Timon of Athens is one of Shakespeare's most divisive plays, not only in terms of the quality of its writing, but also because it is by far and away one of the least performed Shakespeare plays. In this episode of Chronicles, I discuss why this play is so divisive, and why it may have been written by two different authors.
00:04:08.760This is something that Middleton does a great amount.
00:04:11.580Also, in the banquet scenes, they really lend themselves
00:04:16.260to a particular genre of play that was very popular
00:04:20.420in the Jacobean period known as city comedies. And these were something that Middleton himself
00:04:26.340absolutely excelled at in plays like A Mad World and My Masters. So there are those aspects of it
00:04:35.200too. The other thing is that this may explain in having two separate writers working on it
00:04:43.840simultaneously, and on top of that the fact that it seems that the play may never actually have
00:04:50.740been performed. It might have been discarded, it may have been finished, but simply never had any
00:04:56.800revisions put to it. There is a lot of conjecture, and all of these questions are asked by scholars
00:05:03.460far more capable than myself. But to just simply give you the information on this, one of the
00:05:10.160things that people often point to as evidence of there being two writers, other than the things
00:05:16.300that I've just outlined, is also the fact that when it comes to the talents, right, this measurement
00:05:22.600of money, these large sums of money, there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency there. For example,
00:05:30.360At the beginning of the story, Tymon of Athens gives five talents to pay the debt of Ventilius.
00:05:41.320However, he also then goes on to pay three talents for a dowry, and this is made out from the reactions of people around to be a sizable chunk of money.
00:05:52.180However, later on in the play, we see the same measurement, the same unit of talents being used.
00:06:00.360much more broadly, like 500 talents, and this is seen as actually not a great deal.
00:06:07.380So there seems to be some disagreement between the hands that is working on this as to the
00:06:12.060very idea of how much a talent is actually worth, which would have been a large sum of
00:06:20.260And they've obviously got their own metrics and their own way of measuring it within the
00:06:25.080story without seemingly a great deal of cross-referencing with one another.
00:06:30.360But this is all conjecture. This is all speculation. We truly don't know. It may well have been an entirely Shakespearean work. This is something that people will probably continue to debate for long here after me recording this now.
00:06:47.080But let's just actually talk about some things that we do know for certain. For one, Timon of Athens, long before he became the main character of a Shakespearean tragedy, was a very often cited figure across sources from antiquity.
00:07:04.760This is very famously the case in Time and the Misanthrop
00:07:28.000So you can get an idea of the sources that Shakespeare was working from
00:07:32.460Plutarch's lives was one of Shakespeare's main resources.
00:07:36.500It was always one of his go-tos when he was writing anything about the antiquity period.
00:07:43.440This is also true of Coriolanus and his play Antony and Cleopatra, which were also being written around this time.
00:07:51.980Shakespeare had this phase of writing these antiquity plays.
00:07:56.780Amongst also, just to say, this is also the period of about 1605 to 1608
00:08:03.620When Shakespeare is writing many of his most famous tragedies as well, such as King Lear
00:08:09.960So I'll just read you this part from Plutarch and then we'll carry on
00:08:15.680Now, Timon was an Athenian and lived about the time of the Peloponnesian War
00:08:22.160As may be gathered from the plays of Aristophanes and Plato
00:08:25.700for he is represented in their comedies as peevish and misanthropical. But though he avoided
00:08:32.360and repelled all intercourse with men, he was glad to see Alcibiades, who was then young and
00:08:38.920headstrong and showered kisses upon him. And when Appamantus was amazed at this and asked the reason
00:08:46.340for it, Tymon said he loved the youth because he knew that he would be a cause of many ills of
00:08:52.840Athens. This Appomantus alone of all men Tymon would sometimes admit into his company, since
00:09:00.560Appomantus was like him and tried sometimes to imitate his mode of life, and once, at the
00:09:07.020festival of the pictures, the two were feasting for themselves, and Appomantus said, Tymon,
00:09:13.620what a fine symposium ours is. It would be, said Tymon, if thou wert not here.
00:09:20.480We are told, also, that when the Athenians were holding an assembly, he ascended to Bema,
00:09:27.180and the strangeness of the thing caused deep silence and great expectancy. Then he said,
00:09:33.340I have a small building lot, men of Athens, and a fig tree is growing in it, from which many of my
00:09:40.460fellow citizens have already hanged themselves. Accordingly, as I intend to build a house there,
00:09:47.240I wanted to give public notice to that effect in order that all of you who desire to do so
00:09:53.540may hang yourselves before the fig tree is cut down. After he had died and been buried at Helier
00:10:00.860near the sea, the shore in front of the tomb slipped away and the water surrounding it
00:10:07.080and made it completely inaccessible to man. The inscription of the tomb was,
00:10:12.200Here, after snapping the thread of a wretched life I lie, yet shall not learn my name, but my curses shall follow you.
00:10:22.580This inscription he is said to have composed himself, and that in general circulation is by Callimachus.0.62
00:10:29.920Timon, hater of men, dwells here, so pass along, heap many curses on me, if thou wilt only pass along.
00:10:39.520And so you can get, just from that short extract, an entire flavour of the temperament and manner of Tymon, and also his relation, or lack thereof, to the other Athenians and men of the city.
00:10:54.500And what we have here in Tymon of Athens is of a man who is the entire opposite of this depiction.
00:11:02.240It is the man who is endlessly benevolent, endlessly magnanimous.
00:11:08.240He is philanthropic to the point of absurdity in comedy.
00:11:13.260And it's the story of how that man is betrayed and will become the man that Plutarch outlines in his lives
00:11:22.420as a man who becomes that sinister, cynical and cantankerous and venomous character
00:11:30.080who will go on to die and have a tomb by the sea away from society, right?
00:11:36.500He's not buried in Athens in the city.
00:11:39.180He is away from the city, away from civilization on his own,
00:11:44.200where he might finally have some peace.
00:11:46.940And as it says there, even lay your curses on me and then just pass along,
00:11:51.900but just make sure that you pass along.
00:11:57.300not one you'd want to spend any amount of time with whatsoever.
00:12:01.780But there is another reason why Shakespeare is writing this play,
00:12:07.220other than the fact that it makes for a very colourful type of character from antiquity,
00:12:13.700which is, of course, the themes that it allows Shakespeare to explore,
00:12:17.900and Middleton, indeed, if he didn't collaborate on this,
00:12:22.320which is the fact that, well, it has somewhat eternal questions to ask about credit and debt
00:12:32.200and to what extent gold and gift-giving actually seal friendship with one another.
00:12:40.700One of the things that's spoken about at the beginning of Catherine Maus's analysis of
00:12:47.540Tymon of Athens, who writes the preface for the version of Tymon that is in the Norton
00:12:56.440complete works, is one of the things that Catherine says is the fact that whenever you
00:13:01.600see an advertisement, right, and you see the man giving the woman the golden ring, or you
00:13:07.780just see a man giving a woman an expensive gift at all, or indeed just a gift amongst
00:13:13.240friend, right? We have in it, it only works on our minds. If I were to go into Waterstones and0.52
00:13:20.420look on the shelf and find a copy of Timing of Athens and give it to someone as a gift,
00:13:25.940then that would be probably appreciated. But if I went out of my way to look online for a really,
00:13:32.840really old copy that was worth hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and I were to give that as
00:13:38.780a gift, then that would prove to be probably a stronger display of that friendship. It speaks
00:13:47.120in some way of the fact that because I am willing to pay so much money into a gift, that that is
00:13:55.140somehow correlatory with how much I value that friendship, right? And this is something somewhat
00:14:02.780eternal. The more expensive the gift, then it is. But it's also something else as well. It's not
00:14:09.820just that. It also can be a reflection on your own sense of pride, your own ability to give,
00:14:18.140to provide to people, to tell them that, yes, I have within my power the ability to lavish
00:14:27.280this bounty upon you. And the word bounty is used constantly throughout the play Tymon of Athens.
00:14:34.820And the other thing as well is the fact that Tymon is in doing this, and when we meet him
00:14:40.180at the beginning of Act 1, he is constantly giving and giving and giving, but he never actually
00:14:46.020receives any gifts back. And so he's constantly keeping people within his power. Only he is
00:14:52.560allowed to display his own magnanimity. And this entire social arrangement of giving gifts is all
00:15:04.380illusion. It's all an illusion, because behind it, Tymon finds himself in a great amount of debt
00:15:12.120to his creditors. And this would have been a very topical aspect of conversation at the time when
00:15:19.580the play was written for a Jacobean audience, because, as Catherine Maus points out here
00:15:25.020in her analysis of Timon of Athens, in the first decade of the 17th century, the traditional
00:15:32.760aristocratic virtues of open-handed generosity and carelessness of expense were coming into
00:15:39.700increasingly acute conflict with the limited means upon which the great nobles could actually draw.
00:15:45.740As England became an international trading power, luxuries once unheard of became available to people with the money to buy them.
00:15:55.620As tastes grew more sophisticated, noblemen who wished to impress peers and subordinates with the splendour of their bounty were forced into ever greater expenditures.
00:16:08.120The result was an extraordinary expansion in the credit markets.
00:16:13.000The worst offender in this respect was King James, who, rather like Tymon, showered his favourites with expensive gifts, a habit that created staggering deficits in the royal exchequer.
00:16:28.560By 1608, royal indebtedness had reached crisis proportions, and other members of the upper aristocracy were likewise floating on a sea of debt.
00:16:39.140As I say, this is one of the main aspects that the play directly deals with in a brutal and a very blunt manner, and perhaps may even explain why this play may not have been performed.
00:16:55.940perhaps as a subject, it was too close to the bone for many of the aristocrats and even the king
00:17:03.160that it would have likely been performed to, especially with Shakespeare and his company being
00:17:08.440the king's men at this time for King James. And it might have seemed a little too on the nose,
00:17:19.060even compared to a play like Macbeth, which was at least able to tell a story in a way that was
00:17:29.600kind and honourable to King James' own ancestors, mythical ancestor of Banquo, and also the fact
00:17:37.260that it comes together with a unity of the Scottish and English at the end to restore order.
00:17:43.280So whereas with this one, it's speaking to a genuine warning about what happens when that balance between the creditor and the debtor falls into an openly parasitical nature.
00:17:57.080And we see that reflected in also the way that a character like Alcibiades, who features prominently in the play, is constantly railing against the fact that the senators of Athens have allowed Athens to become so corrupted by usury as to basically need a fresh start.
00:18:20.800And Alcibiades is going to bring his army in, scourge the Senate of its corruption.
00:18:27.080and start again but these are all things that we can get into much much more when we talk about
00:18:33.960the actual analysis of the play so let's now talk about the play every act of it go through the
00:18:40.600synopsis as we often do i will read some of the soliloquies and you know put on some of my voices
00:18:47.880and i hope you enjoy the story if you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the lotus eaters
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