[In the following essay, Cartelli contends that Shakespeare deliberately refused to accommodate the conventional expectations of tragedy in Timon of Athens, and calls the play a “radical experiment in the psychology of theatrical experience.”]

I

The “corrupt text on the subject of absolute corruption” that is Timon of Athens has attracted a disproportionately small number of sympathetic scholars to the task of making dramatic sense of the play's own disproportionate blend of “icy precepts” and “sweet degrees.”¹ The text's very corruption has, moreover, provoked even some of the play's most fervent supporters to attempt the critical transformation of this obviously unpolished play into an image and likeness that accords with prevailing standards of Shakespearean dramatic integrity and decorum.² It has also led others, equally sympathetic but more interested in what the play itself has to say, to explore the underpinnings and most crucial motivations of Shakespeare's approach to his dramatic art.³ But probably the most common tendency of recent Shakespeare criticism has been simply to dismiss the play from sustained consideration, not on the basis of its textual corruption, but on account of its apparent single-mindedness, its unaccommodating commitment to its protagonist's stubbornly inflexible point of view. Norman Rabkin formulates his own version of this critical position in the following terms:

The trouble with Timon of Athens is that it is not complementary … at no point do we encounter such tensions as Shakespearean tragedy has elsewhere involved us in. … Because Shakespeare seems to assume a simple moral position, the play is uniquely unable to call into question the nature of being. It never seems … to get down to the unresolvable conflicts with which … King Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello are primarily concerned.⁴

Rabkin articulates this position with his usual judiciousness and precision; he describes in a very straightforward manner the problem many of us have had in attempting to reconcile Timon with plays that hold both the mind and the stage with greater power and authority. But in basing his own dismissal of Timon on its lack of complementarity (an arguable proposition in its own right), Rabkin localizes the “trouble” with Timon in the context of the play's failure to provide what the critic is looking for and has come to expect, and thus transfers to the play what may well be the trouble with his critical ideology.⁵ Since Timon does not seem to generate “unresolvable conflicts” of the variety associated with more canonically respectable texts, the conflicts that the play does generate are ignored and the play itself is effectively excluded from critical discourse. In the process, the play is implicitly assigned the status of an unaccommodating text, that is, a text that is inconsistent with the prevailing critical consensus concerning what a Shakespearean tragedy is or should be, does or should do. Rabkin's privileging of complementarity thus serves the combined purpose of preserving a canonical distinction and a critical predisposition at the expense of sacrificing a potentially provocative critical encounter with a text that may call into question the whole process by which such judgments were arrived at in the first place.

In taking issue with Timon's critical reputation in this manner, I do not mean to suggest that Timon is not as single-minded a play or as unaccommodating a text as Rabkin implies; nor do I mean to set into motion a process that will raise Timon's value in the critical marketplace or in the Shakespearean canon. Rather, I mean to clear interpretive ground for readings of Timon that are more consistent with the play's peculiar dramatic aims and organization than most past readings have been, and to do so in a manner that is less committed to a critical idiom and ideology alien to the peculiar nature of dramatic texts. It seems to me that what finally distinguishes Timon from Shakespeare's other tragedies is not its failure but its refusal to be complementary in the way Rabkin describes. In Timon Shakespeare appears deliberately to refuse to accommodate the disruptions of tragic experience to the consolations effected by dramatic strategies that seek to redeem or, at least, moderate the expression of waste or loss. This refusal is combined in the play with an equally bold attempt on Shakespeare's part to have his audience assume an unusually active role in monitoring and evaluating its own responses to the play's protagonist, who similarly refuses to accommodate himself to conventional expectations but who has no sustained rival in his claim on audience sympathy and attention. The unaccommodating text of the drama becomes in this fashion the occasion for a radical experiment in the psychology of theatrical experience, an experiment that requires its audience both to identify and to engage in a critical dialogue with a character who is at once its bane and its ideal, its representative and its accuser, the anatomizer and embodiment of its own values and assumptions.⁶ This experiment is radical to the extent that it remains faithful to the dramatic logic of its own conclusions, denying Timon as it denies its audience recourse to strategies that might serve to redeem, resolve, or otherwise reduce the prevailing pressure of bitterness and rage that firmly establishes itself at the close of the play's third act and maintains its hold on the drama through to the end.

It is, of course, Timon's unswerving devotion to its chosen dramatic idiom that is responsible for its historic failure to command an “understanding auditory” fully sympathetic to what has often been construed as a denial of art itself. As Susan Handelman states in one of the more penetrating recent appraisals of the play:

In Timon of Athens disillusion is absolute, no substitute is acceptable, there are no rituals of atonement, no provisions for mourning. The play is less about the experience of loss itself than a demonstration of the rage which refuses to accept loss. Perhaps this is why it is generally considered to be a bad play—it does not do what we expect of art in general: help us to accept loss.⁷

In making her point, Handelman seems to assign primary responsibility for Timon's failure to find its audience to the play itself, particularly to the play's refusal to accommodate itself to its audience's psychological needs and aesthetic expectations. But her statement also implies that Timon's refusal to “help us to accept loss” is reciprocated by our own refusal to meet the unusual challenges posed by a play that upsets our conventional notions about the uses of art. Although Handelman, herself, might object to the uses to which I am putting her argument, I find her providing here a rather crucial insight into the critical tendency to deny or dismiss works of art that define themselves in terms of refusal or rejection, instead of conforming to an aesthetic of accommodation or compromise upon which we have come too often to rely.⁸ In refusing to provide us with “rituals of atonement” consistent with this aesthetic, Timon is effectively calling the aesthetic itself into question, is attempting to extend the range of tragic expression beyond the pale of dramatic proprieties that serve to defend or protect us from unmediated involvement in tragic experience. In so doing, Timon may, admittedly, be demanding more of us than we are normally accustomed to give in relation to theatrical productions; it may be requiring us to break critical habits of mind that are ineluctably tied to our psychological need for defenses against precisely the kinds of denial with which Timon is preoccupied.

It is the possibility that such habits of mind can, indeed, be broken (especially at a time when so many of us are actively involved in the demystification of critical and cultural assumptions) that I intend to entertain in the following in order to provide Timon with the new reading I believe it deserves: a reading premised on the notion that in Timon Shakespeare is consciously engaged in revising his own aesthetic in an effort to bring “unaccommodated man” into the affective orbit of an auditory held captive by its very presence in the theater. Such a notion clearly suggests an insight into Shakespeare's intentions for his play that no one can claim with assurance. I make provisional claim to such insight here in order to give Shakespeare's facility as a playwright priority in discussing the play's dramatic effects, and also to counter the tendency to see in the playtext's corruption evidence of a compositional breakdown, the formal remains of an unresolved conflict between Shakespeare's actual or original intentions and the intractable matter he had taken for his subject. Of this theory's proponents, Handelman makes the most persuasive case:

All the questions about [Timon's] authorship, which stem from the many confusions and disjunctions in the text, indicate an unfinished play which somewhere broke down, would not allow itself to be composed. But that indeed … is itself what the play is about—a breakdown of all those ways in which rage, pain, and loss can somehow be accepted, made sense of, transformed into life-affirming energies.⁹

Handelman again seems perfectly correct in respect to “what the play is about,” but when she connects the play's dramatic breakdowns with a sympathetic breakdown in the compositional process itself, she tends to make Shakespeare more the victim than the master of his own intentions and to define the play in terms of the same rhetoric of accommodation that gave us Timon's lack of complementarity.¹⁰ Shakespeare does, of course, go to some trouble in the text of the play as we have it to mediate our generally inescapable involvement with Timon; the Alcibiades subplot, the “normative” incursions of Flavius, as well as the sometimes nagging monomania of Timon himself, all seem to constitute gestures in this direction. But each also seems sufficiently half-hearted and ambiguous to suggest that Shakespeare did not intend his audience to escape so easily from the disturbing implications of Timon's extreme position, which is, in the end, more a culmination of than a divergence from Shakespeare's recent preoccupation with the tragic predicament and with the dramatic forms required to express it. It may, therefore, be more reasonable to assume that compositional strategies which permitted Shakespeare to provide at least the outlines of reconciliation in the great tragedies either proved insufficient in relation to Timon, or—an alternative I find more convincing—simply inappropriate to the kind of play Shakespeare was writing. The inefficacy of such strategies in Timon, rather than serving as evidence of Shakespeare's inability to achieve his intentions, may, in short, help us better to understand just what his intentions were.¹¹

Richard Fly approaches the problem of intentionality with a more obvious regard for Shakespeare's control over his own experiment, but, like Handelman, ultimately identifies the process of accommodation as a basic component of the tragic medium itself:

In his monomaniac actions and language Timon has been slowly destroying himself as a dramatic entity by attacking the very structure that sustains his being. Shakespeare's apparent willingness to attend the misanthrope on his drift towards non-being suggests his own temporary commitment to a concomitant aesthetic suicide. He appears to have designed a play licensed to pursue its own generic collapse by a perverse rejection of its own medium.¹²

What is especially noteworthy about Fly's formulation is his explicit identification of Timon's rejection of the world's values with Shakespeare's rejection of his own aesthetic standards, his designation as “perverse” Shakespeare's refusal to provide either his play or his audience with what Fly terms a “middle ground of compromise and moderation.”¹³ The question Fly provokes here is whether “Shakespeare's apparent willingness to attend” Timon so unconditionally really must issue in “a concomitant aesthetic suicide,” in “a play licensed to pursue its own generic collapse,” as opposed to encouraging the collapse and consequent revision of our own critical categories. Fly avoids having to dwell on the consequences of his own formulation by critically disengaging Shakespeare from Timon in his discussion of the closing movement of the play where he contends that “Timon succumbs to suicidal silence, but Shakespeare goes on to finish the play in a new key” by returning “to the abandoned world of mediation, the carefully excluded ‘middle of humanity’” embodied by the now moderate and forgiving Alcibiades.¹⁴ But those of us who are less willing than Fly to accept the seeming even-handedness of a character whom Kenneth Burke has aptly termed a “winsome rotter,” and, hence, are less persuaded of the efficacy of what Handelman describes as “an artificial and uncertain resolution” must continue to dwell on the question Fly has answered to his own satisfaction.¹⁵ We must also begin to examine the ways in which a play that so consistently resists accommodating itself to critical rituals of atonement—framed in the idiom of complementarity, compromise, and mediation—may actually be able to explore areas of theatrical experience left unexplored by more obviously balanced dramatic productions.

II

At the end of King Lear, Edgar offers a powerful corrective to Albany's understandably human but dramatically inappropriate attempt to compensate for a tragic loss by formalizing his response to it: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” (5.3.328-29). Edgar is rejecting here what Nietzsche calls “the mendacious finery” that is the conventional appliance of “the man of culture” in favor of “the unvarnished expression of the truth,” which is, in Nietzsche's terms, the true “sphere of poetry.”¹⁶ Edgar's corrective resonates throughout the second half of Timon of Athens, but nowhere more crucially than in Timon's interview with the Poet and the Painter in 5.1 and in his dialogue with Apemantus in 4.3. In the former scene, Timon responds to the Poet's chronically verbose hypocrisy—“I am rapt, and cannot cover / The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude / With any size of words”—by offering a corrective of his own in regard to the frequently duplicitous relationship that obtains between words and feelings: “Let it go naked, men may see't the better” (5.1.63-66).¹⁷ Without unduly overrating the importance of this one statement in relation to the play as a whole, I would submit that its advocacy of “unvarnished expression” occupies a pivotal role in Shakespeare's attempt to give the unaccommodating spirit of Edgar's remark a more sustained hearing than it could receive within the confines of the earlier play.¹⁸ Letting feelings “go naked” is not, of course, a characteristic procedure of art. Indeed, it can, as Fly suggests, constitute a “rejection” of artistic control that could be construed as “perverse” if in the act of rejection it fails to communicate its purpose to an audience. But there is a second half to Timon's statement that endows his injunction with a positive purpose, and thus makes it appear less a rejection of art than a rejection of the gilded sophistries that pass themselves off as art. The Poet should, according to Timon, let his ingratitude go naked that “men may see't the better,” so that it may be made plain and clearly discernible to everyone, hence, impossible to deny. It is here, I believe, that Timon's voice can be confidently identified with that of its author whose evolving aesthetic involves the same uncompromising approach to tragic experience which Timon brings to bear on his succession of personal encounters. That such an approach continues to elicit far more negative critical appraisals than those generated by the similarly disturbing but comparatively more “complementary” King Lear may suggest that we are, ourselves, more like the Painter and the Poet than we are like Edgar or Timon. As a consequence of our general uneasiness in regard to feelings that go naked and truths that remain unvarnished, we are likely to be on the lookout, throughout the second half of Timon, for other characters with whom we can identify our interests and for dramatic encounters that will serve either to discredit Timon, or to place him at a sufficient remove from us so that he might become the object of our critical scrutiny, instead of our anatomizer and accuser.

It is just such an area of relief that Shakespeare seems to provide for us when in 4.3 Apemantus delivers what has appeared to many to be the fatal critical blow against Timon's uncompromising indictment of the world's corruption:

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but
the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy
gilt and thy perfume, they mock'd thee for too much
curiosity; in thy rags thou know'st none, but art
despis'd for the contrary.

[4.3.301-5]

These are strong and working words. They appeal not only to our need to reduce Timon to manageable proportions, but to our prejudice against people who, like Timon, have never had to endure the perhaps pettier but more perdurable round of daily defeats and frustration, who, suffering now from a loss of fortune, never before had a loss to contend with. In short, Apemantus speaks on behalf of our collective desire to undermine the authority of Timon's pronouncements, to invalidate what he says by invalidating who he is. There is, moreover, a certain justice in this, especially given the apparent arrogance and condescension of Timon's immediately prior attempt to discredit Apemantus: “Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm / With favour never clasp'd, but bred a dog” (4.3.252-53). Justice, however, seems meant to occupy but a secondary role in our response to the extended address of Timon's that these harsh words initiate. For in the verses that follow, Shakespeare endows Timon's speech with a power, grace, and authority that transcend the ongoing battle of mutual abuse and recrimination. In so doing, he grants a sudden dignity to the extreme positions Timon has inhabited, a dignity they will retain even in the face of Apemantus's potent counterattack:¹⁹

Hadst thou like us from our first swath proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drugs of it
Freely command, thou wouldst have plung'd thyself
In general riot, melted down thy youth
In different beds of lust, and never learn'd
The icy precepts of respect, but followed
The sugar'd game before thee. But myself—
Who had the world as my confectionary,
The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment:
That numberless upon me stuck, as leaves
Do on the oak, have with one winter's brush
Fell from their boughs and left me open, bare,
For every storm that blows—I, to bear this,
That never knew but better, is some burthen.
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in 't. Why shouldst thou hate men?
They never flatter'd thee.

[4.3.254-72]

This speech, providing as it does an influential preface to Apemantus's rejoinder, constitutes a pivotal moment in the play's complex shaping of audience response. The excessive animus toward Apemantus that it betrays both at its beginning and end—“Hence, be gone! / If thou hadst not been born the worst of men, / Thou hadst been a knave and flatterer” (4.3.276-78)—may, as noted above, serve to further alienate an audience that is not sympathetic in the first place to Timon's bias in favor of the prerogatives of privilege. But I believe that the speech is intentionally geared to break down even this audience's resistance to Timon—and to do so before Apemantus has an opportunity to respond—by basing its appeal not on a conscious evaluation of what Timon says, but on a more immediate participation in the story he tells.

Shakespeare proceeds here in a manner that is consistent with his ongoing attempt to make his protagonist's approach to the audience both dramatically direct and psychologically provocative, but also in a manner that is uncharacteristic of his writing for Timon in the second half of the play, which is usually phrased in the shrill language of invective. Timon seems meant to surprise us as he recalls with a contagious nostalgia and, in the process, conjures up in remarkably appealing terms the life of pleasure he lived when all the world was his “confectionary.” His speech has the effect of awakening in us a shared sympathy for that life (based, perhaps, on our own common fantasies about our respective “golden ages”) which tends to disarm us of the censorious attitude we may have previously developed in regard to Timon's earlier prodigality. Clearly, Timon is not “going naked” here in the same way he later suggests the Poet should. But he is going naked in a different and profounder sense by giving us sustained insight into an interior life (inhabited by his own common fantasies) that most critics of the play refuse to believe exists. When Timon speaks of “The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men” that once surrounded him with an almost maternal warmth but have now disappeared, he recreates for his audience its own inner narrative of security and separation, compelling it to identify its earliest experience of loss with his present state of abandonment, despite the fact that, on a conscious level, the men of whom Timon speaks were merely servants and suitors “At duty.” This largely unconscious (though, perhaps, consciously wrought) bonding between actor and audience is, I would submit, precisely the “stuff” theatrical experience is made upon, a point easy to lose sight of when speeches like this one are read with a profounder regard for surface detail than for the kind of interactional dynamics a playwright must always have in mind. The dynamics of this moment are such that after Timon reaches the peak of his expression of abandonment—in the wonderfully evocative tree/leaves simile—the point he has been moving toward—“I, to bear this,” etc.—is made with far greater impact than it could command were we to encounter it in complete isolation from performative considerations. In short, these too are strong and working words and, as such, they make a case for Timon's “extremity of both ends” that no representative of the “middle of humanity” can wholly discredit, especially when the latter must compete against the audience's desire for identification, which generally proves to be a more dominant force than resistance in the peculiar economy of theatrical experience.

Placed in its full performative context, Apemantus's critique of Timon thus loses a great deal of the choric authority that is frequently claimed for it. We may, of course, continue to rely on it as a buffer between ourselves and Timon's more icy precepts, as an endorsement of an ethic of accommodation that opposes itself to Timon's rather subversive claim on our sympathies. But to do so would be at odds with Shakespeare's prevailing approach to such situations throughout the second half of the play, which involves turning our search for areas of relief from Timon into a renewed respect for Timon's rejection of the same. In the present instance, we first expect Apemantus to drive Timon out of his misanthropic humor but actually play witness to a reversal of roles. In an ironic variation on Jonsonian practice, the “fantasist” eventually confutes the “counter-fantasist” and disarms him of his presumptive claim to the role of professional demystifier by revealing his own embeddedness in a “middle of humanity” he once professed to disdain.²⁰ An even more subtle reversal characterizes Timon's encounter with Alcibiades in the first half of 4.3, which, like the ensuing encounter with Apemantus, focuses on a “normative” character with whom an audience might easily identify its interests, but whose own interests come to seem increasingly mercenary. Critics who like to envision Alcibiades as the restorative embodiment of balance and moderation at play's end tend to pass lightly over the company Alcibiades keeps in this scene, and thus fail to make the connection Timon makes in linking the soldier's pursuits with those of his prostitute companions:

I know thee too, and more than I know thee
I not desire to know. Follow thy drum;
With man's blood paint the ground, gules, gules.
Religious canons, civil laws are cruel;
Then what should war be? This fell whore of thine
Hath in her more destruction than thy sword,
For all her cherubin look.

[4.3.57-64]

Timon restates here the critical equation of war with lechery that Thersites makes in Troilus and Cressida, but does not do so in the idiom of the professional detractor whose satiric thrusts are indistinguishable from sarcasm. Rather, he speaks in the more authoritative vein of a self-exiled outsider who has become sufficiently estranged from the world he formerly inhabited to be able to anatomize its most common values and assumptions. Indeed, Timon “reads” the face of Alcibiades's “fell whore” with the same interpretive facility Macbeth brings to bear on the news of Lady Macbeth's death. And, though his insight into the cruelty of human institutions may be more sudden and unmediated than King Lear's, this is only the result of the dramatic shorthand Shakespeare employs throughout Timon to move his former concern with narrative development into the background, and to foreground what is most unaccommodating in his dramatic text.²¹

Surely, Timon is too wholesale in his condemnations, and Alcibiades does, conceivably, remain a more sympathetic character than Timon portrays. But this does not change the fact that most of what Timon asserts constitutes a faithful anatomy of the world the play presents and of the characters who inhabit it, as the following, consciously enigmatic exchange, seems meant to illustrate:

ALCIB.
I have heard in some sort of thy miseries.
TIM.
Thou saw'st them when I had prosperity.
ALCIB.
I see them now; then was a blessed time.
TIM.
As thine is now, held with a brace of harlots.

[4.3.78-81]

Timon's attempt here to turn upside-down Alcibiades's notions about what constitutes misery and what constitutes prosperity meets with a complete lack of understanding on the part of a character presumably meant to embody our own normative notions about the same. This being the case, what, then, could Shakespeare have expected our own response to be? Clearly, Shakespeare would be asking as much of his audience as Timon is asking of Alcibiades were he to require it to reverse entirely its most ingrained notions about what really constitutes “a blessed time.” The point is that Shakespeare is asking a lot of the audience, perhaps more than Timon (who knows very well that “then” had its share of blessings, as his later discourse on its “sweet degrees” makes plain) is asking of the irreversibly limited Alcibiades, who is more interested in Timon's gold than his “counsel” (4.3.131). Timon's baiting of Alcibiades seems intended to provoke the audience into making the kind of intellectual leap Alcibiades is plainly incapable of making; it seems meant to draw the audience out of its complacent identification with a set of values Timon is in the process of transvaluing. Shakespeare provides Timon with apt tools for his seemingly quixotic task by making the rest of Alcibiades's visit serve as the dramatic demonstration that his values are, indeed, “held with a brace of harlots.” As the scene proceeds, and Phrynia and Timandra respond to Timon's injunction to “Be strong in whore” by saying, “Believe 't that we'll do anything for gold” (4.3.143, 152), our normative associations with Alcibiades are performatively broken down and displaced by the performatively more appealing spirit of indignation we identify with Timon, whose anatomy of the world now commands an enhanced admiration and respect.

This dramatic transaction (like others in the play, including Timon's exchange with Apemantus) is, however, complicated by the extreme form Timon's indignation takes and the unpredictable effect of that form on an audience conceivably unaccustomed to identifying its interests with so harsh and unrelenting a dramatic vehicle as invective:

Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man; strike their sharp shins,
And mar men's spurring. Crack the lawyer's voice,
That he may never more false title plead,
Nor sound his quillets shrilly. Hoar the flamen,
That scolds against the quality of flesh,
And not believes himself. Down with the nose,
Down with it flat, take the bridge away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal.

[4.3.153-62]

Probably the most common strategy employed by playwrights who wish to have their audience identify itself with a character onstage is to make that character the walking embodiment of a fantasy it too desires to see fulfilled. Such a character must be able to awaken and bring to the surface impulses or aspirations that an audience generally represses in its life outside the theater, and he must give these feelings at least the illusion of free and unbridled play before it is time to tame or restrain them at play's end. In this way the playwright provides his audience with an area of licensed relief from the pressures of the quotidian, with a temporary escape from the limitations of its daily round, and gives it an ephemeral, though sustaining, taste of freedom and, even at times, omnipotence. In the end, to be sure, plays that traffic in such effects—Richard III is an obvious example—tend to insist on the illusoriness and illegitimacy of such departures from the norm, and sometimes do so with a fervor equal to the freedom their protagonists enjoy (e.g., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus). Usually, however, even such insistence is less memorable than the fantasies that have been shared.²²

In Timon of Athens Shakespeare seems to have set himself the task of experimenting with and, in the process, complicating his usual procedures. From the very start of the play, Timon's position in relation to the audience is made ambiguous. On the one hand, he regales both on- and off-stage audiences with visions of apparently unlimited abundance, and should, on that count alone, provide for most of us the walking embodiment of our dreams of wealth-in-idleness and for some a composite projection of an all-caring, all-providing, rather maternally inclined father. On the other hand, Shakespeare makes a discernible effort throughout the first act of the play to inhibit our impulse to identify with Timon by warning us that “admiring Timon the progidal is precisely what we are not intended to do.”²³ This warning is, moreover, conveyed as clearly by Timon himself as it is by the sarcastic Apemantus, the concerned steward, Flavius, and the flagrant insincerity of Timon's suitors. What Terence Eagleton terms Timon's “projected egoism” generates in performance the feeling that Timon's generosity is as remarkably self-satisfied and self-satisfying as it is ingratiating and that it constitutes a characteristic gesture of self-aggrandizement and exclusivity that seeks to invalidate the possibility of magnanimity in others.²⁴ As Timon says to Ventidius as the latter attempts to repay a loan, “there's none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives” (1.2.10-11), a remark Ventidius seems to have expected, indeed, to have banked on, much as Timon seems to expect from it a round of applause (which a performance-minded reading of the ensuing nine lines suggests he gets, a standing ovation in fact). The pomposity of Timon's liberality thus serves the purpose of undermining the very fantasy he is originally meant to embody and of making it an object of the audience's critical scrutiny. When Timon later effects his dramatic transformation into a misanthropist, the audience is consequently prepared to accept this reversal as the logical realization of its own suspicions, as a turn in the performance the audience has anticipated and, perhaps, even desired. Compelled by the failure of the original fantasy to do more than provoke its ambivalence, the audience plays a cooperative role in the reformulation of that fantasy into more immediately identifiable terms. This reformulated counterfantasy of misanthropy exploits the audience's cultivated distrust in the duplicitous arrangements of society as the first three acts of the play presents them, as well as its equally cultivated desire to maintain its imaginative ties with a character who has at least stimulated its capacity for identification and who now defines himself in direct opposition to duplicity itself. The appeal of this counterfantasy is communicated to the audience in the most performatively immediate and unambivalent manner as possible through the medium of invective, which supplies the audience itself with the vicarious means to express its own understandable resentment at the dissolution of its original terms of involvement with the play.

If we return now to the problem raised by Timon's insistent reversion to invective in the second half of the play, we may be better able to appreciate how a mode of speech that appears in the abstract to constitute a rather alienating approach to dramatic experience may, in performative terms, actually serve as the expressive vehicle of the audience's own interests. Clearly, a device such as hyperbole would seem to have more to recommend it than does invective in the context of a theater uniquely geared to raise an audience's sights above and beyond the struggles and pressures of the quotidian. But, as Burke contends, in a remarkably probing essay on Timon, invective may claim an appeal of its own that has not been as generally acknowledged as the appeal of hyperbole:

Invective, I submit, is a primary “freedom of speech,” rooted extralinguistically in the helpless rage of an infant that states its attitudes by utterances wholly unbridled. In this sense, no mode of expression could be more “radical,” unless it be the closely allied motive of sheer lamentation, undirected wailing. …

Obviously, the Shakespearean theater lends itself perfectly to the effects of invective. Coriolanus is an excellent case in point. Even a reader who might loathe his politics cannot but be engrossed by this man's mouthings. Lear also has a strong measure of such appeal, with his impotent senile maledictions that come quite close to the state of man's equally powerless infantile beginnings.²⁵

Burke concludes his survey of Shakespeare's use of invective by stating that “with Timon the function [of invective] becomes almost total,” and goes on to claim for Timon himself “a certain categorical or universal appeal,” based mainly on his ability to give “full expression” to the impulse described.²⁶ Although I am unwilling to accept all of Burke's confident pronouncements at face value, I believe they strike at the heart of the prevailing critical difficulty with Timon, and are particularly useful in regard to the specific problem before us. For if, as Burke contends, invective has its source “in the helpless rage of an infant that states its attitudes by utterances wholly unbridled,” in an emotion that refuses to accommodate itself to reason or restraint, how can we possibly expect to position ourselves in sympathetic relation to it? Clearly, we cannot sympathize in the theater with an emotion whose surface manifestations we would ordinarily find irritating outside the theater if the source of that irritation is someone or something that we are indifferent to or alienated from. But we can sympathize with someone or something that elicits or provokes—even against our will—our capacity for identification, especially when the theatrical apparatus itself has prepared us to make this apparent breach in dramatic decorum the occasion for our own vicarious participation in the freedom from restraint it celebrates. As Burke notes, Timon appeals to us, as Coriolanus and Lear appeal to us despite the “practical discomfitures” engendered by their respective complaints, in large part because he indulges a freedom most of us have long ago suppressed in the face of “the fears and proprieties that make up our ‘second nature,’” a nature dominated by an ethic of restraint.²⁷

Viewed in the abstract, Timon's indulgence in this freedom should be expected to garner little conscious support from an audience conditioned by its “second nature” to relegate such childish displays to the province of childish behavior. John Bayley speaks on behalf of such an audience when he states: “What survives … in Timon is something hurt, and that is touching. But how to relate it to the human scene?”²⁸ Shakespeare relates it to the human scene by making the expression of the something that is “hurt” in Timon strike a responsive chord in the something that is hurt, angry, or simply disappointed in all of us, and by making that chord resonate with the play's concomitant attack on the very same “proprieties” that seek to hold our responsiveness in conscious check. As the most extreme form of unvarnished expression in which the play engages, invective is geared to awaken in the audience that dormant “first nature” which gives us access to feelings as unaccommodating as Timon's own, and thus to extend the range of our own emotional involvement in Timon's expression of rage and resentment against “the mendacious finery” of the world. Although, like the drama within which it plays so crucial a role, invective may not help either Timon or the audience “to accept loss,” it may well provide both with an expressive medium for the cathartic release of feelings that do not necessarily require the “rituals of atonement” theoretically considered mandatory for the achievement of dramatic satisfaction.²⁹ As Burke suggests in a related essay on Coriolanus, invective may actually serve a “curative function,” consistent with its status as an idiom of denial and refusal, when it is “released under controlled conditions that transform the repressed into the expressed, yet do us no damage.”³⁰

In Timon invective operates within the “controlled conditions” of a dramatic experiment radical enough to encourage its audience to participate vicariously in the rejection of the audience's own “fears and proprieties,” but sufficiently conventional to allow the audience to survive its own act of rejection after the object of its capacity for identification chooses to repress, once and for all, his capacity for self-expression: “Lips, let sour words go by and language end” (5.1.219).³¹ Since Timon's renunciation of language occurs only after he has seemingly exhausted the resources of the medium through which his bond with the audience has been established, the audience should, conceivably, be purged of the impulses that made Timon its spokesman in the first place, and thus should be free to negotiate its way through the closing scenes of the play in a manner that is more consistent with its previously displaced normative persuasion. In the very scene in which Timon enacts his renunciation, Shakespeare has, however, taken pains to condition the audience to resist the movement toward accommodation that begins with the mercenary visit of the senators to Timon's cave and that culminates with Alcibiades's attempt to annex Timon's alienation to his questionable cause: “Those enemies of Timon's and mine own / Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof / Fall, and no more” (5.4.56-58). We are treated in 5.1 to a striking extension of Timon's misanthropic idiom, to a flexibility of manner not generally associated with it, as he parodically plays upon the senators' accommodating rhetoric in his sarcastic response to the same blandishments that will soon win over the “wild” but more politic Alcibiades:

                                                                                You witch me in it;
Surprise me to the brink of tears.
Lend me a fool's heart and a woman's eyes,
And I'll beweep these comforts, worthy senators.

[5.1.154-57]

And we are conspicuously reminded by Timon himself that he is as alienated from Alcibiades and his cause as he is from Athens and the senators who represent it: “Go, live still; / Be Alcibiades your plague, you his, / And last so long enough” (5.1.187-89).

Timon's refusal to enact the same compromise Alcibiades enacts in the play's closing scene may, of course, be construed in both psychological and ethical terms as a variety of regressive selfishness, of the kind we are meant to outgrow in the name of maturity. But in performative terms it operates as an influential determinant in shaping the way an audience will respond to Alcibiades's closing appeal to its second nature. Although humanity in the aggregate will do whatever it needs to do to protect itself from incursions against its safety and security, audiences at plays have little really to fear from theatrical assaults against their characteristic values and assumptions, and this is especially the case when the audience is actually encouraged to participate vicariously in a licensed release from normative constraints. In short, an audience may, in the closing moments of this play, experience more satisfaction in rejecting Alcibiades's attempt to dissolve the disruptive tensions provoked by Timon than it might experience were it to accept his formula for accommodation at face value. Alcibiades's alternative clearly promises the audience a smoother return to reality than does a continuing imaginative alliance with Timon's misanthropy. But it fails to offer the audience the final (though fleeting) luxury of feeling superior to a gesture the audience must soon perform in an analogous way of its own, as it reaccommodates itself to the values and standards of behavior that obtain outside the theater. Once it has sufficiently distanced itself from the affective range of theatrical experience, the audience will, presumably, come to acknowledge its essential resemblance to the normative likes of Alcibiades, and recognize the inescapable otherness of the abnormative Timon. But until the play ends, Alcibiades and the senators who attempt to appease him seem intended to serve as embodiments of what the audience imagines itself to be cured of, not as the welcome agents of a mutually desired reconciliation.

III

Having now claimed far more on behalf of Timon than it would seem reasonable to claim on behalf of a play that has elicited so many negative responses in the course of its critical history, it seems time to subject my own interpretive strategies to critical scrutiny. I have, in the preceding, developed a reading of a dramatic text based, for the most part, on what I have termed performative considerations. My reading has focused less on what the text means than on what it does or, more correctly, seems intended to do when it is performatively realized in immediate relation to an attentive and, perhaps, unusually responsive audience. I have, however, proceeded without reference either to a specific performance of Timon, or to an actual audience whose consensual responses to the sequences under examination could be accurately determined. My mode of approach has, instead, compelled me to construct a hypothetical version of Timon in performance that is consistent with the dramatic directives embedded in the playtext itself, and to reconstruct in both critical and descriptive terms the kinds of audience response such a version of the play would conceivably elicit. Both of these strategies are, of course, highly problematic. The version of Timon in performance I have constructed may represent as much of a distortion of the playtext's directives as anyone else's attempt to develop a performative model of the play, and may, moreover, be incapable of practical realization on the stage. And my critical reconstruction of audience response to a play I have myself set into motion may be too subjectively charged to lay any claim to consensual validity. The problem of consensual validity is, I believe, a central one, and has, in fact, provided the focus for many of the recent debates about the various forms of reader-response criticism, an enterprise that has much in common with the project I have undertaken here. Unfortunately, most proponents of reader-response criticism have confined themselves, both in theory and practice, to the consideration of texts whose performative function is completely “transacted” by the reader himself, in isolation from the powerful stimulus provided by actors on a stage and from the more subtle influence exerted by his membership in a company of consenting others.³² In attempting to adapt the readerly persuasions of the likes of Norman Holland, Stanley Fish, and Wolfgang Iser to the specific demands of a dramatic text, it thus becomes necessary to begin by acknowledging the peculiar position that text holds in relation to the interpretive process.

Strictly speaking, the dramatic text operates as a supplement to the performance it plans or “maps,” as a secondary source to a primary experience it closely resembles but with which it can never become synonymous. Transacting a reading with this text alone is, of course, a perfectly legitimate exercise insofar as the performance to which the text refers can never be reconstructed in a manner that will satisfy everyone in regard to its validity or authority. However, no response to a dramatic text that proceeds in the absence of performative considerations can lay claim to being also a response to the play that is the elusive signified of the textual signifier. This is the case because a play performed in a uniquely public space, constructed with a conscious regard for bringing audiences into close proximity to speaking pictures and animated emotions, necessarily claims a more active role in shaping and manipulating audience response than has recently been claimed for nondramatic texts, which are considered to be mere passive accomplices to the interpretive act itself.³³ This priority of performance dynamics in a play's shaping of audience response requires the reader- or audience-oriented critic of dramatic texts to construct a provisional mean between the two extremes embodied by the static text which we alone can animate and the kinetic play which alone can animate us. Lacking a representative performance version of a play like Timon to which we can refer with the same graphic consistency as we refer to its text, we are compelled to operate in a middle ground that is, admittedly, of our own making, but that is also shaped by a sustained regard for the conventions of theatrical performance and for the peculiar psychology of theatrical experience. Obviously, the validity of this operation finally depends on whether or not the audience-oriented critic and his audience are in agreement in regard to what these conventions are and what this peculiar psychology actually entails; it depends, that is, on whether or not they are—to borrow Fish's phrase—“member[s] of the same interpretive community.”³⁴

Although I am tempted to conclude, with Fish, that my audience “will agree with me … only if [it] already agree[s] with me,” I am equally tempted to believe that an exercise like the one I have conducted in relation to Timon of Athens may be able to provoke even the most wary of my readers to conduct similar exercises of their own. I base my optimism on the fact that the present generation of Shakespearean scholars and critics has been for some time actively preoccupied with approaching the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as performance texts, instead of as purely literary artifacts.³⁵ This emphasis on performance values and dramatic conventions has, admittedly, been generally restricted to the province of the stage itself; scholars have wandered into the province of the audience only with the greatest reluctance and usually when they are well equipped with a stock of documentary sources.³⁶ Psychoanalytically inclined Shakespeareans have, of course, been more eager to project their own “identity themes” into the affective range of the audience, and it is with their critical procedures that my own approach to audience response is closely allied.³⁷ But in the end I am most interested in seeing whether a comparatively objective concern with Shakespeare in performance can be combined with a comparatively subjective concern for how performances are transacted by audiences in order to render a more complete model of theatrical experience than criticism has yet provided. Since my own model in this essay has been Burke's rather eclectic approach to Timon, I would like to conclude by summarizing his argument in the context of the issues I have raised above.

In claiming so privileged a position for Timon's commitment to invective in the dramatic economy of the play, and in suggesting that invective may serve a curative function for the audience that is usually associated with more decorous pronouncements on the part of Shakespeare's protagonists, Burke is both calling attention to the need to give priority to performance dynamics in the criticism of dramatic texts and confirming the priority of psychological effect, as opposed to “theme” or “meaning,” in our experience of plays. Instead of standing back from the insistent presence of Timon himself in order to legislate a meaning consistent with Shakespeare's status as a humanistic institution—one that would presumably focus on Timon's prodigality, misplaced idealism, or downright immaturity—Burke grants Timon the dramatic status with which the play itself endows him, casting him as the prevailing focus of the play's theatrical gravity, as the sustained object of the play's operation on its audience's capacity for identification.³⁸ In so doing, he relieves us of our groundedness in a corrupt text that we attempt to piece together with the help of strategies borrowed from our experience of other, more obviously accommodating, plays, as well as from the stockpile of traditional literary criticism and received ideas. My own effort to give priority to the interplay between performance and response is meant to serve a similar function in regard to our general approach to other dramatic texts that are corrupt only insofar as they remain unanimated by performative considerations. At the very least, it is meant to encourage others to “Piece out [its] imperfections with [their] thoughts.”

Notes

1. The quoted phrase is taken from Kenneth Burke, “Timon of Athens and Misanthropic Gold,” in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1966), p. 115.

2. See, for example, G. Wilson Knight, “The Pilgrimage of Hate: An Essay on Timon of Athens,” in The Wheel of Fire, 5th ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 207-39. Knight actually takes his reading of the play beyond the bounds of my formulation by claiming that Timon constitutes “the archetype and norm of all tragedy” (p. 220).

3. See Susan Handelman, “Timon of Athens: The Rage of Disillusion,” American Imago 36 (1979): 45-68, and Richard Fly, “Confounding Contraries: The Unmediated World of Timon of Athens,” in Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), pp. 117-42.

4. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 193.

5. Rabkin's manner of dismissing Timon may serve as a good example of Frederic Jameson's recent assertion that “the working theoretical framework or presuppositions of a given method are in general the ideology which that method seeks to perpetuate.” The ideology within which Rabkin is working in Common Understanding would probably fall under the rubric of what Jameson terms “ethical criticism” or, more precisely, “metaphysical thought, which presupposes the possibility of questions about the ‘meaning’ of life”; see Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 58-60. For his part, Rabkin has recently revised his critical attitude toward “meaning”; he has, however, done so without sacrificing his commitment to humanistic ends which Jameson would consider ideologically exclusive as the following passage from Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) makes clear: “The challenge to criticism … is to embark on a self-conscious reconsideration of the phenomena that our technology has enabled us to explore, to consider the play as a dynamic interaction between artist and audience, to learn to talk about the process of our involvement rather than our considered view after the aesthetic event. We need to find concepts other than meaning to account for the end of a play, the sense of unverbalizable coherence, lucidity, and unity that makes us know we have been through a single, significant, and shared experience” (p. 27). Given his present emphasis on the process of audience involvement, it would appear doubtful that Rabkin would now endorse his earlier critical estimate of Timon.

6. Timon's status as an experimental drama has already been noted by Una Ellis-Fermor, “Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play,” Review of English Studies 18 (1942): 270-83, and by Derek A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare, vol. 2, 3d ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 170. According to Ellis-Fermor, Shakespeare was, in Timon, “experimenting with structure; again, as in Troilus and Cressida, attempting a theme so original that the form it dictated must inevitably be revolutionary” (p. 275).

7. Handelman, “Rage of Disillusion,” pp. 47-48.

8. See Jameson's discussion of the similarly accommodating impulses of “ethical” and psychological criticism in Political Unconscious, pp. 59-60.

9. Handelman, “Rage of Disillusion,” p. 48.

10. Cf. Jameson, Political Unconscious: “Here notions of personal identity, myths of the reunification of the psyche, and the mirage of some Jungian ‘self’ or ‘ego’ stand in for the older themes of moral sensibility and ethical awareness” (p. 60).

11. Although I accept here, for the sake of contrast, the conventional critical belief in the efficacy of the great tragedies in transforming the experience of loss into what Handelman terms “life-affirming energies,” I believe it is in need of radical revision. The intensification of suffering that attends the closure of King Lear, for instance, probably does produce in some readers and most audiences an experience akin to Aristotelian catharsis. But do the closing colloquies of Kent, Albany, and Edgar really accommodate us to an acceptance of loss? Early redactors of Shakespeare did not appear to think so, and their sense of the original play as unrelievedly painful has been repeatedly echoed in our own time by scholars, directors, and filmmakers interested mainly in the play's seemingly unyielding pessimism.

12. Fly, “Confounding Contraries,” p. 139.

13. Ibid., p. 125.

14. Ibid., p. 140.

15. Burke, “Misanthropic Gold,” p. 119; Handelman, “Rage of Disillusion,” p. 67.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. & trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 61.

17. All quotations from Timon are drawn from the Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver (London: Methuen, 1959).

18. Although I agree with Traversi in An Approach to Shakespeare that we should resist the temptation “to think of Timon of Athens as a kind of appendix to King Lear” and see it, instead, as an attempt on Shakespeare's part at “contriving a new kind of dramatic action” (p. 170), I believe that the aggressive, comparatively stripped-down dramatic orientation of the later play is a direct consequence of Shakespeare's continuing preoccupation with developing an appropriate language for tragic experience.

19. Traversi begins his own analysis of this scene (ibid., pp. 181-84) by stating that “the truth is evenly divided” between Timon and Apemantus, but concludes that “Timon remains distinguished from Apemantus by the ability to turn his life-weariness into distinctive poetry.”

20. I have borrowed this terminology from Gabriele Bernhard Jackson's excellent article, “Structural Interplay in Ben Jonson's Drama,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 113-45.

21. In purely narrative terms, it would make no sense to place Alcibiades in such company as he goes about the business of plotting his revenge against Athens. That Shakespeare has gone out of his way to make so explicit a connection between Alcibiades's martial pursuits and the whores' mercenary and “infectious” profession plainly suggests his endorsement of Timon's indictment.

22. I make this last point in relation to the closing movement of Macbeth in an article entitled “Banquo's Ghost: The Shared Vision,” Theatre Journal 35, no. 3 (1983).

23. Anne Lancashire, “Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Doctor Faustus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 42. Although I am in general agreement with what Lancashire has to say about Timon in regard to the first movement of the play (despite the fact that she seems blind to his obvious performance appeal), I disagree altogether with her overall reading of the drama, which derives from an oddly uncritical regard for its indebtedness to the morality tradition.

24. Terence Eagleton, “A Note on Timon of Athens,” in Shakespeare and Society (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), pp. 172-76.

25. Burke, “Misanthropic Gold,” p. 120.

26. Ibid., pp. 120-21.

27. Ibid., p. 121.

28. John Bayley, Shakespeare and Tragedy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 87. I find Bayley's chapter on Timon (aptly entitled “The Big Idea”) consistently illuminating and provocative and recommend it to anyone interested in a reading of the play opposed to the one provided here.

29. See Theodor Adorno's critique of what Wolfgang Iser terms the “quietistic aspect” of conventional psychological approaches to aesthetic experience: “The conformist acceptance by psychoanalysis of the popular view of art as beneficent to culture corresponds to aesthetic hedonism, which banishes all negativity from art, confining it to the conflicts that gave rise to the work and suppressing it from the end-product. If an acquired sublimation and integration are made into the be-all and end-all of the work of art, it loses that power through which it transcends the life which, by its very existence, it has renounced.” Quoted in Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 47.

30. Kenneth Burke, “Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction,” Language as Symbolic Action, p. 94.

31. I have substituted the alternate reading “sour” in place of Oliver's choice of “four.” Oliver defends his choice on the grounds that “‘sour’ hardly makes sense, since Timon proceeds to further curses” (Arden edition, p. 132). I would suggest that it makes a great deal more sense than “four” since it announces the imminent, not simultaneous, termination of speech that, moreover, will be effected in three lines, instead of in the space of four words.

32. In employing the term “transacted,” I am, of course, alluding to Norman Holland's psychoanalytically based models of reader response and, specifically, to a seminal work of his recent theoretical preoccupations, “Transactive Criticism: Re-Creation through Identity,” Criticism 18 (1976): 334-52. In a more recent article, “How Can Dr. Johnson's Remarks on Cordelia's Death Add to My Own Response?”, in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text, ed., Geoffrey H. Hartman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 18-44, Holland directly addresses the problem of consensual validity in relation to what he terms the “outmoded and confusing” notion of “the ‘power’ of the text” (p. 40). Although they differ in several crucial ways in regard to the dynamics of reader response, Stanley Fish shares Holland's conception of the priority of the interpretive process. See, e.g., “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (1976): 465-85. Wolfgang Iser, on the other hand, claims a more significant role for the text itself in manipulating reader response and thus provides a supportive context for the argument I am attempting to make on behalf of dramatic texts. See The Act of Reading, pp. 152-53.

33. Cf. Fish, in “Interpreting the Variorum”: “In my model … meanings are not extracted but made and made not by encoded forms but by interpretive strategies that call forms into being” (p. 485).

34. Ibid.

35. Examples range from Bernard Beckerman's seminal Shakespeare at the Globe (New York: Macmillan, 1962) and J. L. Styan's Shakespeare's Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) to Michael Goldman's “applied” readings of Shakespeare's texts in Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972).

36. The latest and, to my mind, most illuminating study of Shakespeare's audience is Ann Jennalie Cook's The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

37. See Norman Holland, “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 90 (1975): 814. Also see Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

38. For a British version of the present argument, see Derek Longhurst's examination of Shakespeare's treatment as “the National Poet,” “‘Not for all time, but for an Age’: An Approach to Shakespeare Studies,” in Re-Reading English, ed. Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 150-63.