SOURCE: Prendergast, Maria Teresa Michaela. “‘Unmanly Melancholy’: Lack, Fetishism, and Abuse in Timon of Athens.” Criticism 42, no. 2 (spring 2000): 207-27.

[In the following essay, Prendergast notes the lack of female characters in the play and examines the work in terms of the misogynistic practices of early Jacobean culture. Prendergast contends that Timon represses women and displaces his desire for women with a desire for gold in order to establish “absolute male autonomy.”]

Since at least 1678, when Thomas Shadwell adapted the script for the earliest recorded performance of Timon of Athens, critics, directors, and playwrights have responded to Timon as an unfinished play—lacking dramatic tension, complex characterization, or compelling rhetoric.¹ But for early adapters like Shadwell, it was above all the lack of female characters that marked Timon as unfinished. Timon's adapters apparently noted that, in sharp contrast to Shakespeare's other plays, women appear only twice here: in act 1 a few women dance and play musical instruments, but never speak; then, towards the end of the play, two courtesans appear and speak six lines between them. To supplement this lack Shadwell gave Timon a mistress; one eighteenth-century adapter focused on Timon in love; and another gave him a daughter.² But despite evidence of early discomfort with the lack of female characters, it is only in the last decade or so that critics have begun to share Shadwell's preoccupation with this lack. Richard Wheeler and Coppélia Kahn have read Timon as a kind of case history of early Jacobean resentment against the maternal womb, while Jody Greene has suggested that the lack of women in the play is a symptom of a culture of sodomy and patronage associated with the Jacobean court.³

My own reading of the play depends strongly on the psychoanalytical and cultural perspectives articulated by Wheeler, Kahn, and Greene, but my interest in the thematics of lack focuses on one central crux of the play—the question of why the Athenian citizens repress women yet comment endlessly about them. From the moment that the cynical Apemantus represents women as beings who “eat lords” (1.1.209), the play develops as a series of vituperative utterances against women's predatory, deceitful, and promiscuous ways, utterances that contrast markedly with the apparent lack of activity, influence, or power on the part of Athenian women.⁴ My working hypothesis is that the lack of female characters and the overabundance of slanderous comments about them are complex and contradictory responses to a fantasy of male autonomy inscribed in early Jacobean culture. If this fantasy characterizes much of the early modern landscape of desire, it received particular force in the early seventeenth century as the English people adapted to having a man, instead of a woman, as their reigning symbol of patriarchal power—a man noted for his strong belief in the absolute autonomy of the male monarch. This radical shift in symbology was at once facilitated and complicated by James's claim to the throne via what one might call a bad mother and a good mother—James's purportedly treasonous biological mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, whom James strategically and rhetorically replaced with his symbolically good mother, Elizabeth.⁵

I wish to explore the particular force of this fantasy by placing the play in a triangular relationship with James I's misogynistic figuration of women and with the popular genre of abuse pamphlets—pamphlets that mark a desire to affirm male phallic authority by verbally abusing women. While each element of this triangle projects distinct fantasies of male autonomy, all three share an active desire to contain the apparent threat to male autonomy posed by phallic women, and all three do so by denying women any constructive role in their culture. As Wheeler and Kahn have noted, this shared impulse gestures to a primal desire to repress the mother's crucial role as a powerful agent in the birth of the male self. Quite possibly it yields, as well, a desire to rewrite the early modern cultural ideal of aristocratic patriarchy. For if this patriarchal structure depends, in part, on the mediatory role of women, the texts I examine share a fantasy of absolute male autonomy which depends on the vilification or repression of women.

In Timon, this contradictory urge to vilify (and hence acknowledge) and repress women is a response to the dual threat women pose to male autonomy. The Athenians, I argue, vilify women for usurping the phallus even as they repress women because they lack the phallus—and hence remind men of the threat of castration. Such inconsistent figurations of women recall as well James I's apparently contradictory response to women. As a participant in the popular misogynistic polemics, James actively attempted to prevent women from gaining access to phallic privileges (as his mother and Queen Elizabeth did); but as a monarch who excluded women from courtly proceedings James's actions resonate with the fetishistic desire to disavow the mother's lack, or emptiness, by replacing women with the kind of glittering objects that characterized James's opulent court.⁶ Whether (like James) Timon and his courtiers are repressing or vilifying women, the result is the same: rather than establish autonomy by demeaning or repressing women, Timon's court—and, perhaps, the Jacobean court as well—finally empties itself of any significance. As such, Athenian culture represents the other side of the coin to Freud's notion of the threat of castration. If (according to Freud) castration results from the oppressive presence and power of women, here it results from their oppressive absence, an absence that erodes homosocial bonds and normative—early modern—masculine identity, leading to the dissolution of Athenian culture.

This article traces the pathological trajectory of repression and vilification in Timon's Athens by looking, first, at the culture of (Lacanian) Lack that is at once veiled and marked by the opulence of James I's and Timon's courts. In Timon's Athens, at least, this culture is marked by a displacement of desire for subjective women and its replacement with the fetishization of gold. But if Timon's court is defined by fetishization, Timon's self-imposed exile from Athens that dominates the second half of the play is characterized by its apparent opposite—by active vituperation against women. Timon, in this section, illogically responds to his betrayal by male courtiers as he fantasizes women as demonic and aggressive usurpers of the phallus. Yet if, in abuse pamphlets, this active vilification of women maintains homosocial bonds by shaping a male culture mediated by misogynistic language, Timon, I argue, turns words themselves into fetish objects—rigid signs for a male fantasy of autonomy that is, in fact, empty of significance. Given that Timon of Athens ends with the disappearance of Timon's body, the play traces what happens when man rejects all subjective attachments—to women, men, gold, or even exchanges of language: an utter disillusion with and dissolution of the self.

FETISHISM AND OPULENCE: JAMES I AND TIMON

That Shakespeare's Timon might recall cultural figurations of James I is not surprising. As a number of scholars have noted, the presence of a male king on the throne for the first time in fifty years would almost certainly have unleashed a series of fertile meditations on what it meant to have a man in the ultimate phallic position. And the fact that James I, from the moment he arrived in England, behaved far more autocratically than did his female predecessor, would almost certainly have supported traditional associations of masculinity with authority and autonomy. But where the character of Timon most recalls the figure of James I is in his copious generosity. Coppélia Kahn has articulated how Renaissance rulers like James I maintained power by ostentatiously handing out gifts to their courtiers—whether they be gifts of art, land, money, or what Lévi-Strauss terms the most precious of all cultural objects, women.⁷ These displays of generosity were used by princes to bind their subjects to themselves, promoting a culture based on the granting of gifts in exchange for loyalty and service.⁸ But if, for Levi-Strauss, no scene of generosity is as effective in forming social bonds as the exchange of women, Timon and James I seem to have though otherwise. Certainly Timon's court, like James's, is more strongly marked by the opulent and ostentatious giving of objects rather than of women. In the first scene the Poet comments on how Timon's

large fortune,
Upon his good and gracious nature hanging,
Subdues and properties to his love and tendance
All sorts of hearts

(1.1.56-59)

and we are immediately treated to a series of tableaux which illustrate how Timon's practice of generous giving creates a homosocial culture of men joined by their utter dependence on Timon.

Timon seems to be emulating James not only in his generosity but also in his apparent hostility to the institution of marriage. James's hostility to his wife led him to segregate his queen and her retainers into a separate court, thus attempting (often unsuccessfully) to deprive them of their traditional status as mediators between king and courtiers.⁹ Timon's feelings about marriage are less clear, but his unmarried state implies, at the very least, a resistance to granting women their traditional, if limited, power as mediators.¹⁰ Timon's repression of women's mediatory roles along with his ostentatious generosity might be read, then, as imaginative transpositions of James I's desire to replace mediations by women with mediations by objects. As such, the actions of both princes embody a male cultural fantasy of absolute autonomy based on the disavowal of the crucial role that women play as mediators within traditional homosocial culture.

I would suggest that this cultural fantasy is the symptom of one model for male creativity—the desire to disavow woman's essential Lack by fetishizing an ordinary object. Woman's Lack, then, is the inspiration for the male desire to transform nature into artifice; the fetish object, according to Freud, serves as “a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) phallus that the little boy once believed in and … does not wish to give up.”¹¹ Fetishization, one might say, is at once what is most common and most perverse about male sexual desire—becoming perverse when the fetish object becomes an erotic end in itself, far more desirable than any female body. The fetish—this radical sign for the repression of woman's Lack—is, by extension, a symptom of narcissism, a projection of the desiring male's penis onto the feminized object of desire.

Nowhere is this narcissistic fantasy more seductively expressed than at the opening of Timon of Athens, with its many opportunities for displaying glittering objects and costumes. Peter Brook, for example, ended the first act with “a dance of whirling dervishes, Arabic capes flying over gold cloth on the floor,” while the Old Vic production of 1956 opened with, among other paraphernalia, a “somewhat awe-inspiring statue of a goddess”—signifying, perhaps, the repression of female characters and their replacement with controllable, man-made, art.¹² But James's subjects soon became disillusioned with his generosity—a generosity which many came to associate with megalomania and an alarming ability to bankrupt his household—so many performances of Timon represent Timon's opulence as an empty façade. Indeed this façade turns out to be as superficial as are homosocial bonds in the play.¹³ Timon's courtiers, the play suggests, are not so much loyal subjects as they are mere flatterers who will abandon their benefactor once he is no longer able to shower them with gifts; as the Poet predicts early in the play:

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

(1.1.84-88)

The Poet's comments prepare us for the essential misogyny that characterizes the Athenian court by representing Fortune as a fickle dame. But his comments also display how the façade of homosocial bonding which characterizes Timon's court masks a strong narcissistic streak among the courtiers—none of whom will aid Timon when he needs them.

It may be said that the emptiness and narcissism of the court result from narcissistic tendencies within Timon's own generous nature; at the very least his obsession with giving gestures toward a constant need to supplement his lack of a coherent self by surrounding himself with the kinds of flatterers, dependents, and slaves that he claims to abhor.¹⁴ This may be why Timon's steward, Flavius, comments fretfully that Timon is but an “empty coffer” who has “no power to make his wishes good” (1.2.191; 194).¹⁵ If we place this comment in context with Freud's characterization of woman's genitalia as a case or box, then Flavius seems to imply that Timon's love of glittering objects marks his ongoing desire to mask his lack of the phallus that he purportedly embodies as an Athenian patriarch.¹⁶ For if, in traditional aristocratic patriarchies, the leader's authority is confirmed by his gifts of land, horses, and women, here (as Timon discovers later in the play) the phallus is associated instead with hoarding gold. Every time that Timon gives away gold, he erodes, rather than affirms, his phallic authority.¹⁷

This reading certainly invites us to look at Timon as an early modern critique of the growing and rapacious power of capitalism, which robs the aristocracy of its idealized form of patriarchy, based upon oligarchic, homosocial bonds. Thus Timon might point to the pathological trajectory of the early Stuart court, whose blind insistence on traditional aristocratic privileges led to its dissolution (at least for a generation). But the play just as strongly seems to associate the self-destructive trajectory of Timon's court with its repression of women. For if Timon is nothing, if his court is nothing, it is, as I have suggested, because the play lacks women—the sex that, in a traditional aristocratic culture, gives substance to male identity and homosocial exchanges.¹⁸ Indeed Flavius's comments about Timon's emptiness—comments that are a kind of leitmotif in the play—suggests that despite, or because of, the exile of women from Timon's court, Timon and his dependents are characterized by Lack.

This may be one reason why critics and directors often find a lack of eroticism in the play, one that may not, in contrast, have characterized James's court. If James's court lacked women, it did not lack eroticism: the Duke of Somerset, and, later Buckingham, who famously took on the traditional role of mediator between the king and his court, are commonly considered to have been the king's objects of erotic interest.¹⁹Timon of Athens, however, presents us with no male substitute for the desired woman. Although a recent performance of the play constructed an erotic friendship between Alcibiades and Timon, the script, as we have inherited it, does not suggest such a relationship.²⁰ Instead, the lack of any eroticized object of desire and mediation seems closely linked to the breakdown of homosocial culture in Athens, as there is no one who can mediate, for instance, between Timon's debtors and Timon himself.²¹ The result is that objects which, in a traditional oligarchy, ought to be circulated between men (such as women, gifts, and money) are hoarded—a practice that leads to division between avaricious men, rather than trade between them. Put in other terms, members of this culture replace the trade in precious women with the hoarding of precious gold (talents), and so erode cultural ties between men.²²

GOLD AS FETISH OBJECT

This does not mean that the play entirely lacks eroticism, but rather that eroticism is displaced from living women (the traditional object of desire) onto inanimate gold. Gold is the Athenian icon for absolute autonomy, as it emblematizes the disavowal of women (the subjective Other) and their replacement with an inanimate, controllable, object. Yet the result of this narcissistic projection is the disintegration of Athenian homosocial culture, as exchanges between men are replaced by divisive, pathological hoarding—what Freud would term a regression from mature genital experience to a childlike anal obsession. Certainly free-floating anxieties about gold in the play partake of both extremes of anality—the excessive lack of control associated with Timon's aristocratic giving and the hoarding of gold associated with Timon's craven courtiers along with, perhaps, the rise of a capitalist economy in mercantile England.²³

Timon himself gives the most erotically tinged panegyric to money towards the end of the play, suggesting that his excessive giving is just the other side of the coin of pathological hoarding:

O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
'Twixt natural [son] and [sire]! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen's purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, lov'd, and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian's lap! thou visible god,
That sold'rest close impossibilities,
And mak'st them kiss!

(4.3.381-88)

With wonderfully seductive language Timon dramatizes how gold not only severs homosocial relations between king and vassal (or Timon and his courtiers), and between father and son, but also displaces all loves—homosocial, filial, and erotic—with a carnal and depraved desire for lucre. In other words, gold is to Timon of Athens what women (I will argue) are to abuse pamphlets—the Circe/Helen figure that lures men away from the path of virtue, and towards immoral, effeminate, and fetishistic desires.²⁴ If, then, the replacement of women with gold as object of desire arises out of an attempt to establish absolute male autonomy, it yields a return of the repressed, as gold turns out to be just as divisive and castrating (“king-killer”) as are—according to abuse pamphleteers—women. If women are the archetypal symbols of mediation, gold is the ongoing symbol, in the play, for divisiveness and self-destruction.

That this desire for gold is equated with “unnatural” desires is made clear by the gendering of gold in Timon's panegyric. For this “young,” “fresh,” and “blush[ing]” figure is not, as the adjectives at first imply, necessarily female; instead it appears to be a quite immoral and effeminate young man who seduces virgins (“Dian”) and panders to a number of erotically transgressive acts (“sold'rest close impossibilities / And mak'st them kiss”). This figuration of gold as an apparently bisexual and effeminate youth may at first seem odd, but it is crucial to the thematics of idolatry in the play. For one thing, it makes manifest the tendency to displace women as objects of desire in Timon's Athens by conceptualizing gold as the Athenian object of erotic passion. And gold is associated throughout with the destruction of traditional, homosocial culture: it disrupts homosocial relations between “natural son and sire” and threatens the mediatory ties of marriage by seducing virgins. Yet the seductive power of this golden idol is such that Timon, for all his awareness of its destructive potential, cannot fully demystify it. Gold remains “sweet” and “dear” in his eyes.

Gold, then, is the sign for Timon's court as narcissistic and idolatrous, particularly as the courtiers' consumption of Timon's gifts is associated with cannibalism, which, for Lévi-Strauss, is symptomatic of an inability to engage in the kinds of mediatory exchanges that undergird homosocial culture.²⁵ When Apemantus comments, “What a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not!” (1.2.39-40), he is suggesting that Timon's courtiers are cannibalizing their prince by misrecognizing that his gifts of gold and banquets are meant to have exchange value. As Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Slavoj Žižek have noted, gold has no intrinsic meaning or identity—it gains meaning only when it is traded amongst men and women (hence its constant association with “nothing” throughout the play).²⁶ Rather than grant gold significance by circulating it between men to facilitate homosocial alliances, Timon's courtiers turn gold into a fetish object to be hoarded and idolized.²⁷

Juxtaposed to this condemnation of grasping, cannibalistic courtiers is the more familiar association, in early modern misogynistic literature, of cannibalism with women. Apemantus in fact notes how women “eat lords; so they come by great bellies” (1.1.206). This erotic representation of cannibalism—so closely juxtaposed to comments about men cannibalizing Timon—suggests that those courtiers who ingest and hoard Timon's gifts are entering into an eroticized, parasitical relationship with him.²⁸ These men seduce and “eat” Timon with their hypocritical flatteries in order to come by “great bellies”—to give birth to the material possessions they so deeply crave.²⁹ Apemantus's reference to Timon's blindness here suggests how Timon is in the process effeminized, even symbolically castrated, by his craven courtiers. This submerged language resurfaces intermittently throughout the play, as Apemantus bemoans Timon's “unmanly melancholy” (4.3.203), a melancholy that appears when Timon's friends refuse him the source of masculine potency and idolatrous desire in Athens—gold.³⁰ Yet, despite the erotic metaphorics of male cannibalism, there is little sense of sexual energy here, for it is not Timon, himself, to whom (as Freud would say) these men are erotically cathected; it is, instead, Timon's gold—the ongoing metaphor for male potency in this play.

THE FEMALE PHALLUS: TIMON AND ABUSE PAMPHLETS

If Apemantus's statements about the male courtier's cannibalistic proclivities are borne out by the courtiers' rapaciousness, his remark about women as cannibalistic appears gratuitous; for the play has, at this point, presented us with no evidence of woman's rapacious nature. And yet, within the symbolic logic of the play, male narcissism seems to be symbiotically associated with female predation. As the play moves from the Athenian court to Timon's cave outside of Athens, its symbology shifts from fetishism (originating in anxieties about female Lack) to vituperation (originating in anxieties about woman's usurpation of the phallus). If we are to understand the odd pairing of male fetishism with anxieties about female predation, one key, I have suggested, is the vituperative language of early modern abuse pamphlets. In fact Apemantus's references to female cannibalism recall Stephen Gosson's earlier contention, in his School of Abuse, that “Harpies have virgin faces, and vultures talents: Hyena speakes like a friend, and devours like a foe.”³¹ Woman—predatory, cannibalistic, and promiscuous—seems here, as in Timon, to embody an anxiety about the threat desiring women pose to male autonomy, subjectivity, and cultural authority.

Closely associated with anxieties about predatory women are imprecations against female deceit and infidelity. Thomas Nashe's Anatomie of Absurditie begins by claiming that, “How ever the Syren change her shape, yet is she inseperable from deceit … constancie will sooner inhabite the body of a Camelion, a Tyger or a Wolfe, then the hart of a woman.”³² In much the same vein Charles Bansley, in his Treatyse Shewing and Declaring the Pryde and Abuse of Women Now a Dayes, writes

And loke well, ye men, to your wives trycksynes,
whyche is to shamefull wyde,
Or some wyll not stycke, or it be longe,
to horne you on everye side.(33)

Such remarks anticipate Timon's remarks against “the counterfeit matron” whose “habit only … is honest, / Herself's a bawd” (4.3.113-15) or his exhortation to courtesans to “Whore still; / Paint till a horse may mire upon your face: / A pox of wrinkles!” (4.3.146-48). These varied slurs share a tendency to associate women's promiscuities with their “masks” of makeup or lies that conceal their “trycksynes.”

This common association of women with deceit points to an ongoing concern from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean period with the “trycksynes” of women. For despite the shift from a female to a male ruler, abuse pamphlets continue to reflect anxieties that aggressive women have usurped the male position of authority. Psychoanalytically, the notion that women have usurped the phallus would be traced to the simple fact that all men (even Macduff) are of women born; this common dependance on women for men's very existence would, of course, have troubled men's traditional position of authority. But these anxieties had cultural resonances as well. Stephen Cohen has argued convincingly that these anxieties are “larger than a single figure [Queen Elizabeth], rooted instead in an ideological instability … that would not be resolved until the modern construction of an interiorized, essentialized subject had fully taken hold.”³⁴ And certainly anxieties about male identity may be traced to shifting notions of gender construction triggered by the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. But this generalized anxiety also had focal points during the Jacobean period. For England and its king were haunted by the constant influence of the “good” and “bad” phallic mothers—Mary and Elizabeth. Certainly the Guy Fawkes plot signalled a continuation of the Catholic plots against the sovereign that originated around the figure of Mary, and James's decision to rebury his biological mother next to his “adopted” mother Queen Elizabeth suggests a somewhat futile attempt to put their presence and influence, finally, to rest.³⁵

Whatever notion of phallic women continued to haunt the Jacobean imagination, it seems to have fed the popularity of abuse pamphlets against women, as pamphlets continue to inveigh against women's deceitful makeup. There is, however, one significant addition to this symbology, and that is a stronger invective against women who dress like men. Where makeup gestures to woman's deceitful nature, transvestism gestures to the opposite—to women who trumpet their usurpation of the phallus. Why exactly this concern emerges during the Jacobean period is hard to explain, but it was at the very least enabled by James I, who participated actively in this anti-transvestite invective by urging sermons against women who dressed like men.³⁶ The ongoing popularity of abuse pamphlets about female transvestism—particularly the Hic Mulier and Haec-Vir pamphlets—suggests that anxieties about male autonomy continue to be closely associated with notions that women have usurped the male phallus, whether they veil or display this usurpation.

Whether abuse pamphlets focus on women's deceitful makeup or their assumption of phallic dress, their language exists in interesting counterposition to the symbology of fetishism. The pamphleteers' ongoing concern with woman's “mask” of ornamentation and deceit recalls, at first, Laura Mulvey's characterization of cinematic women: “Just as an elaborate and highly artificial, dressed-up made-up appearance envelops the movie star in ‘surface,’ so does her surface supply a glossy front for the cinema. … This fragile carapace shares the phantasmatic space of the fetish itself, masking the site of the wound, covering lack with beauty.”³⁷ Mulvey's comments about movie stars resonate as well with the fetishizing tendencies behind the Athenian lust for gold. Arguably they also gesture to James I's court by associating fetish objects with a desire to repress woman's Lack. In contrast, Timon (in the latter half of the play), like abuse pamphleteers, invokes the fetishized image of woman in order to demystify it. As such his comments gesture more to the genre of the horror movie, about which, as Mulvey comments, “the exterior carapace of feminine beauty collapses to reveal the uncanny, abject, maternal body.”³⁸

But, in the abuse tradition, this tearing off woman's mask does not so much reveal woman's gaping wound as its opposite—woman's usurpation of the male phallus. Hence abuse pamphleteers return obsessively to Medusa-like images of woman as “Adders, Serpents and Snakes” or to women as sporting such phallic objects as “a Leadenhall Dagger; a Highway Pistol.”³⁹ Timon adopts a similar vocabulary when he tells Alcibiades that “This fell whore of thine / Hath in her more destruction than thy sword” (4.3.62-63). This symbology of castration anxiety may explain the violent language and imagery of abuse pamphlets and Timon of Athens as if Timon and abuse pamphleteers wish to compensate for the threat women pose to male authority by turning words into weapons of violence. In this way the abusers reassert the phallic, aggressive force of male creativity and autonomy. What is odd, of course, is that no woman appears to have actually betrayed Timon.⁴⁰ As far as the play is concerned, he has only encountered a few mute dancing women, and later, two prostitutes, who appear only after he has spoken most of his conjurations against women—as if they were external projections of his internalized, malignant, image of women.⁴¹

This radical disjunction between the lack of women in Athens and the Athenian preoccupation with women's threat to male authority suggests that these misogynistic imprecations tell us less about what women were like in Athens (and early Jacobean England) and more about male anxieties about an essential lack of identity and autonomy. Certainly, in Timon, it is the glittering male courtiers who (like women in abuse pamphlets) prostitute themselves for gold and willingly betray their prince. And if, in Jacobean abuse pamphlets, women display their usurpation of the phallus, in Timon male courtiers hide their lack of phallus—of authoritative male identity—under their male dress. That the work should begin with a dialogue between a Poet and a Painter is telling, given Flavius's remark that:

Who would be so mock'd with glory, or to live
But in a dream of friendship,
To have his pomp and all what state compounds
But only painted, like his varnish'd friends?

(4.2.33-36)

Flavius's comment, recalling as it does Timon's diatribe against “painted” women, suggests that it is not so much women as Athenian men who mask their essential Lack with the paint of “pomp.” Timon himself shows some awareness of this male mask; when Apemantus asks Timon, “What things in the world canst thou nearest compare to thy flatterers?” Timon responds, “Women nearest, but men—men are the things themselves” (4.3.318-21). Men, it turns out, are the empty, painted things.

LANGUAGE AS FETISH

But such moments of self-awareness never affect the impulse towards fetishism that, finally, overwhelms the world of Timon of Athens, enveloping even Timon's fertile imprecations against women. The Athenian drive to repress women's subjectivity leads to the disintegration of homosocial bonds and, consequently, to that of Athenian culture itself. In contrast, I will argue, abuse pamphleteers and their readers may repress women but they maintain homosocial culture by exchanging misogynistic words about them.

In moving from exogamic to linguistic exchanges I am thinking of Levi-Strauss's contention that cultural exchanges depend not just on mediations by women but on those by language as well; this notion leads him to the conclusion that “The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged.”⁴² To hoard or fetishize either is to withdraw oneself from the circulations that define and maintain homosocial, patriarchal culture. If, then, Apemantus, and later Timon, internalize the vituperative language of abuse pamphlets, its effect is ultimately fetishistic; words, like gold, become objects to be hoarded rather than objects of exchange. The play then dramatizes how the disavowal of subjective women and the concomitant worship of fetishized objects empties Athenian culture of any cultural or aesthetic significance.

To fetishize language, then, is to strip words of their dialogical, deictic function by turning them into idolatrous objects unto themselves. Timon is by no means the only early modern work that reveals the seductive force of this transformation of language. John Freccero and Nancy Vickers have described how the Renaissance blazon expresses the desire to fetishize and idolize the female body by fragmenting the subjective Other and reshaping her as a figura for the male poet's autonomy.⁴³ And, as Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich have pointed out, medieval and early modern versiprosaic literature fetishizes poetry in an attempt to fix and control a lost, and fantasized, culture of orality (much as men attempt to control their childhood fantasy of the phallic mother).⁴⁴ The fetishization of language, then, is a symptom of an early modern desire to repress Otherness—whether Otherness be conceived as the desired woman or the elusive oral past—in order to celebrate the male subject's mastery of Self and Other via a semiotics of fixity and artifice.

In Timon of Athens, by contrast, language is not consistently fetishized. The early acts of the play, for all their effacement of women, at least employ dialogue, gesture (presumably), and dramatic action to act out the kinds of issues that abuse pamphleteers tend to focus on: rather than simply have words against hypocrites, we encounter hypocrites in action; rather than simply hear criticisms of flatterers, we see flatterers mislead Timon. But once the disillusioned Timon enacts his revenge against his so-called friends by shaming them, then leaves Athens for a cave, the play effaces dramatic action to foreground invective. Essentially, then, it turns into a solipsistic abuse pamphlet, switching from an emphasis on dialogue or persuasive speech to a series of soliloquies and monologues.⁴⁵

Unlike the fetishized poetry described by Kittay and Godzich, these speeches do have strong dramatic force—enabled by the many verbs of violence that Timon employs in his imprecations:

                                                                                          Matrons turn incontinent!
Obedience, fail in children! Slaves and fools,
Pluck the grave wrinkled Senate from the bench,
And minister in their steads! To general filths
Convert o' th' instant green virginity!
Do't in your parents' eyes! 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. Maid, to thy master's bed,
Thy mistress is o' th' brothel.

(4.1.3-12)

But if language is not fully static here, it has become less a medium for dramatic action or dialogue, than a substitute for it—a series of verbal weapons aimed against all women and men.

If, then, the First Senator tells Alcibiades that “Your words have … labor'd / To bring manslaughter into form” (3.5.26-27), Timon's words have the opposite effect: they turn potential dramatic action (such as manslaughter) into a series of vituperative words. Though Timon appears to use words as projectiles against his enemies these words are quite often said to no one in particular—as residues of Timon's fantasies of absolute autonomy. Rather than see the effect of these weapons (they do eventually lead to or at least predict the fall of Timon's false friends), the play continues to focus, instead, on Timon's indefatigable and obsessive list of insults. His list returns repeatedly to the same subjects—the unfaithfulness and promiscuity of women, the disruption of homosocial bonds by women, the ingratitude of “children” (tropes for Timon's ungrateful courtiers), and the misuse of gold.⁴⁶ This, in fact, appears to be the great challenge to playing Timon on the stage. Even G. Wilson Knight, one of the great apologists for the play, comments that “The succession of curses in IV. I., if spoken at high pressure throughout, would be almost impossible for the actor and unbearable for the listener.”⁴⁷ What adds to the “unbearable” nature of this list of curses is their lack of development and drama; for, unlike many of Shakespeare's soliloquies, these lead to no internal insight or external action. Timon's all-encompassing hatred leads to a stark demonstration of what happens when man rejects all attachments—to women, men, gold, or even exchanges of language—the dissolution of the self.

One might say that the alternate hoarding and expelling of words that characterizes Timon at the end of the play represents a narcissistic projection of Timon's fear of lack, as Timon employs words to construct a fantasy of absolute autonomy based on rejecting cathexis to any person or object, except insofar as words are themselves emanations of the Self. But, ironically, these incantatory terms only reflect back upon Timon his lack of power, as the language resonates with references to nothingness, emptiness, and Lack. When Flavius comments about Timon, “what he speaks is all in debt; he owes for ev'ry word” (1.2.195-96), he signals how words, in Timon's Athens, like gold, have become empty signifiers of themselves.

This torrent of words that only highlights the void behind them is reflected in Timon's own self-effacement. Early in the play Apemantus tells Timon: “thou wilt give away thyself in paper shortly” (1.2.242-43), and this prophecy comes true at the end of the play, as Timon undoes himself with a catalogue of insults:

Therefore be abhorr'd
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea himself, Timon disdains.
Destruction fang mankind!

(4.3.20-23)

Timon, literally, talks himself out of the play: he comes up with an epitaph for himself then disappears. Ostensibly he has died, but no one ever sees his body. This self-effacement is the logical result of the fantasy of autonomy in the play: in his relentless desire for autonomy Timon continually erases male homosocial culture—first by depriving his court of the exchange of women, then by presiding over a court that empties gold of all circulatory significance, then by depriving words of any dialogical significance, and, finally, by denying the body itself. His continual disillusion with each fantasy of autonomous desire—gold, men, even language—leads to its logical conclusion: a dissolution of the self.

The effacement of dramatic action, along with the disappearance of Timon, is, I suggest, the radical effect of shaping a play out of abuse pamphlets, particularly their reiterated fantasy of promoting male autonomy by effacing women and eroticism. In contrast, abuse pamphleteers never fully follow through on the logic of their arguments. Their indefatigable references to women and eroticism, couched in vigorous and seductive language, speak to an awareness that references to women and sexuality enable homosocial bonds between male writers and readers. And so, in abuse pamphlets, we typically get passages like the following one from The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women:

If thou mean to see the Bearbaiting of women, then trudge to this Bear garden apace and get in betimes. And view every room where thou mayest best sit for thy own pleasure, profit, and heart's ease. … But before I do open this trunk full of torments against women, I think it were not amiss to resemble those which in old time did sacrifices to Hercules. For they used first to whip all their Dogs out of their City, and I think it were not amiss to drive all the women out of my hearing.⁴⁸

Swetnam describes his pamphlet as an arena where men gather for pleasure to share baited words about women. Women here are described as two kinds of aggressive animals—bears and dogs—which are either torn apart or chased out by Swetnam's vituperative words. In fact Swetnam's purpose, as he states it, is to chase women out of the arena of male readership, replacing them with words about women that bond male readers to male writer.⁴⁹

This strong dependence on misogynistic language suggests that male early modern culture, for all its fantasies of absolute autonomy, was ultimately unable to efface the category “woman,” because women, as objects of exchange between men, define homosocial relations. Just as the exchange of women via marriage remained crucial for the maintenance of alliances between families during the Jacobean era, so the predominantly homosocial culture of literate England was enhanced by exchanging words about women. By substituting misogynistic words about women for the trade in women, writers of abuse pamphlets indirectly reaffirm homosocial relations, thus maintaining their dependence on a community of male spectators, readers, and patrons. In contrast, Timon of Athens effectively effaces women from the play. The play's substitution of subjective women with inanimate gold along with its substitution of homosocial exchanges with the practice of hoarding and its displacement of dialogue with solipsistic invective erode possibilities for homosocial bonding.

One might say that Timon of Athens dramatizes an early modern cultural assumption that homosocial culture is built upon an infrastructure of female exchange—whether this exchange be characterized by mediations via marriage, or, more abstractly, by words about women. Against this assumption the play sets forth an equally powerful fantasy of absolute male autonomy, a fantasy quite possibly enhanced by the fact that, since 1553, England had not experienced a male monarch. It is not, I think, coincidental that the antipodal concepts of female mediation and absolute male autonomy should yield a play that, most critics agree, was written early in James's reign, resonating as it does with the English subjects' initial enthusiasm for, then disillusion with, the opulent, autonomous, and self-destructive figure of James I, a figure known for his disavowal of women. His queen, Anne of Denmark, became quite the opposite of the phallic Queen Elizabeth; yet her transformation into a figure of Lack (of female power and presence) it turns out, is just as threatening to male identity as is the figuration of Queen Elizabeth. For, in the play, at least, this disavowal of women is associated with the disintegration of courtly culture.

This stress on cultural emptiness, even exhaustion, may explain why inherited responses to the play are often of disillusion, for—unlike so many of Shakespeare's other plays—this one demystifies the fantasy of male autonomy without offering any powerful and seductive paradigm to replace it. And perhaps this is why readers, critics, spectators, and directors so often have problems with this play: it has traced, too successfully, the pathological trajectory of the fantasy of absolute male autonomy, leaving us with no alternative fantasy to replace it and with no sense of catharctic resolution. For, from the moment that Timon exiles women from his court, he begins a process that leads not only to the loss of autonomy but to the very absence of any embodied self. This may be why Thomas Shadwell, in his adaptation of the play, gave Timon a dramatic death along with a mistress. By dramatizing a grand death he grants Timon the very agency, aggression, and subjectivity that Shakespeare's Timon seems to have lost from the moment, perhaps, that he exiled women from his court.⁵⁰

Notes

1. The notion that Timon is unfinished was, apparently, first broached by E. K. Chambers in 1930; see William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 1:230. The same notion is taken up by Maurice Charney in his introduction to The Life of Timon of Athens, in Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, The Life of Timon of Athens (New York: Signet, 1989) xxi; Una Ellis-Fermor, “Timon of Athens: An Unfinished Play,” Review of English Studies 18 (1942): 270-83, and Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 183. A number of directors share this conception. Trevor Nunn states that “The play's scarcely presentable without some form of textual adaptation” (in Murray Biggs, “Adapting Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Bulletin 10 [1992]: 5-10), while Michael Langham has responded to Timon as “a draft of a play” (in Royal Ward, “Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Bulletin 9 [1991]: 28-31). See also Peter Brooks's comments on the play in Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 280. For a summary of such views, see Gary J. Williams, “Stage History of Timon of Athens,” in Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy, ed. Rolf Soellner (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979), 161-85.

2. For an overview of Shadwell's additions, as well as those by other adapters, see Williams, “Stage History of Timon of Athens,” 161.

3. Coppélia Kahn, ‘“Magic of Bounty: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” in Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengthaler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Richard P. Wheeler, “‘Since first we were dissevered’: Trust and Autonomy in Shakespearean Tragedy and Romance,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Jody Greene, “‘You Must Eat Men’: The Sodomitic Economy of Renaissance Patronage,” GLQ [GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies] 1 (1994): 163-97. In earlier studies of Timon references to this sense of lack have often been subordinated to other critical concerns about the play's lack of “finish.” Muriel Bradbrook's comment that “unlike earlier or later Prodigals, Timon courts no mistress,” in The Tragic Pageant of “Timon of Athens” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4 is part of her response to the play as more allegory than drama; Charney comments on this lack to support his argument that Timon is unfinished (The Life of Timon of Athens, xxv).

4. William Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens, ed. Frank Kermode, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), 1.1.206. All further quotations from Timon of Athens are from this edition of the play.

5. On James's strategic substitution of Queen Elizabeth for Mary, Queen of Scots as his mother figure, see especially David M. Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers: King James of England and Scotland (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 35-46, and Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 1-27.

6. James wrote both a satirical poem against women (see The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie [Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1955-1958] 2:165) and, apparently, exhorted the clergy to preach against transvestite women. On this exhortation see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 143-44.

7. Kahn, “Magic of Bounty,” 142-43.

8. This system of exchange reflects as well Marcel Mauss's earlier theories on gift giving. On this system in Timon of Athens, see Michael Chorost, “Biological Finance in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 21 (1991): 350-58.

9. James I was not entirely successful in this effort, given that Anne surrounded herself with a number of powerful and influential women. This aspect of James's rule has been commented on by a number of scholars, but see especially Leeds Barroll, “The Court of the First Stuart Queen,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 199-208; and Bergeron, Royal Family, 135-43.

10. It is true that Timon's lack of a wife is not Shakespeare's idea—it comes from his main source, Plutarch's Lives, but it is interesting that Shakespeare, unlike those playwrights who succeeded him in rewriting the Timon story, chose not to change Timon's marital status, hence endowing Timon with some of the apparently misogynistic attributes associated with James I.

11. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).

12. Dennis Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 281; Roy Walker, “Unto Caesar: A Review of Recent Productions,” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 128. A similar setting characterized Robin Phillips's production of Timon for the Grand Theatre Company of London, Ontario (1983). Here the setting was fin de siècle, “lavish with silver and crystal” according to Nina Mellamphy [“Wormwood in the Wood outside Athens: Timon and the Problem for the Audience,” in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations in the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988)], 170. See also Royal Ward's description of Langham's production ([Timon of Athens, Shakespeare Bulletin 9 (1991): 28-31), 29].

13. On Timon of Athens and instabilities of Jacobean economies, see especially Chorost, “Biological Finance,” 349-58.

14. On giving as a form of power in Timon of Athens see also David Cook, “Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Survey, vol. 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 221; and Kahn, “Magic of Bounty,” 140. For a more extensive discussion of how Timon's court represents a sham of homosocial giving and receiving, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 176-84. Productions of Timon of Athens often represent him as, at least, selfishly generous. In the Old Vic production of 1956, for instance, “The early scenes suggested … not the noble magnanimity of a largess universal like the sun, [but] … a reckless extravagance” (Walker, “Unto Caesar,” 212).

15. For a more detailed reading of narcissism and its relations to misanthropy in Timon of Athens, see Wheeler, “Since First We Were Dissevered,” 149-66.

16. On this symbology for boxes, see Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 187-88, 389-90, and 394.

17. The representation of gold as object of desire and identification points to a leitmotif of anal symbolism throughout the play. While this symbolism is outside of my focus on lack of women, I note some moments where it is of particular relevance to my argument. For a larger elaboration on some of the associations of desire with anality, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men.” While Greene does not explicitly discuss anality, his essay deals with a number of issues associated with anal desire.

18. We receive a reminder of this gender role when, early in the play, Timon enables Lucilius to marry the Old Athenian's daughter by putting up money for the marriage. But this classic homosocial exchange only points to the very Lack that defines Timon: while he is happy to enable others to marry, he prefers, apparently, to live free of a wife—a statement of absolute autonomy which, within the dynamics of the play, is also narcissistic and self-destructive.

19. For a recent elaboration on the roles that the dukes of Somerset and Buckingham played in King James's court, see Bergeron, Royal Family, Royal Lovers, esp. 86-88, 104-15, and 126-32.

20. This is Michael Langham's production at the 1991 Stratford festival. On the homoerotics of this production, see Ward, “Timon of Athens,” 30-31. Biggs (“Adapting Timon of Athens,” 8-10) also comments on this aspect of this production, while emphasizing the spiritual, rather than erotic, qualities of the bonding between Alcibiades and Timon.

21. Flavius, of course, attempts to take on this role, but, perhaps because he is merely a servant, Timon never attends to what he has to say.

22. Harry Levin articulates a similar concept when he says, “The key-words of the play, employed more often than anywhere else in Shakespeare, friend and gold, almost seem to cancel each other out” (“Shakespeare's Misanthrope,” Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 26., ed. Kenneth Muir [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973], 91). For a more detailed commentary on gold and idolatry in early modern culture, see David Hawkes, “Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in the Antitheatrical Controversy,” SEL [SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 39.2 (1999): 255-73.

23. The notion that Timon of Athens may be read as a condemnation of a capitalist fetishization of gold has been proposed by a number of critics. See, for instance, Chorost, “Biological Finance,” 358-63; Levin, “Shakespeare's Misanthrope,” 94, and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Tragic Sequence (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), 190-91. This critical perspective inspired Peter Brook to represent Timon of Athens as a reflection of Western consumer crises (see Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 297). A similar representation of gold underlay Ron Daniel's 1980 production of Timon (see Richard Pasco, “Timon of Athens,” in Players of Shakespeare: Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Twelve Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Philip Brockbank [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], 135). For a discussion of how this anticapitalist anxiety underlies abuse pamphlets against theater, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 172-74, and Hawkes, “Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism,” 255-59.

24. This figurative language makes clear how effeminacy, during the Renaissance, was associated not so much with excessive desire for a man, as with excessive desire for a woman. For a somewhat different reading of eroticism in this passage, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 172.

25. On cannibalism in the play, see also William Farnham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier: The World of His Final Tragedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 70; Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 163-97; and Kahn, “Magic of Bounty,” 141.

26. See Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor (London: Macmillan, 1978); and Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 18-21.

27. The fetishization of gold signals an apparent point of intersection between the Freudian fetish and Marx's notion of commodity fetishism. As Laura Mulvey has noted, both notions of the fetish converge in the erotics of disavowal: much as, for Freud, fetishism marks the desire to disavow the mother's Lack by replacing it with a controllable object, so, for Marx, commodity fetishism marks the desire to estrange oneself from the labor power that produces objects by replacing it with an autonomous sign of exchange—such as money. See Mulvey's Fetishism and Curiosity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1-6. In Timon, however, it is not commodity fetishization per se that is problematic; in fact the play represents exchanges of gold as constructive and valuable for homosocial culture. It is, instead, when exchanges of gold become replaced by hoarding that Athenian culture becomes self-destructive and cannibalistic.

28. For a more extended discussion of the homoerotic associations between eating and desire, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 178-91. Greene argues that the pathologies of Timon result from an economy of patronage in which “the boundaries of friendship and sodomy collapse” (186). I take this notion a step further by suggesting that sodomitical desire itself has been transferred from desire for Lord Timon to a fetishistic craving solely for Timon's gold.

29. The association, in these lines, between sadistic homoeroticism and desire for gold is reinforced by Deuteronomy 23: 17-20. As Greene has noted, the Deuteronomic decrees against usury are immediately followed by decrees against “sodomites” and “whores.” In this constellation, usury, like whoredom and sodomy, is associated with unnatural breeding—the unnaturalness of illegitimate children, barren sexuality, or financial interest. While this essay focuses on the significance of associating women with either Lack or whoredom, Greene explores the homoerotic and usurious implications of the language of eroticism and cannibalism in Timon of Athens. See “You Must Eat Men,” 163-97.

30. See also 5.1.157.

31. Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse: Containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &. (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1841), 10. On dates for the period during which these pamphlets were especially popular, see Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, ed., Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 11-20; and Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, 13-17. Greene also finds links between abuse pamphlets and Timon, although he focuses on references to sodomy, rather than women, in the pamphlets; see “You Must Eat Men,” 167-69.

32. Thomas Nashe, The Anatomie of Absurditie, in Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910), 1:6.

33. Charles Bansley, A Treatyse Shewing and Declaring the Pryde and Abuse of Women Now A Dayes ([ca. 1550] Waukegan, Ill.: The Elizabethan Bookseller, n.d.), lines 73-76.

34. Stephen Cohen, “(Post)modern Elizabeth: Gender, Politics, and the Emergence of Modern Subjectivity,” in Shakespeare and Modernity, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20-39.

35. On this reburial see Bergeron, Royal Family, 73-74.

36. On this action, see Henderson and McManus, introduction to Half Humankind, 28. James also wrote to his son against dressing effeminately, as, he claimed some male courtiers did. On these writings, see Greene, “You Must Eat Men,” 163-97.

37. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 13.

38. Ibid., 14.

39. Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, in Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 192; Haec-Vir, in Henderson and McManus, Half Humankind, 280. Quite often the pamphleteers seem to be responding to the threat to traditional homosocial culture posed by increasingly influential female readers, patrons, and writers. Nashe most vividly portrays this threat by claiming that “Women … seeke to stop my mouth by most voices” and by reminding us that “Orpheus the excellentest Musition in any memory, [was] torne in peeces by Women” (The Anatomie of Absurditie, 11,16).

40. Wheeler (“Since first we were dissevered,” 152) and Kahn (“Magic of Bounty,” 136) have given a convincing psychoanalytical explanation for this obsession with betrayals by women—finding it in the male child's primal separation from (and hence sense of betrayal by) his mother. This notion would certainly fit nicely with James I, whose mother left him when he was under a year old.

41. On this point see also Mellamphy, “Wormwood in the Wood,” 173.

42. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Strumer, ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 496.

43. John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

44. Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich, The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 203. I discuss the fetishization of poetry in early modern versiprosaic fiction in “Philoclea Parsed: Prose, Verse, and Femininity in Sidney's Old Arcadia,” in Framing Elizabethan Fictions: Contemporary Approaches to Early Modern Narrative Prose (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996).

45. Timon speaks a forty-one line soliloquy in 4.1, in addition to a forty-eight line and a twenty-one line soliloquy in 4.3; and most of Timon's interactions with other characters in this act are framed by long monologues or speeches.

46. This may be why the Old Vic production of 1958 (like other productions) cut a number of lines at this point of the performance (see Charney, intro., The Life of Timon of Athens, 210-11).

47. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy (1930; rev. London: Methuen, 1949), 121. Richard Pasco makes a similar point when he states that “From here (4.2) to the end of the play the actor's problem is to prevent each set scene from becoming one long shouting-match between Timon and his visitors in the wilderness” (“Timon of Athens,” 134). In much the same way Mellamphy, commenting on seeing Timon performed, suggests that the monologues of 4.3 lead to “monotony” (“Wormwood in the Wood,” 173).

48. Swetnam, 192.

49. Oddly enough, Swetnam indirectly places himself in the feminine position in this passage; his reference to opening “this trunk full of torment” places him in the position of Pandora.

50. I am grateful to Steve Cohen, David Kawkes, Katharine Maus, Tom Prendergast, and Mihoko Suzuki for their comments on this essay in its various stages.