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'A Private Man in Athens': Shakespeare's Timon, Theatre Wars, Culture- Clashes, and the Play's Afterlife1 I Want to Argue Th

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'A Private Man in Athens': Shakespeare's Timon, Theatre Wars, Culture- Clashes, and the Play's Afterlife1 I Want to Argue Th ‘A Private Man in Athens’: Shakespeare's Timon, Theatre Wars, Culture- Clashes, and the Play's Afterlife1 MICHAEL HATTAWAY I want to argue that Timon of Athens is a play about social conflict in Jacobean London, written for the Blackfriars and not the Globe; I accept that it was co- authored by Middleton. The Tempest is the only other play among Shakespeare’s ‘last plays’ to have been written for the Blackfriars: like Timon it is a play that registers a cultural clash, between colonisers and colonised, and both plays are influenced by the repertoires of the boys’ companies. Middleton’s contribution was not just to write ‘clip-on’ scenes but also to contribute a steer, and I detect a savage indignation informing his work. I would argue that Timon does not address itself simply to the psychology of a misanthrope but rather to the conditions that breed Timon’s misanthropy. It is a problem play, probing the ecologies of friendship and money, the affiliation between gifts and debts, an exhilarating anatomy of the wages of commodification. After a consideration of what makes Timon new, I want to conclude by giving an account of the 2008 production at Shakespeare’s Globe, the replica playhouse on the South Bank of the Thames. This production was marked by the decision of the director, Lucy Bailey, to build an enclosed ‘private’ space, a chamber theatre within the amphitheatre. 1 Published as Michael Hattaway, ‘"A Private Man in Athens": Shakespeare's Timon and the Play's Afterlife’, Peregrinations of the Text: Reading, Translation, Rewriting. Essays in Honour of Alexander Shurbanov, ed. Evgenia Pancheva, et al., (Sofia, Sofia University Press, 2013), 98-108. 2 Playhouse history To revert to early modern playhouse history: Paul’s boys had ceased to be in 1606. Middleton had written both for that company and the other boys’ company, the Children of the Queen’s Revels, based at the first Blackfriars. For the former group he had written The Puritan Widow (1606) and for the latter he had written three plays, including A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) – like Timon a play that addresses themes of sex and money – and Your Five Gallants of 1607. (A Trick was to be recycled for a court performance by the Children of the Whitefriars on 1 January 1609.2) King James had ended the career of the boy- actors at the Blackfriars by dissolving the company, shortly after 11 March 1608 when Chapman’s Tragedy of Byron had given offence to the King, compounding the problems caused earlier by Day’s Isle of Gulls.3 It makes lots of sense to suggest that Timon, this only collaboration with Middleton – he seems to have adapted Measure for Measure and Macbeth after Shakespeare’s death – was written during the time the private playhouse was changing hands, being transferred to the King’s Men. This was a time of great confusion, manifest in a plethora of lawsuits, and there really is no way of concluding whether the play was written for the King’s Men at their new Blackfriars playhouse (probably), or (possibly) the short-lived Children of the King’s Revels, a group which included boys from the first Blackfriars company as well as the musician Philip Rosseter, and who performed for a single season at the Whitefriars. However, I conjecture, first, both an influence from the repertory and also the presence of some boy players from the children of Blackfriars, and, second, the possibility that the play was ‘pulled’ because it may have been deemed as offensive to King James as Byron had been. We cannot plump definitively for either the Globe or the Blackfriars, and Timon is a text that could have been performed by either boys or adults – indeed, there may have been no ‘Blackfriars repertory’. However, John Jowett asserts that ‘A Shakespeare-Middleton collaboration printed in the Shakespeare First Folio would almost certainly have been written for the King’s Men’, and he sees it designed for a Globe performance.4 I disagree: there are definite features that suggest the Blackfriars. Playhouse structures We can start with the comparative size of the two stages – which must have affected the dramaturgy of the plays performed here. The Blackfriars Playhouse probably occupied the upper frater of the monastery, a room of about 66 by 46 feet; its stage was about 20 feet wide by 15 feet deep. Up to fifteen gallants could be sitting on stools on the stage – there could not be more intimacy. Moreover, when morality plays like Liberality and Prodigality were performed for courtiers, the audience actually surrounded the players, and the nobles were not separated from them by a sea of groundlings in the yard. 2 Richard Dutton, ‘The Revels Office and the boy companies 1600-1613: new perspectives’, English Literary Renaissance 32 (2002), 324-51 at 350; Gurr, Shakespearian Playing Companies, pp. 362-3. 3 Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram, (ed.), English Professional Theatre, 1530- 1660, (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 514-5. 4 Jowett, in Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, Thomas Middleton and early modern textual culture: a companion to the collected works, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 356. 3 JOHN WEBB’S PLANS TO CONVERT THE COCKPIT IN DRURY LANE INTO A THEATRE (1616) THE WANAMAKER PLAYHOUSE, BASED ON THE BLACKFRIARS In contrast, the exterior diameter of the Globe was 100 feet, and the stage about 44 feet wide by 25 feet deep. As was demonstrated in 2008 at the Outside In/Inside Out Conference at Shakespeare’s Globe, the smaller sized playing area at the Blackfriars must have been significant: Timon contains no hierarchical processions (although ‘passing over the stage’ [Capell’s stage direction] was still possible [see 1.1.6SD]), and no battles – duelling, however, could take place). Timon does not die on-stage: could this have been because the business of exiting bodies could be more decorously performed from the larger amphitheatre stages? Lastly, but most significantly, the knotted style that marks 4 a lot of Timon of Athens would have been much more difficult to project into the large Globe amphitheatre. Music Music is definitely another private playhouse indicator: the direction ‘Oboes [hautboys] playing loud music’ appears at the opening of 1.2, a scene written by Middleton, and ‘a lofty strain or two to the oboes’ closes the following masque of Amazons. PLAYERS OF HAUTBOYS The word ‘hautboy’ appears only once in a stage direction by Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra (4.3.12SD), which is recorded as being performed only at the Blackfriars and not the Globe;5 the only children’s company to use this instrument was the Children of the King’s Revels playing at the Whitefriars in 1607-8. The scenes in which relevant stage directions appear are in 1.1 of Robert Armin’s The Two Maids of Moreclack (1606) and 5.1 of the anonymous Every Woman in her Humour (1607).6 (I don’t think we can stipulate that the play was written for Whitefriars – but it is suggestive.) Editors have made invasive emendations to 1.2, the scene of music and dance without, to my mind, offering a clear rationalisation of a sequence that must have been either unpolished or else corrupted in the printing house. It is significant that the sequence begins with the ‘tucket’, a military signal. Does this signify an outbreak of war between the sexes? Andrew Gurr writes, ‘For the Shakespeare company [drums and trumpets] were exclusively for outdoor signalling, either ceremonial fanfares and sennets or military tuckets and alarms.’7 5 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 Linda Phyllis Austern, Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance, (Philadelphia, Gordon and Breach, 1992), p. 67. 7 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 5 A DEVIL PLAYS A TRUMPET IN A DANCE OF DEATH: PRINT BY JOHN DRAPENTIER 1674-1700 So this is another hint that Timon did not follow the usual conventions of a Globe play. In fact, trumpets had been called for at 1.1.96 SD and elsewhere. Now Blackfriars neighbours had registered their fear of ‘the noise of the drums and trumpets’ in a petition of to the Privy Council in 1596.8 In the children’s performances cornets were generally used.9 By 1608, however, the King’s Men must have felt freer to do what that they wanted. So this too need not be a Globe indicator. It is difficult to know how ‘the five senses’ were represented – in a dumbshow before the dancing? This is obviously a ‘banquet of sense’, the anti-type of a ‘Platonic’ divine banquet. I conjecture that, because songs were generally included in court masques, a boy or boys would have sung a song, perhaps to the accompaniment of the oboes, perhaps using the lutes that are called for later. 2004), p. 78. 8 Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry, William Ingram, (ed.), English Professional Theatre, 1530- 1660, Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, (Cambridge, 2000), p. 506. 9 Austern, pp. 63 and 67. 6 The cue for the song may have been Timon’s line ‘Music, make them welcome’ (1.2.128) i.e. an instruction to the waits. John Dowland’s song ‘Come again’, with its banquet-of sense-refrain ‘To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die / With thee again in sweetest sympathy’, would have been very suitable. Then the song might have been reprised after the dancing to the oboes (1.2.144.3 SD) – I take ‘strain’ in the stage direction to mean ‘song’.
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