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Timon of Athens Rolf Soellner TIMON OF ATHENS Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy $15.50 TIMON OF ATHENS Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy By Rolf Soellner With a Stage History by Gary Jay Williams Perhaps the most problematical of Shake­ speare's tragedies opens on a distinctly ominous if nonetheless casual note. A poet and a painter meet and, after exchanging greetings, the former asks, "How goes the world?" Whereupon the painter replies, "It wears, sir, as it grows" — to which the poet responds, as to a cliche, "Ay, that's well known." The notion of the world's decay, a sur­ vivor of the contempus mundi of medieval philosophy, with its groundings in concep­ tions of the Fall and Last Judgment, achieved a renewed ascendancy in the dark­ ening climate of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. And it is, Professor Soellner points out, only in the mood and tenor engendered by this pervasive pes­ simism, which many critics of Timon have found uncongenial, that we can come fully to understand Shakespeare's misanthrope, who has been much maligned as the inferior of Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear, but who is, if not entirely their equal, an authen­ tic tragic hero in his own right. Professor Soellner accepts Timon as a tragedy, albeit one that does not necessarily satisfy standard definitions; and though he readily concedes that there are sporadic tex­ tual deficiencies, he finds in the structure of the play, its characterization, imagery, and thematic development, the imprint of Shakespeare's incomparable genius and the indisputable evidence of the drama's having been meticulously worked out in conformity with a controlling and high tragic design. Indeed, having chosen to treat the difficult subject of an uncompromising and tragic misanthropy, Dr. Soellner argues, Shake­ speare anchored the play more deliberately and securely in the pessimistic intellectual tradition than has heretofore been sup­ posed, and made the superbly right decision (Continued on back flap) TIMON OF ATHENS Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy ROLF SOELLNER TIMON OF ATHENS Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy With a stage history by Gary Jay Williams Ohio State University Press : Columbus Copyright © 1979 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Soellner, Rolf. Timon of Athens, Shakespeare's pessimistic tragedy. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Timon of Athens. I. Williams, Gary Jay. II. Title. PR2834.S6 822.3'3 78-10884 ISBN 0-8142-0292-6 Contents Preface 1 1 Facing the Depth 3 2 At the Boundary of Tragedy 15 3 The Turn of Fortune's Wheel 30 4 The Rise of Alcibiades 50 5 Timon the Misanthrope 64 6 Apemantus and the Others 83 7 Patterns and Image 97 8 The Ills of Society 114 9 The Uses of Nature and Art 129 10 Fortune and the Globe 143 Appendixes 159 Stage History 161 Text 186 Date and Sources 201 Notes 219 Index 237 To My Parents Preface Charlton Hinman's observation that "critical responses to Timon of Athens have not always been charac­ terized by moderation" should have a sobering effect on any critic of the play. But since most violations of moderation have been committed by those who dislike Timon, I may be forgiven if I have lapsed occasionally into fervor when de­ fending its merits. I have tried to write a comprehensive critical analysis of the play in its dramatic and cultural contexts. I have felt no need to take up the so-called author­ ship question; few people now doubt that Timon is wholly Shakespeare's. Three other questions much debated in the past are merely marginal to my purposes: when Timon was written, what its sources are, and how to explain the defec­ tiveness of the only text we have, that of the First Folio. Such thoughts as I have on these subjects are in the Appendixes. After completing the manuscript, I had the good fortune of meeting Gary Williams, of the Catholic University of America, whose interest in the play and fascination with it parallel mine. He kindly accepted my invitation to contribute a stage history—the more welcome an addition to this book as he speaks with the rare authority of a man who has directed Timon on the stage. 2 / Preface My approach has made it necessary to discuss some key passages of the play in more than one chapter; the reader in search of their total interpretation may consult the Index of Lines. The edition of Timon quoted and referred to is H. J. Oliver's in the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1969); plays other than Timon are cited from The Riverside Shakespeare, text ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). For illustrating the intellectual background, 1 have sought to quote sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources in preference to secondary, modern ones; but I have cau­ tiously modernized their punctuation and spelling. I have followed the same procedure with the Bible, which I quote in the Genevan version (London: Christopher Barker, 1599). It remains for me to acknowledge the magic of bounty re­ ceived in writing this book. Two grants-in-aid from the Humanities College of the Ohio State University helped me to travel to research libraries. The personnel of these libraries—the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Newberry Library—was most generous and helpful. For reading and criticizing parts or all of my manu­ script at various stages, I am indebted to my colleagues Lee Cox, John Gabel, Robert Jones, James Kincaid, and Edwin Robbins. Maurice Charaey of Rutgers University gave me the benefit of his learning and intimate knowledge of the play. Thelma Greenfield of the University of Oregon read what I thought was my final version and convinced me for my own good that it still needed considerable revision. Last but not least, I am grateful to Weldon Kefauver, director of the Ohio State University Press, for his consideration and encourage­ ment, and to Robert Demorest, the editor, for guiding the manuscript through the press. Facing the Depth Pass by and curse thy fill Timon of Athens opens on a casually ominous note. A poet and a painter meet and, after mutual greeting, the poet asks: "How goes the world?" Whereupon the painter answers: "It wears, sir, as it grows." Shakespeare's audience was familiar with the idea that the world was now in the last stages of its life; therefore, the poet can treat it as a cliche: "Ay, that's well known." But this hackneyed notion could still conjure up the fearful image of a doomed humanity as it did effectively in medieval Christian eschatology and as it does again in the blind Gloucester's cry when he meets his wracked and tortured old master Lear: "O ruin'd piece of nature! This great world / Shall so wear out to nought" (4.6.134-35). The painter's offhand reminder of the world's imperma­ nence is followed by the poet's alarmingly cynical portrayal of man and society in the allegory of Fortune he is about to present to Timon: it depicts a world of fortune-seekers where "all deserts, all kinds" greedily congregate at the foot of Fortune's hill. The one man—a person "of Lord Timon's frame"—whom the goddess wafts upward to her throne is obsequiously adulated by those below; but when Fortune displays her proverbial fickleness by rejecting her erstwhile darling and he slides down the hill, the odious sycophants 4 / Timon of Athens abandon him, "Not one accompanying his declining foot (1.1.90). This satire on greed and ingratitude is a fitting overture to the strident displays of meanness and the break­ ing of societal bonds in the play. This may be a shrinking and decaying world, but what is dramatized is the sickness and degeneracy of man. "The strain of man's bred out / Into ba­ boon and monkey" says the cynic Apemantus when Alci­ biades and his followers arrive at Timon's hospitable house and exercise their pliant joints in courtesy (1.1.249—50). Apemantus's inverse Darwinism is an apt expression of the feeling of the human regression the unfolding play conveys; one is reminded that most Renaissance moralists thought that men too were shrinking and degenerating along with the universe. The cynic's remarks bristle with biting invec­ tives against the hypocrisy and depravity of this human world. The initial cynical statements, borne out as they are by the accompanying action, are mild compared with what is to come: in the second part of the play, a virulently pessimistic voice is raised and spews forth hatred and disgust, the voice of Timon the misanthrope, a man who has rudely awakened from his long dream of universal friendship and love to the reality of his destitution and his friends' villainy. He is now misanthropy personified; he cannot be moved from his fixed hatred by finding gold, which would permit him to be rich and honored again, nor by the subtle plea of Alcibiades to help him against Athens, nor by the Athenians' desperate supplication to save them from Alcibiades' army. While his countrymen strenuously seek to extend their sojourn on the ultimately doomed globe, Timon becomes an insistent apoca­ lyptic voice, a prophet of gloom, a preacher of destruction, and a destroyer of himself. Episode after episode demonstrates the meanness and venality of men, the relentless insistence varied only by the disturbing inversions of irony, sarcasm, and grotesquerie. There is no substantial relief. Too much, I think, has in this respect been made of Timon's faithful steward.
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