A Strangely Tame Timon
The other great Shakespearean play about money is the rarely-mounted Timon of Athens. It’s a peculiar play in terms of structure and in terms of its place in the canon. There’s some evidence that it’s a collaboration, more evidence that it’s simply unfinished – among other things, the play ends twice, and it feels like the author hadn’t yet decided between the two. And while it nominally follows Shakespeare’s standard five-act scheme, in fact it’s structured as a diptych.
The first half of the play takes place in the title character’s stately home in Athens. Timon is a prodigal spender, rashly emptying his purse on fancy parties, expensive gifts for his friends, and other grand gestures. The first thing we see him do onstage is provide a handsome dowry to a servant of his who has fallen in love with a woman of greater means whose father objects to a love match with an unpropertied man. Timon will not hear his faithful Steward when he tries to warn him that the coffers are empty, and so he is shocked when his own creditors, realizing that he cannot avoid bankruptcy, begin dunning him for prompt payment of his debts. Appraised finally of his dire financial condition, Timon tries to borrow of the many friends who have long enjoyed his benificence, only to discover that nobody knows you when you’re down and out. So, Timon throws one last feast, inviting all his erstwhile friends, and serves them only smoke and water, then drives them from his house in rage and flees to the wilderness.
The second half takes place in the wilderness. Almost immediately upon embracing his impoverished condition, Timon finds gold buried in the earth – a gift he curses, until he realizes that he can use it to sow mischief among the humanity he hates. And as word of his find gets out fast, Timon is visited by various people he knew in his prime in Athens. Some are thieves out to steal his gold. Some are flattering painters and poets who he was wont to support. One is Apemantus, a cynical philosopher who used to rail against Timon when he was a spendthrift. One is Alcibiades, an Athenian warrior who has been banished by the Senate for standing up for one of his soldiers who committed a murder, and now marches on Athens in revenge. And finally he is visited by his faithful Steward, who leads the Athenian notables to Timon to beg his support to combat Alcibiades. Timon refuses all offers to return to society; he gives gold to Alcibiades to help him fight Athens, leaves the rest to his Steward, and kills himself. The play ends with Alcibiades’ triumphant entry into Athens.
Beckett is one obvious point of comparison, at least for the second half of the play; the Book of Job is another obvious point – but neither comparison, I think, gets one very far into the play. Job, after all, is smitten for no reason at all; Timon, by contrast, is smitten for his own prodigality, and he knows this. Job learns something about the indifference of the Divine to human suffering – and somehow comes through that to an appreciation that behind this apparent indifference is deeper set of values, beyond good and evil, but expressing an ecstatic involvement of the Divine in creation. Timon, unlike Lear, does not implicate the indifferent cosmos in his suffering; he does not accuse the gods, but rather man, and declares himself misanthropos. As for Beckett, one thing his characters do not do is “curse God and die” as Job’s wife advises – they cannot go on, but they go on. But Timon does pretty much that – not curse God, but curse man, and hang himself in despair.
Timon is, at the end of the day, a rather small, weak character, who never really understands why he is suffering; a profoundly lonely man who has done all the wrong things to try to find connection in his life. The key, it seems to me, to understanding Timon is to recall that he is both single and childless. Indeed, Timon seems to have negligible interest in women. This is in sharp contrast to Alcibiades, who (historically) went into battle with Cupid painted on his shield, and who (in the play) is always surrounded by whores. Timon doesn’t think much of women – in his misanthropic latter phase, in answer to the question of what creatures might be compared to his former flatterers, he says, “women, nearest; but men, men are the things themselves” – and, later, when the faithful Steward comes back to him in his misery, surprising Timon with his loyal tears, he says:
What, dost thou weep? Come nearer. Then I
love thee,
Because thou art a woman, and disclaim’st
Flinty mankind; whose eyes do never give
But thorough lust and laughter.
In the earlier part of the play, Timon provides female entertainment for his flatterers – exotic dancers and the like – but he himself has little interest. Why is this? I don’t think it’s especially useful to think of Timon as having repressed homosexual leanings; rather, I think it’s more effective to think of him as pre-sexual, his contempt for and lack of interest in women more comparable to the attitude of a nine year old boy than of a grown up misogynist (like, say, Lear, to whom Timon is also often compared).
With this view of Timon in mind, I was encouraged by the casting of Richard Thomas in the title role of the recent production at the Public Theatre. As it happens, though, the production pulled its punches, giving us a relatively tame Timon. Most notably, we are not forced to confront the place of women in the play. The whores and strippers are removed from the play – we get one blue movie at one of Timon’s parties, but that’s it. The figure of Alcibiades is changed radically by this omission. In the play, he is continually in the company of whores; he is an emphatically fleshy character, and this prevents us from seeing him unambiguously as a figure of righteous revenge on wicked Athens. Having stripped him of his libido, this production turns him into precisely that figure, his triumph no longer a terrible caution but just retribution on a decadent society. There’s a word for that, the longing for a martial, masculine figure untainted by sex or money, who will cleanse the polis by the sword, and the word is “fascism.” I doubt that’s what the director, Barry Edelstein, was aiming for, but by removing this fruitful complexity in Alcibiades’ character, that’s what he’s given us.
And without the whores, Timon as well has much less to do in the second half of the play. In the text, Timon eagerly eggs the whores on – “whore more!” – “be strong in whore!” – seeing them as another vehicle for the destruction of mankind by disease. Without them, Timon is left calling for Alcibiades to wreak his just vengeance on Athens. And that’s not quite the total misanthropy that we’re supposed to get.
The other change is to Apemantus who shows far too much pity on Timon in his fallen state. Again, a character with a fruitful ambiguity to him is transformed by this production into a clear good guy, and the play is reduced. Timon and Apemantus have a marvelous dialogue when Apemantus meets him in his miserable state in the wilderness. Apemantus declares:
Always a villain’s office or a fool’s.
Dost please thyself in’t?If thou didst put this sour-cold habit on
To castigate thy pride, ‘twere well: but thou
Dost it enforcedly; thou’ldst courtier be again,
Wert thou not beggar. Willing misery
Outlives encertain pomp, is crown’d before:
The one is filling still, never complete;
The other, at high wish: best state, contentless,
Hath a distracted and most wretched being,
Worse than the worst, content.
Thou shouldst desire to die, being miserable.Not by his breath that is more miserable.
Thou art a slave, whom Fortune’s tender arm
With favour never clasp’d; but bred a dog.
Hadst thou, like us from our first swath, proceeded
The sweet degrees that this brief world affords
To such as may the passive drugs of it
Freely command, thou wouldst have plunged thyself
In general riot; melted down thy youth
In different beds of lust; and never learn’d
The icy precepts of respect, but follow’d
The sugar’d game before thee. But myself,
Who had the world as my confectionary,
The mouths, the tongues, the eyes and hearts of men
At duty, more than I could frame employment,
That numberless upon me stuck as leaves
Do on the oak, hive with one winter’s brush
Fell from their boughs and left me open, bare
For every storm that blows: I, to bear this,
That never knew but better, is some burden:
Thy nature did commence in sufferance, time
Hath made thee hard in’t. Why shouldst thou hate men?
They never flatter’d thee: what hast thou given?
If thou wilt curse, thy father, that poor rag,
Must be thy subject, who in spite put stuff
To some she beggar and compounded thee
Poor rogue hereditary. Hence, be gone!
If thou hadst not been born the worst of men,
Thou hadst been a knave and flatterer.
Who’s gets the better of this exchange – Apemantus? Or Timon? It seems to me that Timon comes out on top – he scores a far more telling point against Apemantus than Apemantus ever does against him. And this is reflected in the way their meeting ends:
Away,
Thou tedious rogue! I am sorry I shall lose
A stone by thee.Throws a stone at him
Rogue, rogue, rogue!
I am sick of this false world, and will love nought
But even the mere necessities upon ‘t.
Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave;
Lie where the light foam the sea may beat
Thy grave-stone daily: make thine epitaph,
That death in me at others’ lives may laugh.To the gold
O thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce
‘Twixt natural son and sire! thou bright defiler
Of Hymen’s purest bed! thou valiant Mars!
Thou ever young, fresh, loved and delicate wooer,
Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow
That lies on Dian’s lap! thou visible god,
That solder’st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! that speak’st with
every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think, thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire!Would ‘twere so!
But not till I am dead. I’ll say thou’st gold:
Thou wilt be throng’d to shortly.Exit APEMANTUS
Timon’s one wish is to be alone, apart from society. Apemantus’s one self-professed goal has been to breed a strong stoicism in Timon, an ability to shun the flattery he craves, and rely upon his own resources. So how does he end his interview. Promising to bring in the society, thronging, that he and Timon both profess to hate! And he eagerly awaits Timon’s prophesied end of the world – “but not til I am dead.” Such courage he has in his convictions! Timon has declared his intention to kill himself, and Apemantus has no words that respond. Directly to this declaration. To my mind, Apemantus’s pretensions are comprehensively annihilated by Timon, as surely as Job’s comforters are annihilated by that man of woe; indeed, it is in his dialogue with Apemantus that Timon comes off strongest of any moment in the play. So how was this scene handled in this production? Apemantus is never really touched by Timon’s barbs, and Timon very nearly cries on Apemantus’s shoulders. But if that’s the way you’re going to play the scene, then what’s the point of the play? What have we got to learn from Timon that we didn’t know when first we meet him? Because we already know that extravagant prodigality won’t end well; we already know that you shouldn’t listen to flatterers. In this production, I’m afraid we end feeling a kind of contemptuous pity for Timon; he does not touch us where we live.
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