[Joseph Ziegler is Timon in a modernized version of the play. His Timon is a corporate leader for whom gift-giving is an investment bolstering his pride and
prominence. Ziegler is robust in the role. His appearance as a homeless derelict in the wasteland is shocking, and his anger is a bellow, not a whimper.]

Shakespeare (along with Thomas Middleton) wrote Timon of Athens in 1606/07. It was never staged during his lifetime and languished, all but forgotten, for centuries. Lately it’s been produced regularly; The Royal Shakespeare Company promoting its 2018 staging calls it “a parable for our times". It’s a play about honor and friendship, undone by greed and power. It was a timely play in Jacobean London when an aristocracy was facing the challenge of merchant wealth and unprivileged men of talents. Playwrights would have noted this collision, trying their best to sell their art to a play-going public but also fully dependent upon patronage. These critical tensions persist to our day.

Karl Marx in Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts( 1843), quotes at length Timon’s remarks on the magical power of money to dissolve all values into itself. Herman Melville praises the play’s unsettling suggestions in his essay on Hawthorne’s “Mosses from the Old Manse". In Timon of Athens, Melville comments, Shakespeare “craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any goodman,in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them." Good and proper people know deep down what they can scarcely acknowledge, a particular point with this angry dog of a play.

Timon of Athens seems to the judgment of many to be unfinished, perhaps abandoned by its authors. It contains inconsistencies, poorly motivated actions, misnamed characters,and a peculiar ending. Recent productions vary significantly in the characterization of Timon, the play’s politics, and especially the ending. Rather than a deficit, this indeterminacy seems to be an inducement to modern staging and increases its possibilities and fascination.

Timon in Shakespeare’s day was a character without a story. Depicted as a misanthrope who turned against society, Timon cultivated his bitterness in isolation. Plutarch (46-120 CE) mentions Timon in his biographies of Mark Anthony and Alcibiades. The play sets loose this allegorical figure to rail against the corruption of a money-grubbing society, reviling high to low, from Athens’ senators and wealthy lords, to artists and merchants, to thieves and whores.

Here is the story
Timon, a great lord in Athens, maintains a grand household where he entertains consequential Athenian --“lords,successful merchants,artists,and senators. He is revered by the state for his contributions when Athens faced military threats. His lavish banquets spare no cost, and he supports his neighbors when they fall into difficulties --“ imprisoned for debts or needing help arranging marriages. He patronizes the arts and delights in giving expensive gifts to friends. He glows in their esteem, convinced that giving gifts is the cement of friendship, which is the highest goal in life.

Flavius,his steward,has long since noticed that Timon’s wealth is being depleted by his unstinting largesse. Indeed, Timon is in increasing debt to the very friends he entertains, none of whom bother to warn him, as they enjoy his generosity.
After a particularly lavish evening’s entertainment -- with a feast, a dance performance, and the conferring of jewels upon the guests, Timon begins to receive demands for payment of his debts. He soon learns even his lands have been mortgaged off and his only recourse is help from his friends.

When Timon solicits help, his wealthy friends evade his request,and when his steward, Flavius, approaches the Athenian Senate, it’s as if they hardly know Timon. Instead of money, they offer sermons on the prudent management of wealth. In a fury at their hypocrisy, Timon hosts one last dinner in which he berates his “mouth-friends" and declares his end to all sociality. He has become “Misanthropos", abandoning Athens to live in a cave, subsisting on roots and water from a stream. His excess now is to curse the city and all humanity.

In a subplot, Alcibiades is a captain devoted to defending his city against Sparta. Like Timon, he lives for honor and pays insufficient attention to state politics. When a compatriot kills another in a drunken brawl, Alcibiades entreats the senate for mercy. The senators, who benefit from the military’s sacrifices, demand the soldier’s execution. When Alcibiades argues his appeal strenuously, he is banished from the city on threat of execution. Like Timon, Alcibiades is betrayed by the thankless citizens and their self-serving standards of conduct. Alcibiades leaves the city to organize an army to overthrow the state.

A third variation of these themes belongs to the cynic philosopher Apemantus. He sees through the hypocrisy of convention and has biting things to say about the powerful and wealthy. However, he employs a strategy of amusement that keeps him at the table of the rich. The painter and poet have also found ingenious ways to amuse their betters for cash and glory. Apemantus’ brilliant verbal gymnastics, performed as ingenious comedy, furthers the satire.
Flavius, Timon’s loyal steward, has also had to find ways to navigate a society that has abandoned honesty and friendship. Athenians have become slaves to money and the corruption of state service. Flavius lives by the classic code of honorable service to his master and leads the servants of Timon’s household in reverent devotion to their beneficent master. This code of honorable service lives on in Athens only as a ghost haunting the craven indecency of commerce.

When Timon retreats to the wasteland, he discovers mounds of gold coins that jeer at his poverty. Rumors of this wealth bring a parade of beggars and thieves and allows for Timon’s lacerating invective. These wasteland scenes anticipate Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot", leaving humankind’s grievances nothing more than rhetoric and irony. Timon voices dismay at a life without honor and friendship and the false versions of getting along in it. What could be more contemporary?


The Play’s Progress

The play opens with the poet and the painter at Timon’s palace discussing their prospects. Their discussion -“ whether picture or rhetoric excels in depicting the world -- is unenlightening. Their discussion is livelier about getting on among Timon’s wealthy lords and merchants. Shakespeare/Middleton here mock the artists’ dependency on patronage, not really different from the merchants and bankers attending Timon’s banquet. They too are often flatterers enrobing their masters in allegorical glory for cash.

Timon of Athens offers a gallery of scammers and hypocrites, much like Melville’s The Confidence Man and its parade of grifters. A wealthy old man begs Timon to discourage one of his servants who has been courting the gentleman’s daughter. The indignant father cites his investment in his daughter’s elegant upbringing and refuses to see this squandered on a poor marriage. When Timon supplies the requisite cash, the father’s moral outrage instantly subsides.

Apemantus, the cynic philosopher, offers the dinner’s grace, in a manner playfully offensive in depicting Timon’s guests:

Immortal gods, I crave no pelf.
I pray for no man but myself.
Grant I may never prove so fond,
To trust man on his oath or bond.
Or a harlot for her weeping,
Or a dog that seems a-sleeping.
Or a keeper with my freedom,
Or my friends if I should need
'em.
Amen.
I.2. 62-72

Apemantus’ light satire has made his posture amusing and thereby allows him a place at Athens’ richest table. Satire approaches tragic depth, however, when Timon’s trust in friendship ruins him and his household.



When Timon discovers he cannot pay his debts, he sends his servants around to rich friends who had long been enjoying his generous fellowship. “O, what a precious comfort 'tis to have so many, like brothers, commanding one another’s fortunes." His friends’ excuses are richly comic, portraying their ingenuity when the higher virtues collide with cash interests. The sequence of three refusals has a fairy-tale quality, as false friends find clever ways to reject Timon’s request.

Flavius, the steward, solicits the Athenian Senate to come to the rescue of Timon, a grandee whose generosity often saved Athens from its enemies. For some, Flavius is the play’s hero. Flavius, the good servant, is devastated by the senators’ greed and craven hypocrisy. In this summary of the senators’ excuses we notice his cleverness:

They answer in a joint and corporate voice
That now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot,
Do what they would, are sorry. You are honorable,
But yet they could have wished -- they know not --
Something hath been amiss a noble nature
May catch a wrench -- would all were well -- 'tis pity --
And so, intending other serious matters,
After distasteful looks and these hard fractions,
With certain half-caps and cold-moving nods
They froze one into silence
II.2. 204-213.

Flavius is a tender-hearted soul in a world of frozen affections. He belongs to the classic world of station and dependencies, now being extinguished as power and place open to the boldest schemer, the man on the make. Timon of Athens foresees the world we know. In a society of false appearances, Flavius, in a voice of compassion and truth, does his best to assure his suffering master:

That which I show, heaven knows, is merely love,
Duty and zeal to your unmatched mind,
Care of your food and living. And believe it
My most honored lord,
For any benefit that points to me,
Either in hope or present, I’d exchange
For this one wish, that you had power and wealth
To requite me by making rich yourself.
IV. 3. 510-517

Flavius is the play’s most decent character. However, the most memorable, without question, is the raging and embittered Timon, out in the wasteland, bellowing his hurt at false friends and empty suits who have dashed his dream of brotherly affections. Shakespeare’s Timon speaks to and for us, in our frustration at a world turned cold for cash. Timon’s protest, his titanic invective and dismay, is our voice as we sink deeper into crisis and despair.

Timon awakens from his dream

Timon, the Misanthrope, dominates Act Four, and his voice justifies the play’s existence. Here’s Timon in a modest excerpt from a brilliant and much larger rant on the magical force of money:

Thus much of this [gold coins] will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! Why, this?
What this, you gods? Why this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappened [dried up] widow wed again;
She whom the spittle-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind that puts odds
Among the rout of nations, I will make thee
Do thy right nature.
IV. 3. 28-45

This infected speech depicts Timon’s misanthropy, a fevered voice embittered by the warping of nature into something ghastly. The passage reeks with lurid
images of illness and corruption, of the “wappened widow" and her “ulcerous sores" granted by money the power to invoke the “April day again." However, it’s the whole of society and its architecture of precedence, respect, and order that has been twisted to its opposite. This “yellow slave" controls the Church and State, household and family, and all relations of order and justice. In his madness, Timon swears to confound those who benefit from it and have his revenge.

Apemantus knows all this but has shaped his feelings to live with it; he’s constructed his character on irony. For Timon, Apemantus has found a way to join the beasts to enjoy their benefits. Apemantus derides Timon for his inability to play the game. He counsels Timon: “Shame not these woods/ By putting on the cunning of a carper./ Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive/ By that which has undone thee IV. 3. 207-10. Apemantus’ advice is practical, a recipe for thriving in a fallen world. Become a cunning beast and employ this sly wisdom to get on in the world, but Timon’s rage is beyond therapeutic adjustments. It’s the deep voice, as Melville proposes, that we struggle not to hear.

Many take the cynic’s advice as the play’s sensible counsel. Apemantus recommends the middle way most sensible adopt:

The middle of humanity thou never knowst, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mocked thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou knowst none, but art despised for the contrary.
IV. 3. 300-304.

By living his truth, Timon makes himself the object of contempt and derision. The cynic’s practical wisdom is based upon what corrupted people think of Timon and not upon values of fellowship and genuine feeling. Apemantus embraces this alienation and mocks Timon for not learning to live with it.

Melville’s observation finds something strikingly modern. Timon of Athens forces the play-goer to face the possibility that everything he knows as sensible is dishonorable and destructive. It’s that moment in “Benito Cereno" when the tormented Spanish Captain, held prisoner, tosses the knotted cord into the jolly US captain’s lap and prompts him to see what he’s looking at. Perhaps everything considered practical and sensible is the product of an evil compromise that hopes to gain the whole world but instead purchases despair. Great literature is not produced to advise on getting along in things; great art is not comforting.

Wealthy again

When Timon, living in a cave on roots and stream water, discovers gold coins in the gravel outside his den, word gets out and he is again besieged by false friends. This time he is ready for them. The play gathers comic exuberance as the painter and poet appear again begging for patronage. The highest flights of vengeance, however, belong to Timon’s responses to the Athenian senators, now besieged by Alcibiades and his army bearing down on Athens.

Timon’s speeches are models of comic timing and adroit ironies. Flavius on
Timon’s behalf had begged the senate to relieve his distress. Now the senators,
facing loss of station, wealth and lands, and likely their lives come begging Timon to lead the defense of the city. It’s a delicious opportunity to turn the tables on his tormentors, and Timon makes the most of it.

The lead senator, with infinite politeness and self-effacing humility begs Timon to come to their aid:

Therefore, so please thee to return with us,
And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take
The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks,
Allowed with absolute power, and thy good name
Live with authority. So soon we shall drive back
Of Alcibiades th’ approaches wild,
Who like a boar too savage doth root up
His country’s peace
V. 2. 44-51

Timon answers this high-flown rhetoric with a speech any actor would relish:

I have a tree, which grows here in my close
That mine own use invites me to cut down,
And shortly must I fell it. Tell my friends,
Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree
From high to low throughout, that whoso please
To stop affliction, let him take his haste,
Come hither ere my tree hath felt the ax [pause]
And hang himself. I pray you, do my greeting
V. 2. 90-97

The speech mirrors the senator’s rhetorical delays and ingratiating flourishes -- as
the senators wait in tense expectation -- to deliver its withering conclusion.

The ending of the play’s text is abrupt and confusing. Alcibiades enters Athens
victorious and, showing mercy, allows the venal and hypocritical senators to keep their fortunes while placing them under some sort of new regime. The senators mouth excuses, shifting blame and evading responsibility. They are permitted to be what they have been.

The final scene is absorbed in granting Timon a proper memorial, the celebration of which is a rough-sketched ritual of peace between warring factions. There’s
falderal about his epitaph and the location and manner of Timon’s burial but the Athenians don’t much seem to care and neither do we. Recent productions have proposed clever solutions to this problem.

THREE PRODUCTIONS Timon of Athens,
BBC Television Shakespeare, available online

The BBC production (1981), directed by Jonathan Miller, stars Jonathan Pryce,
a fastidious and precise Timon, an idealized version of a generous yet modest lord,
loving to his friends and desiring nothing more than to benefit them and be loved. Pryce’s is a dreamy Timon, which serves the first half of the play well but lacks the force necessary for Act Four. The setting is Jacobean, with suitable furnishings and dress, drab but just what you’d expect. The camera focuses on faces in close-up, which serves the actors well.

This production excels in its minor roles --the painter and poet, the evasive false friends, the arrogant senators -- and an old and wise Flavius whose sad visage mourns over the state of the world. Alcibiades is quite good, but his attendant prostitutes, with pitted faces riddled with disease (one played by a plus-size Diana Dors) are a special treat.

Jonathan Miller takes no interpretive risks, so the final scenes have all the muddling qualities of the text -- the mystery of Timon’s death and the mix-up of epitaphs that takes on undue attention. Pryce’s lack of animation in Act Four drains energy without establishing tragic inwardness. The BBC Shakespeare “Timon" is true to the purposes of the series, to produce good solid readings of the plays without venturing much into their possibilities.

Timon in Archive

Timon of Athens, The Stratford Ontario Production 2017, available at Amazon Prime and online at Internet Archive

This production, directed for the stage by Stephen Ouimette and for the film by Barry Avrich, stars Joseph Ziegler as Timon. This “Timon" brings the fable up to date. Timon is a corporate CEO, burley and boastful, with arms outspread in prideful welcome to dazzle his guests. This Timon of Wall Street parties as hard as his pampered visitors, come to see and be seen, and among them merchants and artists on the make.

When a troupe of gyrating disco dancers arrives to entertain, Timon joins in, bumping and grinding. “Was that good for you?" asks one of the buxom pros after simulating buggery. The gift-giving is there -- the friend bailed out of prison, the serving man purchased as husband for the rich man’s daughter -- but the image is quick and crude, in modern fashion. It is difficult to understand this Timon as a person with depths of feeling. Instead, we get a direct satire of modern ways.

The visits to false friends to beg relief after Timon’s fall is a high point of this
production. Lucullus is an aging playboy with a sun-bathing bimbo; Lucus hides
behind a virtual reality mask, and Sempronius voices his ridiculous indignation at being solicited last. The second triumph is depicting the Cynic Apemantus as an
adjunct lecturer in the humanities. His speeches are artfully trimmed for coherence and point.

Timon in despair and isolation appears in a sweat-stained and ragged undershirt, bellowing like the madmen that stagger our streets. The effect is memorable but the lines are hard to hear. Alcibiades, thick and stolid like General Milley, is defeated by the grandeur of his speeches. The explosion of bombs bursting, helicopters
terrorizing Athens, and the screams of the innocent bring the assault up to date but drown out the point of the senators and their manipulations. The production’s up-to-date-ness devours the play and its reach for tragic measure. We can’t care for or about Timon enough to feel or understand the loss.

[Kathryn Hunter is Lady Timon in this recent RSC production. The gendering is bold, given the almost complete absence of women in the text. The hostess Lady Timon seeks sociability rather than power or a transcendent ideal. Her wit and high spirits take the wasteland scenes in a remarkably energetic direction.]

Timon on DVD

Timon of Athens, Royal Shakespeare Company (2018), live from Stratford-upon- Avon, available on DVD.

Simon Godwin is the director, with Kathryn Hunter as Timon. Where the BBC version relocates ancient Athens to Jacobean England, and the Ontario to contemporary Canada/US, the RSC takes us to an undetermined time and place, and to something like a dream-world, where music and furnishings are Mediterranean, national types are British Empire diverse, social signaling suggest early 20th Century, and race and gender have no interest.

Here Timon is an odd and diminutive woman done up in a golden outfit and bizarre hair-style. She’s an animated Timon, extremely gracious to her guests, and a hands-on hostess, full of vitality and sociability. While she confers her prodigious gifts, the dominant feature is her unguarded friendliness -- shown a ghastly painting for possible purchase, she mimics aesthetic transport, and shares her joke with the audience. Hunter’s emotional vitality projected out of her small stature sparks this production.

The highly talented cast delivers the glories of the English language in the London of 2020, from high and low, as only a British company in all its national diversity can. Minor roles -- Lady Lucas and the Painter, for example, shine, as does the vocalist who carries the masque. Flavius has a major role, something like the guardian of all sanity and of his mistress quite protectively. He’s stately and stolid for much of the play but acquires emotional warmth.

Apemantus is played by a young woman who comments with a wicked turn as the guests freeze in stop-action. She often poses on a balcony overlooking the scene, remarking on the action with good sense and precision. The one role that begs for clarity is Alcibiades, played by a Black woman, and dislodged from any military identity. Late in the play she leads an anarchist protest march against greed and usury, as this version by-passes the issues of state power.

Hunter’s Timon is passionate. She’s offended by her false friends, and it’s personal. When she serves her second feast, she dishes out blood and anger, her body twisting in a torn rictus of contempt with curses tearing out of her, and her expression close to demonic possession. Her Act Four Timon is humorous and relaxed. The scene with Apemantus, after all their mutual curses, ends in an embrace of understanding between two kinds of misanthropes. Hunter toys wonderfully with her petitioners, especially the senators.

At the conclusion Timon’s frail body is carried on-stage by Flavius in “King Lear" solemnity. A later tableau invokes the “Pieta" as Alcibiades and her troops gather Timon into their arms and into eternity. It helps to sum up a play whose sentiment is not well anchored. The RSC version proves the play’s remarkable possibilities, building on a somewhat broken text.

Texts
The Arden Shakespeare Timon of Athens, edited by Anthony Dawson and Gretchen Minton (2008), is a gift to serious students of the play. Its background material, variant readings of the text, vast explanatory notes, and a rich appendices covers the field. The Arden is particularly useful for its review of stage, film, and television productions of the play up through 2005. This essay’s quotations follow the Arden edition.

The Folger Edition, edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, offers fewer notes and commentaries, but includes a fine collection of essays and has the advantage of being available as an ebook for easier reading and quick reference.