Part 16 (2/2)
_3rd Roman._ A murrain on't. I took this for silver.
_Timon of Athens._
_Written._ 1606-8 (?)
_Published._ 1623.
_Source of the Plot._ William Paynter's _Palace of Pleasure_.
Plutarch's _Life of Antonius_. Lucian's _Dialogue_.
_The Fable._ Timon of Athens, a wealthy, over-generous man, gives to his friends so lavishly that he ruins himself. He finds none grateful for his bounty. In his ruin all his friends desert him.
None of them will lend to him or help him. He falls into a loathing of the world and retires to die alone. Alcibiades of Athens, finding a like ingrat.i.tude in the State, openly makes war upon it, reduces it to his own terms, and rules it. He finds Timon dead.
_Timon of Athens_ is a play of mixed authors.h.i.+p. Shakespeare's share in it is large and unmistakable; but much of it was written by an unknown poet of whom we can decipher this, that he was a man of genius, a skilled writer for the stage, and of a marked personality. It cannot now be known how the collaboration was arranged. Either the unknown collaborated with Shakespeare, or the unknown wrote the play and Shakespeare revised it.
Ingrat.i.tude is one of the commonest forms of treachery. It is the form that leads most quickly to the putting back of the world, because it destroys generosity of mind. It creates in man the bitter and destructive quality of misanthropy, or a destroying pa.s.sion of revenge.
In this play the two authors show the different ways in which the human mind may be turned to those bitter pa.s.sions.
Apemantus is currish, because others are not. He has wit without charity. Alcibiades makes war on his city because others have not the rough-and-ready large practical justice of men used to knocks. He has a large good humour without idealism. Timon, the great-natured, truly generous man, whose mind is as beneficial as the sun, cannot be currish, nor stoop to the baseness of revenge. Finding men base, he removes himself from them, and ministers with bitter contempt to the baseness that infects them. The flaming out of his anger against whatever is parasitic in life makes the action of the last two acts. The exhibition of the baseness of parasites and of the wrath of a n.o.ble mind embittered, is contrived, varied and heightened with intense dramatic energy. The character of Flavius, Timon's steward, his only friend, shows again, as in so many of the plays, Shakespeare's deep sense of the n.o.ble generosity in faithful service.
Some think the play gloomy, others that it is autobiography.
Shakespeare's completed work is never gloomy. A great mind working with such a glory of energy cannot be gloomy. This generation is gloomy and unimaginative in its conception of art. Shakespeare, reading the story of Timon, saw in him an image of tragic destiny that would flood the heart of even an ingrate with pity. Great poets have something more difficult and more n.o.ble to do than to pin their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at. Shakespeare wrought the figure of Timon with as grave justice as he wrought Alcibiades. He wrought both from something feeling within himself, as he wrought Cleopatra, and Macbeth, and Sir Toby Belch. They are as much autobiographical, and as little, as the hundred other pa.s.sionate moods that built up the system of his soul.
The poetry of the play is that of the great late manner--
”will these moss'd trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out?”
”Come not to me again: but say to Athens, Timon hath made his everlasting mansion Upon the beached verge of the salt flood: Who, once a day with his embossed froth The turbulent surge shall cover.”
The final speech, spoken by Alcibiades after he has read the epitaph, with which Timon goes down to death, like some hurt thing shrinking even from the thought of pa.s.sers, is one of the most lovely examples of the power and variety of blank verse as a form of dramatic speech.
_Alcib._ (reading) _Pa.s.s by and curse thy fill; but pa.s.s, and stay not here thy gait._
These well express in thee thy latter spirits: Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scorned'st our brain's flow and those our droplets which From n.i.g.g.ard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead Is n.o.ble Timon: of whose memory Hereafter more. Bring me into your city, And I will use the olive with my sword, Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each Prescribe to other as each other's leech.
Let our drums strike.
_Pericles, Prince of Tyre._
_Written._ 1607-8 (?)
_Published._ 1608.
_Source of the Plot._ The plot is taken from an English prose version of a Latin translation of a fifth century Greek romance.
This version was published by Lawrence Twine, in the year 1576, under the name of _The Patterne of Paynfull Adventures_ (etc., etc.). It was reprinted in 1607. An adaptation from the Latin story was made by John Gower for the eighth book of his _Confessio Amantis_. This adaptation was known to the authors of the play.
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