Thank you for coming. This is the last of my Shakespeare lectures this time, and it's on time in the. Talk about timing of action. I was always, in a sense, a kind of afterthought or something that you might do at the end of the series. It's a late play, although probably not as late. The Simple have tended to dated the most recent dating of Plato, somebody about 60 No.
Five to six. But the thing I want to focus on about the play today is that we pretty much unanimously recognise it now as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. So what I want to try and do in the lecture, and I hope this will be useful, both are thinking about time and but also we're thinking about a large number of collaborative plays in the canon is to try to think about what to do with Middleton.
How should the fact of collaboration in the history of this play affect our interpretation? What kinds of critical methodologies have we got for thinking about collaborative playwriting and how might they be helpful or not? OK, so firstly, this is what the play is about. A party of petitioners gathered at the House of Time in a wealthy Athenian.
They all want his patronage time and it's a generous philanthropic host who welcomes all of them, pays off their debts, gives them money to marry and all those kinds of things. This is a this is a great scene of sort of conspicuous consumption, showcasing timeless generosity, the greedy self-interest of the guests and a kind of Mariscal like celebration. A dance of Amazon's Timeline's Stuart Flavia's knows that time is actually almost bankrupt.
He sends to try and get some of the money back or some repayment for Taiwan's generosity. But no one will give time and any money. And he is besieged by his creditors time and is bewildered and stages another banquet to the power of the first one where he invites his close friends again to dinner.
This time serves them stones and water, berates them for their ingratitude and vows misanthropy time, and then leaves up and live like a beast in the wood, followed by his steward digging for roots to eat out in the wood time and find gold, which he gives to the soldier asked by these to fight Athens unto two [INAUDIBLE] to spread venereal diseases. So we've got a kind of two part play to half play where time it is.
It's generous in the city and then time and is money left hand in the wood and it ends up with a kind of attack on Athens led by our Savides time. It is indifferent to the fate of Athens. He predicts his own death. And then a talk on talk talk about in a few minutes, we have a strange series of three epitaphs. We don't quite know how time and dies also by these morns Timon and vows to enter Athens in peace. So there's an odd set. I hope that gives a sense of how or not plated.
Actually, that's a kind of somebody which attempts to establish two things about it. One is that there are pretty much two halves. So we're going to talk about that as we go forward. The Hafitz in Athens, where time has got his money and is in in the encounter with people who want it and the Hafitz in the woods. There's a strange kind of politics about the invasion of Athens, but really an anticlimax at the end.
It's quite unclear to think what actually happens at the end, both to time and until this belated political clout of our savides against Athens. So it's a play above anticlimax about money and about alienation. This is the play that Karl Marx most enjoyed of Shakespeare. And we'll talk a bit about why that was. There's also some question mark about whether this play exists in a final form and whether it ever had an early modern performance.
Though no record of performance from the early modern period. And those questions about whether it's completed generated both by the play itself. So it's a very short play compared with the other tragedies is only about two thirds the length of the other tragic plays. And by the fact that time was apparently an afterthought in its only early edition in the 16 23 First Folio and the textual history. This is quite easy to sketch out, although quite complicated to.
Too much detail, I'm not going to go to a lot of detail. Let's do the sketch. When I have Jagged and Edward Blunt, the folios publishers were buying up the rights to Shakespeare's plays in order to produce their collected edition. It seems that the owner of Toilsome Cressida, Henry Walli, who would publish that play in 69 nine in a quarter, did not want to play ball.
He does not want to sell his rights. Troilus and cross-border negotiations about how to get hold of this play went right up to the wire. The Folio catalogue page was printed without trying to some precedent, and it seems from various extant copies that work started on the play. Work started on the on the volume when it was thought that Transgresses would not be included.
Timon was the make wait. So time and reference was the play that was brought in when it suddenly see that there was a big hole in the collected edition and it was printed instead of trying to compress it down. But what happened right at the last minute was the trove of crises that also became free and that was printed as a kind of insert its differently patinated from the rest of the book. But the status of time and therefore was always already marginal.
It seems to have come in only as an afterthought or only as a contingency without that problem with getting the rights to troublesome precedent. It's pretty clear we wouldn't have this play. It wouldn't have survived at all. So it becomes a kind of a to me at the contingency, which surrounds most of Shakespeare's plays and indeed most modern drama. Perhaps the man preparing the First Folio knew that timing was not quite finished.
Perhaps they did not want to include it because they knew that it was collaborative. One of the things the Folio is trying to do is to present a single author collection and single authority is a very important part of its brand. That's why we get that image of Shakespeare, that very iconic engraving by Drew should. And there's no other writer, no playwright, no NoCal, no collaborator is ever named in the Folios, and none of the plays is acknowledged as having a co-author.
So perhaps they didn't want to include Timon in the first place because they knew that it was collaborative. They also don't include paraphilias or two Noble Kinsman or Corbino, a play that is not lost. Another Shakespeare and Fletcher collaboration. But current scholarship does, however, find quite a large amount of collaboration in plays that are in the folio. So that's not a very stable kind of criterion, and that includes work by Middleton at the moment.
We think that Middleton, as Shakespeare's successor right with the King's men, was responsible for revising some of Shakespeare's plays. Perhaps for new performance on both Macbeth and Measure for Measure are now thought to be post Shakespearean revisions by Middleton, some measure for measure, and that there are already understood to be Shakespeare plays overlaid with some work by Middleton.
The extent of which is hard to judge because, of course, we don't now have the purely Shakespearean text, if indeed it has existed. Now it seems likely that more middle term will probably be found in Shakespeare's works. I think that's pretty clear quite where it will be found.
It isn't so clear at the moment, but the examples of Macbeth in measure for measure suggests that many of the plays, which are not printed at a date close to their first performance, will have been changed during their life. A script with the Kingsmen before the date of the first solium. So no play tax exists as a as a property of a play company being revived occasionally in the repertoire without being changed. That's just that's kind of unthinkable, really.
So a large number of the plays, particularly from the second half of Shakespeare's career, don't get published until the First Folio. And it seems quite likely that those many of those texts may represent plays originally by Shakespeare and to some extent a greater or lesser extent revised by someone else. Most probably Middleton, the new Oxford Shakespeare, which will come out in the summer of 2016.
Well, I think, Major, on the issues of collaboration. The one thing that will give us is a much more collaborative Shakespeare so that these are questions which are really the point of being explored and at least for the moment, resolved. So currently we think about. Quarter of Shakespeare's plays have elements. By other writers can are different forms of collaboration, of course, that can be a joint enterprise from the start or a revision later.
Kind of posthole provision by another writer, which is the case with Macbeth or measure for measure. So a quarter of Shakespeare's plays a thought currently to be collaborative. I think that's going to quickly look like a real understatement. That's the theme which is going to change about Shakespeare studies over the next two or three years. Studies of collaboration, though.
Like all movements in Shakespeare, criticism are based on cultural and desire for what we want to be true at any particular time. So authorship studies tend to deploy a rhetoric of specialists. Linguistic analysis, kind of computer generated statistical tables and all that kind of stuff. But as we know from other forms of quasar scientific criticism, they are, of course, already looking for what they want to find.
Okay, so this is no more scientific than the science of editing that we've talked about before or the science of other kinds of critical method in our age. We can see that the values of teamwork, of kind of collaborative web authorship.
What we understand about commercial entertainment, the whole leanin kind of philosophy, suspicion of individual genius, all of these combined to make it inevitable, perhaps, that our Shakespeare early 21st century Shakespeare might look more collaborative than sodomy. 20TH century Shakespeare. And no doubt the pendulum will move again to go on to suggest we're on the brink of a of of a sudden new and kind of final understanding of Shakespeare.
Of course we're not. We're but we're on the brink of a quite an interesting new critical movement, which has some new things to say about Shakespeare as a collaborative writer. So we're asking about how understanding Timon of Athens is as Shakespeare Middleton collaboration. I should say that so far this is the only play that is broadly accepted to be a collaboration between the two writers.
There's something that they're both working on at the same time. Presumably discussing together, dividing up the work in some way between them. So it's the only collaboration of that sort that we think that Shakespeare Middleton have done at the moment. But we're asking how understanding the players are that kind of cooperation might affect our reading of it. And by extension, what can critical methodologies are appropriate to the study of collaborative works?
Identifying the work as collaborative has, of course, historically been a way of excusing the things we don't like about it or the ways in which we think it's fair to statically. Let's just spend a couple of minutes on the debate about who ran to some drug makers as kind of an instructive example. For centuries, critics comforted themselves that this brutal, grotesquely comic play could not be mostly by Shakespeare, just couldn't be by Shakespeare.
So value and authorship went together. We didn't think it touched on drama. This was very good. We knew that Shakespeare was very good. So therefore, Shakespeare could not have written Titus Andronicus or not. Mostly when Jonathan Bate rehabilitated the play's critical reputation in the early 1990s. In the Autumn three edition, he also made a very strong case that Titus Andronicus was solely by Shakespeare.
Okay, so authorship and value are still going together. Now, Titus Andronicus is really good. Shakespeare is really good. Therefore, Shakespeare wrote some problem. He it's the same argument, but just flipped, flipped around and. Very honest about this. He said he couldn't have both made a case of the aesthetic qualities of Titus and the case that it was collaborative.
But those cases could not be made at the same time because you couldn't make a case that the play was really good and and at the same time say it was it was written by more than one author. The consensus now is both that Titus Andronicus is an interesting, valuable, sophisticated play and that it is a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Pell now. Timerman has not yet had the work of major critical rehabilitation that bakes Synthesise for Titus.
And that's because most recent editions of the play have been concerned to sort out the issue of collaboration rather than to work on the issue of ascetic or cultural value. A recent stage production, though, by Nick Hytner at the National Theatre with Simon Russell Beale as Timon did much to bring out the play's topical consciousness by attaching it pretty effectively, I think, to the collapse of the banking system. I think it's a play ripe for reassessment.
We all feel working on Shakespeare. Everything has already been said about Shakespeare. If that's not true generally. But it's most certainly not true of timing of our friends. Unlike many aspects of the critical reception of Shakespeare's plays, this echoes a bit in my mind with what I was saying about Coriolanus a couple of weeks ago. For instance, attitudes to the play mirror attitudes within it.
Timing is a play about rejection and being shunned underplay that has itself often been rejected and shunned. And I guess one aim of our work on the collaborative here is to move beyond simply rationalising, not liking the play by identifying it as a feature collaboration. Saying we don't like time because it's not very good and it's not very good because it's collaborative. That's a bit of a dead end. A critically and not where we want to be right now.
So if we're going to understand collaboration as the dominant writing practise of the early modern theatre, most plays in this period are co-authored. We need to move beyond seeing the product of that practise as invariably split, coherent and aesthetically divided. But having said that, one common way to understand collaboration in Timon is to use use it to think about or even to emphasise gaps or inconsistencies or problems in the play.
That's a collaboration can be a way of, instead of smoothing over a kind of problematic element of the play that we foregrounding and splitting it apart. Introducing Tyran in the best modern edition box with Worlds Classics text, John Jarratt argues that the oscillation between satire and rage results in part from the shift between Middleton and Shakespeare because he's making a night point out that the play's tonal differences are actually differences of authorship.
There are lots of other examples, too. We could argue that the two writers each have a quite different idea of what the character Alsup by this is for. I suppose it's quite difficult character to understand what his motives are, what is meant to represent in the play, and maybe because Middleton is shaped for a quite different view of what what what is there for.
They both, however interesting, they suppress the rumour of homosexuality that such a part of our society's classical biography is something that Spencer and Maya are both quite interested to bring out. We can see that there are two styles in the play to linguistic styles. One is more tolerant of irregular verse lines and more inclined to rhyming couplets. So irregular verse lines and rhyming couplets.
That's really a hallmark of Middleton's work, and it's unusual in Shakespeare's later work to use rhyme at all. Another linguistic difference is the characteristically Shakespearian preference for the I do verb form shapes, but always, almost always uses the older form. I did go back marks a kind of generational difference, but also a provincial difference. That's if that's a bad form, if you know anything about the development of English, which is on its way out.
He's looking old fashioned by this point. Middleton uses the modern form. I went, so I did go. It's a Shakespearean collocation. I went. It's a Middleton one. It's quite interesting to think of a Shakespeare who we tend to praise for being inventive and kind of modern linguistically, but in verbal forms and syntax. He's a distinctly old fashioned writer. That must have occurred to people who heard his parents.
We also can see that Middleton tends to conceptualise the play's attitude to money around the word debt. So debt is an economic relationship between people. It's a kind of relational understanding of money, whereas for Shakespeare, the crucial noun about money seems to be gold. So that's the thing. It's a prop on the stage, but it's also a thing with more kind of fairy tale, less nakedly economic connotations.
The play is structured, as I've already hinted, around a kind of echo of the first half time. And in the city, the second in the woods, the first half philanthropy, the second misanthropic. It's a split or dual play structurally, that's to say. But this is not a division that maps onto the division of writing between the two characters.
It is not the case of Shakespeare has a kind of philanthropic time and a Middleton has a misanthropic time and but there is some echo of divided authorship, perhaps in the place, divided structure. Shakespeare seems to have worked on the very beginning of the play on the end and in particular on the current of time. But much of the central portion of time in Athens is attributed to Middleton, particularly those banquet scenes that I already mentioned.
They're going to talk about again in a minute. OK, so one way to think about collaboration is to use it to make to put at the centre of the analysis. This continuity's or splits structural, linguistic, ideological in the play. And to make those splits somehow that the dynamic of how to interpret the play and the evidence for dual authorship. Another way to think about timing or by any collaborative play is to think about the way it is or is not like other plays by Shakespeare.
So for many critics, Simon stands alone in Shakespeare's canon as a central character who has no family. When you think about it, it's a really significant observation. Crucial to Shakespeare's plotting in all genres is the relationship between family members, between fathers and daughters, in comedies and in the late plays between fathers and sons.
In the history plays in particular between siblings, between married couples, it's hard to think of another protagonist who is so completely alienated from those structures. And it's one of the ways, I guess, we could think about a difference between Shakespeare on the one hand and Johnson on the other. If Johnson is a playwright, he rarely shows us family relationships. One really interesting parallel to time and I think is both Pony Johnson's play Volpone.
So timing is a distinctly isolated figure. In some ways. He's the kind of ideal, tragic figure because he hasn't really got anybody to separate himself from in order to achieve the tragic hyphenation that characters are trying to get to by the end of that play. But while the isolation does seem distinctive, it also chimes in with some aspirations of Shakespeare's contemporaneous plays. Lots of other characters would like to be like Timon.
In this regard, we might think of Coriolanus, his desire, that man, what all four of himself and knew no other king said. That man were author of himself and knew no other kings could discourage its oppressed by his family, his mother, his wife, his sense of obligation to them. Or we might think of the superhuman strength bestowed on Macduff in the play Macbeth. Remember the witches tale Macbeth that Macduff can't be beaten because he is not born of woman.
And of course, Macduff Duff neatly sidestepped being massacred by leaving. His wife and children are saying remark quite sharply in that for the play. So by separate himself from his family and having this strange kind of metaphysical separation from femininity, MacDuffie is unbeatable in the play. So like Coraline, it's he too aspires to a kind of family. This family, less state. Even Leers attempts to disown his daughters participate in this male fantasy of self-sufficiency.
Time is the Shakespeare play, which has least interesting all scope for women. But there are other ways, too, in which Tollman is a play closely integrated with Shakespeare's other works. Its sources include Plutarch's Lives of the Noble, Grecians and Romans. We've talked about this on a number of occasions. So he shares that with Julius Caesar, with Antony Cleopatra and with Coriolanus Kleiman's Epitaph, or one of them, at least as quoted almost directly from Plutarch.
And while it's a play that's tended to be seen as emblematic rather than realist, more like a fable than a kind of psychological exploration, it does have lots of points of contact with King Lear, Flavia's, who is time, and Stewart follows him loyally into exile, a bit like Lears. Phou Coleridge dumped time in a Lear of domestic or ordinary line, a layer of domestic or ordinary life.
Amongst Shakespeare's tragedies, perhaps its closest to Coriolanus, both plays have got this bitterly alienated protagonist turning against the former city state and the sense that these kind of private relationships turn into the public antagonism, the military antagonism against the city. I think the play's depiction of money under bonds, of gifts and of the way they do or don't connect people is interestingly linked with the Merchant of Venice.
It's a kind of Merchant of Venice told from her point of view of Antonio. And when there's no Porsche to save him, this is so, so time. And it's an Antonio who's given away all his money but doesn't get anything back for it. And we might think about comedy of errors, too, as another kind of city comedy city play about money and and the interactions it enables.
And finally, thinking about the relationship of this play to other Shakespearean plays, the idea of a four to degree in the world so away from the selfish city time then finds in nature just a perverted version of the economic relationships is left behind and finds this gold under the tree. What he's looking for food. The idea of a thwarted green world goes back again to King Lear and its perverse pastoral politics.
And it's the play's depiction of a nightmarish pastoral or the parallels and contrast between the city and the woods might also link it with another play set in Athens, Midsummer Night's Dream and another distinctly commercial pastoral as you like it. So these connexions with other Shakespeare plays are fruitful, and there are also some really interesting ways that timing could be much more integrated critically into the Shakespeare canon than it has been.
But there are also, of course, implicitly ways of suppressing the middle, Tony, in aspects of the play and incorporating it, incorporating time and more fully on thematic grounds with the work of Shakespeare. It's an attitude to collaboration that effectively ignores it. On the one hand, it refuses the aesthetic implications of the collaborative as bitter or incoherent. But in doing so on the other, it refuses collaboration as a theme at all.
So in this kind of analysis, Milton is at best a kind of gofer, a sort of artistic blank whose work does little to change the play's dominant experience, and that maybe puts in a few rhyming couplets alongside it. Of course, it's entirely possible, although much less usual, to flip this model.
The Oxford collected Middleton looks at time, and just as it looks at my back and measure for measure as Middleton plays rather than a Shakespeare one that contextualises them amongst what Middleton is writing, rather than thinking of them as kind of outposts of the Shakespearean canon. This is a really interesting, critical manoeuvre and it makes a whole new set of affinities and into text jollity is visible.
We can see, for example, timecards affinities with city accommodate is a really popular contemporary early 17th century qara, which Shakespeare never really enters. We used to say he entered it in measure for measure. But I think we now think that was Middleton that the board didn't measure for. Measure called mysteries overdone must only look to have been a Middleton name. Really a very Shakespearean way of thinking about characters names and Athans time.
And Athans is only nominally a foreign place. It has recognisably Jacobean London elements. Just ask. Measure for measure does so like the other plays in city comedy. It's really set in contemporary London characters in time. And are the generic types typical of city comedy? It's a system of individuation that's more like Middleton than Shakespeare and that kind of contextless hero that seems so strange in the Shakespearean context at time.
And as a man with no family, no lover, no profession and no background. It's quite common in Middleton where effective or blood bonds are much less important than commercial ones for time, and there is nothing that defines him other than his money. And therefore, when he loses that, he has lost everything. There is no character to time and only a row, or that's two roles that fit philanthropic and then the misanthrope.
It's an arrangement we tend to associate more with comedy than with tragedy, and particularly with the kind of satirical comedy which gives characters names that represent their dominant characteristics. At one point in the play time, it is called a naked dive and naked gull. The goal is a term for someone tricked or made to look foolish by a comic plot.
It's a perennial feature of the period satiric comedies so looked at as a Middleton play times dark city comedy satire comes much more to the fore. So a Shakespearean view of time, and that's to say, takes King Lear and Coriolanus as its primary argumentative coordinates a middle Ternium view of time and would be interested to trace the connexions with a mad world. My Masters a trick to catch the old one and Middleton's transition about this time to the tragedies he wrote for The King's Men.
The awkward tragedy, which is bewilderingly associated with Shakespeare, is attributed to Shakespeare in print. It's another point where Shakespeare, Middleton's reputation somehow are intersecting at this point. So the auto tragedy and the Revengers tragedy. Not quite a collaboration with Shakespeare, but one which is deeply dependent on Middleton's reading of Hamlet.
So I guess we could think of Timon of Athens as a point of connexion between Middleton and Shakespeare, which from both sides is that collaboration looks interesting and looks to some extent inevitable or looks part of a kind of pattern. So a line this play with Middletons rather than Shakespeare's work reorders our priorities and it can undo an assumption about their relative roles in the writing. We always think that Shakespeare must have been the boss, and that's probably not quite justified.
Like the Book of Sir Thomas Moore, to which scholars now believe Shakespeare contributed around 60 No. Four and poetries sixteen hours, seven time and is a collaborative play that messes up the old acceptance that theatre collaboration worked on the model of the painting maestro and his apprentice. So we used to think the collaborative work was firmly located at the beginning of Shakespeare's career. Titus may be handed a six point one where Shakespeare is clearly in The Apprentice role.
He's learning to be a playwright and then at the end of his career, the work with Fletcher on two never kinsmen and Henry the eighth here. He's the old master and Fletcher is The Apprentice. So that's the model we used to have and how collaboration work. It worked on a deeply unequal basis where one person had all the kind of experience and cultural capital and the other person was learning by painting the sky or the equivalent.
So it's a model that suggests that collaboration is always unequal and that the younger writer is always the junior partner. That's the kind of apprentice model. I think we all feel that we now need to look at that again, prompted by evidence that Shakespeare is in collaborative writing environments. Pretty much all the way through his career.
It's also not necessarily the case that the younger writer has more to gain from the collaboration than the older one, competitive arts industries like the theatre, then like music now tend to prefer younger new talent over old stagers. Middleton's prowess in the kind of satirical, unsentimental scifi comedy which was so fashionable in 17th century London may have looked like a much more desirable theatrical commodity than Shakespeare's old romantic comedies.
Because it may be Shakespeare who looked out of date, a Middleton who was bringing some vyn into this well established playwright. Shakespeare may have needed Middleton more than the other way around. Perhaps there is one argument that suggests that Shakespeare is getting much, much less popular as his career continues. He's the second half of his work is much less likely to be printed than the first half, for instance.
Is his divert his diversion all the way to digresses from what's generally popular and where people are put looking for theatrical entertainment? That's much more obvious in the second half of his career than in the first.
Okay, so we've looked at the critical models for talking about collaborative plays as if they are intrinsically broken, so that what's most interesting about them is dividing up the play into the separate contributions of the two writers and explaining away the things that don't work as a failure of communication or execution between them.
Then we've talked about an alternative view in which the play is aligned with the solo work of the writer who is considered to be dominant in contempt criticism. That's usually Shakespeare, but it's worth flipping that to think about Middleton. That's a model which we try to load parallels to the tax and can be really useful in in making it feel less orphaned.
But it's also a model which minimises the contribution of the other writer or turns away from thinking about what collaboration is saying. And I hope that what this makes clear is that our models for thinking about collaborative work are still pretty undeveloped. It's hard to think after all of the work of art we all acknowledge is a masterpiece that is jointly created. It's as if the aesthetic value, aesthetic appreciation and single authorship across all kinds of genres go together.
Maybe it's worth looking at modern creative partnerships and their account of their work has revealing interview with the artist. Gilbert and George. The arguments about Lennon and McCartney.
Perhaps it's easy, easier still to think about creative partnerships in other art forms than in literature, because all of the collaborate co-operative arguments that have Shakespeare is one of the parties can't really get away from the overwhelming reputation of Shakespeare to think about collaboration in a more creative way.
I think our models for thinking about collaborative work are unable to think about how to writers might form a partnership that's more effective or more powerful or at least different from either of them on their own at the moment. That's to say our model for thinking about early, modern, dramatic collaboration could be said to be a search for marks of its failure.
We only see collaboration points when two styles don't match together or they pull in different narrative, characterological or stylistic directions. OK. So is everything we might want to say about Timon shaped by the fact of its being collaborative? I guess probably not. No more than everything we might want to say about a different play would be all about. It's been written by a single writer. All kinds of theories from Roland.
Parts per structuralism of authorial demise to more modern work on performance and theatre at intrinsically collaborative would suggest that authorial collaboration should never be the most interesting thing about to play. In fact, who wrote a play is almost certainly the least interesting thing about it.
So in the last 10 or so minutes, I just want to develop a couple of other points of interest, although I think maybe because of the way I've set this lecture up, authorship keeps coming back as one aspect of the critical purchase of these things. I want to talk about gifts and money and bonds first and then to talk about the idea of tragedy and of anticlimax appropriately at the end. So at the beginning of this play, Timon seems limitlessly wealthy and generous.
They would seem to be really positive terms. To be generous seems to be positive. But in fact, timeline's largesse is a form of propaganda tape, a form of excess, a form of what led a later theorist would call conspicuous consumption. Time then becomes a figure for the kind of unrestricted capitalism that is based on nothing. Money based on nothing. Money divorced from a kind of gold standard.
Early on in the play, the Stuart notes that his lounds put to their books, his lands put to their books and the early signal that time. And like Richard, the second is mortgaged to the hilt. The idea of mortgaging away proper assets like planned in order to have money to spend on fripperies is one of the early modern period. Great fears about how how the economic world is developing so that you can raise a mortgage on a real tangible asset and spend all the money on on on shows of display.
So timeline's displays of wealth are just daft displays. They frittering away the money rather than reflecting its endlessness, like the friendships and the networks they purportedly support then timings. Generous displays are hollow. His second banquet, when the friends have proved themselves false, serves up stones and water in an elaborate parody of his earlier lavishness. But it also symbolises the ultimate emptiness of his unsecured expenses and the relationships it has engineered.
A number of men eats, Kleinman notes. One onlooker, a number of man beats Tirman. There's a sense in which time he himself is being consumed. There are shades of a perverse last supper in which Simon Sacranie timely sacrifices himself for his greedy and worthless followers. But the play is unsympathetic both to the hangers on who show no loyalty to Timon and instead are interested only in his money. So something pathetic to them. But it's also unsympathetic to Time and himself.
His philanthropy is excessive. It's needy. So debt and laziness. Along with conspicuous consumption are both criticised. Perhaps this is intended as some kind of critique of the Jacobean courtly gift economy. James was known for lavish expenditure banqueting masking, including a mask of the Amazons, which time in himself brings to his table. He was known for the exchange of expensive gifts with particular favourites. The bankruptcy of the play's economic vision is symbolised in the empty box.
That time in Serban takes to be filled by his old debts as he keeps taking this box to say, filled this box up to help Timon. And of course, none of them will do it. The empty box is exactly the symbol of the economic bankruptcy of the play play world. So if you're interested in political economy, in finance and metaphore, you'll enjoy Timon. Just like Marx, Marx quoted time and extensively as a critique of the.
Capitalist money economy. And in particular, he brought out two elements of the way money operates in time in which you felt were indicative of the power of money in the economy more generally. So the idea that it is the visible divinity, the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries impossibilities are sold together by it.
An interesting idea that money might smoulder over or attempt to smoulder over the distinctions between the two writers or other kinds of breaks in the play. And then secondly, Mark says in a quotation from the play itself, it is the common [INAUDIBLE], the common procurer of people and nations. Money, says Marx, is the alienated ability of mankind. Now, for Marx, this power of money was a deeply renaissance invention.
He juxtaposes quotations from Toman with quotations from Columbus on the riches of the new world that have transformed the European economy of the 16th century and beyond. And interesting that the plays coy about the origins of tomans gold that you find in the wood. Having given away all his money to his factories, parasites timeline finds while searching for roots to eat under a tree, a new cache of gold.
The play is absolutely unclear about whether this cash should be interpreted as the fruit of human ingenuity. Does he find a lot of gold coin buried there by someone else? A bit like the money that Aaron buries in tight Titus Andronicus. Or does he find some natural beneficence, the kind of gold or that is this is the kind of fruit of nature. So is this about culture or about nature?
That's a question which is always, always present in Shakespeare's pastoral has time and escaped from corrupted systems of human value. Is he being rewarded in some cosmic sense that his generosity by giving been giving money back? Or is it revealed that he cannot escape the tentacles of economics and finance?
Time and zone, scornful depiction of that goal description of baffled that he finds when searching for food was from marks the epitome of the realisation that money was the alienated ability of mankind. Pointless, conspicuous consumption such as for milk, white horses trapped in silver for milk, white horses trapped in Silvo, which is sent as a gift at two time and in the opening scene, are seen as a cynical version of gift exchange.
So altruism and generosity are just 50 leads for deeply manipulative manoeuvres in a financial game of escalating value. So critics of the plan have often been interested in anthropological theories of the gift. The gift, as Marcel Marceau and others have written, is always implicated in an ongoing reciprocity of bonds. Max and the critics following him are clear that the gift is never freely given. It's always part of asserting, consolidating and manipulating bonds of loyalty.
The gift requires another gift in return. Site tandems celebrity lifestyle in the opening scenes is a parable of moral and spiritual emptiness. And it is a parable in which literature too is implicated. We talked in the lecture on Julius Caesar about the role of sinner, the poet. Remember that there are two professional poets in Julius Caesar. The only other character in the Shakespearean canon who is identified with that profession is here in time and of Athens.
He, in conversation with a painter, opens the play and he's one of the few elements to link the plays, often rather distinct. Two halves. He returns again towards the end to try to ingratiate himself with time and again. The poet promises to shape Simon's reputation, fingering him in the role of bountiful fortune and in depicting the self-interested poet in this way.
The play's opening gets to the heart of the patronage system, in which both authors operated poetic publication like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, or the rapidly creese dedicated to the Earl of Southhampton and theatrical publication or opera production time and produced under the patronage of the King were both part of a complex economy of patronage in which protection, money and praise circulated. Perhaps the implication here is that these systems of value are as unsecured as the financial.
One of the many ironies of this satirical play is that it can atomise the system of patronage even while it is implicated within it. There's no sense at all and Timon of Athens that poetry has a privileged status outside the distorting claims of capital. Rather, it is deeply expressive of human relationships, understood not as effective bonds, but almost always as monetised ones.
The opening scene goes into a lot of detail about how artworks might be seen as almost a kind of act frantic scene, a crisis, the rhetorical term for the verbal description of an artwork and that sets up the aesthetics of patronage and the economics of patronage as crucial to the play. From the very beginning, the only character who really sees through all this is Upper Mantas. He's called a churlish philosopher in the Photios character, least on the stage directions.
His entrance in the in in the second act of the play is typical of Middleton's tendency towards a narrative stage directions, a great banquet surfing and then enter Lord Time in the States. The Athenian lords voted yes to which time and redeemed from prison. So which time then redeemed from prison is a kind of phrase you would never get in a Shakespearean stage direction. And never they never clarify or recap the plot for us.
But Middleton does that quite often. Perhaps partly because Middleton's place has a lot of plot. Then comes dropping. After all, opponents discontented Li like himself. So there's a clear kind of stage choreography here in which this bright group of revellers are followed by this physically quite distinct, much less cheerful figure. After months of discontented, contentedly dropping. But we might feel that subcommanders like himself is a tautology.
Nobody has been explicitly described in this stage. The action has been in disguise, which is tends to be what stage directions suggests. Ask himself is in opposition to. But there's the suggestion. Therefore, the stakes are actually set. Everybody else is pretending to be something that they're all living some kind of lie or some kind of display. And the top amount is only a house, a kind of personal integrity.
You can also see a from the stage direction that the characters in the scene, apart from Time and himself, are hardly differentiated as individuals, their representatives rather than people. And the final thing I want to talk about really briefly is Tynan's death. We all know that death in tragedy is paradoxically that moment of dramatic self-assertion, even at the point of self annihilation.
That's to say at the moment of dying, Shakespearean character, Shakespeare and tragic characters are most at the centre of their plans. They tend to have extended death scenes in the early modern equivalent of a theatrical spotlight, a dramaturgical technique that isolates them, makes the audience focus on them, and makes them supremely important to their own story. In its final moments. So key to this plays off key indication of the tragic form is its treatment of time instead.
Unlike most tragic heroes, Time's death gives us no moments of pathos or still focus. We don't exactly know how he dies. His withdrawal from human society is so complete that he withdraws from tragedy itself and from the stage. He dies offstage in a way which is not at all clear. The play's evasive, whether he succumbs to his miseries, whether he commit suicide, or whether he simply wills himself to die. Certainly he's angry in a way that seems self consuming and unsustainable.
But in place of our actually seeing how time and guys, what the play gives us instead is three distinct epitaphs. The first one is from time and from. So this is his farewell to the stage. Come up to me again, but say Sacre Arthur's time and have made his everlasting mansion upon the beach verge at the salt flood. Who wants a day with his embossing from the turbulent surf shall cover that kind of Sematary seems to suggest, but confound that sense of regeneration we get from the sea the place.
There's a common migration beyond Oracle lips. Let forewords go by and language. And what is a mixed plague and infection? Mend graves only remains worse than death. Their gay son hide Bybee's time and half done his reign in time and leaves the stage offstage. He seems he dies. And moments later, an unnamed soldier appears to come across his grave. But he reads out something quite different. Timing is dead. Who hath outstretched his spine? Some beast. Read this.
That does not live. A man goes on to say dead. Sure. And this his grave. What's on this, too? I cannot read the character I'll take with wax. Our Captain half in every figure of skill. An aged interpreter. They're young in days before proud Athens, who sat down by this, who's for the mark of his ambition is.
So somebody has written some different kind of at the top, which isn't times own, the soldier takes an impression, a kind of rubbing of the lettering could take back to Athens for deciphering. And that idea that you would copy out the epitaph and try and get it deciphered seems to point again to the difficulty of interpreting at the time its last words.
The big, sad, comfortless notes of this inscription is hollowly underlined when asked by these reads the top for the third time in the play's final lines. So this is up. What else? Ubaidi says Time's epitaph is. Here lies a wretched cause of wretched soul. Bereft seek. Not my name. A plague consume you. Wicked cakes. HIP's left here. Lie I Teichmann who alive. All living men did hate. Pass by and curse by Phil.
But pass and stay. Not here thy gate. So something can some kind of strange and self-defeating about that epitaph seek. Not my name. Here lie I time the some. There's something very kind of weird about this over generation of epitaphs for someone whose death remains so mysterious instead of the death of time.
And then we have three different epitaphs, as if they are a record of the difficulty of summarising his life and securing his legacy time and leaves the stage to a confusion of funerary remembrance. The alternative epitaph sketch out timeline's life is subject to interpretation sardonically pre-empted by time and himself and by the source material. That's always a feature of these possible plans. It's a bleak ending, I think, to a harsh play, which has no truck with transcendent values.
We have historically liked to attribute to tragedy. Interestingly, most of the engagement with time and has been in the later 20th century had been in the 20th century and beyond a series of vortices drawings by the modernist writer and artist Windom Lewis, in which the alienation of time as misanthropic rage resound was the ascetic culture of modernism, big time and as a play.
But like Coriolanus, that modernism begins to understand for the first time and time, and unflinching bleakness has had its echoes in the 20th century theatre of the absurd. What I've been talking about today is cooperation and Timon of Athens. And I've tried to think through some of the models we've got for thinking about co authorship. In addition, I've tried to identify some of the current critical hotspots, but also the blindspots of thinking about plays which are collaboratively written.
This is the last of my lectures in this series for this time. Thanks a lot for being here.