's interest in competing or collaborative modes of representing character in action. It is an interest that seems to preoccupy Shakespeare at this point in his career, for even physical presence does not always guarantee a “likeness,” as anyone who considers Coriolanus will acknowledge: for all of his visibility, what we see and what we hear do not readily represent Caius Martius in any perdurable shape.

Recently it has been suggested that the relationship of verbal and visual modes in the depiction of Timon is not that of the emblem—explicit, generalizing, and visually-verbally cooperative—but that of the impresa—riddling, individualizing, and with word independent of, even tensed against, image. By forcing us to tease some congruence out of what we see and hear of Timon, Shakespeare effectively dramatizes the impresa's mysterious utterances about a particular human being. This argument sees a parallel between the impresa portrait, an image of the sitter with enigmatic insets often containing words but without explicit connections between constituent parts, and the endeavor to present the eponymous character in Timon of Athens.¹⁴ It is a rewarding notion in that it focuses upon not only a specific Elizabethan and Jacobean concern with words and images, a concern that effectively localizes the topos of the paragone, but also a form with which we know Shakespeare engaged. It is then a most useful insight. But what I want to do is stepside its argument by analogy and focus directly upon Shakespeare's actual realization of the paragone, which in its contrast between the visual and verbal actually subverts the analogic claim of ut pictura poesis.¹⁵ By dramatizing the competition between visual and verbal languages—explicitly in the encounter between Poet and Painter, then implicitly (as will be argued) throughout the rest of the play—Shakespeare surreptitiously urges the claim of theater as a stage for a special liaison of the two.

Contemporary commentary upon the theater did not appear to think of the stage as a unique medium, let alone as a tilting ground between poetry and painting; at its most complimentary it treated the dramatic text as a poem and playwrights as makers. But by the 1590s the London theatrical world had a vitality and a seriousness that implied larger and different claims, claims that the following decades substantiated—most obviously in the masque work of Inigo Jones and his various literary collaborators. By the date when we assume Timon to have been written (after 1604; perhaps 1607-8), Shakespeare shows himself particularly attentive to the special role of theatrical art. His interest in the paragone stemmed from his recognition explicitly and implicitly that he was, as a dramatist, both verbal and visual artist, and that he was uniquely placed to engineer a special dialogue between them. He could explore the rivalries, the different modes of verbal and visual, counterpoise them or let them complement each other; indeed, precisely in the theater was the rivalry between poet and painter that preoccupied his nondramatic contemporaries actually capable, not of simple resolution, but of a new and richly suggestive symbiosis. The implication, thus, was that theater transcended the achievements of either poetry or painting.

3

Timon of Athens, I want to suggest, is Shakespeare's fullest and most explicit exploration of the potentialities of that vision of theater (this is, however, not the same as claiming that Timon is the most accomplished of the plays). Criticism of the play has focused largely upon its social and moral themes, but I would suggest that what is in question here, as with other plays like Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra written soon afterwards, is just as much how we reach judgments as what those judgments are. Indeed, the how, not the what, is perhaps more prominent in Timon. From its opening sequence, it establishes that we will be involved in viewing, hearing, and only then, upon the basis of those means—neither of which is unproblematical—judging the central, eponymous character.

In Timon Poet and Painter stress the role of seeing and hearing: seeing is often emphasized in the play, but the problems of translating what we see are quickly highlighted. As Cupid says to Timon at the banquet, “The five best senses / Acknowledge thee their patron” (1.2.123-24). But since both Poet and Painter are skeptical of the sense basis of each other's art—a mistrust echoed also by Apemantus, who scorns both alike—how are we to judge? Timon himself participates in an early, vital commentary upon this problem:

The painting is almost the natural man;
For since dishonor traffics with man's nature,
He is but outside; these pencill’d figures are
Even such as they give out. I like your work …

[1.1.157-60]

Interpretations of this passage differ radically. H. J. Oliver explains it—perversely, in my view—as painting gives “man as he really is, not the man whom dishonesty makes pretend to be better than he is”; J. C. Maxwell, contrariwise, paraphrases “Painting can almost be called natural, in comparison with the deceitfulness of human nature; a painting professes to be no other than it is.”¹⁶ The difficulty of the speech is perhaps essential: we may hear a version of Oliver's message, but surely the primary meaning—Timon’s—that we register is the one offered by Maxwell, namely, that painting shows only the outside and none of that within which passeth show. Timon's praise of painting's meretricious signs is, we come to learn, apt.

The play teases us and our surrogates upon the stage with the problem of reading the nature of Timon: exactly what has human nature achieved in his makeup, what kind of man is he? The word kind, like see, oscillates throughout the dialogue. Apemantus alone at first sees through Timon to diagnose something rotten in him, and we tend to attribute this to his ineluctable cynicism. But it is not always so explained in the play. Apemantus is present, he says, to observe (1.2.34). Like see, this is a sharply double word. “I see,” signaling “I understand,” betrays the fundamental assumption, like Leonardo’s, that to see is to grasp. To “observe” is to watch or see, but it also implies passing judgments or observations, and accordingly seems to acknowledge the problematics of vision. The man who scorned both Poet and Painter in the preceding scene now provides an alternative vision. And what Apemantus sees, he glosses, first in his own sardonic grace before eating (1.2.62-71), then in his commentary upon the visual masque of “Ladies as Amazons, with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing,” a commentary that begins with “What a sweep of vanity comes this way” (ll.132-45). He glosses (literally—etymologically—he gives a tongue to) what his eyes see. The ceremonies with which Timon entertains his guests are not, he assures them, mere outward show—“Ceremony was but devis’d at first / To set a gloss on faint deeds” (1.2.15-16); but Apemantus's gloss says otherwise. Similarly, while an audience may think they see obsequiousness, bowing, scraping, and answering Timon's beck and call, Apemantus sees it as “Serving of becks and jutting-out of bums” (1.2.231). All this is more of the perspectivism of the sort that was established in the opening scene, here linked to the verbal forms into which we translate visual experience.

To complicate matters, our viewing of Apemantus is in fact as problematical as our viewing of Timon. The stage direction that ushers Apemantus into the banquet describes him as “like himself.” This authorial fossil surviving into the Folio stage direction is enormously revealing: it contrasts Apemantus visually with the dolled-up and sycophantic followers assembled at Timon's feast; he appears as himself. But then we realize that this part of the honest, straightforward man is studied, too; the role—and with it perhaps an apt costume—is adopted. And if we are using him to “observe” Timon, we are further distanced, perspectively again, from that task. This is especially so at that point in the play when Timon presents a masque (mask) to his guests and they, including Apemantus, and ourselves have to interpret it.

The masque, Timon observes, “entertain’d me with mine own device” (1.2.150). Commentators tell us that if this cannot mean that he was the author of the masque, then he must be saying that his own devising of the feast has entertained him as much as his guests.¹⁷ But surely there is also the strong suggestion that everything the guests have seen and heard—a masque's essential features being that doubleness of visual and verbal arts and a further complicity of art and life when the masquers dance with the spectators—is Timon's device, something like a heraldic device or devise, an impresa. But this theatrical version of an impresa—doubly theatrical in that Timon presents a masque and we assist at the play in which it appears—is complicated in that we have various perspectives upon its words and images. Apemantus, Poet, Painter, and all the other suitors have each his own view (sight/interpretation) of Timon's “devise.”

By the end of the first act the Steward is lamenting that Timon's words do not square with his bank accounts—“what he speaks is all in debt”—and that his master's nature is itself usurous—“He is so kind that he / Pays interest for’t” (1.2.199-200). Indeed, Timon's largesse, whether it is interpreted as generosity, prodigality, or foolish waste, was as much in words heard as gifts we saw distributed. The Senator says this (2.1.26) and Timon is told so himself (“my good lord, the world is but a word; / Were it all yours to give it in a breath, / How quickly were it gone,” 2.2.152-54). We have heard those lavish words, seen the luxurious spectacle, yet still we cannot assess what his nature really is—his “kind.” At best, like his steward—yet another perspective—we register only a paradox that “never mind / Was to be so unwise, to be so kind” (2.2.5-6).

Always in this play there are bystanders who, like Poet and Painter earlier, must alert us to the act and action of seeing: “Do you observe this, Hostilius?” or “O, see the monstrousness of man” (3.2.62, 72) And act 3 also stresses, just when others’ views of Timon begin to be crucial, the unreliability of these spectators. Timon's erstwhile friends cannot live up to their empty words: there are explicit and implict fractures of seeing and saying—doing one thing but saying another (“say thou saw’st me not” 3.1.44). By now we should be on our guard not to see too confidently, not to see/understand the play's face values. We are always reverting literally as we watch Timon and metaphorically as we assess him to that portrait that Timon himself valued in the first scene for its ambiguous representation of the natural man, man in his kind.

The difficulty of making up one's mind about Timon¹⁸ is highlighted and complicated by his own metamorphosis in act 3; though it is possible to “explain” this switch into misanthropy as some sort of reaction to the greedy shallowness of Athenian society, its extremeness does not—deliberately, I feel—sanction such an explanation but rather highlights the inexplicable. Attention is perhaps directed to this aspect of the volte-face by the preceding scene (3.5), usually taken as an instance of Athenian ingratitude. In it the senators judge an unspecified friend of Alcibiades solely (as far as we are concerned) on the basis of verbal accounts that they judge “too strict a paradox, / Striving to make an ugly deed look fair” with words (ll.24-25); the scene closes with Alcibiades's banishment, “ ’Tis in few words, but spacious in effect” (1.96). Once again in this play is represented a viewing, a judging of someone whom we never see, followed by a judging of Alcibiades himself: in both, words and images are problematical. That scene is our introit into the central metamorphosis of Timon himself.

Timon's change is signaled at another banquet, which at its start is outwardly, visibly, like its predecessor. It is surrounded by variations on the theme of putting words to what we see happening—his friends faking excuses for themselves, devising explanations for Timon's requests for money and then seeing those explanations confirmed in his behaviour at the feast (“This is the old man still,” 3.6.61); these “mouth-friends,” as he calls them (1.89), or “painted … varnish’d friends” in the steward's phrase (4.2.36), are last seen groping among the stones he has hurled at them for a lost and apparently indistinguishable jewel and for the remnants of their outward selves—caps and gowns.

Once Timon takes himself into exile, he is again the center of fresh efforts to understand him. Perhaps because he is now isolated from any social context, we (and those on stage who, like us, seek to understand him) think this task may be easier. A series of visitors—Alcibiades, Apemantus, some banditti, the Poet and the Painter, Timon's steward, some Athenian senators, and finally a soldier—performs on stage what we, too, as audience undergo: a quest for the truth about Timon. We are frequently alerted to the perspective of others: “Is yond despis’d and ruinous man my lord?” asks the Steward (4.3.459), and his yond verbally enacts his middle place between us watching him and him watching Timon. Indeed, I wonder whether the puzzling textual crux of Apemantus's saying “Yonder comes a poet and a painter” (4.3.351) two hundred lines before they speak is not a verbal clue to their physical arrival on stage, watching the series of visitors trying to make Timon out. If so, it would parallel their actions on first entry into the play. Their presence upon the stage would also reiterate the problematics of seeing and hearing.

Timon is no longer the richly arrayed patron of the first half; visibly changed, as Apemantus's speech ensures that we register (4.3.202-18), he now inhabits a cave in the woods. But is this outward transformation “real”? Is it not another mask (masque)? Timon himself half-suggests that it is a role (“I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind,” 4.3.), and Apemantus repeatedly insists that Timon is only acting—“Thou dost affect my manners,” “putting on the cunning of a carper,” and finally, “Do not assume my likeness” (ll. 199, 209, 218). The use of likeness, a painterly, portrait-associated term, implies that in his bafflement with understanding the new Timon Apemantus grasps at an explanation that deals solely with exteriors. Just as Timon castigated counterfeit society in his exchange with Alcibiades and the whores, so he may simply himself be counterfeiting. Timon responds to Apemantus's accusation in a way that forces the issue out into the open, yet without clarifying it;

Timon.
Were I like thee I’d throw away myself.
Apem.
Thou has cast away thyself, being like thyself, a madman so long, now
a fool.

[4.3.219-21]

The Poet and Painter now intervene for the second time in the play, at the high point of our and others’ bafflement. They are sycophantic, time-servers, but their concern with fashioning a likeness of Timon is still prominent. The Painter claims to have nothing ready yet for Timon—he has come to see, to look again at his sitter. The Poet, however, plans to respond to the new Timon's apparent subterfuge of pretending misanthropy by “a personating of himself” (5.1.34). Ironically, at this point they are both watched by Timon, a brief switch of perspective that builds dramatically upon Timon's previous exchange with Apemantus, where each character watched the other and we were forced to read one through the mediating vision of the other. Faced with the two artists, Timon's scorn for poetry and painting is now of a piece with his outrage against society. But it tellingly undermines our residual confidence in those arts as satisfactory agents of likeness: Timon's wrath takes its cue from the Poet's affected modesty:

I am rapt, and cannot cover
The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude
With any size of words.

[5.1.64-66]

Timon responds with “Let it go naked, men may see’t the better” (l. 67); words are simply a disguise. Similarly, he ascribes to the Painter and his visual art the skill only of counterfeiting (l. 79). He taunts them with being deceived by a knave—they “hear him cog, see him dissemble” and yet fail to grasp his knavery (ll. 95-98). But what they equally do not see—but we perhaps do—is that this very “knave” whom they hear and see is (at least by implication) Timon himself—a counterfeiter outwitting a verbal and a visual counterfeiter by his own acting that relies upon both. It is, I think, the closest the play comes to claiming for itself a skill with fiction superior to either of the two arts usually embattled in paragone.

The play does not end with Timon's death scene, as we might expect and as all of Shakespeare's other tragedies do. This representation of Timon, as happens often in life itself, faces us at the end only with epitaphs after the event of the unseen death itself. Yet unlike those that Aufidius utters over Coriolanus or Octavius over Cleopatra, themselves inadequate summations, Timon's epitaph is double and, in more ways than one, contradictory.

First we see a soldier (5.3) trying to find Timon's habitation by a “description”; he calls out, “Who's here? Speak, ho!” But the only reply is some written notice that is first presented to his sight:

“Timon is dead, who hath outstretch’d his span:
Some beast read this; there does not live a man.”

[5.3.3-4]

Those words he can read; others he can only see and he takes a wax impression of those. Elaborate editorial annotations at this point in the text, which seek to explain that one is obviously a notice in his language and the other in Latin that he cannot read, may be right,¹⁹ though such an explanation would surely not intrude upon an audience at the play. But these annotations are also less than apt: one's attention is drawn here again to words and images. The waxen images taken by the soldier, which he actually calls “insculpture” (5.4.67), are interpreted by Alcibiades. The Folio stage direction says that he “reades the Epitaph,” which he must hold in his hands, just as the Painter at the start of the play held a visual image in his hands.

The text that Alcibiades reads has four lines:

“Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft;
Seek not my name: a plague consume you, wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate;
Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait.”

[5.4.69-73]

Shakespeare may indeed have copied two epitaphs from North's Plutarch, “meaning to omit one or the other (probably the first) on revision,” as the Arden editor puts it.²⁰ But other explanations of this apparent textual crux are more consonant with the play's vision as I have outlined it. Inasmuch as the two couplets contradict each other, that is wholly in line with the paradoxes the play has presented. Further, one defies the user of words (“Seek not my name”), just as Timon's very last speech also castigated language—“Lips, let four words go by and language end” (5.1.220); while the epithet's other couplet that Alcibiades reads out accepts verbal naming and the opportunities of cursing.

4

I am arguing then for Timon of Athens as a play abut seeing and hearing in the theater of Blackfriars (or Globe) and the theater of the world represented on those stages. But unlike other theatrical occasions when to see and to hear lead to judgments, this play recalls us constantly to the difficulties of matching word and image; indeed, unlike painting, even those turning pictures so loved of the Elizabethans,²¹ a play is capable of offering us various perspectives in each of which word and image seem to establish their own treaty. The whole movement of the play, awkwardly tailored to readings that stress its social satire, seems much more apt when Timon is to be viewed as a representation of a human being whose behavior, character, and indeed whole nature are difficult to comprehend, not least because he changes so strikingly at a certain point in his life. We are shown habitual modes of inquiry and understanding—conversations between those who supposedly “know” the character; obituaries. We are also given the opportunity to assess how poetic and painterly fictions would cope with representing an adequate likeness.

But all these modes of inquiry are contained within, given performance by and in, a theatrical work. Theater, by implication, succeeds in representing Timon where poetry and painting fail, partly because it can dramatize uncertainties or ambiguities and continue to do so not once, like painting, but throughout the dramatic experience. Above all, of course, the theater can provide both verbal and visual language either simultaneously or in counterpoint. It can stage perspectives, and in a fashion that makes contemporary delight in anamorphic pictures seem very simplistic. For both turning pictures and such anamorphic images as those contained in Holbein's Ambassadors or the portrait of Edward VI in the National Portrait Gallery, London, depend upon the viewer's having to shift his position in order to register the alternative image: he can never see both at once. But in the theater the simultaneity of double views is allowed by the combination of word and image and by the physical possibilities of an audience watching a deep stage space where rival perspectives are displayed.²² Finally, painting, as Shakespeare himself had written, strives with “nature's workmanship” to surpass the life,²³ the stage's pictures actually incorporate life in the shape of an actor's presence: in short, the traditional paragone of word and image and the age-old rivalry of art and life are both resolved upon the stage.

5

This is therefore how I would explain Shakespeare's interest in the paragone. He is seldom explicit, rebuking our contemporary bent for theorizing, though we have to take into account also the somewhat rough-hewn state of the Timon text. But after highlighting this Renaissance topos, Timon of Athens goes on to dramatize ways in which the theater can reconcile the rival modes of word and image by setting them in a situation where their competition, though still acknowledged, can be transcended. This therefore explains why the play is, in M. C. Bradbrook's terms, an experimental reshaping of the Elizabethan “show.”²⁴

This discussion of Shakespeare and the paragone can clearly be related to the substantial recent interest in performative readings of Shakespeare's plays. Discussions by Alan Dessen, for example, or Ann Pasternak Slater²⁵ are concerned to establish how Elizabethan dramatic texts yield directions for performance, for how we see as well as how we hear. But I do not see this as containing the full thrust of my argument, which is concerned to explore the various forms of rivalry or collaboration by which Shakespeare manipulated words and images to achieve subtle effects. My focus upon the explicit and implicit paragone yields not just a critique hospitable to the verbal and visual construction of drama, to the procedures of ut pictura poesis, but strives for an understanding that is alert to an audience's perception of their relationship, whether hostility, rivalry, or mutual collaboration and elaboration. And this implicitly raises theater above the habitual rivalry, even gives it a special place in the exemplifications of ut pictura poesis.

This is not the occasion on which to extend my analysis of Timon of Athens into the rest of Shakespeare's oeuvre, let alone into the work of his contemporaries in poetry, painting, and drama. But it is worth lingering, by way of conclusion, upon why Shakespeare raises the issue of the paragone so prominently at this stage of his career. Obviously he was always fascinated by verbal and visual forms—The Comedy of Errors makes that clear and shows the vital involvement of these two, often opposed, modes of communication. But if I am right in my insistence on the opportunities for more subtle presentations of character in action that dramatic implementations of the paragone allow, then Shakespeare will inevitably be seen to invoke it increasingly as his career develops. It is highlighted explicitly in Timon of Athens, but is implicit also in Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra.²⁶

I would offer four suggestions as to why the paragone features so much more prominently in these plays. First, in these Shakespeare seems concerned to foreground the ambiguities, the problematics of character to a greater degree than before. Second, this theme is clearly suggested and available to Shakespeare in Plutarch's sophisticated biographical material that he made his major sources for these plays: Plutarch not only narrates history through character, but he is fascinated (though not to the point of being sidetracked) with the difficulties of assessing and describing character.²⁷ Third, while Lomazzo had claimed that a good likeness of some great man made viewers wish to emulate his deeds, the rapid developments in English portraiture around 1600 actually highlighted the exact requirements of a likeness²⁸; and incidentally the interest in a portrait's “shadows” as contributing to a lifelikeness, which increased hugely from the 1580s, echoes in the theater's absorption with actors as shadows (“Dost dialogue with thy shadow?” asks Apemantus in 2.2.51). Fourth, the development of the masque to which of course Shakespeare responded in his last plays laid greater and more self-conscious emphasis on the mutual contributions of word and image.

Shakespeare's response to these stimuli was to concentrate his and his audiences’ energies on the rival potential of words and images. Definition of character preoccupies him in the figures of Timon, Coriolanus, Antony, and Cleopatra, but this is focused largely upon what words will describe or will suit and match our sight of those figures; and equally whether what can be seen is accessible to words, is adequately transcribed in its language.

Antony and Cleopatra addresses this series of theatrical challenges at its very beginning.²⁹ Demetrius and Philo start the play with their comments upon Antony's “view” of Cleopatra (“his goodly eyes … now turn … their view”); then as the lovers enter these bystanders’ “Look,” “see,” “behold and see,” and “tell” dramatize for the audience a perspectival situation that will be maintained throughout the play—us watching others seeing, observing, judging. It is clear that Demetrius and Philo's view of a degenerate Antony and his gipsy does not jibe with the lovers’ own feelings; yet they are themselves hyperbolically concerned with the adequacy of language to describe (“tell … reckon’d”) their own state. The play constantly juxtaposes verbal judgments of the two central figures, these rival versions being themselves predicated upon how the speakers see them: Enobarbus's famous speech offers in miniature this concern with how words and images may variously represent reality. His speech is perhaps the most prominent example of a concern with “report,”³⁰ spoken versions of the leading figures, which are a feature, too, of Coriolanus from its initial scene. Verbal judgments clash not only with each other but with our sight of them; and these sightings are themselves perspectively shaped, as we view Coriolanus from patrician or plebian or Volscian directions. Indeed, this play is a succession of scenes in which we see others, not always used to the particular context, observing and assessing Caius Martius. In the climactic scene of act 5 we must both hear (“I prate”) and see (“Holds her by the hand silent”) and so register these rival modes upon a stage; and Coriolanus himself actually underlines this conjunction of theatrical perspective with the paragone by invoking its endless extent—“The gods look down, and this unnatural scene / They laugh at” (5.3.184-85). Even the gods are an audience engaged in the slippery and ambiguous act of interpreting character in action.

Timon, I would suggest, simply highlights concerns at the center of these Roman plays. It begins crucially with the longish absence of the character whose dramatic likeness is to be attempted. This gives Poet and Painter, the traditionally and self-established purveyors of likeness, the opportunity to debate their skills before the dramatist himself begins to assume that role and in so doing pass judgment upon their kinds of achievement. We have noticed how the Painter is put down during Timon; our last sight of the Poet, equally, is of him being pelted off stage with gold as Timon shouts, “You are an alcumist, make gold of that” (5.1.114). At that point, Bradbrook asks, “What is Shakespeare doing there to himself?”³¹ I would answer that he is relegating those who use words or images by themselves and erecting in their place the dramatist's more subtle combinations of each. It was always Shakespeare's concern to promote “the very faculties of eyes and ears,” but in Timon he chooses to remind us explicitly and to show us how the drama, as Spenser had argued, was the medium “By which man's life in his likest image / Was limned forth.”³²

Notes

1. A. Blunt, “An Echo of the ‘Paragone’ in Shakespeare,” JWI 2 (1938-39): 260-62.

2. See Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 69-70; W. M. Merchant, “Timon and the Conceit of Art,” Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 249-57; and David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 26 and 28.

3. This essay is a preliminary excursion into a large territory, and consequently betrays its attempt to circumscribe a far too ambitious project, but one which nevertheless needs mapping in a sketchy fashion if the scope and implications of my discussion of Timon are to be appreciated. I have other essays in progress on the paragone in England, notably as it concerns the presentation of character, and on verbal/visual disputes in early Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, and in the last plays.

4. See Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts by Leonardo da Vinci, with introduction by I. A. Richter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949), on which I draw; all references in the text are to this volume. On the paragone see also n. 10.

5. Queen Elizabeth's Entertainment at Mitcham, ed. Leslie Hotson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).

6. Bevington, Action Is Eloquence, 19-20 et passim, discusses Shakespeare's ambiguous stance towards visual imagery.

7. On the original stage for Timon see both M. C. Bradbrook, “The Comedy of Timon: A Reveling Play of the Inner Temple,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1966): 83-103, and “Blackfriars: The Pageant of Timon of Athens,” in Shakespeare the Craftsman, ed. Bradbrook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 144-67, as well as E. A. J. Honigmann, “Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): 3-20.

8. In this context I am thinking specifically of the work by D. J. Gordon on the visual/verbal rivalries and collaborations of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones: see variously in The Renaissance Imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975).

9. Leonardo meets the objection that poetry's “words will move a people to tears or to laughter” more readily than visual arts by arguing that it is not the poet but “another science”—that of the orator—which is responsible (p. 65).

10. See the extremely useful discussion both of this important commentator on the rivalries between the arts and of the larger Renaissance context in Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s “Due Lezzioni” and Cinquecento Art Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982). Another important commentary upon the paragone is David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), chap. 19. See also the work cited in n. 4 above.

11. All references are to the Riverside edition of the play by G. Blakemore Evans (1974), and are given in the text within brackets. I have taken for granted Shakespeare's authorship of the whole play, in part because other claims for part-authorship are unconvincing and in part because it is precisely my ambition to read the play as having more authority and cohesion than arguments for divided authorship (or, indeed, incompletion) are, by their very nature, willing to allow.

12. For instance, Two Gentlemen of Verona, 4.2, and Troilus and Cressida, 5.2; much of the plot of Much Ado About Nothing also depends upon this strategy. See also note 22 below.

13. See, primarily, Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), especially chaps. 4 and 5.

14. Michael Leslie, “The Dialogue between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poesy in the English Renaissance,” Word & Image I (1985): 28-29.

15. It is this interest of Shakespeare in the rival claims of word and image that makes me somewhat skeptical of approaches to his plays via emblem and iconography that stress only parallels and not their dramatic competition: see my “Pictura, Scriptura, and Theatrum—Shakespeare and the Emblem,” forthcoming in Poetics Today.

16. Oliver's note is on pp. 13-14 of the Arden edition (1959), Maxwell's on p. 108 of his Cambridge edition (1957).

17. See Arden editor's comment, p. 29.

18. It has been suggested to me by Barbara Everett that there is really no “problem” with reading Timon's character. To answer that characters on the stage have difficulties—even before his volte-face in act 3 the Poet and Painter among others are concerned with understanding him—is perhaps insufficient. But Shakespeare's dramatization of others’ puzzlement over Timon surely foregrounds what is his major concern in later plays—the complexities of human behavior and personality and the difficulties of representating them. Furthermore, though it is awkward to invoke standard analyses of Timon when I am engaged in revising them, there is a long and imposing tradition of critical puzzlement about Timon that it is part of my aim to involve in a reading of the play.

19. Such is the Arden editor's gloss, pp. 134-35.

20. Ibid.

21. See both Gilman, cited in n. 13 above, and Allan Shickman, “Turning Pictures in Shakespeare's England,” Art Bulletin 59 (1971): 67-70. Turning pictures actually foreclose or limit options, which Shakespeare theatrical portraits do not.

22. I think the best example of this must be Troilus and Cressida 5.2, where the depth of stage (even the inner stage) must be used to stage Thersites watching Ulysses watching Troilus watching Cressida and Diomed: and we watch them all.

23. Venus and Adonis, ll. 289-94

24. Bradbrook, Renaissance Drama, 84 n.

25. Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Ann Pasternak Slater, Shakespeare the Director (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982).

26. In the final stages of revising this essay for publication I have come across R. M. Frye, “Relating Visual and Verbal Art in Shakespeare,” Proceedings of the Conference of College Teachers of English 19 (1980): 11-28. Frye touches upon the relations of portrait painting and literary characterization, but to my mind indulges in subjective analogies and casual parallels rather than concentrating on how Shakespeare's theatrical practice absorbed and utilized contemporary arts and their rivalries, above all the debates about “likeness.”

27. See, for example, in Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964), 296-97.

28. On contemporary portraiture and its relevance to the paragone see Claire Pace, “‘Delineated lives’: Themes and Variations in 17th-Century Poems about Portraits,” Word & Image 2 (1986): 1-17.

29. All quotations from Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are from the respective Riverside editions.

30. I am grateful to Cedric Barfoot of Leiden University for making me aware of the centrality and relevance of “report” to this play of messengers, rumors, gossip.

31. Bradbrook, Shakespeare the Craftsman, 160.

32. Teares of the Muses, ll. 201-2.