Michael:

Timon may not be a formal tragedy, though Timon dies at the end; we’ll have to talk about that in due course.

The first act establishes Timon as extraordinarily generous, and by the end of the act comments by his steward Fulvius suggest even too generous. The curious opening scene begins with unnamed characters, a poet and a painter, who suggest the relation of artists to patrons, and presumably intend a relationship with Timon. But we also have a merchant and jeweler, whose interest may be more commercial. Curiously the poet seems to overpraise the work of the painter — the painting “tutors nature.” But that may be the role of the poet. “Certain Senators” parade over the stage, suggesting perhaps the attraction of money to law-giving, and the poet does call attention to the free resort of people to a rich man. When Timon comes on stage, with the pomp of trumpets and adorned with a rich jewel, we see the effect of riches on a man’s presentation.

Timon’s first act seem entirely benevolent, releasing a friend, Ventidius, from prison by paying his debt. And his second act seems similarly benevolent, allowing his poor servant Lucilius to marry the daughter of the “old Athenian” by paying the necessary dowry. But then Apemantus enters and his mockery challenges our sense of the goodness of Timon. Not all of Apemantus’ raillery is immediately clear, but it seems to amuse, or at least be tolerated by, Timon. Apemantus also takes on the poet and the various lords.

In the next scene Timon’s hospitality is expressed in “loud music” and a great banquet. Ventidius’ attempt to thank and repay Timon for his release from debtors’ prison is met by Timon’s refusal to accept repayment and insistence that it was the duty of friendship. But right away Apemantus renews his raillery. In our terms Apemantus appears rather like a libertarian, especially in his “grace,” and this opposes the apparently unlimited benevolence of Timon. In his extended speech at 1.2. 85 Timon suggests that such benevolence is the essence of friendship. There follows the curious scene of a masque of Cupid and “ladies as Amazons” dancing and playing. This looks like vanity and nonsense to Apemantus. Then the lords rise from the banquet table and dance with the ladies/Amazons. Timon ends by giving jewels as party favors to the lords.

When Flavius attempts to speak with Timon about his concern for him, Timon puts him off, apparently because it’s personal to him and he wants to be available to his guests. But meanwhile guests are giving gifts – horses and greyhounds – to Timon.  Flavius then says in an aside that Timon can’t really afford all his generosity — and the reciprocity of all the gift-giving. He pities Timon.

Timon gives away a horse that a lord had merely commended. The scene concludes with Timon and Apemantus in entire disagreement, A. lamenting that men should be open to flattery, but closed to counsel.

The language of the play is certainly “late Shakespeare,” often difficult and with rather challenging metaphoric constructions. This is especially the case in Apemantus’ usage.

Dusty:

The play is called “The Life of Timon of Athens, the only one of the “tragedies” in the Folio that is not called a “tragedy.”

I think the poet and painter, who apparently return to the stage later in the play, are also engaged in base flattery and calculated overpraising, just like the suitors and the merchants. But the poet’s poem also predicts Timon’s fall from Fortune.

A director presumably needs to decide whether to present Timon in Act 1 as a big-hearted, warm-hearted, generous man, or as a foolish man who doesn’t see through the suitors and doesn’t bother to pay attention to his steward’s warnings about the accounts.

Apemantus is a sharp corrective to the flatterers. He’s skeptical of their motives and suspicious of the false “courtesy” — and will prove to be right about that — but he goes beyond skepticism to cynicism. If Timon represents excessive bounty, Apemantus perhaps presents another kind of excess.

The play invites us to think about gift-giving. As I understand it, the reciprocal presentation of gifts was thought to be a way to create social and political bonds. Timon rejects the idea of reciprocity — that is, he claims to give with no expectation of return. The flatterers are clearly giving in order to get. Maybe Shakespeare is suggesting that the giving system is flawed at the core.

I assumed that the scene of Cupid and the masquers was designed as dinner theatre, entertainment for Timon and his guests. But maybe there is more to it.

Flavius on Timon’s reckless bounty sounds a bit like the Fool warning Lear that he has given away too much. I think Timon will be Lear-like later in the play.

Dusty:

Act 2 is quite short. The first scene confirms that Timon’s “friends” know how to get him to supply their needs. And it turns out that the senator has also been loaning Timon money, and is now calling in the loans. So we get a retrospective new look at Timon’s riches — he is apparently living well beyond his income. In the second scene Flavius finally gets Timon to pay attention, but Timon insists that although he has given “unwisely” it is “not ignobly.” Maybe so. But isn’t there something ignoble about Timon blindly pressing gifts on the undeserving?

When he says that “I am wealthy in my friends,” who will, he thinks, help him out in his time of need, we know what’s coming.

I was surprised when a Fool is introduced, since Apemantus seems to play that role. Maybe the point is to suggest again that Apemantus goes too far. The Fool’s remarks are similar to Apemantus’s, but he is not abusive.

Michael:

I’ve been struck in the past by some connections between Timon and King Lear; I agree with your noted points of overlap. Flavius may connect not only with the Fool in Lear, but also with Kent. And there’s something of Lear’s Fool in Apemantus, though the latter is not as appealing or loyal as the Fool. It seems almost as if Timon, the play, is a kind of overflowing of the bitterness in Lear.

In Act 2 we begin to get a sense of Timon’s excess and foolishness in his generosity. What had seemed merely generous and humane in Act 1 (at least at the start) begins to become excessive. Now Flavius explains what has happened to Timon’s fortune. We can guess what will come of Timon’s optimism in his friends’ disinclination to repay him.

Michael:

With Act 3 we see three almost comic scenes — maybe there is an element of satiric comedy in them all — as Timon’s servants go to the former beneficiaries of his generosity. Each has a different excuse for not helping/repaying Timon. Lucullus, the first, protests that he often remonstrated with Timon over his generosity, but then dismisses his own servant and gives Flaminius a paltry tip and asks that he say he didn’t see Lucullus. Flaminius then tosses the coins back at Lucullus, who sees the gesture as just like Timon’s foolishness.

Next Servilius goes to Lucius, who thinks Timon has sent another gift and can’t believe he’s really asking for a return, or partial return, of what Lucius owes. But Lucius protests that he’s deeply pained that he can’t help Timon now and asks that Servilius will use his exact words back to Timon — and promises a future reward to Servilius, then quickly ducks out. The three strangers are aghast and indicate they would have taken loans to help Timon.

The third creditor, Sempronius, claims he’s offended that Timon has turned last to him. This may be the most comic of the excuses.

In 3.4 we see the rest of Timon’s “friends” running for the exits; they gather outside Timon’s house and compare the amounts they owe Timon, and the servants confront the situation. Flavius says he’s left Timon, who has now nothing for him to reckon, or Timon to spend. Varro says that Timon now has no house to put his head in, which sounds like an echo of the Fool in Lear. Timon comes onstage in a Lear-like rage to discover that he cannot enter his house. Instead, all the servants of Timon’s creditors present their bills. In the short 3.5 Timon asks Flavius to arrange one more feast for his “friends.”

3.6 initially puzzles, but it’s a subplot scene, that has Alcibiades pleading for the life of a friend, probably one of his soldiers, who has been sentenced to death for a killing. He argues with the judging senators for mercy. The killing seems to have been a duel or a quarrel, for which the friend has been condemned. Alcibiades argues that the service of the soldier merits mercy. But the judges are unmoved. Because he has challenged them, they then banish Alcibiades, threatening him with death if he has not left in two days. Clearly it’s related to the Timon plot by the disregard of Alcibiades’ service to Athens and the judges’ failure of gratitude toward him.

Timon serves his comeuppance to his creditors in 3.7 with a covered banquet, perhaps something like the banquet that Ariel serves plotters in The Tempest. Here Timon says his “grace,” an ironic thanksgiving that reflects his treatment by the “friends.” The whole thing is a kind of overturning of “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” As his friends are nothing to him, so the gods should bless them in nothing. The uncovered dishes reveal nothing but steaming water and stones. Then Timon throws the water at them and beats them away. Then he leaves them in disarray about their caps and cloaks.

Dusty:

I agree that there is something almost comic about the three matched scenes in Act 3. But it’s a black comedy. The dramatic mode of the play seems to have shifted into something like satire, or maybe morality play. It’s a stylized display of ingratitude, with increasingly convoluted reasons offered for not helping Timon in his hour of need. It is not clear to me why Shakespeare sometimes uses prose, sometimes verse. The false friends sometimes but not always speak prose, those who ask and are denied generally but not always speak their curses in verse.

3.5 seems a bit late to introduce a subplot, but I guess that’s what the Alcibiades scene turns out to be, suggesting that ingratitude is general. Alcibiades is exiled, but Timon exiles himself. (Maybe that difference is important.) It’s not surprising that they will meet in Act 4.

3.6 — the mock-banquet — seems like the first three scenes in the play, a satiric display, with Timon as the emcee/satirist. I don’t know why his big speech is in prose, and only later in verse. His rage makes him sound a lot like Lear.

Dusty:

In Act 4 Timon becomes yet more like Lear, rushing off into the woods (rather than the storm), tearing his clothes off, and raging at man’s ingratitude. He has generalized his hatred, so that now he curses “the whole race of mankind,” and has become Timon the Misanthrope.

But not everybody deserves his hatred, and in 4.2 we see the faithful Flavius. It’s odd that he no longer says anything about Timon’s foolishly over-generous behavior, or his unwillingness to look at his accounts. Now Timon is honest and kind, offers “bounty,” and “does too much good.” In resolving to follow his old master, Flavius is, as you suggested earlier, a bit like Kent.

(By the way, I don’t see any connection between Timon’s unstinted bounty and the Renaissance ideal of “magnificence,” which was designed to maintain a rich man’s political, social, and economic preeminence.)

4.3, at 536 lines, is the longest scene in the play, but it really consists of four consecutive sub-scenes in which Timon remains on stage but one or more others come on stage to talk with him, first Alcibiades, then Apemantus, then the banditti, and finally Flavius. (Again, Shakespeare’s dramatic structure seems different from that in the other tragedies.) Timon, digging for roots to eat, ironically finds gold, which he now reviles. I often found Timon’s language difficult to follow closely. I get the drift, but have a hard time working out the details.

Alcibiades and Timon recognize that each has been ill treated by Athens. I can’t figure why Alcibiades is accompanied by two floozies. Timon calls them whores, but the dramatis personae says they are Alcibiades’ mistresses. In any event, they seem primarily to be gold-diggers. In offering gold to Alcibiades and the girls, Timon is a grim parody of his former self.

Apemantus has heard that Timon is behaving like him — cynically ranting about false friends. Are we to think that Apemantus has been right all along? Timon in fact out-Apemantuses Apemantus. In some ways Apemantus acts the role of Lear’s Fool, telling Timon that he (Timon) is a fool, still “proud” (“Are thou proud yet?” at l. 277), and has gone from one extreme to the other (“The middle of humanity thou never knewest” at line 300). It appears that unlike Lear, Timon does not begin to see himself. The ‘scene’ with Apemantus ends with a wonderful cursing match, and with Apemantus suggesting that somehow Timon actually “love[s] his misery” (395).

Apemantus goes off, and on come the banditti. Timon welcomes them, saying that at least they are honest about being thieves. In fact, they aren’t: they claim to be soldiers, and then to be men in want. But Timon also offers them gold.

The banditti go off and on comes Flavius. Timon is still raving mad, offering more gold, and doesn’t recognize Flavius for who he is. Even if there is one honest man in the world, Timon won’t change his tune: he continues to hate all men. At the end of the act he still does not see any recklessness, naivete, or excess in himself.

Michael:

The play grows stranger and darker as it goes on. Lear seems oddly connected to various parts of the play. In act 4 in semi-clothed state Timon rages at the ingratitude of the Athenians and curses them. In the scene with the servants, Flavius appears like the loyal Kent and the Fool and pities Timon, pledging loyalty. At the beginning of the extraordinarily long 4.3 Timon appears altogether mad in his uncompromising misanthropy.

Instead of roots, which are at least edible, Timon finds gold, which reverses human value altogether. It’s not clear why he decides to keep some of the gold, as he buries the rest, though it will later come into play.

There’s a deficit of women in the play, but Alcibiades’ whores don’t compensate. Alcibiades cannot comfort Timon at all, even as the two seem to be connected in their bitterness. And they exchange gold. The two floozies emphasize Timon’s negativity, but their relation to Alcibiades never becomes clear; we do seem to be in the realm of morality-play dramaturgy. Now Apemantus finds that Timon has become much like himself, only more so it seems. He likes Timon better than before, but T. doesn’t return the compliment and is quite nasty to him. Apemantus makes a good point when he says that Timon never knew the “middle of humanity” but only the extremes. Timon forecasts his grave at the edge of the sea. Finally the banditti come to Timon, presumably to suggest their universality, which is cancelled by the appearance of Flavius. He suggests almost the awakening of Lear to Cordelia, but to no avail for Timon. If there’s any moment of tragic failure for Timon, it must be here in his non-response to Flavius.

But with the shorter final act there’s little but reiteration of mad Timon’s cast of mind. We initially see the return of the poet and painter, who seem merely conventional in their satiric roles. They suspect, correctly it appears, that Timon has discovered gold, so they’re happy to again offer their services. But Timon understands their motivation and beats them.

Flavius seems to want to reconcile Timon to the Athenian rulers. At first Timon seems to agree, but instead turns nasty and vindictive again and ends up commending a tree on which they can all hang themselves. And he bitterly returns to his cave.

The soldier who apparently finds Timon’s grave but cannot read the inscription makes a wax impression. Alcibiades is besieging the city, but the senators seem to surrender it to him. His acceptance promises clemency. The soldier who made the impression brings it forth, and in the current state of the text it gives a contradictory message: “Seek not my name” and “Here I lie, Timon, who alive/ All living men did hate.” Timon’s ending has none of the emphatic definition of tragedy. He’s called “noble Timon” by Alcibiades, who promises peace. It’s all rather quick and evasive of meaning.

I find it hard to make out what exactly the play wants to be — or what it is exactly. It doesn’t seem tragedy. And it lacks so much of what one otherwise finds in a play by Shakespeare. As far as one can tell, it was never acted by Shakespeare’s company, and in the folio it apparently lacks act divisions. Linguistic analysis apparently suggests collaboration with Thomas Middleton, but gives no indication what that collaboration might have been. There are no consequential female roles in the play. The characterization is thin, and even Timon seems strikingly exaggerated in his bitterness and misanthropy. And yet the number of connections with King Lear seem real and somewhat interesting, almost as if some of the bitterness was a kind of safety valve for the far more thematically and emotionally sensitive elements of Lear.

I find the language of the play frequently difficult and gnarly, sometimes in the ways we expect from Sh’s late style, but more frequently in a more tangled way. Was this Middleton?

Structurally the play seems schematic and not at all what we would expect of Sh’s way of constructing a play.

Of all the plays we’ve read, Timon seems the most puzzling and difficult. What do you think?

Dusty:

Perhaps the last act is primarily designed to contrast the opposed responses of Timon and Alcibiades to Athenian ingratitude. Timon doubles down, but Alcibades finds a “middle” way: Timon still hates everybody, but Alcibiades will only kill one out of ten. It’s odd, however, that it’s not Timon’s false friends who return to him, but the poet and painter, who come up with the cockamamie idea that Timon is just “trying” his friends, that his “distress” is just “suppos’d,” and that they too can get gold out of him. And I did not understand why the senators now think that Timon can help them defend the city against Alcibiades? (Do they imagine that Timon could just persuade A. not to attack?)

In 5.3 I did not understand why the soldier can read the detached epitaph (“Timon is dead. . .”) but is unable to read what is written on his gravestone, and takes a rubbing. Could it be that Shakespeare considered two plot ideas — 1) the soldier reads the epitaph, and 2) the soldier  is unable to read — and crudely combined them? I gather that editors have conjectured that the two contradictory epitaphs in 5.4 — 1) seek not my name, and 2) Here lie I, Timon — may be explained the same way. (Both epitaphs are in Plutarch.) I like your idea that in failing to recognize Flavius as a good and loyal servant Timon loses his last opportunity to show that he began to see himself more clearly.

You have suggested more than once that some of Shakespeare’s material from Lear spilled over into this play. Yes, some elements seem quite similar, almost copied. But I agree with you that the language seems gnarlier than Lear. Perhaps the explanation is that it’s the collaborator — Middleton,  I suppose — who was given the task of completing a play that Shakespeare started, and when he ran out of inspiration tried re-doing Lear. (But I don’t think any editor adopts that theory.)