[In the following essay, Wilcher assesses Timon of Athens as an experimental work of art, and studies the issues of genre and artistic vision through an exploration of the play's structure.]

I

The centre of critical debate has shifted considerably since T. M. Parrott published his monograph on Timon of Athens in 1923,¹ but the problematic nature of the work continues to exercise the ingenuity of Shakespearian scholars. Victorian and early twentieth-century arguments about its authorship and the state and status of the text printed in the 1623 Folio, though not conclusively settled, have been pushed to one side by arguments about the play's purpose or meaning.² It has been found to embody, among other things, “the stark contrast of the partial and imperfect nature of humanity and the world of the senses with the strong aspiration toward infinity and perfection and the ultimate darkness of the unknown”,³ the plight of a feudal aristocracy in an age of usury and rising capitalism,⁴ “the dual theme of the false appearance of friendship and the uncertainty of fortune”,⁵ “an investigation of aberrations from natural order in the individual promoted by subtle forms of pride”,⁶ “a bold and immediate challenge to the teachings the New Testament urges man to live by”,⁷ “a primitive rage at the destruction of an ego-ideal”,⁸ a series of “insights into the moral and political nature of man”, which express Shakespeare's “contempt for democracy”,⁹ and a meditation on “the great social and ideological crisis which accompanies the birth, in England, of modern man”.¹⁰ This quest to make sense of the play as it stands has to a large extent resolved itself into an endeavour to ascertain its generic affiliations, since a genre—far from being merely a set of formal conventions—is recognized as a way of encoding a hierarchy of values and enforcing a particular perspective upon man's experience of his world. Timon of Athens has consequently been identified as an allegorical tragedy that “includes and transcends” Shakespeare's earlier tragic masterpieces,¹¹ as a transitional tragedy that links Othello and King Lear with Macbeth, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra,¹² as one of the “Last Tragedies” that point the way from Shakespeare's tragic phase to his Late Romances,¹³ as a “pessimistic tragedy”,¹⁴ as a “tragical satire”,¹⁵ as a morality play,¹⁶ as a “Misanthropy”,¹⁷ and as an example of “genera mixta”, drawing upon “masque, comic antimasque, bitter satire, and tragedy”.¹⁸

It is evident that “the problem of Timon of Athens” is still very much with us, and also that many of the interpretative difficulties arise from the procedure of circumscribing the text within certain generic assumptions and then complaining that it fails to satisfy them. The present attempt to shed light on it will approach the issues of genre and artistic purpose by way of a detailed examination of the play's formal design as it has come down to us in the text printed in the First Folio.

II

Critical opinion as to the success of Timon of Athens as an artistic structure reveals some startling contradictions. A. C. Bradley represents the larger party, with the verdict that the play is “weak, ill-constructed and confused”; Wilson Knight speaks for the smaller band of champions in praising its “masterly construction”.¹⁹ A more recent view relates it to the problem comedies as a work “which shows Shakespeare struggling with the problem of form”.²⁰ Those who have gone into more detail about the reasons for their contempt, admiration, or puzzlement have dwelt particularly on the sharp contrast between Acts I-III and Acts IV-V. Mark Van Doren states bluntly, “The play is two plays, casually joined at the middle.”²¹ One may want to quarrel with the implications of the word ‘casually’, but the radical difference between the first three and the last two acts is an unavoidable fact of the play's structure. Acts I-III are set in the city of Athens; Acts IV-V are set outside Athens, either before the city's walls or near Timon's cave. The break between the two settings, which corresponds to the break that is felt to occur in the play's atmosphere and dramatic texture, is strongly marked by Timon's first soliloquy:

Let me look back upon thee. O thou wall
That girdles in those wolves, dive in the earth
And fence not Athens! […]
[…]                    Nothing I'll bear from thee
But nakedness, thou detestable town!
Take thou that too, with multiplying bans.
Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th' unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.

(IV.1.1-3, 32-6)²²

The first part of the play—centred on the extravagant hospitality and subsequent ruin of Timon—has been concerned with the economic foundations of communal life and with the social and moral consequences of usury and materialism. In narrative substance, it has been a didactic parable illustrating the Poet's summary of the ‘rough work’ he intends to present to Timon in the opening scene:

When Fortune in her shift and change of mood
Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,
Which labour'd after him to the mountain's top
Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down,
Not one accompanying his declining foot.

(I.1.87-91)

This action is completed by the end of Act III. Acts IV-V are a different kind of play. Timon is no longer part of a community. He stands outside the walls of human society and directs against it the bitter shafts of his misanthropic outlook, each of his visitors providing an occasion for further vituperation against humanity and life itself. The point which seems to underlie much of the dissatisfaction felt with the play is that the second half, after the fall of Timon, is not the inevitable outcome of the first half. A man, even an extreme idealist, subjected to the kind of shock that Timon receives, need not have become a misanthrope and ended his life in hatred and a futile death.²³ He might have emerged from the collapse of his world and his encounter with the wilderness with a new wisdom and simplicity born of suffering, as Lear had done when ingratitude drove him out into the storm. But in this instance, Shakespeare has chosen a hero who pursues the negative course of misanthropy, in which the wrongs of the world are magnified rather than transcended, and who plunges towards meaningless self-destruction rather than healing martyrdom. Timon's soliloquy at the beginning of Act IV establishes the direction the rest of the play will follow and prepares us for a change of tone and dramatic method: the railing man-hater will take over from the Poet, whose didactic vision of Fortune's fickleness shaped the first three acts.

This is not the first time, and it will not be the last, that Shakespeare has imposed a solution to an artistic and human problem rather than allowing the internal dynamic of the narrative material to carry through to a tragic consummation. Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, both of which develop strong and potentially tragic situations in Acts I-III, are diverted onto the quite different tracks of Romantic Comedy and Pastoral Romance and, as in Timon of Athens, the transition from one kind of drama to another is marked by a speech that draws attention to its function in the structure. The Duke of Vienna's soliloquy. in octosyllabic couplets—Craft against vice I must apply—and the Chorus's words about Time—that makes and unfolds error—occur, like Timon's first soliloquy, at the juncture of Acts III and IV and prepare us for the audacious change of key that Shakespeare is about to effect.²⁴ Shakespeare does not neglect artistic decorum and the canons of common sense to the extent of providing no links between the two phases of Timon's existence on the stage, since there is enough psychological plausibility to give the play a degree of continuity in the explanation that Timon turns against his species because his former idealistic trust in mankind has been painfully violated. But the nature of Shakespeare's enterprise will be missed if one goes to the play with the kind of preconceptions implied in H. J. Oliver's statement that the dramatist “started from the ‘fact’ of Timon's misanthropy”, and then designed a play that would offer a convincing answer to the question, “What might conceivably have reduced a man to this condition?”²⁵ The play no more focusses on the reasons for Timon's descent into misanthropy than Measure for Measure focusses on the reasons for the Duke's initial decision to place the reins of government in Angelo's hands or The Winter's Tale on the reasons for Leontes' jealousy.

Another of the features of Timon of Athens which has caused considerable critical comment is the episodic quality which characterises the development of Timon's story throughout the play and which might appear to override the discontinuity between Acts I-III and Acts IV-V. But a closer analysis reveals that the two phases, though both episodic in a broad sense, are built on different principles. After the opening scene, in which the Poet, the Painter, the Jeweller, and the Merchant gather to pay court to Timon—as the Poet sneeringly puts it, See, / Magic of bounty, all these spirits thy power / Hath conjur'd to attend (I.1.5-7)—Timon enters and displays his role as Bounty in a series of encounters. Ventidius, Lucilius, the Poet, the Painter, and the Jeweller all profit from his generosity or bask in his hospitality; Apemantus comes in to warn Timon against flattery and fair-weather friends, and Timon rejects his cynical assessment of human nature; Alcibiades approaches, and Timon leads him away to a feast, where all will share a bounteous time (I.1.256). The scene ends with the comments of some Athenian lords, which underline the emblematic significance of what we have just witnessed:

He pours it out: Plutus, the god of gold,
Is but his steward; no meed but he repays
Sevenfold above itself; no gift to him
But breeds the giver a return exceeding
All use of quittance.

(I.1.278-82)

The second scene amplifies the impression of the first, as we watch Timon lavishly entertaining his friends to a banquet, repaying all presents brought to him with extravagant generosity, and descanting on true friendship till tears come to his eyes at the thought of what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes (I.2.100-01). The first hint of disaster is sounded in the steward's asides—'Tis pity bounty had not eyes behind (I.2.158) and He commands us to provide and give great gifts, / And all out of an empty coffer (I.2.189-90)—and Act I comes to a close with two assessments of Timon's behaviour: the Third Lord's O, he's the very soul of bounty (I.2.207) is counterpointed a few lines later by Apemantus's verdict, Thou giv'st so long, Timon, I fear me thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly (I.2.243-4).

In the brief second act, the servants of the money-lenders gather to reclaim the sums that Timon has borrowed to sustain his hospitality and Flavius, the steward, at last manages to convince him that his finances are in a state of crisis, although he remains confident that the bonds of friendship will hold firm in his time of need.

Act III mirrors the episodic structure of Act I. One after another, men who have enjoyed Timon's bounty find excuses for not helping him. More servants assemble to collect debts from Timon and his anger begins to brew against the ingratitude of mankind. His second banquet ends with him driving away his guests in a fury, in symbolic contrast to the parallel scene in Act I. This symmetry is emphasised by the final line of this act and of the first phase of the play—a line spoken by Ventidius, the very first recipient of his largesse in Act I: One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones (III.6.119).

In these first three acts, the episodes accumulate to demonstrate the themes of Timon's bounty, his financial collapse, and the ingratitude of his friends. In spite of the episodic method, this phase of the play constitutes a developing, if somewhat stylized, story, designed to illustrate the Poet's fable. The underlying structural principle is a narrative one, and the meaning of the drama is carried by the symbolic action. This is not the case in the continuation of Timon's ‘Life’ in Acts IV-V. After the transitional soliloquy and the scene of the parting servants at the start of Act IV, the rest of the act and the first scene of Act V form an unbroken sequence of encounters, in which various characters approach Timon in procession and are lashed by his tongue. Alcibiades, with the prostitutes Phrynia and Timandra; Apemantus; the bandits; Flavius; the Poet and the Painter; and the senators: each in turn provides a separate episode, giving the misanthrope ample opportunity to expound his bitter view of his species. As Winifred Nowottny has shown, the order in which the visitors approach Timon's cave is not governed by the requirements of the action in the usual dramatic sense. Instead, “the function of the plot itself, in this part of the play, is to provide encounters with people who will appear to have suggested to the hero precisely those symbols upon which the dramatist's imagination is at work”.²⁶ The meaning is carried no longer by the story, but by the developing meditation on the nature of man and the society and universe he inhabits.

The difference in the nature of the episodes that make up the two halves of Timon's career can be gauged by comparing the role of language in the two parts of the play. In Acts I-III, Timon is engaged in dialogue with his friends and clients. His only lengthy utterances—none of them soliloquies—are when he addresses his guests at the banquet and weeps at the vision of brotherhood he conjures up, and in the parallel scene in the second banquet, when he makes his mock prayer to the gods and turns his wrath on the smiling, smooth, detested parasites (III.6.94) at his table. Words function as the accompaniment of deeds, as the medium for social intercourse. In Acts IV-V, dialogue is superceded by soliloquy or by extended harangues by Timon, in which he expounds his philosophy of universal depravity and heaps curses on his countrymen (IV.1.1-41; IV.3.1-47, 105-28, 175-95, 248-75, 373-90, 422-48). Words have now taken over from deeds as the medium for Timon's self-expression and as the focus of dramatic attention. It may be this shift in artistic method from stylized plot to stylized rhetoric that has led critics like Oscar Campbell to the conclusion that the two halves of the play represent less and more finished portions of Shakespeare's text and Winifred Nowottny to the view that most of Acts I and III and the latter part of Act V are by another hand.²⁷ But perhaps we shall get nearer to the true nature of Timon of Athens as an experimental work of art if we consider the possibility that the greater elaboration of the language in Acts IV-V is a response to the demands of a different generic model from that followed in Acts I-III.

III

This brings us to the fundamental question of what those generic models were. What literary kinds was Shakespeare harnessing together in Timon of Athens? A. S. Collins' suggestion that this “most striking of his experiments” was a development from “the medieval morality play”²⁸ has been taken up in more recent articles, which seek to establish that Shakespeare was deliberately exploiting earlier types of drama. David M. Bergeron traces “the basic parallelism between the fate of Timon and Everyman”, but acknowledges that once the heroes have been deserted by their worldly companions “the two plays begin to go opposite ways”.²⁹ Anne Lancashire puts her main emphasis on this divergence, arguing that, whereas Marlowe took the psychomachia, exemplified by Mankind, for his model in Doctor Faustus, “Shakespeare uses the tradition of plays such as Everyman, in which the mankind hero is brought, by the experience of some material disaster, to a realization of the transitory nature of worldly goods, and accordingly turns to spiritual values”. Of course, like Marlowe, Shakespeare “reverses the stock morality-play ending of spiritual salvation … and essentially shows Timon going to death ‘unredeemed’, a self-made exile from human society”. Timon of Athens is thus placed “as secularized, anti-traditional everyman drama”, which would have appealed to an audience “fully conscious that Shakespeare was using the morality tradition to create an anti-Everyman”.³⁰ Ruth Levitsky finds a more appropriate model in Skelton's Magnyfycence which, like Timon of Athens, “is secular in its concern with the dispensation of worldly goods”. She sees these plays and King Lear as being “related thematically through the concern with the question of how the great-souled man will bear up under the burden either of prosperity or of adversity”, but, like Bergeron and Lancashire, she has to admit that Shakespeare's hero can only be assimilated to the generic pattern as an inversion of the traditional type. A satisfactory artistic unity can be discovered in the play if it is read “as a kind of secular morality in which all the other virtues are subsumed within the grand virtue of magnificence, a virtue which Skelton's Prince learns but which Timon lacks from beginning to end”.³¹

While Levitsky's version of Timon of Athens as “a kind of pagan morality” is more convincing than the rather forced comparisons between the careers of Timon and Everyman, all three interpretations are weakened by the attempt to force the play into a single generic frame, with the consequent need to argue for a process of reversal and secularization of the Christian sources.³²

My own view is that the first three acts are indeed modelled on the methods of morality drama, but that neither Everyman nor Magnyfycence represents the type most likely to have influenced Shakespeare's treatment of a story about Timon the prodigal or to have been part of a potential audience's conscious response in the first decade of the seventeenth century. M. C. Bradbrook is on the right track in drawing attention to such late Tudor moralities as Enough is as Good as a Feast (c. 1560), The Three Ladies of London (1581), and Liberality and Prodigality (c. 1567), the last of which was revived for a performance before Queen Elizabeth in 1601.³³ Bradbrook cites these plays because of thematic similarities to Timon of Athens—a concern with the distinctions between liberality and prodigality, and the effects of usury on hospitality—but, in fact, they also afford striking parallels to the dramatic methods adopted by Shakespeare in Acts I-III.

Louis B. Wright pointed out many years ago that the uses to which morality plays were put as vehicles for propaganda changed to reflect the more stable government under Elizabeth, so that “interest began to shift from theology to economics and state-craft”.³⁴ This adaptation of the methods of earlier Tudor drama to meet the challenge of contemporary conditions was begun in such works of the 1560s and 1570s as Thomas Lupton's All for Money, Walter Wager's Enough is as Good as a Feast, The Trial of Treasure, and George Wapull's The Tide Tarrieth No Man. These achievements, in turn, prepared the way for further developments. In Wright's words, “The convention firmly established in these plays of using morality play technique and characteristics for social satire clearly influenced a group of later plays of social protest in the last decade of the century.” Such plays as Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London and The Cobbler's Prophecy (c. 1590) and the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (1592) prolonged the currency of the morality, “modified somewhat under the influence of modern dramatic development”, until the close of Elizabeth's reign. One of the modifications was to “put more flesh and blood into the abstractions” and another was to mingle “real beings with allegorical virtues and vices”.³⁵ More recent studies of the evolution of the morality genre have identified further changes that have a bearing on Shakespeare's art in Timon of Athens. Alan C. Dessen has shown that in an ‘estates’ morality like The Tide Tarrieth No Man the allegorical names of the Vice's victims—Greediness, No Good Neighbourhood, Wastefulness—should not conceal the fact that these characters are conceived not as abstractions in a psychomachia, but as social types representing the landlord, the courtier, the usurer or merchant, and the young married couple.³⁶ David M. Bevington has isolated another strain in the development of the genre—what he calls the ‘hybrid’, which combines elements of the morality tradition with romance or chronicle material. In plays of the 1560s like Horestes and Cambises historical or legendary characters exist side-by-side with allegorical abstractions.³⁷

In addition to the changing conception of dramatic character in later mutations of the morality genre, other changes of method must be mentioned. Dessen describes the plays of Wapull and Lupton as having a “thesis-and-demonstration structure”, which is designed to establish the author's views on the condition of the kingdom by means of enactment rather than description. The “summary exposition of abuses through set speeches”, which is the staple method of many earlier and contemporary plays, is replaced by dramatic action that illustrates “the power of vice over ‘people’”.³⁸ In both ‘estates’ plays and ‘hybrids’, there is an episodic development of the plot, which is organized on a thematic principle to amplify either a social/economic thesis or some aspect of the life of a historical protagonist. Bevington sums up the technique in his commentary on Horestes and Cambises: “Minor Psychomachia figures have merely been replaced by minor historical figures. They are treated in the same way: developed only to illustrate a theme in the life of the protagonist, and then discarded.”³⁹

Various features of Acts I-III of Timon of Athens can be precisely paralleled in the estates moralities of the Elizabethan period. In the first 98 lines of the play, representatives of art and trade—Poet and Painter, Jeweller and Merchant—gather to wait on Timon and discuss the magnetic effect of his bounty on all conditions … all minds. This is a more sophisticated version of the kind of opening found in All for Money, in which Theologie, Science, and Arte exchange comments on the power of Money to corrupt the commonwealth, or in The Three Ladies of London, in which Love and Conscience complain of Lucre's ability to draw crowds of suitors and a group of allegorical figures—Dissimulation, Simplicity, Fraud, Simony, and Usury—assemble to seek preferment from Lucre and her sisters. In these introductory scenes, the social ills that are to be amplified in the ensuing action are sketched in—the corrupting power of money, Lucre's victory over Love and Conscience in contemporary London, and (in the Poet's ‘rough work’ in Timon of Athens) the effects of Fortune on human loyalty.

The following scene, in which various suitors approach Timon in quest of financial aid or patronage, makes use of one of the commonest structural patterns in the ‘estates’ moralities. In All for Money, Sinne makes a public proclamation, inviting All manner of men that haue either matter or suite to attend on All for Money. One after another, Gregorie Graceles, a thief, William-with-the-two-Wives, Nichol-never-out-of-the-law, a rich franklin, and Sir Laurence Livingless, an ill-educated priest, press before the source of power and patronage with their petitions and their bribes. The central demonstration of the thesis that the tide tarrieth no man in Wapull's play takes the form of a procession of suitors seeking the aid or advice of Corage, the Vice. The method of these two plays is closer to Jonson's Volpone or The Alchemist than to Timon of Athens, however, since the audience is first made acquainted with the Vice and his assistants before the procession of suitor-victims begins. More like Shakespeare's handling of the suitor device is The Three Ladies of London. In this play, we meet some of the prospective petitioners before we are introduced to the figure whose wealth attracts them. Once Lucre's entourage has been collected about her, another sequence of suitor episodes begins, with first Mercatore, an Italian merchant, then Artifex, an artificer, then a Lawyer demonstrating the corruption of different aspects of the commonwealth at the beck of Lucre and her attendant vices. Liberality and Prodigality makes extensive use of the same device for structuring its argument. Tenacity and Prodigality, egged on by Vanity, seek out Lady Fortune and, in Vanity's words: Both at once unto your royal majesty / Most humbly make their suits for money.⁴⁰ Prodigality is granted control over Money, and so in his turn becomes the target for another pair of self-seekers, Tom Toss and Dick Dicer. Like the parasites gathering in the first scene of Shakespeare's play—or like those in his Poet's fable, who fill the lobbies of the man beckoned from the rest below by Fortune—these two wastrels discuss the prospects that they hope to realise by cultivating Prodigality's company:

DICER.
I pray thee, tell me is this brave Prodigality,
So full of money as he is said to be?
TOSS.
Full, Quotha? he is too full, I promise thee.
DICER.
And will he lash it out lustily?
TOSS.
Exceedingly, unreasonably, unmeasurably.
DICER.
Then may such mates as we, that be so bare,
Hope some way or another to catch a share.
TOSS.
Assure thyself that; but whist, he cometh here:
Let's entertain him with familiar cheer.
DICER.
In order, then, bravely.

(pp. 353-4)

Later, when Money, after a period with Tenacity, has passed under the control of Liberality, another group of petitioners, two of them simply identified as Second and Third Suitors, are rewarded for their faithful service to the state.

Not all suits are successful, however, and parallels to Timon's treatment at the hands of his friends can also be found in the moralities. Alone, among those who bring their petitions to All for Money, Moneyless and Friendless is sent away with contempt. In the relatively late play, A Knack to Know a Knave, a tight-fisted landowner rejects the suits of two poor men who owe him money, but their debts are paid (as are Ventidius's by Timon) by the Knight, who represents the virtues of the old landed gentry. Later in the same play, another typical member of the corrupt kingdom, the Priest, finds excuses, for not giving financial assistance to first a near kinsman, then a poor neighbour, and lastly a beggar. His whole performance is reminiscent of the episodes in which Timon's friends refuse to help him, especially in his sanctimonious response to the beggar, which is comparable with Lucullus's sermon on Timon's thoughtless expenditure (III.1.21-9), and in the embarrassed tones of his final excuses to the neighbour as he hurries away—Truly, I cannot afford it, I would I could⁴¹—which look forward to the lengthier apology of Shakespeare's Lucius (III.2.43-57).

The method of carrying forward both plot and thesis by contrast, which Shakespeare exploits in his schematic arrangement of Timon's career as two episodic demonstrations of Bounty and Ingratitude in action in Acts I and III, is also a common feature of morality play structure. Liberality and Prodigality is mainly organized around the adventures of Prodigality and Tenacity, whose changing careers, as first one and then the other is given charge of Money, illustrate Fortune's words about her influence on human life: Fortune is known the queen of all renown: / That makes, that mars; sets up and throws adown (p. 342). The sudden reversal of Prodigality's fortune, as his wealth passes into Tenacity's greedy hands, occasions a petulant outburst that dimly foreshadows Timon's great rage at the consequences of his loss: O monstrous, vile, filthy luck! see, in the twinkling of an eye, / Scarce knowing which way, I have quite lost my Money (p. 364). A further contrast is provided by the figure of Liberality, who represents the balanced mean between foolish extravagance and pinching miserliness and who finally inherits Money and puts it to its proper use.

The late moralities also furnish many instances of commentaries on the action of characters who have little or no connection with the unfolding of the narrative demonstration, but who serve to direct the audience's attitude and to keep the play's thesis clearly in mind.⁴² It should not surprise us, therefore, to encounter Two Lords or Three Strangers in single scenes in Timon of Athens, whose sole function is to provide an external perspective on the behaviour of Timon in the act which displays his bounty and on the monstrousness of men in the act which displays the ingratitude of his friends. Like the Prologue scenes that announce the thesis and forecast the action, the episodic patterning, and the use of the suitor motif, these choric figures are a familiar part of the methods of the later morality tradition. At the end of Act III of Timon of Athens, there needs only the appearance of some such figure as Authority or Virtue to point the individual and social morals in order to round off the traditional dramatic pattern. Instead, Timon lays down his function as participant in society and takes up a different role in the wilderness outside Athens.

IV

In the second half of the play, the conventions that govern the handling of the material derive not from the morality tradition, but from verse satire. The relationship between Timon of Athens and the art of satire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been examined by a number of scholars, and a variety of critical conclusions have been drawn. Campbell sees the play as being modelled on Jonson's experiments with tragical and comical satire in Sejanus and Volpone. According to this view, Acts I-III are designed to present Timon as the credulous victim of flatterers, and Acts IV-V to display him as “almost a caricature of the now familiar figure of the malcontent satirist”.⁴³ In both parts of the play, Timon is himself the primary object of Shakespeare's satire. Alvin Kernan sees Timon as a study in the saeva indignatio of the satirist “raised to heroic proportions”. The lesser satirists, Apemantus and the Poet, are created as foils to the “romantic grandeur” of “Timon's titanic loathing of the world.”⁴⁴ It is noticeable that this interpretation dismisses the first three acts in a single paragraph, and concentrates attention on Acts IV and V, when Timon has turned misanthrope. Alice Lotvin Birney, who reads the entire play as a psychological study in the development of a disillusioned satirist, sees Timon not as an object of satire himself, but as the medium for a satiric catharsis, a channel through which the audience's emotions of hatred and censure are drained away. She, too, takes little interest in Acts I-III and throws the weight of discussion onto Acts IV-V. A glance at the characteristics of the verse satire, as practised by men like Donne, Marston, Middleton, and Guilpin in the 1590s, may help us to get a clearer view of what Shakespeare was doing in the second phase of his play about Timon.

Based on classical models, it often took the form of a dialogue between the figure of the satirist himself and a companion known as the Adversarius.⁴⁵ The voice of the satirist dominates the poem with its impassioned denunciation of folly and depravity, and is occasionally interrupted by the more equable, sometimes more optimistic, voice of the Adversarius, who offers a less extreme view of man's nature. The scene is usually a crowded city street. Various characters detach themselves from the throng and provide the subjects for the satirist's diatribes. A few lines from John Marston's The Scourge of Villainy (1598) will demonstrate the method:

‘A man, a man, a kingdom for a man!’
Why how now, currish mad Athenian,
Thou Cynic dog, seest not the streets do swarm
With troops of men? ‘No, no, for Circe's charm
Hath turned them all to swine’. […]
‘A man, a man!’ Peace, Cynic: yon is one.
A complete soul of all perfection.
‘What? mean'st thou him that walks all open-breasted?
Drawn through the ear with ribands, plumy-crested?
He that doth snort in fat-fed luxury
And gapes for some grinding monopoly?’(46)

The verse satire obviously contains dramatic qualities that could be exploited by a playwright, but it lacks the essential element of developing action. Ben Jonson's achievement, after his early experimental stage satires from Every Man Out of His Humour to The Poetaster, was to develop from the procession of visitors in Act I of Volpone a classical plot based on both trickery and chance confusion. The first three acts of Timon of Athens are much less complex. They lack the element of intrigue that makes the construction of Volpone and The Alchemist so dazzling a technical accomplishment, and, as we have seen, rely on the more primitive structure of demonstration by episode and contrast found in the Elizabethan moralities. Campbell's insistence that Timon of Athens should be read as an attempt to write dramatic satire “after the new manner of Ben Jonson”⁴⁷ is, therefore, quite misleading, since even when Shakespeare did adopt the methods of verse satire in the last two acts of the play, it served his purpose to dispense with plot almost entirely in favour of procession.

After the bitter soliloquy at the start of Act IV, in which Timon finds gold in the earth and curses it as the common whore of mankind, the parade begins, with each newcomer feeding the flames of his anger and contempt. Those who lust for gold and the satirist who scorns it and them are, in Kernan's words, “locked in their respective attitudes”,⁴⁸ and there seems no possibility of resolution in the form of either comic reconciliation or tragic transcendence. John Bayley's description of the effect of the soliloquy which inaugurates this movement of the play in highly perceptive, but the conclusion he draws misses the point of what Shakespeare is doing:

Timon's speech gives the impression of marking time between good ideas. This yellow slave / Will knit and break religions, bless th' accursed, is just water under the bridge before something really venomous occurs to him. And the effect of this reliance on words is the opposite of the way the language works in the other tragedies, both those of construction and those of consciousness. The impression is disconcerting in ways it seems the play can hardly intend. Timon is left with nothing but words, rich in them only, and this is all the theatre and the actors have. The play reminds us involuntarily of that fact, which is one reason why it seems so much less of an invention and separate world than any of the others, more of a recitation, or opera in concert performance.⁴⁹

Timon, in turning his back on the city of Athens, has chosen to live outside the walls of the community, and in so doing has abandoned action for words. Act IV, scene 3 and Act V, scene 1 are extended verse satire—a recitation by the satirist of the ills of society and his contempt for the fools and rogues who inhabit it—punctuated by the appearance of figures who prompt the next flood of “good ideas”. Timon's diatribes lead nowhere—they are not designed to have an effect on the world. In that sense, they are indeed a kind of “concert performance” rather than part of a dramatic action. Shakespeare, like others of his time, was aware that satire was open to the charge of futile exhibitionism. Hamlet, having whipped himself into a passionate tirade against Claudius, suddenly pulls himself up short and mocks the pointlessness of the satirist's catharsis of hatred by word rather than deed:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion!

(II.2.578-83)

And he turns to the active plotting of the play, in which he will catch the conscience of the king. Far from being an unintentional or involuntary impression, as Bayley suggests in his effort to read the play as an unsatisfactory tragedy, Timon's “reliance on words” and the consequent abandoning of the hero, the theatre, and the actors to “nothing but words” is Shakespeare's way of making his dramatic point. Hamlet tears himself away from the dead-end of verbal satire and commits himself to his tragic role by engaging with the evil in his world; Timon refuses all engagement, and backs away from the challenge of tragedy to expire alone in a futile welter of rhetoric. The deliberate appeal to formal verse satire as the precise generic equivalent for the human disaster the dramatist was intent on exploring is underlined by the words given to Timon when he sees new visitors approaching his cave—More man? Plague, plague! (IV.3.196)—a direct reminiscence of the kind of cry uttered by Marston's satiric persona, A man, a man!

V

So far, in considering the division of the play into two distinct parts, the structural differences between them, and the generic origins of those differences in late morality drama and verse satire, the Alcibiades material has been omitted. It is now time to examine the characteristics of that material and to make some suggestions about its function within the overall design of Timon of Athens. In Act I, Alcibiades is merely one of the series of figures entertained by Timon in his prosperity, although Timon seems to have a special regard for him. We do not see him again until Act III, scene 5, when he unexpectedly takes the centre of the stage and emerges as the leading character in a secondary plot. His anger at the senate's rejection of his plea for clemency towards one of his friends causes him to be banished, and he leaves the city vowing revenge. He next appears before Timon's cave with his army, marching against Athens. He is shocked at the change in the noble Timon and emphasizes the similarity of their grievances against their countrymen:

                                        I have heard, and griev'd,
How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth,
Forgetting thy great deeds, when neighbour states,
But for thy sword and fortune, trod upon them—

(IV.3.92-5)

This is the first time we have heard of Timon's former military service to the state, and it looks as if Shakespeare introduces it here to reinforce the parallel between the two exiles—one self-banished, the other banished by the senate. But it is the contrast in their reactions to ingratitude, rather than the likeness, that is highlighted. Alcibiades is set on active vengeance; Timon has retreated into impotent disgust and rage. Alcibiades is sympathetic and offers friendship, understanding and partnership in action; Timon can only curse him and reject him as a member of his species. After the report of Timon's death—never fully explained as suicide or natural death—it is left to Alcibiades to conclude the play in a scene in which he magnanimously, or perhaps expediently, spares the abject city and takes over the task of healing old wounds:

                                                  Bring me into your city,
And I will use the olive, with my sword;
Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each
Prescribe to other, as each other's leech.

(V.4.81-4)

The story of Alcibiades thus has a developing action, which leads to a genuine dramatic resolution. It belongs to a different literary kind from both the stylized morality demonstration-in-action of Timon's fall and the word-centred satire of his existence as a misanthrope, and, indeed, the function of this inserted drama resides as much in its structure and dynamic thrust as in its thematic content, important though that may be. The generic counterpoint reinforces the thematic counterpoint, as the satisfying completeness of the Alcibiades plot, in which a situation is created, developed, and resolved by the determined behaviour of the hero, sets off the incompleteness and lack of resolution in the Timon story, which simply peters out inconclusively. Satire is shown to be a dead end, both morally and structurally. Once the satirist has exhausted his venom against the procession of representative vices—prostitutes, bandits, mercenary artists, corrupt politicians—there is nothing more for him to do but vanish, leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. Alcibiades, miniature drama, which economically charts an alternative course to that taken by Timon, thus makes a vital contribution to the larger artistic design of the play.

VI

These comments on Alcibiades have already broached the final topic for discussion in this paper: the question of what Shakespeare was attempting to achieve in his experimental combination of different generic models. It seems to me that Timon of Athens is Shakespeare's most extended and single-minded analysis of a literary mode which was alien to his temperament as an artist, but which he could not ignore. His suspicion of satire as a literary genre, of the satirist as a human type, and of the satiric perspective as a way of looking at the world had already been registered in his portraits of Jaques, Thersites, and Iago. His tragic heroes had been drawn towards indiscriminate contempt for the world as an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed and as a great stage of fools, and for life itself as a tale told by an idiot. But the tragedies had gone on to demonstrate that this was an inadequate response to human existence. Now, before he put the tragic period and its uncomfortable pressure towards the negative vision of satire behind him, and committed himself to the quite different mood and preoccupations of the last romances, he undertook a full-scale and schematic anatomy of the nature, function, and value of satire in relation to both society and the individual who practises it. In this examination, Apemantus plays a central part—or rather, two distinct parts in the two phases of the play.

The first thee acts are not a satire on Timon, or even on Athenian society, nor are they designed simply to embody the Poet's fable about the vagaries of Fortune and the ingratitude of men. They employ the methods of a genre that had been developed specifically to undertake an analysis of society and its ills, in order to examine the function of satire in a human community. The philosopher-satirist, Apemantus, proves to be one of the necessary ‘estates’ in a society dominated by materialistic values, although Shakespeare has no illusions about the unpleasant nature of the role he performs. Apemantus is coarse and ill-natured in contrast to the open-hearted generosity and trust of Timon, who sums up the impression his sour-faced guest makes at his first banquet:

Fie, th' art a churl; ye have got a humour there

Does not become a man; 'tis much to blame.

They say, my lords, Ira furor brevis est; but yond man is ever angry. Go, let him have a table by himself; for he does neither affect company nor is he fit for't, indeed.

(I.2.26-31)

Apemantus, in this part of the play, is judged by his relationship with the rest of his community—and he is found to be unfit for company. But, on the other hand, we gradually realize that Timon is acting foolishly, as well as generously, in lavishing presents he can ill afford on all and sundry, and Apemantus's warnings against unthinking bounty and self-seeking flatterers begin to seem eminently sensible. His cynical assessment of human nature is a necessary check to Timon's blind idealism, and it has the virtue of being disinterested. When Timon offers him a gift, Apemantus gives his plainest account of his self-appointed role in society:

No, I'll nothing; for if I should be brib'd too, there would be none left to rail upon thee, and then thou wouldst sin the faster. Thou giv'st so long, Timon, I fear me thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly.

(I.2.241-4)

He performs for Timon the role that the Fool plays in relation to King Lear: he is the satirist-jester, who sees clearly and states fearlessly the truth that the blind hero cannot or will not face. The techniques of the morality play, with its schematic organization of material and its focus on representative social qualities and functions rather than on the psychological complexities of individualized characters, enable us to measure Timon's generosity against his friends' ingratitude, and also Timon's unrealistic view of human nature against Apemantus's cynical realism.

In the last two acts of the play, Apemantus has a different function. We are now to measure not Cynic against Idealist, but two kinds of satirist against each other. And attention is no longer directed at the social purpose of satire, but at the motivation of the man who adopts the satirist's role and the validity of the satiric view of life. Both Apemantus and Timon have seen through the false pretensions of their fellow-men, but one has reached his satirical vision through observation and the other through personal injury: Apemantus's disgust claims to be objective, Timon's is insistently subjective. Apemantus tells him:

This is in thee a nature but infected,
A poor unmanly melancholy sprung
From change of fortune.

(IV.3.201-03)

The philosopher dissociates himself from the resentful misanthrope: Do not assume my likeness. With his usual clear-sightedness, he goes straight to the heart of Timon's situation. Timon has learnt nothing about himself from his experiences. He has withdrawn into the woods to nurse his hatred, putting all the blame on mankind for its ingratitude and never recognizing the folly of his own extravagance and naivety. As Apemantus puts it:

If thou didst put this sour-cold habit on
To castigate thy pride, 'twere well; but thou
Dost it enforcedly.

(IV.3.238-40)

Even more perceptively, Apemantus sees that Timon's kind of hatred is self-destructive, because it feeds on a deep personal disillusionment with life itself: Thou shouldst desire to die, being miserable. That Timon's satire against mankind, vented in the great speeches which form the core of this part of the play, is an extension of his own sense of injury is emphasized in his failure to understand the basis of Apemantus's satirical vision: Why shouldst thou hate men? / They never flatter'd thee (IV.3.268-9).

The encounter between the two men serves not only to distinguish one kind of satirist from another—one rational, the other irrational—it also provides an insight into the essential nature of the satiric point of view. Although the philosophical satirist aims at reforming men and the unbalanced misanthrope yearns only to destroy them with war and diseases, both are ultimately life-haters who would gladly give the world over to the beasts, to be rid of the men. This central episode ends with the two of them hurling abuse at each other and Timon throwing a stone to reinforce his words: Beast!, Slave!, Toad!, Rogue, rogue, rogue! (IV.3.369-72). Reduced to its essentials, satire is revealed as little more than impotent name-calling.

Timon of Athens is certainly an oddity in the Shakespearian canon; but to dismiss it as an abortive attempt to produce another great tragedy in the manner of King Lear or as a satire in the manner of Ben Jonson's masterpieces, or even as a poor half-finished project that the author abandoned, is to miss the point. Once the nature of the enterprise is recognized—an intellectual exercise in analysis, rather than an imitation of life—then one can admire the extraordinary skill with which the dramatist adapted his means to achieve his ends.⁵⁰ This is not a tragedy; nor is it a satire; nor is it a morality play teaching a lesson about the vagaries of fortune and the dangers of extreme idealism. It is a play about satire, which uses morality play techniques to demonstrate that, regrettably, it does serve a necessary purpose in an imperfect world, and then adopts the verbal extravagance and intensity of verse satire to expose its dangerous tendency to corrupt the personality of the practitioner and to revile life, rather than enhance it.

Notes

1. T. M. Parrott, The Problem of Timon of Athens (London, 1923).

2. For a historical survey of the ‘divided authorship’ and ‘unfinished’ theories about the text, see Francelia Butler, The Strange Critical Fortunes of Shakespeare's ‘Timon of Athens’ (Ames, Iowa, 1966), Chapters I-IV.

   One aspect of the authorship debate which is still alive, and which has some bearing on the argument of this paper, is the claim that a number of scenes and passages were the work of Thomas Middleton. William Wells first suggested that I.2, III.1-6, IV.2.30-50, and IV.3.458-536 should be attributed to Middleton (see “Timon of Athens”, Notes & Queries, 12th Series, 6 [1920], 266-9); and this case was supported by H. Dugdale Sykes in Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama (London, 1924), pp. 1-48. More recently, David J. Lake has conducted a statistical survey of the linguistic evidence and come to the conclusion that it “is strong enough to justify a strong suspicion of Middleton's presence, but no more” (The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays [Cambridge, 1975], p. 285).

3. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930, rptd. 1960), p. 207. For a recent supplement to Professor Knight's controversial chapter on the play, see his “Timon of Athens and Buddhism”, Essays in Criticism, 30 (1980), 105-123.

4. See John W. Draper, “The Theme of Timon of Athens”, Modern Language Review, 29 (1934), 20-31 and E. C. Pettet, “Timon of Athens: the Disruption of Feudal Morality”, Review of English Studies, 23 (1947), 321-36.

5. W. M. Merchant, “Timon and the Conceit of Art”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 6, (1955), 250.

6. David Cook, “Timon of Athens”, Shakespeare Survey, 16 (1963), 84.

7. Jarold W. Ramsey, “Timon's Imitation of Christ”, Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 162.

8. L. C. Knights, “Timon of Athens”, in The Morality of Art, ed. D. W. Jefferson (London, 1969), p. 13.

9. Robert S. Miola, “Timon in Shakespeare's Athens”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 23, 30.

10. Agostino Lombardo, “The Two Utopias of Timon of Athens”, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 120 (1984), 85.

11. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, p. 236.

12. Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), pp. 39-77.

13. G. K. Hunter, “The Last Tragic Heroes”, in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London, 1966), pp. 11-28.

14. Rolf Soellner, ‘Timon of Athens’: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus, Ohio, 1979).

15. See Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (London, 1943); Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton, N.J., 1960); Robert E. Morsberger, “Timon of Athens': Tragedy or Satire?”, in Shakespeare in the Southwest: Some New Directions, ed. T. J. Stafford (El Paso, Texas, 1969); Alice Lotvin Birney, Satiric Catharsis in Shakespeare: A Theory of Dramatic Structure (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London, 1973).

16. See A. S. Collins, “Timon of Athens: A Reconsideration”, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 96-108; David M. Bergeron, “Timon of Athens and Morality Drama”, College Language Association Journal, 10 (1967), 181-8; Anne Lancashire, “Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Dr Faustus”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 21 (1970), 35-44; Ruth Levitsky, “Timon: Shakespeare's Magnyfycence and an Embryonic Lear”, Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 107-21.

17. G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare's Tragedies (London, 1951). Harrison coins the term to describe “plays designed mainly to display the rottenness of human nature” (p. 253).

18. William W. E. Slights, “Genera Mixta and Timon of Athens”, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 61.

19. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1957), p. 200; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, 1930, rptd. 1960), p. 220.

20. Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London, 1972), p. 133.

21. Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (London, 1941), p. 288.

22. All quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from The Alexander Text of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works (London & Glasgow, 1951).

23. Una Ellis-Fermor regards this as one of the play's chief weaknesses and as evidence of the unfinished state of the text: “a character which does not convince us, upon inspection, that, given its nature and these events, the resultant action presented to us is inevitable” (Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play”, Review of English Studies, 18 [1942], 283).

24. Rolf Soellner (p. 40) locates the turning point in the play's structure jointly in Timon's soliloquy (IV.1), which “announces what will motivate him in the following act”, and in the scene involving the servants of the disbanded household (IV.2), in which “the steward's concluding announcement that he will follow Timon to his refuge indicates the direction the action will take in the fourth act”. For this reason, he suggests revising the traditional act and scene division to make these two scenes the culmination of Act III. Act IV would then open with Timon in the woods. In the 1980-81 RSC production in The Other Place at Stratford-upon-Avon, the interval was placed after Act IV, scene 2, and this proved an effective point at which to break the performance, reinforcing the geographical change of set for the second half of the play. Such a redistribution of scenes would make the structure of Timon of Athens more obviously similar to that of Measure for Measure, which closes the third act with a prison scene and the Duke's choric lines and opens Act IV in the contrasting setting of Mariana's moated grange.

25. The Arden edition of Timon of Athens, ed. H. J. Oliver (London, 1969), p. xlvii.

26. Winifred M. T. Nowottny, “Acts IV and V of Timon of Athens”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 496.

27. Campbell, p. 196; Nowottny, p. 497. If Middleton was involved in writing the play, perhaps the author of a rough draft (see Lake, pp. 285-6), it is conceivable that Shakespeare left parts of the first half of the text, especially Act III, much as he found them and devoted his main energies to developing the potential of the second half.

28. Collins, pp. 97-8.

29. Bergeron, pp. 184 and 187.

30. Lancashire, p. 35.

31. Levitsky, pp. 107, 108, 111.

32. The various objections which Soellner makes to the claim that the play derives from the morality tradition are valid for the Mankind-Everyman type, but do not apply to later sixteenth-century developments in the genre. See Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy, p. 17.

33. See M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare the Craftsman (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 146-7.

34. Louis B. Wright, “Social Aspects of Some Belated Moralities”, Anglia, 54 (1930), 108.

35. Ibid., pp. 127-8.

36. Alan C. Dessen, Jonson's Moral Comedy (Evanston, 1971), p. 21.

37. David M. Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 9-10, 178-85.

38. Dessen, pp. 21-3.

39. Bevington, p. 185.

40. A Select Collection of Old English Plays, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt, 4th edn. (London, 1874), Vol. VIII, p. 347.

41. Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 581.

42. For example, Virtue and Equity perform this function in Liberality and Prodigality; Tenaunt makes a single appearance in The Tide Tarrieth No Man to lament the plight of those exploited by unscrupulous self-seekers; and Godly Admonition comes on at the end of All for Money to draw out the lessons from the preceding action.

43. Campbell, p. 189.

44. Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (Hamden, Connecticut, 1976), p. 201.

45. See Mary Claire Randolph, “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire”, Philological Quarterly, 21 (1942), 368-84.

46. Tudor Verse Satire, ed. K. W. Grandsen (London, 1970), pp. 111-12.

47. Campbell, p. 185.

48. Kernan, pp. 31-2. This phrase comes from Kernan's account of the distinctive nature of the ‘plot’ in a verse satire:

    The normal “plot” of satire would then appear to be a stasis in which the two opposing forces, the satirist on one hand and the fools on the other, are locked in their respective attitudes without any possibility of either dialectical movement or the simple triumph of good over evil. Whatever movement there is, is not plot in the true sense of change but mere intensification of the unpleasant situation with which satire opens. It is here that one of the basic differences between satire and the other major literary genres, tragedy and comedy, becomes evident, for in both the latter kinds the developing plot is very close to being the absolute heart of the form.

49. John Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy (London, Boston and Henley, 1981), p. 77.

50. This view of the play can accommodate the theory that Shakespeare, as so often in his career, was adapting an already existing text—perhaps an unfinished draft of a morality-style ‘prodigal’ play by Middleton—and turning it into a vehicle for his own commentary on art and life. The very fact that in the first scene (not one of those attributed to Middleton) the Poet uses the phrase this rough work to describe his parable of flattery and ingratitude may hint at the unrevised state of those scenes which dramatize the consequences of Fortune's shift and change of mood—i.e. III.1-6, the most sustained stretch of text to be marked by linguistic features characteristic of Middleton (see Lake, Table V (2), p. 283).