Read Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (39 page)
Lines 122–249:
Flavius arrives with two Senators but warns them that Timon will not receive them. Flavius calls to him and the Senators offer apologies for their ingratitude and ill-treatment. The Senators now wish to make amends and offer him honors and the “captainship” of the city in their battles against Alcibiades. Timon is unmoved, however, and repeats “I care not.” He claims that he is writing his epitaph and will soon cut down the tree near his cave, but he has one piece of advice to his fellow Athenians, to come and hang themselves from it before he does so. Timon’s thoughts are now only of his death and he retires. The Senators leave to return in haste to Athens.
Two more Senators discuss a Messenger’s report that Timon is helping Alcibiades. The Senators from the previous scene enter and confirm that Timon has refused to help Athens.
A Soldier enters, seeking Timon. He finds a grave; the epitaph suggests it must be Timon’s. Claiming that he is unable to read, he says
he’ll take a wax impression and get Alcibiades to interpret it, confirming that Alcibiades is now camped in front of Athens, whose conquest he intends.
Alcibiades and his army stand before Athens. He sounds “a parley” and the Senators appear to speak to him. He accuses them of the former wrongs he now intends to right. They claim to have tried to make peace with him and to have offered Timon recompense. They now offer to open their gates and let him enter in peace and take “the destined tithe” (i.e. kill 10 percent of the population as a punishment for the city’s ungrateful treatment). They point out that not everyone has done wrong and it is not fair to punish them all. He will gain more by friendly treatment than violence. Alcibiades agrees to enter peaceably and that he will punish none but the enemies of Timon and himself. A Messenger enters with the news of Timon’s death and Alcibiades reads the wax impression of his epitaph. He agrees to “Make war breed peace” and heal the city and orders the drums to strike.
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
FOUR CENTURIES OF
TIMON:
AN OVERVIEW
Written around 1605, there is no record of the play’s performance before the Restoration adaptation of Thomas Shadwell’s
The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater
in 1678. There are a few scattered allusions to suggest that it may have been acted before 1623. The reasons generally cited for the play’s lack of popularity—no familial or love-interest and an unsatisfying, incoherent plotline—have produced a patchy stage history. Shakespeare’s text wasn’t played complete until the late nineteenth century, and it wasn’t until the late twentieth century that it could be said to have come into its own. Despite a sense that its ideas and experiences chime in many ways with the contemporary zeitgeist,
Timon of Athens
remains one of the least popular and least performed of Shakespeare’s plays.
Early adaptations attempted to remedy what were seen as its defects, hence Shadwell’s adaptation introduced a faithful mistress, Evandra, and flirtatious betrothed, Melissa, as rivals for Timon’s love, capitalizing on the recent innovation of actresses playing women’s parts. Dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham, it was read as satire (John Kelly’s unsuccessful
Timon in Love
at Drury Lane Theatre in 1733 was a translation of a French comedy based on the writings of Lucian and doesn’t relate to Shakespeare’s play). There were later English adaptations: James Love (1768), Richard Cumberland (1771), and Thomas Hull (1786). These all built on Shadwell’s work. Cumberland replaced the character of Apemantus with Timon’s daughter, Evanthe, with whom Alcibiades falls in love. Timon is finally “unveiled” as “a sweet old man whose gruff exterior covers a doting father,” signifying, as theater historian Francelia Butler points out, “We have now moved far from any meanings in Shakespeare’s
play.”
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It was Cumberland’s version that was staged by John Philip Kemble at Drury Lane with himself as Timon. Interest in ancient Greece had been revived by the publication of James Stuart’s
The Antiquities of Athens
(1794) and inspired the spectacular scenery for Kemble’s 1815 revival, which included “an accurate vista of Athens.”
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The print of Kemble in the role from 1785 looks forward to romantic Victorian readings and was used as the frontispiece for Bell’s edition of the play.
There is a history of translation and adaptation of
Timon
for stages in Germany and France in the eighteenth century and for Japan in the early twentieth.
F. J. Fischer translated and adapted a three-act version and the poet Friedrich Schiller intended to adapt it himself. The first German production by Dalberg at Mannheim in 1789 made Timon the lover of Timandra and murderer of Sempronius. The next German production in 1871 introduced a host of new characters and songs. The “freest of all the versions of Timon”
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by Heinrich Bulthaupt at the Hof-und-National Theatre in Munich 1882, described as an “ironical travesty” of Shakespeare, included a housekeeper, daughter, and son-in-law for Timon. Its popularity, however, was attested by numerous revivals throughout Germany. In 1910 Paul Heyse’s translation of Shakespeare’s text, which condensed the play into three acts, was performed with elaborate sets at Munich’s new Shakespeare theater.
The earliest French versions of the Timon story are based on Lucian’s writings and not related to Shakespeare’s play, but it is surmised that Molière’s most famous play,
Le Misanthrope
(1666), was influenced by Shakespeare’s Timon.
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Several translations were made in the late eighteenth century, including Pierre Letourner’s and Louis-Sebastian Mercier’s. The latter version was produced in 1794 during the French revolution; Timon “becomes a mouthpiece for the political unrest of the age” and it included “a diatribe against Robespierre” in the Preface.
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Charles Lamb’s English 1816 revival at Drury Lane presented a fuller, more authentic version of the play but it still excised all those elements deemed offensive—sexual references, curses, and whores—and included a section of Cumberland’s conclusion. Its chief merits were spectacular scenery and Edmund Kean’s Timon: “With respect to the scenery and other mechanical matters, the piece was excellently got up”;
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“Mr. Kean of course personated the principal character, upon which almost the whole interest of the play depends. It is certainly one of those parts in which his peculiarity of manner, his rapid transition of countenance, and the harshness of his voice, are employed to great advantage.”
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Its chief demerits were judged to be the play itself: “This is not a bad version of Shakespeare’s play; it fails, as does the original, in female interest, but possibly that did not matter so much when a Kean could play the leading role.”
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9.
John Philip Kemble’s Romantic Timon: his spectacular 1815 staging for Drury Lane included “an accurate vista of Athens.”
In the nineteenth century, the play was regarded as offering a useful moral exemplum. Theater historian Gary Jay Williams argues that,
On the Victorian stage, the play was realized in idealized and sentimental terms. Those two noble Athenians, Timon and Alcibiades, were seen as the victims of greed, corruption and ingratitude. Timon was a good and generous man, driven to hate and madness by the inhumanity of unworthy friends, but avenged in the end by the stalwart Alcibiades. Neither the shallowness of the early Timon nor the intensity of his later satire and nihilism was squarely faced. Also, Alcibiades was simplified and made a noble hero.
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Samuel Phelps’s production at Sadler’s Wells in 1851, and revived five years later, was the most successful and the most complete version of Shakespeare’s play to date, cutting only 20 percent of the lines and including all Shakespeare’s characters except the Fool. Praise was again accorded the spectacular panoramic scenery and Phelps’s performance as Timon, but even more to his meticulous attention to every detail of production.
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There are references to but no reviews of the production staged in Manchester in 1864 by Charles Calvert. F. R. Benson revived the play in 1892 for the Shakespeare Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon, and took the leading role. According to one eyewitness:
there is really only one “part” in
Timon of Athens
and that was played by Mr. Benson and played well. The change from the
graceful and gracious lord to the bitter and broken misanthrope was skilfully worked out. The five acts were thrown into three, to hasten the action, and the scenery was pretty if not always true to reality. The music was necessarily incongruous.
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J. H. Leigh’s 1904 production at the Court Theatre was based on Benson’s version, but in place of the masque it introduced “a lovely ballet, and a Cupid who might have strayed out of Offenbach’s
Belle Helène.
”
79
The first American production was N. H. Bannister’s at the Franklin Theater in New York in 1839. In 1910, Frederick Warde, who had played Flaminius in Calvert’s 1871 production, adapted the play and took it on an American tour, opening at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was an “elaborately staged” free version of Shakespeare’s play that included “a pantomime, called
The Senses
, together with a Greek dance” and ended with “a procession of soldiers and citizenry following Timon’s body as it is borne along in lamentation.”
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A successful Japanese version was staged by Koshu Kojima for the Shintomiza Theatre of Tokyo in 1914 called
The Sound of the Bell.
81
Robert Atkins, influenced by William Poel’s ideas on recreating Elizabethan stagings for Shakespeare’s plays, directed all of them during his tenure at the Old Vic and played Timon himself in his 1922 production there. In 1935 at the Westminster Theatre, Nugent Monck’s production, in which the text was again extensively cut, was negatively received, despite a score written by the young Benjamin Britten and the inclusion once again of a ballet in place of the masque.
Willard Stoker’s 1947 staging for Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Repertory Theatre was updated and presented in modern dress, with the Senators as Athenian businessmen and Apemantus as “an out-at-elbows Bohemian of the Aldous Huxley period—a discharged reporter, insolvent artist or ham actor.”
82
The second half took place “beside a bomb crater overlooked by a huge howitzer.”
83
While reviewers praised the innovation of modern dress and John Phillips’s Timon, the second half of the play was still felt to pall. In Tyrone Guthrie’s 1952 production at the Old Vic the play “was approached
not as a tragedy but as a satire against materialism.”
84
This was felt ultimately to detract from the play, despite praise for Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s set and André Morell’s performance as Timon: “Guthrie’s view of Timon is an understandable one and a welcome, sharp rejection of the idealized Timon, but it can account theatrically for only the first half of the play.”
85
Critics were divided over Michael Benthall’s 1956 production, again at the Old Vic, with Sir Ralph Richardson as Timon. Williams calls it “an ambitious but conspicuous failure” while acknowledging that “it remains in memory today as a major reference point in the play’s performance history.”
86
Five hundred lines were cut and the playing time was reduced to two hours, including a fifteen-minute interval. Leslie Hurry’s set was admired and Caryl Brahms advised: “The playgoer should see this Timon—if only for the magnificent
coup de théâtre …
in which Timon casts down his cloak while through the gauze-drop the flames lick at his burning palace.”
87
While the critic of
Theatre World
thought “His Timon … one of the really outstanding performances seen at the Vic in recent years,”
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the majority felt that Richardson was simply miscast as any sort of misanthropist. Kenneth Tynan summed it up as not so much a “study of benevolence warped by ingratitude” as “the story of a scoutmaster betrayed by his troop.”
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For the 1963 Stratford Festival, Ontario, Michael Langham updated the play and included an original jazz score by Duke Ellington—Gregory Doran reprised it in his 1999 production for the RSC, discussed below. Critics were once more divided despite appreciation for individual performances, especially John Colicos’s Timon, played “at the outset, [as] a sleek young millionaire in red brocade dinner jacket” with Apemantus “a newspaper man with drooping cigarette and tie askew” and an Alcibiades who “suggests Fidel Castro in uniform and beard.”
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However, Howard Taubman of the
New York Times
thought the production, which went on tour to the Chichester Festival the following year, “gets in the way of the play rather than serves it.”
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