The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Chronicles #55 ｜ Timon Of Athens： Part 1

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about

00:00:18.560 Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. Now, before we get into it, I just want to say

00:00:25.160 thank you to Tim who I do believe sent me this copy many many months ago and you know said that

00:00:31.960 it was a play that he had a particular fascination with and so I've been thank you Tim for sending it

00:00:38.280 in it's been wonderful to to read through because it's actually the first time that I've ever read

00:00:44.100 this play and this that's not actually so unusual not only is Timing of Athens one of Shakespeare's

00:00:52.400 most divisive plays amongst Shakespearean scholars as to the actual quality of it itself,

00:01:00.960 but also in terms of the fact that it is by far and away one of the least performed Shakespeare

00:01:08.080 plays. And that is a shame, because there is actually a lot to appreciate here, having read

00:01:15.480 it now for the first time, but I can undoubtedly see why, unlike when we covered Macbeth with

00:01:23.240 Harry or Romeo and Juliet, of course, those two being very, very famous Shakespearean

00:01:28.560 plays, and it feels like they never let up, whereas with this one, there are moments where

00:01:35.760 you can see inconsistencies in the writing, where some aspects of the play do feel a little

00:01:42.440 bit more developed than others. However, Shakespeare or no, I wouldn't bring this to you

00:01:47.800 if I didn't think it was actually worth discussing. And it really, really is, because the themes that

00:01:55.080 Timon of Athens deals with and the actual main characters, such as Timon and the cynical

00:02:02.140 philosopher Appomantus, make that not only are they brilliantly written, but they ask some very,

00:02:08.760 very important questions and sort of perennial questions as well. And so I'm really looking

00:02:14.560 forward to discussing all of that with you. Part of the reason why Time in the Vathens is

00:02:21.340 not entirely ubiquitously well received and also why it's perhaps less performed than other plays

00:02:29.560 is because from the first copy of Time in the Vathens that we actually have, which comes from

00:02:36.940 the first folio, this compendium of many of Shakespeare's plays from 1623, well, it seems

00:02:45.760 unfinished, right? There is speculation that actually this play was never finished.

00:02:51.200 We have no evidence of it even being performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. From what we understand,

00:02:57.900 the first performance of Timing of Athens was all the way over in 1674, long after, of course,

00:03:05.580 the Civil War and even the Restoration, you know, some, I'm trying to think, 50, 60 years after

00:03:14.080 Shakespeare's death. So it didn't exactly hit the ground running when it came out. There is a theory

00:03:21.860 that actually a good amount of Time in Athens, the actual writing of it, is not Shakespeare's

00:03:28.840 actual hand and that this play may have indeed been a collaborative project and the person who's

00:03:36.440 most speculated to have fit that person that mystery or the writer is Thomas Middleton who

00:03:45.440 went on to become a very very famous Jacobean playwright in his own day and one of the things

00:03:52.300 that points towards Middleton being the other man on this project

00:03:57.700 is that it favours a lot of Middletonian contractions.

00:04:02.500 You see the way that it puts Oeth and stuff like this,

00:04:06.380 the way it's a T-H to thee.

00:04:08.760 This is something that Middleton does a great amount.

00:04:11.580 Also, in the banquet scenes, they really lend themselves

00:04:16.260 to a particular genre of play that was very popular

00:04:20.420 in the Jacobean period known as city comedies. And these were something that Middleton himself

00:04:26.340 absolutely excelled at in plays like A Mad World and My Masters. So there are those aspects of it

00:04:35.200 too. The other thing is that this may explain in having two separate writers working on it

00:04:43.840 simultaneously, and on top of that the fact that it seems that the play may never actually have

00:04:50.740 been performed. It might have been discarded, it may have been finished, but simply never had any

00:04:56.800 revisions put to it. There is a lot of conjecture, and all of these questions are asked by scholars

00:05:03.460 far more capable than myself. But to just simply give you the information on this, one of the

00:05:10.160 things that people often point to as evidence of there being two writers, other than the things

00:05:16.300 that I've just outlined, is also the fact that when it comes to the talents, right, this measurement

00:05:22.600 of money, these large sums of money, there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency there. For example,

00:05:30.360 At the beginning of the story, Tymon of Athens gives five talents to pay the debt of Ventilius.

00:05:41.320 However, 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.

00:05:52.180 However, later on in the play, we see the same measurement, the same unit of talents being used.

00:06:00.360 much more broadly, like 500 talents, and this is seen as actually not a great deal.

00:06:07.380 So there seems to be some disagreement between the hands that is working on this as to the

00:06:12.060 very idea of how much a talent is actually worth, which would have been a large sum of

00:06:17.140 silver back in the day.

00:06:20.260 And they've obviously got their own metrics and their own way of measuring it within the

00:06:25.080 story without seemingly a great deal of cross-referencing with one another.

00:06:30.360 But 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.

00:06:47.080 But 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.

00:07:04.760 This is very famously the case in Time and the Misanthrop

00:07:08.580 By the Greek satirist Lucian

00:07:10.780 And he also features briefly in Plutarch's Lives as well

00:07:15.800 Where he's talking about the life of Alcibiades

00:07:19.380 And in fact the extract is so short

00:07:23.080 That I'm actually just going to read for you now

00:07:25.320 That part from Plutarch's Lives

00:07:28.000 So you can get an idea of the sources that Shakespeare was working from

00:07:32.460 Plutarch's lives was one of Shakespeare's main resources.

00:07:36.500 It was always one of his go-tos when he was writing anything about the antiquity period.

00:07:43.440 This is also true of Coriolanus and his play Antony and Cleopatra, which were also being written around this time.

00:07:51.980 Shakespeare had this phase of writing these antiquity plays.

00:07:56.780 Amongst also, just to say, this is also the period of about 1605 to 1608

00:08:03.620 When Shakespeare is writing many of his most famous tragedies as well, such as King Lear

00:08:09.960 So I'll just read you this part from Plutarch and then we'll carry on

00:08:15.680 Now, Timon was an Athenian and lived about the time of the Peloponnesian War

00:08:22.160 As may be gathered from the plays of Aristophanes and Plato

00:08:25.700 for he is represented in their comedies as peevish and misanthropical. But though he avoided

00:08:32.360 and repelled all intercourse with men, he was glad to see Alcibiades, who was then young and

00:08:38.920 headstrong and showered kisses upon him. And when Appamantus was amazed at this and asked the reason

00:08:46.340 for it, Tymon said he loved the youth because he knew that he would be a cause of many ills of

00:08:52.840 Athens. This Appomantus alone of all men Tymon would sometimes admit into his company, since

00:09:00.560 Appomantus was like him and tried sometimes to imitate his mode of life, and once, at the

00:09:07.020 festival of the pictures, the two were feasting for themselves, and Appomantus said, Tymon,

00:09:13.620 what a fine symposium ours is. It would be, said Tymon, if thou wert not here.

00:09:20.480 We are told, also, that when the Athenians were holding an assembly, he ascended to Bema,

00:09:27.180 and the strangeness of the thing caused deep silence and great expectancy. Then he said,

00:09:33.340 I have a small building lot, men of Athens, and a fig tree is growing in it, from which many of my

00:09:40.460 fellow citizens have already hanged themselves. Accordingly, as I intend to build a house there,

00:09:47.240 I wanted to give public notice to that effect in order that all of you who desire to do so

00:09:53.540 may hang yourselves before the fig tree is cut down. After he had died and been buried at Helier

00:10:00.860 near the sea, the shore in front of the tomb slipped away and the water surrounding it

00:10:07.080 and made it completely inaccessible to man. The inscription of the tomb was,

00:10:12.200 Here, after snapping the thread of a wretched life I lie, yet shall not learn my name, but my curses shall follow you.

00:10:22.580 This inscription he is said to have composed himself, and that in general circulation is by Callimachus. 0.62

00:10:29.920 Timon, hater of men, dwells here, so pass along, heap many curses on me, if thou wilt only pass along.

00:10:39.520 And 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.

00:10:54.500 And what we have here in Tymon of Athens is of a man who is the entire opposite of this depiction.

00:11:02.240 It is the man who is endlessly benevolent, endlessly magnanimous.

00:11:08.240 He is philanthropic to the point of absurdity in comedy.

00:11:13.260 And it's the story of how that man is betrayed and will become the man that Plutarch outlines in his lives

00:11:22.420 as a man who becomes that sinister, cynical and cantankerous and venomous character

00:11:30.080 who will go on to die and have a tomb by the sea away from society, right?

00:11:36.500 He's not buried in Athens in the city.

00:11:39.180 He is away from the city, away from civilization on his own,

00:11:44.200 where he might finally have some peace.

00:11:46.940 And as it says there, even lay your curses on me and then just pass along,

00:11:51.900 but just make sure that you pass along.

00:11:54.580 Yeah, not a sound guy.

00:11:57.300 not one you'd want to spend any amount of time with whatsoever.

00:12:01.780 But there is another reason why Shakespeare is writing this play,

00:12:07.220 other than the fact that it makes for a very colourful type of character from antiquity,

00:12:13.700 which is, of course, the themes that it allows Shakespeare to explore,

00:12:17.900 and Middleton, indeed, if he didn't collaborate on this,

00:12:22.320 which is the fact that, well, it has somewhat eternal questions to ask about credit and debt

00:12:32.200 and to what extent gold and gift-giving actually seal friendship with one another.

00:12:40.700 One of the things that's spoken about at the beginning of Catherine Maus's analysis of

00:12:47.540 Tymon of Athens, who writes the preface for the version of Tymon that is in the Norton

00:12:56.440 complete works, is one of the things that Catherine says is the fact that whenever you

00:13:01.600 see an advertisement, right, and you see the man giving the woman the golden ring, or you

00:13:07.780 just see a man giving a woman an expensive gift at all, or indeed just a gift amongst

00:13:13.240 friend, right? We have in it, it only works on our minds. If I were to go into Waterstones and 0.52

00:13:20.420 look on the shelf and find a copy of Timing of Athens and give it to someone as a gift,

00:13:25.940 then that would be probably appreciated. But if I went out of my way to look online for a really,

00:13:32.840 really old copy that was worth hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and I were to give that as

00:13:38.780 a gift, then that would prove to be probably a stronger display of that friendship. It speaks

00:13:47.120 in some way of the fact that because I am willing to pay so much money into a gift, that that is

00:13:55.140 somehow correlatory with how much I value that friendship, right? And this is something somewhat

00:14:02.780 eternal. The more expensive the gift, then it is. But it's also something else as well. It's not

00:14:09.820 just that. It also can be a reflection on your own sense of pride, your own ability to give,

00:14:18.140 to provide to people, to tell them that, yes, I have within my power the ability to lavish

00:14:27.280 this bounty upon you. And the word bounty is used constantly throughout the play Tymon of Athens.

00:14:34.820 And the other thing as well is the fact that Tymon is in doing this, and when we meet him

00:14:40.180 at the beginning of Act 1, he is constantly giving and giving and giving, but he never actually

00:14:46.020 receives any gifts back. And so he's constantly keeping people within his power. Only he is

00:14:52.560 allowed to display his own magnanimity. And this entire social arrangement of giving gifts is all

00:15:04.380 illusion. It's all an illusion, because behind it, Tymon finds himself in a great amount of debt

00:15:12.120 to his creditors. And this would have been a very topical aspect of conversation at the time when

00:15:19.580 the play was written for a Jacobean audience, because, as Catherine Maus points out here

00:15:25.020 in her analysis of Timon of Athens, in the first decade of the 17th century, the traditional

00:15:32.760 aristocratic virtues of open-handed generosity and carelessness of expense were coming into

00:15:39.700 increasingly acute conflict with the limited means upon which the great nobles could actually draw.

00:15:45.740 As England became an international trading power, luxuries once unheard of became available to people with the money to buy them.

00:15:55.620 As tastes grew more sophisticated, noblemen who wished to impress peers and subordinates with the splendour of their bounty were forced into ever greater expenditures.

00:16:08.120 The result was an extraordinary expansion in the credit markets.

00:16:13.000 The 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.

00:16:28.560 By 1608, royal indebtedness had reached crisis proportions, and other members of the upper aristocracy were likewise floating on a sea of debt.

00:16:39.140 As 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.

00:16:55.940 perhaps as a subject, it was too close to the bone for many of the aristocrats and even the king

00:17:03.160 that it would have likely been performed to, especially with Shakespeare and his company being

00:17:08.440 the king's men at this time for King James. And it might have seemed a little too on the nose,

00:17:19.060 even compared to a play like Macbeth, which was at least able to tell a story in a way that was

00:17:29.600 kind and honourable to King James' own ancestors, mythical ancestor of Banquo, and also the fact

00:17:37.260 that it comes together with a unity of the Scottish and English at the end to restore order.

00:17:43.280 So 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.

00:17:57.080 And 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.

00:18:20.800 And Alcibiades is going to bring his army in, scourge the Senate of its corruption.

00:18:27.080 and start again but these are all things that we can get into much much more when we talk about

00:18:33.960 the actual analysis of the play so let's now talk about the play every act of it go through the

00:18:40.600 synopsis as we often do i will read some of the soliloquies and you know put on some of my voices

00:18:47.880 and i hope you enjoy the story if you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the lotus eaters

00:18:53.700 head to our website where you can find more

00:18:57.080 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 18, 2026

PREVIEW： Chronicles #55 ｜ Timon Of Athens： Part 1

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