[In the following essay, Cohen examines the theme of wealth in Timon of Athens and contends that it is Timon's realization of its corrupting effect on society that leads to his misanthropy.]

The obsessive concern of the chief characters of Timon of Athens is having and not having money. The question raised by the obsession is not merely what it means to be rich or poor but, more important, how identity is determined by external measureable phenomena like money. The play reveals the extent and the means by which the individual's social locus is fixed and unfixed in relation to such phenomena. Because money buys power and its concomitants like authority, it serves as a convenient signifier of a complex of social practices that has arisen out of the individualist economic framework. There is, as is well known, a rather heavy overlay of morality-play to the drama, a level of allegory that directs attention to a single moral meaning and message about the corruptive power of wealth. The Freudian implications of the presence and meaning of cash have also been mined. Timon's world of privilege perceives itself as complete, but one of the inevitable byproducts of privilege and money is poor people: they are slaves, servants, beggars, and whores, and their presence is regarded by the rich without apparent interest. They are not commented on, their plight is unremarked. They are presented as being without social or political value. Such glaring lacunae deserve attention.

The slow movement from serfdom or villeinage to a capitalist economy, or, as R. H. Tawney describes it, from one nakedly exploitative economic structure to another, is given a somewhat uneasy and reluctant expression in the poor and working people of this play.¹ They are, indeed, humanized, but they are nonetheless located firmly in the margins of the play where their function as a subservient class is primary. For such folk there was little initial difference in the exchange of one form of poverty for another. Feudalism confirmed for the poor the eternal lesson of money's power and its inaccessibility to themselves. But Timon's plummet from wealth to poverty is dramatic precisely because of his former wealth. He has not inherited or deserved his poverty—hence it is the tangible proof of his tragedy. The impecunious Timon is not like any of the other paupers of the play: he is a great man whose sudden poverty seems to have nothing to do with the rational economic context of his world. He is a victim of accident, carelessness, and the selfishness of the rich. He is a feudal lord in a capitalist economy, and that feudalism manifests itself in his largesse within the ranks of the rich. But capitalism, in the form of greed, complicated evasions, money lending, borrowing, and exploitative relationships, is well comprehended by his fellow plutocrats for whom friendship is valued in economic not sentimental terms.

The rich, in contrast to the authentically and “naturally” poor, take for granted that they will not be servants or beggars, but that servants and beggars will always be available for their usage or merely as a means of demonstrating their substantiality to themselves and others. A remarkable instance of dehumanization and othering—a ratiocinative process of the entrenchment and validation of difference—this process itself sustains capitalism in a primarily Christian world. For the rich to be easy with their wealth, they have to believe that it is their right and their desert that supplies that wealth. To possess it uneasily is an occasional exception given shape in the play by Timon in his last days. The culture of wealth and possession which is certainly the dominant culture in the world of Timon of Athens, has woven elaborate justifications of the possession of wealth in a world teeming with the poor and has created practices to sustain it. Religion supplies society with the ideology of charity, whose ulterior purpose, it could be and has been argued (by Karl Marx among others), is to fend off a revolution of the hungry. And economic rationalization focuses on the usefulness of concentrated, centralized wealth in the creation of more wealth and the relief of poverty. It is probably fair to say that in Shakespeare's plays the possession of wealth is never itself regarded as bad or undesireable, although, clearly, the pursuit of wealth can be profoundly corruptive. In this, Shakespeare is in harmony with most Western economic thought and practice except, possibly, fundamentalist Christian. There is little in the plays to challenge the moral validity of private wealth per se as a good. It is equally true that capitalist thought and practice and its antecedents have regarded individually-held wealth as a benefit both in itself and in social terms, while socialist thought through the centuries has challenged this very concept. The logical corollary to the idea of wealth being a virtue is, of course, that poverty is a vice, and Tawney notes the prevalence through the centuries of the development of capitalist individualism of this way of thinking.

How the rich regard the poor is a constant, if unfocussed, theme of Timon. The presence of servants and beggars draws attention to their existence, even if it does so only indirectly. They are there; as much, therefore, as the other characters, they may be said to live and breathe and suffer. Their function within this system of having and wanting is to serve. It is left, later, to Timon himself to demonstrate a human condition of absolute poverty, of lacking the very necessities considered basic in human life. He lives uncovered and hungry. Interestingly, a moment occurs in the play when this condition is actually chosen in preference to the condition of having; when the possession of gold is rejected in favour of the possession of nothing.

The moment is rich in irony and ideological contradiction. The discovery of gold coincides with Timon's misanthropic exultation in the bestiality of his fellow men. It evinces a passionate diatribe about the corruptive potentiality of wealth and power. It complements the Lear-like abuse of the world—“Destruction fang mankind! Earth yield me roots.” (IV, 3, 23)—and inspires the revelation that gold turns morality upside down: it makes

Black, white; foul, fair; wrong, right;
Base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

(29-30)

And yet, deep though his loathing is, Timon is himself contaminated by the attraction gold offers—he saves some “for earnest” (47). The self-exiled, self-outcast crazy recluse is unable completely to separate himself from the corruptive element. He cannot, in other words, escape the taint of wealth because it has become fixed as the agent, symbol, and cornerstone of the society which esteems and disesteems itself according to its relation to wealth. There is no escape to innocence possible for Timon or anyone else in the drama. The whole of the social discourse is tied to the cash nexus. Nothingness, oblivion, freedom even, are inextricable from it. This connectedness of all elements of the system to wealth is visible in the most innocent-seeming moments and the most undefiled relationships. That Timon is related to his “friends” through his wealth is obvious, even to himself, since he constantly revivifies and nurtures these relationships by money. To his servants too, Timon is implicitly connected by his wealth and their dependency upon that wealth. His being a kinder master than some does nothing to alter the fact that the currency that links them is cash. Apemantus, somewhat anomalously, is a kind of clown, tied to Timon by his cynicism, and wealthy enough to be able to enjoy the luxury of cynicism. Whores and soldiers, like Alcibiades, are themselves dependent upon money for their livelihoods. They, like everyone else in the play, are unable to continue without money.

Money is a gordian knot linking man to society. The mad misanthropic violence of the ending, the explosive hatred of Timon for all who come near him, and his helpless desire for the deaths of those around him are merely an expression of the helplessness of penury. And yet, strange though it would be to feel sympathy for the rich men of this play, the problems of wealth are represented graphically enough. Money creates anxiety, and anxiety creates covetousness. The rich man who contemplates the loss of even part of his fortune contemplates simultaneously the weakening of his hold on a social fraction which has taught him that his value is directly equivalent to his fortune. It is clearly anxiety as much as greed that makes the rich unwilling to serve Timon. For their contradictory responses to his newfound poverty indicate a reluctant awareness of their debts to him, a concomitant awareness of his generosity and kindness, coupled with the unwillingness—or emotional inability—to relieve him. They are far from pathetic, and may be presumed to live to a ripe old conscience-free age, but they are surely made anxious by their almost self-aware articulation of the contradiction and the lying to which Timon's poverty forces them:

Draw nearer, honest Flaminius. Thy lord's a bountiful gentleman: but thou art wise, and thou know'st well enough, although thou com'st to me, that this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security. Here's three solidares for thee; good boy, wink at me, and say thou saw'st me not.

(III, 1, 39-45)

Such moments expose greed and dishonesty, and are far indeed from eliciting sympathy for the speaker. Yet they do nevertheless direct attention to the centrality of money as an agent of moral and social change. Furthermore, the greed and dishonesty are represented not as the the inevitable expressions of bad characters, but rather as the necessary elements of wealth and power. In other words, this most radical play acknowledges the social sources of corruption and makes no easy correlation between evil and power. The rich are bad because they are rich and not rich because they are bad; this point the drama reiterates time and again.

It is this self-consciousness about the nature of wealth and its relation to society that makes the play less transformative in its impulses than Lear, to which it is often compared. It is this same quality of self-consciousness that makes it a more intellectual and controlled dialectic about the social and individual meaning of wealth and its implications for the collectivities in which Timon lives and is forced to live. Before he is poor, Timon never needs to question the meaning of having money. He is a rather flamboyant philantropist, doing good deeds by ostentation, chiefly in behalf of those who seem not greatly to need his largesse. Once his money has been lost, its meaning, its presence as a dynamic factor in his life, suddenly become matters of bitter urgency to him. We have his two worlds sharply and evenly divided.

While the poor of Athens are neither enriched nor further impoverished by the fortunes of Timon, the rich are found depending upon him to sustain their positions of wealth. Nothing that occurs in Timon's wealthy phase, in other words, suggests the rich protagonist's awareness of the poor. Once he is poor, however, it is to him as though all the poverty in the world is his, all the wrongs done by rich to poor are wrongs done to him. In this concentrated and narrow awareness, he is the opposite of Lear who perceives in his penuriousness that he has taken too little care of the poor, that he and they share crucial human matters. Timon is so consumed with the rage for revenge against his humiliators that other people become less and less important. As Lear is reabsorbed into the world he once controlled from the heights, so Timon is alienated from his world by his poverty. The poor are the dirty little secret of both worlds, but far more passionately acknowledged by Lear than by Timon. Yet their sheer presence as a quiet force is a factor in both plays where they represent the potential plight of the powerful.

Timon's poverty is represented as unique, as wholly separated from that of his fellows. He has nothing in common with the whores and servants with whom he is forced to keep company. In this separation lies much of the secret power of the play and much also of its complex politics. In Timon of Athens it is not power but poverty that corrupts. The ancient notion of poverty as a sin, as an evidence of moral worthlessness, is given a kind of extensive play in the variegations of narrative and the pungent invective of the drama. As ingratitude drives Timon into frenzies of rage against his former friends, so poverty takes him further into the catastrophes wrought by revulsion. As Lear sees poverty with the eyes of pity and shame, so Timon sees poverty as a grotesque deformation of his desert. The point is crucial. The informing power of loathing is given expression in filth and rage and self pity. The view of poverty as a punishment and wealth as a reward had, by Shakespeare's time, replaced the view that poverty and material inequality were socially necessary.² Thus, the justice Timon clamours for sits firmly within the individualistic politics of the play.

The notion of their own poverty rolls easily off the lips of the rich, but only when it is notional. Before the warm water banquet, the Second Lord tells Timon, “I am e'en sick of shame, that when your lordship this other day sent to me I was so unfortunate a beggar.” (III, 6, 40-2) And it is this casual, crass, linguistic, and wholly insincere familiarity with poverty and beggary that the narrative seeks to expose as one of the many disguises by which wealth distances itself from poverty. It neutralizes the lexis by which poverty is constructed and so makes it harmless and unthreatening. To be poor does not mean as it does in, say, Lear, to be penurious and lacking in necessities. In the mouth of the Second Lord and his like, to be poor means to have less money and comfort than one would like or than one thinks one deserves. It means to be less rich, perhaps, than one's friends, who seem to supply the standard of measurement. Thus it may be suggested that wealth corrupts language itself from a motive of the nakedest self interest. For poverty is a potential threat to Timon and his fellow millionaires. Through reconstructing it linguistically, they effectively stave it off, make it part of another world than the one they inhabit. Beggars are others than themselves, yet they appropriate beggary by absorbing it into their language and experience thereby, in effect, distancing it further from their own real experience. As a metaphor the word loses its ties to the fact of actually not having and comes to suggest something far more harmless. When not having a great deal of ready money can be described as being in a state of beggary—as above—then beggars are not taken seriously. In a similar fashion it is common to hear comfortable or uncomfortable middle class people describe themselves as being poor. The description inevitably denotes a devaluation of poverty, robbing it of its conceptual power and value.

One of the evidences of wealth is the possession of servants. All the rich, notwithstanding protestations of poverty, always have servants. Yet poverty and beggary are constantly on their tongues. The play is populated with characters from the poorer classes. Servants, prostitutes, robbers, a page and a clown. Though, indeed, as Rolf Soellner notes, poverty “provides no total immunity from the [temptations of fortune].”³ Commenting on the servants, Soellner notes “how sympathetically they are protrayed. One cannot attribute their benevolence merely to their choric function or underline the pathos of Timon's fall. … There is no breakdown in servant morality of the kind that Malynes and other critics found in England and that Timon proclaims in his craze for total upheaval. … Yet, one cannot take much satisfaction in this goodness from below. Its most salient feature, after all, is its impotence, and it seems susceptible to perversion too.”⁴

The conclusion of the warm-water feast provides an example of the means by which wealth insulates and protects itself from the reality of penury. The lords, having been driven violently away by Timon, conclude that he has surely gone crazy:

SECOND Lord.
Lord Timon's mad.
THIRD Lord.
I feel't upon my bones.
FOURTH Lord.
One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones.

(III, 6, 113-5)

The reverse side of this collective reprehension is, of course, a kind of cheering up of themselves as blameless victims of Timon's irrational rage. The lords separate themselves from their former patron and friend by agreeing to absolve themselves and blame Timon. But it is the word “mad” that gives them release from their responsibilities to feel and act upon guilt. Timon has been put beyond the pale and reach of help by his own “madness”. His madness, they conclude, is a “natural” product of his own self-induced poverty.

The play exposes the hoax of the natural in a remarkable way. Shakespeare seems to have recognized two vital points: one is that the ideologies of his culture are political and partial, that they are determined and defined by those with the power to determine and define ideological formations—that is, the ruling class. Secondly, that the vaunted ideology of naturalness is anything but natural; rather, it is formed out of the desire and need to control society. Thus, the “natural” bonds of parent and child, or husband and wife, or ruler and subject, or brother and sister, need the sustaining support of institutionalized systems and structures of law to be enforced. Pascal noted that “Fathers fear that the natural love of their children can be erased. What kind of nature is this, that can thus be erased? Custom is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why isn't custom natural? I am very much afraid that this nature is only a first custom, as custom is a second nature.”⁵

The naturalization of wealth as the prerogative of the wealthy is one of the essential functions of the rich in the play. They believe that they deserve their wealth, they possess it “naturally”. To allow things to seem otherwise is to permit the idea of the opposite—that they do not deserve or have a natural title to it. A consequence of such thinking is, of course, for them to have to surrender that natural right. Wealth and possessions and their concomitants, power and security, fit comfortably into the doctrines of individualism. As a complex of values, they neatly submit to the motive forces that drive individualism and are malleable enough for their achievement to to be valued more highly than individual doctrines that might hamper it. In Timon of Athens the behaviour of Timon's friends, after he has lost his fortune, must surely throw into question the means by which their wealth was won in the first place. Besides wealth itself, in other words, what has wealth brought them? The answer is plain: anxiety, cupidity, dishonesty, greed, cruelty, crookedness, hypocrisy, selfishness, cowardliness. It is true that all may have possessed these traits before they became rich, but it is wealth that has made them matter socially, that has given credibility and political force to their lies.

Where King Lear throws the entire value system of individualism or, in its seventeenth-century form, possessive mercantilism⁶, into question in its recognitions of the social injustice deriving from laissez faire economics, so too Timon of Athens interrogates the economic and political roots of greed and crookedness. Like Northumberland, in 2 Henry IV, who calls upon mankind to destroy itself because he himself has been injured, Timon's hurt elicits from him a desire to hurt others, all others, innocent and guilty alike, because of what he perceives them to have done to him. His betrayers are not merely, in other words, his treacherous friends, but all the inhabitants of the city.

His massive curse outside the walls of Athens reconstructs the entire Athenian society in its hierarchical order. In pouring his venom on the society he lays bare its structures and hierarchical arrangements of power. Notwithstanding the wild, ranging ubiquitousness of his hatred, Timon retains a clear sense of the order of the world he has left behind him. His attack on Athens is an attack on the political ideologies which give it its identity; these are related directly to its power nexus, itself an integral part of its cash economy. The first target of Timon's wrath is, tellingly, female chastity, which is arguably the cornerstone of patriarchal individualist economic structures. When he cries, “Matrons turn incontinent” (IV, 1, 3) and, a few lines later, “To general filths / Convert, o'th'instant, green virginity!” (6-7) he is striking at the very heart of that thing by which individualism, patriarchy, paternalism, and, above all, primogeniture are maintained. Take but chastity away and the entire system by which poverty and wealth are determined falls to pieces. More sinister by far than Lear's misogynistic outpourings near Dover, Timon's assault on this most vulnerable and uncertain means of sustaining patriarchy derives from a driving impulse to bring about social collapse. The world of King Lear has a Cordelia and a Kent in it, memories of whom draw Lear away from total nihilism. Timon is a play remarkably without heroes or heroism; it provides Athens with nothing worth saving from the blight of Timon's bitter curses.

It is intriguing indeed that Timon, like Lear, a man who has stood at the top of his society, should recognize in retrospect the force of sexual control as a chief means of maintaining social order. The release from sexually responsible behaviour, brought about by their outcast states, reveals the extent of psychological and social repression that has been necessary for social order to reach the form and extent it has. The concentration of Lear and Timon on female sexuality, and the form that their feelings about women take, reveal two crucial constructions of gender and sexual relations: first of all, it is evident that both men regard women as their natural enemies; as people who would take up arms against them if given the means. Secondly, it would seem that the gynophobia of Timon and Lear derives from a series of beliefs and assumptions about the inherent propensity of women to unrestrained sexuality. In his catalogue of reversals, Timon attributes power to women in only one area—that of sexual behaviour. An unsurprising concomitant of this sexuality is the implication that sexuality is equivalent to vice.

Where Northumberland's invocation of the “spirit of Cain” calls forth, even from his supporters, a cry of shame, Timon's cry of hatred for Athens possesses no such corrective. As Athens has been exposed, and has exposed itself, as corrupt and evil, there is no evident reason to save it. Its treatment of Alcibiades and Timon are evidences of its failure. Thus, in his raving, Timon produces an abstract of the ideologies and institutions which hold the society together:

Piety and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries;
And yet confusion live!

(IV, 1, 15-21)

This delineation of the social and civil categories with a view only to their destruction marks this scarifying speech as utterly and unrelievedly subversive to the point of complete upheaval. A. D. Nuttall proposes that in this speech, “fierce contrariety of mind reaches out towards and almost touches the practical contrariety of social revolution.”⁷ The basis of social revolution, however, is always regeneration, which is surely the last thing on Timon's mind here or ever again. The frantic curses of the speech possess and are possessed by an overwhelming desire for the apocalypse.

All elements of the curse conspire to one end; that of the reign of poverty and one of its frequent Shakespearean synonyms, criminality. That is the nature and extent of Timon's apocalypse. It is to this that his curses point. When he calls on Destruction to “fang mankind” (IV, 3, 23), he is placing himself far from redemption and into the centre of a maelstrom of death and destruction. For, indeed, there is unchastity and promiscuity in the play in the form of the prostitutes who visit Timon in his cave. And it is their example that this diatribe anticipates and summons down upon Athens as a dreadful curse. The speech adumbrates a world in which order is upended, not destroyed. This is the nature of the vengeful curse. Timon's revenge will be, if the curse is realized, not an absence of order such as that summoned by Lear and Northumberland, but an inversion of it, so that his former friends will now themselves be ruled by their former servants and outcasts:

Bankrupts, hold fast;
Rather than render back, out with your knives,
And cut your trusters' throats!
Bound servants steal!
Large-handed robbers your grave masters are,
And pill by law.

(IV, 1, 8-12)

The notion, of course, transcends any idea of social revolution, upholding, as it does, the value and practice of criminality. There is no question of the replacement of vice—the rich—with virtue—their servants. No sense, in other words, of providing the disenfranchised with a voice or an opportunity. Nuttall quite reasonably points out that the servants of the play whose “hearts wear Timon's livery [still]” (IV, 2, 17) are “pathologically loyal”.⁸ And Ralph Berry, in discussing the exemplariness of the servants, reminds us that the Steward “seeks out Timon in the woods, to serve him still. Even Timon admits him ‘one honest man’. So the relationship of master and man, which might seem to be founded on money, escapes the play's nihilism.”⁹

Prostitution supplies the most resonant metaphorical means for the destructive impulses of the drama. It is, of course, one of the abiding evidences of the frailty and duality of patriarchy. The ubiquitous and universal condemnation of prostitution has done nothing to slow its pace. The male use of women takes no more tangible or obvious form. Timon treats the prostitutes loutishly. Though he is an outcast, and though they are outcasts, he regards them with withering contempt; they are corrupt and tainted. He treats them like dogs whose silence he can purchase. The scene in which they and Alcibiades visit him in the woods ends up restating the power of money to divide humans into classes. Timon's misogynist abuse of the prostitutes takes his earlier gynophobia several steps further. Prostitutes are the lowest class of people in the play and the worst treated. As though men had nothing to do with them or their profession, the prostitutes are reviled by Timon as diseased creatures unworthy of human communion beyond their ability to contaminate and sicken men and help to fulfill his project of destroying Athens. In the whores Timon finds the metaphor he seeks for the filthy condition of humanity and the instrument he seeks for destroying it:

Hold up, you sluts,
Your aprons mountant. You are not oathable,
Although I know you'll swear, terribly swear
Into strong shudders and to heavenly agues
Th'immortal gods that hear you. Spare your oaths:
I'll trust to your conditions. Be whores still;
And he whose pious breath seeks to convert you,
Be strong in whore, allure him, burn him up;
Let your close fire predominate his smoke

(IV, 1, 135-44)

And yet, when Timon was at the height of his powers, he was little different from this. Though benignly, he did entertain his quests lavishly with Amazons, unthinkingly, smoothly, as a mark of his silky generosity. The distinction between the prostitutes and the “Ladies as Amazons” is purely contextual. All “belong” to men, all are defined and dehumanized by their functions; the Amazons to caress men, the whores to burn them up with disease. A potent loathing is expressed by the curious but resonant phrase, “Be strong in whore” which, oddly, has the effect of encouraging while it condemns, thus setting Timon above the corruption he is so eager to employ. Their function is their belonging, their capacity to be possessed and purchased like goods by money. And then, hypocrisy of hypocrisies, Timon who has purchased women himself to entertain his guests, who has taught dependent women their obligation to cash, damns the whores for accepting the gold he throws at them.

Though Timon is, in some measure, unthoughtful, quick to conclude but slow to examine, there is no reason we must follow his suit. Each evidence of want in his world he transforms into a means to blame and destroy the “Athens” that has injured him. His rages against Apemantus as he stalks the woods are the passions of a towering sulk. Apemantus sees neediness, he acknowledges the inequity and cruelty of the “Athens” of the rich. He taunts Timon to

Call the creatures
Whose naked natures live in all the spite
Of wreakful heaven, whose bare unhoused trunks,
To the conflicting elements expos'd,
Answer mere nature; bid them flatter thee.

(IV, 3, 229-34)

Such recognitions in King Lear are praiseworthy. Why not so in Apemantus? He sees the vanity and pride of Timon, though not, perhaps, the perverse depths of his fury: “Thou'dst courtier be again / Wert thou not beggar.” (243-4)

Outside the walls of the city, Timon is imprisoned by a violent shame born of shock, disappointment, outrage, and helplessness. The injustice to himself is different from that to other men because he was born to his wealth, had—in other words, or so it seems—earned it by inheritance, a curious but common notion. That it has been taken from him is a greater injustice than if it had been taken from someone else who had earned it by sufferance and labour. This is surely a most odd economics, but one which Timon is resolute in. He rages at Apemantus:

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 …
—I to bear this,
That never knew but better, is some burthen.

And then, selfrighteously:

Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in't. Why shouldst thou hate men?
They never flatter'd thee.

(271-3)

Timon, outcast, poor and dirty, still insists on his rights and privileges as a rich man. The distinctions would be comical if he were not so passionately serious about them. Because the world was his confectionary his right to hate it is as great as his right to possess and direct it had been. No others need apply. The mastery of Timon is indisputable and the economic and class system which produced in the society the means of ingratitude and the divisive propensities of an economy of wealth and poverty must remain intact or be completely destroyed.

His passion is his blind hatred for all. Timon never loses his naive idealism, clinging furiously and hopelessly to the patriarchal model which is so contingent on the wealth of individuals. He transforms the citizens of Athens in his mind into thieves as vicious and culpable as the Banditti who seek his gold. They are all alike in their betrayal of the morality of money. They all steal it, Timon insists, and thus have not the right to it that he had:

To Athens go;
Break open shops: nothing can you steal
But thieves do lose it.

(IV, 3, 449-51)

It is his exemption of himself from the general curse that robs his rage of moral fervour and makes it look like colossal spite. Timon is a Malvolio who has lost the will to live. His hatred is purer than Malvolio's because it includes himself. There is no thought in him of survival or social victory within Athens. Whereas Malvolio, right to the end, seeks to triumph over the society that has humiliated and betrayed him, Timon rejoices in his separation from it. He luxuriates in his perception of Athens as not worth conquering, unless it be to destroy it utterly, not worth living in or being part of unless its values have been inverted and deformed. It has been said often enough that Malvolio is a tragic figure in a comic play. Timon is a Malvolio writ large, a tragic figure of rage and violence in a tragic play, unembarrassed by the consolations of the slapstick which doesn't really hurt. Timon plummets to death by way of wrath.

His splenetic rages and universal curses are a volatile mixture which explodes in destructive frenzy. Timon's is a tragedy of disorder and chaos. No healing precedes or follows his death. The conditions of greed and covetousness that produced the conditions that drove the hero from his home are still firmly in place. Knowing this, Timon is merciless. He invokes the agents of chaos; he calls for the violent deaths of his countrymen by any and all means. Timon's last spoken words amply fulfill his lust for the suffering of his fellow Athenians. His invitation to them to hang themselves on his tree tauntingly expresses his loathing. Between his last speech and his two epitaphs is a curious continuity of action. He speaks his words of venom to the senators while his steward's benignant presence here disturbs the validity of the tirade. With “Sun, hide thy beams, Timon hath done his reign” (V, 1, 221) the last spoken words of Timon are given voice, and he disappears from sight, curiously lingering on in memory through the bitter self-dramatizing epitaphs. These have the effect of grandly excommunicating the whole insanely materialist world, reducing it to inconsequence and worthlessness.

The analysis of wealth which constitutes the play has exposed the revolutionary nature of this tragedy. No sense of loss accompanies the declining fortunes or the death of the hero. Values have been robbed of meaning, death is a release even for a robustly aggressive character like Timon. There is no purpose left in his life once disillusionment has taken hold of his imagination. Betrayal, weakness, and dishonesty are what are left of the ruling class of Athens. Its painters and poets collaborate cheerfully with its ruling faction in the frenetic pursuit of wealth. Those citizens on its margins, its mad hermits, its servants, its whores, haunt the periphery of the once proud city, waiting for it to fall to the military machine of Alcibiades, himself yet another victim of its distorted mercenary values.

Notes

1. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) p. 69.

2. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 36.

3. Rolf Soellner, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), p. 121.

4. Ibid, p. 120.

5. Quoted by Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (Routledge, Chapman and Hall: London, 1990), p. 94.

6. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1962)

7. A. D. Nuttall, Timon of Athens (Boston: Twayne, 1989) p. 87.

8. Ibid. p. 87.

9. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare and Social Class (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988) p. 163.