COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH

THE AUTHORSHIP OF TIMON OF ATHENS

THE AUTHORSHIP

OF

TIMON OF ATHENS

BY

ERNEST HUNTER WRIGHT

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, IN THE FACULTY

OF PHILOSOPHY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK 1910

Copyright, 1910 BY THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Printed from type May, 1910

PRESS or

THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY LANCASTER. PA.

This Monograph has been approved by the Department of Eng lish in Columbia University as a contribution to knowledge worthy

of publication.

A. H. THORNDIKE,

Secretary.

PREFACE

Considered with regard to its corrupted text, its indetermi nate 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 collec tion 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 Shaks- * pere's life, or in his century. We are not certain whether its j 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 re shaped 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 pur pose 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 bibli ography 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 evi dence anew and seeking to increase it in such measure that it v 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 kind nesses to me, first suggested my work on the present problem, and reviewed and criticized it at several stages of its develop ment, as well as in its final form.

Oxford, 1909. ' ERNEST HUNTER WRIGHT.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEMS i

CHAPTER II. THE SOURCES 8

CHAPTER III. A DIVISION OF AUTHORSHIP 24

CHAPTER IV. SHAKSPERE'S PRIORITY 58

CHAPTER V. SHAKSPERE'S PLOT . . 82

THE AUTHORSHIP OF TIM ON OF ATHENS

CHAPTER I THE PROBLEMS

It was sixty-two years after Shakspere's death when Thomas Shadwell set about improving Timon of A thens, and thus gave us, incidentally, the first external reference to the play. Mean while 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 fre quent. 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 possi ble 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.

i Nor are these all the singularities of the play. The charac ters 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 inv portant, 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 name less ; 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. Tn another, a strategic scene is put in without any thread of plot to lead up to it and explain it. The whole plot is there fore 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, War- burton, Johnson, Steevens, Malone, and 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 mis tresses 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 irreg ularities 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, copy ists, 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 Shaks- pere'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 argument5 that Timon was originally written by " a very inferior dramatist " ; that Shak spere 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

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

3 Note to I, i, 25. *Note to V, ii, 8.

B 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 Delius6 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 Verplanck8 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 elabo rate defence of it by Tschischwitz9 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 dra matic history — we reach the locus classicus of criticism on the subject. To be sure, the argument of Mr. Fleay is weak ened 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 Shaks pere's was theJfost-haLnd to touch Timon. One cannot say that

^^*— _.,. r i ,-,- J

Mr. Fleay concludes the case ; he does not, even for his main

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

contention of Shakspere's priority, furnish final proof. Never theless 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 ac cept 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 ques tions. Yet the greater number of the critics — Messrs. Furni- vall, 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 vir tually static since. Both theories have gained adherents, Mr. Fleay's by far the more ; but neither side has put forth a sig nificant 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.

32 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 fur 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,

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.13 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 agree ment 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 Shak- spere 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 any thing 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 pos sible, 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 incom plete, 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.

13 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 Misan thrope. 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 gather ing 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 human ity.2 Three years later the same writer, incidentally inform ing 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* that the comic poet Plato also made capital of Timon's fame; and from Antiphanes,6 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 frag ment 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. 1 8. For full treatment of the ancient Timon legend see Dr. Franz Bertram's Die Timonlegende in der antiken Literatur, Heidelberg, 1906.

2 Line 1547- 3 Line 805.

4 Antonius, 38. B Athenaeus, VII, 309 d.

8

9

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 dpes Seneca;7 while the elder Pliny definitely classes him with Heraclitus, Pyrrho, and Diogenes.8 In another reference9 Cicero tells us some thing 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 Ta- rentum had supplied that " innocuous one " as Timon's com rade.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 mo tive 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, Plutarch12 is tempted"' into some remarks upon the life and character of Timon, which, as we shall see, form one sure source of the Shaks perean 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 unthank fulness 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. 7 Epistle II, iv, 7.

sNat. Hist., VII, 19. »De Amicitia, XXIII, 87.

10 Diogenes Laertius, I, ix, 107. ll Geography, XVII, 9.

12 Antonius, 38.

10

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™ 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 per suaded 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 i o.

11

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 con-v' tribution 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 immedi ately 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 proceed ing 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. Thra- sycles, 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 refer ences 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.

12

With the Renaissance Timon reappeared; and indeed had the distinction of inspiring what is usually called the first

^/ modern comedy. Although Boiardo's // Timone,™ 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 Tim one,™ 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 fa miliar figure in all kinds of books. " Who more envious," asks Lyly, in Enphues,17 " than Timon, denouncing all human society ? " Advocating the schooling of girls in his Positions,18 Richard Mulcaster is afraid that " some Timon will say, ' what should women do with learning? ' ' Nor is this the only ref- ,<• erence 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 ref erence :

" 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 ? "*°

16 Torraca's // Teatro Italiano dei Sec. XIII, XIV, XV.

18 Ante 1497; Ireneo Sanesi, Storia dei Generi Letterarii Italiani: La Commedia, page 170.

17 Arber's reprint, page 40. "Quick Ed., 1888, page 174.

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.

13

v/

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 them selves at the world's ingratitude."22 Edward Guilpin's Skia- lethia (1598) contain this line:

" Like hate-man Timon in his cell he sits."28

Two of the controversial plays about 1601-2 use Timon's name. In Jack Drum's Entertainment one of the characters proposes to be " as sociable as Timon of Athens."24 And in the Satiromastijf, Dekker makes Horace say:

" I did it to retire me from the world, And turn my muse into a Timonist, Loathing the general leprosy of sin."28

Dekker twice again refers to Timonists.26 And we must not forget that Shakspere himself knew Timon early:

" And critic Timon laugh at idle toys,"

is a line in Love's Labour's Lost.27

These lines are not of much importance for us here ex cept as showing that to Shakspere and his fellows Timon was a stock exponent of misanthropy; and that any dramatist who took him for a hero might have found at least a few hints for his character in current tradition. Of course the references quoted are too slight to be considered sources in themselves for the Shaksperean play ; nor do they testify to any treatment of the legend after North, in dramatic form or otherwise, that might have served as such a source. So far North and

21 Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, Grosart Ed., IV, 1 39.

22 Wit's Misery, Hunterian Club Pub., No. 47, page 100. It is interesting that the spelling Apermantus appears frequently, though not significantly, in the Shaksperean play.

23 Ed. J. P. Collier, Miscellaneous Tracts, page 18.

24 Act I, line 314.

25 Line 2502. " General leprosy," whether taken hence or not, is the final plague that the Shaksperean Timon invokes on Athens — IV, i, 30.

20 Grosart Ed., II, 214; III, 74. 21 IV, iii, 169.

14

Painter give the only long accounts of Timon in English.28 We know on other grounds, however, that the story did run into drama before Shakspere. An anonymous comedy on Timon is extant from about 1600, and was first edited by Dyce.29 The author of this knew his Lucian well, borrowed several names from him, and followed him with care in the main plot of the play. Yet in dramatizing Lucian he found certain changes necessary or advisable. All of these, so far as can be told, are of his own invention ; and as some of them appear again in the Shaksperean play, they are the most in teresting features of his work. Departing from all earlier writers, he devotes half of his comedy to Timon in prosperity; shows him scattering his gold among the people, revelling with his friends, enriching favorites, discharging his steward for protesting against his lavishness, receiving him again in the disguise of a soldier, paying one Eutrapelus out of a usurer's hands with five talents, rescuing Demeas (Lucian's orator) from the Serjeants with sixteen, — even falling in love with the daughter of an old Philargurus, a miser, who accepts him be cause he asks no dowry. Timon is about to take his bride when his calamity comes; not from overwhelming debts, as in the later play, but from the wreck of all his ships, as with Antonio. He is penniless. Instantly his friends are " sick to see his face." When he begs, one offers him a groat, another a halter; some bid him clothe himself with virtue, others fail to recognize him. Only the faithful steward clings to him — as in the Shaksperean play. Through the steward Timon now announces that he has only been having a joke, that he has yet a little money, and will spend it in one last banquet for his friends. The latter gather with great appetites ; and are treated to a hail of stones painted like artichokes. This mock- banquet is first heard of in the Timon comedy; in the Shaks perean play we know it forms the climax. Timon now leaves

28 In the Felicity of Man (1598) Sir Richard Barckley repeated Painter's tale. Shakspere may well have known Barckley's book ; but the question is immaterial, as we know that he knew Painter's.

28 Shakespeare Society Transactions, 1842. The fact that it contains a reference to Jonson's Every Man in his Humour helps us to date the anonymous comedy near 1600.

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the city to dig in the fields. He is still followed by the stew ard, though he scarcely allows even this faithful servitor to dig in a far corner of the ground; he hates all men. When he spades up gold, it only adds to his vexation. He makes ready straightway to bury it again or drown it in the ocean. Even when dissuaded by the steward from that course, he can . only think of taking it to some desert place where he can live alone with it. " Thee also will I fly," he tells the steward, " thy love doth vex me." But he cannot fly so fast as to escape his former flatterers, who now come flocking to his new-found treasure — and who receive, as in Lucian, proper treatment from his spade. Even when they are gone he does not fly. At the last moment he begins to " feel a sudden change " ; and to make a happy ending, " Timon doffs Timon " and goes home to Athens. The end is not entirely out of keeping; for in spite of a few heavy scenes the spirit of the work is comic, as is that of all preceding treatments of the legend ; and a strong under-plot, neligible for our present pur pose though it takes up half the play, is pure farce.

Less than a decade later, in the Shaksperean play, the story found its supreme expression in one of the bitterest of trage dies. The first thing to be said here about this development of the legend is that, in the strict sense 6f the term, it had no known source — nothing to correspond to the older King John or the pre-Shaksperean Taming of a Shrew. Indebtedness the play shows to various sources. The author of the tragedy on the intense but tenuous Timon legend needed and took hints wherever he could find them — a general idea here, a char acter there, an episode yonder. Still he added and trans formed so much that as a whole his plot is almost as pure cre ation as the dress in which he clothed it. In fact he had no great number of possible sources, and hardly one of these was adequate. There was Lucian's dialogue ; the comedies of Boiardo and Caretto closely imitating it; the English comedy following it somewhat further off; Plutarch's brief extract on Timon; and Painter's repetition of Plutarch. We need only compare Timon of Athens with any of these works, or with all of them together, to see how much its author in vented and how much more he transformed. Our search is

16

therefore narrowed to the hints he took from each source that he knew.

There is nothing to indicate that he knew Boiardo or Caretto. We cannot prove the negative, of course; he may have read their plays ; but if he did, he made no use of them in his own. All that he has in common with them may be found in Lucian and in the English Timon comedy, one or both of which, as we shall see, he certainly used. Wherever the Italian dram atists depart from Lucian, our author fails to follow them; and not a line or phrase of his work suggests his acquaintance with their plays. Whether or not, then, he had ever heard of the two plays, they may safely be dismissed as sources. He is therefore left with four (or practically three) possible sources: Lucian and the English comedy on the one hand; Plutarch (and Painter's transcript) on the other.

Plutarch could give him little; but that little he used to the full. Plutarch buried his Timon on the sea-shore; our dra matist also " taught him to make vast Neptune weep for aye on his low grave."30 Plutarch told how Timon offered the Athenians a tree on which to hang themselves ; an incident finely realized in the play.31 Timon's two epitaphs in Plu tarch are combined as one in the play.32 But Plutarch's two main hints were the characters of Apemantus and Al- cibiades. These were indeed hints only; two or three sen tences about each man, from which the dramatist developed two important characters and the double contrast of the play. All that Plutarch says of Apemantus is that he was like unto Timon and that Timon once protested he could eat more com fortably in Apemantus' absence. The protest is repeated in the play ;33 while the hint of Apemantus' nature is rounded out into a character, a lineal descendant of Lyly's Diogenes,34

80 TV, iii, 379; V, i, 218; V, iv, 78.

"V, i, 208.

M Where they contradict each other ; see page 54, note.

"IV, iii, 284.

M In the general conception of his character, and particularly in the manner of his address, Apemantus closely resembles the Diogenes of Lyly's Campaspe — much more closely, in fact, than he resembles the Diogenes of Lucian's Sale of Philosophers; and the former work was surely known to our author, while the latter was unavailable in English.

17

whose inborn but frittering cynicism forms an effective con trast to Timon's powerful though acquired misanthropy. In Plutarch's sketch of Timon, Alcibiades is merely mentioned as the only man whom Timon loves- — because he knows that Alcibiades will one day prove the bane of Athens. The mo tive recurs in the play;35 and the character, taking on some general traits from Plutarch's separate Life of Alcibiades?* becomes a kind of Fortinbras in the drama, fighting out the wrongs at which Timon can only curse.

Yet when our author had expanded twenty-fold the hints that Plutarch gave him, he had still far too little for a play. An ill-defined hero, three or four lesser episodes, one minor and two major characters, are all his heritage from this branch of the legend. Even the characters he found almost wholly static. The most that Plutarch says of the course of Timon's life is that his misanthropy was due to " the unthankfulness of those he had done good unto." For all further details of Timon's life — his early affluence, his kindnesses to flat terers, their desertion of him, his change of nature, his mock- banquet, his departure from Athens, his digging in the fields, discovery of gold, repulsion of the friends who then flock to him; as well as for the characters of Ventidius, the Old Athenian, and the faithful steward — for all these things, some of which had general, and the others very definite sources, our dramatist had to go elsewhere. In only two places that we know could he have found any of them: Lucian and the English comedy.

It is evident at once that Lucian could have supplied some of these features and that the old comedy could have sup plied them all; that particularly the important character of the faithful steward and the striking episode of the mock- banquet, surely not repeatable by accident, are not in Lucian or in any other version of the Timon legend except the old comedy. Before going on, however, to see whether Lucian or the comedy nearest approximates our play, we may well

85 IV, iii, 105.

38 Specifically, the name of Timandra comes from the Life of Alcibiades, paragraph 10. 3

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consider certain objections to either as a possible source for it. Lucian's dialogue, so far as is known, had not been Englished. That it was not unknown in England the old comedy indeed shows; and as it had been three times translated into Italian and at least once into French,37 our author would not neces sarily have had to go to the Greek for it. But at best he would have had to go outside of his own language. As for the old comedy, it has always been supposed to be an academic piece. We are pretty sure that it was acted, as Dyce points out,38 yet if only at a university, quite possibly without the knowledge of the London author of Timon of Athens. This objection did not seem so serious, to be sure, to some of the earlier critics. Steevens was inclined to think that the old play sup plied certain features to Timon of Athens; and Malone stated the fact as certain. But Dyce, first editing the old play, was more cautious : " I leave to others a minute discussion of the question whether or not Shakspere was indebted to the present piece. I shall merely observe that- I entertain considerable doubts of his having been acquainted with a drama which was certainly never performed in the metropolis."39 Since Dyce such doubts have steadily grown more considerable, with the most recent critics frequently amounting to negation. Prac tically all the critics now agree that the academic origin of the English comedy is a more insuperable objection than the non- translation of Lucian's dialogue, and that the author therefore

87 Into Italian in 1527, anonymously, and again in 1535 and 1551, both times by Nicolo da Lonigo ; into French in 1582 by Filbert Bretin.

38 The numerous and minute stage-directions — referring in almost every scene to this or that " door " by which the characters were to enter, to implements they were to bring with them for later use, etc. — go far toward showing that the play was presented; and Dyce clinched the matter by discovering that in Act V, Scene ii, where Timon and the steward enter to dig, a stage-direction which had read " Enter Timon and Laches with either a spade in their hands " is carefully altered in the manuscript to read " Enter Timon and Laches with 3 spades in their hands " — the third spade having been found necessary, in the actual presentation, in order that Gelasimus might also dig at the end of the next scene. See Dyce's introduction to the play, Shakespeare Society Transactions, 1842.

89 For the view of Steevens and Malone, also, see Dyce's introduction.

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used the dialogue, but, despite the repetition of the steward and the mock-banquet, did not know the old play.40

Let us note the points in which Timon resembles either of the possible sources.

In the first scene Timon redeems Ventidius from a debtor's prison with five talents.41 In the beginning of the old play one Eutrapelus, chased by a usurer, asks Timon for four talents to pay off his debt ; and Timon answers, " Yea, take five."*2 The nearest parallel in Lucian — but this is also repeated in the old play43 — is the narrated rescue of Demeas, where the sum is sixteen talents.

After rescuing Ventidius, Timon endows a servant in order that the latter may wed the daughter of a certain frugal Old Athenian. In the old play a miser, Philargurus, is seeking to marry off his daughter to a wealthy husband. In Lucian it is said that Timon gave a dowry to the daughter of a bald-head Philiades for a song the latter sang. One parallel is about as close as the other.

Half of the Shaksperean play is devoted to Timon in luxury, enriching flatterers. This phase of Timon's life was first presented in the old play, being only implied in Lucian. About the middle of both plays Timon goes bankrupt, his friends fall off, and he turns misanthrope and leaves Athens.

In the Shaksperean play Timon is digging for roots when

40 Only one " minute discussion of the question " that Dyce " left to others " followed within sixty years, and this argued for the above opinion. Adolf Miiller, the author of Uber die Quellen aus denen Shakespeare Timon von At hen entnommen hat, Jena, 1873, recognized the parallels between the old play and the Shaksperean tragedy in the character of the faithful steward and the episode of the mock-banquet ; but he thought the steward's character exhibited only a general similarity in the two plays, — rather missing the main point that there should be any steward in both plays at all ; and he argued that the mock-banquet was too witty a device to have been invented by the author of the old play; and therefore assumed, practically without evidence, a lost source which served both the old comedy and the Shaksperean play. In a well-written article on the sources of Timon in the Princeton University Bulletin for 1904, however, Mr. W. H. demons presented much the same argument as is offered in the present book. "I, i, 95-

42 1, ii, 60. * II, iv.

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he discovers gold; in the old play he seems to dig for no especial purpose; in Lucian he hires out to dig for sixpence a day. When he finds the gold, in the Shaksperean play, he starts straightway to bury it; so in the old play; not so in Lucian.

The crowd that flocks to Timon's new-found wealth in the

Shaksperean play is equally like that in the old play and that

in Lucian; or rather, differs equally from each. The general

/idea is the same in all three works, but the only parasite in the

! Shaksperean play who shows the least specific similarity to

any character in either of the sources is the poet ; and he is as

much like the Hermogenes of the old play, whose only claim

to being a poet is that he can sing and play the fiddle, as like

v the Gnathonides of Lucian, whose poetic activity consists

solely in bringing Timon a copy of the latest song from Athens.

To sum the matter up : all the features of the tragedy that could have come from Lucian could quite as well have come from the old comedy; and some of them — as the five talents which ransom Ventidius — are paralleled in the old comedy but not in Lucian. Now over and above all this we have the faith ful steward and the mock-banquet to account for in both plays. V The striking fact about the steward is not so much that in both plays he stands by his master; or that in both, when he comes to Timon in the fields, Timon. at first repels him ; the striking thing is that Timon has a steward, who plays an important part, in both plays. And the significant fact about the Shaks perean mock-banquet is not the one so often mentioned, namely that a guest there who has suffered only from hot water cries out, " One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones" — words "X^ which have been construed as a possible reminiscence of the old comedy, where Timon actually throws stones painted like artichokes ; the significant thing is the repetition of any mock- banquet at all. The recurrence of the steward might possibly be accidental ; the reproduction of the mock-banquet is beyond all the " canon of coincidence." One is simply driven to accept \ the fact — unless he gratuitously assumes a lost source — that the Shaksperean play derives in part from the old comedy.

This is not to say that the play may not also derive in part

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from Lucian. The sources are not mutually exclusive; the author may have known both. Lucian might have been before him in Italian or in French, as we have seen, as well as in the Greek.44 In some ways the style and spirit of the tragedy re semble Lucian rather than the old play ; and for that reason the one recent writer who holds much the same view of the sources as that here advanced believes that Lucian was known to the author of the tragedy. " The Timon of Shakespeare," says Mr. demons, "is* not the Timon of the academic production; still, less is it like the Timon of the popular Elizabethan stories. In the depth and tone of his misanthropy, Lucian's Timon is the true prototype of Shakespeare's Timon.45 These are facts, undoubtedly; yet they are just such facts as we find true of any work of Shakspere. Neither is the Macbeth of Shakspere the Macbeth of Holinshed, nor the Lear of Shakspere the Lear of the older dramatist who wrote of him, nor the Hamlet of Shakspere, presumably, the Hamlet of Kyd. We should never expect Shakspere to picture Timon in the silly fashion of the writer of the old play; but we might readily expect him to conceive a Timon who should show some general resemblance, in " the depth and tone of his misanthropy," to the Timon drawn in Lucian's able manner. Such a general resemblance is not necessarily the result of imitation ; and as specific paral lels of a convincing kind are lacking,46 a direct relation between

44 Far too much has been made of the argument — absolutely the sole argument for a lost source — that the mention of " solidares," a kind of coin, in III, i, 45, betrays a Romance source. The author of the play did not necessarily get the name of the coin from a work on Timon. According to Maginn, " saludores," i. e., " saluts d'or," were coined in France by the English Henry V ; and are mentioned by Holinshed, Ducange, Rabelais, and others. See Maginn, Shakespeare Papers, Ed. Mackenzie, 1856, III, 135.

46 Op. cit., page 219.

46 The only, one that Mr. demons mentions is the fact that Timon ad dresses an apostrophe to the gold that he has found in the Shaksperean play, as he also does in Lucian. Such an apostrophe at this point is so entirely natural — Timon being alone and in the midst of a soliloquy when he finds the treasure — that the mere recurrence of it does not seem very significant ; and its substance and diction do not resemble Lucian closely enough to prove it an imitation. No such apostrophe is found in the old play ; but the latter, at this very point, shows a much more specific like ness to our tragedy — the resolution of Timon to bury the gold.

22

Lucian's dialogue and our play is not proved. While it is not disproved either, that relation is at least unnecessary to explain the substance of the play. All the features of the plot therein that could have come from Lucian could as well have come from the old comedy. That comedy, unless some document is lost, was certainly a source; Lucian may have been used in addition.

That Shakspere should have known the old play does not seem so extraordinary as has frequently been thought. We have never had a real proof that the play originated in a university; we shall never know quite certainly but that its learned sophomoric style and numerous academic phrases were the product of some youthful dramatist, just from the univer sity perhaps, who had not yet had sufficient chance to air his scholasticism. And even if we positively knew that the play hailed from Oxford or from Cambridge, the objection of its origin would not be insurmountable. Dramatists of the Eliza bethan period, Shakspere not less than the others, searched for plots wherever they could find them. Hamlet, according to the title-page of the quarto of 1603, had recently been acted at both universities; at a date, as Mr. demons notes, very close to that of the production of the Timon comedy. Traditions of the latter, at the least, may have lingered. We know, more over, that Shakspere must have been familiar with Oxford ; he lodged with the D'Avenants there, on trips between Strat ford and London. It is therefore by no means impossible, or even unlikely, that he should have heard of the academic play ; and in the absence of any other explanation for certain strik ing features in his own Timon, we must believe that he heard at least some account of it. He need not necessarily have seen or read it; a description of it might have served his purpose.

The conclusion of this chapter, therefore, is that Timon of Athens shows indebtedness to Plutarch's sketch of Timon in his Life of Antony, and perhaps to Painter's repetition of that sketch ; to Plutarch's Life of Alcibiades; to the academic comedy on Timon; and possibly to Lucian's dialogue. No source was followed closely; all that came from any source was transfigured in the play. Yet the combined sources would

23

supply all the important elements of the plot in Timon, more or less in full. The fact will be apparent from the adjoining table, which will show at what points — about twenty — the sources enter the play.

THE PROBABLE SOURCES OF THE INCIDENTS IN Timon of Athens

Passage	Incident.	Plutarch or Painter.	The Timon Comedy.	Lucian (?).
Acts I, II, and III.	Timon's benevolence, gifts to flatterers, bankruptcy; the desertion of his friends, and his change to misanthropy.	Implied.	First realized.	Narrated.
I, i, 94-109.	Redemption of Ventidius (5 talents).		Of Eutrapelus (5 talents). Of De- meas(i6 talents).	Of Demeas (16 talents).
I, i, 110-172.	The old Athenian with his daughter.		Philargurus and daughter.	Philiades.
II, ii; IV, iii;	The faithful steward.		do.
III, vi.	1'he mock-banquet		do.
IV, iii, 25-	Discovery of gold.		do.	do.
IV, iii, 27-	Apostrophe to gold.			do. (?)
IV, iii, 45-	Resolution to bury it.		do.
IV, iii, and V, i.	Crowd of flatterers come to new-found treasure ; no specific imitation ex cept possibly in the intro duction of the character of the poet.		do. Poet = Hermog- enes, fiddler and singer (?).	do. Poet = Gna- thonides, who brings a new song (?)
IV, iii, 106-	Timon encourages Alcibi- ades because the latter will work harm, to Athens.	do.
IV, iii, 81-	Timandra.	do.
IV, iii, 283-	Timon would rather eat in Apemantus* absence.	do.
V, i, 208-	Offers a tree for Athenians to hang themselves.	d o.
V, i, 218: V.iv, 65 ; and pas sim.	Buried on sea-shore.	do.
V, iv, 70-	The epitaphs.	do.

CHAPTER III A DIVISION OF AUTHORSHIP

We have said that scholars' are all but finally agreed on double authorship in Timon, and, roughly speaking, fairly well agreed on what each author wrote. For this agreement there are three main reasons : glaring disparities in esthetic merit between different sections of the play; striking incon gruities in technic between the same sections ; and singular divergences and contradictions in treatment and in matter. Having merely mentioned these peculiarities in a former chap ter, we must now examine them more closely to see what grounds they give us for believing in two authors, and what criteria for the work of each.

There are many scenes and passages in Timon which, no one has ever doubted and no one will ever doubt, are Shakspere's work. For convenience we may make two classes of them, without trying to define any precise line between the two. In the first class come those passages of comparatively unem- phatic dialogue which, while they warrant no suspicion of any hand but Shakspere's, while they may indeed be pregnant with such ideas and such images and phrases as seem character istic of the master, yet naturally lack, from their relatively un important place and purpose, that passion which was usually necessary to take Shakspere to the height where none could follow him. Such passages Shakspere has in every play ; such, in Timon, fill a large part of the first three acts. In the other class come scenes and passages in which passions as intense as Shakspere ever gave to any character find expression in supreme poetry — poetry coming short of Lear, perhaps, in poignancy of diction, and certainly in pathos of situation, but surpassing even Lear or Coriolanus in the sheer force of that emotion which, in different forms, is common to the three plays. Such passages comprise much of the last two acts.

24

25

Let us examine a passage of the first kind. We need not pick the best; take three of the first extended speeches in the play:

" Poet. Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feign'd Fortune to be thron'd : the base o' the mount Is rank'd with all deserts, all kind of natures, That labour on the bosom of this sphere To propagate their states : amongst them all, Whose eyes are on this sovereign lady fix'd, One do I personate of Lord Timon's frame, Whom Fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her ; Whose present grace to present slaves and servants Translates his rivals.

Painter. 'Tis conceiv'd to scope.

This throne, this Fortune, and this . hill, methinks, With one man beckon'd from the rest below, Bowing his head against the steepy mount To climb his happiness, would be well express'd In our condition.

Poet. Nay, sir, but hear me on.

All those which were his fellows but of late, Some better than his value, on the moment Follow his strides, his lobbies fill with tendance, Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear, Make sacred even his stirrup, and through him Drink the free air." I, i, 63.

This is merely exposition. There is practically no emotion; no incitement to a soaring flight of poetry. The passage is excellent; it reaches easily the plane of Shakspere when he is not stirred to a great moment of pathos or of passion. We do not need to say it is inevitably Shaksperean. Should we find it in a play by Chapman, or by Massinger or Beaumont, we should have no doubt that any of these dramatists was equal to it ; we find it in a play printed as Shakspere's and we call it amply good enough for him. If there were nothing in the play inferior to it, we should have no reason to think that Shakspere did not write the whole; if the work suspected to be spurious in Timon had been written by one of the other authors mentioned, we should find his portions hard to sepa rate upon esthetic evidence. But when we find that in artis tic merit the suspected portions, one and all, fall so far below

26

the passage we have quoted that their author cannot rival any great Elizabethan poet, we shall have strong esthetic reason to consider the passage quoted, and others like it in the play, as Shakspere's work.

Less need be said, then, of the scenes and passages of the second kind. Take two speeches — and again we do not need to choose the best — surcharged with Timon's misanthropy; ten might be found like them.

" Be as a planetary plague, when Jove Will o'er some high-viced city hang his poison In the sick air ; let not thy sword skip one. Pity not honour'd age for his white beard ; He is an usurer. Strike me the counterfeit matron ; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd. Let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword ; for those milk-paps, That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes, Are not within the leaf of pity writ,

But set them down horrible traitors. Spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy throat shall cut, And mince it sans remorse. Swear against objects : Put armour on thine ears and on thine eyes, Whose proof, nor yells of mothers, maids, nor babes, Nor sight of priests in holy vestments bleeding, Shall pierce a jot. There's gold to pay thy soldiers: Make large confusion ; and thy fury spent, Confounded be thyself! Speak not, be gone." IV, iii, 108.

., 108.

" That nature, being sick of man's unkindness, Should yet be hungry ! Common mother, thou, Whose womb unmeasurable, and infinite breast, Teems, and feeds all ; whose self-same mettle, Whereof thy proud child, arrogant man, is puff'd, Engenders the black toad and adder blue, The gilded newt and eyeless venom'd worm, With all the abhorred births below crisp heaven Whereon Hyperion's quickening fire doth shine ; Yield him, who all thy human sons doth hate, From forth thy plenteous bosom, one poor root ! Ensear thy fertile and conceptious womb, Let it no more bring out ingrateful man !

27

Go great with tigers, dragons, wolves, and bears ;

Teem with new monsters, whom thy upward face

Hath to the marbled mansion all above

Never presented ! O, a root ! dear thanks :

Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas ;

Whereof ingrateful man, with liquorish draughts

And morsels unctuous, greases his pure mind,

That from it all consideration slips ! " IV, iii, 1 76.

Argument will be unnecessary to convince a reader that these are from the pen that wrote the following passage, better known :

" Hear, nature ! hear, dear goddess, hear ! Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend- To make this creature fruitful ! . Into her womb convey sterility ! Dry up in her the organs of increase, And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her ! If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live, And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her ! Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, Turn all her mother's pains and benefits To laughter and contempt, that she may feel How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child! " King Lear, I, iv, 297.

We have quoted from Shakspere in an average and in a greater mood. Now along with such passages as we have illustrated, there are many scenes and passages in Timon which a reader feels at once to be unworthy of Shakspere in / any mood. Whoever wrote them did not fail entirely of being a poet; indeed he seems to have tried hard to be one; for a striking and suspicious trait is his clear striving for rhetorical • effect. Yet the product is too thin in substance, too halting in expression, too tame and trite in imagery, too clumsy in characterization, too lacking in dramatic fitness, in a word too uninspired, to pass unsuspected. Such work makes up about one-third of the play ; scattered through it in some ten scenes or parts of scenes. One or two of them, if short,

28

might make no great difference, though they would be noticed ; ten together, many of them long, comprise perhaps more third- rate poetry than can be found in any other play in the Shak- sperean canon. Titus Andronicus may shed more blood than honors Shakspere; its poetry is above comparison with most of the bad poetry in Timon — and is less peculiar. Henry the Sixth may be the work of several authors ; if so, each of them not only outwrote the man who supplied the inferior parts of Timon, but each wrote less peculiarly — all of them writing a good deal like Shakspere in his early period. Henry the Eighth may well be largely Fletcher's ; but the very doubt of the fact, if any exists, is caused by the practical equality in merit of much of Fletcher's work in it to much of Shakspere's. The case in Pericles is likest that in Timon. Two acts there are decidedly inferior to Shakspere, and are also couched in verse decidedly peculiar. Yet even these are superior in quality and less singular in form than the condemned passages in Timon. The word "peculiar" leads to a discussion of the technic of those passages ; and the examples quoted here to show their esthetic quality may well be chosen also with an eye upon their technical characteristics. The double aim makes it impos sible to distort the case by quoting the worst. On the con trary, the first and last quotations are taken from the most ambitious of all the suspected scenes; and the other is an as piring passage. All may be read with some attention to the technic, a discussion of which will succeed them. The curious shifts from prose to verse, especially, are to be noted in the first quotation; the rimes and the irregular lines in the next; while the last is nothing but a set of separate lines, all chosen from one scene, where each serves, let it be said, for a blank verse.

" Apemantus. I scorn thy meat ; 'twould choke me, for I should ne'er flatter thee. O you gods! What a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood ; and all the madness is, he cheers 'em up too.

I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.

Methinks they should invite them without knives ;

Good for their meat, and safer for their lives.

29

There's much example for't ; the fellow that sits next him now, parts bread with him, pledges the breath of him in a divided draught, is the readiest man to kill him ; 't has been proved. If I were a huge man, I should fear to drink at meals,

Lest they should spy my wind-pipe's dangerous notes ; Great men should drink with harness on their throats. Timon. My lord, in heart, and let the health go round. Second Lord. Let it flow this way, my good lord.

Apem. Flow this way ! A brave fellow ! He keeps his tides well. Those healths will make thee and thy state look ill, Timon. Here's that which is too weak to be a sinner, Honest water, which ne'er left man in the mire : This and my food are equals, there's no odds. Feasts are too proud to give thanks to the gods."

I, ", 38.

" O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us ! Who would not wish to i>e from wealth exempt, Since riches point to misery and contempt? Who would be so mock'd with glory? or to live But in a dream of friendship? To have his pomp and all what state compounds' But only painted, like his varnish'd friends? Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart, Undone by goodness ! Strange unusual blood, When man's worst sin is, he does too much good! My dearest lord, blest to be most accurst, Rich only to be wretched, thy great fortunes Are made thy chief afflictions. Alas, kind lord ! He's flung in rage from this ingrateful seat Of monstrous friends ;• Nor 'has he with him to supply his life, Or that which can command it. I'll follow and inquire him out : I'll ever serve his mind with my best will ; Whilst I have gold, I'll be- his steward still." IV, ii, 30.

" It has pleas'd the gods to remember my father's age " I, ii 2

"If our betters play at that game, we must not dare " 12

" Nay, my lords, ceremony was but devised at first " 14

" I have one word to say to you. Look you, my good lord " 174

"I prithee, let's be provided to show them entertainment" 185

" And call him to long peace " 3

" But yond man is ever angry " 29

"They dance ; they are mad women " 1 38

30

"With poisonous spite and envy" 144

" Of their friends' gift " .' 147

" O, that men's ears should be " 256

The first of these quotations was written to expose the characters of Timon and his parasites; contrast it with the piece from Shakspere's exposition. The second was intended to be passionate denunciation of the parasites and of the world ; contrast this with the thunderings quoted from Shakspere. It might be possible that Shakspere would somewhere write a piece of patchwork like the first quotation; it may be pos sible that on some few occasions he came as short of genuine passion as the second; it may be that he is sometimes guilty of verses as ill-shaped as the third; but it takes a high order j of credulity to believe that at the time of Lear and Macbethl he wrote copious quantities of such stuff — filled up one-thirdi of a play with it. Nor is this all. The technic of the faulty, passages, that unconscious signature of authorship, aptly illus trated in the extracts quoted, is irreconcilable with Shak spere's technic at any time. Frequent and useless shifts from prose to verse were never part of Shakspere's practice ; irregu lar verse was always scarce with him; and by the period of Timon he had all but discarded rime. But just these features which we should perhaps least expect to find in Shakspere at this period are the ones we find most prominent in our quota tions and in the inferior passages throughout the play. We can only take them as the ear-marks of another author. We shall find he has still other ear-marks when we later come to tabulate the metrical phenomena for all the scenes of the play. Certain striking facts, however, may be borrowed from the table and placed here as criteria of his work.

Twenty per cent, of his verses rime. The ratio is prac tically constant with him; and the rimes are scattered indis criminately through his scenes. Shakspere has only four per

cent, of rimes and almost all of these at ends of scenes. Leave

t

out such final couplets, which both writers use, and we have still a fairer test. The inferior author then has eighteen per cent, of rimes, Shakspere less than one per cent. A prac tically constant ratio of eighteen to one in rimes is as keen a

31

verse-test as is often offered by the two parts of a doubtful play.

Timon, however, gives us another test as clean-cut. Irreg ular lines like those .that have been quoted pervade the sus pected verse of the play. They may be roughly classified; lines with about ten syllables, unscannable; rather more with twelve or fourteen syllables, sometimes scannable and some times not; and still more with six, seven, or eight syllables, scannable or not. These are the inferior author's specialties when he fails to hit upon an orthodox line ; and he fails nearly one time in five. Shakspere was capable of such distortions on occasion; in Timon he has four per cent, of them. The other author has eighteen per cent. ; and this ratio, throughout his verse, is also practically constant!

Yet another mark of the inferior author is found in quick and aimless shifts from prose to verse, as illustrated in the first quotation; usually not even due, as in that excerpt, to a desire to rime. This trait, however, unlike the first two, is not constant. It is very prominent in several of this author's scenes, and in none not his ; but in others he writes solid verse or solid prose.

We have considered only a few illustrations of the esthetic and the technical contrast between different parts of our play. The esthetic contrast will be heightened as we look at indi vidual scenes; and further metrical phenomena, all showing differences, though not so marked, will appear in the table. We may leave the evidence of the third kind, those curious divergences in treatment and contradictions in substance which in this play often give the most concrete testimony to double authorship, to appear in their natural places in the following chapters. We have perhaps found sufficient reason for be lieving in two authors. If so, we have already valuable \ tests to aid us in distinguishing their work: strong esthetic \ evidence in almost every scene ; a practically constant ratio of 1 8 to i in rimes between the authors, and of 1 8 to 4 in irreg ular lines; and a further, though not constant, mark of the inferior author in a tendency to jumble prose and verse. The tests will not be all-sufficient. We may expect to find some

32

scenes in prose, where the verse-tests will not apply, and where the pure esthetic evidence will also be -too weak to be conclusive. We shall come to practical decision on most scenes ; but only to a probability on several others ; and on two, hardly to that. We shall need further evidence than that of style and meter to confirm the decisions and to strengthen the probabilities; and this we shall look for in another chapter.

Our first problem now is, therefore, to distribute the dis jecta membra of the play between the authors. Our next will be to find out which were written first — whether Shak- spere partially recast an older piece, and, leaving patches from it, made up the misshapen play as printed, or whether he wrote the original play in which those patches are interpolations. If we find that Shakspere wrote the original play, we shall have to ask how near he came to finishing it, and how the play, if finished as he planned it, would differ from the play as actually finished by another. Speaking somewhat roughly, the three questions furnish the respective topics of the next three chapters. This chapter henceforth attempts merely to divide the play between the authors. To some extent it must be taken as preliminary; because, as said above, not all the evidence is brought to bear in it. Confirmatory evidence will come conveniently in the next chapter, being incidental to the argument for Shakspere's priority. The last chapter will then restore, so far as possible, the plot that Shakspere planned.1

I, i, I-I75

No doubt has ever been expressed that the opening of the play, from the dialogue of the parasites through the redemp tion of Ventidius and the complaint of the Old Athenian, is Shakspere's work. One need not say the passages are un mistakably Shaksperean. In quoting from one of them a while ago, we implied that if we were comparing them with such verse as a man like Fletcher, for example, often writes, we might have considerable esthetic ground for doubt. But

1 One word of caution is advisable. The text of the First Folio is the sole authority for our play. It will be useful at many points in the argument that follows, and at one or two imperative. In all references to individual lines, the numbering of the Globe Edition is taken as a standard.

33

we are comparing them with the work of a man who was by no means a Fletcher, as we have seen and shall see again; and thus compared, the skill of the expository dialogue, the nice discrimination of the characters, and especially the rare quality of the copious and involved imagery, suggest no hand but Shakspere's ; while the orderly technic of the verse, lack ing all the distortions constant with the other author, seems to speak definitively. More cannot be said at present; there is little need, however, to enlarge the stylistic argument for an ascription that is undisputed.2

176-293 .

In part, the last half of the scene, where Apemantus holds the boards, is one of the two passages in the play on which esthetic evidence must leave us genuinely doubtful. Only a probability, gained by balancing the evidence, can be stated. It would seem that Shakspere was making ready, in describing Apemantus a hundred lines back,3 to introduce him in the scene. One is therefore prepared to take the entrance of the cynic, even though the latter fails to " drop down the knee " to Timon, as was said to be his wont, as Shakspere's work. So far most of the critics are agreed. But many of them follow Mr. Fleay in giving Shakspere only the first ten lines after Apemantus' entrance; and think the other author wrote the sixty lines thence following till Alcibiades enters. Mr.

2 A mercer who enters with the other parasites, according to the stage- direction, but who never speaks, has called forth much comment but no explanation. The mention of him has been used as evidence that Shakspere here revised an old scene in which the mercer had a speaking part ; and coming in the first line of the play, has predisposed some critics to the theory that Shakspere was revising throughout. If that theory is shown impossible — and little further evidence shall we find for it — this explana tion of the mercer falls. So do all others. The last author, whichever one he was, does not seem to have added the mercer in the stage-direction, meaning to give him a part, for he gave him none ; or to have cut any part that the first author had already given the mercer, for no cut is apparent. Nor is the error very like a printer's. The important fact here is that the mercer — explain him who can — does not testify to any theory of authorship.

3 Line 59.

4

-

,

34

Fleay so argues because the first ten lines are verse, the others prose ; because the " bald " and " cut-up " style of the prose is like that of two later Apemantus scenes known to be non-Shaksperean ;* and because the speeches of the various characters in the prose are unlike their speeches elsewhere in the play. One feels these reasons to be inconclusive. The change from verse to prose — definitive, and by no means like the uncertain vacillations of the inferior author into and out of meter — may very well prove nothing but that prose is the natural, almost the only suitable, medium for Apemantus' brand of sarcasm. The balder this is, the better it suits Ape mantus ; its " cut-up " nature is its merit ; and the fact that two later spurious scenes have much the same style — though not half so pointed — may mean only that one author imitated the other in imitating Lyly's Diogenes. As for any change in the characters where the prose begins, it remains to be shown. Timon's attitude to Apemantus, admirably suited to complete the exposition of the hero's character, is that of noblesse oblige; and the scorn of the rest for the cynic is natural enough. There is no great reason, then, to think that Shak- spere stopped when he had written the first ten lines, in verse. Hardly could he possibly have stopped with them; for if we agree that he wrote those ten, letting Timon warn his friends that they will " be chid " by Apemantus, we have every reason to believe he wrote the clever chiding that ensues.

When Alcibiades enters, verse begins again and lasts for fifteen lines — until the company adjourn to dinner. One can hardly doubt that Mr. Fleay and his school are right in giving these lines to Shakspere. We may note that in them Apeman tus again speaks, and speaks in verse Shaksperean through and through :

" Aches contract and starve your supple joints ! That there should be small love 'mongst these sweet knaves, And all this courtesy ! The strain of man's bred out Into baboon jmd monkey." I, i, 257.

Such a speech is valiant evidence that Shakspere had Ape-

* I, ii ; II, ii, 47-132.

35

mantus in his scene. But now, as the guests go in to dinner, a stage-direction says, "Enter two Lords." These talk with Apemantus for eighteen lines in prose, then with each other for ten more in verse, and go in. Bent on giving all the prose to the inferior author, Mr. Fleay is driven to the argument that that author kept back the two lords when the other guests went in to the feast ; that he kept them back to close the scene by baiting Apemantus, in order that Apemantus might enter in the next scene " dropping after all, discontentedly, like him self," as the stage-direction there has it. Now the statement that the author kept back the two lords is simply in defiance of the text, which makes them enter; and the reader may be left to judge whether Apemantus' mode of dropping into the next scene is in any way conditioned by the way in which he drops out of this one. If not, there is no valid reason to doubt Shakspere's hand in the closing passage of the scene.

Thus the evidences balance. They lean to Shakspere's side — create a probability, at least, that Shakspere is responsible for all that Apemantus says and does in the first scene. Only a probability, however; they cannot be said to determine the fact. The last half of our first scene must therefore be left open to some question.

i, n

It is easy to account for the unanimous opinion of the critics that the banquet scene is the inferior author's. The prose and verse of the scene, often indistinguishable, are alike vapid. The latter shows no sign of Shakspere's technic, but abounds with the metrical shortcomings of the other writer. The frequency of these approximates his constant ratio; a fifth of the verses rime, a sixth betray his regular irregular ities. The whole scene should be read to get an idea of his strange technic. Illustration is unnecessary here, as we have already quoted much from the scene in the introduction to this chapter. Grant that Shakspere might write one such passage as the first there quoted; grant that here and there he may be guilty of a line as halting as the last quotations ; that he would habitually write such passages and such lines is beyond belief.

36

But with the other author such lines are habitual. Not only in this scene, but wherever he writes verse, • he sprinkles a steady twenty per cent, of them.

Other facts are even more telling. The scene is full of blunders. Ventidius is allowed to offer the return of Timon's loan and so largely to destroy the dramatic force of Timon's later request for payment. The steward is given a name (Flavius) not his. These facts will call for fuller comment later. Although the steward is to be the only faithful fol lower of Timon's miseries, he is made to wish " he were

'

gently put out of office before he were forced out."5 Timon starts to make a gift to Alcibiades but stops short for no reason.6 Senators are announced who never enter.7 And through it all the plot is at a standstill. When these blunders have been told, the low poetic level of the scene needs little comment. Suffice it to say here that the blunders are con veyed in a scene which, even as reformed by modern editors, staggers aimlessly from prose to verse, from verse back to prose, sixteen times in 257 lines. Such substance, in such style, under such technic, — though easily paralleled, as we shall find, in several of this author's scenes, — Shakspere never wrote.

II, i

After the lapse of the plot through the dead waste of the banquet scene, one is relieved to come to its resumption in the little scene that follows. The solidity and dignity, yet delicacy, of the thought and verse alike, unmarred by metrical deform ity, the unerring stroke of every sentence, driven home with telling phrases and with striking images, leave no doubt of the author of the scene. One feels it to be as characteristically Shaksperean, perhaps, as any passage in the play; and as masterful as any except those in which a storm of passion makes the lightning play. Quotation of half the scene will best evince the fact.

" Get on your cloak, and haste you to Lord Timon. Importune him for my moneys ; be not ceas'd

8 Line 207. 8 Line 227. T Line 180.

37

With slight denial, nor then silenc'd when ' Commend me to your master,' and the cap Plays in the right hand, thus ; but tell him, My uses cry to me ; I must serve my turn Out of mine own ; his days and times are past, And my reliances on his fracted dates Have smit my credit. I love and honour him, But must not break by back to heal his finger. Immediate are my needs, and my relief Must not be toss'd and turn'd to me in words, But find supply immediate. Get you gone. Put on a most importunate aspect, A visage of demand ; for I do fear, When every feather sticks in his own wing, Lord Timon will be left a naked gull, Which flashes now a phoenix. -Get you gone."

H, i, 15.

II, ii

This scene falls naturally into the three parts in which it is here examined. The dunning part runs through line 46; the foolery of Apemantus thence through line 132; and the conference of Timon with the steward fills the rest.

The Dunning

There is every reason to accept the usual ascription of the dunning scene to Shakspere. We have just seen him pre paring for it in the scene preceding; and in the conference of Timon with the steward, and indeed throughout the play, we shall find him presupposing that it has been shown. We should therefore naturally think he wrote it. The style and meter bespeak his hand. For while the short dialogue may not be inevitably Shaksperean, as would hardly be expected in a few short speeches, it is skilful enough for Shakspere, and at least more graphic than the other author's average; and the meter, disturbed but slightly by the broken nature of the dialogue, shows the regular technic of Shakspere and lacks the derangements of the other man. But we do not have to rest on evidence as slight as style and meter here afford. The crowning proof that Shakspere wrote the dunning part lies in the fact that it cannot have been written by the man who wrote

38

the Apemantus part that follows it, and that this man was the other author — as will now be shown.

The Apemantus Part

The man who wrote down to line 47 sent the duns off the stage at that point. He made the steward beg them to retire till after dinner that Timon might prepare an answer for them. He made Timon second this request and bid the steward see them well entertained during dinner. He made them start off when the steward bade them, " Pray, draw near." But just as they are going off — at line 47 — one of them sees Ape mantus coming and cries out, " Stay, Stay ! " And stay they do. The steward who was leading them gets off as best he can in silence, but they remain for eighty-five lines of fun with Apemantus. No single author would have made this error; would have started the servants off the stage, if all the while he meant them to remain. Clearly it was one writer who sent them off, another who made them turn and stay for sport with Apemantus.

That the latter was the anonymous author is not doubted. As he wrote in prose here, we cannot apply the ear-marks that we always find to stamp his verse. But his blunders tell. He mistakes the duns, one at least of whom, in Shakspere, serves a senator, for " three usurers' men."8 He seemingly forgets that the scene is placed in Timon's house, for he makes Ape mantus tell his companion that he " will go with him to Lord Timon's."9 Much worse, the author finds it needful, while he holds the plot at halt, to bring on an unknown fool and an unknown page, with letters of unknown purport to Timon and to Alcibiades. These blunders have never been thought Shakspere's.

The Conference with the Steward

Only ten lines in this part abide our question. The rest is Shakspere palpably — his zenith for the first half of the play. Let quotation tell.

8 Compare II, i, with II, ii, 61, 98, and 101. * II, ii, 94-

39

" When all our offices have been oppress'd With riotous feeders, when our vaults have wept With drunken spilth of wine, when every room Hath blaz'd with lights and bray'd with minstrelsy, I have retir'd me to a wasteful cock, And set mine eyes at flow.

********** Heavens, have I said, the bounty of this lord ! ,

How many prodigal bits have slaves and peasants This night englutted? Who is not Timon's? What heart, head, sword, force, means, but is Lord Timon's? Great Timon, noble, worthy, royal Timon ! Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise, The breath is gone whereof this praise is made. Feast-won, fast-lost ; one cloud of winter showers, These flies are couch'd." II, ii, 167.

But ten prose lines that suddenly break into this poetry at line 195 are open to debate. Without exception, critics give these lines to the inferior author; and the ascription is in deed a natural one, since the singular intrusion of a bit of prose at such a point has every semblance of interpolation. The present argument, however, will depart from the accepted belief that the ten lines are spurious; in fact, the very key-y stone of the argument will be a theory that all but one of them belong to Shakspere. Such a theory may well seem trivial at first thought; but that the theory, by accident, must hold a more important place in our argument than the lines them selves hold in the play will perhaps be apparent when we come to discuss the matter in the next chapter.

Ill, i V

Something of the importance of that theory, indeed, will be at once appreciated from the fact that the three scenes which follow are inseparably bound up with the ten prose lines just mentioned. In those lines Timon sends to borrow of three friends — Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius; and the three scenes ensuing show those lords denying the requests. A purely esthetic judgment as to the first two of the three scenes — although, as the scenes are mainly prose, it will not be conclusive — indicates that Shakspere wrote them; but an

40

esthetic and technical judgment as to the third scene, which is mainly in bad verse, points to the other author. In the present scene, for instance, that of Lucullus, the dialogue is dexterous enough, the character-delineation subtle enough, the prose facile enough, for Shakspere; while the one speech in verse seems characteristic of him. And so, also, in the Lucius scene. But the Sempronius scene we shall find different; and its metrical tricks alone will show abundant indications of the other author.

On account of a logical necessity, however, which arises from the relation of the three scenes to the ten prose lines , aforesaid, and almost on that account alone, the critics who I have followed Mr. Fleay have found themselves forced to give all three scenes to the inferior author. If the ten lines are interpolated, then the three scenes must be interpolated also. That fact will be apparent. Many critics have wanted to rebel, indeed, against the logic ; some for the esthetic reasons mentioned in the last paragraph, others because these scenes where Timon's friends deny him are so absolutely essential to the play that Shakspere could not in reason have omitted them. \/Thus Dr. Furnivall, the first critic of Mr. Fleay's paper:10 " I cannot believe that Shakspere would make the ingratitude of one man [Ventidius — whose ingratitude is not shown] the sole cause of Timon's entire change of character; and I therefore believe that Shakspere wrote those few prose words ordering the servants to go to Lucius and Lucullus (and possibly to Sempronius)." Note well that Sempronius is left doubtful ; and then note how, for other reasons, and even inadvertently, he is again left doubtful by Mr. K. Deighton :" " Though there is perhaps nothing in the verse [of the three scenes] that might not have been written by an inferior poet, there is in the prose, to my ear and mind, a great deal that has the genuine ring of Shakspere." Now the prose is in the Lucius and Lucullus scenes; the verse is found in the Sempronius scene; so that while Mr. Deighton was here arguing that all three scenes are Shakspere's, his sentence unintentionally testifies

10 New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874, page 243.

11 The Arden Timon, page xviii.

41

,

to our theory that only the first two are so ascribable. " The details of the scenes," says the same editor, " have an air of waisemblance, there is abundance of humor in the excuses made, and the character of the sycophants is skilfully discrim inated ; " and furthermore, like Dr. Furnivall, he " cannot conceive Shakspere as a dramatic artist showing us Timon turned bitter misanthrope without also showing in detail the process which caused the sudden revulsion."

This critic, following Dr. Furnivall, is alone in his ascription of the scenes to Shakspere; and he gives all three of them to Shakspere, and in spite of logic. For the logical necessity above-mentioned forces all the other followers of Mr. Fleay, though sometimes unwillingly, to ascribe the scenes to the inferior author. To dispel that logical necessity, or rather so to interpret it as to make it reinforce the esthetic judgment that the first two scenes are Shakspere's and the third one only the inferior author's, will be part of our task in the next chapter. It is well to know that the esthetic verdict clears the way for the attempt.

Ill, ii

What was implied of this scene under the last section need not be repeated. Good enough for Shakspere, the scene has been given to the other author from an exigency of logic which the next chapter will seek to dispel.12

13 There is little reason for agreeing with certain critics who think that the " three strangers " whose dialogue opens and closes the scene are not Shakspere's characters. To let Lucius boast to them of what he would do for Timon, and then encounter Timon's request, was a good device ; and in the body of the scene, which we shall see in the next chapter Shakspere must have written, they are mentioned as having been present at its beginning : " I was sending," says Lucius, " to use Lord Timon my self, these gentlemen can witness." The main doubt about them is caused, however, by their dialogue at the end, where one of them suddenly gets a name (Hostilius), and where six lines of prose, printed as verse, are fol lowed by eighteen verses which show some, but not many, of the inferior author's tricks. But these lines have Shaksperean touches too, as in the sentence,

" He ne'er drinks

But Timon's silver treads upon his lip, — " so that it seems unlikely that even the closing dialogue of the strangers

42

III, iii

If the Lucius and Lucullus scenes agree in style, the Sem- pronius scene is widely different from both. The first two are mainly in good prose, the last in very ragged verse — and verse showing the inferior author's eccentricities in plenty. From the thirty-four verses of this scene alone we could make an in ventory of his metrical anomalies. Let sample lines suffice.

Line.

" Has Ventidius and Lucullus denied him ? " 8

"Must I be his last refuge? His friends, like physicians" n

" Thrice give him over ; must I take the cure upon me ? " 12

" That e'er received gift from him " 17

" That I'll requite it last ? No " 19

" Now to guard sure their master " 40

Each of these masquerades as a blank verse. With such blemishes prevailing, we may leave to the table the other metrical phenomena which help to stamp the scene as the inferior author's. And that same logical necessity, moreover, which will give the two preceding scenes to Shakspere, will force this one on the other man.

is spurious. There is no contradiction in their professing to be " but strangers " to Timon in line 2, and yet seeming to know a good deal about him in the rest of the scene. Their plain meaning in line 2 is that they are not personal friends of Timon's, like Lucius ; and this fact one of them repeats in the very last speech.

Some critics, too, have made capital of a curious blunder in the scene. The second stranger says that Timon's man has asked Lucullus for " so many talents." (Timon had sent, of course, for fifty.) Lucius, replying, boasts that he would not deny Timon " so many talents." Thereupon another man of Timon's enters and asks Lucius for " so many taknts " ; and Lucius answers,

" I know his lordship is but merry with me ;

He cannot want fifty-five hundred talents."

One thing is fairly sure about this bungle. Timon's man must have asked Lucius — as the line was written — for fifty talents ; merely because the reply of Lucius — " He cannot want fifty-five hundred " — is a somewhat natural reply to a request for fifty, and a virtually impossible reply to one for " so many." The last " so many," then, — the one that makes the main confusion — was almost surely written " fifty," and is only a corruption, evincing nothing as to authorship. If so, the first two may well be corruptions also — probably misprints.

43

III, iv

There is little need, if any, for a second dunning scene in the play. It is therefore likely, a priori, that this superfluous scene, repeating one of Shakspere's, is the other author's. Esthetically it is on the latter's plane. When not positively silly, the style is mediocre ; the best line in the scene would not make us think of Shakspere. The verse, as in the banquet scene, is largely indistinguishable from the prose; but at best it alternates with prose, on an average, every twenty lines ; and through all obstacles it shows abundant brands of the inferior author in irregularities and rimes. To make way for other evidence, however, the phenomena of verse, sufficient in them selves to show the authorship, may be left safely to the table of the metrics.

For there is more to say. Timon's creditors in this scene are Varro,13 Titus, Hortensius, Philotus, and Lucius. Varro we know from Shakspere's dunning scene. Titus, Hortensius, and Philotus never appear elsewhere. Nor is this fact to be dismissed with the argument — which would be weak if true — that they are nowhere shown because they are mere usurers. They are lords, and friends of Timon; they have had gifts from him, eaten at his table, " spent of his wealth."14 The fact speaks for itself; one will not readily believe it to be Shakspere who here shows us three close friends of Timon pestering him for money without ever having introduced those friends to us before, and without ever mentioning them after ward. And if the presence of three unknown creditors were

13 Only their servants, of course, — called, as in Shakspere's dunning scene, by their masters' names — appear on the stage. Varro sends two servants. The stage-direction, " Enter Varro' s man," is a misprint for " men." For in the first lines of the scene, where Lucius says his business " is money," Titus replies, " So is theirs and ours ; " and an examina tion of the lines will make it clear that " ours " must mean Titus' and Hortensius', and that therefore " theirs " must indicate two men of Varro's. Otherwise it would be " his." This minute matter is worth noting only because it kills the theory that Varro's man is doubled only in the last half of the scene, where he speaks — a theory which has sometimes caused a claim for two authors in this scene.

14 Witness lines 18, 19, 23, 26, 50.

44

not conclusive, the appearance of another one named Lucius would be the last straw. This man is either' meant for the same Lucius whom both writers have already used,15 or for another. If the same, his presence here cannot be Shakspere's work; for in the Lucius scene, the next but one preceding, Shakspere certainly had no intent of making Lucius a creditor of Timon. But if another, he cannot be Shakspere's either; for it is impossible that Shakspere meant to give Timon two proteges named Lucius. We can hardly think that Shakspere either contradicted his own Lucius out and out, or added a second Lucius to the play ; but we shall find that neither blunder surpasses some feats of the other author in his haste.

Ill, v

Sundered from all else in the play, this scene proclaims itself spurious by its very insulation. To motivate the last half of the play, the writer must get Alcibiades banished. Let us suppose that in his hurry he fell in with the first plan that occurred to him, without thinking overmuch how well or ill that plan would fit the play. Let us even assume that he was none too familiar with the play. The allowances will perhaps , help us to explain why he makes Alcibiades anger the senate with pleas for mercy to the unknown author of an unknown crime; why he meanwhile quite forgets the play on which he is working, and writes in a scene which has not the slightest reference to Timon or the remotest relation to anything what soever that takes place in the half of the play preceding. The introduction of a crime and criminal, both alien to the plot and both unheard of elsewhere in the play, to motivate a scene which has so little relevancy to the scenes preceding that it might as well have come from Hamlet, will not be considered the expedient of Shakspere. The technic of the verse — to waive the mediocrity of style as patent — puts the authorship beyond dispute. Let some characteristic lines be shown.

Line.

" Tis necessary he should die " 2

" He did oppose his foe " 20

15 Shakspere in III, ii ; the other man in I, ii, 187 ff.

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" To bring manslaughter into form and set quarreling " 27

" The worst that man can breathe " 32

" And make his wrongs his outsides " 33

" And for I know, your reverend ages love security " 80

Twenty such verses occur in the hundred and seventeen lines of the scene. Thirty rimes appear; and the other metrical tokens of the inferior writer tally with his average.

Ill, vi

Every one admits that Shakspere wrote the one piece of verse in the mock-banquet. He alone was capable of this :

" May you a better feast never behold, You knot of mouth-friends ! Smoke and lukewarm water Is your perfection. This is Timon's last; Who, stuck and spangled with your flatteries, Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces Your reeking villainy. Live loathed, and long, Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears, You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time's flies, Cap and knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks ! Of man and beast the infinite malady Crust you quite o'er! " III, vi, 98.

The remainder of the scene, in prose, has been subject to all manner of doubt and guessing. It is the second passage on which esthetic evidence leaves us seriously in doubt; for, as prose, it gives us no strong argument for either author. There is little or no reason, to be sure, to think that Shakspere did not write it; one speech at least — the only long one, just before the verse — seems very like him ; and as we are sure he wrote the verse, we should think it probable he wrote the prose too. But we cannot claim that the esthetic evidence is strong enough to prove the fact. The probability, however, will gain strength in the next chapter.

IV, i

From the fourth act on, the play may be called Shakspere's. In every scene, excepting one of ten lines only, his hand is

46

manifest; and though three other scenes embody spurious bits — making in all less than two hundred lines — the latter are so insignificant, and, except in one scene, so palpable, as to give us little trouble. In the rest of the two acts, barring some three score lines of prose, the majesty of the style leaves us in no doubt of the master's hand. Appreciations of the separate scenes will not be asked for here; and analysis of technic may be left for tabulation. It will therefore be needless to pick out, as we review the scenes remaining, passages equal to what follows from the present scene.

" Piety, and fear,

Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth, Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood, Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades, Degrees, observances, customs, and laws, Decline to your confounding contraries, And yet confusion live! Plagues incident to men, Your potent and infectious fevers heap On Athens, ripe for stroke ! Thou cold sciatica, Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt As lamely as their manners ! Lust and liberty Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth, That 'gainst the stream of virtue they may strive, And drown themselves in riot ! Itches, blains, Sow all the Athenian bosoms, and their crop Be general leprosy ! Breath infect breath, That their society, as their friendship, may Be merely poison! " IV, i, 15.

IV, ii

It is all but universally agreed that only Shakspere could have written to line 30 of this scene ; that he would never have been guilty of the twenty lines that follow. The parting of the servants is the tenderest scene in Timon; in it is concen trated more pure poetry, perhaps, than is found in any scene of equal length in the play. All the critics note the breach be tween it and the twenty-line soliloquy the steward stays to speak after the servants go; which is little more than prose run mad in the inferior author's manner. The latter's flaws in technic, present in their steady ratio, will be apparent from an excerpt.

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" Poor honest lord, brought low by his own heart, Undone by goodness ! Strange unusual blood, When man's worst sin is, he does too much good ! My dearest lord, blest to be most accurst, Rich only to be wretched, thy great fortunes Are made thy chief afflictions. Alas, kind lord ! He's flung in rage from this ingrateful seat Of monstrous friends ; Nor has he with him to supply his life, Or that which can command it. I'll follow and inquire him out: I'll ever serve his mind with my best will ; Whilst I have gold, I'll be his steward still."

IV, ii, 37.

IV, iii Alcibiades

Timon's cave is visited by Alcibiades, Apemantus, certain banditti, the steward, the poet and painter, and the senators of Athens. As the play stands, no interval is possible between their visits, unless just before the last; for Apemantus follows Alcibiades directly, and, before he leaves, sees the poet and painter coming. Modern editors, however, put to it to make two acts of reasonable length, begin the fifth with the entrance of the poet and painter, who were seen approaching far back in the fourth. For convenience we may follow this division here; examining the first four visits separately, however, for authorship. Of that of Alcibiades we need only say that it has always been admitted to be palpably Shaksperean.

Apemantus

Two hands are admitted in this part. To line 291 Shakspere assuredly wrote ; at line 292, quite as certainly, the other man began. A child would feel the drop at that point from the stateliness of Shakspere's poetry to the tomfoolery of the other author's prose. For tomfoolery it is ; no sooner do the two man-haters, so nicely set against each other in Shakspere's lines, pass from his hand, than they leave their scathing ful- minations for the cheapest frippery of vaudeville ; each trump ing up questions on which the other may hang witticisms, each

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fretting or amusing the other — for they are friends one minute, foes the next — with nothings that concern neither them nor us. We do not care " where Timon lies o' nights," " where Ape- mantus feeds o' days," what either would do with poison if it " were obedient," or for any of the other posers illustrated in the second of the following quotations showing how the different authors handle Apemantus. Shakspere's brocade »f imagery :

" Thou hast cast away thyself, being like thyself ; A madman so long, now a fool. What ! Think'st That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? Will these moss'd trees, That have outlived the eagle, page thy heels, And skip when thou point'st out ? Will the cold brook, Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste To cure thy o'er-night's surfeit?" IV, iii, 220.

The other author's small-talk:

" Apem. An thou hadst hated meddlers sooner, thou shouldst have loved thyself better now. What man didst thou ever know unthrift that was beloved after his means ?

Tim. Who, without those means thou talkest of, didst thou ever know beloved ?

Apem. Myself.

Tim. I understand thee ; thou hadst some means to keep a dog.

Apem. What things in the world canst thou nearest compare to thy flatterers ?

Tim. Women nearest ; but men, men are the things themselves. What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?

Apem. Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men.

Tim. Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts?

Apem. Ay, Timon." IV, iii, 309.

But though the passage is admitted to be spurious, its end has never been correctly placed. Certainly it stops before line 376; there Shakspere's hand is once more unmistakable. The followers of Mr. Fleay, however, make it close fifteen lines earlier, at line 362; solely because the verse begins again

49

there.16 Even if the inferior author did not habitually hash his prose and verse, the reason would seem insufficient. But there is better reason to show that he did not leave off where the prose begins.

At line 356 Apemantus starts to take his leave of Timon. His farewells fill twenty lines:

" Apem. Yonder comes a poet and a painter: the plague of company light upon thee ! I will fear to catch it, and give way. When I know not what else to do, I'll see thee again.

Tim. When there is nothing living but thee, thou shalt be welcome. I had rather be a beggar's dog than Apemantus.

Apem. Thou art the cap of all the fools alive.

Tim. Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon !

Apem. A plague on thee, thou art too bad to curse.

Tim. All villains that do stand by thee are pure.

Apem. There is no leprosy but what thou speak'st.

Tim. If I name thee. I'll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.

Apem. I would my tongue could rot them off !

Tim. Away, thou issue of a mangy dog ! Choler does kill me that thou art alive; I swoon to see thee.

Apem. Would thou wouldst burst !

Tim. Away, thou tedious rogue !

I am sorry I shall lose a stone by thee.

Apem. Beast !

Tim. Slave !

Apem. Toad !

Tim. Rogue, rogue, rogue ! "

And after this last breathless anathema, after the stone is hurled at him, does Apemantus not decamp? Not at all! Certain he is gone, we read on into the soliloquy that Timon now begins ; and at the end we start at finding that the cynic has stayed through it all. Only one inference is then possible. Shakspere wrote the soliloquy; the other author must have written the leave-taking that precedes it; for we may be sure

16 Mr. Fleay also thought that Apemantus' line (363) — " Thou art the cap of all the fools alive" — made a good answer to line 291, where Shakspere left off. It is no more apposite to that line than to any speech of Timon's whatsoever. 5

50

that Shakspere never wrote such a valediction only to keep a character on the stage.

The spurious work, then, runs from line 291 to line 376. And now note how the latter line, if we cut all that intervenes, links with perfect sequence to the former. Timon has just showed Apemantus his gold :

" Apem. Here is no use for gold.

Tim. The best and truest ;

For here it sleeps, and does no hired harm. (Line 291) I am sick of this false world, and will love nought (Line 376) But even the mere necessities upon't"

He despises treasure and will love only roots ; and one finds it hard to think that the sentences were not consecutive as Shak spere wrote them. But even if Shakspere's parts did not fit so nicely, we might be sure that the limits of the spurious work are fixed.

The Banditti

Admitting that the body of this part is self-evidently Shaks pere's, many critics yet ascribe the opening and closing bits of dialogue between the bandits to the other author. Herein they follow Mr. Fleay; and Mr. Fleay's sole reason for thinking that the bandits' dialogue is spurious was that it is prose.17 When we find that Mr. Fleay has given the inferior writer every word of prose, without exception, in the play, we begin to doubt his judgment where it has no further basis; and when we see, moreover, that Shakspere meant the bandits to hold some dialogue before addressing Timon — for he makes Timon prepare, as they approach, to " eat and abhor them " — we are inclined to think he must have written that dialogue. We do not care very much who wrote it ; but everything points, at least, to Shakspere.

17 For his other reason — that the bandits had no chance to learn from any one that Timon had the gold they came to steal — would, if valid, argue their whole scene spurious, not the prose of it alone. But the argument is negligible. It would be no great breach of dramatic license if Shak spere left their source of information obscure — by no means the greatest breach of this kind that Shakspere has left us ; Alcibiades had a whole army, however, to tell them. It would be just as reasonable to argue that Apemantus and the others had no way of knowing where Timon was.

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The Steward

It was to make way for the steward's visit that the inferior author tagged the scene of the servants' parting with a solilo quy in which the steward resolves to follow his master. While it does not thence ensue that this author wrote all or any of the steward's visit, traces of his hand in it will at least not be surprising. But Shakspere also planned the visit of the faithful steward. Two hundred lines below, Shakspere em ploys him to guide the senators to Timon's cave; and the first words at that point unmistakably imply the steward's previous visit. Since Shakspere, then, assumes the present scene, we might expect to find it all or partly his.

Partly his, partly the other writer's, we do find it. Between the thin lines of the opening soliloquy, for instance, the signa ture of the inferior author is manifest in his unfailing irreg ularities and rimes. Witness the gaucherie of the third and fifth verses, the rimes that follow, and the nonsense of the last couplet :

" O you gods !

Is yond despis'd and ruinous man my lord? Full of decay and failing? O monument And wonder of good deeds evilly bestow'd ! What an alteration of honour has desperate want made! What viler thing upon the earth than friends Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends ! How rarely does it meet with this time's guise, That man was wished to love his enemies ! Grant I may ever love, and rather woo Those that would mischief me than those that do ! "

Will any reader feel that this is Shakspere's ? But as soon as the steward gets through his soliloquy and speaks to Timon, the style leaps into poetry, and the metrical tokens of the in ferior writer — save for a single rime — vanish. The poetry, surely Shakspere's, lasts to line 508. There, after a broken verse, starts a prosaic digression, occupied with Timon's contradictory suspicions of the steward he has just pronounced " so true, so just, so comfortable," and showing enough of the inferior author's tricks of meter to make his hand highly prob-

52

able. This digression over at line 530, the thought of line 508 is taken up again in a style such as that author never wrote :

" Thou singly honest man, Here, take : the gods out of my misery Have sent thee treasure. Go, live rich and happy ; But thus condition'd : thou shalt build from men ; Hate all, curse all ; show charity to none, And let the famished flesh slide from the bone, Ere thou relieve the beggar ; give to dogs What thou deniest to men ; let prisons swallow 'em, Debts wither 'em to nothing; be men like blasted woods, And may diseases lick up their false bloods ! And so farewell and thrive."

Evidence within and without the scene, then, points to two authors in the steward's visit. It need not be argued that the exact division here made is beyond dispute. We may in deed be fairly certain that the first soliloquy is spurious ; that the passage thence to line 508, and the passage after line 530, are genuine. But the digression between these lines, though far more likely the inferior author's, might conceivably be Shaks- pere's. The evidence does not sanction the clean-cut demark- ation we have made in some of the preceding scenes ; and it is inadvisable to stretch the facts. One thing somewhat signi ficant, however, should be noted — that the two parts most surely Shakspere's make the scene; the soliloquy and the digression may be omitted with advantage.

V, i

It is admitted on all hands that Shakspere wrote all that follows line 57 in the visit of the poet and the painter, and the entire visit of the senators. So much may be taken as self- evident. And just because he wrote the body of the scene we have some reason not to follow Mr. Fleay, as most critics do, in giving the opening dialogue of the poet and the painter, before line 57, to the other author. It is mainly prose ; and in it Phrynia and Timandra are spelled Phrinica and Timandylo. But the prose is Shaksperean enough; and the misspelling is more like a corruption, or a printer's error, than an author's.

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Final proof is lacking, and is not of great importance; but it is at least more probable that Shakspere wrote the introduction to his own scene — an introduction that certainly contains one string of conceits neater than his coadjutor usually gives us:

" Promising is the very air o' the time ; it opens the eyes of expecta tion ; performance is ever the duller for his act ; and, but in the plainer and simpler kind of people, the deed of saying is quite out of use. To promise is most courtly and fashionable ; performance is a kind of will or testament, which argues a great sickness in his judgment that makes it." V, i, 24.

Aside from the question of authorship, the belated entrance of the poet and painter calls for a word. In the spurious pas sage in his visit Apemantus sees them coming and " gives way " to escape them. We therefore expect them when he leaves ; but then the bandits enter, and the steward follows next. Only after these have taken up two hundred lines — in modern editions, after a new act has started — do the poet and the painter finally arrive. This matter, though much agitated, need not detain us long here.18 Let us only remember that it is a spurious passage in which the poet and painter are an nounced approaching; and if we later prove that that passage was added after Shakspere wrote the play, we shall see that in his play the poet and painter were not announced at all, and were therefore not belated. Our fifth act can then open where it does without confusion.

18 Having no bearing on the authorship. To show this fact, let us assume — for once, to save space, anticipating — that the man who wrote the announcement of the poet and painter interpolated Shakspere's play. Two inferences might then be drawn. First, that as he announced the poet and painter, he wrote the scene in which they come; but if so, he would have placed it next. Second, that he wrote the scenes that inter vene between announcement and arrival — 'the bandits' visit and the steward's; but if so, he would have brought them in after the poet and painter. All this regardless of the fact that all three scenes show the clearest evidence of Shakspere. Finally, the scenes have not been shuffled ; for the painter mentions that the " soldiers " (bandits) and the steward have preceded him at Timon's cave.

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V; ii, iii, iv

As the usual view of them is incontestable, we may take the last three scenes together. The first scene before Athens has not been doubted to be Shakspere's. The ten-line scene at Timon's grave which follows it is quite as certainly the other author's. The style of the ten lines, particularly of the last four, is flat. We had not heard before that Alcibiades was a linguist ; and we are rather impatient with a soldier who can not read in line 6 though he could read in line 4 — and did there read the superfluous epitaph that Timon must be thought to have hung upon some tree before he put the real one on his tombstone.19 To such shifts is the inferior author put to save the genuine epitaph for Alcibiades to read — as Shakspere makes him — in the closing scene of the play. For the final scene, again, can only be considered Shakspere's work.20

In many passages our evidence has led us to ascriptions that seem practically final ; in others to grave probabilities ; in only two to serious doubt. The first half of the opening scene we gave to Shakspere ; but we were doubtful of the prose part of the last half, where Apemantus figures. The banquet scene we gave in toto to the other author. The little scene that leads up to the dunning we found Shakspere's. The next scene we divided into three parts. We gave the dunning it-

19 Dr. Brinsley Nicholson's explanation of the soldier's actions seems correct. The soldier enters, looking for Timon, and calls : " Who's there ? Speak, ho ! " Then after a moment he says, " No answer ! What is this ? " " This " proves to be some sign or other, which reads :

" Timon is dead, who hath outstretched his span. Some beast read this ; there does not live a man."

When the soldier has read this couplet, he sees the tomb ; so he says : " Dead, sure ; and this his grave. What's on this tomb I cannot read." It has been suggested that the soldier spoke the couplet, and that the word " read " in it should be " rear'd." But the natural explanation seems to be the one Nicholson gives {New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874, page 251).

20 There two epitaphs — both from Plutarch — are read as one. It is just possible that Shakspere did not notice the contradiction between them — one of them saying, " Seek not my name," the other, " Here lie I, Timon." Or it is possible, as has been guessed, that he copied both, intending later to scratch one.

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self to Shakspere; the slap-stick feats of Apemantus then ensuing to the other author ; and the reckoning of Timon with the steward — barring the ten lines of prose which break it in the middle, and which we left for consideration later — to Shakspere again. In the third act we ascribed the first two begging scenes, of Lucullus and Lucius, to Shakspere ; but the third, that of Sempronius, to the other man. To the latter we also attributed the second dunning and the scene of Alci- biades' banishment. The one verse speech of the mock-ban quet we found Shakspere's palpably; the prose of it we left in doubt. Almost all the last two acts we adjudged Shak spere's. The only portions not ascribed to him were the solil oquy appended to the parting of the servants ; the break-down in the middle of Apemantus' visit to Timon ; the soliloquy beginning, and probably the digression breaking, the visit of the steward; and the ten lines of the soldier at the tomb. The evidence we found for these ascriptions is so strong that most critics have accepted the larger part of it as conclusive. Yet it has not satisfied us everywhere. More evidence will be welcome if available ; and we shall find in the next chapter that more is at hand.

It will be convenient to have our ascriptions together in a table that will show wherein they differ from those some what generally agreed upon. Mr. Fleay's are taken as the norm of the latter, and italics mark the departures we have made. These are not many ; some five hundred lines in all are transferred to Shakspere, and fifteen to the other author; but some of the changes will later prove of the first importance. They will be clearer if SJbakspere's work alone is given.

Mr. Fleay's Ascriptions The Present Ascriptions

I, i, 1-184; 249-264; 284-293 I, i (entire)

II, i II, i

II, ii, 1-45; 132-194; 205-242 II, ii, 1-46; 133-242 (except one

line) III, i III, ii

III, vi, 95-115 III, vi (entire)

IV, i IV, i

IV, ii, 1-29 IV, ii, 1-29

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IV, iii, 1-291; 363-398; 414-453 IV, iii, 1-291; 376-463,' 479~5o8 ;

530-543

V, i, 57-231 V, i (entire) V, ii V, ii

V, iv V, iv

A Metrical Table

The two verse-tests that help us most in Timon — rimes and irregular lines — have been already used, where needed, almost to the full. It remains only to tabulate them, with the minor tests, for the whole play. One meets some difficulties in making out the table. It is always hard to maintain an exact criterion for run-on lines, or even for irregularities; and a special difficulty occurs in some of the inferior author's scenes — the impossibility of telling whether certain passages are meant for prose or verse. So far as possible, however, one criterion has been kept up; and in every case of doubt that figure is here given which will cause the least divergence. In in terpreting the table, also, some allowance must of course be made for a natural disparity in certain points of technic be tween scenes of either author written in long speeches, and other scenes by the same author but made up of broken dia logue. For this reason it is natural that the per cent, of Shak- spere's feminine endings and of his run-on lines should once or twice approach the per cent, of the other author, and vice versa. With this reservation in the case of a few scenes, the following table shows us practically constant divergences for all phenomena. They may be summarized about as follows:

The least divergence occurs in the frequency of feminine endings, in which Shakspere's ratio to the other author is as 22 to 14. A greater difference is seen in run-on lines, of which Shakspere uses 27 to the other author's 12. But the marked distinctions appear in the use of rimes and of irregular lines, for which the ratios are as 4 to 21, and 4 to 18, re spectively.

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SHAKSPERE'S VERSE

		Feminine	Run-on	Rimes.	Irregular
Passage.	Verses.	Endings.	Lines.		Lines.
		No.	%	No.	*	No.	*	No.	%
I, i, 1-184; 249-264;	210	51	.24	57	.27	2	.01 —	4	.02 —
284-293.
II, i.	35	7	.20	12	•34	2	.06—	3	.09-
II, ii, 1-46.	46	ii	•24	10	.22	2	.04+	3	.07—
II. ii, 133-242.	109	3i	.28	30	.28	4	.04—	7	.07—
Ill, i, 50-66.	16	4	•25	4	.25	2	.12*	2	.12
Ill, ii, 42-46 ; 68-94.	32	7	.22	6	• 19	4	.12*	4	.12
Ill, vi, 98-115.	18	2	.11	4	.22	4	.22*	i	.06—
IV, i.	40	5	.12	10	•25	6	•IS*	i	.02 -f
IV, ii, 1-29.	29	8	.28	4	•M	2	.07 —	i	.03 +
IV, iii, 1-291 ; 376-	39°	76	.20	104	.27	10	•03—	15	.04—
3985418-452:478-
508; 530-543-
V, i, 44-231.	1 88	48	.26	44	•23	IO	-05^	4	.02 +
V, ii.	i7	5	.29	6	•35	2	.12*	o	.OO
V, iv.	85	10	.12	35	•41	4	•OS"	i	.01 +
Totals.	1215	265	.22	326	.27	54	.04+	46	.04—

THE SPURIOUS VERSE

Passage.	Verses.	Feminine Endings.	Run-on Lines.	Rimes.	Irregular Lines.
		No.	*	No.	*	No.	*	No.	*
I, ii.	I56	24	•15	19	.12	32	.21	24	•15
Ill, iii.	34	7	.21	5	•15	6	.18	9	.26
Ill, iv.	72	7	.10	7	.10	8	.11	12	•17
Ill, V.	117	20	•17	18	•15	30	.25	20	• 17
IV, ii, 30-50.	22	2	.09	2	.09	8	.36	6	•27
IV, iii, 362-375.	13	0	.00	I	.08	o	.oof	2	•15
V, iii.	IO	O	.00	I	.10	4	.40	I	.10
Totals.	424	60	.14	53	.12	88	.21	74	.18

* The anomalies — the only striking ones in the table — are merely ap parent. In each case they are caused by one or two final couplets, which in scenes of very few verses, of course give a high per cent. Leave out all final couplets, and the column will range, as was said, between .00 and .02 per cent.

t The only verses in which the inferior author did not rime are in this piece of repartee, in which rime would be out of the question.

X"

CHAPTER IV SHAKSPERE'S PRIORITY

" To be thus is nothing ; but to be safely thus." So far we have been bent on taking our play apart, distributing its scenes and passages between the authors ; our work is only half done until we find out why and in what way those scenes and pas sages were put together in the incongruous whole. When we have found reason to give Shakspere nearly everything that is worthy in the play, and the other author much that is wretched, we are called on to account for the presence of both authors and both kinds of work. We ask immediately whether Shak- spere's work in Timon was done first or last; was he or the other author the reviser? And evidently much depends upon the answer — nothing less than Shakspere's responsibility for the play as it stands.

Additional proof of the ascriptions we have made is yet to come, and will accompany the answer to the question just propounded. But if we may take our ascriptions, for a moment, as even roughly accurate, a glance will show how clearly the scenes and passages most surely spurious seem to be additions to the play as Shakspere had written it. Shak spere ended his first scene with all the persons going in to dinner; the other author seems to carry out the hint in his wretched banquet scene. Shakspere closed the dunning scene by sending the creditors off the stage ; the man who made them turn and stay to joke with Apemantus seems certainly to have written later. Shakspere wrote two scenes where Timon's friends deny him; the other man put in a third. Then he ap parently repeated Shakspere's dunning scene; and after this wrote in the scene of Alcibiades' banishment, the utter insula tion of which argues it inserted in a play already written. He tagged to Shakspere's scene of the parting of the servants the steward's maudlin soliloquy ; for we can hardly think the scene

58

59

was added to the soliloquy. But the clearest of all his inser tions is the drollery of Apemantus in the middle of his visit to Timon; for the two lines between which it comes were apparently consecutive in Shakspere. We need push these probabilities no further. It is enough at present to see that all the spurious passages seem naturally explainable as addi tions to Shakspere ; that hardly one can be plausibly explained as antedating him. To make safer the ascriptions on which the theory of his priority rests, and to put that theory, if possible, beyond dispute, certain further arguments will now be offered.

I

The first of these, touching the treatment of Ventidius by the two authors, is Mr. Fleay's. It is easy to see what Shak spere meant to do with Ventidius. In the first scene he makes Timon, in affluence, ransom Ventidius from a debtor's prison with five talents. At the close of the second act, when the now insolvent Timon is appealing to his friends for help, he lets him send to Ventidius as a last and surest friend, now rich, for those five talents. We cannot think that Shakspere meant to stop here. In a later scene, surely — after the other friends of Timon have deserted — he meant to show Ventidius denying the request. Such a refusal would have put the climax on the ingratitude of Timon's friends; and without it the part of Ventidius in the play is pointless. But before we reach the request to Ventidius we have seen it practically nullified. For the author of the banquet scene could think of no better way to open it than by making Ventidius1 offer to repay Timon's loan. With this error behind him, the author found it difficult \ / to show Ventidius refusing Timon's appeal; so instead he merely mentions the refusal casually in the scene where he displays that of his own Sempronius.

We may be sure, with Mr. Fleay, that Shakspere did not frustrate his own plan ; that the passage in the banquet scene which cripples the device of the appeal to Ventidius for aid, and the consequent bare mention of the latter's defection

1 Who finds time to take over the estate of a father who finds time to die, between the first and second scenes, where there is no interval.

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where Shakspere apparently meant to make it a climactic scene, are the work of another author. If so, that author wrote last. For Shakspere has the plot of the Ventidius matter ; the other man subverts it. Shakspere's parts of it had a source;2 the others none. Less significantly, Shakspere spells the name Ventidius or Ventiddius; the other man corrupts it to Ven- tigius or Ventidgius? It must needs be that the author who followed the source, constructed the plot, and spelled the name correctly, preceded the author who deviated from the source, undermined the plot, and corrupted the spelling of the name. And if we could still assume the contrary — that the spurious passages about Ventidius are relics from an older play — we should have to think not only that Shakspere was strangely satisfied to rewrite two of them and leave two others imbecile, not only that he sanctioned the abortion of the Ventidius plot, but that this abortion occurred in two plays, and that Shak spere, revising the first, did not see it and correct it in the second.

So far Mr. Fleay ; who misses only the last link in the argu ment. For he does not seem to have suspected that Shakspere may have actually written the refusal of Ventidius as planned. That Shakspere probably did write the scene out, and that the other author cut it and replaced it with his own Sempronius scene, will be corollaries to the farther-reaching argument that now begins.

II

In the last scene of the second act, where Timon finally gives ear to the steward's revelations and resolves to send out servants to his friends for help, Shakspere's poetry is at its height. Just about the center of the scene, however, there occurs an ugly break, for ten lines only, into prose. The mere lapse into prose, striking enough at such a point, is not the oddest thing about the passage. Others will be noted if the prose be taken with its context.

" Timon. And, in some sort, these wants of mine are crown'd, That I account them blessings ; for by these

2 Page 19.

3 Compare I, i and II, ii with I, ii and III, iii.

-'

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Shall I try friends. You shall perceive how you Mistake my fortunes ; I am wealthy in my friends. Within there ! Flavius ! Servilius !

Enter three Servants.

Ser. My lord? my lord?

Tim. I will dispatch you severally : you to Lord Lucius ; to Lord Lucullus you, I hunted with his honour to-day ; you to Sempronius ; com mend me to their loves, and I am proud, say, that my occasions have found time to use 'em toward a supply of money. Let the request be fifty talents.

Flam. As you have said, my lord.

Steward. Lord Lucius and Lucullus! Humh ! " II, ii, 190.

This will be enough. The scene returns to verse now — and to such poetry as leaves no question of the author. Yet we must remember what takes place in the remainder of the scene. Let us therefore note that Timon now turns to the steward who is sneering at the names of Lucius and Lucullus and bids him go and demand a thousand talents from the senate. The steward answers that the senate has refused already. Timon can then send him only to Ventidius for the five talents which the latter owes.

Just before the prose begins, as will be noted, Timon calls two servants — Flavius and Servilius. Three answer; and of these one is Flaminius,4 one Servilius,5 the third nameless. Clearly it took two hands to make these blunders. One writer would not, in a breath, have changed the number of the ser vants and the name of one of them.

If the blunders in the bit of prose were all, the passage /^A* might be negligible. We could call it spurious, if so doing t)bJ& would explain it, and be through. But the fact is that this bit t of prose, intrinsically trivial, will be found to form a kind of keystone in the entire structure of the first three acts. Many threads of plot begin or end or center in it; and genuine or spurious, almost all the scenes in the three acts connect, and

* That Flam, (line 203) stands for Flaminius is apparent from the next scene. We cannot suppose Flavius, in line 194, to be a misprint for Flaminius without ruining the meter of the line ; and the name Flavius has already occurred in the play (I, ii) — of which occurrence later.

5 As may be told from the second scene following.

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many of them strangely and suspiciously connect, with the bit of prose or with its context. We have just been speaking, for instance, of the part Ventidius has in the play. His part begins in the first scene, where Shakspere makes him borrow of Timon; is perverted in the banquet scene, where the other writer makes him offer to repay; and therefore has to be cut short in the present scene, where Shakspere makes Timon him self ask for repayment. For the other author thought Venti dius could not now be shown refusing; so he merely let Sempronius mention the refusal. Or take another thread connecting with the banquet scene. Throughout that scene, but nowhere else, the steward's name is Flavius. Now in the line preceding our prose extract, Timon, talking with the steward, calls forth another servant named Flavius. But in the prose itself this name turns to Flaminius^. and so remains thereafter. The facts may be suspected to have a connection. Such are the bearings of the bit of prose on what precedes it. With what follows it connects more closely; for three threads of plot begin in its ten lines. In the prose bit Timon sends to Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius, for fifty talents each. Three scenes follow in which Timon's servants inter view Lucullus, Lucius, and Sempronius, respectively. Now it is manifest that any theory as to the author of the bit of prose must make peace with a theory as to the author of the three scenes. For instance, if the prose is held to be inter polated, so the scenes must be; they could not have already existed in the play without the prose to prepare for and explain them. And yet — to complicate the matter — so easy a solution cannot be right unless a point in our reasoning so far is wrong ; for we have already given judgment for two authors in the three scenes — Shakspere in the first two and the other writer in the third. To let this division hold is therefore part of our problem with the bit of prose. Curious, again, seem the con nections of the piece of prose with the second dunning scene. Flaminius, who only came into this name in the prose bit, again appears in that scene. Sempronius also — who is never else where mentioned except in the prose bit and in his own scene — is referred to there.6 A Lucius, too, comes forth there;

"Line 112.

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what Lucius it is hard to say. In the bit of prose and in his own scene, Lucius is a friend whom Timon tries to borrow from ; this man, on the contrary, is dunning Timon. The real Lucius and Lucullus, finally, seem to appear for the last time at the mock-banquet. They are not named ; none of the guests are; but the excuses which the first and second lords tender^ Timon fit Lucullus and Lucius respectively.

In short, our bit of prose not only contains interesting errors in itself, but it connects, sometimes through those errors and sometimes otherwise, sometimes vitally and sometimes acci dentally, with almost every scene in the first half of the play. Pure accident, of course, that it should be the focus of the first three acts; but a lucky accident. An explanation of the errors within the bit of prose alone would be interesting, but it cannot be discovered without regard to the connections, and it is important just in so far as it radiates through the con nections. Let us recapitulate the complications which the explanation must or may unravel. As to the bit of prose itself, we must see first why it is prose at all — why it breaks into the verse at an odd point; then why two servants in it become three; and why Flavius turns to Flaminius. Outside of it we may learn something more about Ventidius; find the relation of the Flavius in the banquet to the Flavius here ; get further information, certainly, on the Lucius and Lucullus scenes; and probably on the second dunning scene and the mock-banquet.

The critics have not worried much about the outside con nections of the bit of prose. They have tried mainly to explain the blunders that occur within it. One explanation has ap peased them all: the blunders fall within the bit of prose; therefore it is spurious. Half the critics, of course, construe it as a relic from the older play they think Shakspere was revising. The others think it an addition to the play that Shakspere wrote. No advocate of either theory has noted that the explanation leads both theories from the frying-pan into the fire.

For suppose the bit of prose is from an older play. It did not stand alone there. Then we must think that when Shak-

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spere was revising the whole scene he was content to leave ten crucial lines untouched, breaking it in the middle. We must also believe that he made the blunders ; for on this theory the latter evidently fall, not in the prose itself, but in the context Shakspere wrote before it. Thus a theory intended to acquit Shakspere of the blunders only ends in accusing him of them anew, and this without attempting to explain how he or any man could naturally have made them. Over such a solution, soon to disprove itself anyhow, we need not linger.

But the opposite belief — that the prose was interpolated in the play — leaves us in no better plight. This theory is Mr. Fleay's; and his statement of it has remained unaltered by his followers. Mr. Fleay believes that Shakspere summoned Flavius and Servilius, to send them, one to the senators, the other to Ventidius; and that these two requests were all that Shakspere wrote. But an interpolator, he thinks, devised three more requests — to Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius — and of course wrote in the prose bit containing them. For these errands the interpolator had to use the two servants and to in troduce a third. The servants thus dispatched, he had no one but the steward to send to the senators and to Ventidius. Inci dentally he changed one servant's name from Flavius to Flaminius.

Although it gives no reason for that change, the theory has found many adherents. Strangely enough, no one has noticed that its basic assumption is false. Shakspere did not send to the senators. If he wrote none of the prose, he sent only — and very strangely, after just announcing that he would " try friends" — to Ventidius. He would not have called two ser- » vants. If he had, one of them would have been left on his hands; or if in his play the steward went to Ventidius, both of them. Unsound at bottom, the theory thus ends in a con fusion as bad as that it started to explain.

It was always weak. The most important theory that Mr. Fleay put forth on Timon, and the most generally accepted, it is still the most pernicious. For grant — and here lies the importance — that the bit of prose with the appeals to Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius was added to the play, and it fol-

• Jrw*

f

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lows, as we saw, that the three scenes in which those lords deny them were also added. Nothing else is logically possible. But this is to pluck the very heart out of Shakspere's play. It is to suppose that he left out all motivation for his last two acts; that he put forth the beginning and the end of a play with no middle to connect them; that without showing the defection of a single friend he made his generous hero turn man-hater for no reason whatsoever. All this Mr. Fleay thinks Shakspere did ; for as he prints the play,7 Timon closes this scene boasting that "his fortunes cannot sink among his friends," and opens the next8 with the words " uncover, dogs, and lap," addressed to those same friends, whom he is now covering with curses and hot water.

Finally, the theory leads us to these straits against esthetic evidence. For we have seen that many of the critics who have followed Mr. Fleay as to the bit of prose have still re belled against the logic which then forces them to take the Lucius and Lucullus scenes as interpolations ; and not only because those scenes are necessary in the play, but because, as appeared in the last chapter, they seem Shaksperean. No such claim is made for the Sempronius scene. But the logical necessity has prevailed; only one critic, and he in spite of logic, has openly ascribed the scenes to Shakspere.9

Thus both explanations end in further complications. Each leads us to confusion; neither clears the premises. We are still asking why the bit of prose obtrudes itself in the wrong place; why the two servants were changed to three; why Flavius was turned into Flaminius ; what he has to do with the other Flavius in the banquet scene; how we can explain our bit of prose so as to give the Lucius and Lucullus scenes to Shakspere, but the Sempronius scene to the other author; and all the other questions with which we started. Neither explanation answers any of the questions. The refutation of them both, however, has made the way clear for a third theory.

7 New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874.

8 The verse of the mock-banquet ; the five and a half scenes intervening Mr. Fleay thinks spurious. ' See page 41.

6

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That theory is that one line only in our bit of prose is spurious; that nothing but the insertion of that line made prose of the rest of it, which Shakspere wrote and wrote in verse ; and that in the passage as he wrote it there was no more contradiction in the names and number of the servants than appears in the quotation now to be made.

The hunting trip of-Timon and Lucullus was not Shak- spere's device. The other author planned it in his banquet scene.10 If that author wrote last — which we may assume in order to prove — one clause in the mooted bit of prose must, then, be his — " I hunted with his honour to-day." " You to Sempronius " — the next words — must be his also, if, as almost all agree, he inserted the Sempronius scene. Let the nine words be extracted:

" Timon. Within there ! Flavius ! Servilius ! Enter the Servants.

Ser. My lord?

My lord?

Tim. I will dispatch you severally :

You to Lord Lucius ; to Lord Lucullus you ; Commend me to their loves, and I am proud, say, That my occasions have found time to use 'em Toward a supply of money. Let the request Be fifty talents.

Flav. As you have said, my lord.

Stew. Lord Lucius and Lucullus ! Humh ! "

One line out, the passage settles into blank verse. Even the pieces of the broken lines fit. So, we may be sure, Shakspere wrote it. Such a reconstruction is not possible by accident. But mark how all the evidence confirms the reconstruction, and how the blunders now explain themselves. When Timon announced that he was going to " try friends," he did not mean Ventidius alone, but Lucius and Lucullus also. But when the steward sneered at these two lords — " Lord Lucius and Lucul lus ! Humh ! " — he had no Sempronius to sneer at. Shak-

10 1, ii, 192. The steward, in his short soliloquy at the opening of the dunning scene, does indeed say that Timon is coming in " from hunting." But it was the inferior author who took the hint, connected Lucullus with the hunt, and issued the latter's invitation to it in the banquet scene.

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spere had written the requests to Lucius and Lucullus, and those only. To these lords he had sent Flavius and Servilius, reserving the steward for the proposed errand to the senators, and for the actual one to Ventidius. The second author — for we may now call him so with confidence — left the servants to those missions. He only introduced one more request, to Sempronius, and one more servant to bear it. He did not take the trouble to make Timon call this third servant, but merely changed the stage-direction so as to let three servants enter; and indeed he seems to have ignored the line where . Timon calls the servants, for he left the name of Flavius standing in that line, although he changed it to Flaminius a few lines below — for a reason of which we shall speak in a moment. He left the third servant nameless. When the latter gets to Sempronius he is merely " a third servant " ; and Sempronius himself has to be explained as " another of Timon's friends."

Here the argument gets beyond the present scene. The fact that Shakspere cleared the way for the Lucius and Lucul lus scenes dispels the logical necessity which, against esthetic evidence, has forced ascription of those scenes to the interpo lator; rather it shifts the logical necessity to Shakspere's side and forces us to follow the esthetic^ judgment that those scenes are his. But the fact that the interpolator added the request to Sempronius makes it sure that he added also, as esthetic judgment. indicates, the Sempronius scene.

About this scene another fact is fairly sure. When Shak spere made Timon beg of Lucius, Lucullus, and Ventidius, he doubtless meant to show the faithlessness of all three friends. To that of Lucius and Lucullus he devotes two scenes. That

of Ventidius — the man Timon redeemed from jail — would

J i

have made a climactic third scene. Surely Shakspere meant to write that scene ; and there is therefore a presumption that he actually wrote it. Now the second author had good reason to cut the scene if it was before him. We have seen how he had nullified it. Having made Ventidius previously offer to return Timon's loan unasked, he could hardly show him spurning an appeal for the money in a later scene. It is altogether prob able that that scene was before him in Shakspere's writing;

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that he cut it and replaced it with his own Sempronius scene — making some effort to repair the break by just mentioning therein that Ventidius had proved faithless; and that these were the only reasons why he brought Sempronius into the play at all.

Sempronius is mentioned only once again — in the second dunning scene. That scene we have already given, on the surest evidence, to the interpolator. The mention of Sem pronius in it clinches the ascription ; the name would mean nothing unless written by the man who had already added Sempronius to the play. Even so it is obscure enough; for the reference is to Sempronius Ullorxa^ What this new name means is past finding out. But one thing is sure : Sem pronius, with or without his weird cognomen, was never in Shakspere's play. Moreover, the strange Lucius of this scene gives evidence that the scene was added. He is not the Lucius of two scenes back; and that Lucius we have just found to be Shakspere's character. This one must be the other author's — whether intended for the same character or not.

Among the guests at the mock-banquet, two scenes further on, Lucius and Lucullus apparently appear once more. They are nameless ; but their excuses betray them. Nothing betrays Sempronius; he is not present. Perhaps the facts do not warrant dogmatism ; but as Shakspere's two characters are \ present at the mock-banquet, and the other author's character is absent — though that author took pains to invite him12 — one at least inclines to think that Shakspere wrote the prose, as we know he wrote the verse, of the mock-banquet.

We must now complete the circuit by returning to the first banquet; for the one thing we have left unsolved about our bit of prose — why Flavius was altered to Flaminius — has a bearing, as we thought, upon that scene. We began with the assumption that the scene was an interpolation. The clearest evidence of style and meter, with the many blunders in the

11 III, iv, 112. The acme of subtlety is attained in Leo's labored argu ment that Ullorxa = Vliorxa = Vliorxa = Five pounds or ten angels I See Jahrbuch, XVI, 400.

"Ill, iv, 112.

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scene, proclaimed it spurious ; and the subversion of the Ven- tidius plot in it left little doubt that it was added to the play. So we took the hunting trip projected in this scene, applied it to the bit of prose we were discussing, and found the line which, extracted, left the prose verse. Our argument now returns upon itself to prove that the banquet scene, as we as sumed, is an interpolation.

The matter is simple. Throughout the banquet scene the steward is named Flavius. Shakspere never gave him any name; on the contrary, he made Timon, while talking with the steward, call another servant named Flavius.13 It will not be held that Shakspere forgot the names of his own characters. The man who called the steward Flavius in the banquet scene must have been the other author. And it is easy to guess — though it makes little difference — how he made the error. Casting about for the name of the steward he was introducing, he probably remembered, or looked ahead and saw, that in later scenes the name Flavius was prominent as that of a re tainer of Timon's; and the steward being anonymous, he mis took that name for the steward's, and so wrote it in the banquet scene. When he came, however, to those later scenes, he saw his error. Therefore he changed Flavius, in the last scene of the second act, and in the first scene of the third, to Flaminius. But the very first occurrence of it — where Timon calls the servants to go to his friends — he overlooked. And that oc currence tells the tale.14

One step further and the argument is closed. Shakspere must have written the dunning scene. He presupposes it. The scene we have now demonstrated to be his, where Timon sends to borrow of the lords, depends upon it, is impossible without it, and indeed explicitly refers back to it; for Timon orders that the borrowed money be given to the " fellows "

13 II, ii, 194.

14 It may be repeated that this Flavius, being metrical, is not a misprint for Flaminius. Even if it were, the argument would not suffer ; for the man who gave a name in the banquet scene to the steward whom Shakspere everywhere left nameless was the second author, however he made the mistake.

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that have dunned him.15 A scene indispensable in Shak- spere's play, one he presupposes and refers to, cannot be in terpolated; and in giving it to Shakspere we merely certify, again, esthetic evidence. It is almost supererogation to go on to say that the little scene preceding and preparing for the dunning is evidently Shakspere's also. It is equally unneces sary to argue further that the foolery of Apemantus, follow ing the dunning, is the second author's, since we have already seen that this foolery cannot possibly have been written by the man who wrote the dunning itself.16 In both these pas sages, moreover, the esthetic evidence — in the first for Shak spere, in the other for the second writer — was strong enough to be held final.

Let us take stock of what we have done. Perhaps the mass of arguments that we collected upon evidence of style and meter begins to shape itself to something like a pyramid. Its base lay in the division of the play made in the last chapter; its apex points to the single interpolated line in the last scene of the second act. To begin we let the evidence of style and meter set apart the spurious from the genuine without regard to any theory as to how they had been put together. The style and meter spoke decisively at many points; a little less than finally at others ; dubiously at only two ; and at all they spoke together. Taking the most certain cases, we then saw the natural explanation of the play to be the theory that the unknown author followed Shakspere. The treatment of Ven- tidius by the two authors fortified that theory. The discov ery of the single interpolated line put it beyond reasonable dispute.

Meanwhile we had checked off the ascriptions previously made on grounds of style and meter. The way the two au thors handled Ventidius certified Shakspere's hand in the first scene of the play and in the last scene of the second act ; the interpolator's in the banquet scene and the Sempronius scene. The single interpolated line, with its connections, did more. It proclaimed again that the banquet scene is the in terpolator's. It showed the second act — the foolery of Ape-

15 II, ii, 238. 16 See page 38.

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mantus, added to the dunning scene, and the single line itself, excepted — to be Shakspere's. In the third act it gave the Lucius and Lucullus scenes to Shakspere, and therewith bridged the gap yawning in his play; argued that the Sem- pronius and the second dunning scenes are interpolations, and that the former probably supplants a Ventidius scene that Shakspere wrote; and finally made it likely that the prose of the mock-banquet is Shakspere's work.

In every scene they reach, the arguments have ratified esthe tic judgment. On every part of every scene all the kinds of evidence agree. Only one scene in the first three acts do the later arguments leave untouched — the banishment of Alcibi- ades. Happily that is the one scene of the play which we are most certain was interpolated. Happily, too, that very scene will start us on an argument which will take us through the last two acts, and which will, returning, once more argue it in terpolated.

Ill

It is hoped that the last argument answered the questions raised; it will almost be sufficient if the one now opening does no more at present than raise certain other questions. These are not, primarily, questions of authorship; for merely to decide the authorship of the two acts remaining, further argu ment is scarcely necessary. All but some two hundred lines in the two acts, as we have seen, is Shakspere's unmistakably. The spurious passages are few and patent; and except in one scene we have fixed their limits to the very line. Corrobora- tfon of any of these facts is therefore only incidental to the argument that follows. The chief aim of the argument is to show that Shakspere seems to have left out one important link in the chain of plot in Timon; and that the interpolator supplied in its place a link that Shakspere never intended, and thus seriously changed the meaning of the play. What Shak spere himself may have meant to supply will be a question that will then arise ; and though an attempt to answer it must be deferred to the next chapter, we shall do well at least to throw the question open at this point in our argument.

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In the plot of Timon, taken by and large, the critics have found two main gaps. The first — the lack of -motivation for Timon's change of nature — we have filled. For as long as it was held that all the scenes in which his friends deny him were interpolated, the misanthropy of Timon had no motive, and Shakspere's play was cloven through the middle. But we have found that two of -these scenes are Shakspere's, and that the third replaces, probably, a better scene of his. Shakspere did motivate his misanthrope. But what then? Timon goes off to the woods, curses the friends and enemies who visit him, and dies. Meanwhile his friend Alcibiades, for reasons of his own, musters troops and marches upon Athens. Passing Timon on the way, he parleys somewhat with him, and out of pity adds the misanthrope's cause to his own. Therefore when he conquers Athens he declares that Timon's enemies shall fall with his. Just herein has been found the second great fault of the play. Critics have held that Timon's troubles were domestic matters ; that he suffered little or nothing from the state; and that the downfall of the state is therefore no revenge for him. But even if it were, it is but incidental to the revenge of Alcibiades ; and so hardly natural and certainly unsatisfactory. It is hardly natural because we can see no great reason why Alcibiades should avenge Timon. It is cer tainly unsatisfactory because in the first place the revenge falls rather on the state which has done Timon little wrong than on the private friends who have played him utterly false ; and in the second place because even this avengement of the hero, instead of being Alcibiades' chief motive, is only sub sidiary to his revenge for himself. In a word, we want a better reason why Timon should be revenged upon the state J of Athens ; a better reason why Alcibiades should be the instru ment of that revenge ; in fact so good a reason that Alcibiades will make that revenge, and not his own, the leading motive of his crusade. If Shakspere meant to give us these, he certainly fell short of his intention; he left a gap in his play. We shall soon see how the interpolator tried to fill that gap, and we shall find ourselves inquiring then how Shakspere may have meant to fill it. The latter question is not without its dangers; we

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are much less safe in looking for what Shakspere may have left out of his play than we have been so far in speaking of what he put into it ; yet if any traces of his plan in this regard are to be found they may be presented for the reader's judg ment. Let us therefore see what evidence there is that Shak spere planned to make the wrongs of Timon largely public,-, and the downfall of the state a full and natural avengement of them ; and that he also meant to make Alcibiades the nat ural instrument of that revenge.

In his very first scene Shakspere takes care to introduce the senators among the flattering guests of Timon. In his second he shows one of them mistrusting Timon's means and sending forth a servant in harsh terms to worry Timon for his debts. The arrival of that servant and two others is the beginning of Timon's fall. But immediately the hero tries to stay himself with the aid of the senate : " Go you, sir," he bids the steward, " to the senators ;

" Of whom, even to the state's best health, I have Deserved this hearing ; bid 'em send o' the instant A thousand talents to me." II, ii, 205.

Twenty times as much as he asked of any single friend. The words in italics are significant. They seem to indicate that Timon is appealing to the senate as a body, as the state ; they certainly show that he is only asking repayment for service he has done the state. What sympathy should we have for him otherwise? But the steward has already tried the senate; with one half-answer or another, they " froze him into silence.'' " These old fellows," rejoins Timon, again implying that he was asking only what was due him, " have their ingratitude in them hereditary." Therefore in his mock-banquet, the next scene of Shakspere's where Timon appears, he singles them out in his diatribe : " The rest of your foes, O gods, the sena tors of Athens, together with the common legge17 of people, what is amiss in them, you gods, make suitable for destruc tion." And in -the scene that follows he again vents his spleen upon the senate :

17 The word is doubtless a corruption (III, vi, 89).

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" Thou cold sciatica,

Cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt . As lamely as their manners," IV, i, 23.

But it is only when we come to Timon's scene with Alci biades that we learn the full measure of his service to the state. " I have heard, and grieved," says Alcibiades,

" How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth, / / Forgetting thy great deeds when neighbor states,

y

' But for thy sword and fortune, trod upon them — " IV, iii, 92.

and Timon interrupts him. But he has told much. Athens owes to Timon nothing less than its salvation ; purchased partly with the money for which Timon felt he had a right to ask again. The facts are re-echoed by the senators who later come imploring Timon's aid.

" / Sen. The senators with one consent of love Entreat thee back to Athens; who have thought On special dignities, which vacant lie For thy best use and wearing.

2 Sen. They confess

Toward thee forgetfulness too general, gross ; Which now the public body, which doth seldom Play the recanter, feeling in itself A lack of Timon's aid, hath sense withal Of its own fault,16 restraining aid to Timon; *****

i Sen. Therefore so please thee to return with us, And of our Athens, thine and ours, to take The captainship, thou shalt be met with thanks, Allow'd with absolute power, and thy good name Live with authority ; so soon shall we drive back Of Alcibiades the approaches wild — " V, i, 141-169.

Timon's services, their former thanklessness for which they own, have been great; so great that, once more threatened with destruction, the state feels heavily its need of him; so great that only a dictatorship of Timon can now save the state from ruin. Such is the relation Shakspere meant to show

18 In the Folio, " fall."

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existing between Timon and the state. Let us admit that he did not make it clear enough; let us acknowledge that he should have made it so apparent as to need no argument based on the scattered references here quoted; let us even say he should have emphasized it by showing us some scene in which »/ the senate should cast off Timon, just as he showed us scenes where Timon's private friends reject him. That it was part of Shakspere's plan is still unquestionable — though we may begin to question whether he has not left out a scene in which that plan would have reached definite expression.

We may now speak of Alcibiades. In the first half of the ~ play he is Timon's closest friend. None too close, to be sure, . — that fact will call for comment in a moment — but at least the chief associate of Timon, and the only friend that does not play him false. Let us run through Shakspere's references to Alcibiades, so far as possible forgetting for the moment what the other author has to say of him. In the first scene Alci biades enters last of Timon's friends, his entrance furnishing the climax of the exposition. He is again with Timon in the dunning scene. He is certainly not very prominent so far; he has spoken only two lines ; yet we have been allowed to feel that he is Timon's boon-companion. But now begins a gap in his career. It is true that we hear in three words somewhat later that he has been banished ; we are not told why ; and even these words may possibly be interpolated.19 At any rate we see no more of him until the fourth act, where he suddenly appears crusading against Athens for reasons at least vague. Perhaps we do not trouble much about his reasons, though we cannot help feeling that we ought to know them. Only when he resolves to take Timon's cause into his hands, only when we see that this man of whom we know so little has been chosen to close the play with a revenge for the hero, do we begin to trouble somewhat seriously. We wish that we could see more reason why he should avenge Timon; we feel that he should have been shown to be a much closer friend of Timon hitherto, that indeed some bond should have been cre ated between him and Timon so strong that his present reso-

19 See page 45.

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lution would be natural, inevitable. Thus much we might reasonably ask, and yet, even without such a bond, even though we might feel that Shakspere has told us far too little about Alcibiades, we might still accept the latter as a fairly natural avenger if we knew only what Shakspere has told us of him. The trouble is, we know a good deal more. The interpo lator has seen the gap just mentioned and has been at pains to fill it by exhibiting the banishment of Alcibiades. The wrongs of Alcibiades himself are therefore prominently be fore us; they outweigh any other motive that can now be given for his crusade. We are bound to feel that he is fight- * ing first and foremost to avenge himself, and that his revenge for Timon is only an incident. Just this feeling we must forget if we would take the play as Shakspere wrote it. Shak spere leaves us almost wholly in the dark about the wrongs of Alcibiades. He may have failed to give Alcibiades sufficient motive for avenging Timon's cause, — we shall later see if there is any evidence that he planned such a motive, — but at least he gave the soldier no great cause of his own. The most he makes the latter say of his own grievances is incidental to a resolution to redress those of Timon. Alcibiades is just start ing to promise revenge : — " When I have laid proud Athens on a heap " — when Timon interrupts him : " Warr'st thou 'gainst Athens ? " " Ay, Timon," he answers, " and have cause"20 But that cause Shakspere never tells. He leaves it vague because it is immaterial in his plot ; because to lay stress on it would subvert the plot; in a word, because he must make Alcibiades the avenger of Timon's wrongs rather than of his own. Therefore he ignores every grievance of Alci biades, and emphasizes every tie between him and Timon, in the remainder of the play. Thus half the second scene of the last act is used to show how Alcibiades has made common cause with Timon. Says the messenger to the senators there :

" I met a courier, one mine ancient friend, Whom,21 though in general part we were opposed, Yet our old love made a particular force,

"IV, iii, 101.

21 The sentence is not strictly grammatical.

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And made us speak like friends. This man was riding

From Alcibiades to Timon's cave

With letters of entreaty, which imported

His fellowship i' the cause against your city,

In part for his sake mov'd." V, ii, 6.

So Alcibiades himself, when he triumphs, couples Timon's injuries to his own with equal emphasis. The senators beg mercy for their thanklessness to both:

" i Sen. Noble and young,

When thy first griefs were but a mere conceit, Ere thou hadst power or we had cause of fear, We sent to thee to give thy rages balm, To wipe out our ingratitude with loves Above their quantity.

2 Sen. So did we woo

Transformed Timon to our city's love By humble message and by promis'd means. We were not all unkind, nor all deserve The common stroke of war." V, iv, 13.

After more pleading, Alcibiades relents:

" Then there's my glove ; Descend and open your uncharged ports. Those enemies of Timon's and mine own Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof Fall and no more ; " V, iv, 54.

and devotes the close of the play to a noble eulogy of Timon, announced dead:

" Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scorn'dst our brain's flow, and those our droplets which From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead Is noble Timon, of whose memory Hereafter more." V, iv, 75.

So the play developed, so it closed, under Shakspere's hand. It made a good end. Timon's friend, warring upon Athens for reasons scarcely divulged, takes up Timon's cause and

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squares it in the conquest of the city, the restoration of the state to justice, and the punishment of Timon's .enemies. We ask only that this friend have a greater reason for his fight for Timon — 'that Timon's wrongs, if possible, be made the main cause of his fight. Then the vindication would be natural and full. But the second author has robbed it of what meaning Shakspere gave it. He has displayed the banishment of Alci- biades and so laid stress upon his sufferings at the hand of Athens. He has made us feel that Alcibiades fights first and foremost in his own redress. He has all but blinded us to the fact that the only business of Alcibiades in the play — the only purpose he would serve if we but cut the scene of his banish ment — is to avenge Timon. That end only did he serve in the play as Shakspere wrote it; and the reader of that play would care little more about the wrongs of Alcibiades him self than, in another play, he would about the wars of Fortinbras.

Let us repeat the two things which the reader might demand : that Timon's claim on Alcibiades and Timon's service to the thankless state be more conspicuous in the first half of the play. For if Shakspere clearly meant that Timon should suffer largely from the senate's cruelty, he should have let us see their cruelty; and just because he meant to use Alcibiades as the natural avenger of Timon, he should have made the bond between the two much stronger. His failure to do so has left a lacuna in the play. How he may have meant to fill this will be a question for us in the next chapter. At present we may be assured that the scene which misfits the lacuna and distorts the motivation of the last half of the play is the inter polation which its style and meter brand it.

IV

Perhaps a simpler argument for Shakspere's priority will now be welcome. At twenty points, as we found before at tempting to divide the play between the authors, Timon fol lows a source. A glance through the play as now divided will reveal the signal fact that every point of the twenty falls within a scene which Shakspere wrote — that every episode or

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line for which a source is known comes from his pen. The fact will be clearest from the table of the sources in a former chapter. Comment on it may be brief. This single truth would deal a death-blow to the theory that Shakspere's was the second hand in Timon. Shakspere built the play upon the sources. The other author had no source, though frequently he seems to take a cue from Shakspere. That Shakspere wrote first follows irresistibly. Taking more or less from one source or another in almost every scene he wrote, he pieced together the entire plot. The other author merely ran amuck with hints he took from Shakspere; and so far from adding to the plot, upset it.

V

Quite as simple is the final and crucial test. If Shakspere had rewritten two-thirds of an older Timon but left one-third of it standing, the scenes and passages which he rewrote would presumably be dovetailed with the scenes and passages which he let stand. Even if they were but loosely integrated, cer tainly some spene of his would somewhere depend, for motiva tion or for clarity, on something said or done in one of the older^scenes. At the very least, some passage that Shakspere rewrote would contain a reference to something in a passage he preserved. The opposite is all but unthinkable — that he could or would have rewritten two-thirds of a play and in the operation have cut all the connections with the other third he was incorporating.

Let us see what the connections of the spurious scenes are. First, the banquet : not one event that takes place in it is ever mentioned by Shakspere. The single later line referring to it is the other author's.22 Leave the scene out, and no word of Shakspere's tells of the omission. So, naturally, with the clownage added to the dunning scene; the page and fool, and their mistresses and letters, are never heard of again. If we take them out, the dunning scene will close, and the conference of Timon with the steward open — after an intermission; and

22 Timon, sending to Lucullus for money, says, " I hunted with his honour to-day" (interpolated line, II, ii, 198); connecting with the invita tion to the hunt received in the banquet scene.

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no one would suspect that anything had ever come between. As for the Sempronius scene, we have noted already that Sempronius was never mentioned by Shakspere. Leave out the interpolator's references to him, and we should never dream that a Sempronius had been in the play. Omit the second dunning scene, and nothing tells that Timon has passed through the added trial. And so we come to the banishment of Alcibiades — one spurious scene, at last, that Shakspere might be thought to show some knowledge of. We are not absolutely certain, to be sure, that Shakspere presupposed the banishment of Alcibiades. As we trace Alcibiades' career through the last two acts we find him saying that he "has cause " to war on Athens ; and we find a senator informing him that those persons are no longer living who were the reason why he " first went out."23 The expressions are vague. If, however, Shakspere wrote the prose of the mock-banquet, as is probable, he did make one explicit, though unobtrusive, mention of the banishment. "Alcibiades is banished," is a sentence in that scene ;24 and if Shakspere wrote it, he certainly assumed that Alcibiades had been exiled. But we may still doubt whether he assumed that a banishment scene had been shown ; and we may be sure that he did not assume that this particular scene now in the play, where Alcibiades is banished in behalf of his friend the murderer, had been shown. We have found that this scene was interpolated in the play after Shakspere wrote; and Shakspere's reference to the banish ment must have suggested it, not presupposed it. With the rest of the insertions we have easy work. Cut off the soliloquy of the steward after the parting of the servants, and the steward follows Timon anyhow. Take out the jokes of Timon and Apemantus in their scene at Timon's cave, and two lines of Shakspere's come together which no one would imagine had ever been separated. Omit the suspected portions of the steward's visit to Timon, and the scene will stand. Leave out, finally, the little scene in which the soldier copies the inscrip tion on Timon's tomb; when the epitaph is brought in at the end, the reader will not feel cheated at not having seen the operation.

28 V, iv, 27. "Ill, vi, 60.

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Ten spurious scenes and passages scattered through Shak- spere's play and filling one-third of it; and Shakspere never using them, never counting on them, never, except to suggest "one, making a mention of them, — unaware of them. Lift them bodily from the play, and not a word will tell that they were ever in it. The fact is final. Those scenes and passages were no nucleus around which Shakspere built his play. They were extensions to the play he had already built.

CHAPTER V SHAKSPERE'S PLOT

We have just found that if we take out the interpolations we shall have no evidence in what remains that they were ever in the play. We shall have the scenes that Shakspere wrote, with nothing to imply that anything was added by another author; and questions will immediately occur about those scenes. Does Shakspere's work make a play? In so far as it does, what is the nature of the play? If it falls short, what does it lack? An answer to these questions will be easier if we first find out exactly what the aim and the effect of the interpolations was; for in asking how much the addi tions were needed we shall have to ask how much Shakspere had finished in the play, and how much he had only planned and left undone — how far, in other words, his Timon is com plete. The whole problem will be simpler if we have before us the substance of Shakspere's plot, with the parts supplied by the interpolator bracketed.

The exposition shapes the figure of a hero whose great fortune and whose gracious nature have subdued all hearts to his command. Senators, lords, artists, merchants, flock to Timon's lobbies. But their friendship is hollow. A poet and a painter who bring gifts to Timon for their own reward are quick to let us know that Timon's guests are but the trencher- friends who will flee from him in the evil days they see ap proaching. When Timon enters, therefore, " addressing him self courteously to every suitor," we know he is addressing sycophants. His first act is to pay' Ventidius out of prison; his next to give a dowry unasked to speed a servant's wedding. Kind words ensue to all his parasites; they must needs dine with him. When he condones the cynic Apemantus, whom all others swear at, the 'picture of his magnanimity is com plete; and with a special welcome to his friend Alcibiades, he

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leads his guests in to dinner. [The interpolator takes the cue and writes a banquet scene; filling it with hints derived from Shakspere, and beginning to undermine the plot by spoiling the part of Ventidius, by confounding the steward with another servant, and by other blunders.]

In one line we now learn that Timon's house is built upon the sand. He is deep in debt ; " His days and times are past ; " and one creditor is sending a servant to demand immediate satisfaction from him. The servant comes to Timon with two others. Astounded at the clamor they raise in the presence of his friends, Timon is yet, as always, kindly. If the servants will but retire and let his steward dine them, he will see what is the reason they have not been paid. They go off. [But the second writer sends them back again, and brings in Apeman- tus with two strangers, page and fool, to make fun and con fusion.] Timon now learns from the steward the true state of his purse. It has been emptied to his flatterers. But want cannot depress him ; he is " wealthy in his friends." He is " proud " to send to his friends Lucius and Lucullus for fifty talents each. [The interpolator makes him send to Sempro- nius for a third fifty.] From the senate he can command a thousand for past services; and even when that hope is shat tered by the steward, he can still say, " Prithee, man, look cheerly . . . Go to Ventidius ; " Ventidius is rich now, bid him think some good necessity of his friend craves the five talents that cleared him from prison —

r~ " Never speak, or think, \

I That Timon's fortunes 'mong his friends can sink." /

But Lucullus, when approached by Timon's servant, feels that " this is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship, without security"; and so he tries to bribe the servant to say he saw him not. As for Lucius, he realizes " what a wicked beast he was to disfurnish himself against such a good time, when he might have shown himself honour able"; but "he was just sending to use Lord Timon himself." [And we can hardly doubt that Shakspere made Ventidius cap the climax with excuses still more artful; but these, if

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Shakspere wrote them, the interpolator now displaces with his Sempronius anti-climax. Then he goes on with more dunning; scraping up three creditors unknown to Shakspere, and a fourth — Lucius — either unknown to him, or unidentifi able with his Lucius. Worse than all, the author now inserts the scene of Alcibiades' banishment, in which he quite forgets the hero and the main plot of the play. For he feels only that he must give Alcibiades some motive for his fight with Athens, and does not realize that this motive must be vitally connected with Timon's cause; so he simply introduces one more Un known — this time a murderer — and thus gives Alcibiades a motive which unhinges the remainder of the plot. This author has little more to add now. It is barely possible that he re wrote the prose of the mock-banquet; but if he did, he added nothing to the plot therein.] Shakspere devised the scene and wrote at least the verse of it, where Timon, soured by the falseness of his trencher-friends, covers them with shame. / The misanthrope now sets out for the woods, hurling his ^curses back to Athens as he leaves; and the scene in the city •[closes as his servants, in plaintive affection, part and go their /ways [though the interpolator makes the steward stay a while \to plod through a soliloquy].

We follow Timon to the woods. Cursing mankind, and praying but for roots to keep up life, he spades up gold enough to restore him to his glory. Restore him? Rather to restore the leper to fascination, to exalt thieves, to spice the ulcer- eaten hag " to the April day," to " knit and break religions," to " put odds among the rout of nations." The yellow slave shall back into the earth alive, to mingle with the ashes of its gouty keepers. But nay; — for troops approach — perhaps he can find a fitter service for it ; and he leaves it out as Alcibiades enters. Alcibiades has been his friend ; has used him without guile. But Timon's hate is all-inclusive. Alcibiades recalls all that Timon did for Athens. " I prithee, beat thy Xlrum, and get thee gone," rejoins Timon. He offers Timon sympathy. "How dost thou pity him whom thou dost trouble? \l had rather be alone." He offers money. " Keep it, I cw\not eat it." But finally, about to go, he offers revenge : " When I have

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laid proud Athens on a heap " — Timon cannot wait for him to finish: "Warr'st thou 'gainst Athens? . . . The gods con found them all in thy conquest ! . . . Put up thy gold. Go on, here's gold, go on ... Let not thy sword skip one — pity not honoured age — strike the counterfeit matron — gash the virgin's cheek — mince the babes — cut down the priests . . . There's gold to pay thy soldiers . . . Make large confusion; and, thy fury spent," — for Timon is consistent in his man-hatred — " confounded be thyself ! " And Alcibiades, though he will not take " all his counsel," goes forth to square Timon's ac count with Athens when he conquers it.

Other visitors intrude. Apemantus comes to see if he can not persuade Tirnon to " be a flatterer now, and seek to thrive by that which has undone him; to hinge his knee, and let the very breath of the rascals who have bled him blow off his cap." Could irony, after what we have just heard Timon say, be finer? Could two man-haters be more nicely balanced ? [They lose their balance only when they both turn petty rogues and play-fellows in the mainly farcical interpolation in the scene.] Banditti come to steal. Timon baits them with a taste of treasure that they may crave more elsewhere, break more shops, and cut more throats — " and gold confound them how- soe'er ! " The faithful steward comes to share his master's sorrows. " If thou grant'st thou art a man," Timon can only say, " I have forgot thee." The steward pleads his innocence, and Timon is convinced ; he breaks into tears, and Timon can not but love him. But Timon can brook no comrade in his man-hatred. The steward may take gold, live rich, be happy, — but he must away from Timon. Especially he shall " build from men, hate all, curse all ; let the famished flesh slide from the bone, ere he relieve the beggar — give to dogs what he denies to men." [The interpolation or interpolations in the steward's visit do not change the substance of it.] The syco phant poet and painter come next. They have heard that Timon is " full of gold " ; and think it not amiss to tender their love and some soft promises. Timon plays them on his hook a while, snaps them up short, and beats them out — but banes them with his gold. Last come the senators of Athens, fright-

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ened with impending ruin. Will Timon forget the wrongs they did him, come back now to honors, love, and wealth in Athens, take the field for them with absolute power, and drive off Alcibiades ? " Lend me a fool's heart, and a woman's eyes," he answers them, " and I'll beweep these comforts, worthy senators."

" If Alcibiades kill my countrymen, Let Alcibiades know this of Timon, That Timon cares not. But if he sack fair Athens, And take our goodly aged men by the beards, Giving our holy virgins to the stain Of contumelious, beastly, mad-brained war, • Then let him know, and tell him Timon speaks it, In pity of our aged and our youth, I cannot choose but tell him that I care not, And let him take't at worst." V, i, 172.

But still he is not quite unfeeling:

" I have a tree which grows here in my close, That mine own use invites me to cut down, And shortly must I fell it ; tell my friends, Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree From high to low throughout, that whoso please To stop affliction, let him take his haste, Come hither ere my tree hath felt the axe, And hang himself. I pray you, do my greeting."

V, i, 208.

Having so devoted Athens to destruction, and having scattered his gold where it would do most harm, Timon retires to write his epitaph and dig his grave :

" Graves only be men's works and death their gain ! Sun, hide thy beams ! Timon hath done his reign."

V, i, 225

The rest happens quickly. The senators in Athens are in turmoil when they learn not only that their hope of Timon's aid is dead, but that Alcibiades is fighting Timon's cause. They prepare to make what terms they can with the con-

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queror, who, [the ten-line scene of the soldier seeking Timon being left out,] is before the gates. Their humble pleas for mercy and their manifold excuses for their wrongs to Alci- i biades and Timon induce the conqueror to " use the olive with his sword." Only the foremost enemies of Timon and himself shall fall. Athens is saved, restored to peace and justice.

But Timon does not live, he did not care to live, to know the end. He was done with man. An epitaph is all the mes sage Alcibiades' courier brings from him :

" Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate. Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass and stay not here thy gait."

V, iv, 72.

" These well express in him his latter spirits ; " but a magnifi cent eulogy, closing the play, does justice to the noble Timon of other days.

Leaving out the portions bracketed, we have here the sub stance of the plot as Shakspere planned it. If we put our selves in the interpolator's place, we must acknowledge that we have to deal with a peculiar play. In the first place the play lacks certain features which, while they may be nothing more than stage-requirements, — while they might not con tribute largely in developing the actual plot, while their absence may indeed leave no omission whatsoever in the plot itself, — were yet all but essential to a play intended for the theater of Shakspere's time. In the second place there seem to be some missing steps in the development of the plot proper. Let us illustrate both faults. The first thing we notice about Shakspere's Timon is its brevity. The play is~^^n^ejiths_a& long -SLsJMjicbeJh, the next shortest tragedy; the interpolations make up just about the other three-tenths. In variety the drama lacks as much, moreover, as in length. There are no women in it except two courtesans who play minor parts in one scene only.1 Shakspere's company was fitted to present two or three important female characters, and in all his other plays he furnished them ; to say nothing of the fact that a play!

1 IV, iii.

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without a woman is a rara avis. Again, except in the last half of the first scene, Shakspere g«fesjhe^pjay practically no comic relief-^ a feature which his audience expected ^n3~He^usually supplied. We know how he provided comedy, perhaps almost went out of his way for it, ijp JJj3in.le±-2nd Mgrheth; how in he made it copiously subserve the deepest_p_athos. Now

here in Timon he has made as fine a chance for wit as a grave- digger or a porter or a jester could afford him — a chance to make Apemantus immortal. But he fails to improve it. His Apemantus only has a little fun in the^fitst-scene2 — then dis- / appears until the f6uTtrTlict7 where, in Shakspere's part at least, he is naturajly_jurry_thingj3«t comic. Lack of fun, how ever, is not the main insufficiency one feels in Apemantus' character. Shakspere hardly acquaints us with the man at all before the fourth act, introducing him only in the opening scene; but in the fourth act brings him on as if we knew him •well — even letting him warn Timon not to assume " his like- /ness." We scarcely know his likeness ; and we are inclined , to think that Shakspere must have meant to show us more of i it, and to improve the splendid chance it gave for the creation v of a character, in the first three acts. The case of Alcibiades is similar — and here at least we come to what seems an omis sion in the plot itself. Alcibiades is present in the first scene and in the dunning scene, though very little more than merely present ; then he too disappears until the fourth act, where he comes forth playing an important and rather startling part. For some reason we can hardly guess at, he is fighting against Athens; and for reasons which we feel are insufficient, he re solves to fight in part for Timon. It is very hard to think that Shakspere did not mean to give us all these reasons earlier in the play; that he did not see the need, especially, of so relating Alcibiades to Timon previously as to explain the part the soldier is now playing; that he did not plan to make his Alcibiades a character of some importance in the first three acts. Even if Alcibiades had the best reason for avenging Timon, finally, we should still want to know why

2 Unless — as is improbable — the second author wrote the Apemantus sec tion of that scene. See page 33.

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he should execute the vengeance on the senate. We have not seen the senate doing Timon any harm, and only casually have we heard of their ingratitude to him; yet when the play ends we must take their downfall as his revenge. We therefore' find it hard, again, to think that Shakspere did not mean to display their thanklessness more fully in the first three acts.

The first three acts : that is just the point. There can hardly be a criticism as to the completeness of the last two acts of Timon. They are full ; and they are all but wholly Shakspere's. Shakspere began to lavish his resources when he came to Timon in misanthropy — clearly bis main~4tt4*H=gst-in the char acter and in the play. Timon the misanthrope jthergfore_-as- sumes magnificent proportiojis ; Alcibiades comes into his proper function ; and the plot moves on, missing no step, until the end. The strange thing is that Shakspere did not lay foundations deep enough — that he failed to give full expla nations in the first half of the play for things that happen, properly enough, in the last half. When Apemantus comes to visit Timon in the woods, we are supposed to know a good deal about Apemantus ; yet we have only seen him for a little while far back in the first scene. When Alcibiades shoulders Timon's cause, we are to think the action natural ; yet we know little reason for it, having hardly had a chance to get ac quainted with Alcibiades. If the vengeance executed on the senate is to satisfy us, we must believe the senate had rejected Timon when he went off to the woods ; yet we have only had a hint or two of their ingratitude. The play, in brief, is top- heavy. The last two acts stand out complete; the first three will not hold them up. To be more accurate, indeed, there are no first three; for Shakspere's work before the fourth can not be well stretched into three acts.

Such is the first impression which the play makes on one — doubtless the first it made on the interpolator; for in the earlier acts he found the openings for almost all his insertions. Everything leads to a suspicion that Shakspere had become en grossed with the misanthropy of Timon, and had therefore written out the last half of the play in full, but had left omis sions in the first half. He might easily have gone ahead in

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such a manner, meaning to return and fill up the omissions when convenient. In this case we might expect the scenes that he completed to betray at least some hint of what he meant to show us in the scenes that he left incomplete or vacant; and our task is now to gather up such hints as we can find, and see what they will tell us. In so doing we must be very careful to remember one thing which we have said already: that certain features which the play appears to lack, as an amount of comedy, are little more than stage-require ments ; and that while Shakspere may very well have meant to furnish them in actually getting the play ready for the stage, their absence may yet cause no perceptible omission in the plot itself. Of these we cannot speak with any certainty. We may say that the play needs them, that it lacks variety without them ; we have no way to tell how Shakspere may have planned to furnish them, or whether he so planned at all. But with those more prominent omissions which cause breaches in the actual plot, which interrupt the continuity of the play, we may perhaps deal with greater confidence. A good way to approach them will be to find out just what the interpolator was attempt ing in the plot proper. What did he try to do with it? What reason was there for his doing what he did, or doing anything ?

In the banquet scene he tried only to enlarge on Shakspere's exposition. The idea was not a bad one; more exposition, especially if some beginnings of the plot were filtered through it, would be admissible. And the author wanted to do just the right things — to display the generosity of Timon in more gifts, to warn us once more of the hero's perilous condition, to show the sycophancy of his friends, and to touch up the characters of Alcibiades and Apemantus. But in executing all this the author blundered bewilderingly. His first blunder — making Ventidius offer to repay Timon — is the only point in the scene where, inadvertently, it seems, he touched the plot. By that mistake, as we have seen, he cut one thread of it ; and made more cutting and addition necessary later on.

He next inserted, to make fun and again to bring on Ape mantus, the pure clownage added to the dunning scene. Here he left the plot untouched ; only he ran away from it to get in

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his unknown fool and page with letters that should have a bearing on the plot or else be left unmentioned. Passing this point, he began to suffer for his mistreatment of Ventidius in the banquet scene. Shakspere had meant Ventidius' part to end in his denying Timon ; had meant the scene of his refusal to be the climax of the faithlessness of Timon's friends; and had probably written that scene down. The second author had to truncate the part of Ventidius; and to substitute in place of the scene — for the substitution is as much a fact, from the viewpoint of the plot, if Shakspere only planned Ventidius' refusal as if he wrote it out — the Sempronius scene: anti climax in the place of climax. So the interpolator's first deal ing with the plot ends in his throwing away the last half of the one thread of it which he had already cut in two — in sub tracting from the plot, not adding to it.

So far, indeed, he had not tried to add to it. In one place he had touched it seemingly by accident, and in another he had made a substitution which that accident necessitated. But now he started on the plot in earnest. He felt some gap in it between the scene where the last of Timon's friends deserts him and the scene where Timon dupes those friends at his mock-banquet. He had left Timon trusting in his friends serenely as the second act closed, and now found him pouring curses on them in the last scene of the third. In the meantime, to be sure, he had seen three of them turning their backs on Timon — Lucius, Lucullus, and Ventidius, if Shakspere wrote the third refusal; Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius, as the other author wrote it. But Timon himself had not appeared; and while the treachery of his friends might seem sufficient motive for Timon's action, the interpolator evidently thought an intermediate step in the development of Timon's character should be shown as leading to that action. So he tried to give Timon more motive, and to make clear the step in his develop ment, — by putting in the repetitious and superfluous dunning of three unknown creditors and an enigmatic Lucius. With their help he gains his end; works up Timon to a fury, and hurries him on to the mock-banquet. The end may not have been ill-advised. Even more dunning could be made effective,

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if well managed. Timon's fury might not be out of keeping, if somewhat more articulate. But to attain the end by bring ing on a set of unknown characters was to make a breach wider than the oner— if there was one — which the author was trying to fill. His first attempt at real addition to the plot thus ends in a digression from it.

At his busiest now, the interpolator found and tried to fill another breach. He had left Alcibiades at peace with every body in the second act ; he found him in the fourth crusading against Athens. In the meantime, to be sure, he probably had seen some reason for the crusade; he had read in the mock- banquet, we presume, that Alcibiades had been exiled from Athens.3 But he felt, and rightly, that just to mention the exile was not enough; and he undertook to show the banish ment and motivate the crusade. The result we know. He wrote a scene in which he forgot Timon, sought out an un known criminal to call down banishment on Alcibiades, and so, in his attempt to motivate one character, broke up the mo tivation of all the plot remaining — a scene which, midway in !the play, breaks loose from every thread of plot preceding it, and twists and slackens the one straight thread of plot that follows. Once more, trying to fill a breach, the interpolator made it wider.

The attempt to fill these breaches in the middle of the third act was his first and last at real addition to the plot. There after he let it alone. In the soliloquy he added to the fare wells of the servants he made the steward resolve to do only what Shakspere had already made the steward do — follow his master. The interpolation in the scene where Apemantus visits Timon in the woods is nothing but pure padding; of course the characters go to pieces in it, but no element of plot is added or subtracted. The additions to the steward's visit do not change the action. And finally, the little scene at Timon's grave introduces nothing new. We have said nothing, in this summary, of most of the interpolator's blemishes. His lame style, faulty structure, indistinct and vacillating char-

* That is, unless the interpolator himself wrote the prose of the mock- banquet. See page 45.

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acterization, his minor blunders, inconsistencies, and contradic tions — all of which latter will be found between two scenes of his, or between one of his and one of Shakspere's — have been considered hitherto. Here we are keeping to the one aim of finding out exactly his effect upon the plot itself. We have seen that he had reason to attempt to change it at some points ; we must give him credit for locating some of the omissions in it and attempting in good will to fill them. We regret only that his will did not find a better way.

Most of the time he missed the plot entirely. He added ex position, put in clownage, played with Apemantus, made the steward bay the moon about his master's miseries, — sometimes doing little harm, sometimes much. But four times he made changes in the plot. In his first two alterations he cut off the part of Ventidius, made one for Sempronius, and swept away the climax of the scenes that motivate Timon's misanthropy. In his third — possibly because he had tampered with that motiva tion ? 4 — he undertook to fill up what he thought a breach in the development of Timon's character ; but succeeded ill in the attempt and effected still wider breaches in the play. In his fourth he tried to bridge the greater gap in Alcibiades' part; but ignored what plot preceded and distorted all that followed. Such is the sum total of his dealings with the plot. Not a thing did he add to it. In one case he subtracted from it, in another he digressed from it, in a third he split it. He marred it everywhere he touched it.

All the plot is Shakspere's ; and we care more about what Shakspere did than about what the other author may have done or undone. If the latter did sap the plot at the very points where he tried to add to it, was there not still reason for his trying? If the breaches which he thought to fill are even better than the filling, are they not breaches still ?

In the first two acts — whatever they may lack of fulness — the actual plot as Shakspere wrote it is continuous. To be sure, the extra exposition of the banquet scene might not hurt the play, if well done. Some of it, indeed, would help. Shak-

* For we do not know what Shakspere may or might have made of his Ventidius scene.

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spere may himself have meant to write the scene — to show a little more of Ventidius, to bring out Apemantus, to introduce Lords Lucius and Lucullus, to draw the tie of Alcibiades to Timon closer, to provide spectacle and humor; all which things the interpolator tried and bungled. We cannot say that Shakspere meant to do them. We can say that even had he done them, they would not have much affected his plot proper at this point ; for without them it is continuous. Upon the exposition of Timon's lavishness follows the mistrust of his creditors, their demands for payment, Timon's reckoning with the steward, and his appeals to friends for help. No other element of plot, apparently, was to be added here. Shak- spere's second scene follows his first, and the rest of his two acts5 follows the second, with entire continuity. There is no breach in his plot before the third act — none before the third scene of that act. After the third act we have traced his plot and found it whole; only thrown out of gear by the in sertion of the banishment of Alcibiades in the middle of that act. There, too, we found the only place where the inter polator tried consciously to fill a blank in Shakspere's plot. In this place, therefore, we must look for the lacuna in the plot.

The interpolator tried to do two things there, and he should have tried to do two more. All four, at one place or another, we have mentioned. The interpolator thought that the de fection of three friends was not sufficient motive for Timon's change of nature; or that this change was at least somewhat abrupt. He therefore tried to give Timon more motive, and to make his change more gradual, by putting in another dun ning scene. But the breach this filled, if such it was, was small in comparison with the other one that the interpolator worked on — the gap between Alcibiades at peace in Athens and Alcibiades warring against Athens. This the interpolator felt compelled to bridge; bridged it thoughtlessly, and de ranged the whole plot. Still more needful were the two things

8 Without the banquet, of course, Shakspere's work would not make two full acts ; a fact which may incline one the more to believe that Shakspere planned to insert something like a banquet scene himself.

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which he should have done but did not. We saw in the last chapter that Shakspere meant Timon for a public benefactor who should suffer from the senate's cruelty ; and that he there fore planned the ruin of the state as a great part of the revenge of Timon. But Shakspere said just enough to indicate that such was his plan ; he did not consummate that plan by empha sizing Timon's services to the senate and by demonstrating its ingratitude to Timon. It was not enough to let the steward tell how the senate " froze him into silence " when he begged for Timon. But if, for instance, after Timon's private friends had played him false, — in the place where the interpolator felt he must put in some more dunning, — Shakspere had shown the senate casting Timon off: one lacuna in his plot would have been filled. The fourth lacuna, and the worst of all, would have remained. Shakspere, we saw, meant Alcibiades to be the natural avenger of Timon ; to redress his own wrongs, and perhaps to have wrongs of his own, but incidentally. Such an end Shakspere kept in view throughout the last two acts. Now to that end, to make those acts seem reasonable, he needed to create some strong bond between Alcibiades and Timon in the first half of the play — to show there some con vincing reason why Alcibiades, if he was to avenge himself but incidentally, should avenge Timon at all. That reason Shakspere did not give us. He made Alcibiades the closest friend that Timon has, and left the way open for some peculiar tie between the two; but he did not perfect that tie. The in terpolator was blind to the need of it. He saw that he must give Alcibiades some cause to fight; he did not see that he must make him fight for Timon. So forgetting Timon, he had Alcibiades banished in behalf of an obscure criminal, made him fight in his own cause, and split the play in two.

Let us put all this into few words. Of the four lacunae in Shakspere's plot the first and least is the missing step in the development of Timon's character between the scene where ^ his last friend deserts him and the scene in which he turns and tramples on his friends — that is, in the middle of the third act. The next is the omission of a scene showing the senate's thanklessness for Timon's benefactions ; which scene would

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have to be placed in the middle of the third act. The third is the all but entire breach in Alcibiades' career between his peaceful residence in the city and his crusade against Athens ; a breach which cannot be filled anywhere but in the middle of the third act. The fourth is the failure so to motivate that cru sade as to leave no doubt that it is made in Timon's cause. The four lacunae come at one spot. The plot is whole up to the scene where Timon's last friend turns his back; after the mock-banquet it is whole again. Between those scenes the four lacunae meet and make one large lacuna. This is the only breach in Shakspere's plot. Filled right, it would complete the plot; filled wrong by the interpolator, it makes the plot collapse in the center.

As we said in the beginning, all this is strict logic. We are figuring on what the plot demands ; beyond its bounds we cannot reason safely. Whatever else Shakspere may or may not have meant to put into his first three acts, by way of lengthening the play, rounding out the characters, meeting stage-requirements, adding variety, spectacle, comic relief, may be matter of opinion. For such purposes he may well have planned to furnish many features in this play, as he did in others, which would not increase the substance of the actual plot or turn its course perceptibly ; the absence of which, there fore, leaves little or no mark upon the plot itself. Such potential features must remain beyond our ken. But the one breach in the plot is a sure fact. That Shakspere did not see it is hardly possible. Perhaps he filled it up with scenes now lost. Far more probably he simply left it blank, knowing how he would fill it when he had thundered through the last two acts, which interested him more. If so, we wonder why he did not come back to it, and how he would have filled it if he had returned to it ; but we have no way of answering either question. One scene might have filled the gap — might have laid bare the senate's cruelty to Timon, given Alcibiades a cause to go to arms, and based that cause on his friendship for Timon. The interpolator need only have made Alcibiades provoke the senate to his banishment by pleading, not for mercy on an unknown criminal, but for aid to Timon — for

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repayment of the fortune Timon spent to save the senate and the state from ruin. So we should have Timon cast off by the senate, and Alcibiades banished in Timon's cause ; and what ever else the play might lack, its plot would be continuous from end to end. Perhaps it would be hard to find an easier way to splice the different threads of plot at the point where they break. But we need not dwell upon this way. It was not Shakspere's. Else his Alcibiades, when he meets Timon in the woods, would know more of the latter's fortunes; would have more than heard how " cursed Athens " had been mind less of Timon's worth.6 How Shakspere did intend to fill the breach we do not know. Perhaps he had a better way; but he left us no clue to it. We do know that the plot is other wise continuous, and therefore we presume that it is otherwise complete as Shakspere planned it.

At this point one naturally wonders whether Shakspere could have countenanced the additions to the play, or have been aware of them; and the attempt to answer brings up certain final questions on which the answer would more or less depend. What was the date of Shakspere's Timon, and the date of the interpolations? Were the latter written for stage-purposes? Was the play, with or without them, acted? Who, finally, was the interpolator?

In practical agreement critics now date Shakspere's work in Timon about 1607-8. The date is estimated from the general technical resemblance of his verse in this play to the verse of his other later tragedies; from the fact that he may well have thought of Timon for a hero first when reading the excursus on the misanthrope in Plutarch's Antonius, which was used for Antony and Cleopatra (1607-8) ; and from the likeness in the plot and sentiment and title-character of Timon to those of Lear and Coriolanus especially. The evidence is not enough to fix the exact year; but the estimated date can hardly be far wrong. For the date of the interpolations we have no evidence whatever except the knowledge that they had been written by 1623. There has been a theory, none too well

8 IV, iii, 92. 8

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credited, that they were written in that very year; not for stage-purposes, but to enlarge the play for publication in the Folio. " Bold even to impudence," in the confession of its father, Mr. Fleay,7 that theory rested solely on certain strange irregularities in the pagination of the Folio Timon. It has recently lost even that support. In an article which seems to say the last word as to those irregularities, Mr. Josiah Quincy Adams8 has demonstrated that they have no bearing on the authorship or date or purpose of the interpolations in the play. Mr. Adams therefore leaves us no more reason to believe that Timon was enlarged for printing in the Folio — never the most natural theory — than we should have in case its paging there were entirely regular; in which case the theory would hardly have been thought of.

We are therefore free for the more natural theory that the interpolator wrote for the stage. For this there is some evi dence. Time and again that writer seems to have the stage in mind. His first scene is elaborate spectacle:

T Verplanck hinted at the theory, but Mr. Fleay first argued it.

8 Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1908. The gist of the argument may be given. The pagination of the Folio shows that Timon occupies twenty of the thirty pages, following Romeo and Juliet, which the editors first intended to fill with Troilus and Cressida. (The opening page-numbers of Troilus and Cressida are consecutive with the closing ones of Romeo and Juliet ; into two copies of the Folio a stray leaf has crept, bearing the last page of Romeo and Juliet on its recto and the first of Troilus and Cressida on its verso ; and other phenomena betray the fact.) But before the Folio was published, the editors moved Troilus and Cressida to a place in front of all the other tragedies. So much Mr. Adams, slightly correcting Mr. Sidney Lee, proves at the start. Now Mr. Fleay had argued that when the editors saw that Timon would not fill the space left blank by the removal of Troilus, they gave Timon to some writer with instructions to " make it up to thirty pages." Even supposing the worst of the editors, Mr. Fleay is silent about the fact that their hireling made it up to only twenty pages. But Mr. Adams shows that the only trouble of the editors was some hitch in printing Troilus; that, once decided on removing that play, they presumably found Timon ready at hand to take the vacant place ; and that Timon filled, with one page for the actors' names and one page blank, all the space left vacant by the removal of the other play except one quire — which was easily left out.

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" Hautboys playing loud music. A great banquet served in ; and then enter Lord Timon, the States, the Athenian Lords, Ventidius, which Timon redeemed from prison. Then comes, dropping after all, Apemantus, dis contentedly, like himself." I, ii.

In that day such stage-directions were not written for a reader's benefit. And are we to suppose that the interpolator devised a masque of Amazons, — to mention but one feature of the spectacle, — brought them in " with lutes in their hands, dancing and playing," dressed up a Cupid to precede them, wrote another stage-direction for the lords, speaking no word, to rise from table and dance with them, — that he contrived all this pure show only to be read about, or to be seen? It is nothing to read — a few halting lines, and a soliloquy by Ape mantus which must be spoken during the dance. It is all spectacle. Surely the author would not go to so much trouble to invent a dance that was to be danced only in the mind's eye of a reader. Nor does it seem for a reader's benefit that in his next insertion he recalled the duns whom Shakspere had sent off the stage, to do clownage with Apemantus and the page and fool; that later for more clownage he broke in on Shak- spere's scene between Timon and Apemantus. He seems to have been thinking of his groundlings. Another time his thought is of his actors. " Enter three senators," he says to start the banishment scene, "at one door" Men have been hanged on less evidence than that door affords. For whom but the actors would he mention it ? In every scene he strove for stage-effect ; outside the two in which he tried to fill the one breach in the plot, he added little but buffoonery and spec tacle. Apparently he kept his eye too much upon his audience, and not enough upon the play; for he fell into most of his minor blunders when trying to make hits.

All these facts endorse the natural theory that he wrote for the stage ; and though they do not prove that his play was acted, they at least incline one to believe so. The play, as Shakspere's, had credentials for the stage already; and we should think that the man who patched it up with plain intent to fit it more completely for the theater was getting ready for an actual presentation. None is, of course, recorded. Dr.

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Brinsley Nicholson,9 however, found in certain advance stage- directions — entrances indicated, seemingly as actors' cues, from two to fourteen lines before the actual entrance of the charac ters concerned — what he thought a " tolerably decisive proof " that Timon came into the hands of actors who performed it. If so, they presented it in the interpolator's form; for the clearest evidence is found in his banquet scene. There, in the midst of dialogue, appears this stage-direction : " Sound tucket; enter the masquers of Amazons, with lutes in their hands, danc ing and playing." But the masquers do not then enter. Hear ing the tucket, Timon asks, " What means that trump ? " Only a servant comes to answer that certain ladies are " desirous of admittance." Then Timon asks their purpose, and the servant says that a fore-runner comes with them to signify it. After six lines Timon bids them be admitted, and another stage- direction seems to bring them in: "Enter Cupid, with the masque of ladies." But Cupid speaks a second six lines ; and the ladies seem really to enter only when he concludes and Timon again says, " Let 'em have kind admittance ; music make their welcome ! " The episode reads smoothly ; only the first stage-direction prompts the entrance of the ladies fourteen lines ahead of time. The natural explanation is that the author wrote the last stage-direction only, making the ladies enter with or after Cupid ; that the first direction, getting them ready for that entrance, is the work of actors.10

We find it all but certain, then, that the interpolator wrote for the theater, and very likely that his play was performed. Whether it had been tried before, in Shakspere's form, is questionable. We cannot tell at what date it was played, if any; whether before Shakspere's death, whether with his knowledge or without, we do not know. One feels fairly sure it was without his supervision. He might have passed poor work, might have left loopholes in his plot with sug gestions for another man to fill them; but he would hardly have consented to their being filled in such a way as to wreck the plot which he had almost finished. We should like to think

* New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874, page 252, note 2. 10 See also I, i, 173 ; III, vi, 44.

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the work was done without his knowledge; but evidence is silent.

Probably the name of the interpolator will remain unknown. The guesses that have been made at him have been supported by so little evidence that none of them has ever been entirely accepted, or even seriously considered frequently, by other critics than the guesser. Delius found some reason to believe that George Wilkins had a share in Pericles, and thereupon he argued the non sequitur that Wilkins wrote the spurious parts of Timon — an opinion which has little other evidence to support it. The argument on Pericles perhaps deserves to be reviewed with care ; but probably the nearer a reviewer comes to thinking that George Wilkins wrote the regular though wooden verse of the first two acts of Pericles, the farther he will be from a belief that the same man wrote the highly irreg ular verse of the interpolations in Timon. On slight and ques tionable evidence of verse-technic, Mr. Fleay argued that Cyril Tourneur was responsible for the interpolations — having written them, of course, to fit the play for publication in the Folio. But this theory, perhaps the slenderest that Mr. Fleay put forth on Timon, was too weak to gain much credence. Unless more evidence should be forthcoming, we have only one clue by which possibly to trace the interpolator — his very peculiar technic. This might be a good clue if we could find a chance to use it; if verse could be discovered elsewhere very like the spurious verse in Timon, we might gain at least a probability as to the personage of the interpolator. The hard thing has been to locate any verse so similar as to raise a strong suspicion. We should be gratified if we could put a finger on the man who touched pens with Shakspere in the play; but it is not likely we shall ever do so.

Some things about the play are therefore left in question; it is hoped that the main problems have been somewhat clari fied. Unless our reasoning is wrong, the singularities and inconsistences we noted in the play when starting are the product of some man of small ability, writing probably in haste, and seemingly without an intimate acquaintance with the play he was augmenting, or at least without good judgment

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of its needs. Unless some document is lost, we know the sources that had served that play. Unless we have unwar rantably stretched the evidence, we can now divide the play between its authors with considerable accuracy. Unless the author who cut down Ventidius' part was prior to the one who built it up; unless the author who inserted the one line which seemingly makes prose of a verse passage wrote before the author who composed that passage in blank verse; unless the man who tried to fill a gap in Alcibiades' part foreran the man who planned the part and left the gap; unless the writer who used no source antedated the writer who used all the sources he could find; unless the author who continually borrowed from the other nevertheless preceded him; unless the author who is quite oblivious of the other nevertheless followed him; — unless what seems impossible is true, Shak- spere was the first writer to touch the play. We may wish that he had finished it, that we could know more fully how he planned to finish it; but possibly some outlines of his plan are clearer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. THE TIMON LEGEND

Coopman, Ludovicus. Dissertatio de Timone Misanthrope, Utrecht, 1841. Binder, A. Uber Timon den Misanthropen, in the Ulmer Schulprogram,

1855-6. Piccolomini, Emanuele. Sulla leggenda di Timone il Misantropo, in the

Studi di filologia greca. Torino, 1882, I, 3. L'Abbe de Resnel. Recherches sur Timon le Misantrope, in the Histoire

de I'Academie des Inscriptions, tome XIV (Memoires de Litterature,

page 74). Bertram, Franz. Die Timonlegende in der antiken Literatur. Heidelberg

Dissertation, 1906.

II. THE SOURCES AND AUTHORSHIP OF TIMON OF ATHENS

The larger part of the bibliography on these subjects is comprised in the prefaces and notes of the various editors of the play. For comment on the problems in Timon the most important editions are those of Malone, Knight, Verplanck, Staunton, Dyce, Delius, Clark and Wright, Hudson, Rolfe, Furnivall (the Leopold), Herford (the Eversley), Evans (the Henry Irving'), Deighton (the Arden), and Gollancz (the Temple). Similar material is treated in histories of the drama, such as Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature, Klein's Geschichte des Dramas, and Professor Schelling's Elizabethan Drama; and in lives of Shakspere, such as Mr. Sidney Lee's. The extensive treatises are:

(i) ON THE SOURCES

Miiller, Adolf. Uber die Quellen aus denen Shakespeare Timon -von Athen entnommen hat. Jena Dissertation, 1873.

Clemons, W. H. The Sources of Timon of Athens, in the Princeton Uni versity Bulletin, vol. XV.

(2) ON THE AUTHORSHIP

Knight, Charles. Preface to Timon in the Pictorial Edition, 1838. Verplanck, G. C. Preface to Timon in Shakespeare's Plays, 1847. Delius, Nikolaus. Uber Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, in the Jahrbuch

der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, vol. II.

Delius, Nikolaus. Uber Shakespeare's Pericles, in the Jahrbuch, vol. III. Tschischwitz, Benno. Timon von Athen, ein Kritische Versuch, in the

Jahrbuch, vol. IV.

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Fleay, F. G. On the Authorship of Timon of Athens, followed by an edition of The Life of Timon of Athens, " the usual insertions by another hand in the play being left out ; " in the Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, 1874.

Kullmann, Georg. Shakespeare's Antheil an dem unter seinem Namen veroffentlichten Trauerspiele Timon, in the Archiv fiir Literatur- geschichte, vol. XI.

Wendlandt, Wilhelm. Shakespeare's Timon von Athen, in the Shake speare Jahrbuch, vol. XXIII.

Adams, Josiah Quincy. Timon of Athens and the Irregularities in the First Folio, in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 1908.

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VITA

The author of the foregoing treatise was born in Lynch- burg, Virginia, on the twentieth of March, 1882. He received his elementary and secondary education in private and public schools of his native city. He entered Columbia College in the City of New York in the autumn of 1902, and was graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Arts at the commencement of 1905. In 1906 he became a graduate student in the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University, proceeded to the degree of Master of Arts at the commencement of 1907, and was ap pointed incumbent of the Proudfit Fellowship in Letters for the three ensuing years successively. During his residence as a graduate student in the university he was enrolled in courses under Professors William W. Lawrence, George P. Krapp, Ashley H. Thorndike, and William P. Trent, in the Depart ment of English, and under Professors Joel E. Spingarn and Jefferson B. Fletcher, in the Department of Comparative Literature.

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The authorship of Timon of Athens