SOURCE: Fischer, Sandra K. “‘Cut My Heart in Sums’: Shakespeare's Economics and Timon of Athens.” In Money: Lure, Lore, and Literature, edited by John Louis DiGaetani, pp. 187-95. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Fischer examines Timon's character in light of his “economic faults.” Fischer finds Timon to be an unsatisfying hero whose failure lies in his inability to receive.]

G. Wilson Knight asserts that “in studying, normally, everything but economics, great poetry necessarily studies, though indirectly, economics too” (224). In Econolingua, I have chronicled how the works of Shakespeare reveal a habit of mind that links love and money in an intricate metaphorical system. For the bard, parallel spheres exist in relation to natural processes and artificial financial connections.¹ The two worlds share a common lexicon, each with its own type of bonds, debts, dues, accounts, estimates, increase, profit, thrift, value, and use. The plays often investigate the relation between the two realms, as we see most blatantly in The Merchant of Venice. Because of their linguistic overlap, the systems often become confused, and thus a notion of correctly interpreting the right use of money becomes central in the theme and structure of the plays.

No single image in Shakespeare portrays the link between natural and economic processes as potently as the connection of usury and prostitution. Usury, according to E. C. Pettet, appears in Shakespeare as an inclusive metaphor for the operations of a society based on the money ethic. In the natural realm of human relations, usury becomes equivalent to prostitution, “because they are the degeneration of a human relationship into a purely mercenary one” (335). For Shakespeare the processes of nature are to be desired over social processes contrived by people. This natural/artificial dichotomy reiterates notions of intrinsic and exchange value and implicates the concept of double seeing, or a discrepancy between appearance and reality.² Nature teaches a kind of economics that instructs us in our reciprocal obligations, the right use of nature's gifts. Our abilities and attributes are not true donations but rather loans; the receiver is obliged to put the sum of the loan “to use” so that he can repay nature with interest upon the day of reckoning (judgment). Most often that interest is viewed as the outcome of breeding or propagation: nature's “use” produces more heirs. Breeding is an investment in the future, for a child is entered on the asset side of the ledger. Nature is thus bountiful to those who understand her system of economics, those who, themselves “free,” repay her in kind.

The connection between nature's system of “natural” economics and man's contrived system of high finance is prolific in Shakespeare. However, the similarity of expression for markedly different functions—the one a “natural” relationship whose activities are of the greatest good in creating and cementing society, and the other an “artificial” relationship that breeds an unnatural offspring of financial profit and that tends to isolate and alienate individuals—ultimately contributes to problems in discerning between the two. Timon of Athens, for instance, believes that he lives in the sphere of natural connection and finds his appropriately gauged behavior thwarted by a society operating on the “unnatural” system of financial ethics. The ability to recognize true but hidden value is a virtue allied with the side of nature and “natural” economics. Irresponsible financial behavior more often than not expresses itself in an inwardly empty show of finery. The greatest wealth attainable shows in a congruency between inner worth and material riches and extends itself socially in bounty, hospitality, and generosity.

Directly pointing to this double sense inherent in economics, Pompey the clown in Measure for Measure comments on the social encroachment of merchandising ethics into the natural processes of love: “'Twas never merry world since of two usuries the merriest was put down, and the worser allow'd by order of law” (3.2.5-7). This distinction of the “two usuries” is at the core of Shakespeare's economic theory. The worse is, of course, moneylending at 10 percent interest; the merrier is “the generating of offspring construed as a payment made to nature in recompense for the use of the body” (Pearlman 217).

Alongside The Merchant of Venice, Timon of Athens (1607) is Shakespeare's most “economic” play, and it reveals a structural confusion resulting from the treatment of its economic theme as it moves toward a reckoning with a new financial system of morality obviously here to stay.³ Although Shakespeare and his editors did not assign a generic title to this play—alone among the tragedies, it is merely The Life of Timon of Athens—we can see how it partakes of the characteristics of overlapping genres. Act 1 ostensibly presents to us the world of comedy. Timon reigns over a benevolent household with himself installed as king of giving. He pays the debt of Ventidius, a sizable sum, and then supports him from his own income. Only lines later he donates to Lucilius a sum that allows him to marry for love, basing his gift on the bond of service that Lucilius has faithfully incurred: “For 'tis a bond in men” (1.1.144). For Timon human bounty reiterates and reenacts nature's free bounty. Thinking himself wealthy in his friends, in the community of concord harmonious as nature's hierarchy, he gives in order to celebrate and acknowledge his social bonds: “We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another's fortunes!” (1.2.101-5).

Within this harmonious and “natural” first act, however, hints appear of threats to Timon's order, of motives not quite properly understood, regardless of their outward manifestations. As in The Merchant of Venice we must view the characters and their actions with the eyes of double vision, for they inhabit a world in economic transition and are temporarily suspended in a limbo of values. The Jeweler is first to warn us by emphasizing relative rather than absolute standards of value. Showing Timon his stone, he says,

                                        My lord, 'tis rated
As those which sell would give; but you well know,
Things of like value differing in the owners
Are prized by their masters.

(1.1.168-71)

The role of human value in exchange transactions becomes even clearer when the old Athenian, father of Lucilius' fiancée, in effect auctions off his daughter to the highest bidder without regard for her affections. Apemantus and Flavius both seem to understand the danger of Timon's anachronistic economic action, especially in the Athenian society of opportunists. Their warnings, which Timon refuses to accept, indicate a structural change from comedy to something more resembling tragedy, focusing on a character who suffers because of his blindness.

The values of the new economic order indicate that while worth is measured almost totally in monetary terms, anything may become currency, a medium of exchange.⁴ Timon discovers both of these unhappy truths when he becomes impecunious and is repaid by his friends in a variety of commodities like rejection, false pride, and empty words. Shakespeare capitalizes on the imagistic connection of words and coins, as he did in the portrayal of Shylock, to demonstrate both the workings of the commodity ethic and the lack of sound inner merit that the rich so often hide. Early in the play, when Timon squanders his estate in recklessly extravagant gifts and promises of more gifts, his steward is prompted to exclaim, “what he speaks is all in debt: he owes / For ev'ry word” (1.2.198-99), and later, when Timon finally listens to Flavius, he admonishes his master with:

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!

(2.2.152-54)

The final blow is represented by the vapid speech of Lucius (3.2.44-58) as his portion of repayment for the “small kindnesses from him, as money, plate, jewels, and such like trifles.” These images support Shakespeare's conception of value in a mercantilist society as infinitely various and variable.

Although we are prone to view Timon sympathetically as a man wholeheartedly subscribing to old values in the context of a changed society that mocks these ethics, the character also has shortcomings that temper this sympathy. We may pity the man “shattered and disillusioned to the point of madness by his discovery that the traditional beliefs he has lived by are no longer the beliefs of the world around him” (Pettet 329), but we also realize his own economic faults. In a sense he is an inverse Shylock, for he gives and gives but never learns to accept. Early on, when false friends offer him gifts, he takes them only in order to present even better gifts in return. Even by the end of the play he vehemently refuses help and good counsel from his best devotees, Apemantus and Flavius. According to Kenneth Burke, Timon gives so excessively in a sort of desperate attempt to make his bounty replace the human bonds that he lacks or feels inadequate to form. While these gifts do represent bonds, sadly enough they do not constitute bonds (122).

Part of Timon's inability to form satisfying human bonds stems from a Lear-like fault. In the guise of bounty, Timon actually establishes himself as an economic judge who rewards good socioeconomic behavior and who tests the economic fidelity of his friends (2.2). While Lear eventually learns both to give and to receive, Timon makes no such progress. His giving is faulty in motive and his inability to receive a crucial failure, “an attempt on the part of man to ape divine bounty, ever spontaneously giving without receiving anything in return, … presumptuous and … inevitably … frustrated” (Maxwell 201). To the end of the play he ignores the necessity of reciprocity. His economic abuses, although erring on the side of prodigality rather than frugality, are judged almost as harshly. His excessive bounty, according to one of the senators, is itself a type of usury or counterfeiting that partakes of the “unnatural” side of economic fertility:

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

(2.1.5-10)

Dogs and horses are not so very different from the ewes and rams of Shylock's parable of usury, and evidently just as productive.

By introducing usury into this play along with the tangible bonds that invariably accompany moneylending transactions, Shakespeare shows us an equivocation on bonds at least as disturbing as in The Merchant of Venice. Burke finds Timon as well to be a play “almost wholly concerned with relations among men (as though all the world were a kind of secular monastery devoted perversely to a universal god of gold)” (118). As the money ethic gains precedence, the nature of human bonds changes. The senator who comments on Timon's unnatural propagation of wealth also eventually finds his financial bond more pressing than the bond of friendship and sues an impecunious Timon for repayment. In his decision of utility the material wins out over the intangible. Similarly, in act 1 all of the false lords counterfeit the actions that generally indicate traditional bonds, but they do it only to profit from Timon's gifts and feasts. Alcibiades offers a refreshing counterpoint in that he knows and upholds the bonds of war, fidelity, and honor and lives by their ethics; yet when he argues the case of his friend and fellow soldier before the Senate, he knows enough of their priorities to couch his argument in terms of economic bonds (3.5.76-84). According to O. J. Campbell, “The senators who rule the city value riches more than virtue” (194), and their morality has extended into the majority of the citizenry as well. This is the problem of Timon when, pressed by creditors and aware of the betrayal of his friends, he cries out “Cut my heart in sums” (3.4.92) as payment for the bills. Mingling love and money, this image crystallizes Timon's dilemma: he tried to give his heart, but false friends find such a gift ultimately worthless in a money economy.

As the play moves toward tragedy with Timon's realization of his prior blindness and betrayal and with his isolation, it falls short of a satisfying structure because of the economic lessons that remain unlearned. Timon never achieves the proper balance: as Apemantus observes, “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (4.3.300-301). Timon still persists in giving without receiving. Having placed too much faith in human bonds, he now denies and curses all bonds, even economic ones. A man can rely only upon their being broken (4.1.3-21). Similarly, he is slow to recognize his bond to Flavius, who has been faithful all along, and when he does accept his service, Timon yet again rewards and repays this human debt with gold, as does Lear his “bonded” servant, Kent.

By the end of the play, Timon still fails to understand the true nature and right use of money. He has learned accurately of his society's dedication to the money ethic and of its faith in the ability of gold to transmute human action; some values, however, cannot be touched by gold. Timon neglects to acknowledge the role of intrinsic values, even with Alcibiades as his teacher. When Timon flees Athens and society for the solace of natural economy as a hermit living in a cave, nature tries one last time to turn him around. Ironically, Timon digs for roots to eat and finds only gold; the women who visit and offer him succor are prostitutes. Here Shakespeare stunningly encapsulates the theory of the two usuries. In a passage that was influential in helping Karl Marx to theorize about the galvanizing effects of gold, Timon rails against a society in which the money morality tends to negate all traditional bonds:

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural [son] and [sire]! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, lov'd, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That sold'rest close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss! that speak'st with every tongue
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts,
Think they slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!

(4.3.381-92)

But there is still a remnant of humanity that finds value in serving its siblings. Timon can only rail against a society that has disappointed him; Alcibiades, in contrast, takes arms against a sea of troubles and emerges victorious. While the money ethic and its companions of usury and financial bonds threaten society, all money is not therefore bad. Alcibiades in fact uses the gold that Timon gives him to put down the economic corruption of the Senate. Timon cannot see the positive power of gold because he confuses the two usuries. As Ellis-Fermor notes, when Timon lashes out at nature, he misreads the function of natural use, which can be productive (265). Nature is not a thief; it merely operates by a system of reciprocal obligation that Timon does not understand. “Natural” usury and use are desirable. Accepting as well as returning are essential in the hierarchies of both nature and society. Friends, then, are to be “used” in the sense of reciprocal human obligations rather than “put to use” with only the hope of pecuniary gain. Having been slow to recognize the latter, Timon persists in refusing the former.

Timon's persistent wrongheadedness attains its final expression in the first epitaph he proposes, “nothing brings me all things” (5.1.188).⁵ Nothing brings him only a self-imposed solitude and an irrational, all-consuming hate. Bounty, used correctly and with discretion, is able to achieve the true sense of community for which he strives. Comparing this last act with act 5 in The Merchant of Venice instructs us in Shakespeare's theory of proper economics. While wealth may lend itself to abuses, withdrawal is not the right answer. Even Shylock is in a sense incorporated into the society. Like Shylock, who hangs between censure and sympathy, Timon is an unsatisfying hero. In both structure and character the playwright can only expose the abuses of this new money economy without finding a workable solution. Some traditional values, like those of Alcibiades and the servants of Timon, show themselves strong enough to fend off the corruption of economic ethics, but these values are no longer widespread. Shakespeare acknowledges the presence of a money economy but cannot yet answer the question of how to cope with its attendant morality. The issue itself breaches the gap in time and setting from ancient Greece to Renaissance England: “If usury then was responsible for this social disintegration and the misery it entailed, one can easily see why … Timon [was] so sympathetic to an Elizabethan audience, which saw itself, like [him], in the clutches of griping creditors” (Draper 26-27).

One hope seems to reside in those who can recognize the necessity of human interrelation and interdependence, those who believe in enduring values and have the ability to discern them truly. Flavius, as steward and faithful servant, epitomizes the hope of man in Timon of Athens. From the beginning he understands prudent economic management, loves Timon because of his inner values rather than his external shows of wealth, and stands by his master in the direst circumstances. Like Bassanio, he is eventually rewarded materially for his knowledge of and participation in “natural” economics.

Critics may have trouble with the structure and characters in this play if they give short shrift to its economic emphasis. Its minimal character development sets the play firmly in the tradition of the moral interlude, which concerned itself with a similar nexus between the worldly and the spiritual (Collins 97). The confused generic structure of the play also reflects its economic theme. While the subject of money in relation to love and friendship usually lies within the province of comedy, Shakespeare found the threats of traditional values growing too menacing to resolve as easily as in The Comedy of Errors. The intervening fifteen years witnessed an expanded acceptance of mercantilism and the money ethic. Even though Timon's world initially is the world of comedy, economic threats to this social stability drive the play toward tragedy. The work eventually falls short of true tragedy, however, for Timon never reaches a proper balance in reconciling the two realms of bonds. While The Merchant of Venice, written eleven years earlier, at least made a pro forma attempt at the standard comedic ending, by 1607 even this was no longer possible. Structurally Timon of Athens demonstrates the effect of the new mercantilism on society and decries its moral uncertainties in unresolved tragedy.

Notes

1. This distinction may derive from Aristotle's original separation of household economy (as allocation for the primary needs of life) from chrematistics (acquisition for its own sake). See Politics, Bk. I, Ch. 9.

2. The interest in how to distinguish between intrinsic and exchange value was, with usury, one of the paramount concerns of late medieval and Renaissance “economists.” See Bowley 64-90.

3. The Renaissance in England was a time of confused economic transition. While mercantilism and its ethics, defined then as “commerce,” “merchandising,” and “dedication to money as the sole embodiment of wealth” (Oxford English Dictionary), constituted more often than not one's daily activities, the traditional morality governing socioeconomic transactions was anachronistic and inadequate. These moral precepts were typically derived from medieval church doctrine and the Schoolmen, passed on to the Renaissance in morality plays and moral interludes. The economically reactionary Liberalitie and Prodigalitie, for example, was performed before the queen in 1603. The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation of sophisticated economic machinery, like bills of exchange, insurance, investment in mercantile and exploratory ventures, and representative currency. These developments, coupled with a distrust of the currency stimulated in part by the coinage debasements of the mid-sixteenth century in England, resulted in an economic ethical confusion caused by a divergence between economic theory and practice. Much of Renaissance drama wrestles with questions of a changing system of economic morality and human value. A bond became confusingly equivocal in actual as well as lexical terms. See Fischer, Econolingua 23-27.

4. For a similar suggestion, linking words and coins, see Sigurd Burckhardt 23, 232; Marc Shell, Economy 3, “Verbal Usury” 66, 71; and Fischer, “‘He means’” 150-53.

5. According to Aristotle, money was barren and could not propagate; this concept was commonly expressed in the truism “Nothing comes of nothing.” Timon plays on the proverb by inverting it.

References

Aristotle. Politics and Economics. Trans. Edward Walford. London: Henry C. Bohn, 1853.

Bowley, Marian. Studies in the History of Economic Theory before 1870. London: Macmillan, 1973.

Burckhardt, Sigurd. “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond.” English Literary History 29 (1962): 239-62.

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

Campbell, O. J. Shakespeare's Satire. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Collins, A. S. “Timon of Athens: A Reconsideration.” Review of English Studies 22 (1946): 105.

Draper, John W. “The Theme of ‘Timon of Athens.’” Modern Language Review 29 (1934): 26-27.

Ellis-Fermor, U. M. The Jacobean Drama. London: Methuen, 1936.

Fischer, Sandra K. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1985.

———. “‘He Means to Pay’: Value and Metaphor in the Lancastrian Tetralogy.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 149-64.

Knight, G. Wilson. Christ and Nietzsche. 1948; reprinted n.p.: Folcroft Press, 1970.

Marx, Karl. Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Maxwell, J. C. “‘Timon of Athens.’” Scrutiny 15 (1947-48): 201.

Pearlman, E. “Shakespeare, Freud, and the Two Usuries, or, Money's a Meddler.” English Language Review 2 (1972): 217.

Pettet, E. C. “Timon of Athens: The Disruption of Feudal Morality.” Review of English Studies 23 (1947): 330-35.

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

———. “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice.” Kenyon Review 1, 4 (1979): 66, 71.