SOURCE: Bulman, James C., Jr. “Shakespeare's Use of the Timon Comedy.” Shakespeare Survey 29 (1976): 103-16.

[In the following essay, Bulman presents evidence that Shakespeare's chief source for Timon of Athens was an English academic comedy known as Timon.]

Timon of Athens, fraught with inconsistencies and long regarded as unfinished, has been of particular interest to scholars who believe that finding the right source will resolve all its inherent problems. These scholars inevitably have cited either Plutarch's Life of Antony or Lucian's dialogue Misanthropos as the principle source through which the play ought to be approached; and their interpretations have alternated between the extremes of romantic tragedy and bitter satire.¹ In a recent article I suggested that the MS Timon comedy, long discounted as a source because of its academic quality and because there was no significant evidence that it was ever performed, probably was performed c. 1602 at the Inns of Court, where Shakespeare could easily have seen it.² I propose to examine in this paper, therefore, the comedy as a possible source for Timon of Athens, and to suggest some ideas Shakespeare may have gleaned from it.

Shakespeare had used North's translation (from the French of Amyot) of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, published in 1579, as the major source for Julius Caesar as early as 1599, and as a minor source for even earlier plays. The fact that he used it extensively again for his two later Roman plays has encouraged critics to regard Timon of Athens as a play written at the same time, c. 1607; for he undoubtedly knew the brief sketch of Timon which comes at the end of the Life of Antony, and turned to it for details.³ The sketch establishes that Timon's misanthropy was caused by ‘the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto’: Timon, as a result, tolerates the company of only one man, Alcibiades, ‘a bold and insolent youth’, because he believes that one day Alcibiades ‘shall do great mischief unto the Athenians’.

From Timon's brief encounter with another misanthrope named Apemantus, Shakespeare picked up the name of his cynic and a bit of repartee. He also transplanted into his play Timon's invitation to desperate Athenians to hang themselves on his fig tree. Both epitaphs which appear at the end of the sketch—the first made by Timon himself; the second, by Callimachus—found their way into the play. Shakespeare probably intended to choose between them during revision.

From the Life of Alcibiades, he seems to have derived little more than Timon's cryptic prophecy that Alcibiades would humble Athens, the fact of Alcibiades's banishment, and the name Timandra; from the Lives in general, most of the names, oddly Latin, for characters in the play.⁴ E. A. J. Honigmann has recently argued that Shakespeare not only milked dry this brief sketch of Timon, but scanned the Lives he is known to have used while writing the Roman plays for further ideas. Especially suggestive are his arguments that Timon's character bears the mark of Antony's liberality, and that Alcibiades's heroism is portrayed very much like that of Coriolanus, the parallel Life.⁵

All this material from Plutarch, however, far from being Shakespeare's ‘main source’, as Oliver suggests (p. xxxii), is only incidental to the body of the play. For the source which inspired Shakespeare to flesh out his play with an account of Timon's prosperity, bankruptcy, and exile, we must turn to Lucian's Misanthropos, a satire of hypocrisy, prodigality, and the decaying mythological system of religion which focuses on Timon's relationship with Jove and Plutus, the god of wealth.

It is much more difficult to establish how Shakespeare knew Lucian than how he knew Plutarch, for there is no known English translation of the Misanthropos before Heywood's in 1637. Critics have posited intermediary sources, such as Boiardo's Il Timone or a lost English play, through which Shakespeare may have derived his knowledge of Lucian; but inevitably their evidence has proved insufficient, and they have conceded that Shakespeare must have known the dialogue itself either in the original Greek or in Latin, Italian, or French translation.⁶ All this is but surmise. Unless one allows that Shakespeare may have recalled the Misanthropos from his school days—a distinct possibility—one must be inclined to agree with Joseph Quincy Adams, Jr, ‘that Shakespeare's knowledge of the Greek story was indirect. A person who used absolutely everything in the barren Plutarch version, would certainly have drawn freely from the rich storehouse of material in Misanthropos. We can trace no close borrowing, no following of detail; the story must have been known to the dramatist only in its broadest outlines’.⁷

These broad outlines can be found in the Timon comedy, which, written by a man with substantial classical learning, follows the Misanthropos much more closely than Timon of Athens does and interpolates passages from other Lucianic satires as well.⁸ It is possible that if Shakespeare saw the comedy acted at the Inns of Court, or read the MS, his knowledge of Lucian came largely, if not exclusively, through it. This is a possibility which I now shall put to the test, weighing whether the material which Shakespeare is thought to have borrowed from the Misanthropos may in fact have been borrowed from the comedy instead.

I

Timon's legendary misanthropy, said by Plutarch to have been caused only by his friends' ingratitude, is more explicitly motivated by Lucian. Timon complains,

I have raised any number of Athenians to high position, I have turned poor men into rich, I have assisted everyone that was in want, nay, flung my wealth broadcast in the service of my friends, and now that profusion has brought me to beggary, they do not so much as know me …⁹

Wealth, then, is Lucian's addition to the legend; and in both plays, Timon's extravagant expenditure on his friends is dramatically contrasted with his friendless poverty. Lucian recalls a world of riches which the two plays capitalize on. And the flatterers who, when asked to reciprocate Timon's generosity, ‘do not so much as know’ him, are made the subjects of scathing satire.

Hermes, Jove's messenger in the Misanthropos, explains Timon's misfortune from two different points of view. ‘It was kindness and generosity and universal compassion that ruined him’, he charitably suggests; ‘but it would be nearer the truth to call him a fool and a simpleton and a blunderer’ (Fowler, pp. 33-4). From either point of view, Timon was a victim of ingratitude. But romantic critics have agreed with Hermes's first explanation, that Timon's spiritual nobility caused him to be blind of the nature of his flatterers, while more cynical critics have preferred the second explanation and have regarded Timon as a fool whose moral blindness justified his fall from fortune. Shakespeare drew Timon's character ambiguously enough to allow his critics ample scope for their argument. The ambiguity is apparent in this remark of Flavius, who sees Timon at once as admirably kind but foolishly unwise:

No care, no stop; so senseless of expense,
That he will neither know how to maintain it,
Nor cease his flow of riot. Takes no accompt
How things go from him, nor resumes no care
Of what is to continue. Never mind
Was to be so unwise, to be so kind.

(II, ii, 1-6)¹⁰

Shakespeare did not need to resort to the original dialogue to find the suggestion of this ambiguity. He could have found it in the comedy. The steward of the comedy, like Flavius, agonizes over Timon's senseless spending—

Soe are my masters goods consum'd: this way
Will bring him to the house of pouerty.
O Joue, conuert him, leaste hee feele to soone
To much the rodde of desp'rate misery …

(III, ii, p. 48)¹¹

—but elsewhere blames the flatterers' base ingratitude far more than Timon's foolishness, and asserts the essential nobility of Timon's nature: ‘The greatnes of his spirit will not downe’ (IV, iii, p. 69).

The central action of the Misanthropos begins when Timon is forced by Hermes to accept unwanted treasure. Timon's first impulse is to reject it as the cause of all his misery, an impulse dramatized in both plays when Timon, digging for a root, finds gold:

He brought me countless troubles long ago—put me in the power of flatterers, set designing persons on me, stirred up ill-feeling, corrupted me with indulgence, exposed me to envy, and wound up with treacherously deserting me at a moment's notice.

(Fowler, p. 44)

Gold, in all three works, is the emblem of inconstancy, the fickle reward for which men will sell their souls. The brief appearance of Timandra and Phrynia in Timon of Athens has suggested to critics that Shakespeare thought gold can make whores of us all.¹² ‘Well, more gold’, beg the two whores; ‘… Believe 't that we'll do anything for gold’ (IV, iii, 151-2). Callimela, the miser's daughter in the comedy, expresses the same sentiment: ‘Who doth possesse moste golde shall mee possesse’ (III, ii, p. 47). Plutus's complaint to Timon in the Misanthropos is a more universal statement of economic whoredom: ‘you prostituted me vilely to scoundrels, whose laudations and cajolery of you were only samples of their designs upon me’ (Fowler, p. 45). The prostitution, and Timon's unwillingness to acknowledge responsibility for it, is the same in all three; but Shakespeare's version is closer to the comedy.

As rumor spreads of Timon's newfound treasure, the flatterers flock back to him with vain hopes of cashing in: the remainder of the Misanthropos is devoted to Timon's repulsion of them. The comedy follows the form and detail of these encounters with reasonable accuracy, while the tragedy follows the form but not the detail—further evidence that Shakespeare may have gone to the comedy for his Lucianic material. A glance at Timon's individual encounters will illustrate my point.

Philiades, Lucian's miser whom Timon awards a farm and two talents as a dowry for his daughter, is thought to be the model for Shakespeare's Old Athenian, who forbids his daughter to marry Timon's servant Lucilius because he is poor. Timon, having satisfied himself that the couple love one another, vows to match the Old Athenian's dowry of three talents for his daughter with a like sum for Lucilius: evidence that Shakespeare may have known the Philiades episode in Lucian. But the comedy has its own old Athenian in the person of Philargurus, whose miserliness sets Timon's generosity in sharp relief. Philargurus is obsessed with finding a rich husband for his daughter, and entertains first the ‘cittie heyre’ Gelasimus, and then the even richer Timon:

Venus doth fauour thee aboue the rest;
A seconde person doth desire thy loue,
A golden youthe: reiecte Gelasimus;
This is farre richer, and thee, Callimele,
Will take without a dowry.

(III, ii, p. 47)

Like Philargurus, Shakespeare's Old Athenian is concerned with making a profitable match for his only daughter—

                                                                                                    I am a man
That from my first have been inclin'd to thrift,
And my estate deserves an heir more rais'd
Than one which holds a trencher

(I, i, 120-3)

—whereas Philiades, unlike either stage miser, never expresses the slightest concern over his daughter's marriage to any man, let alone a rich one. It seems likely, then, that Shakespeare used the comedy rather than the dialogue as the source for this episode.

Gelasimus seems to have served as a model, at least in part, for Shakespeare's cardboard character Ventidius. Both of them are Athenian citizens and possessors of that audacity so peculiar to the bourgeoisie, which permits them to boast of the wealth they inherited when their fathers died. There is no equivalent character in Lucian. Ventidius, in being redeemed from his creditors by Timon's payment of five talents, resembles Lucian's orator Demeas, whom Timon frees from arrest by paying a sixteen-talent bond. But the author of the comedy not only keeps the Demeas episode intact, but also adds a similar scene of his own invention in which Timon liberates another flatterer by paying a debt of the very amount Shakespeare mentions:¹³

EUTRAPELUS.
Timon, lend me a litle goulden dust,
To ffree me from this ffeind; some fower talents
Will doe it.
TIMON.
Yea, take ffyue: while I haue gould,
I will not see my ffreinds to stand in neede.

(I, ii, p. 7)

This apparently was Shakespeare's model for Timon's response to Ventidius's request:

I am not of that feather to shake off
My friend when he must need me. I do know him
A gentleman that well deserves a help,
Which he shall have: I'll pay the debt, and free him.

(I, i, 103-6)

It is groundless to claim Lucian as the source for this scene when the details match those of the comedy alone.

Demeas does not appear at all in Timon of Athens; but the author of the comedy translated the character from Lucian almost verbatim. ‘Almost verbatim’: therein lies the crux. For what the author neglected to translate (or, more probably, the copyist neglected to transcribe) from Demeas's hyperbolic address to Timon has caused critics to conclude that Shakespeare must have referred to the original. Shakespeare mentions Timon's military service to Athens on three different occasions. Alcibiades has ‘heard and griev'd / How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth, / Forgetting thy great deeds, when neighbor states, / But for thy sword and fortune, trod upon them—’ (IV, iii, 93-6). This is a new theme, introduced late and taken up again soon by a senator who, repenting Athens's ingratitude, begs Timon ‘to take / The captainship’ and ‘drive back / Of Alcibiades th' approaches wild’ (V, i, 159-63); and it is capped by another senator who warns, ‘We stand much hazard if they bring not Timon’ (V, ii, 5). Shakespeare evidently wished to stress Timon's importance to the state in order to elevate him into something of a public character, in whose name Alcibiades might execute a revenge on the whole realm of Athens. If Shakespeare needed any inspiration for elevating Timon's character, he could have found it in Demeas's remarks about Timon's military glory in the Misanthropos:

—‘and Whereas he fought with distinction last year at Acharnae cutting two Peloponnesian companies to pieces—’ … —‘and Whereas by political measures and responsible advice and military action he has conferred great benefits on his country …’

(Fowler, p. 50)

These may be the very lines which the copyist of the comedy unwittingly omitted. The author probably supplied them, for they are clearly required in context. Their omission renders Timon's line, ‘I neere as yett bore armes out of Athens’, irrelevant. But the author added some new lines to Demeas's preface which imply that Timon has distinguished himself in military service and which may justify both the seemingly irrelevant line and the one which follows it, ‘But thou shalt in the next warr’:

Wher's Athens piller? wher's my glory? wher's Timon? Thou hast blest myne eyes, now I see thee. Joue saue thee, who art the defence of Greece, and the whole worlds delight!

(v, v, p. 92)

This suggestion of Timon's importance to Athens, even if one assumes that the omitted lines were never spoken in performance, may have been sufficient to have sparked Shakespeare's imagination without necessitating his reference to the original source.

Another character whom Shakespeare purportedly derived from the Misanthropos is Apemantus, a figure ‘roughly corresponding’, writes Maxwell, ‘to Lucian's Thrasicles as well as to the more shadowy Apemantus of Plutarch’ (pp. xxi-xxii); Thrasicles, however, has almost nothing in common with Apemantus. He is the stoic who, in the morning, ‘will utter a thousand maxims, expounding Virtue, arraigning self-indulgence, lauding simplicity’, but who, at dinner, ‘proceeds to turn his morning maxims inside out’, and ‘laps like a dog, with his nose in his plate, as if he expected to find Virtue there’ (Fowler, p. 51). Apemantus, on the contrary, as the near-relation of Diogenes the Cynic, who rails at social vices with little regard for patience, prides himself on being consistent, on shunning the society of Timon's banquet and scorning Timon's meat. Thrasicles comes to fawn on Timon for gold; Apemantus, to flite with him. Slight evidence for claiming a correspondence, to be sure. On the other hand Speusippus and Stilpo, the ‘two lying philosophers’ in the comedy, are patterned directly after Thrasicles. They lecture Timon on the virtue of stoic fortitude but, in a sudden reversal, become epicureans at Timon's table. Like Thrasicles, they return to Timon in exile in order to win a share of his gold. I suspect that neither source suggested much more than the mere idea of ‘the philosopher’ to Shakespeare; and that idea he could have gleaned as easily from the comedy as from the dialogue.

Thrasicles, feigning disinterest, advises Timon to get rid of his newfound treasure as a sign of contemptus mundi: ‘many is the man it has sunk in helpless misery. Take my advice, and fling it bodily into the sea’ (Fowler, p. 52). This line probably influenced Timon's response to his newfound gold in the comedy:

                                                                                                    What, shall I hide
My new found treasure vnderneath the earth,
Or shall I drowne it in the ocean?
Though all the world loue thee, Timon hates thee:
Ile drowne thee in the seas profunditie.

(V, iii, p. 84)

Shakespeare echoes the first half of this speech in Timon's response to his discovery—‘Th'art quick, / But yet I'll bury thee’ (IV, iii, 45-6)—without alluding to burial at sea. Shakespeare apparently took his lead from the comedy rather than from the dialogue.

It should be noted, too, that although Timon ultimately is willing to keep the gold and live in isolated luxury according to Lucian, in both plays Timon is persuaded to keep the gold only as a means of revenge on his flatterers. The two plays are alike, and unlike the dialogue, remarks Bond, in that Timon's instinctive impulse to hide the gold is soon overborne by his sense of its mischief (pp. 65-6).

In the Misanthropos Timon beats back each intruder individually with his spade, and for his final assault on the whole army of flatterers retreats to a rock to pelt them with stones. The author of the comedy altered the order of Lucian's drubbings: his Timon pelts the flatterers with stones at a mock-banquet in Act IV, and so resorts to his spade to beat them off in Act V. Shakespeare adopted the sequence of the comedy. There is no stage direction in Shakespeare's mock-banquet scene to indicate that Timon pelts his guests with stones: the only explicit direction reads ‘Throwing the water in their faces’; one more vague reads ‘Drives them out’. But the mock-banquet scene is unique to the two plays; and the last line of the departing guests, ‘One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones’ (III, vi, 115), certainly indicates that Timon threw stones to drive them out and suggests that Shakespeare may have had the climactic action of this scene from the comedy so firmly in mind that he had no need to write it down. Shakespeare's Timon throws a stone at Apemantus (IV, iii) to get rid of him, and then turns to an alternate weapon (whether his spade or his bare hands is not made clear) in order to beat the Poet and the Painter off the stage (V, i) as a last act of aggression, just as Timon in the comedy drives off the flatterers with his spade at the very end.

Muriel Bradbrook believes that the comedy was written c. 1611 as a parody of Timon of Athens and cites the comedy's numerous references to Jove as proof of its indebtedness.¹⁴ When Shakespeare's Timon pelts his guests with stones at the mock-banquet, she asserts, he resembles nothing so much as Jove hurling down his thunderbolts. And Shakespeare certainly would have traced this resemblance to Lucian, whose Timon frequently invokes Jove's thunderbolt as an instrument of revenge. But the author of the comedy is more explicitly Lucianic in his use of Jove imagery. During his mock-banquet scene, Timon hurls stones which have been painted to look like artichokes (‘To the irreverent, Jove's thunderbolt, as depicted by such iconographers as G. Cartari, resembles nothing so much as an elongated artichoke’—Bradbrook, p. 99) while uttering a line of self-deification:

If I Joues horridde thunderbolte did holde
Within my hande, thus, thus would I darte it!

(IV, v, p. 75)

Bradbrook attempts to justify her association of Timon of Athens with Jove by citing further evidence from Demeas's oration in Lucian: ‘it is the pleasure of the Assembly and the Council the ten divisions of the High Court and the Borough Councils individually and collectively That a golden statue of the said Timon be placed on the Acropolis alongside of Athene with a thunderbolt in the hand and a seven-rayed aureole on the head’ (Fowler, p. 50). But this part of Demeas's oration is included in the comedy as well. Shakespeare, in fact, refers to Jove only once by name, when Timon is persuading Alcibiades to be his avenging deity:

Be as a planetary plague, when Jove
Will o'er some high-vic'd city hang his poison
In the sick air.

(IV, iii, 110-12)

It is an invocation remarkably like one in the comedy:

O Joue that darts't thy peircing thunderboults,
Lett a dire comett with his blazing streames
Threaten a deadly plauge from heau'n on earth!

(V, iii, p. 80)

It is far more logical to conclude from this evidence that Shakespeare, recalling the importance of the Jove imagery in the comedy, incorporated a little of it into Timon of Athens, than that the author of the comedy seized upon a few scattered, veiled allusions to Jove in Timon of Athens and expanded them to Lucianic proportions. Lucian directly inspired the mock-heroic invocations to Jove in the comedy. His influence on Shakespeare was indirect, probably filtered through the comedy.

A great deal has been made of the beast imagery in Timon of Athens, and at least two recent critics have suggested that Shakespeare derived it from the Misanthropos, in which the flatterers are pictured as birds of prey devouring an innocent victim:¹⁵

… he did not realize that his protégés were carrion crows and wolves; vultures were feeding on his unfortunate liver, and he took them for friends and good comrades, showing a fine appetite just to please him. So they gnawed his bones perfectly clean, sucked out with great precision any marrow there might be in them, and went off …

(Fowler, p. 34)

Shakespeare uses beast imagery so frequently that I am reluctant to think he resorted to any specific source for it. But as critics have made claims of his indebtedness to Lucian, I feel duty-bound to point out that virtually the same imagery can be found in the comedy: ‘I would not see / My goodes by crowes devoured as they bee’ (I, i, p. 4); ‘They follow thee as crowes doe carrion’ (V, v, p. 89); ‘Yee crowes, yee vultures, yee doe gape in vaine: / I will make duckes and drakes with this my golde’ (V, v, p. 91). If Shakespeare needed a source for his beast imagery, the comedy would have served as adequately as the dialogue.

A few similarities between the Misanthropos and Timon of Athens, however, cannot be accounted for by the source play. The Poet in Timon of Athens, for example, more closely resembles characters in the Misanthropos than any character in the comedy. Like Lucian's Gnathonides, who approaches Timon in exile with a new dithyramb, Shakespeare's Poet offers Timon a piece calculated to appeal to his misanthropy, ‘a satire against the softness of prosperity, with a discovery of the infinite flatteries that follow youth and opulency’ (V, i, 33-5). Hermogenes, the figure in the comedy who most closely resembles Gnathonides, actually is modelled on a musician of the same name in Jonson's Poetaster; but he renounces musicianship the moment Timon makes him rich and never offers to sing for him in exile. Furthermore, the hypocrisy of the Poet's satire, with its implicit self-exemption, is patterned after the miser Philiades's warning of Timon against his fellow flatterers (see Fowler, p. 49). There is nothing comparable in the comedy.

In his Arden edition of 1905, K. Deighton listed what he thought were verbal parallels between Timon of Athens and the Misanthropos. All but two of them have been discounted by subsequent scholars; but those two are intriguing. The first is the stronger. Lucian's line, ‘I cannot get a glance from the men who once cringed and worshipped and hung upon my nod’ (Fowler, pp. 32-3), is distinctly echoed by Shakespeare's Poet: ‘—even he drops down / The knee before him, and returns in peace / Most rich in Timon's nod’ (I, i, 61-3). The parallel, though inconclusive, is all the more suggestive because there is no corresponding line in the comedy. The nearest is spoken by a minor character with reference to himself rather than to Timon: ‘I haue whole islands at my beck and nodd’ (I, iv, p. 13).

The second verbal echo is not quite so striking. Timon's declaration, ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’ (IV, iii, 54), is thought to be a recasting of Lucian's ‘Be the name he loves Misanthropus, and the marks whereby he may be known peevishness and spleen …’ (Fowler, p. 47). But Shakespeare may as easily have borrowed the name ‘Timon Misanthropus’ from North's Life of Antony, where it appears three times in the margin.

Shakespeare alludes to Plutus at I, i, 275-6: ‘Plutus the god of gold / Is but his steward.’ As the god of riches, Plutus plays a significant part as Timon's antagonist in the dialogue. His name does not occur in the comedy.

It has been suggested by W. H. Clemons that Timon's apostrophe to gold in Timon of Athens was modelled on a parallel apostrophe in the Misanthropos.¹⁶ The absence of such an apostrophe from the comedy is offered as further evidence that Shakespeare had direct recourse to Lucian. The two apostrophes are similar in their use of erotic imagery:

Come to me, my own, my beloved. I doubt the tale no longer; well might Zeus take the shape of gold; where is the maid that would not open her bosom to receive so fair a lover gliding through the roof?

(Fowler, p. 46)

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, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap!

(IV, iii, 384-9)

But they are so discrepant in tone—the one rapturous, as to a lover; the other bitter, as to a whore—that the case for direct influence remains undecided. There is, perhaps, enough evidence to indicate that Shakespeare was recalling Lucian from a firsthand acquaintance, possibly from a school text.

While these parallels prevent me from stating conclusively that Shakespeare could have derived all the Lucianic material from the comedy, they nevertheless are tenuous enough to allow me to doubt that he had recourse to the original dialogue at the time he wrote his play. The problem must go unsolved. But the the balance of evidence suggests that he gleaned all the important Lucianic material from comedy.

II

Working from Apemantus's assessment of Timon's character, ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends’ (IV, iii, 301-2), Geoffrey Bullough states, ‘Plutarch presented one extremity; Lucian indicated the previous existence of the other’ (p. 247). But this statement only serves to remind us that even Lucian could not have been the ultimate source for Shakespeare's play. His narrative is the equivalent of only Acts IV and V of Timon of Athens, only Act V of the comedy. Lucian, says Bullough, ‘indicated the previous existence’ of Timon's prosperity; but if this mere indication of something gone by provided Shakespeare with enough substance to structure three acts, it must have been magic to his imagination. No other source so thin had undergone such marvelous transformation in Shakespeare's hands. For The Life of Tymon of Athens—and this is its Folio title—concentrates on Timon before he banishes himself from Athens, depicts how he enjoyed his fortune and how he lost it. A few critics over the years have conceded, none too willingly, that the comedy may in some way have contributed to Shakespeare's grand design:¹⁷ there are many correspondences unique to the two plays, to be found in no common source. Of all the possible sources for Timon of Athens, only the comedy depicts Timon in prosperity—and for a full three acts. I suggest that the comedy was the most significant influence on the way Shakespeare developed both the structure and the theme of Timon of Athens.

If we except the Jonsonian sub-plot from the comedy and narrow our focus only to those scenes in which Timon figures, we arrive at the following synopsis:

Timon enters as a magnificent prodigal, entertaining his parasitic companions and paying off their debts, revelling with them, and finally falling in love. With him there is a faithful steward who remonstrates against his extravagance and warns him in vain that his wealth is being rapidly depleted by riot. Timon, at the height of his fortune, suddenly loses everything: destitute, he appeals to his companions for help, only to be refused. He grows bitter and stages a mock-banquet, at which he pelts them with stones. Then, in absolute misanthropy, he banishes himself from Athens, but is followed by his steward—the one man who does not forsake him. Digging in the earth, he finds unwanted gold; and as word of his wealth spreads, he is once again approached by the old parasites, whom he drives off with his spade.

This distillation of the main plot of the comedy, which omits only a handful of details, corresponds almost exactly with the plot of Timon of Athens. Though ultimately Jonsonian in spirit, the comedy nevertheless is the only source which could have provided Shakespeare with the De Casibus tragic pattern of Timon's rise to and fall from fortune; and this pattern is reinforced throughout by an undercurrent of tragic sententiae: ‘Base pouertie doth followe luxury’ (III, v, p. 56): ‘Man's like vnto the sea, that ebbes and flowes, / And all things in this world vnstable are’ (IV, iii, p. 68).

In neither play does Timon adjust to his fall from fortune with patience or fortitude. In the comedy, the hypocritical philosophers instruct Timon in the virtue of stoic endurance:

Art thou opprest with griefe? be patient.
A heauy burthen patience makes light.
Hath fortune left thee naked and forlorne?
Then clothe thyselfe with vertue. …
The chiefest good in vertue doth consiste.
Whose rage is moderate, that man is wise.

(IV, iii, p. 68)

But in both plays, Timon's rage is immoderate and belies any claim that he has accommodated himself to a life of poverty. In Lucian, on the contrary, Timon accepts the allegorical figure of Poverty as ‘a true teacher … of Wisdom and Toil’ who has ‘perfected him in virtue’; it is a stoic virtue Timon learns from Poverty, and he is content with it (see Fowler, pp. 43-4). That this accommodation is not suggested in either play indicates a certain connection between them. A further examination of details will bolster my argument that the comedy was Shakespeare's chief source.

Feasting is the central emblem of Timon's prosperity in both plays: the lure of food and drink proves irresistible to the parasites, and is ironically turned against them in the mock-banquet. There are corresponding scenes in the two plays in which Timon, having redeemed insolvent friends and enriched others, invites them all to dine as a kind of reward for their constancy. ‘Hermogenes, thou hast deseru'd thye dynner’, remarks the comic Timon after he has been entertained with a song (I, v, p. 19); similarly the tragic Timon says to the Poet who has offered him a flattering verse, ‘You must needs dine with me. Go not you hence / Till I have thank'd you’ (I, i, 243-4). The feast itself immediately follows in Timon of Athens; in the comedy, however, it is postponed by the comic plot and ultimately becomes a drinking bout at a tavern.

Between these emblematic scenes of communion and the later mock-banquets fall the scenes of appeal, in which Timon wakes up to the ingratitude of his erstwhile ‘friends’. Each play devotes three consecutive scenes to these trials of friendship. In the comedy Timon makes the appeals himself, while in the tragedy he remains offstage, allowing his servants to make the appeals for him—a device by which Shakespeare focuses with utmost clarity on the various modes of hypocrisy. But Shakespeare recalls the comedy at least once, in the scene in which Lucullus tries to bribe Timon's servant with ‘three solidares’ to ‘say thou saw'st me not’. The servant's response is violent:

Is't possible the world should so much differ,
And we alive that lived? Fly, damned baseness,
To him that worships thee!
                              [Throwing the money back at Lucullus.

(III, i, 46-8)

In the comedy, Demeas has given Timon ‘this one groate’, with the provision, ‘thou must publish my munificence’. Timon's response is what Shakespeare echoes in his servant: ‘Thus I returne it backe into thy face: / Ne're bende thy browes; proude threats I doe not feare’ (IV, i, p. 60).

The mock-banquets are handled with remarkable similarity in the two plays. They come upon the heels of Timon's rejection by his friends as magnificent gestures of revenge, made all the more effective because the friends, obedient to their instinctive greed, come unsuspecting that Timon has anything up his sleeve. In the comedy they assume that the banquet is Timon's farewell gift to them; in the tragedy, that Timon's bankruptcy was only feigned. In both plays Timon is assisted by his steward. Even the wording is similar:

TIMON.
But it will lessen griefe: something Ile doe; / Ile not consume this day in idlenesse. / Inuite these rascalls. /
LACHES.
What shall they doe here? /
TIMON.
I haue prepared them a worthy feaste: / Goe, call them therefore; tell them there remaines / Of soe much wealth as yet some ouerplus.

(IV, iii, p. 70)

TIMON.
… Go, bid all my friends again, / Lucius, Lucullus and Sempronius: all. / I'll once more feast the rascals.
STEWARD.
O my lord, / You only speak from your distracted soul; / There's not so much left to furnish out / A moderate table.
TIMON.
Be it not in thy care. / Go, I charge thee, invite them all, let in the tide / Of knaves once more; my cook and I'll provide.

(III, iv, 106-14)

The friends arrive and are duly pelted; but in each play they exonerate themselves with assurances that Timon has gone mad. Timon hurls verbal abuse at them as well as stones, and concludes with a general curse on Athens—the same pattern in both plays.

In examining the influence of a rather amateur source play on a play of genius, it is always safer to look for similarities of plot and structure than for verbal echoes. Shakespeare's poetry, after all, so far transcends the verse of the comedy that it seems almost blasphemous to suggest that Shakespeare could have been inspired by certain passages from it. But inspiration can come from strange sources; and it is so likely that Shakespeare knew the comedy, and borrowed heavily from it for the form of Timon of Athens, that one ought not totally to disregard evidence of verbal borrowing.

Timon's great inversion of Ulysses's degree speech, indeed, contains scattered recollections of the comic Timon's curses. His speech is almost incantatory in its call for the disruption of a natural order: ‘Matrons, turn incontinent! / Obedience fail in children! … Son of sixteen, / Pluck the lin'd crutch from thy old limping sire; / With it beat out his brains! … And yet confusion live! Plagues incident to men, / Your potent and infectious fevers heap / On Athens ripe for stroke!’ (IV, i, 1 ff.). The curses which the comic Timon and his steward ring down on Athens in their stichomythic incantation are remarkably similar to those of the tragic Timon:

TIMON.
Men, woemen, children perish by the sword!
LACHES.
Lett ffunerall follow funerall, and noe parte
Of this world ruyne want! …
TIMON.
Let riuers all wax drye,
The hunger pyned parent eate the sonne!
LACHES.
The sonne the parent!
TIMON.
All plauges fall on this generation,
And neuer cease!

(V, iii, p. 81)

Sun imagery is central to Timon of Athens as a natural correlative to Timon's fortune: from Apemantus's warning, ‘Men shut their doors against a setting sun’ (I, ii, 141), to Timon's last line, ‘Sun, hide thy beams, Timon hath done his reign’ (V, i, 222), the sun is invoked as a deity of scourge: ‘Thou sun, that comforts, burn!’ (V, i, 130) exclaims Timon with deliberate paradox; and again, ‘O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth / Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb / Infect the air!’ (IV, iii, 1-3). Bond (p. 65) remarks that although the Misanthropos contains no invocations to the sun, the comedy does. ‘Thee, thee, O sunne, I doe to witnesse call’, cries the comic Timon at one point (IV, iii, p. 69); and at another, ‘Lett neuer sunn shyne to the world againe, / Or Luna with her brothers borrow'd light!’ (V, ii, p. 81). Although the author never identifies the sun as the instrument of plague, as Shakespeare does, he nevertheless juxtaposes his solar imagery with plague imagery to achieve a similar effect: ‘I lothe to breathe that aire; / I grieue that these mine eyes should see that sunne’ (V, v, p. 94).

The source for Timon's existential declaration in Timon of Athens—

                                                                                          My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things

(V, i, 185-7)

—has long been thought to be 2 Corinthians vi. 10. But there is a curious repartee between Timon and Gelasimus in the comedy—

GELASIMUS.
What's this?
TIMON.
Somethinge.
GELASIMUS.
What's this something?
TIMON.
Nothing, I say, nothing:
All things are made nothing

(V, ii, p. 64)

—which provides just enough ingredients for Shakespeare to have made poetic manna of it, without having to turn to its ultimate Biblical source.

The most striking parallel between the two plays is the presence of a faithful steward who follows Timon into exile. Flavius's only forebear among the known sources is Laches. Each steward is a voice of reason, trying in vain to curb the spending of his spendthrift master, grieving over the likely consequences of such blind excess. ‘What will this come to?’ asks Flavius:

He commands us to provide, and give great gifts,
And all out of an empty coffer;
Nor will he know his purse, or yield me this,
To show him what a beggar his heart is,
Being of no power to make his wishes good.

(I, ii, 189-94)

His sentiments directly echo those of Laches …, who hopes that Jove will convert Timon ‘Before his chests bee emptied’, and before ‘hee feele … the rodde of desp'rate misery’ (III, ii, p. 48).

The moving scene in Timon of Athens in which Flavius finally gets Timon to listen to an account of his insolvency is strategically placed before the scenes of appeal, when the tragic sequence of events has already been set in motion by the usurers' demands for repayment. This scene has no counterpart in the comedy; but Flavius's description of his earlier attempts to warn Timon, and Timon's persistent rebuffs, indicates that Shakespeare may have been recalling the opening scene of the comedy, in which Laches tries to warn an ungrateful Timon not to be so prodigal:

TIMON.
Laches, hast thou receau'd my rents?
LACHES.
Master, I haue,
And brought in sacks filled with goulden talents:
Is't your pleasure that I cast them into pryson?
TIMON.
Into pryson! why soe?
LACHES.
Lett your chests be the pryson,
Your locks the keeper, and your keyes the porter,
Otherwise they'le fly away, swyfter then birds or wyndes.
TIMON.
I will no miser bee.
Flye, gould, enioye the sunn beames! …
LACHES.
Who beares a princelie mynd needes princelie wealth,
Or ells hee'le wither like a rose in springe,
Nought wilbe left but thornes of povertie,
Master, thou art noe kinge, noe prince; …
TIMON.
I'st euen soe, my learned counsaylor?
… By all the gods I sweare,
Bridle thy tounge, or I will cutt it out,
And turne thee out of dores.

(I, i, pp. 3-4)

This scene may have served as the model for the experience which Flavius describes as follows:

                                                                                                    O my good lord,
At many times I brought in my accompts,
Laid them before you; you would throw them off,
And say you found them in mine honesty.
When for some trifling present you have bid me
Return so much, I have shook my head and wept:
Yea, 'gainst th'authority of manners, pray'd you
To hold your hand more close. I did endure
Not seldom, nor no slight checks, when I have
Prompted you in the ebb of your estate
And your great flow of debts.

(II, ii, 137-46)

I might add parenthetically that the comedy may have been the immediate source of Shakespeare's confusion over the value of the Attic talent. Terence Spencer has argued that Shakespeare's widely discrepant sums of talents are proof positive that Timon of Athens is only an author's draft.¹⁸ Timon requests fifty talents from his friends, a thousand from the senate—absurd requests, considering that the talent today is roughly equivalent to three thousand dollars—but elsewhere, as instances of apparent largesse, pays off a friend's five-talent debt and is willing to ‘strain a little’ (I, i, 146) to match a three-talent dowry. Shakespeare obviously learned the value of a talent in the course of composition, Spencer concludes; and those places in III, ii in which the amount is left indefinite (‘so many talents’) clinches his argument for Shakespeare's uncertainty.

Oliver suggests (pp. xxvii-viii) that the uncertainty may have sprung from North's Plutarch, wherein hundreds and thousands of talents are common sums. But it seems to me that the comedy might more readily have caused the uncertainty: Laches has ‘brought in sacks filled with goulden talents’—indicative of great sums; and yet, as I have noted earlier, Timon in a magnificent gesture releases Eutrapelus from a five-talent bond, the same amount with which Shakespeare's Timon frees Ventidius; and furthermore Gelasimus begs fortune to pour down ‘fyve or six talents … into my hands’ (V, iii, p. 85). Here, I suggest, is the likely source of Shakespeare's confusion.

From Laches's determination to follow Timon into exile and to remain his servant ‘through sword, through fire, and deathe … to the pale house of hell’ (IV, v, p. 76), Shakespeare wrought a whole scene of Flavius's paying off Timon's faithful servants before going to seek his master. It resembles the poignant scene in Antony and Cleopatra (IV, ii) in which Antony bids farewell to his ‘Servitors’: and just as the servitors' loyalty favorably mirrors Antony's character, so the servants here favorably reflect Timon's inherent nobility. Left alone onstage, Flavius states his intention to follow Timon: ‘I'll ever serve his mind with my best will; / Whilst I have gold I'll be his steward still’ (IV, ii, 50-1). The couplet is a recasting of Laches's, ‘Well, howsoeuer fortune play her parte, / Laches from Timon neuer shall departe’ (III, ii, p. 48).

When the comic Timon discovers that Laches has intruded upon his isolation, he abuses him with curt language which Shakespeare appears to have adopted for a different scene in which Alcibiades confronts Timon:

ALCIBIADES.
What art thou there? Speak.
TIMON.
A beast as thou art. The canker gnaw thy heart,
For showing me again the eyes of man!
ALCIBIADES.
What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee
That art thyself a man?
TIMON.
I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.

(IV, iii, 49-54)

By eliminating Shakespeare's beast imagery, we are left with lines nearly identical with those muttered by the comic Timon when he sees Laches—‘This former face I hate, detest, and flye’:

LACHES.
What is the reason thou dost hate me thus? …
What wickednesse doth make me soe abhor'd? …
TIMON.
Thou art a man, that's wickednesse enough;
I hate that fault; I hate all humane kinde,
I hate myselfe …

(V, ii, p. 80)

Laches is more than just a faithful servant. He is an occasional satirist who rails against the parasites during Timon's prosperity and joins Timon's invective against them in exile, something which the more compromising Flavius never does. In his latter role, Laches may, as Robert Hilles Goldsmith argues, have influenced Shakespeare's concept of Apemantus: though not a confirmed cynic, Laches makes asides which have that bitter Apemantean ring to them—

Hee baites his hooke to gaine some of thy golde;
I know this fellowes crafty pollicy

(V, v, p. 90)

—and, as Goldsmith notes, answers Timon, ‘in language which anticipates the currish replies of Apemantus to Shakespeare's Timon’ (pp. 33-4):

TIMON.
Thou speakest like thie selfe, and in thy kinde: / Lett those that are borne slaues beare abiect minds. / I Timon am, not Laches.
LACHES.
I, poore Laches, / Not Timon; yf I were, I would not see / My goodes by crowes devoured as they bee.

(I, i, p. 4)

TIMON.
If thou hadst not been born the worst of men, / Thou hadst been a knave and flatterer.
APEMANTUS.
Art thou proud yet?
TIMON.
Ay, that I am not thee.
APEMANTUS.
I, that I was / No prodigal.

(IV, iii, 277-80)

Apparently Laches's roles as Timon's foil were diverse enough to suggest to Shakespeare both the faithful steward and the disinterested cynic.

Not all the evidence cited above, I admit, is equally convincing. The comedy is, after all, largely an exposé of Jonsonian humourous characters; its tone, not at all akin to Shakespeare's bitter tragedy. But Timon himself, though the comedy's central character, remains oddly on the periphery of the comic action—a misfit, a railer, whose fall from fortune follows a distinctly tragic curve. The number of important correspondences between the two plays, so much larger than between Timon of Athens and any other supposed source, points to the inevitable conclusion: not Plutarch's Lives, nor Lucian's Misanthropos, but the academic comedy, crude though it may be, is the stuff that Timon of Athens was made on.

Notes

1. Francelia Butler, The Strange Critical Fortunes of Shakespeare's ‘Timon of Athens’ (Iowa State University, 1966), pp. 75-115, traces the history of interpretation of the play. The two critics who defined the lines of demarcation for our current critical warfare were G. Wilson Knight, who regarded Timon as a paragon of humanism, flawed only by being too good, in The Wheel of Fire (1930; Oxford, 1949), pp. 207-39; and O. J. Campbell, who explicitly refuted Knight by accusing Timon of selfish ostentation worthy of satirical scorn, in Shakespeare's Satire (Oxford, 1943), pp. 168-97.

2. ‘The Date and Production of “Timon” Reconsidered’, Shakespeare Survey 27 (Cambridge, 1974), 111-27.

3. For general surveys of Shakespeare's sources, see two recent editions of the play: J. C. Maxwell's (Cambridge, 1957), pp. xiv-xxii; and H. J. Oliver's (1959), pp. xxxii-xl. Willard Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 50-67, traces the Timon legend from Lucian and Plutarch through its various Renaissance manifestations largely in terms of thematic development, without concentrating on Shakespeare's specific debts.

4. This was first observed by W. W. Skeat, Shakespeare's Plutarch (1875), pp. xvii-xviii.

5. ‘Timon of Athens’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 (1961), 3-8.

6. Honigmann, pp. 8ff., cites a few verbal coincidences between Timon of Athens and the French translation of Lucian. R. Warwick Bond, on the other hand, in ‘Lucian and Boiardo in Timon of Athens’, MLR, [Modern Language Review] 26 (1931), 53ff., argues that Shakespeare knew enough Italian to have been able to use Il Timone—and, it logically follows, the Italian translation of Lucian. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), I, 732-5, imagines that Shakespeare may have read Lucian's dialogues in grammar school, either in Erasmus's Latin translation or in the original Greek; but there is little evidence of his ever having known much Greek.

7. ‘The Timon Plays,’ JEGP, [Journal of English and Germanic Philology] 9 (1910), 524.

8. Adams, pp. 512-21, details a number of borrowings from Lucian scattered through the comedy, especially by Pseudocheus, whose traveler's tales correspond with various passages in The True History. The fact that the author of the comedy relies on Lucian exclusively, and shows no knowledge of the passages in Plutarch which Shakespeare uses, makes it all the more unlikely that he was imitating Shakespeare.

9. References are to The Works of Lucian of Samosata, ed., H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (Oxford, 1905), I, 31-53, hereafter referred to as ‘Fowler’. For the lines quoted here, see p. 32.

10. References are to Oliver's New Arden edition. Act and scene divisions were absent from the Folio. Most modern editors follow those made by Edward Capell in his 1768 edition.

11. References are to the Alexander Dyce edition, published by The Shakespeare Society (1842), from MS 52 of the Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the absence of line numbers, I cite page numbers instead. The play was reprinted in Hazlitt, Shakespeare Library (1875), VI; and extracts from it can be found in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed., Geoffrey Bullough (1957-75), VI, 297-339.

12. E. C. Pettet, ‘Timon of Athens: The Disruption of Feudal Morality,’ RES, [Review of English Studies] 23 (1947), 335, thinks that the whores are intended to be emblems of usury. Kenneth Muir, too, in Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (1972), p. 191, suggests that sexual relations are bound totally to the cash nexus, and thus define the nature of society in Timon.

13. This parallel was first noticed by Ernest Hunter Wright, The Authorship of Timon of Athens (New York, 1910), p. 19.

14. ‘The Comedy of Timon: A Reveling Play of the Inner Temple,’ Renaissance Drama, 9 (1966), 99-100; also The Tragic Pageant of ‘Timon of Athens’ (Cambridge, 1966), p. 19, reprinted in Shakespeare the Craftsman (1969), in which she claims that Lucian is the immediate source of Shakespeare's Jove imagery. For my refutation of her theory, see ‘Date and Production’, pp. 113ff.

15. See Farnham, pp. 63-4; and G. R. Hibbard's edition of the play (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 21.

16. ‘The Sources of Timon of Athens’, Princeton University Bulletin, 15 (1904), 219.

17. George Steevens, Shakspere (20 vols., 1788), XVII, Annotations pp. 3-4, was first to record a few similarities between the two plays. The problem at once arose, who borrowed from whom? Most critics, finding the comedy an embarrassment, have tried to circumvent the issue of Shakespeare's possible debt. G. C. Moore Smith, ‘Notes on Some English University Plays’, MLR, 3 (1907-8), 143, and Georges A. Bonnard, ‘Notes sur les Sources de Timon of Athens’, Études Anglaises, 7 (1954), 59-69, for example, claim that the comedy was a school play, never acted in London and therefore unknown to Shakespeare; Warwick Bond (p. 66) and Geoffrey Bullough (p. 235), on the other hand, join Muriel Bradbrook in supposing that the comedy was written later than Shakespeare's Timon. Ernest Hunter Wright was daring enough to examine the problem without bias and, having assessed the major correspondences, to declare the comedy a significant source for Shakespeare (pp. 17-23). Tucker Brooke, The Tudor Drama (Boston, 1911), 410-11, acknowledged Shakespeare's probable debt without close scrutiny; and J. C. Maxwell, after more careful deliberation, was forced to the same acknowledgement (pp. xix-xxi). It is curious that no one has bothered to look any more closely for correspondences than Steevens and W. H. Clemons (p. 217) did. Perhaps critics are satisfied with the obvious few. Even Robert Hilles Goldsmith, the most recent to ask ‘Did Shakespeare Use the Old Timon Comedy?’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 9 (1958), 31-8, was far more concerned with the comedy as a source for King Lear than for Timon of Athens.

18. ‘Shakespeare Learns the Value of Money: The Dramatist at Work on Timon of Athens’, Shakespeare Survey 6 (Cambridge, 1953), 75-8. Spencer refers to the work of J. M. Robertson, Shakespeare and Chapman (1917), p. 133, who cited the discrepancies as evidence for divided authorship.