[In the following essay, Tambling investigates Timon's anger and melancholy, finding that these feelings generate both his philanthropy and misanthropy.]

Timon of Athens begins with two artists, a Poet and a Painter, who seem to stand aloof from the crowds of people visiting Timon for their own ends; however, they are just as financially interested, for they want to sell Timon their art-works. While the scene shows implicitly how art exists in a commodified form, their dialogue hints that the play will be self-reflexive, turning on the possibilities offered by its own art and language. The Poet asks the question, ‘how goes the world?’:

PAINTER:
It wears, sir, as it grows.
POET:
Ay, that's well known.
But what particular rarity, what strange,
Which manifold record not matches?

(I. i. 3-5)¹

When the Poet thinks of ‘manifold record’, he focuses on literary precedents. If the world wears as it grows, this negates change; as it grows so it also wears out. ‘Wears’ could mean wearing down, or wearing away, or wearing out, all notions that imply exhaustion, so that ‘wears’ may also signal ‘wearies’, implying an entropic experience at the heart of growing which prevents growth, progress or change. What appears, disappears, in a reversal of Freud's ‘Fort-Da’ game, where what is gone returns.² In the organisation of the Painter's sentence, and contradicting its balance, before there is growth, there is deterioration. If there is also a reference to dress (what people wear), then the world wears in the sense that it covers itself. That implies an attention to surfaces, perhaps to superficiality, matching the laconic tone of the Painter, and the Poet's no less laconic reply, ‘Ay, that's well known’. If it wears as it grows, there may also be the sense of things becoming customary, or of people becoming used to things: just as sayings, for instance, become ‘well worn’. What is well known, because people are used to precedents, implies a general exhaustion of interest.

Poet and Painter are both part of that exhaustion. The Painter carries with him a painting for Timon, of which all that he will say, when asked, is, ‘a picture, sir’ and then, when he shows it, ‘'tis a good piece’ and ‘indifferent’ (I. i. 26-30). The laconic tone reappears, eventually warming up into almost two whole lines, ‘It is a pretty mocking of the life. / Here is a touch: is't good?’ (I. i. 35-6). Other than that the picture includes a portrait, not much else is learned about its subject-matter. It comes from the artist who expresses the near-nihilism of ‘it wears … as it grows’. As for the Poet, who says that ‘a thing slipp'd idly from me’ (I. i. 20) as if disclaiming responsibility for what he has done, the work he has roughed out for Timon allegorises Fortune and the man who ascends Fortune's hill, only to be cast down, and further satirises the people who benefit from the fortunate man. That this is working in an exhausted vein is implied by the Painter's terse comment, ‘'Tis common’ and his addition that it is the theme of ‘a thousand moral paintings’ (I. i. 91-2). If Timon of Athens itself is allegory, and the names Poet and Painter may imply that, it cannot be of the same sort as the Poet's.

The Merchant and the Jeweller—his work another art-form—join in this dialogue's reduction of the significance of experience, with its continual return to the lack of the new, where the Poet wants to know ‘what particular rarity, what strange, / Which manifold record not matches’. Though the words describing the new, ‘rarity’ and ‘strange’, have a particular charge within them, as the Poet uses them, they become debased, for the desire to find something new means only the wish to find some new subject-matter, which would be turned back into well-known experience. He says of his poetry that his free drift ‘flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, / Leaving no tract behind’ (I. i. 49-50). H. J. Oliver glosses ‘tract’ as ‘trace’, or ‘track’. If it leaves no trace, it is completely original, and unfollowable. Yet flying inexhaustibly like an eagle through the unbounded air is not what the Poet produces in the work for Timon, any more than it will be later, when it is hoped that the misanthropic Timon may still be brought back to Athens. The Poet then thinks of writing a new work for him for which he wants to get a commission: ‘a personating of himself; a satire against the softness of prosperity, with a discovery of the infinite flatteries that follow youth and opulency’ (V. i. 33-5). Again the terms of this satire are pre-set through the replaying of allegorical types—Prosperity, Youth and Opulency—and so it becomes indistinguishable from other ‘manifold records’. If Timon is to be personated in another ‘pretty mocking of the life’, not only will there be nothing new, but the work will be written under the assumption that what can be said about Timon is what is already known; art need be only mimetic of a pre-given reality, and if art ‘mocks’, the artist must be outside what he describes. His agenda implies not so much the superiority of art to life, as its superiority over life's changes, which it has fixed in allegorical form. Allegorical insight purveys topics already known through ‘manifold record’ and forms part of the culture of exhaustion of interest, the boredom of ‘it wears as it grows’. In Timon of Athens, knowledge is of what is usual, déjà vu, allegory and satire alike serve vested interests, and the question is whether anything can change the indifferent state of things wearing as they grow.³

When the Painter calls his work ‘indifferent’,⁴ his lack of involvement evokes a mood of modern ‘indifference’ which links the play, in its melancholia and frustrated anger which becomes misanthropy, to the loss of feeling which has been seen to mark modernity.⁵ Melancholia and anger surface in its subplot, centring on Alcibiades no less than on Timon. Alcibiades has had to plead with the Senate on behalf of a friend who in ‘hot blood’ has killed a man. By the end of the scene not only has Alcibiades failed to have the sentence of death commuted but has lost his own temper and been banished. When Alcibiades asks the Senate ‘Who is man that is not angry?’ (III. v. 58), the commonplace defines ‘man’ in terms of anger, something already considered as known through manifold record. There may be something else here, for anger as a motif to describe all men—coming in the scene immediately after that where Timon has been seen ‘in a rage’ (III. iv. 77)—binds everyone together in a state of frustration which is called ‘discontentment’. ‘Discontented’ appears first as a stage direction—apparently Shakespeare's own—marking out a person's gestures, in I. ii. 1. Describing the entrance of Timon's feast, it concludes ‘Then comes, dropping after all, Apemantus, discontentedly, like himself’. ‘Like himself’ means that Apemantus changes neither his clothes nor his behaviour for Timon's feast: his appearance allegorises his inner state. Later in the play, when it is obvious that Timon is in debt, Apemantus's state proves infectious, for one of Timon's servants says ‘my lord leans wondrously to discontent’ (III. iv. 69). This is just before the stage direction—again Shakespeare's—‘Enter Timon, in a rage’. Alcibiades, in the following scene, after he has been banished for defending his friend's ‘beastly fury’, speaks of his own ‘spleen and fury’ and resolves to stir up his ‘discontented troops’ (V. v. 116) to mutiny. The First Senator concludes of Timon that ‘his discontents are unremovably / Coupled to nature’ (V. i. 223-4), recognising that he can never be used by the State again. Timon is ‘contentless’, and, as Apemantus puts it:

                                                            Best state, contentless,
Hath a distracted and most wretched being,
Worse than the worst, content.

(IV. iii. 247-9)

To be content, even if poor, seems to be passive. To be contentless seems to generate a form of active being. Linking that with the question, ‘who is man that is not angry?’ implies that action in this play stems from discontent or melancholia, from ‘a distracted and most wretched state’. This cannot be coped with by the Stoic commonplaces, recommendations to passivity, which are preached by the Senators to Alicibiades, such as ‘He's truly valiant that can wisely suffer …’ (III. v. 31); indeed discontent is further enraged, if not produced, by them.

Such complacencies as the Senators offer, coming from the mouth of the law, represent its cynicism, which is not like the classical cynicism of Diogenes (asserting the importance of laughter, and folly, and of the body, in the face of a restrictive rationality), but the cynicism of those in power,⁶ depriving the individual of any possibility of changing things through aggressiveness and setting up that division between society and the subject which Freud works with in ‘Civilization and its Discontents’. When Timon appears in a rage, it is not a spontaneous wrath which changes things. Shut up in his chamber, ‘much out of health’ (III. iv. 70), it becomes clear that his rage emanates from brooding and solitude, so that his anger is also a form of melancholia.⁷ Timon, the hater of mankind, noted as a prime example of the type by Rabelais and Montaigne, is taken as a melancholic by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy.⁸ His combination of moods—anger and melancholia—suits Alcibiades' mixture of spleen and fury, for ‘spleen’ suggests a melancholic state, and ‘fury’ evokes not only passion but potential madness.⁹ It seems that this play does not deal in the engendering of ‘normal’ emotions. Timon has already become misanthropic, within the walls of Athens, before staging his banquet for his false friends and leaving the city. Perhaps he was always like that, and his lavish generosity only disguised the point from himself. He remains lavish—with gold and with curses—when he has become a misanthrope, as if implying that philanthropy and misanthropy may be the same humour.

The psychic needs that impel Timon's gift-giving have been endlessly argued over. Are his actions to be regarded as a negation of himself through giving, or an attempt to assert supreme patriarchal authority, as when the First Stranger says about Lucius, ‘in my knowing, / Timon hath been this lord's father’ (III. ii. 68-9)? We recall that Timon has no children, no dependants, and no wife. Jacques Lacan, speaking in a clinical context, notes ‘the aggressive motives that lie hidden in all so-called philanthropic activity’.¹⁰ Philanthropic behaviour towards other people might be a form of control (making sure that they are your friends), or philanthropy might be an attempt to keep the other person from dominating with real or imagined demands by anticipating and so preventing those demands. It may have the same motivation revealed in Apemantus's grace before he eats when he prays that he may never trust his friends if he needs them (I. ii. 68). Fear of the other produces the desire to control the distance between the self and the other person, but if it is control, that also implies a muted aggression, and that state is already inseparable from hatred or at least distrust of mankind, so that philanthropy conceals its own misanthropy.

The play has begun with boredom and exhaustion in the Painter and the Poet, and their cynicism, which aligns them with the spirit of the Senators. It continues with Apemantus's melancholic complaints. Timon is also said, by Apemantus, to be melancholic, and he calls himself a misanthrope in the line ‘I am Misanthropos and hate mankind’ (IV. iii. 205, 54). Misanthropy, whether newly induced in Timon, or an always latent potential, seems to be either a form of melancholia or an inseparable concomitant of it. It is like a disease, so that Timon will say, ‘I am sick of this false world’ (IV. iii. 378)—sick of the world and sick because of it. Flaminius refers to the false friend Lucullus as ‘thou disease of a friend and not himself’ (III. i. 53) and to the meaning that Lucullus is a disease to Timon, Oliver adds in a note that ‘there may, secondarily, be something of the old literal meaning of dis-ease, i.e. discomfort or cause of discomfort’. Freud, in ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, ‘Das Unbehagen in Der Kultur’, uses the notion of ‘discontent’—meaning discomfort or unease in culture—to argue that modern culture turns people towards depression as a normative state. In Freud, the function of civilisation (here, the Senate), is to control aggression, which turns inward, and becomes part of a move disorganising the ego, which is part of the death-drive. In Timon's misanthropy there is a deathwards tendency, but this works against another desire, which is to feel:

I am sick of this false world, and will love naught
But even the mere necessities upon't.
Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave;
Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat
Thy grave-stone daily: make thine epitaph
That death in me at others' lives may laugh.

(IV. iii. 378-83)

He still wants to know the sensation of the sea, as the possible masochism in the word ‘beat’ may imply, and he wants to have the sense of the tombstone with its inscription being worn away, in an erasure of himself. He envisages his own disappearance—‘death in me’, death replacing him—yet he wants to have, even after death, the aggression of wanting to laugh at others through an epitaph which will be a new form of satire, and, like the art of the Poet and the Painter, superior to those it mocks. The man who says he hates mankind works in a circular manner, fitting the earlier statement, ‘Who is man that is not angry?’ A man's anger produces hatred of mankind, and hatred of mankind continues the emotion of anger. Anger includes anger at the self as man, and hatred of that form of being, ‘mankind’. The doubleness Timon desires—not wanting to feel but also wanting to feel, wanting indifference and yet wanting to mean something—reverses the spirit of ‘it wears … as it grows’ into its opposite. Montaigne suggests how this may be so, since he points out that misanthropy contains its own opposite, being a frustrated form of love:

Diogenes … was a more sharpe, a more bitter, and a more stinging judge, and consequently more just and fitting my humor than Timon, surnamed the hater of all mankinde. For looke what a man hateth, the same thing he takes to hart. Timon wisht all evil might light on us: He was passionate in desiring our ruine. He shunned and loathed our conversation as dangerous and wicked, and of a depraved nature: Whereas the other so little regarded us, that we could neither trouble nor alter him by our contagion.

(Essays, pp. 394-5)

Timon's hatred shows his emotional involvement, that he is taking things to heart, contrary to the exhausted spirit of the Poet and Painter, or the flat nihilism of Apemantus.¹¹

Timon's philanthropy and misanthropy may be reverse sides of each other, both failures of feeling, feelings of anger formed from melancholia and productive of it. Everything in him attempts to move away from that which ‘manifold record’ speaks of. He tries to make giving to his friends an example of the unprecedented, the rare, the wholly new. His philanthropy takes the form of him half-consciously desiring his body to be eaten.¹² When Cupid announces the Prologue to the masque of the Amazons who represent the five senses, he greets both Timon and also ‘all that of his bounties taste!’

The five best senses acknowledge thee their patron, and come freely to gratulate thy plenteous bosom.
There, taste, touch, all, pleas'd from thy table rise;
They only come now but to feast thine eyes.

(I. ii. 119-23)

Timon wishes his ‘plenteous bosom’, which seems to be synonymous with his ‘table’, to be consumed—like Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, who also hands over his bosom to the knife. Desire for consumption means that the word ‘taste’ dominates: Cupid uses it first in the sense which is repeated when one stranger says that for his own part, ‘I never tasted Timon in my life’ (III. ii. 79). The idea of feeding on Timon, tacitly aligning him to Christ at the Last Supper,¹³ indicates a dream in Timon of being godlike in self-giving—the First Lord's comment ‘he out-goes / The very heart of kindness’ is echoed by the Second Lord's: ‘He pours it out. Plutus the god of gold / Is but his steward’ (I. i. 273-6). In the word ‘out-goes’ there is the half-sense of something original. When the Poet describes the man favoured by Fortune, his language, however ironically, becomes suffused with religious awe, since the man's followers ‘Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear, / Make sacred even his stirrup and through him / Drink the free air’ (I. i. 83-5). But this absolute language and this quest for newness cannot be matched by what happens with Timon's friends. Timon's philanthropy cannot escape the negativity of ‘it wears … as it grows’. Nor can the banquet which he stages—as allegorist and a theatrical artist, the synthesis of poet and painter. After the saying of grace, he calls out ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap’ (III. vi. 82). The stage direction reads ‘the dishes are uncovered and seen to be full of warm water’. The Poet says that he will ‘discover’ infinite flatteries: Timon uncovers them. The ‘dogs’, whose many flattering uses of the tongue are played on in ‘lap’, uncover the bowls, which have already fascinated their attention by being covered, which reveals them as flatterers—as ‘dogs’.¹⁴ When uncovering takes place, there is nothing there. This is not like the feast in Titus Andronicus which leads to further horrific revelations, or the disappearing banquet in The Tempest which seems to generate change in Alonso. The ‘dogs’ are merely baffled by Timon's behaviour: this is not a world of change, and the theatrical display of nothing has revealed nothing.

When Timon is next seen, he has exiled himself from Athens, and finishes his speech invoking plagues on the city with the desire that ‘as Timon grows, his hate may grow / To the whole race of mankind, high and low’ (IV. i. 39-40). At the moment when his own hatred of Athens has boiled over, he still thinks of growing, rather than becoming exhausted. The line recalls ‘it wears … as it grows’ but excludes the possibility of things wearing out, or away. Hatred will become purer by growing. His aim is to become the pure misanthrope, ‘Misanthropos’. ‘Growing’ will close the gap between wishing to be something and being it in that pure form, assuming the title as his own. But growing towards the term ‘Misanthropos’ is also away from growth, into the already known and worn, into a construction which has already been named in allegory and literature. His move is inherently self-defeating, and so a further source of melancholia and anger. A person cannot be that which the allegorical inscription proclaims him to be; allegory shows the breakdown of the power of naming by introducing a gap between desire and actuality. Bruegel's picture ‘The Misanthrope’ (1568), subtitled ‘The Perfidy of this World’, shows that an allegorical state cannot be singular. The misanthrope is a man dressed all in black: the inscription of the painting runs, in translation, ‘Because the world is so faithless, I wear mourning’. But in this form of self-dramatisation his mourning cowl acts as blinkers, whereby he walks along not seeing the man-traps in his path, and having his purse cut from his back pocket by a smiling blind figure trapped in a glass ball—that is, in the world of vanities from which the misanthrope hopes to escape. What the misanthrope assumes as a single state only puts him further into a position of ridicule, or increases the tendency towards the melancholia the misanthropic position tries to escape.¹⁵

The usurers' servants differentiate Timon from the allegorical in comparing him with the sun:

Ay, the days are wax'd shorter with him:
You must consider that a prodigal course
Is like the sun's,
But not, like his, recoverable. I fear
'Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon's purse.

(III. iv. 11-15)

The sun is prodigal, a figure of excess, in dispensing so much more light and heat than is necessary; Timon has been the same, giving in response to need (freeing the prisoner, endowing his servant so that he can marry well in the first scene) and giving without regard to need. To say that Timon's course is unrecoverable means that he cannot be redeemed, nor can his exhaustion be revived like the sun after winter. Yet the flatness of what the servant says does not prevent a third implication: the sun's path is usual and predictable, a feature of ‘manifold record’, but Timon's course cannot be recovered, in the sense of ‘tracked’. This meaning, which retraces the Poet's earlier reference to the eagle's flight ‘leaving no tract behind’, questions the other two.

Timon comments on his failure of growth in a later scene, when Alcibiades asks him, ‘How came the noble Timon to this change?’:

As the moon does, by wanting light to give.
But then renew I could not like the moon;
There were no suns to borrow of.

(IV. iii. 68-70)

When Timon refers to himself as the moon, he implicitly genders himself as feminine, in his loss of power, and in his loss of autonomy (becoming only the reflection of something else). It is the first hint in him of a shift of power, a sign of the play unveiling power-structures that are productive not only of misanthropy, but also of misogyny, a new word of the seventeenth century, a newly distinguished state (OED [Oxford English Dictionary] gives 1620 for the first appearance of ‘misogynist’).

Timon of Athens does not link misanthropy with gender in the manner of Molière's Le Misanthrope, where the misanthrope Alceste—in love with Célimene—is the melancholic in love, ‘l'atrabilaire amoureux’ of the play's original subtitle. In contrast, Timon of Athens almost wholly excludes women. Northrop Frye takes that to reinforce the sense that it is ‘a comedy of humour with no focus for a comic development’ which would allow for growth,¹⁶ but we can go further. The virtual absence of women in the play supports the feeling, emerging from the way they are referred to, that there is a misogynistic bias at work in it—though misogyny, perhaps a standard element of medieval and Renaissance culture, even if not named as such, is unrelated to misanthropy.¹⁷ Something of this bias may be seen even in the first reference to a woman in the play—Fortune with her ‘ivory hand’—in the Poet's allegory. While a woman is being made to figure instability, which is implicitly misogynistic, R. Howard Bloch finds allegory ‘peculiarly attracted’ to anti-feminism.¹⁸ Bloch does not enlarge on the links between idealisation of women and medieval misogyny, but it may be argued that allegory, confining characterisation of a person to one quality only, is inherently an abstracting mode. Applied to a female figure, its unidimensionality implies an idealisation where the woman can only be seen as like a work of art, like sculpture, or as dead. ‘Ivory hand’ suggests both of these possibilities.

A more obvious instinctual misogyny appears in the Old Athenian, as curmudgeonly as Egeus, his prototype in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in his implicitly misanthropic response to Timon's question whether his daughter loves Timon's servant:

                                                            She is young and apt:
Our own precedent passions do instruct us
What levity's in youth.

(I. i. 135-7)

The old man's laconic words on his ‘apt’ daughter (Maxwell annotates ‘apt’ as ‘impressionable’), whom he has allegorised as ‘youth’, show a studied refusal to engage with the idea of love. A tendency to think allegorically pre-sets people's dispositions, works with abstractions, allows no room for growth.

The only women actually to appear in the first half of the play are the Amazons in the masque, dancing with lutes, leading to the Lords, each of whom—to show their love to Timon—takes an Amazon to dance with her. Apemantus's sexually suggestive comments throughout this dance align the women with sexual disease, and give weight to the point that ‘Amazon’ might be an Elizabethan term for a prostitute.¹⁹ Apemantus's form of misogyny, which is also misanthropy, sees women as sexually dangerous, and, de-idealising the scene of dancing in front of him, he attempts to justify both with the line ‘Who lives that's not depraved or depraves?’ (I. ii. 136). He justifies, too, his own self-hatred—for, as the Poet says, Apemantus loves to abhor himself (I. i. 60, 61). For him, ‘manifold record’ makes these things obvious, and he is content to live with these commonplaces, as though he needs to be supported by the power of the usual.

In the second half of the play, Alcibiades appears with his whores Phrynia and Timandra, virtually the only speaking women's parts in the play. Are they a pointer to his misogyny, in that he only wants women as whores, or, as his chosen travelling companions, are they his way of rejecting the values of the Athenian society that has impoverished him by banishing him? If the second, they would be a response to his misanthropy, his hatred of Athens.²⁰ They would suggest that the marginalised man feels he can only consort with others like him, such as ‘whores’. Timon, however, does not identify with the marginal. The ‘fell whore’ that he notices, and who, he tells Alcibiades, ‘hath in her more destruction than thy sword’ (IV. iii. 62, 63), thus becomes Amazonic in a way that reactivates and literalises the Amazons' earlier appearance in the masque (as well as the Amazons' mythical status). The threat and the horror that Timon plays on is of women undercutting the world of men. Timon's repeated ‘Be a whore still’ (echoing through lines 84, 141, 149), makes women serve the misanthrope's purpose, as though they were his revenge on men. Timon looks for a complete disfiguring of the male body, the head, the face, right down to ‘the source of all erection’ (IV. iii. 166). The exhausted sexual body's collapse, under the weight of Timon's violence and the incursions of syphilis (his language attempting to find an equivalent of its power), provides the strongest meaning to ‘it wears’. It wears out; it loses all distinction; the appearance of a man is wholly erased.

Timon corrupts the whores by showering them with the gold he has found just as he has previously showered his guests at the banquet; he pays them to infect all the males of Athens with syphilis. Gold can be exchanged for the pox.²¹ His misogyny—his hatred of the whores, which generates their anger—pairs with his misanthropy, the hatred of the men who use women. The women have for him no more than an instrumental function; perhaps they have no more than that for Alcibiades either. They are the means whereby Timon can get back at the world of men.²² There is nothing of women outside this, except a sense of them as sexual, which appears in an early dialogue in the play:

TIMON:
Wilt dine with me, Apemantus?
APEMANTUS:
No; I eat not lords.
TIMON:
And thou shouldst, thou'dst anger ladies.
APEMANTUS:
O they eat lords; so they come by great bellies.
TIMON:
That's a lascivious apprehension.
APEMANTUS:
So thou apprehend'st it; take it for thy labour.

(I. i. 203-8)

Timon's accusation that Apemantus is lascivious attempts to protect women, for at this stage, characterised as he is by philanthropy, his misogyny is not overt. It also appears that misanthropy—in this case Apemantus's—is inseparable from a sexuality it cannot forget, as if misanthropy hates men because of their dependence on women (just as Apemantus loathes the idea of dependency altogether). Apemantus's response to Timon's invitation to dinner shows that he thinks Timon's feasts are occasions when he is cannibalistically consumed by the lords. Timon fails to take the point, and his reply is confined to the sexual: to eat lords would anger ladies. Sexual frustration, implicit in the way the word ‘anger’ suddenly flares up with reference to women, indicates how much Alcibiades excludes (and how much else could also have been in this play) when he says ‘Who is man that is not angry?’ The anger of women, alluded to by Timon, is at their own exclusion.

Apemantus's reply (‘they eat lords’) unconsciously underscores the topos ‘it wears as it grows’. Males are lessened by sexual orgasm, while women's bodies swell in pregnancy. Has Timon implied without knowing it (if he did know it, he could not refer to Apemantus as lascivious) that eating lords in this context indicates homoeroticism? If so, the exclusion of women from the first half of the play, their sole reminder apart from Amazons—warrior women, and therefore marked by an anger or passion which has here been tamed—would mark a sexuality which while not consciously recognised is silently acknowledged by their absence. Yet there seems to be no homoeroticism, even. In this play, gold and silver, common objects of exchange, are the obscure objects of desire. Lucullus gives the game away when he dreams of ‘a silver basin or ewer’, which is all he is interested in discovering when he sees Timon's Steward, and says ‘And what hast thou there under thy cloak, pretty Flaminius?’ (III. i. 14-15).

At first, Timon gratified himself by simply showering people with money. But then Cupid, the figure of blind desire—no wonder Apemantus follows the sequence with comments of such sexual hatred—speaks for the five ‘best’ senses and of the enlargement of ‘taste and touch’. Timon's world includes the sensual, but hardly in a way that is evocative of women. A moment before Cupid's entrance, he has wept to think of the precious comfort of having friends, and the Second Lord's banal follow-up—‘Joy had the like conception in our eyes, / And at that instant like a babe sprung up’ (I. ii. 107-8) suggests, as Oliver notes, not only the experience of lovers ‘looking babies in each other's eyes’, but also the idea of conception without women. In the first three acts, Timon works within a restricted economy, a closed system of giving. The senses which Cupid says come to ‘gratulate him’—whether this means ‘congratulate’ or ‘satisfy’—complete a cycle which begins with him and returns to him; they give him only what he has already given, so that his bounty is not new in itself, but turns, self-reflexively, upon itself, needing confirmation from what it sees, and what it sees is the usual, a matter of manifold record, and excluding women. In the line ‘His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains’ (IV. iii. 22) can be seen an attack on any form which reflects him, in which he can see his image—and those forms are only masculine.

In saying ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’, Timon tries to become something complete, like an allegorical figure, but his dialogue with the Steward shows that he cannot be what he aspires to be. It shows, too, that misanthropy, however it may be associated with misogyny, is actually different from it; when Timon speaks the language of misanthropy, this means hatred of males.

TIMON:
I have forgot all men.
Then, if thou grant'st th'art a man,
I have forgot thee …
I never had honest man about me, I; all
I kept were knaves, to serve in meat to villains.
STEWARD:
The gods are witness,
Ne'er did poor steward wear a truer grief
For his undone lord than mine eyes for you.
TIMON:
What, dost thou weep? Come nearer; then I love thee,
Because thou art a woman, and disclaim'st
Flinty mankind, whose eyes do never give
But thorough lust and laughter. Pity's sleeping.
Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping.

(IV. iii. 476-90)

The reflectiveness of Timon's last line finds the existence of the something ‘strange’ that the Poet had looked for, and finds it in the world that wears as it grows. But it also locates it in the Steward, for when Timon looks again at him he concludes, ‘surely this man / Was born of woman’ (IV. iii. 497-8). In Macbeth, the phrase is a cue for contempt; in Timon it becomes a marker of a particular detail which makes a difference, and makes misanthropy impossible as a position. Some men, not ‘flinty’, may be women; the times are stranger than had been thought. But what are the implications for misanthropy if implicitly it does not even recognise the existence of women? To be a hater of ‘mankind’ means hating an abstraction.

Michel Foucault argues that the category ‘Man’, as a conceptualisation, or a diagrammatic representation of people, is a ‘recent invention’. He thinks of this abstraction ‘Man’ which in its generality negates all singularity, and collapses gender distinctions, as taking its origin in the European sixteenth century—the moment of the emergence of Timon in Rabelais, Montaigne and Shakespeare.²³ In a play so full of references to beasts, from which ‘man’ is dissociated,²⁴ a process of differentiation is taking place, forming this new abstract entity of ‘man’, and deciding on what behaviour is proper to it. Timandra thinks of Timon as a ‘monster’ (IV. iii. 88), while Apemantus, though apparently cynical, shows himself to be on the side of a normalising view of ‘man’, expressed first when he calls Timon's melancholy ‘unmanly’ (IV. iii. 205). This not only underlines Apemantus's characteristic misogyny, and evokes allegorisations of women as melancholic,²⁵ but it also makes Timon into a deviant figure, marked out by an otherness which can be criticised, not quite ‘man’. Apemantus does not stop there, for he continues by calling Timon ‘a madman so long, now a fool’ (IV. iii. 223). According to Foucault, the word ‘fool’ and the concept of folie in the sixteenth century allowed for both the folly of the fool and for madness.²⁶ Although Apemantus distinguishes between madness, which might be creative, and foolishness, he has sympathy with neither. His attitudes align him with the social world that Timon has left behind and separate his railing from Timon's misanthropy, which, by his reproaches, he shows he believes to be marked by excess. The satirist reveals a conservatism which implicitly links him to the world of the Poet and the Painter.

Timon, then, is linked with women, with folly and with monstrosity—the only states in this play which allow something new to take place. Each of these—being a woman, being mad, being monstrous—is unnameable, unlike the term ‘man’, which involves a fundamental repression, the drawing of a line to delimit and confine experience. Man as an abstraction, neither mad nor foolish nor female, has attributed to it such distinctive markers as language, existence in society and difference from animals, and it is a closed circle which despite his misanthropy, Timon finally makes some effort to break out of. This appears when he prepares his grave on the margin between the sea and the land, and writes his epitaph, which sets him against the Poet and his writing. In doing so, he approaches another form of allegory. In Act V, he is confronted for the last time with the Senators, he re-reads his existence within Athenian society as a disease, as a state of dis-ease in culture. He says abstractedly (he is hardly talking to them):

Why, I was writing of my epitaph;
It will be seen to-morrow. My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.

(V. i. 184-7)

The lines are virtually an epitaph in themselves; they read as if said from beyond the tomb. Timon uses the terms of allegory, for sickness, health, living, nothing and all things appear as hypostatised realities, but the allegory is not of the Poet's kind. It is a form of speaking different from the normal sense of allegory, where one thing may easily equate with another. ‘My long sickness of health and living’, developing from ‘I am sick of this false world’, means either that health and living are seen as disease, or that health and living produce sickness, as though one could be sick of being healthy. Though these two meanings are not quite the same, the second being less nihilistic than the first (as if pronouncing an attention to health to be a form of decadence) both of them reverse the significations of words. If sickness means health, and to mend means to die, and nothing is instinct with all things, Timon has become another kind of allegorist from the type so far discussed. In this epitaph language, instead of reinforcing the meanings implicit in ‘manifold record’, collapses them.

For Walter Benjamin, writing on seventeenth century Baroque allegory, ‘the only pleasure the melancholic permits himself, and it is a powerful one, is allegory’.²⁷ Timon's speech is both allegorical and illuminates allegory through its cryptic nature. Benjamin does not take allegory, a form of writing whose meaning is secret (and certainly hidden from the Senators) as the explication of meanings that are already ‘common’, but rather as the opposite. He says that in allegory ‘any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’.²⁸ That is exactly what Timon makes happen, his speech turning words' meanings inside out, with the final contradiction of ‘nothing brings me all things’. It is obviously impossible that nothing can be the source of everything to him, though it may be true that all things cannot be got from nothing, or no thing. But if ‘nothing’ is to be taken as meaning language—and words in Shakespeare are often seen as ‘nothing’²⁹—then there may be a sense here of the powerlessness of that language which differentiates ‘man’ from beasts.

The words ‘And nothing brings me all things’ would then explain the use of allegory in the previous line and a half—‘My long sickness / Of health and living now begins to mend’. What Timon does to language is to bring it to nothing, to make nothing of it. The language of manifold record is exhausted, not because it has ceased to mean something, but because that language, as exemplified in the terms of the Poet's allegory, never meant anything. Only when language has ceased to yield up the world of usual meanings, when both are reduced to nothingness, can there be anything else. Benjamin in discussing Baroque allegory uses images of ruins, empty husks, meaningless unsorted fragments, saying that they are the things the allegorist works with. They do not mean; they are nothing. But only from them is there any chance of anything being ‘recoverable’, to recall the word of the servant (III. iv. 14). In that sense, ‘nothing brings me all things’ describes allegory.

Putting the two halves of the statement together confirms the sense that Timon's philanthropy was an allegory of his misanthropy, as well as the other way about. During the time of prosperity, Timon's Steward says of him:

O my good lord, the world is but a word:
Were it all yours, to give it in a breath,
How quickly were it gone!

(II. ii. 156-8)

Timon's giving has an aggression about it which annihilates the world: so does his misanthropy. The statement could apply equally to his misanthropy, and indicate that neither state—philanthropy, misanthropy—could move away from nihilism.

Benjamin says that, in contrast with allegory, ‘in the symbol destruction is idealised’. The symbol is what the Poet works with; it is his type of allegorical thinking. Apemantus's misanthropy and Timon's gestures towards it are similarly idealisations, where the character tries to exist as pure hatred, where hatred is still part of a range of meanings implicit in or allowed to the human. The allegorical image of the death's head, which is what Benjamin comes back to, figures what cannot be turned into consolation, or given a meaning.³⁰ Timon with a spade may seem absurd to Apemantus (‘Why this spade?’—IV. iii. 206), but he has become like the gravedigger in Hamlet (a text which was certainly in Benjamin's thoughts), and the gravedigger bleakly shows that there are no consolations left. This is a different and more intense form of exhaustion from the earlier one, which meant mere cynical boredom, the failure of anything to keep its interest, not to wear as it grew. The Poet and Painter made no attempt to move outside ‘manifold record’; in contrast, Timon feels he has exhausted the power of symbolisation. Words can say nothing, and cannot bring in a change. This more radical exhaustion links Timon to figures in Beckett;³¹ like them, Timon knows that language can say nothing, but he cannot for that reason accept silence; he must go on, hence the writing of epitaphs.³² If we take the speech beginning ‘My long disease’ as a first epitaph, and add in that of V. iii. 3, 4, and see two more in what Alcibiades reads (V. iv. 70-3), we can count four altogether.

As the Senators prepare to leave, Timon adds,

Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come,
And let my grave-stone be your oracle.
Lips, let four words go by, and language end:
What is amiss, plague and infection mend!
Graves only be men's works and death their gain;
Sun, hide thy beams, Timon hath done his reign.

(V. i. 213-22)

With an injunction whose excess makes the sun less than himself, Timon announces that his grave will be at the point of the difference between the beach and the sea, covered by the ‘embossed froth’. Oliver notes ‘embossed’ as meaning ‘foaming from exhaustion’, like a hunted animal. The troubled ‘surge’—the word contains implications of the sea rising and flooding in discontent—collapses diurnally in exhaustion on Timon's grave, as if marking Timon as at its limit (the ‘verge’ is the limit of the sea's turbulence, the extent of its power of disturbance). Being buried on the verge he has gone as far as possible to get out of the course of the usual, out of the pattern of what is predicated as human. Yet exhaustion is not the last word: the sea also resumes its cyclical motion. Timon anticipates an endless Fort-Da motion covering and uncovering a gravestone and so covering and uncovering writing. The location matches Timon's double desire to cease—including ceasing from memory—and also to mean something. Sickness will ‘mend’ what is amiss, as Timon's long sickness ‘now begins to mend’, finishing language uttered by the body, but replacing it by a dumb oracle in writing.

Hatred of mankind and attempting to undo its very image, which is what Timon aims at, means hatred of an abstraction, but if that abstraction could disappear, that also would become a mark of hope. Timon, as self-identified with the world of ‘man’, had hoped for his oblivion through an annihilation which prefigures what Foucault speaks of when he envisages the possibility of the conditions that support this abstraction ‘man’ ending: ‘man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.³³ Alcibiades, the only person to interpret Timon's epitaphs, fails to draw the lessons of Timon's nihilism and turns him back into a conventional dead hero.³⁴ And perhaps Alcibiades is right, for the erasure of Timon would still leave a residue, which would in turn enable the appearance of something else. For Timon is more than just the world of Athens he had hated, more than ‘man’, and he leaves writing to be interpreted. Though the writing, hating mankind, is almost nothing, and is marked by finitude in that it will wear away, it offers itself to be read through the play. The writing that will not wear away is the play's writing itself.

Notes

1. Quotations are taken from the Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver (1959), but I have also consulted J. C. Maxwell's edition for the New Cambridge Shakespeare (1957), and G. R. Hibbard's for the New Penguin (1970).

2. For Freud's discussion of the child's game, played in order to symbolise the loss and recovery of the lost object, see Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ch. 2 (The Penguin Freud, vol. xi (Harmondsworth, 1997), pp. 283-7).

3. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), pp. 186-7, sees in the play, and especially in these early scenes, an attack on the notion of art as mimesis. Lesley W. Brill, ‘Truth and Timon of Athens’, Modern Language Quarterly, 40 (1979), 17-36 has good comments on the Poet and Painter.

4. Maxwell, annotating ‘indifferent’ as ‘tolerably good’, says the line is ‘mock-modest’, but OED [Oxford English Dictionary] cites the word as meaning something like ‘neutral’, as well as, in the seventeenth century, a euphemism for ‘bad’.

5. For melancholia, compare Martin Jay, ‘The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn’, in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (1993), pp. 84-98. Walter Benjamin says of the figure of Timon, ‘it is this very inability to experience that lies at the heart of rage’: Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973), p. 143.

6. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (1988), defines modern cynicism as ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (p. 5), the spirit within modernity that uses rationality not as a force for liberation but instrumentally, as a form of domination. See Heinrich Niehues-Pröbsting, ‘The Modern Reception of Cynicism: Diogenes in the Enlightenment’, in R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (eds.), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 329-65.

7. I have argued this in relation to Dante in ‘Dante and the Modern Subject: Overcoming Anger in the Purgatorio’, New Literary History, 28 (1997), 401-20.

8. For the play's sources, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. vi (1966), pp. 225-345. For the Rabelais reference, the context is the end of the practice of lending, which will be ‘everyone bearing hatred against all … like that Timon of Athens who for that reason was surnamed misanthropos’ (III. 3) (Complete Works, tr. Donald Frame (Berkeley, 1991), p. 270. For Montaigne, see Florio's translation of Essay I. 50 (1603), in Essays (Oxford, 1904), pp. 394-5. Burton refers to Timon abandoning the world ‘to creep into caves and holes’, calls him ‘Timon Misanthropos, “averse from company”’, refers to him as a suicide, and says that what made him ‘halfe mad with melancholy’ was ‘to think of his former fortunes and present misfortunes’. The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Nicolas K. Kressling, Thomas C. Faulkner and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford, 1989), vol. i, pp. 279, 395, 432, vol. ii, p. 168.

9. On ‘spleen’ see Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580-1642 (East Lansing, 1951), pp. 26-9 (and see also his discussions of the ‘malcontent’); see also Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven 1986), pp. 139-42, 289-90 for the seventeenth century use of ‘the spleen’ for ‘melancholy’. For ‘fury’, cf. the Latin derivation, ‘furere’, ‘to rage, be mad’ (v. OED); the word includes the anger of beasts.

10. Lacan, ‘Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis’, Écrits (1977), p. 13.

11. ‘Timon feels himself to be part of the collapse of values in Athens, Apemantus never does’, William W. E. Slights, ‘Genera Mixta and Timon of Athens’, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 54.

12. Stanley Cavell discusses Coriolanus in terms of cannibalism but adds that he desires to give food to the people, and his tragedy is that ‘he cannot make himself into food; he cannot say, for example, that his body is bread. His sacrifice will not be redemptive, and hence … his tragedy is that he cannot achieve tragedy’. See ‘Who does the wolf love? Coriolanus and the Interpretations of Politics’, in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985), p. 259; see also pp. 250-3, 256-9.

13. Examples other than those given: I. i. 251-2; I. ii. 38-52, which at l. 46 evokes Judas and the language of Matthew 26: 13; compare with this III. ii. 67-8, ‘dips in the same dish’. In III. iv. 90-5, Timon thinks of himself as needing to be torn in pieces to pay off his debts. In I. ii. 75-81, cannibalism is seen to be universal. Note also, for the relation between Timon and Christ, the implication of three denials (III. iii. 9-11).

14. For this topic see William Empson, ‘Timon's Dog’, in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), pp. 165-74.

15. For the Bruegel painting, see Bruegel, ed. M. Seidel and R. H. Marijnissen (New York, 1971), pp. 502-3, and note at pp. 50-1. See also the note in F. Grossman, Pieter Bruegel: Complete Edition of the Paintings (New York, 1955), p. 202. For the Bruegel reference, see Philip Brockbank's essay on Timon in On Shakespeare: Jesus, Shakespeare and Karl Marx and Other Essays (Oxford, 1989), p. 28.

16. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York, 1965), p. 99.

17. For the extent of medieval misogyny, see Alcuin Blamires, Karen Pratt and C. W. Marx, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended (Oxford, 1992).

18. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago, 1992), p. 7.

19. See Robert C. Fulton, ‘Timon, Cupid and the Amazons’, Shakespeare Studies, 9 (1976), 283-99: 292.

20. The point is made by William O. Scott, ‘The Paradox of Timon's Self-Cursing’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 290-304: 300.

21. On this passage, and the linking of gold and syphilis as both issuing from America and European conquest of America, which turns out to be also the conquest of the Europeans, see Gordon Williams, Shakespeare, Sex and the Print Revolution (1996), pp. 129-43.

22. A feminist reading using psychoanalysis in this connection appears in Coppélia Kahn, ‘Magic of Bounty: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage and Maternal Power’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 34-57.

23. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, tr. Alan Sheridan (1970), pp. 386-7.

24. Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World of his Final Tragedies (1950), p. 68, finds the word ‘beast’ used more often in this play than in any other by Shakespeare. On the attempts to fix boundaries between ‘man’ and ‘beasts’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 17-50.

25. On allegorisations of melancholy in terms of a woman, see Juliana Schiersari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 98-101.

26. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard Howard (1967), pp. 22-32.

27. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (1977), p. 184.

28. Ibid. 175.

29. On the play on the word ‘nothing’, see G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930, 4th edn. 1949), pp. 257-69, which includes his historic ‘The Pilgrimage of Hate: An Essay on Timon of Athens’ (pp. 207-39).

30. Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, p. 166.

31. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, discussing Beckett, in Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 152-74.

32. For a critical reading of Deleuze on Beckett, see Simon Critchley, Very Little … Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (1997), pp. 152-4.

33. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 387.

34. See Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997), p. 296.