[In the following essay, Draper examines Timon's belief in the corrupting influence of wealth.]

In the first part of Timon of Athens Timon appears as a man full of warmth, geniality and overflowing humanity. He is the incarnation of charity and hospitality, and believes in the supreme virtue of friendship, which his generosity is intended to foster. Gold plays an immensely important part throughout the play, but for Timon, before his fall, it is completely the servant of “honour” (another key-word) and of brotherly love. In the great feast of I. ii. he comes very near to enunciating an ideal of benevolent communism in which money merely provides the opportunity for men to express charity towards one another:

We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O! what a precious comfort 'tis, to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another's fortunes.

(I. ii. 105-109)

At this stage Timon has complete faith in society and the altruism of mankind. The men who surround him, all except Apemantus, pretend to share his idealism, but Shakespeare leaves the audience of the play in little doubt as to their sincerity. The professional rivalry of the painter and the poet is but thinly disguised, and the deference paid by his guests to Timon reeks of flattery. Apemantus points to the duplicity of these men,

That there should be small love 'mongst these sweet knaves,
And all this courtesy!

(I. i. 250-251)

—words which strike a significant contrast with Timon's denunciation of the “ceremony” which merely sets “a gloss on faint deeds, hollow welcomes” (I. ii. 16)—and he also links it with the degeneracy of man:

                                                                                          The strain of man's bred out
Into baboon and monkey.

(I. i. 251-252)

The stage is set for tragedy because Timon is under a grievous illusion about the nature of men, and the collapse of society seems imminent because it has become thoroughly degenerate. Apemantus is a commentator on all this, but like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida he is not necessarily Shakespeare's own spokesman. As we learn later from Timon, in a very different mood, he is part of the general corruption that he dwells upon so avidly.¹

Timon's downfall is already imminent at the beginning of the play—the state of his purse as revealed by the faithful steward, Flavius, tells us that—and the consequences of his downfall are already foreshadowed in the Poet's account of Fortune's hill. (I. i. 87-92 are reminiscent of the Fool on the “great wheel”, King Lear II. iv. 71-74.) We are not here confronted with a sudden disillusionment, but with a marked contrast between the magnanimity and totally unsuspicious generosity of Timon and the pusillanimity of all the other characters in the play, except Timon's own servants and Alcibiades. And as the good characters in Lear feel the inner compulsion of Lear's innate kingship, so the worthwhile characters in Timon are under his influence. In IV. ii. we can see that Timon's servants are his creatures. His household may be ruined, so that there is no service for them to do, “Yet do our hearts wear Timon's livery” (IV. ii. 17), and Flavius' action in dividing the remainder of his wealth among his fellow-servants is a notable instance of the servants' discipleship of the master's idealism and practice. Likewise, Alcibiades does not attack Athens for his personal grievance only, but in the name of Timon too. Timon is a larger-than-life figure.

He is also, however, Shakespeare's reflection of the impecunious lords who were ruined by their extravagance in his own day. Blame perhaps chiefly belongs to the society which has become so corrupt by “politic” considerations that it can prove ungrateful to the power which sustains it. (Again the imagery suggests that Timon is the source of life.) Yet he is also a man who is guilty of “riot”. He does not realize (in fact “will not hear, till feel,” II. ii. 7) the limits set to generosity by purely economic factors. “No care, no stop!” exclaims his steward, Flavius,

… so senseless of expense,
That he will neither know how to maintain it,
Nor cease his flow of riot: takes no account
How things go from him; nor resumes no care
Of what is to continue.

(II. ii. 1-5)

When one adds to this his lack of understanding of the baseness and hypocrisy of those who surround him, it is perhaps not too much to see him as a would-be Saturnian figure, living in an imaginary Golden Age, who is unaware of the nature of the fallen world in which he actually exists.²

It is here that the ambiguity of “gold” contributes so much to the play's meaning, far more even than it contributed to The Merchant of Venice. Timon's idealistic communism belongs to the Golden Age, but he lives in the Iron Age, when, as Ovid paradoxically said, gold was first discovered—gold, that is, in the sense of material wealth and all the abuses that go with it. In his disillusionment Timon sees this kind of gold as the source of all evil, that which undermines order, subverts all values, and levels all distinctions. This is expressed by Timon in his devastating soliloquy at the beginning of IV. iii in language strongly reminiscent of Lear in his madness. But in this speech there is even more than the perception of disorder; there is a feeling of revulsion against mankind. Timon's disgust goes so far that it causes him to identify human life with the principle of corruption. Images of fertility run through the speech, but counteracted by images of disease and degradation. Timon's very prayer to the sun is a contradiction of the two adjectives with which he qualifies the sun:

O blessed breeding sun! draw from the earth
Rotten humidity; below thy sister's orb
Infect the air!

(IV. iii. 1-3)

Using ambiguities which alchemy also caused to be attached to gold (the alchemists claimed that the philosopher's stone would cure venereal disease and “make old bawds young”³) Timon speaks of the transmuting power of gold—though the point of his speech is that it is not gold that really transmutes, but its corrupting influence that makes men love disease for the sake of gold.

This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs'd;
Make the hoar leprosy ador'd; place thieves,
And give them title, knee, and approbation,
With senators on the bench; this is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again.

(IV. iii. 33-41)

The subsequent scene with the mistresses of Alcibiades continues this preoccupation with the theme of degeneracy, in the fullest sense of the word. The imagery in the above quotations is brought to life in Phrynia and Timandra, to whom Timon gives gold in order to encourage them in the work of spreading disease. He likewise gives gold to Alcibiades to help him “Make large confusion” (IV. iii. 126) and to the banditti, telling them not to cease stealing because of it, and encouraging their thievery by representing it as part of a universal practice:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun;
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement; each thing's a thief.

(IV. iii. 438-444)

The sense of man's enormity has so taken hold of Timon that it colors his whole outlook. He sees Nature in terms of man's depravity, even down to the generative process itself. The last lines of this quotation come near to what Lawrence calls “doing dirt” on life.

An earlier speech (IV. iii. 176-196) had shown more clearly the relationship between this deepest of all loathing and what is, compared with this, the more limited revulsion from the corruption of man. Returning to his digging again after the exit of Alcibiades, Timon addresses mother earth in a speech that at once evokes a positive feeling of her huge fertility, and dwells upon the loathsomeness of many of the creatures, including “arrogant man”, to which that fertility gives nourishment:

                                        Common mother, thou,
Whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast,
Teems, and feeds all; whose self-same mettle,
Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is puff'd,
Engenders the black toad and adder blue,
The gilded newt and eyeless venom'd worm,
With all the abhorred births below crisp heaven
Whereon Hyperion's quickening fire doth shine.

(IV. iii. 176-183)

Although “the abhorred births” of Nature are here isolated from her more beautiful and healthy creatures, her two agents of breeding, the earth and the sun, are not debased, no dirt is done on them. The loathsome creatures are inserted as the natural companions of man, who has abused the bounty of Nature. For this reason Timon beseeches Nature to diminish her own fertility, in order to stamp out the species of “ingrateful man” (l. 193).⁴ The last few lines of this speech in particular forcefully convey the impression that the very richness of Nature's fertility has “spoilt” man (as pampering spoils a child):

Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas;(5)
Whereof ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts
And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind,
That from it all consideration slips!

(IV. iii. 192-195)

It is in reaction to this that Timon abandons Athens for the woods, and opposes to all the luxury, deceitfulness and corruption that gold stands for the simplicity of “roots”. He deliberately prefers Nature in her poorest form and a life of the barest necessity to anything sumptuous.

I am sick of this false world; and will love nought
But even the mere necessities upon't.

(IV. iii. 377-378)

Against his earlier speech on man's abuse of Nature's riches should be set the following words to the Banditti on the plentifulness of Nature and the meaning of necessity:

TIMON.
Your greatest want is, you want much of meat.
Why should you want? Behold, the earth hath roots;
Within this mile break forth a hundred springs;
The oaks bear mast, the briers scarlet hips;
The bounteous housewife, nature, on each bush
Lays her full mess before you. Want! why want?
FIRST Thief.
We cannot live on grass, on berries, water,
As beasts and birds and fishes.
TIMON.
Nor on the beasts themselves, the birds, and fishes;
You must eat men.

(IV. iii. 418-427)

That last phrase has an almost Jonsonian ring about it. It converts natural appetite suddenly into unnatural, rather like Volpone's

… (I) have no mills for yron,
Oyle, corne, or men, to grinde 'hem into poulder

(Volpone, I. i. 35-36),

but Timon differs from Volpone in making the statement, “You must eat men”, throw back a suggestion of unnaturalness over all the wanting of the Banditti, and through them of mankind. It brings us back to the first line of the quotation, “Your greatest want is, you want much”, the core of mere disorderly appetite, the “blood”, in man which makes him lack (“want”) reasonable control over his desire (a second meaning of “want”). Behind this lies the conception of natural order, which Mr. J. F. Danby has shown to be the more normal one for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.⁶ It is interesting that the effect of these and Timon's subsequent words, including those that debase Nature, should be to make at least one of the Banditti say, “I'll believe him as an enemy, and give over my trade” (IV. iii. 458-459).

Although Timon himself is divided in his attitude to Nature, the general drift of the latter part of the play is towards a restoration of order, in which his hermit-like existence plays its part. Man is diseased, but stress is laid on the cure as well as the disease. Alcibiades is the dominant figure of the last scene, and, much as he has in common with those restorers of order who appear in most of the tragedies—Fortinbras, Edgar, Malcolm, for example—he differs from them in that he seems to foreshadow the regenerative theme of the last plays. He is in some ways a representative of that half of Timon which still conceived of Nature as ordered. He yields to the prayers of the Senators that he should be reasonable and only punish those who have offended, that he should not be “unnatural” towards his birthplace and his kin, and, in particular that he should

… like a shepherd,
Approach the fold, and cull th' infected forth.

(V. iv. 42-43)

These words hint at the healing and regenerative power associated with the pastoral, to be developed at large in The Winter's Tale.

Alcibiades' interpretation of Timon's epitaph brings out the ambivalence of Timon's “latter spirits”.

Here lies a wretched corse, of wretched soul bereft:
Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left!
Here lie I, Timon; who, alive, all living men did hate:
Pass by and curse thy fill; but pass and stay not here thy gait.
These well express in thee thy latter spirits;
Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs,
Scorn'dst our brain's flow and those our droplets which
From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit
Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye
On thy low grave, on faults forgiven.

(V. iv. 70-79)

Rage is toned down to the pastoral virtue of pity, which by “rich conceit” is given a universal significance; and the reference to the sea, together with the strange, unearthly tone of what were almost Timon's last words—

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood;
Who once a day with his embossed froth
The turbulent surge shall cover

(V. i. 218-221)

look forward to the sea-imagery of Pericles and The Tempest and the unearthly music of the religious element in the last plays.

The latter part of the play is not altogether satisfactory. The shift of emphasis from Timon to Alcibiades leaves the psychological evolution of Timon inadequately represented. Something happens to him, or is in the process of happening, which is neither poetically, nor dramatically fully realized. Timon of Athens is a transitional play, in which Shakespeare is feeling his way towards a treatment of the subjects of evil and destruction and of the clash of the ideal and the real which is rather different from that in the tragedies. Nature's powers of healing and regeneration are being explored, though it cannot be said that in Timon of Athens anything more than a hint of the theme of regeneration, as developed in The Winter's Tale, is given. What Shakespeare seems to have gained from the experience of writing this play is a realization of the organic quality of change in man and society—and so, by implication, a realization that the human is an extension of the natural. Thus in the closing lines of the play Alcibiades proclaims that he will use the interaction of justice and mercy, war and peace, to cleanse and purify Athens, and make the body politic healthy again:

… I will use the olive with my sword:
Make war breed peace; make peace stint war; make each
Prescribe to other, as each other's leech.

(V. iv. 82-84)

Notes

1. Cf. IV. iii. 321-346. Quotations from the Arden edition, edited by K. Deighton (London, 1929).

2. Cf. also Flavius' exclamation on finding Timon in the woods:

   O monument and wonder of good deeds
   Evilly bestowed!

   (IV. iii. 464-465)

3. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist—see the whole of the speech from which these words are taken (I. iv. 11-29).

4. Cf. Lear in the storm: “And thou, all-shaking thunder. … That make ingrateful man” (King Lear, III. ii. 6-9).

5. This line seems to recall one of the stock elements in the Golden Age. Before the Fall, land was not ploughed up.

6. See John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London, 1949).