'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.

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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’. The boys would then dance while playing the lutes called for in the stage direction. ‘Amazon’ was a cant word for a bold prostitute.

ERHARD SCHÖN (CA 1491-1542): ‘WOMAN PLAYING LUTE’

We know that the boys in the children’s companies were trained to play stringed instruments – lutes were also called for in the masque of whores in Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (5.2). One is played by Francischina, another whore, in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1603-5) and another is associated with the enchantress Erichtho in his Sophonisba, (1605-6), 4.1–5.1, all played by the Blackfriars Children. (Ophelia seems to have made a rash choice of instrument!) We notice that the decorum of the masque is violated by the men ‘taking out’ the female masquers rather than vice versa – they appeared as lap dancers in the Globe production. In The Tempest there is only one significant female part apart from the deities in the masque. Miranda is curiously passive: she takes no active role in the processes of regeneration that are associated with the women who appear in the other romances. I suspect that the dissolution of the Blackfriars boys in 1608 either led to the young players migrating to the Whitefriars or left at least some of them to be employed by the King’s Men. This might account for the fact that the masques in both plays and the courtesan sequence in Timon have the feeling of being insets. In this play the boys were used for their presentational skills of music and dance rather more than for their representational ones.

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Emblematic scenes The text of Timon is comparatively short, and a full performance might have included not only music between the acts but a concert by the Blackfriars consort or those London Waits. Webster had had to lengthen The Malcontent, originally played at the Blackfriars, for performance at the Globe. The play, then, was probably written at the moment when the King’s Men were planning to realise their dream of running in tandem an outdoor public amphitheatre playhouse and an indoor private playhouse. Immediately, however, either the failure of nerve I suggested earlier, or the long plague closure of 1608-9 probably put paid to a performance of this text soon after it was written. As we have seen, Timon described the Amazon masque as a ‘device’ (1.2.149). Ben Jonson defined devices in Part of the King’s Entertainment in Passing to his Coronation, (London, 1616):

The nature and property of these devices being to present always some one entire body or figure, consisting of distinct members, and each of those expressing itself, in their own active sphere, yet all, with that general harmony so connexed and disposed, as no one little part can be missing to the illustration of the whole.

In Timon scenes are indeed often built around a ‘device’, a, concentrated theatrical image, metonymic, what Brecht was to call a Gestus, possibly demanding, as G. Wilson Knight thought – he saw Timon as Christ-like – a particular kind of acting.

In the text, this dramatic feature is signalled by the discussion of an actual picture between the Poet and Painter. The scene is typically Shakespearean in that it works in two ways, as a mise en abyme, a celebration of the gestures of the players as speaking pictures, and as a satire on the parasitical, mutually flattering, smarmy artists who must have flocked to contribute to the magnificence of their would-be patrons, the noble and wealthy inhabitants of the Blackfriars precinct. Within the allegorical picture, Fortune is displaced from goddess to a metonym for Timon’s gold, presumably accumulated and not the product of industry. The word ‘gold’ occurs in Timon no fewer than 36 times. 8

According to the Second Lord, ‘Plutus’ is but ‘Timon’s steward’ (1.1.283-5): as Karl Marx reminded us ‘modern society, while still in its infancy, pulled Pluto by his hair out of the bowels of the earth’10 – he was god of both riches and hell. Timon may have risen but Timon will surely return to the lower depths. At the Globe the production created another ‘device’, the torture and execution of Alcibiades’ friend – or lover? – broken on a wheel at the top of one of the playhouse pillars. The image was adapted from Breughel’s ‘Triumph of Death’:

BRUEGHEL DETAIL Perhaps it was deemed necessary to give some presence to Alcibiades who is a bit of a cipher – he may well be imagined as ‘epicoene’, for later, as we

10 Quoted William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, The life of Timon of Athens, ed. John Jowett, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 54.

9 shall see, he consorts with women. This is indeed one of the first shows in a prolonged pageant of death: however, at the end Timon curiously vanishes: his epitaphs are like mottos cut away from their images in Renaissance emblem books. Images have been cropped, now it is time for language to end, and when that happens Timon himself has left not a wrack behind, certainly no body over which an epitaph might have been spoken. There are other ‘devices’: the entry of Apemantus ‘as himself’, i.e. not preparing a face to meet the faces that he meets; then the covered dishes in the first half; in the second the Beckett-like image of Timon and Apemantus flyting, perhaps sitting either side of a stage trap (a grave?). Then the ‘sluts’ holding their aprons mountant – a displacement of the visitation of Jupiter to Danaë – Danaë had originally been a symbol of virtue, one that modulated into a figure of venality.

CORREGGIO, DANAE, 1531

TITIAN, DANAE, 1554 10

REMBRANDT, DANAE, 1636

STEFANO DELLA BELLA: PLAYING CARD, 1644

In a way, what is going on in that scene and in those images of a golden rape is a continuation of Timon’s misogyny, manifest in 4.1 in Timon’s horrendous rant against Athens, studded as it is with images of female concupiscence. We can make two points: misogyny linked with homoerotic bawdy was one of the markers of the Whitefriars plays in these years,11 and,

11 For same-sex desire in the plays being performed at this time in the short-lived Whitefriars, 11 when considering the personality of Timon we might reflect that this kind of thing can easily tilt over into misanthropy.

Genre and critical readings To turn from construction to genre. Timon of Athens obviously has a satirical dimension, which matches the plays Middleton had been writing for the boys’ companies and their elite audiences. As a consequence of the experiments of John Marston, satire and tragedy coexisted and were, in practice if not in the eyes of contemporary critics, co-equal. When we think Middleton, we think city – and it is noteworthy that the authors signalled this by calling the play Timon of Athens – the city is significant. Moreover, although we may not wish, when considering a play that is refracted through the forms and pressures of early modern London, to think about class conflict, there is no doubt that this play is based upon caste conflict. Both Alcibiades and Timon wish to enter the political world, the former by great deeds, the latter by acquiring great rank. The prolonged confrontation between politics and society, between rank and finance, was a theme for Middleton and later Massinger. (There are analogies with ancient Athens where an aristocracy of birth, the eupatridae, who owned the best land and governed as an oligarchy, dominated the city. The resentment of merchants and others led to Solon abolishing the aristocracy). The distinction was also inscribed upon the audiences, the ‘publics’ at the two playhouses used by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Globe and the Blackfriars. Now, if there was not a Blackfriars repertory there was certainly a citizen repertory played out in Rose and the Fortune, served by the Admiral’s Men and their successors, Prince Henry’s Men. It is noteworthy that our play opens with pageant of artisans, citizens, coming to pay court to Timon. (Might we reflect that Shakespeare could not become a London gentleman himself, and retired as a private man in Stratford?) Were Shakespeare and Middleton planning to please nobles living in the vicinity of Blackfriars with their portrait of Timon as an arriviste? I am also intrigued by the possibility that the play contained dangerous matter: it obviously presents a spendthrift noble (a figure for King James?) and recycles the old topic of Hospitality murdered by Usury that appeared in Wilson’s Three Ladies of London. To quote Robert Ashton: ‘”Bounty”, suggested Lord Treasurer Salisbury, whose financial policy had … suffered from its undue exercise, “is an essential virtue of the King.”’ In 1606-7 the royal debt had reached about £735,000 although it was to diminish greatly by 1610.12 In the text, ‘Bounty’, it has been shown, is curiously feminised, perhaps an icon of the King’s homosexuality – he had, after all, characterised himself as ‘a loving nourish-father.’13 see Mary Bly, Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 87-115. 12 Robert Ashton, ‘Deficit finance in the reign of James I’, The Economic History Review 10.1 (1957), 15-29, at 16. 13 Coppelia Kahn, ‘"Magic of bounty": Timon of Athens, Jacobean patronage, and maternal power’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38.1 (1987), 34-57; Jowett, p. 39.

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But could Timon equally be a nouveau riche newly ennobled? We see his fall, but we hear about his being wafted up ‘Fortune’s hill’. The medieval icon, Fortune’s Hill, is significantly displaced:

POET … One do I personate of Lord Timon's frame, Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her, Whose present grace to present slaves and servants Translates his rivals. PAINTER 'Tis conceived to scope. This throne, this Fortune, and this hill, methinks, With one man beckoned from the rest below, Bowing his head against the steepy mount To climb his happiness, would be well expressed In our condition. (1.1.71-9)

Fortune, says the disillusioned Timon much later in the play, can

Raise me this beggar and demit that lord, The senator shall bear contempt hereditary, The beggar native honour. (4.3.9-11)

Pecunia omnia vincit. It was not just rich merchants who lent money to spendthrift nobles: Alcibiades refers to a usuring senate (3.6.99). As for arrivistes, we have only to remember Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Camden (1551-1629), mercer and moneylender, who had been knighted by James in 1603, made Baronet in 1620, and eventually raised to the peerage in 1628 (see DNB). The usurers’ servants who appear in 2.2 admit to coming from ‘senators’. In the first scene there is an entrance for ‘Senators’ (1.1.39 SD). Are we to think Athens or London? Were classical or Jacobean costumes going to be worn? Timon is repeatedly called ‘Lord’ or referred to as ‘noble’? These are, I submit, buzz words. Is this ironic? He is not so called in North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of Alcibiades, Painter’s chapter on Timon in The Palace of Pleasure, or in the Inns of Court play, The Comedy of Timon, dated by its editors about 1602-3.14 Nor is the word ‘lord’ to be found in Coriolanus. It is tempting to hint that this may be a reference to the fact that while Elizabeth had granted titles only parsimoniously, James realised that he had to respond to the claims for title on the part of many grandees. Courtiers expected ‘gratuities’ to advance the causes of their eminent but untitled clients, and James eventually sold at least one peerage: Lawrence Stone reckons that the elevation of Sir William Cavendish to an earldom in 1605, at the behest of Arabella Stuart, cost the new peer £2900.15 This was followed by a plethora of titles, often after payment to the Duke of Buckingham. As Bacon commented acidly, ‘new nobility

14 James C. Bulman and J. M. Nosworthy, (ed.), Timon, ([London], Malone Society, 1980), p. xiv. 15 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, (Oxford, 1967), pp. 50-51. 13

HOLLAR, ‘THE PICTURE OF A PATENTEE’ (1641) is but the act of power; but ancient nobility is the act of time’16 and, obviously the reign of King James saw the beginning of clashes between ‘aristocracy’ (first used in 1531, generally in the context of contrast with monarchy) and ‘plutocracy’ – the word in fact goes back to Socrates. There is division between Timon the plutocrat and the senators who, antagonistic towards Alcibiades, are also the recipients of Timon’s vituperations. Plutocracies are inherently unstable. So we are reminded of the masters of the universe and various other whoremasters caught up in the second Wall Street Crash of 2008-9. Fortune, both as material wealth and as a goddess, is a ‘bond in men’ (1.1.148). Here is the Fool on the subject:

16 Francis Bacon, ‘Of nobility’ and ‘Of riches’, Essays, ed. W. Aldis Wright, (London, 1865), pp. 52 and 148. 14

VARRO'S SERVANT What is a whoremaster, fool? FOOL A fool in good clothes, and something like thee. 'Tis a spirit; sometime’t appears like a lord, sometime like a lawyer, sometime like a philosopher with two stones more than’s artificial one. He is very often like a knight; and generally in all shapes that man goes up and down in, from fourscore to thirteen, this spirit walks in. (2.2.108-13)

This is like the transmigration of the soul of Pythagoras in Volpone, an emblem of social change. It is also remarkable that ‘women’ appear only in the Amazonian masque and in the sequence in which the Alcibiades’ mistresses or prostitutes visit Timon to take gold from him. The moment is emblematic: we all recognise the replacement of social and familial bonds by what Carlyle termed the ‘cash nexus’. Timon’s patronage manifests itself in money rather than influence. Marx’s reflections on Timon’s speech on gold led him to conclude that ‘money is the ‘alienated ability of mankind’,17 and later he noted its effects in across human behaviour: ‘General prostitution’, he wrote, ‘appears as a necessary phase in the development of the social character of personal inclinations, capacities, abilities, activities’.18 . Money supplants valour: I think that the Senators pay Alcibiades not to sack their city: seal his ‘full desire’ (5.5.54). Commodification of status generates commodification of love: tragedy in the play derives from Timon’s failure to see that indeed there is beggary in the love that can be reckoned (Ant., 1.1.15). (Shakespeare had dealt with the theme in another key in one of the strangest of the sonnets (115) – the one with all the feminine rhymes: ‘Farewell – thou art too dear for my possessing.’ Feminine endings are common in Middleton) I am also intrigued by the way in which Timon moves from being a public figure to being a private man – I wish that Antony’s line ‘A private man in Athens’ had appeared in this play – but perhaps it registers a backward or forward glance. The comedies register re-accommodation into the family, the tragedies and late romances chronicle the deprivation of intimacy: the world ‘private’ derives ultimately from ‘privatus’ (‘having been deprived). (OED conveniently quotes from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes ‘Alcibiades, off Athene cheeff capteyn ... was ... bi ther ordynaunce ... pryued from al dignyte.’) The last plays depict privati, men alone, Antony, Coriolanus, Pericles, Prospero, deprived of status and family. Timon, in a childish tantrum, tears off his clothes (although I think his nakedness, like Hamlet’s, designates vulnerability): Lear disrobes as an act of penance. Timon turns from the company of men, where he had never, it seems achieved any intimacy, to look back with hatred at mankind. Indeed the word ‘mankind’ appears nine times in Timon, more than twice as often as all other occurrences in the canon. Hannah Arendt comments: ‘One of the characteristics of privacy, prior

17 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 40. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm, consulted 10 July, 2019. 18 Outlines of the Critique of the Critique of Political Economy, quoted Klein, p. 9n.

15 to the discovery of the intimate, was that man existed in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind’.19

Globe Production In 2008, at Shakespeare’s Globe, Lucy Bailey directed an ambitious and visionary but, to my eyes, over-conceptualised production of the play. We were immediately aware that a small space had been created within the amphitheatre playhouse – cargo netting had been slung from the stage canopy out over the yard. Bailey and her designer William Dudley had been inspired both by Hitchcock’s The Birds and also demonic images in Hieronymus Bosch. They wanted an ‘aviary’ within the Globe, and Timon’s parasites and creditors, dressed like the monstrous – even amorous – birds of prey in Volpone, crawled over this and, sometimes, credit-crunchers or bandits, bungee-jumped down onto the stage – the text is redolent with images of cannibalism.

Other characters trapezed around within the space. A wall had been built across the stage, suggesting both inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and pushed the action forward. As Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, ‘For all the visual bravura, I can't help feeling that this most pessimistic and problematic of plays is better suited to intimate studio theatres than to an aggressively social space like Shakespeare's Globe.’20 This production created not emblems of particular follies and vices but a panorama of decadence: the corruption was a pathological commodification of a complete society. It was the complete opposite of G. Wilson Knight’s reading of Athens as site of Apollonian civilisation. A pit had been clipped on to the front of the stage: those within could use the stage lip as a table or bar, wreathed in the smeech that comes from one of London’s posh Mongolian barbecues. At the back a banqueting bench running across the top of the wall allowed those sitting up there to blaspheme the image of Leonardo’s last supper: this Banquet of Sense

19 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago, Chicago U.P, 1958), pp. 45-6. 20 Michael Billington, The Guardian, 8 August, 2008.

16 came with lap dancers to schmoose their johns, cheerfully flashing as they danced, while female musicians jazzed things up in the stage trap.

Timon’s guests pelted Apemantus with bread – rugger-buggers behaving badly. Above the orgy, complete with on-stage copulation, spectres crawled around in the rooky sky. At the end of the first half in the second banquet Timon hurled heavy stones at his guests that bounced off the rear wall. Timon, long-haired and clad in a white Jesus robe, had been a fool to try to join this homo-eroticised boy’s club. The syndrome was of long standing: Plutarch reports on Alcibiades’ habit of being ‘womanish in apparel’ (Bullough, vi, 254). In the second half the night-club/wine-bar effect was transmuted to a grey-lavaed and blasted beach by changing the stage cloth that ran up the dias across the stage. A frieze of grey icy mountains seemed perceptible on what now looked like a sea-wall. Only the whores provided any colour.

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TIMON SCATTERS GOLD ON THE BEACH When Timon stood near naked on his beach, his steward sponged him down. Alcibiades returned as an exterminating angel. But Timon (Simon Paisley Day), having been subjected to nightmare visions out of Breughel and Bosch from his erstwhile friends, was now in a filthy modern hell, clad only in a loin- cloth – on the blanket, as it were. Having contrived a grave in the stage trap he crapped in it, and then smeared the faces of the poet and painter with his excrement. He then laid coins on his eyes and the vultures descended to devour him. The sequence was a grotesque travesty of those shadows of the Eucharist in the earlier banquets.

PIETER VAN DER HEYDEN: AVARITIA (ENGRAVING AFTER BRUEGHEL THE ELDER),1558

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Was this all too much? Concerning the faeces, Brueghel had exhibited an open arse at the front of his ‘Avaritia’ from his Seven Deadly Sins – the engraving was reproduced in the Globe programme:

DETAIL FROM BRUEGHEL

Both Freud and Jung21 had made much of the connections between gold and excrement. Sir Epicure Mammon in The Alchemist boasted to Doll that he would ‘concumbere gold’: I suppose that Timon sought to defaecare gold. However, when I confront the theatrical visualisation of metaphors, of violence or scatology – in this case of what Kenneth Burke called ‘fecal gold’ – my attention wanders from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’. I was pondering what the faeces were made of. I have to say I thought this was an adventurous glance into the afterlife of Timon of Athens, but one that was marred by excess. Although I take the visual to be central to the play, its mise en scène created a determining cash-rich but value- free society, engulfed what anthropologists call this ‘Big Man’,22 and took away from the complexities of Timon’s psyche. For me he is a man for whom love can only be bought, while, for A. D. Nuttall, Timon really does give freely, expecting an ethical response (Nuttall, p. 314.) We could not judge between the harsher alternatives Mercury offers in the Lucianic dialogue:

He was brought to this by his bounty, humanity, and compassion towards all in want; or rather, to speak more correctly, by his ignorance, foolish

21 Freud writes ‘How old this connection between excrement and Gold is can be seen from an observation by Jeremias: gold, according to ancient oriental mythology, is the excrement of hell’ (Sigmund Freud and David Ernst Oppenheim, Dreams in Folklore, ed. James Strachey, trans. A. M. O. Richards, (New York, International Universities Press, 1958), p. 187); Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, p. 520. 22 Kahn, p. 35.

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habits, and small judgment of men, not realizing that he was giving his property to ravens and wolves (Bullough, vi, 265).

It was certainly post-modern, by virtue of its eclecticism and syncretism, its plurality of moral perspectives, and yet it was predicated on a simplified vision of ‘medieval’ primitivism. It certainly reminded us of what an experimental play Timon was and is.

WYNDHAM LEWIS: ILLUSTRATION FOR A PLANNED EDITION OF TIMON