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Other Lords, Senators, Officers, Soldiers, Banditti, and Attendants

SCENE: Athens, and the neighbouring woods.

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Historic Time.-414 B. C. was the date of Alcibiades' disgrace.

INTRODUCTION

THE LYFE OF TIMON OF ATHENS was first printed in the Folio of 1623, as the fourth of the Tragedies. It is there divided neither into Acts nor Scenes, and the text is very corrupt.

It is now generally agreed that large tracts of Timon are not the work of Shakespeare. The following table gives a conspectus of the most currently accepted division, and of the resulting distribution of the characters :

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This division rests partly upon glaring diversities of style, partly on inconsistencies of treatment. Thus Apemantus in Timon's house plays in i. 2. the cynic he is; whereas in i. 1. 58 the poet tells how 'even he drops down the knee before him and returns in peace most rich in Timon's nod.' The unknown writer was a capable playwright, and a facile, even brilliant writer. But it is generally easy to distinguish his rhetorical verse—which tends to run sporadically into rhymed couplets-from the close-packed, pregnant verses of Shakespeare. Contrast, for instance, the two pieces of declamation not dissimilar in moodTimon's in iv. 1. and Flavius' in iv. 2. 30-50.

These discrepancies did not escape the critics of the last century. But they were commonly satisfied to attribute them to careless printers or copyists. The view that it was an incomplete drama, with certain scenes fully worked out, others left in the first draft, was urged with great ingenuity by Ulrici and Kreyssig.1 Knight first put forward the hypothesis that Shakespeare was reworking an old play; and Delius, after demolishing this view in his first critical essay, resuscitated it twenty years later (1866) 3 with all the resources of his mature scholarship. But Delius' acuteness only brought out the difficulties of his hypothesis. For the more glaring

2

1 Cf. also an elaborate but somewhat uncritical paper by W. Wendlandt, Jahrbuch, xxiii. 107 f.

2 Die Tieck'sche Shaksperekritik, 1849.

3 Über Shakespeare's Timon of Athens' (Jahrbuch, ii. 335).

the incongruity, the harder it became to explain how Shakespeare had permitted it to pass. Two years after Delius' essay, accordingly, B. Tschischwitz came forward with the opposite view that Timon was a Shakespearean sketch subsequently completed. This view has been developed, in his own way, by Mr. Fleay, and now prevails in England. In Germany, though widely accepted, it has less completely triumphed over (i.). The defenders of (i.) have successfully maintained the general coherence of the plot against the disintegrating analysis of Delius; but they fail in the discrimination of style. Whole scenes of Timon show no vestige of Shakespeare's manner at any period. The defenders of (ii.) had an apparently strong argument in the fact that Timon betrays a knowledge of classical sources not then translated into English, as also that there are slight signs of an older Timon play accessible to Shakespeare.1 But an argument founded on Shakespeare's ignorance of Latin and of French must always be extremely hazardous, and Lucian's Timon had been translated into both. Lucian's influence is apparent (as will be seen below) not only in isolated passages, but in the fundamental features of the plot,-in the conception of scenes absolutely Shakespearean in execution; while he foreshadowed far more nearly than any other accessible

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version the character of Shakespeare's Timon. No one can assert that Shakespeare had not an older Timon play before him; but the hypothesis explains nothing that is not as easily explained without it. On the other hand, there are evidences that while Shakespeare probably shaped out Timon for himself, he left it incomplete. Notably, the epitaph of Timon (v. 4. 70-73) is an agglomerate of two separate epitaphs recorded by Plutarch, which Shakespeare cannot have intended to combine without change,— the one (v. 4. 70, 71), written by Timon himself, the other (v. 4. 72, 73), according to ancient tradition, by Callimachus. However this happened, it is evident that our text reproduces an unfinished draft MS. of Shakespeare's (for this scene is certainly his) with the two inconsistent epitaphs jotted down together as alternatives for a future decision never made.

Of the revising 'second author' nothing definite can be said; and of the circumstances of the revision equally little.2 But he cannot be shown to have introduced any motive not implied in Shakespeare's work. The banishment of Alcibiades (iii. 5.) is the ground of his hostile return (v. 4.). The futile missions of Timon's servants to his friends (iii. 1.-4.) only carry out the operations already arranged in ii. 2.

The date of the Shakespearean Timon can only be conjectured from somewhat insecure æsthetic

1 Mr. Fleay, by exhausting the list of contemporary writers of requisite ability, identifies him with Cyril Tourneur. The temerity of this procedure needs

no comment.

2 It has been variously suggested that Shakespeare's fragment was completed for stage

purposes, and for publication in the Folio. Irregularities in the pagination of the Folio have been thought to point to hurried insertion of this play, and so perhaps to delays caused by literary manipulation of the MS. But the pagination of the Folio' is far too irregular elsewhere to justify such inferences.

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