This play is just not like any other play by Shakespeare. It is not a tragedy, really. It is not a drama either, certainly not a comedy. We would call it a social drama if it were not dealing with an Athenian noble and the top society of Athens, all dressed in black.
Timon is rich, or he thinks he is, and he gives generously to people he believes are his friends because of all the good things they say about him, flattery of course but he does not see it like that. He believes they are true at heart, though they are only true "at greed." His steward tells him one night he is ruined and he has done it all by himself by overspending without counting. He sends his three servants to "friends" to ask for some money. The three "best friends" just plainly refuse right away and flatly. He is ruined. He dismisses his servants and steward and he vanishes from Athens to escape the creditors and other human hawks.
We discover him living outside the city in a cave, half naked and covered with sores, eating roots and rejecting humanity as absolutely despicable. A first man comes back and recognizes him. Timon sends him away after giving him a gold coin he has found among the gravel of the beach. The miracle that makes the story moral! At once some of his "old friends" are coming just to make sure they can get some gold. The only one he welcomes is his old steward who comes to try to bring him back to life, the only one who is not interested in gold, the only one he hugs and is not repelled by his sores.
The only ones he has a long discussion with are general Alcibiades and philosopher Apemantus. He expresses his absolute misanthropy, rejection of human beings in general, society in particular. He has extremely harsh words about humanity with Apemantus along a "beast" metaphor.
"A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t' attain to! . . . (W)ert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse: wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard: wert thou a leopard, thou wert German to the lion and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life: all thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? and what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!" (Act IV scene 3)
The lesson is that any animal has a prey and a predator in his immediate environment, is the predator to a prey of his own and is a prey to a predator of his own again. And that is granted by the gods and humans are just the same except that they are predators and prey to one another, hence cannibalistic.
And he will die in his cave and Athenians will maybe try to step over their greed and hatred and "forgive" him but that will only be an illusion, man being man, man will always be man, hence beasts to one another. And the play closes with Timon's self-written epitaph brought by a soldier who found him dead in his cave:
'Here lies a wretched corpse, of wretched soul bereft: Seek not my name: a plague consume you wicked caitiffs left! 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.'
The same pessimistic if not frankly schizophrenic attitude that rejects the world since he cannot in anyway be part of it on any friendly terms. And he pushes the fact he was rejected by humanity to the extreme of rejecting humanity as a whole and even forbidding passers-by to even stop for the slightest duration. Note this epitaph is contradictory to what it contains since the passers-by will have to stop to read it. In his derangement Timon keeps a slight particle of humanity in his belief he is something, even though rejected by everyone else, and he actually expresses that mite of humanity with his old steward he hugs.
How can Shakespeare go that far in the expression of this monstrous and beastlike nature of man – and women by the way. Since there are only two shady lady accompanying Alcibiades at the end and some female dancers who are more or less entertainers of the big all-men dinner party of the beginning, we can say women in this society have been reduced to very little, and they may eat some leftovers on the banquet table after dancing and entertaining the men, and that has to be done fast and surreptitiously. At least that's what the production proposes.
That rejection of women is common in the tragedies (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and many others). It is a lot more subtle in the comedies where women can in fact become those who are making men dance for their (women's) own pleasure. They control the situation a lot better than Lady Macbeth of Hamlet's mother. Think of the Shrew who is the tamer more than the tamed. But here women are just rejected on the most outside margin; if not even beyond the margin, of the tale. And men are reduced to voracious devourers that are at the same time submissive victims. There really is no hope and no future in this world . . .
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
