SOURCE: “Biological Finance in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 21, No. 3, Autumn, 1991, pp. 349-70.

[In the essay below, Chorost discusses Timon's attempt to secure devotion through gift giving, exploring the economic and biological dimensions of the plot.]

Timon of Athens is a critique of money and money-oriented economies. Timon runs a lavish court which seems rich in friendship, but is rich only in money.¹ Most of Timon's “friends” are usurers who mouth platitudes of loyalty while draining his treasury with high-interest loans. When he runs out of his own money and turns to them for more, they withhold credit, reducing him to destitution.

In his disillusioned rage Timon indicts, among other things, money itself and economies predicated upon the use of money. This indictment is the central theme of the play. Money is shown to destroy not only human relationships but also the reproductive power of nature itself. Hence to analyze the play's treatment of money, one must examine both its economic and biological aspects.

But analysis is complicated by the fact that economics and biology are inseparable in Timon of Athens. For example, in 5.1.68-70 the Painter tells Timon, “He and myself / Have travail’d in the great show’r of your gifts, / And sweetly felt it.” This is a comment about production in Timon's gift economy. Timon is seen as the spontaneous fount of a ceaseless production of gifts, and the Painter and the Poet have, in response, produced artistic works. But it is also a homage to male powers of reproduction. For both travail and shower referred to birth labor in Elizabethan times. OED (5b) defines “shower” as “labor pains,” and cites a text written in 1598: “It shall come upon them suddenly, even as the showres and dolor come on a woman who is travailing in birth.” Compare this with the Poet's rather queasy description of artistic creation, “A thing slipp’d idly from me” (1.1.20)—this is a similarly dual phrase about (re)production. The language of the artists simultaneously evinces a theory of economic production and biological reproduction. This complication, however, is the source of the play's greatest fascination.

II

Timon is like the tribal potlatchers described by Marcel Mauss in his study of gift economies, unilaterally providing food, extending financial aid, dispensing valuables, and (in his wishful words) giving away a few kingdoms (1.2.219) to establish and exhibit his high social status.² The potlatch Mauss describes is an institution where tribal chieftains give away vast quantities of gifts to dramatize and reinforce their preeminent social status. They give away more than their recipients can give back, leaving them in more or less permanent debt. But despite his strong resemblance to a potlatching chieftain, Timon's rhetoric supports the idea of a different kind of gift economy, one where goods and money move circularly within a community to foster mutual ties of obligation. “O what a precious comfort ’tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes,” Timon cries (1.2.101-03). He implies that he wants a community where money and property constantly shift hands as gifts, reinforcing friendly relationships as they circulate. In this spirit Timon accepts the “two brace of greyhounds” given to him from Lucullus (1.2.187) and the gift of the Amazons’ performance.

But Timon really is a potlatcher, because he contrives to give far more than he gets. The Second Lord observes that “No meed but he repays / Seven-fold above itself (1.1.276-77)”. And when Ventidius tries to return the five talents Timon spent to free him from debtor's prison, Timon rejects the offer: “You mistake my love; / I gave it freely ever, and there's none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives” (1.2.9-11). Although Timon sounds generous, he wants only the theoretical possibility of reciprocation, since the real thing would diminish the accumulated sense of obligation built up in his courtiers. John Ruszkiewicz comments that “Timon resists any attempt at leveling. He desires to remain above his friends, contrary to the best advice of moral philosophy … When Timon is given a gift, he must always outdo it.”³ Although he talks a circular gift economy, he creates a linear gift economy in which the net flow of gifts goes in one direction, from himself to his courtiers.

Timon maintains the illusion of a circular gift economy with cunning verbal stratagems. At one point Timon reiterates the idea of mutual indebtedness while simultaneously preventing his courtiers from acknowledging their debt:

First Lord.
We are so virtuously bound—
Timon.
And so am I to you.
Second Lord.
So infinitely endear’d—
Timon.
All to you.

(1.2.226-29)

Timon's “All to you” is a sneaky move. In proclaiming his own indebtedness, Timon fosters the illusion of a circular, egalitarian gift economy. In interrupting their expressions of gratitude, which serve as partial “repayment” for his gifts, Timon restores his potlatcher status. So Timon prevents any balancing of obligation even as he gives lip service to reciprocity.

Coppélia Kahn writes that Timon's gift economy “prevents reciprocity and makes others appear his dependents, his inferiors, ‘subdued’ to his love … instead of creating ties between himself and others, they set him apart, god-like.”⁴ The linear gift economy has already destroyed the bonds of friendship he says he wants to create (although it will take the money economy to destroy all positive emotional bonds). Mauss explains that “to refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is—like refusing to accept—the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.”⁵ Timon is fulfilling the obligation to give, but breaking the obligation to receive, which kills the spirit of the gift. Whereas circular gift economies reinforce friendship, linear ones reinforce only power.

Timon's linear gift economy has another effect: it lets Timon think his courtiers are in debt to him. And indeed, in terms of a potlatch gift economy, they are. Timon believes their gift-debt insures their reciprocated love, so he is shattered to find they feel no such obligation.

But this is not the only collision with economic reality coming to Timon. There is another economy in the court: a money economy. Many of Timon's courtiers are also usurers. They think not in terms of gifts, but in terms of a money economy based on financial accumulation and personal profit. Timon tries to ignore this economy—indeed, he tries to ignore money itself—but since his gift economy depends on it, this denial has severe repercussions.

The Poet notes that Timon pays them “recompense” for their art (1.1.14), and he and the Painter flatter Timon in 5.1 because they hope to receive fat commissions when he returns to power. But in the first half of the play monetary payment is something Timon ignores. (The two halves of the play are divided by the radical change in Timon's personality. Up to 3.4 Timon is the generous philanthrope, the gift giver; afterward he is Misanthropos, the disillusioned man-hater.) In the first half of the play Timon talks about money only when he can make it a gift. Thus he readily speaks of paying off Ventidius's debt of five talents and underwrites his servant's marriage with a gift of three talents, but when he has to buy something, he does it under the table. When he accepts the artists’ work, he conceals his agreement with elliptical speech:

Poet.
Vouchsafe my labour, and long live your lordship!
Timon.
I thank you; you shall hear from me anon.
Go not away. What have you there, my friend?
Painter.
A piece of painting, which I do beseech
Your lordship to accept.
Timon.
Painting is welcome …
I like your work,
And you shall find I like it. Wait attendance
Till you hear further from me.

(1.1.155-65)

By such stratagems Timon attempts to conceal a money economy. Yet Timon's wealth is derived from large cash loans from his own courtiers. The “First Lord” (Lucius, according to the dramatis personae) is Timon's creditor as well as courtier, as shown in 3.4 when Lucius’ servant duns him for five thousand crowns (3.4.94). Similar reasoning holds for the “Second Lord” and “Third Lord” (Lucullus and Sempronius) and for the Senators, whom the play establishes are both Timon's guests at court (1.2.170-71) and usurers (the “usuring Senate,” 3.5.111). About these debts, Timon says not a word.

Timon's linear gift economy could not exist without a parallel money economy. Timon must borrow to support a permanently unilateral flow of gifts. His aristocratic wealth from agriculture and rents could not for long support the “flow of riot” described by the Steward (2.2.3). Monetary loans underwrite Timon's status as potlatcher.

The converse is also true. Timon must give gifts—maintain a gift economy—to look wealthy. As long as he looks wealthy, he can obtain loans. This is clearly seen at the start of 3.2., where Lucius hears a rumor (originated by the Senator in Act 2) of Timon's bankruptcy. His initial reaction is, “Fie, no, do not believe it; he cannot want for money” (3.2.8). Clearly Lucius has considered Timon a good credit risk; after all, Timon has just given him an expensive jewel (1.2.166). Lucullus, too, fully expects a gift when Timon's servant calls on him for a loan (“And what hast thou there under thy cloak, pretty Flaminius?” [3.1.12-14]). But when Timon's servants cannot precede credit requests with gifts, they return empty-handed. Thus Timon's potlatcher status insures his line of credit, and its loss ruins it.

Timon nurses two fictions. His gift economy creates the fiction of vast monetary wealth, which props up his line of credit; he uses the real money obtained on credit to create the fiction of a gift economy. Like a mathematician, he multiplies two negative quantities—his nonexistent monetary wealth and his nonexistent circular gift economy—to obtain a positive result: real wealth. Although his books show him to be destitute, he nevertheless obtains and gives away food, jewels, and money in abundance. Like a mint, a state, or a god, he has the miraculous ability to create wealth ex nihilo—a “Magic of bounty” (1.1.6). …

Timon can practice his Tinkerbell economics as long as the usurers believe, like Lucius, that “he cannot want for wealth.” But once this belief is punctured, Timon's “magic of bounty” collapses. The Senator at the opening of Act 2 is the first to prick the growing bubble of debt. Worried at last, he scans his ledgers: “And late, five thousand; to Varro and to Isidore / He owes nine thousand, besides my former sum, / Which makes it five and twenty. Still in motion / Of raging waste? It cannot hold, it will not” (2.1.1-4). Having seen through the fictions, he foresees the coming run on Timon when the other usurers come to the same realization. In a move long familiar to us from the stock crashes of 1929 and 1987, and the South Sea Bubble, he tries to pull his money out ahead of everybody else, instructing his servant to “Put on a most importunate aspect, / A visage of demand: for I do fear, / When every feather sticks in his own wing, / Lord Timon will be left a naked gull” (2.1.28-31). From this point Timon's fate is sealed. The action proceeds like a row of falling dominoes. In 2.2 Timon is dunned by the servants of three creditors. In the next three scenes, 3.1 through 3.3, his attempts to borrow from his “friends” to shore up the debts fail, since rumors of his bankruptcy have spread. In 3.1 Lucullus refuses to lend money because Timon has no security (land-based collateral) left for loans: “this is no / time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship, without security” (3.1.41-43). In 3.2 Lucius initially expresses confidence in Timon, but upon hearing that Lucullus has turned him down also shuts off Timon's credit, reasoning, “True, as you said, Timon is shrunk indeed; / And he that's once denied will hardly speed” (3.2.62-63). In 3.3 Sempronius turns Timon down with the concocted excuse that Timon failed to ask him first. In 3.4 the servants of these same “friends” besiege Timon for repayment, which he cannot provide. After a cynical bit of economic fictioneering (the “feast” in 3.6), the court sinks into a Great Depression in 4.2, with the unemployed Steward and servants straggling off into a “sea of air” (4.2.22).

One can read Acts 2 and 3 of Timon of Athens as a Jacobean dress rehearsal for an approaching era of financial panics, bank runs, and depressions. The play is perfectly apropos of the times, as A.D. Nuttall writes: “If one thing is clear it is that these were nervous times, economically. After 1590 price fluctuations became vertiginous. We are dealing with a society, and hence with a literature, which has discovered the instability of money.”⁶ One of the chief factors contributing to this instability is usury, which routinely bankrupted members of the aristocracy. Usury is what both inflates and deflates Timon's bubble of debt.

Timon's usurers ruin him with high interest rates. As a lord with a landed estate, Timon has a substantial but more or less fixed income; he cannot return large principals at high interest rates forever. Indeed, the creditors take advantage of Timon's vision of a circular gift economy to exploit him ruthlessly. In accepting Timon's gifts they recover the value of their principal in kind, but then they also demand their monetary principal and its accrued interest, which greatly multiplies their gain. The creditors’ servants glumly recognize the exploitation. One of them says, “Mark how strange it shows, / Timon in this should pay more than he owes: / And e’en as if your lord should wear rich jewels, / And send for money for ’em” (3.4.22-25). As H.J. Oliver glosses the line, the “rich jewels” are Timon’s, given as gifts. The lord wears Timon's gifts while also dunning him for the loaned money used to buy them.

The usurers’ way of thinking about money has far-reaching consequences. The lord will not allow that Timon's gifts are commensurate with his owed money. He has the legalistic argument to stand on that Timon has not paid back his money, no matter how much the gifts may be worth. It is entirely to the usurers’ advantages to believe that money and gifts are of fundamentally different orders. For the usurer, money is neither a store of worldly value nor something which has value by virtue of its metallic substance. It is, rather, a commodity—an object which is itself bought and sold for profit (that is, at interest). The usurers’ ideology strips money of its concrete use-value and converts it into a pure exchange-value; they live off its exchange rather than its purchasing power. The Senator demands his money not because he needs to buy things, but because he needs to pay back bonds of his own: “I must serve my turn / Out of mine own; … my reliances on his fracted dates / Have smit my credit” (2.1.20-23). They value money because it is the abstract medium of an economic process whose function is to generate more money.

Unfortunately for Timon, he gives the usurers only gifts—food, entertainment, horses, jewels, and basins. This does not satisfy them, because they cannot easily convert them into money; they are not dealers in merchandise. Because they can differentiate gifts from money, they can keep their “personal” and “business” relationships with Timon in separate mental compartments. This ability to separate business and personal relationships, Marx writes, is a function of an economic organization based on money and exchange: “Exchange, when mediated by exchange-value and money, presupposes the allround dependence of the producers on one another, together with the total isolation of their private interests from one another.”⁷ If Timon cannot repay his debts because he has spent the money on gifts (including the ones given to creditors!), that is his concern, not theirs. One of Timon's creditors, Lucullus, says of him, “Every man has his fault, and honesty is his” (3.1.27-28)—conveniently forgetting that Timon's “honesty” (generosity) has made him give much more to Lucullus, in terms of value, than he has borrowed.

Of course Timon sees matters differently. His ideology makes things and money commensurable as physical objects, all of which are convertible into gifts. Mauss argues that gift economies make all things commensurable as objects: “Food, women, children, possessions, charms, land, labour, services, religious offices, rank—everything is stuff to be given away and repaid.”⁸ For Timon, money is an object (round gold discs). He gives it away, treating it solely as a thing and a gift. All “economic” uses of money are proscribed.

Because Timon sees money as a thing, he also sees it as static and “sterile,” and this blinds him to the “reproductive” character of money in usury. His attitude toward money and usury is medieval, an attitude which Georg Simmel describes this way:

All the misgivings of the Middle Ages about the taking of interest arise from the fact that money then appeared to be, and actually was, much more solid and substantial, more starkly contrasted with other things, than in modern times when it appears and operates in a much more dynamic, variable and pliable way. The adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine that it is unnatural for money to engender money; the condemnation of interest as theft, because the capital repaid equals the borrowed capital … illustrate how inflexible and dissociated from the fluctuations of life money appeared, how little it was regarded as a productive power.⁹

Since he refuses to accept the commodity-form of money, Timon acts flabbergasted when it “reproduces” on him. He professes amazement when he is presented notices of bonds due: “How goes the world, that I am thus encounter’d / With clamorous demands of debt, broken bonds, / And the detention of long since due debts / Against my honour?” (2.2.42-45). Here is it not so much that Timon is a fool as that his gift ideology lets him ignore money's commodity-form. In this he is much like a feudal Germanic lord living in an era where money, interest and profit were peripheral to the economy. The “clamorous demands of debt” are as much of an unpleasant intrusion to Timon as usury itself was to the Middle Ages.¹⁰

For Timon, money is a static, sterile, dead object. For his usurers, it is a dynamic, fertile, living commodity. The difference between these ideologies of money is almost as dramatic as the difference between biological death and life. This recognition enables us to shift the discussion to a point midway between the economic and the biological ideologies—the debate over the quasi-biological properties of money.

III

Usury has widely been described in terms of a biological metaphor: it is the “breeding” of money. In his Politics Aristotle likens interest to biological reproduction, and condemns it as “unnatural”: “For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term ‘interest,’ which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.”¹¹ Aristotle metaphorizes interest as sexual reproduction, using terms which Jowett and several other translators translate as “birth,” “breeding,” “offspring,” and “parent.” (The word “interest” in Greek is tokos, “offspring.”) Here, money is not so much produced as re-productive. This accepted, the subsequent reasoning is inevitable: if money reproduces just like organic entities, but is not itself organic, it is behaving at odds with nature, that exclusively organic entity. Interest appears “un-natural.”¹²

Rolf Soellner, in his discussion of anti-usury tracts, notes that the Elizabethans were highly attentive to Aristotle's biological metaphor, and objected to usury on those grounds. “The Aristotelian objection was often quoted: to have money beget money was a perversion of its nature. As Louis Leroy commented, ‘It seemeth contrary to nature that a dead thing as money should engender.’”¹³ In The Merchant of Venice Shylock notes that he makes his money “breed as fast” as “ewes and rams” (1.3.91), to which usage Antonio later replies, “When did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?” (1.3.128-29, emphasis added).¹⁴

Thus it is not surprising that in Timon of Athens Shakespeare deals with usury in terms of a biological metaphor, and uses the metaphor to imply disapproval. In 1.1.277-79 the Second Lord says, “no gift to him / But breeds the giver a return exceeding / All use of quittance” (emphasis added). His tone is approving, since he is one of the recipients of this return. But it is clear that something is being exceeded; something has gone out of control. The Lord's choice of the word “breed” suggests that it is not just the economy but also the process of breeding itself which is breaking down. The “un-naturalness” of usury will take its toll.

We begin to see this breakdown at the beginning of Act 2, where the Senator notes that Timon's gift economy is “Still in motion / Of raging waste” (2.1.3-4). The Senator enumerates two examples of this waste:

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

(2.1.5-10)

Both examples of profit happen “unnaturally.” We have a biological entity (a dog) “coining gold” and an economic process (the gift economy) “foaling” horses. Neither of these processes happens in a normal world. The Senator concludes, “It cannot hold; no reason / Can sound his state in safety” (2.1.12-13). The Senator is saying two things: Timon's estate cannot maintain its profligate economy, and nature itself has become “unreasonable” and ceasing to “hold.” Indeed, the natural world is deteriorating: Apemantus notes that “The strain of man's bred out / Into baboon and monkey” (1.1.249-50), and to the Poet's question “how goes the world?” in 1.1.2 the Painter replies, “It wears, sir, as it grows.”

The world's “wearing” is evident when one considers the biological and economic contexts of the play. The first half of the play takes place indoors, in a glittering palace completely lacking in organic nature. The second half takes place outdoors, but this “nature” weirdly produces money instead of the food Timon seeks. Human reproduction itself is under siege: there are no women in Timon's court except for the guest Amazons, and the prostitutes spread sexual diseases which cause sterility. Economically, Timon is ruined, the creditors lose a substantial amount of money by Timon's bankruptcy (contractually speaking), and Timon's servants lose their jobs. So “worn” is the world that nature is unnatural and the economy is uneconomical.

Timon's own diatribes reveal a vision of nature gone awry. In his first diatribe, at the end of the mock-feast, he calls his creditors “Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears” (3.6.91). In 4.3 he delivers a broadside blast against the idea of increase (natural profit) itself:

O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb
Infect the air! Twinn’d brothers of one womb,
Whose procreation, residence and birth
Scarce is dividant—touch them with several fortunes,
The greater scorns the lesser. Not nature,
To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,
But by contempt of nature.

(4.3.1-8)

The imagery is of the sun, normally seen in Aristotelian and Elizabethan times as the source of reproduction, but here acting as the source of decay. What reproduces is infection rather than vitality, for reproduction itself operates in “contempt of nature.” Timon is claiming that both biological and monetary reproduction are contrary to the natural order. Eighteen lines later, nature actually does unnaturally “bear great fortune”: it gives Timon a great store of money when what he needs is food (4.3.25-26).¹⁵

Timon's attitude toward money is seen in his attack upon the gold yielded up to him by the earth:

What is here?
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
… Thus much of this will make
Black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right;
Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

(4.3.25-30)

To Timon, money is a cosmic negative sign. It makes the prostitutes spread venereal disease, turning fertility into sterility; it nearly makes the thieves honest (4.3.453-54); it even turns the baseness of the usurers’ greed into the “nobility” of “friendship.” Of course, these inversions are shams: one gets either a destructive inversion or a hollow one. But that is just Timon's point.

But how does money make things “unnatural”? The question is easy to answer when one reads unnaturalness as a social or moral category. Money is used to manipulate people; one can buy the behavior one wants with money, no matter how destructive or perverse it may be. But the question is more difficult to answer when one takes unnaturalness as a biological category. How does money make nature unnatural?

Marx's analysis of money is useful in answering this question. In Capital he argues that in an economy where money mediates exchange, it quickly becomes more than a mediator. Since it is what buys desired things, it acquires value in its own right, despite its original status as facilitator of exchange. Realizing this, economic agents begin to focus on exchange as a way to generate more money as well as more commodities. “The circulation of money as capital is … an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement.”¹⁶ Economic activity comes to be valorized for its own sake, rather than for its ability to produce useful products. Economic ideology thus becomes increasingly divorced from the world of natural and human entities, and increasingly focused on growth, increase, and profit. Money splits off from the process it mediates and appears to take on its own form of activity, its own “life.”

Marx's discussion of the effect of this ideology is intriguing: “The circulation of capital suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, passing through a life-process of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn.”¹⁷ In short, people start seeing money as a quasi-biological entity. It appears to take on “life” independent of the interactions between buyers and sellers. Eventually some people realize that money itself can be sold—that is, lent at interest. In such a transaction the commodity and the medium of payment are one and the same. Now money appears to be just like biological entities: it reproduces by its own kind.¹⁸

Of course anyone who seriously believes this about money is making a mistake; even in usury, money increases only as a consequence of human activity. But the metaphor is a vivid and powerful one, and grounds much of the condemnation of usury as “unnatural.” Money looks alive. Marx writes, “Because it [money] is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.”¹⁹

But money is not a natural, organic entity. (Gold might be; money is not.) An economic ideology like Timon’s, where money is a static object—a thing—cannot reconcile itself with money's apparent reproductive behavior. If inorganic entities start behaving like organic ones, then nature itself has gone awry.

And nature is confounded and overturned in Timon of Athens. Dogs coin gold, economies foal horses, bears turn meek, wolves become affable, courts exclude women, women make men sterile, and the earth produces coinage. Timon sees nature as an entity which cannot reconcile contradictions. The mere existence of a specific economic process, usury, makes nature bear great fortune “by contempt of nature.”

Such parallels between nature and the political state are common in Shakespeare. In plays like Macbeth, 1 Henvy IV, and King Lear, the state of the world metaphorizes the state of the state. In Timon of Athens, nature (biology) metaphorizes the economic order (Timon's “state”) and vice versa. But what underwrites the metaphor? Language is the medium of the metaphor, as economics and biology share many terms in common; and the metaphor is underwritten by the fact that economics and biology are both about the management of life.

IV

In some of Shakespeare's works, Timon of Athens included, biology and economics share a common discourse, partaking of the same words and concepts. The Elizabethans adopted Aristotle's condemnation of interest as “unnatural breeding”; conversely, Shakespeare called biological reproduction “usury” in Measure for Measure:

Nature never lends
The smallest scruple of her excellence
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines
Herself the glory of a creditor,
Both thanks and use.

(1.1.36-40)

In The End of Kinship Marc Shell explicates this passage: “For the life nature lends a man, that man is required to repay both the principal and the interest (‘use’)—that is, both his own life (by his eventual death) and the lives of his progeny.”²⁰ Shakespeare paints Nature as the usurer par excellence, lending a life and demanding both it and additional lives in return.

Timon of Athens offers numerous lines where the discourses of biology and economics fuse, such as Timon's speculation on Apemantus’ origin, which makes his conception sound like a malicious banking arrangement: “If thou wilt curse, thy father (that poor rag) / Must be thy subject, who in spite put stuff / To some she-beggar and compounded thee / Poor rogue hereditary” (4.3.273-76, emphases added). The “stuff” Timon speaks of is sperm, but in the context of the language it is also principal, of which Apemantus is the interest.

The interrelationship is also deeply embedded in language. The word “capital” originally comes from the Latin word caput, “head.” In The Gift Lewis Hyde writes that for the Romans, the head was the source of breeding:

For both the Greeks and the Romans, the human head was regarded not as the seat of consciousness but as the container of procreative powers, the seeds of life. A Roman metaphor for kissing was “to diminish the head,” according to Onians; sexual intercourse also “diminished the head,” the point being that erotic or generative activity draws the life-stuff out of its container. In this way it was understood that caput (head, but also capital) produced offspring. Onians tells of a Roman cult, the Templars, who worshiped a divine head ‘as the source of wealth, as making trees bloom and earth to germinate.’ Aboriginally ‘capital’ was a strictly organic wealth that quite literally bore tokos [offspring].²¹

Capital is inherently fertile because its nature is to create more capital. “Use” has both economic and biological (i.e. sexual) meanings, which Shakespeare exploits in Measure for Measure and a number of other plays. “Labor” is used to refer to both economic production and biological re-production. “Corporation” is rooted in the Latin corpus, “body.” The words “economy” (financial economy) and “ecology” (natural economy) share the same Greek root.

But why is there such an intimate connection between biology and economics? At first sight, they appear to be quite different phenomena. Yet both are concerned with production, whether of money, goods, or living beings; both deal with forms of social “intercourse” (exchange, sex); both are sites of power struggles (competition, courtship); perhaps most importantly, both concern themselves vitally with the business of physical survival. If either economy or biology goes awry, so does life itself.

Thus the Elizabethan debate over usury takes as its starting point the charge that it is “unnatural breeding,” and conducts itself through a disputation over what can legitimately breed and what cannot. Conversely, the play's debate over breeding is inseparable from its economic context; the usurers are sexually sterile because their activity, breeding money, violates the natural function of reproduction so profoundly that it stops. If Timon's courtiers held a formal disputation on the desirability of usury, they would have to conduct it in biological terms. And if they wanted to debate whether to introduce wives and children to the court, they would have to speak in their capacity as usurers.

V

Because they have different conceptions of money and nature, Timon and his courtiers differ on what they think can legitimately breed. We can diagram the ideological positions of Timon and his courtiers with a [list] of the play's economic, monetary and biological ideologies:

Timon Philanthrope
Economic. Gift economy
Monetary. Money sterile (covertly fertile)
Biological. Humans, earth sterile
Timon Misanthrope
Economic. Money economy
Monetary. Money fertile (made sterile)
Biological. Humans, earth fertile (but made sterile)
Creditors
Economic. Money economy
Monetary. Money fertile
Biological. Humans, earth sterile

This chart splits Timon into two people, since he changes drastically after his disillusioned rage in 3.4. Timon Misanthrope's ideologies are the exact opposite of Timon Philanthrope’s: the two have opposite theories of economic organization, money, and reproduction.

The courtiers, on the other hand, do not change. Nor do their ideologies ever have a relationship of precise opposition or identity to Timon’s. In the first half of the play Timon and the courtiers have different economic ideologies but identical biological ones; in the second half this reverses, so that they share economic ideologies but not biological ones.

Why does it happen this way? In both halves of the play Timon and his courtiers differ over what is entitled to reproduce. In the first half of the play the primary object of this debate is money, since the usuring courtiers make it “breed” while Timon pretends it is “sterile.” In the second half, the primary object is nature, since Timon argues with his visitors that nature is fertile, while they maintain by word and deed that it is sterile.

In the play's first half the creditors destroy Timon because they, unlike him, are comfortable with the fact that money in the court's protocapitalist economy is inevitably something which “breeds.” But in the play's second half Timon achieves his revenge by harnessing the sex drive, which the courtiers try to ignore and suppress. Timon pays the prostitutes to spread venereal diseases which will “defeat and quell / The source of all erection” (4.3.165-66). His revenge succeeds: Athens falls to Alcibiades, who has Timon's financial support, and the syphilitic prostitutes become biological time bombs primed to commit genocide. Timon acknowledges the fertility of both money and nature, but in revenge suppresses the one and perverts the other.

Unlike his earlier self, Timon Misanthrope believes in a money rather than gift economy. Where before Timon had effaced the idea of monetary payment, as with the Painter and the Jeweler, or given money away as a gift, now he openly uses money as direct payment for services rendered. He gives each of his visitors money in exchange for the service of destroying Athenian society. To Alcibiades he says, “There's gold to pay thy soldiers” (4.3.128). With the prostitutes, he insists on service in exchange for his payment: “More whore, more mischief first; I have given you earnest” (4.3.170). To the Poet and the Painter he says, “You have work for me, there's payment: hence!” (5.1.112).

Likewise, he explicitly accepts both the principle of usury and the quasi-biological fertility of money. To the Steward he says, “Is not thy kindness subtle, covetous, / A usuring kindness, and as rich men deal gifts, / Expecting in return twenty for one?” (4.3.512-14). And he buries his discovered gold, saying “Th’art quick, / But yet I’ll bury thee” (4.3.45-46). H.J. Oliver notes that “quick” in this context means “alive” or “pregnant.” Thus even as he takes money out of circulation, Timon acknowledges its “fertility.” Later in the act Timon points out that gold is best when it “sleeps, and does no hired harm” (4.3.293). “Hired” is a synonym for “rented,” a direct reference to the rental of money at interest. Throughout the fourth and fifth acts, Timon repeatedly acknowledges the institution of moneylending, a recognition Timon Misanthrope had consistently avoided: “But then renew I could not like the moon; / There were no suns to borrow of” (4.3.69-70); “who in spite put stuff / To some shebeggar and compounded thee” (4.3.274-75); “Lend me a fool's heart” (5.1.156).

VI

Whenever the first half of the play views nature, it sees sterility. For both Timon Philanthrope and the courtiers, the fertility of biological entities (humans and the earth) is suppressed or ignored. Timon's first response upon hearing of the Amazons is, “Ladies? What are their wills?” (1.2.114) rather than the cordial “They are fairly welcome” (1.2.172) extended to the Senators. When the masque is over, they are removed from the stage after Timon says, “Please you to dispose yourselves” (1.2.152)—an invitation to eat, but also an invitation to leave. Kenneth Burke writes, “The invitation for them to stay on after the dance is so worded that immediately after this revue-like number the playwright promptly gets them off the stage for good.”²²

As Burke's observation suggests, the play's exclusion of women has not been lost on the critics. Burke writes, “Since the play is almost wholly concerned with relations among men (as though all the world were a kind of secular monastery devoted perversely to a universal god of gold), women figure only in a supernumerary capacity. … Also the role of Cupid in connection with the masque suggests that, whereas the absence of children is accidental in some plays, it is essential to this one.”²³ Burke's surmise is on target: there are no real women or children in Timon's court because the usurers, who make the inorganic breed, have so altered nature that it does not function “naturally.”

Timon's hangers-on share the ideology of biological sterility. The thieves cannot comprehend the significance of natural fertility. When Timon Misanthrope suggests to them that they live off nature as he does, they respond, “We cannot live on grass, on berries, water, / As beasts and birds and fishes” (4.3.425-26). In his trenchant reply Timon points out that they have overlooked the possibility of living carnivorously on beasts. But even this is not a possibility for them, for instead of beasts. Timon declares, “You must eat men” (4.3.428). In this Timon refers triply to their living off men by theft, their possible homosexual predilection, and the creditors’ cannibalistic consumption of fellow men by usury. The thieves cannot see nature as a source of sustenance.

The second half of the play evinces a very different attitude toward nature. In contrast to the courtiers and his earlier self, Timon Misanthrope lives in nature and recognizes its profuse fertility. To the thieves he points out the earth as a fertile source of natural wealth in an erotic passage portraying Mother Nature as the genital source of a “Big Woman” gift economy:

Why should you want? Behold the earth hath roots;
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs;
The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips;
The bounteous housewife nature on
each bush
Lays her full mess before you.

(4.3.420-24, emphases added)

Timon's predilections, homoerotic before, are now heteroerotic and implicitly look to the possibility of human reproduction. The Timon who once could say, “Ladies? What are their wills?” now says, “Each man to his stool, with that spur as he would to the lip of his mistress” (3.6.64-65). The irony of the command is that the courtiers have no mistresses.

To his Steward, Flavius, he says, “What, dost thou weep? Come nearer; then I love thee, / Because thou art a woman, and disclaims’t / Flinty mankind” (4.3.486-88). Timon has perhaps not entirely grasped the idea of womankind, but he recognizes heterosexual attraction where his courtiers would not. In addition, he hypothesizes his Steward's biological origin in saying, “Surely this man / Was born of woman” (4.3.497-98), a generalization normally too obvious to mention. He puts his new knowledge to use in paying prostitutes to spread sexual diseases which will kill and sterilize. Thus, while Timon Misanthrope recognizes the fertility of money and nature, he uses that knowledge to defeat both. In spreading sexual diseases he simultaneously acknowledges and defeats the telos of sexuality. In burying coins he defeats their “quickness.” When he does use money, he uses it only for payment, never for return-producing investments, even though he acknowledges the potential for such.

It marks the depth of pessimism in the play that Timon's reversal of nature's reversed order does not restore things to normal. In the first half of the play, the “natural” order is inverted: money reproduces, and biological entities are sterile. In the second half this inversion is itself inverted. Money is made sterile again, and the earth returns to being a “bounteous housewife.” But this restored natural order is perverse: the “housewife” yields money instead of food, and the sex drive kills. The world is too badly worn to be repaired; nature is too fragile to survive a double inversion intact.

VII

What is the inner life of the denizens of this world? We are not told directly (there are no Hamlet-like soliloquies), but the language of the courtiers reveals a nostalgic and desperate fantasy of reproduction. Their words are laden with references to conception, pregenancy and childbirth. An elaborate conceit used by the Second Lord suggests that the mutual absorption of the lords has reproductive power: “Joy had the like conception in our eyes, / And at that instant like a babe sprung up” (1.2.107-08). And a great many casually delivered metaphors refer to male conception and parturition, such as:

all kinds of natures /… labour on the bosom of this sphere
/ To propagate their states (1.1.67-69);
We’ll bear, with your lordship (1.1.179);
I hope his honour will conceive the fairest of me (3.2.52-53);
To revenge is no valour, but to bear (3.5.40);
I do conceive (3.6.63);
He and myself / Have travail’d in the great shower of your gifts

(5.1.68-69)

The play's language is lambent with the dream of fertility. However, the dream is in truth a nightmare, for the metaphor of birth periodically erupts into images of miscarriage and illegitimacy. To the conceit of “And at that instant like a babe sprung up” Apemantus sardonically retorts, “Ho, ho: I laugh to think that babe a bastard” (1.2.108-09).

A dark and complex miscarriage takes place in 3.4, the scene where Timon Misanthrope is “born.” An extended metaphor of birth starts when the servants waiting for Timon wonder about the time of day, and Philotus answers with the startling line, “Labouring for nine” (3.4.8). At this moment Timon is in his chamber re-gestating himself as a misanthrope. In his entry he suggests a difficult birth in saying “What, are my doors oppos’d against my passage?” (3.4.78). Surrounded by servants clamoring for money, he flails and gasps like a newborn infant struggling for breath: “They have e’en put my breath from me” (3.4.102). Timon's “miscarriage” is suggested by his shouts, “Knock me down with ’em: cleave me to the girdle … Cut my heart in sums … Tell out my blood” (3.4.89-93). Thus, in this sterile court which excludes women, the dream of fertility lives in a dark and twisted form. It is a court where men are sterile, but money breeds like mad.

VIII

In Timon of Athens the “natural” behaviors of money and nature invert themselves, and appalling transformations of values, both social and economic, are the result. All human bonds become merely bonds, that is, notes of economic transactions, or chains. “I’ll pay the debt, and free him,” Timon says to Ventidius’ messenger. “Your lordship ever binds him,” replies the man (1.1.106-07).

The central metaphor of Timon of Athens, Aristotle's “biological finance,” is now forgotten in the canyons of The City and Wall Street (although money and sex are still as interrelated as they ever were). But the play remains an accurate depiction of the webs of faith and peril which make up a money- and credit-oriented economy. On January 8, 1991, the Wall Street Journal profiled a man who ran up a credit-card debt of $35,000 at an interest rate “in the high teens.”²⁴ He had worried that “if he didn’t spend lavishly on his wife and children, he’d ‘lose’ them.” He amassed twenty-five cards to buy them automobiles and vacation trips, and told the Journal, “It never crossed my mind that I’d have to pay it all back.”

Notes

1. Citations are to H.J. Oliver's Arden edition (London, 1959).

2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York, 1967).

3. John Ruszkiewicz, “Liberality, Friendship, and Timon of Athens,” Thoth 13 (Winter 1975-76) 3-17.

4. Coppélia Kahn, “Magic of bounty: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 39, 34-57.

5. Mauss, p. 11.

6. In The Economics of the Imagination (Amherst, 1980), Kurt Heinzelman discusses the importance of socially constructed fictions to economic discourse. Such ficiotns consist of abstract terms which create reather than describe economic entities such as “labor,” “wealth,” and “price.” See also Karl Polanyi's Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies (Boston, 1968), esp. chapter 2.

7. A.D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens (London, 1989), p. 67.

8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London, 1973), p. 158.

9. Mauss, p. 11. One could say that because Timon's economy focuses on things instead of commodities, it has, instead of capital's use-value/exchange-value dichotomy, a use-value/gift-value one.

10. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London, 1978), p. 169.

11. Since John Draper's “The Theme of ‘Timon of Athens’” (Modern Language Review 29 [1934], 21-31) discusses the play's economic background in detail, I will confine my own discussion to a footnote. The play's probable date of composition, 1608, places it in conjunction with a severe debt crisis afflicting King James and other members of the aristocracy. In 1610 and 1611, according to Caroline Bingham, James I of England (London, 1981), the King's Exchequer was £300,000 in debt (p. 93). The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Robert Cecil, owed £53,000 upon a net landed income of £6200 (Lawrence Stone, Family and Fortune: Studies of Aristocratic Finance in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries [Oxford, 1973], p. 25). “Usury,” Draper writes, “was the immediate and obvious cause that wrecked the ancient families” (p. 24). Perhaps the play was never finished because it was a little too topical.

12. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York, 1943), Book I, chap. 10, p. 1258.

13. The word “unnatural” is ambiguous and problematic, because it is diversely applied to issues of biology, finance, morality, and sexuality. I believe that Aristotle uses the word primarily in its most clinical sense, to mean either “a process not normally found in nature” or “a natural process gone awry.” The inference that what is “un-natural” is evil as well as improper may be the invention of later ages. I choose to follow Aristotle's usage for the most part, and skirt the important debate over the status of the term “nature.” Burton M. Leiser critiques modern usages of the word “unnatural” in his “Homosexuality and the ‘Unnaturalness Argument’”, Liberty, Justice and Morals: Contemporary Value Conflicts, 2nd ed. (New York, 1979), pp. 52-59.

14. Rolf Soellner, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus, Ohio, 1979), p. 117. For more examples of the Elizabethan antagonism toward usury, see E. Pearlman, “Shakespeare, Freud, and the Two Usuries, or, Money's a Meddler,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (Spring 1972), 217-36.

15. Arden edition (New York, 1955), ed. John Russell Brown.

16. It is not made clear whether Timon finds elemental gold or coins made of gold. However, Timon uses his discovery as money, and it seems that a production of the play would find it natural to use coins.

17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore (New York, 1906), p. 169.

18. Marx, Capital, p. 172 (emphasis added).

19. To put it in Marxist terms: Usurers participate in the M-C-M’ cycle of capital like other capitalists, but their commodity is money itself. The equation can thus be rewritten as M-M-M’. Money becomes alien to the processes of life (i.e. the buying and selling of food and other vital goods) and acquires an independent, spooky “life” of its own.

20. Capital, p. 172.

21. Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: “Measure for Measure”, Incest, and the Idea of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford, 1988), p. 30.

22. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York, 1983), p. 113, n. 1.

23. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkeley, 1966), p. 118.

24. Burke, p. 118.

25. Dana Milbank, “Hooked on Plastic: Middle-Class Family Takes a Harsh Cure For Credit-Card Abuse,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 1991, p. A1.