criteria. It belongs, in the cast and temper of its tragedy, as also in verse structure, unmistakably to the period of Macbeth and Coriolanus (1606-8); its fragmentary condition, and the decay it evinces in purely dramatic vigour, suggest that it was the last of the Tragedies, and marks the exhaustion of Shakespeare's tragic vein. Pericles, which was printed in 1609, and Cymbeline, which appeared later still, though classed as tragedies, adventure into totally different regions of tragic effect: it is plausible to suppose that Timon preceded this new departure, i.e. was not later than 1608. This is supported by its close connexion in subject with the Plutarchian tragedies of 1607-8; Timon and Alcibiades being Plutarchian parallels to Antony and Coriolanus. Plutarch told the story of Timon as a digression in his Life of Mark Antony. Shakespeare also knew it as told by Painter in the Palace of Pleasure (Novella 28). Both versions are little more than anecdotes, and relate only to the second phase of Timon's career, the morose seclusion of the misanthrope near Athens, his encounters with Apemantus and Alcibiades, his ironical invitation to his countrymen to hang themselves on his fig-tree 'before it be cut down.' Plutarch alone intimates in passing that his hatred of men arose from 'the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto, and whom he took to be his friends.' Apemantus is a man of the very same nature' whom he 'sometimes would have in his company.' When the Athenians held festival the two cynics feasted together by themselves. Apemantus said: 'O here is a trim banquet, Timon.' Timon answered, 'Yea, so thou wert not here.' Alcibiades on the contrary Timon would 'make much of, and kissed him very gladly.' When asked why he singled him out for favour from the rest of men: 'I do it,' said he, 'because I know that one day he shall do great mischief unto the Athenians.' He died a natural death, and ordered his body to be buried upon the sea-shore, 'that the waves and surges might beat and vex his dead carcass.' There is little doubt that in addition to these meagre anecdotes, Shakespeare knew, directly or indirectly, the lively dialogue in which Lucian makes. Timon's story the vehicle of a satire upon ill-used wealth.1 Here also his prodigal days are only referred to: we see him at the outset, a ruined man, squalid, ragged, unkempt, on the slopes of Hymettus, hurling maledictions, as he stoops over his spade, at Zeus, who, in spite of the praises of poets and the sacrifices of the devout, allows his thunderbolts to rust while crime grows rampant. Hermes explains that this Timon is one who has been 'ruined, one may say, by his honesty, generosity, and pity for the poor, but in fact by his foolish heedlessness in choosing, as the recipients of his bounty, crows and wolves and vultures.' Zeus recalls the bountiful sacrifices offered by Timon, and resolves to send Plutus ('Wealth') to his aid. Plutus finds him in the company of Poverty and Wisdom, and is at first rudely dismissed, but finally persuades him to accept riches once more. His pick presently unearths a mass of treasure, he buys a plot of land, and builds a tower to hold it. Having thus secured a financial basis, he proceeds to shape his life on the principles of misanthropy. His code of morals includes such precepts as 'to be his 1 Lucian's works were not translated into English in Shakespeare's lifetime. But Latin, French, and Italian translations were available. Tschischwitz (Jahrbuch, iv. 196) has pointed out a sign that a French or Italian text lay before the English dramatist (or one of them) in the term solidares for the coins offered by Lucullus to Flaminius (iii. I. 46). own neighbour, to love above all names that of a misanthrope, and if any man implores him to put out his burning house, to extinguish it with oil and pitch.' Presently the flattering friends of old arrive. Gnathonides, who had lately offered him a rope when he begged a dinner, now approaches him with a copy of dithyrambs. Timon's pick provides him with occasion for an elegy. Philiades, who had had from Timon two talents for his daughter's dowry, meets a similar reception. Then the orator Demeas comes to extol his victory in the Olympic games ('where I never attended even as a spectator,' interjects Timon), and to announce splendid honours to be paid him by the State. Finally Timon drives off his assailants with stones. Lucian's dialogue evidently comes nearer to the drama than either Plutarch or Painter. The entire scheme of the plot is already there, and the germ of Timon's character; his fierce invective against his countrymen on the completion of his ruin (cf. iv. 1.), his discovery of gold, the visits of the flattering friends and their discomfiture. What is more, the character of Timon himself first became a subject for tragedy when Lucian turned Plutarch's surly cynic, who talked misanthropy over a dinner-table with another surly cynic, into the frantic railer of Hymettus. Plutarch's Timon suffers from ingratitude; Lucian emphasises far more distinctly his blind credulity. But Lucian, pure satirist as he was, missed the fuller significance of his own invention; and in his zest for the exposure of wealthy misanthropes, made Timon abruptly change his ground, and substitute for a misanthropy founded on hatred of wealth one founded on avarice. He is the last man to make missiles of his gold hoard. It was reserved for Shakespeare to make Timon express his hatred for men by hurling the deadliest of evils at their heads. It is easy to see that the story of Timon must have interested Shakespeare, in 1609, at a point all but wholly ignored in all these narratives. The tragic disillusion of a noble, expansive, and confiding nature, finding vent in half-frenzied invective against the world, had been exhibited with the utmost intellectual intensity in Hamlet, and with the utmost sublimity in Lear. There is a vein of misanthropy in both; but neither this nor any other formula comes near to defining either: it marks an approach to hardness and formalism in Shakespeare's conception of character that his Timon is adequately summed up in the label he adopts: 'I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.' Lear is on the whole his nearest Shakespearean analogue. The sting of ingratitude is the common provocation of both; and in both its maddening effect is enhanced by naïve ignorance of men and equally naïve exaggeration of their own claims. Both are simple natures, finely gifted, but quite without subtlety and penetration; a single shock throws them off their balance. But Lear is testy, self-indulgent, arrogant and exacting from the first; while Timon is quixotically generous, and thinks his honour concerned to give more than is asked, and to repay tenfold what he receives. Lear's most imperious ethical instinct is that of the primitive Northern tribe-the duty of children to parent; Timon's is that of the philosophic schools and society of Athens-the duty of friend to friend. The Greek maxim of communism among friends (κοινὰ τὰ φίλων) is actually put into his mouth (i. 2. 104). In the Athens of Timon this noble communism is as dead as the duty of children in the heart of Regan. His disillusion, as terrible as Lear's, and far nearer, in kind, to common experience, is far less real, and is worked out with gravely diminished dramatic resource. His monologues, close packed, knotty with phrase, but unbroken in their sombre monotony, take the place of the wonderfully varied and modulated temper of Lear. His anger pursues its way like a torrent, without pause or change. It is more penetrated than Lear's with the hunger for moral retribution, and the discovery of the gold puts the instrument of it in his grasp the damned earth, Thou common whore of mankind, that put'st odds Do thy right nature. Of Timon's series of vindictive encounters before his cave, little but the idea is probably ultimately due to Lucian. The poet may be foreshadowed in Gnathonides, the envoys of repentant Athens in Demeas. But Flavius, the one honest man, is Shakespeare's characteristic creation, and in Apemantus and Alcibiades he adapted to the scheme of Lucian the suggestive hints of Plutarch. In Plutarch both figure only as the companions of Timon's misanthropic days, the one his fellow cynic, the other his destined avenger upon Athens. Shakespeare introduced both into the picture of Timon's prodigal festivities. The misanthrope by nature was thus set in sharp contrast with the misanthrope by disillusion, and the ground was laid for their encounter in the second part (iv. 3. 198 f.) with its profoundly imagined discrimination between the set hatred grounded in habit and creed and that kindled by fresh conviction, the misanthropy which is a form of intellectual self-indulgence, and that which is goaded with poignant memories. The Apemantus of the earlier Acts is obviously modelled on the cynic Diogenes, whose feats of ßpis were a commonplace, and had already, in Lyly's Campaspe, amused the Elizabethan stage. Apemantus tramples on the pride of Timon as Diogenes on the pride of Plato. |