The authorship of Timon of Athens

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Preface

Considered with regard to its corrupted text, its indeterminate date, its undiscovered history, its disputed sources and more seriously disputed authorship, its dubious relation to the rest of Shakspere's work, its lapses from the excellent to the commonplace in style and in dramatic sense, and from the regular to the eccentric in technical form, its no less singular disparities and contradictions in substance and in treatment, its apparent breaches and apparent patches, serious enough to leave its plot unsatisfactory and its meaning somewhat clouded, — taken with regard to all these and yet other well-known problems which it raises, Timon of Athens presents a collection of enigmas as perplexing and as numerous as any play in the Shaksperean canon offers. We estimate the date of Timon only from its style and content. We know nothing of its history except that it was printed in the Folio and for more than fifty years was never mentioned otherwise in any writing known. We have no evidence that it was acted during Shakspere's life, or in his century. We are not certain whether its main source was a Greek dialogue or an English comedy. As for its authorship, most recent critics hold that Timon is the product of two dramatists; but hardly two authorities agree entirely as to the passages each dramatist contributed; and nearly half the critics think that Shakspere partially rewrote the other author's play, while rather more than half believe the other dramatist interpolated Shakspere's. Though we have good reason to believe that Timon had two authors, we have yet no sure division of their work; and on the question as to which of them originally wrote the play, and which reshaped it into the peculiar form in which we know it, we have two theories point to point contradictory. Neither theory explains quite all of the peculiar features of the form in which the play is extant. If we set aside corruptions as the printer's work, if we also allow the presence of two authors to account for great disparities in style, we have still divergences in purpose and in treatment, inconsistencies in plot and substance, direct contradictions in characters and names and other actual facts, so curious that one would hardly think two authors working separately would have effected them; and some of these have never been explained, or are explained in ways that do not quite appeal to reason.

For it must be said that criticism has been rather languid in the case of Timon. Attention may have been deflected by the seeming hopelessness of the problem, or attracted by the importance of problems elsewhere; at any rate, the bibliography of Timon is surprisingly small. Many have repeated or refuted what a few have said; the treatises significant alike for size and sanity and independence can be counted on the fingers of one hand. No study of the problem has been printed that can properly be called exhaustive; and the latest of the few most nearly answering that description is now thirty-five years old. These facts are my apology for sifting all the evidence anew and seeking to increase it in such measure that it may suffice for a division of the play between the authors and a theory of their relations to each other; and in this problem all the other problems of the play are found involved.

Meagre as the bibliography of Timon is, I have not worked upon the play without incurring heavy debts to predecessors. All these I have sought to mention in the text; and especially I would here acknowledge my peculiar debt to one preceding writer. The name of the late Mr. F. G. Fleay occurs at many points in succeeding pages where I have presumed to disagree with him; but I should not like to omit a statement that at many others I was fortunate in the opportunity to follow in his lead, whether by adopting his conclusions or developing my own from his suggestions. Of those with whom I have had the privilege of personal conference about my work, I would mention Professor William W. Lawrence, Professor Jefferson B. Fletcher, and Professor William P. Trent, to all of whom I owe thanks for reviewing my manuscript and for offering helpful criticism. My special thanks are also due to Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, who, among his many kindnesses to me, first suggested my work on the present problem, and reviewed and criticized it at several stages of its development, as well as in its final form.

Oxford, 1909. Ernest Hunter Wright.

CHAPTER I The Problems

It was sixty-two years after Shakspere's death when Thomas Shadwell set about improving Timon of Athens, and thus gave us, incidentally, the first external reference to the play. Meanwhile Timon had been printed in the First, and copied in the Second and Third Folios ; and nothing further has been found recorded of its history up to 1678.

In the Folio the play shows marked peculiarities. The acts and scenes are not divided. Corruptions of the text are frequent. The printing, regular enough in certain scenes, in others is unusually eccentric. Patches of verse, and sometimes even riming verse, are printed frequently as prose; and still more frequently pure prose is set up to look as much as possible like verse. Nor does the printer seem entirely to blame, since modern editors are at a loss to say just what is meant for verse and what for prose at many points in the play. Taking only what is surely verse, however, critics find its technic strangely varied. In some scenes the verse is regular, in others it is curiously irregular; some scenes are wholly or comparatively free from rime, others are full of it; some, in a word, are written in a technic very like Shakspere's in his later tragic period, while others show a technic very unlike his at any period. And still more striking, at first sight, is the unevenness of Timon in artistic quality. Scenes freighted with the thought, nervous with the passion, and glowing with the imagery of Shakspere's great moments, stand side by side with scenes so trivial, tame, and uninspired as long since to have raised the question whether Shakspere had anything to do with them. Nor does the contrast happen once or twice, but 2 1 many times; and not only between different scenes, but often in two parts of the same one. In brief, about a third of Timon — merely to state concisely the prevailing view of criticism — is such poetry as one scarcely finds outside of Shakspere; another third, in prose and verse, might easily be matched in Shakspere, but also in some other dramatists; while the last third is stuff such as Shakspere seldom or never wrote in quantity.

Nor are these all the singularities of the play. The characters are often inconsistent. ^The hero, for example, breaks down into elaborate foolery at one of his gravest moments. Persons, and sometimes persons who would seem to be important, come into one scene unexpectedly, disappear thereafter, and remain enigmas. At one place a character appears in a stage-direction but not in the scene it introduces. At another, persons are announced who never enter. At a third, persons are said to be about to enter who do not come on until three scenes later. Characters start off the stage and unexpectedly come back. Names get mixed. A's name in the second scene is transferred in the fourth to B. Thereafter A goes nameless ; but B discards A's name and takes still another. C is one man in scenes two, four, six, and seven, but such a different man in scene eight that one cannot tell whether he is still the same C, or, as is usually thought, an unknown D acting under C's name. In one place a thread of plot is made to lead up carefully to a climactic scene — and then the scene is left out. In another, a strategic scene is put in without any thread of plot to lead up to it and explain it. The whole plot is therefore none too continuous. It begins, halts, starts again, skips, gets twisted, takes on new motives, and comes finally to a somewhat unnatural end.

All these anomalies and others will find ample illustration as we progress. Some of them were not unnoticed by the early editors. Not only did Timon demand the unusual amount of textual emendation it received from Theobald, Hanmer, Warburton, Johnson, Steevens, Malone, a.nd others; the singular contrasts in its style, and the contradictions and ellipses in its plot, so far as they were noted, called for explanation. Thus when Johnson saw a poet and a painter announced as on the point of entering in one scene but not actually arriving until three scenes later, he thought " it might be suspected that some scenes were transposed " ; though he discovered that they could in no way be rearranged. 1 And when he found a page and a fool chatting glibly of the letters they are bringing from their mistresses to Timon and to Alcibiades — said page and fool, however, never in the least divulging who they or their mistresses may be, or what the letters may contain — he imagined that some scene had been lost which would have introduced them and explained their dialogue. 2 " It is well known," says Johnson in a sentence that sums up his explanation of the irregularities of the play, " that the players often shorten speeches to quicken the representation; and it may be suspected that they sometimes "performed their amputations with more haste than judgment." 3 Amputations, corruptions, transpositions were held throughout the eighteenth century to explain the peculiarities of the play; and were imputed to players, copyists, printers, or editors. Thus Steevens voiced an opinion current with the critics of his time in saying that many passages " were irretrievably corrupted by transcribers or printers, and could not have proceeded, in their present state, from the pen of Shakspere." 4 Yet no one in the century doubted that the play, however mangled, was entirely Shakspere's work; and the generation of Coleridge and Schlegel, while likewise acknowledging corruptions, saw his hand in it throughout.

No theory of dual authorship appeared until 1838. In that year, Charles Knight put forth an argument 5 that Timon was originally written by " a very inferior dramatist " ; that Shakspere rewrote somewhat more than half the play — mainly those parts of it in which the interest centers in the hero's character — but left a little less than half of it untouched; thus causing the disparities and contradictions. The argument of Knight was fairly brief; it left out of account a large part of

'Note to V, i, 1. 2 Note to II, ii, 47.

8 Note to I, i, 25. 4 Note to V, ii, 8.

Pictorial Edition, 1838.

the evidence at hand; it was more suggestive than conclusive. The theory it started is therefore much better represented in the more exhaustive argument which Delius 6 wrote in 1867. To the latter argument nothing has been added since; the treatise of Delius has remained the only full expression of the theory that Shakspere partially rewrote an older Timon. Staunton, Dyce, Messrs. Clark and Wright, Dr. Brinsley Nicholson, Mr. H. A. Evans, 7 and others, have followed Knight and Delius with slight deviations but without further proof.

In general, the evidence adduced by Knight and Delius came much nearer proving that there were two hands at work in Timon than that Shakspere's was the second. The way was therefore open for the rival theory which Verplanck 8 started by interpreting the evidence to show that Shakspere wrote the original play and that another man reworked it into the incongruous shape in which we have it. The argument of Verplanck, though well put, is again superficial; and for the best expression of this theory we go (passing the elaborate defence of it by Tschischwitz 9 as largely guesswork) to Mr. Fleay. 10 With that scholar's work in the Timon problem — as in so many of the darker corners of Elizabethan dramatic history — we reach the locus classicus of criticism on the subject. To be sure, the argument of Mr. Fleay is weakened here and there by an incautious guess, an assumption hardly warranted, a hasty conclusion, or a logical slip; but it shows far fewer of such eccentricities than are sometimes present in its author's work, and it is on the whole perhaps as brilliant an example as Mr. Fleay has ever given of his peculiar critical acumen. It is a valiant argument that Shakspere's was the first hand to touch Timon. One cannot say that Mr. Fleay concludes the case; he does not, even for his main

"Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, 1867. * See the respective editions, and, for Nicholson, New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874, page 249. 8 Edition, 1847. ° Jahrbuch, 1869. 10 New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874.

contention of Shakspere's priority, furnish final proof. Nevertheless he said, as did Delius on the other side, almost the last word that has been said for that contention, and he turned the course of most of the subsequent speculation on the subject. Not all the later critics have been ready to accept his argument as wholly plausible, and many who do accept his chief thesis of Shakspere's priority still disagree with him and with each other as to dozens of subsidiary questions. Yet the greater number of the critics — Messrs. Furnivall, Hudson, Rolfe, Herford, Deighton, Gollancz, 11 and others — have at least concurred in favoring the central theory of Mr. Fleay that Shakspere was the first of the two authors in the play.

Here we have the kernels only of the two main theories. Shakspere first or Shakspere last — the reviser of an older Timon or the writer of a Timon which another man revised — these are the standards around which the two schools of recent critics respectively rally. The many minor questions on which each school disagrees, within itself and with the other, may be left to the succeeding pages. The arguments here grouped under the two schools, with one or two sporadic theories, 12 comprise all of importance that has been written on our problem. The older theory was complete with Delius in 1867, the newer with Mr. Fleay in 1874. Each has been virtually static since. Both theories have gained adherents, Mr. Fleay's by far the more ; but neither side has put forth a significant new argument. No really exhaustive study of the problems has ever been made.

The way is open. Little or nothing, after all the discussion on the play, has been settled and agreed upon. It is hard to

11 See the respective editions.

^Ulrici thought the play was Shakspere's throughout, though printed in the Folio from badly corrupted acting versions. Elze followed this opinion but was also inclined to think that portions of the play as printed came from an older Timon {William Shakespeare, 1876). G. Kullmann argued weakly for three authors (Archiv fiir Literaturgeschichte, 1882). W. Wendlandt argued quite as feebly that the play is wholly Shakspere's, though he thought that some of it may still be in rough draft (Jahrbuch, 1888).

find a single fact on which the critics are unanimous. Almost all agree that the play had two authors ; yet several still doubt ; and even this belief cannot be said to rest on certainty. Many scholars come, or used to come, to something like agreement as to what parts of the play each author wrote — Mr. Fleay not differing much from Delius on this head. But hardly two entirely concur; and recently a tendency is manifest to break what agreement has existed. 1 ? Divisions of the play between the authors are therefore about as numerous as critics who believe in its dual authorship. And even on the general agreement as to the extent of each author's work in the play, critics have built two opposing theories as to the process of its composition. Somewhat less than half believe that Shakspere revised the play into its present form; somewhat more than half believe that he began the play which some one else reworked into that form. Neither side has furnished what may be called proof, and neither has well explained how the play, even with two authors, could very naturally have assumed the strange form which it now possesses.

In reopening the problem, therefore, we find hardly anything that we may take for granted. We must even satisfy ourselves, in the beginning, that the discrepancies of style and treatment we encounter force us to assume two authors for the play — Shakspere and another. In so doing we shall gain criteria, stylistic and other, of each author's work; and our next step will be to divide the play between the two, if possible, correctly. This done, we shall face a third important question — whether Shakspere's parts were written first or last, whether Shakspere or the other writer is responsible for the peculiar form in which the play has reached us. If, finally, it can be shown that Shakspere was the first to work on the play, we shall naturally inquire in what shape he left it; whether he had finished it, or how, in case he left it incomplete, he would have finished it; as also how it came to be interpolated, and how, with the interpolations, it differs from the play that Shakspere planned.

18 Mr. Deighton, for instance, in the Arden Timon, wishes to transfer some half-dozen important scenes to Shakspere.

Other questions will be found involved with these as we proceed. One, however, comes up at the outset. The first inquiry about a Shaksperean play is usually concerned with its source or sources ; and in our first search for a clue toward a solution of a case of suspected dual authorship we turn naturally to the sources that each author or both authors may have utilized. The sources of Timon are only somewhat less doubtful than the authorship. Two minor ones are known; but the major source or sources are in question. The debate which they precipitate may well have a first chapter ; not only because the problem of the sources is interesting in itself, but also because it will afford valuable assistance in our study of the authorship.

CHAPTER II The Sources

A few lines in any -classical dictionary will tell the little that we know and guess of an historical Timon the Misanthrope. The earliest stray references to him seem to mix fable and fact, though neither in great quantity; and as time goes on, what fact there is disappears in the legend gathering around his name. Whether or not he was still living, he was known well enough in 415 B. C. for Phrynichus to let the hero of his comedy the Misanthrope say of himself : " I live like Timon. I have no wife, no servant, I am irritable and hard to get on with. I never laugh, I never talk, and my opinions are all my own." 1 In the same year Aristophanes lets his Prometheus, in the Birds, claim jestingly to be the Timon of the gods — hating divinities as Timon hates humanity. 2 Three years later the same writer, incidentally informing us that Timon is now surely dead, points to him again, in the Lysistrata, as a typical man-hater. 3 We are told by Plutarch 4 that the comic poet Plato also made capital of Timon's fame; and from Antiphanes, 5 nearly half a century after we first hear of the misanthrope, we have a fragment of a comedy which actually had Timon for its hero. The fragment is too small further to indicate the nature of the play; but its existence, with the other references, shows that Timon was a distinct figure in the Old and Middle Comedy.

More than a century later, Alexandrian epigrammatists are found composing epitaphs on Timon; and these bits of verse are interesting as showing the endurance of his fame and as adding some slight features to his legend, but especially be-

1 Frag. 18. For full treatment of the ancient Timon legend see Dr. Franz Bertram's Die Timonlegende in der antiken Literatur, Heidelberg, 1906.

2 Line 1547. s Line 805. 'Antonius, 38. 5 Athenaeus, VII, 309 d.

cause two of the epitaphs, passing through Plutarch and North, were joined in the double epitaph on Timon's tomb in the Shaksperean play. Historical and philosophic writers, yet much later, are still adding to Timon's story. Cicero seems to rank him as a cynic philosopher; 6 so does Seneca; 7 while the elder Pliny definitely classes him with Heraclitus, Pyrrho, and Diogenes. 8 In another reference 9 Cicero tells us something more interesting about him ; even a recluse like Timon, he says, must have some companion. No one else is meant, apparently, than Apemantus; for already Aristoxenus of Tarentum had supplied that " innocuous one " as Timon's comrade. 10 Strabo gives the story still another turn. 11 Marc Antony, he tells us, started to live a very strange life after the fight at Actium; seeing his friends all fallen from him, he began to think himself a second Timon, and to act accordingly. Now the fact that Timon had once been prosperous, and had turned misanthrope only after losing wealth and friends, had not been mentioned in any earlier extant reference. The motive was common enough, and may have been connected with Timon long before; perhaps may have been historical with him. But it is in Strabo that we first hear of the fact.

Repeating this story about Antony, Plutarch 12 is tempted into some remarks upon the life and character of Timon, which, as we shall see, form one sure source of the Shaksperean play. Brief as the account is, it sums up about all that we have heard of Timon previously, and adds some further facts. Antony, says Plutarch, forsook Alexandria and built himself a solitary abode by the sea, in order that he might there live a life like Timon's. " For the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto, and whom he took to be his friends, he was angry with all men, and would trust no man." This Timon, the narrative continues, was an Athenian in the time of the Peloponnesian wars. He shunned all company but that of Alcibiades ; but him he feasted and held dear because

'Tusc, IV, ii. 'Epistle II, iv, 7.

"Antonius, 38.

he knew that one day Alcibiades would prove the bane of Athens. With a certain dogged Apemantus, also, as like to like, Timon sometimes consorted. Once, as they ate together, Apemantus said, " Here is a trim banquet, Timon ; " " Yea," replied the latter, " so thou wert not near." On another day Timon gathered the Athenians in the market-place to offer them the use of a tree of his to hang themselves upon. He was buried by the sea ; and the water came in around his tomb and hid it. Plutarch quotes the two epitaphs mentioned above. In his Life of Alcibiades 13 he again mentions Timon as the latter's friend ; and there he also gives the name of Alcibiades' companion, the Timandra of our play. 14

So far we have only a few scattered bits of information about Timon, a mention of a lost comedy on his life, and one somewhat more extended account of him. In the century after Plutarch, however, we encounter a long treatment of his story in a work of the imagination bordering on dramatic form. Lucian's comic dialogue of Timon the Misanthrope is the first full expansion of the Timon legend extant from antiquity. To be sure, it covers Timon's days of glory by description only. The opening soliloquy 'of Timon tells how he had raised Athenians to high places in those days, had turned the poor to rich, aided all the needy, flung his wealth to the winds, and thereby gone to beggary himself ; and how his former proteges now hurry past him in the fields where he is digging, as if he were a tombstone which they did not care to read. But all this is incidental to Timon's mock-heroic prayer to Zeus for help and for revenge on his false friends; and the action starts as Zeus, remembering the hecatombs that Timon used to sacrifice, sends Hermes with Plutus and Thesaurus to Timon's aid. Much amusing dialogue is needed to induce the god of riches once more to visit the man who made such wanton use of him in former days. Even when finally persuaded he comes to Timon in the fields only to find the latter quite as loth to receive him and accept his gifts as he had been to come and bring them. Timon is quite happy in the company of his choice friends and helpers, Poverty, Toil, Endurance,

18 Paragraph 4. " Paragraph 10.

Wisdom, and Hunger; he will be entirely at peace if Plutus and his Treasure will only leave him alone to dig. For some time he continues thus defiant; but Plutus and Hermes finally win him over, get him to dig as they direct, and to unearth a mass of gold. This discovery of gold is Lucian's main contribution to the Timon story; and the use the misanthrope makes of the treasure is his most significant advance in the direction of the Shaksperean man-hater. Timon is immediately resolved to build himself a tiny castle in some desert corner and to shut out from it all society. Yet he does wish that his old parasites might know of his new wealth and fret themselves with envy; and even as he wishes, they begin to come. Gnathonides is first. When Timon asked an alms of him a little while ago, he replied by offering a halter. But now he rushes up with a dainty new song for Timon — and is rewarded with some licks from Timon's spade. The bald-head Philiades follows him. He had sung a song once that no one else would praise ; though Timon gave him a farm for it, and a portion for his daughter. Later Timon called on him for help and received only blows. But now that Timon is rich once more, Philiades hastens to warn him against those abominable flatterers who would like to drain him again. He gets a taste of the spade, and makes way for Demeas. This orator Demeas is the man whom Timon redeemed from prison ; who later refused Timon theater-money on the ground that Timon was not a citizen. But now the orator wants to be counted Timon's " cousin " ; and to name his son for Timon — he is going to be married next year, he says. He is proceeding to read a resolution lauding Timon which he means to present to the Areopagus, when the spade cuts him short. Soon the crowd begins to get too thick for the spade. Thrasycles, Blepsias, Laches, Gniphon, all Timon's friends come running up; and Timon has to mount a hill and stone them off. The dialogue ends as they leave. With it, practically, closes the tradition in the ancient world; for the few references to Timon left before the silence of the Middle Ages shut down on him add little to his story — nothing at all, in fact, of interest to the student of the English Timon.

With the Renaissance Timon reappeared; and indeed had the distinction of inspiring what is usually called the first modern comedy. Although Boiardo's 77 Timone, 15 written before 1494, is interesting as showing a revived attention to the misanthrope, it contributed little to the actual growth of the legend. It is Lucian's story retold, with one feature added — a sub-plot, in the fourth and fifth acts only, in which the rightful owner of the gold Timon has found comes to light and regains his money. But the added feature, at least in England, did not stick to the legend; this remained as it had stood in Lucian and in Plutarch. Nor was it much changed by a second Timone, 19 a comedy in which Galleotto del Caretto very quickly followed Boiardo in following Lucian.

In Elizabethan England Timon's story was well-known. " The strange and beastly nature of Timon of Athens " is the title of the twenty-eighth novel in the first tome of Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The story is based on Plutarch; and is indeed almost as faithful a translation as that which North made thirteen years later. From then on, Timon was a familiar figure in all kinds of books. " Who more envious," asks Lyly, in Euphues," " than Timon, denouncing all human society? " Advocating the schooling of girls in his Positions,™ Richard Mulcaster is afraid that " some Timon will say, ' what should women do with learning? ' " Nor is this the only reference to Timon as a woman-hater. Robert Greene, in one of his six references to the misanthrope, 19 says it is " Timon-like to condemn those heavenly creatures." Spencer has a reference :

" What heart so stony hard but that would weep, And pour forth fountains of incessant tears ? What Timon but would let compassion creep Into his breast and pierce his frozen ears? " 20

17 Arber's reprint, page 40.

19 The Card of Fancy, Grosart Ed., IV, 40 ; for the other five see the same ed., Ill, 79; IV, 139; VII, 285; IX, 106; IX, 129.

20 Daphnaida, 246.

I I

Nash complains that " riches have hurt a great number in England, who, if their riches had not been, had still been men, and not Timonists." 21 Speaking of " dullness of spirit," Lodge says it formerly " made certain discontented (as Timon and Apermantus) wax careless of body and soul, fretting themselves at the world's ingratitude." 22 Edward Guilpin's Skialethia (1598) contain this line: