COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
 
 THE AUTHORSHIP 
 OF TIMON OF ATHENS
 
 THE AUTHORSHIP 
 
 OF 
 
 TIMON OF ATHENS 
 
 BY 
 
 ERNEST HUNTER WRIGHT, Ph.D. 
 
 iffa iork 
 
 THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1910 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 Copyright, 1910 
 By The Columhia University Press 
 
 Printed from type May, 1910 
 
 Press of 
 
 The new Era printins company 
 
 Lancaster. Pa.
 
 LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY 01- CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA liAUUARA 
 
 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 
 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 wouKl haiilly think two autliors 
 working separately woiiUl have olTcctoil tlicin; and sonic of 
 these have never been cxi^laincd. or are explained in ways 
 that do not quite appeal to reason. 
 
 For it must be saiil that criticism has been rather languid 
 in the case of Timoti. Attention may have been dellccted 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 
 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 11. The Sources 8 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 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 Athens, 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; aiul not i>iily hotwi-cii diiTcicMit scenes, but often 
 in two parts of the same one. In brief, about a third oi Tii)ioii 
 — merely to state concisely the prevailing view of criticism — 
 is such jMDetry as one scarcely finds outside of Shakspcre ; 
 another thinl, in prose and verse, might easily be matched in 
 Shakspcre. but also in some tUher dramatists; while the last 
 third is stutT such as Shakspcre seldom or never wrote in 
 cpiantity. 
 
 Xor 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 im- 
 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 ofT 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. 
 In 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, Alalone, and others ; the singular 
 contrasts in its style, and the contradictions and ellipses in its 
 plot, so far as they w^ere 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.^ 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.- " 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."^ 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."* 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 argument'^ that Tinion 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 
 
 ^ Note to V, i, I. = Note to II, ii, 47. 
 
 'Note to I, i, 25. ■'Note to V, ii, 8. 
 
 ^Pictorial Edition, 1838.
 
 the evidence at liatul ; it was more sufjgcstivf than conclusive. 
 The theory it started is therefore much hetter represented in 
 the more exhaustive arj^ument wliich DoHus" wrote in 1867. 
 To the huter argument nothing lias heen added since ; the 
 treatise of Dehus has remained the only full expression of 
 the theory that Shakspere partially re\vn>te an older Tinioii. 
 Staunton. Dyce. Messrs. Clark and Wright, Dr. P)rinslcy 
 Nicholson. Mr. II. .\. Kvans.^ and others, have followed 
 Knight ami Dclius with slight deviations but without further 
 pr'>if. 
 
 In general, the evidence adduced by Knight and Delius 
 came much nearer proving that there were two hands at work 
 in Timoii than that Shakspcre's was the second. The way 
 was therefore open for the rival theory which \^crplanck^ 
 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 \'erplanck, though well put, is again superficial ; and for 
 the best expression of this theory we go (passing the elabo- 
 rate defence of it by Tschischwitz" as largely guesswork) to 
 !Mr. Fleay.^° 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- 
 pcre's was the first hand to touch Timon. One cannot say that 
 !Mr. Fleay concludes the case; he does not, even for his main 
 
 * Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft , 1867. 
 ^ See the respective editions, and, for Nicholson, New Shakspere 
 Society Transactions, 1874, page 249. 
 
 * Edition, 1847. 
 
 * Jahrbucit, 1869. 
 
 ^ 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,^^ 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,^- 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 
 
 " See the respective editions. 
 
 ^^ 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 fiir Litetaturgeschichte, 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,
 
 6 
 
 tiiul a siiij^lo fact on which the critics arc unaninioiis. Ahnost 
 all ajjrcc that the play had two authors; yet several still ilonhl ; 
 ami even this helief cannot he saiil to rest ou certainty. Many 
 scholars come, or iiseil to ccMiie. to something,' like aij^reenient 
 as to what parts of the play each aiitluir wrote ^Mr. i'leay 
 not ilitYerini^ ninch from Delius <.>n this head. lUit hardly two 
 entirely concur; and recently a tendency is manifest to hreak 
 what agreement has existed.'-' Divisions of the play ])etween 
 the autlu^rs are therefore ahout 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 opjiosing theories as to the j)rocess 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 wdiat 
 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. 
 
 " 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 
 
 Tin-: 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 (luantity ; 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 ovvn."^ In the same year Aristophanes 
 lets his Prometheus, in the Birds, claim jestingly to be the 
 _the_gDds^:42ating divinities as Timon hates human- 
 ity.- Three years later the same wtiter, incidentally inform- 
 ing us that Timon is now surely dead, points to him again, 
 in the Lysistrata, as a t^ipical maivliater.^ We are told by 
 Pkitajxli* that the comic poet Plato also made capital of 
 Timon's fame ; and from Antiphanes,° 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- 
 
 ^ Frag. 18. For full treatment of the ancient Timon legend see Dr. 
 Franz Bertram's Die Timonlegende in der antiken Literatur, Heidelberg, 
 1906. 
 'Line 1547. 'Line 805. 
 
 itonius, 38. ''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;*' so does Seneca;'^ while 
 the elder Pliny definitely classes him with Heraclitus, Pyrrho, 
 and Diogenes.® In another reference® 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. ^^ Strabo gives the story still another turn.^^ ]\Iarc 
 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, Plutarch^^ 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 unthankfulness 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. ^Epistle II, iv, 7. 
 
 ^Nat. Hist., VII, ig. ^ De Amicilia, XXIII, 87. 
 
 ^"Diogenes Laertius, I, ix, 107. ^^ Geography, XVII, 9. 
 
 " Antonhis, 38.
 
 10 
 
 he know tliat one day AloihiatU-s wouKl prove tlu- hano of 
 Athens. With a certain cK>ggcd Apcniantus, also, as like to 
 like. Tinion sometimes consorted. Once, as they ate together, 
 Apemantus saiil, "Mere is a trim hancpiet, Timon ; " "Yea," 
 replied the latter, " so thon wert not near." On another day 
 Timon gathered the Athenians in the market-place to ofTcr 
 them the use of a tree of his to liang themselves upon. He 
 was huried 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 Alcibiadcs^^ he again mentions Timon as the 
 latter's friend ; and there he also gives the name of Alcibiades' 
 companion, the Timandra of our play.'* 
 
 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 
 I 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~an3^ for revenge "on liTs false friends ; and the action 
 stafti^as^euSj;_remernbering thejiecatombs that Timon used 
 to sacrifice, sends Hermes with Plutiis and Thesaurus to 
 Tim6^n>-^dr^'MucIi amusing dialo gue is needed to induce_the 
 god of riches once more to visit tlie man who made such 
 wantQ^~use^^ hirri_u}_forrfieF days. Even \vhen 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, 
 
 '* 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- 
 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.
 
 I -2 
 
 With tlic Renaissance Tinion reappeared; and iiukcil had 
 the distinction of inspirinjj what is usually called the first 
 modern comedy. Although Hoiardo's // Tinionr.^^ written 
 before 1494. is interesting; as showing a revived attention to 
 the misanthrojie, it contributed little to the actual growth of 
 the legend. It is Lucian's story retold, with one feature 
 addcil — a sub-plot, in the fourth and fifth acts only, in which 
 the rightful owner of the gold Tinion 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 Ti))io)ic,^° a comedy in which Gallcotto 
 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 Eupliues,^~ "than Timon, denouncing all human 
 society? " Advocating the schooling of girls in his Positions, ^^ 
 Richard Mulcaster is afraid that " some Timon will say, ' what 
 should women do with learning? ' " Nor is this the only ref- 
 erence to Xi^es=,as..,ajwoman-hater. Robert Greene, in one of 
 his six references to the misanthrope,^" 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? "" 
 
 " Torraca's // Teatro Italiano dei Sec. XIII, XIV, XV. 
 
 "Ante 1497; Ireneo Sanesi, Storia dei Generi Lelterarii Italiaiti: La 
 Commedia, page 170. 
 
 " Arber's reprint, page 40. 
 
 "Quick Ed., 1888, page 174. 
 
 "r;:e 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. 
 
 ^ Daphnaida, 246.
 
 13 
 
 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."-^ 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."-^ Edward Guilpin's Skia- 
 lethia (1598) contain this line: 
 
 " Like hate-man Timon in his cell he sits.""^ 
 
 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."-* And in 
 the Satiromastix, 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.""° 
 
 Dekker twice again refers to Timonists.-^ 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.-'' 
 
 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 
 
 '^Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, Grosart Ed,, IV, 139. 
 
 ^^ 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. 
 
 ^ Ed. J. P. Collier, Miscellaneous Tracts, page i8. 
 
 -* Act I, line 314. 
 
 -•'• Line 2502. " General leprosy," whether taken hence or not, is the 
 final plague that the Shaksperean Timon invokes on Athens — IV, i, 30. 
 
 ^Grosart Ed., II, 214; III, 74. 
 
 =MV, iii, 169.
 
 14 
 
 Painter jjivc ilu- only lonij avoouiU-^ i>f 'I'imoii in r.iij^lisli.'-" 
 W'c know on other jjroiuuls. however, that the story (hd rini 
 into ilraina before Shakspere. An anonymous comedy on 
 Timon is extant from alxiut i6cm, and was fust eihted hy 
 Dyce."" 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 chanj^cs 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 Shakspcrean 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 ofifers 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 
 
 ^ 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. 
 
 "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.
 
 15 
 
 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 of the term, it had no 
 known source — nothing to correspond to the older King John 
 or the pre-Shaksperean Taming of a Shrezv. 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
 
 ic. 
 
 therefore narrcnveil to the liiiits he took from e.ioh source 
 that lie knew. 
 
 There is nothitijj to inthcate that he knew lioiardo or C'aretto. 
 We cannot prove the negative, of course; he may have read 
 tlieir plays; hut if he did. he made no use of them in his own. 
 All that he lias in common with them may he found in I.ucian 
 and in the English Timon comedy, one or hoth of whicli. as 
 we shall see. he certainly used. Wiicrcver the Italian dram- 
 atists tlepart 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."^" Plutarch told how Timon offered the 
 Athenians a tree on which to hang themselves ; an incident 
 finely realized in the play.^^ Timon's two epitaphs in Plu- 
 tarch are combined as one in the play.^^ 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;'' while the hint of Apemantus' nature is rounded out 
 into a character, a lineal descendant of Lyly's Diogenes,'* 
 
 •"TV, iii, 379; V, i, 218; V, iv, 78. 
 
 "V, i, 208. 
 
 ** Where they contradict each other ; see page 54, note. 
 
 "IV, iii, 284. 
 
 •* 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 f^ and the character, taking on some 
 general traits from Plutarch's separate Life of Alcihiades,^^ 
 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 excej)t the old 
 comedy. Before going on, however, to see whether Lucian 
 or the comedy nearest approximates our play, we may well 
 
 ^^ IV, iii, 105. 
 
 ^ Specifically, the name of Timandra comes from the Life of Alcibiades, 
 paragraph 10. 
 3
 
 IS 
 
 consider certain objections to either as a possil)le source f«M- it. 
 Lucian's dialogue, so far as is known, had not been F.nghshed. 
 That it was not unknown in Enijilanil the old comedy indeed 
 shows; and as it hail heen three times translated into Italian 
 and at least once into French,'"*' our author would not neces- 
 sarily have had to go to the Greek for it. lUit at best he would 
 have hail 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,^" yet 
 if only at a university, quite possibly without the knowledge 
 of the London author of T'niion of .Ithciis. 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 Ti)uon of .UJiciis; 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."^" 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 
 
 "Into Italian in 1527, anonymously, and again in 1535 and 1551, both 
 times by Nicolo da Lonigo ; into French in 1582 by Filbert Bretin. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 '^ For the view of Steevens and Malone, also, see Dyce's introduction.
 
 19 
 
 used the dialogue, but, despite the repetition of the steward and 
 the mock-banquet, did not know the old play.*° 
 
 Let us note the points in which T'unon resembles either of 
 the possible sources. 
 
 In the first scene Timon redeems Ventidius from a debtor's 
 prison with five talents.*^ 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."^^ 
 The nearest parallel in Lucian — but this is also repeated in 
 the old play*^ — 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 
 
 *" 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 Athen 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. 
 
 «I, ii, 60. "MI, iv.
 
 •JO 
 
 lie discovers goKl ; in the old play he seems to di^ for no 
 csjMrcial purpose; in Lucian he hirt-s out to dig for sixpence a 
 day. Wlicn he finds the gold, in the Shaksperean play, he 
 starts straight \v.!\- '■> bury it; so in the old play; not so in 
 Lucian. 
 
 The crowil thai llocks to Tinion's new-found wealth in the 
 Shaks|ierean play is ecpially like that in the old play and that 
 in Lucian ; or rather, differs ec|ually from each. The general 
 idea is the same in all three works, but the only ])arasitc 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 
 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 \'entidius — 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. 
 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 
 y out, " One day he gives us diamonds, next day stones" — words 
 y 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 
 — 'i 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
 
 21 
 
 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.** 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 Tiinon of Shakespeare," says 
 Mr. demons, "is not the Tirnon 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.*^ 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,*** a direct relation between 
 
 ** 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, 
 i8s6, HI, 135. 
 
 " Op. cit., page 219. 
 
 '"' 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.
 
 Lucian's dialogue aiiil our play is not proved. \\ hilc it is not 
 disprovetl either, that rehition is at K-ast unnecessary to explain 
 the substance of the play. .Ml the features oi the plot therein 
 that could have come from Lueian einild as well have come 
 from the old comeily. That comedy, unless some document is 
 lost, was ciTtainlv a source; Lucian may have been used in 
 addition. 
 
 That Shak.Npere should have known the old play does not 
 seem so extraordinary as has frecpiently been thought. We 
 have never hail 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. Clemons 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-iog. 
 
 Redemption of Ventidius 
 (5 talents). 
 
 
 Of Eutrapelus (5 
 talents). Of De- 
 meas( 16 talents). 
 
 Of Demeas (16 
 
 talents). 
 
 I, i, 110-172. 
 
 The old Athenian with his 
 daughter. 
 
 
 Philargurus and 
 daughter. 
 
 Philiades. 
 
 II, ii; IV, iii; 
 and /assim. 
 
 The faithful steward. 
 
 
 do. 
 
 
 Ill, vi. 
 
 Ihe 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- 
 
 Off'ers a tree for Athenians 
 to hang themselves. 
 
 d 0. 
 
 
 
 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 Al'tmorship 
 
 W c have saiil that scholars arc all but finally agreed on 
 double authorship in Timou, 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 wdiat 
 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 Timou, 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 p)oetry — poetry coming short of Lear, perhaps, in 
 poignancy of diction, and certainly in pathos of situation, but 
 surpassing even Lear or Coriolanns 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 fiix'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 no.t 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
 
 '20 
 
 the pas,<agc wo ha\c iiiuitcil that their author caiiiint rival any 
 great Hlizabcthati jHiot, 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 Tinion's misanthropy; 
 ten might be found like them. 
 
 ■' Be as a planetary plagtie, 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, io8. 
 
 " 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 puflF'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, 176. 
 
 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.
 
 'JS 
 
 might make no great iliflforencc, tlunii^li tluv would hi- noticed; 
 ten together, many of them long, comprise perhaps more third- 
 rate poetry than can he found in any other play in the Shak- 
 sperean canon. Titus .htdrotiicus may shed more hlood tlian 
 honors Shakspere ; its poetry is ahove comparison with most 
 of the had poetry in Timoii — and is less peculiar. Ilciiry the 
 Sixth may he 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, 1 
 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, ii, 38. 
 
 " O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us ! 
 Who would not wish to be 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 " 1 74 
 
 "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 " 138
 
 30 
 
 " With poisonous spite and envy " i44 
 
 ■' Of their friends' Rxit" 1 47 
 
 " O, that men's ears should be " 256 
 
 The first oi those quotations was written to cxixise the 
 characters of Timon and his parasites; contrast it willi tlic 
 piece from Shaksperc's exposition. The second was intended 
 to he passionate denunciation of tlie parasites and of the world ; 
 contrast this with tlie tliunderings quoted from Shakspere. It 
 might be jxissible 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 
 of credulity to believe that at the time of Lear and Macbeth 
 he wrote copious quantities of such stufY — filled up one-third 
 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- 
 sperc'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 \ve 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 
 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
 
 scones in prose, where tlu- verse-tests will not apply, ami 
 where the pure esthetic eviik-nce will also be too weak to be 
 conchisive. \\*e shall come to practical clecisi<in on most 
 scenes; but only to a probability on several otlurs; and on two, 
 hardly to that. We shall nei-il furtlu-r eviiknce than that of 
 style and meter to confirm the decisions and to streni^then tlic 
 probabihties ; ami this we shall kx)k for in another chai)ter. 
 
 Our first problem now is, tiierefore, 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, wc shall 
 have to ask how near he came to finishing it, and how the play, 
 if finished as he planned it, would diflfer 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 preHminary; 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.^ 
 
 I, i, 1-175 
 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 
 
 ' One word of caution is advisable. The text of the First Folio is the 
 sole authority for our play. It will Ije 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.- 
 
 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,^ 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. 
 
 ^ 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. 
 
 'Line 59. 
 4
 
 •:a 
 
 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 Apcniantus scenes known to be 
 non-Shaksperean ;* and because the speeches of tlu- 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 w'ill " 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 Hues — 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 swreet knaves. 
 And all this courtesy ! The strain of man's bred out 
 Into baboon and monkey." I, i, 257. 
 
 Such a speech is valiant evidence that Shakspere had Ape- 
 
 * I, ii ; II, ii, 47-132.
 
 36 
 
 mantus in his scene. But now, as the guests go in to dinner, 
 a stage-direction says, " Enter tzvo Lords/' These talk with 
 Apemantus for eighteen hnes 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, ii 
 
 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.
 
 Hut with the other autlior such hiios arc hahitual. Not only 
 in this scene, but wherever lie writes verse, he sprinkles a 
 steady twenty per cent, of them. 
 
 Cither facts are even more tellinj;. The scene is full of 
 hhnulers. Vcntidius is allowed to offer the return of Titnon's 
 loan and so largjely to destroy the dramatic force of Timon's 
 later request for payment. The steward is given a name 
 ( Flavins) 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."'' Timon 
 starts to make a gift to Alcibiades but stops short for no 
 reason." Senators are announced who never enter.'' 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 
 
 * Line 207. 'Line 227. '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." 
 
 11, 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 Aponiantus part tliat k)llo\vs it, ami that this m;m was the 
 other author — as will now he shown. 
 
 The .1 f'ciiuvitns Piirt 
 
 The man who wrote clown to line 47 sent iho duns olT the 
 stage at that piMtit. lie made the steward heg them to retire 
 till after dinner that Tinion might prepare an answer for them. 
 He made Timon second this request and hid the steward see 
 them well entertained during dinner. He made them start 
 off when the steward bade them, " Pray, draw near." Rut 
 just as they are going off — at line 47 — one of them sees Apc- 
 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."* 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."" 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 zvith the Stezvard 
 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. 
 
 •Compare II, i, with II, ii, 61, 98, and loi. 
 •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- 
 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 
 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 ami technical jiulgniH-iit as to tlir third socno, which 
 is mainly in had verse, points to the other author. In the 
 present scene, for instance, that of Lucullus, the dialogue is 
 dexterous enough, the character-delineation suhtle enough, the 
 prose facile enough, for Shakspcre ; while the one speech in 
 verse seems characteristic of him. And so. also, in the Lucius 
 scene. But the Sempronius scene we shall find ditlerent; 
 and its metrical tricks alone W'ill show ahundant 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 
 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 i^" " I 
 cannot believe that Shakspere would make the ingratitude of 
 one man [\'entidius — w'hose 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 
 
 "New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874, page 243. 
 " The Ardcn 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 
 vra\semhlance, there is abundance of humor in the excuses 
 made, and the character of the sycophants is skilfully discrim- 
 inaied;" 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.^^ 
 
 " 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 
 
 111. iii 
 If the Lucius and Lucullus scenes agree in style, the Seni- 
 pronius scene is widely difYerent from both. The first twc arc 
 mainly in gcxxl prose, the last in very ragged verse — and vjrse 
 showing the inferior author's eccentricities in plenty. From 
 the thirty-four verses of this scene alone we could make an in- 
 ventory of liis metrical anomalies. Let sample lines suffice. 
 
 Line. 
 
 " Has Vcntidius and Lucullus denied him ? " 8 
 
 '"Must I be his last refuge? His friends, like physicians" ii 
 
 " 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 talents " ; 
 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 hkely, 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,^^ 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."^'* 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 
 
 " 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. 
 
 " Witness lines i8, 19, 2^, 26, 50.
 
 44 
 
 not conclusive, the ni^jH-aranco of another one named Lueins 
 would Ik- the last straw. This man is eitlier meant for tlie 
 same Lucius whom both writers have already used,''* or for 
 another. If the same, his presence here cannot he Shakspere's 
 work; for in the Lucius scene, the next but one preceding, 
 Shakspere certainly hail no intent of making Lucius a creditor 
 of Timon. lUit if another, he cannot be Shakspere's either; 
 for it is imiK>ssible 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 autlior in his haste. 
 
 in. 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 unknow-n 
 crime ; why he meanwhile quite forgets the play on which he 
 is working, and writes in a scene w-hich 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 
 
 "Shakspere in III, ii; the other man in I, ii, 187 ff.
 
 45 
 
 " To bring manslaughter into form and set quarreling " zj 
 
 " 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 Hnes 
 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 soonos oinhody spuriiius hits 
 — making in all less than two Innulrcd lines — the latter are so 
 insignificant, and, except in i>ne scene, so palpahle, as to give 
 us little trouble. In the rest of the two acts, harring 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, \v\\\ be apparent from 
 an excerpt.
 
 47 
 
 " 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
 
 48 
 
 fretting or anuising the oihvv — fi^r tlicv arc friends ouv minute, 
 foes the next — with nothings that concern neither them nor us. 
 We ilo not care " wliere Timon Hes o' nights." " where Apc- 
 niantus feeds o' days," what cither would do with |)oison if 
 it " were obedient," or for any of the other posers illustrated 
 in the seconil of the following ([notations showing how the 
 different authors handle Apcmantus. Shakspere's brocade of 
 imagery : 
 
 "Thou hast cast away thyself, l>cing 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 : 
 
 " Apcm. 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 t)easts, 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.^® 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 Hnes: 
 
 " 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 
 
 '° 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
 
 r)() 
 
 that Shakspero lu-vor wnuc such a valciliclion only to koop 
 a character on the stage. 
 
 The spurious work, then, runs from line 2i)i to line 376. 
 Ant! now note how the latter line, if we cut all that intervenes, 
 links with perfect seipience to the former. Tiinon lias just 
 -ii-'wod Apeniantus his gold: 
 
 " .tpcm. Here is no use for gold, 
 
 Tim. The Ixjst and truest ; 
 
 For here it sleeps, and docs no hired harm. (Line 29') 
 I am sick of this false world, and will love nought (Line 376) 
 But even the mere necessities upon't." 
 
 He despises treasure and wmII 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. ^' 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. 
 
 " 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.
 
 51 
 
 The Stczvard 
 
 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-
 
 able. This digression over at line 530. the thouf^ht of line 
 508 is taken up again in a style sucii 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 conditioned : 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.
 
 53 
 
 Final proof is lacking, and is not of great importance; but it 
 is at least more probable that Sliakspere 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.^^ 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. 
 
 " 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.
 
 r)4 
 
 \' ; ii. iii. iv 
 
 As the usual view of ihcin is incontestable, we may take 
 the last three scenes tojjether. The first scene before Athens 
 has not been doubted to be Shakspere's. The ten-line scene 
 at Tinion'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 Hat. We had not heard before that Alcibiades was 
 a linguist; and we are rather impatient with a soldier who can- 
 not read in line (> though he could read in line 4 — and did there 
 read the superlluous epitaph that Timon must be thought to 
 have hung upon some tree before ho put the real one on his 
 tombstone.'" To such shifts is the inferior author put to save 
 the genuine epitaph for Alcibiades to read — as Shaksperc 
 makes him — in the closing scene of the play. For the final 
 scene, again, can only be considered Shakspere's work.-" 
 
 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 w^e found Shakspere's. The next 
 scene we divided into three parts. We gave the dunning it- 
 
 " 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). 
 
 "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.
 
 55 
 
 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 Hues 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- 
 hiades' 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 Shakspere'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) 
 HI, i 
 III, ii 
 
 III, vi, 95-115 III, vi {entire) 
 
 IV, i IV, i 
 
 IV, ii, 1-29 IV, ii, 1-29
 
 60 
 
 IV, Jii. I-J9I ; 363-398; 4«4-45J 1\'. •>•- >-29i ; 376-463; 479-508; 
 
 530-543 
 
 V. i. 57-J3« ^^ ' (<•»•'•>«) 
 V. ii V. ii 
 
 V, iv V, iv 
 
 A Metrical Tabic 
 
 The two verse-tests that help us most in Tiinoii — rimes 
 ami irregular lines — have been already used, wIktc needed, 
 almost to the full. It remains only to tabulate them, witli 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 v^hether 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.
 
 57 
 
 Shakspere's Verse 
 
 
 
 Feminine 
 
 Run-on 
 
 Rime<!. 
 
 Irregular 
 
 Passage. 
 
 Verses. 
 
 Endings. 
 
 Lines. 
 
 
 
 Lines. 
 
 
 No. 
 
 !« 
 
 No. 
 
 i 
 
 No. 
 
 i 
 
 No. 
 
 ^ 
 
 I, i, I-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 
 
 31 
 
 .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 
 
 .15* 
 
 I 
 
 .02-f- 
 
 IV, ii, 1-29. 
 
 29 
 
 8 
 
 .28 
 
 4 
 
 .14 
 
 2 
 
 .07— 
 
 I 
 
 .03+ 
 
 IV, iii, 1-291 ; 376- 
 
 390 
 
 76 
 
 .20 
 
 104 
 
 .27 
 
 10 
 
 •03— 
 
 15 
 
 .04— 
 
 398; 418-452; 478- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 508; 530-543- 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 V, i, 44-231. 
 
 188 
 
 48 
 
 .26 
 
 44 
 
 •23 
 
 10 
 
 .05 f 
 
 4 
 
 .02 -|- 
 
 V, ii. 
 
 17 
 
 5 
 
 .29 
 
 6 
 
 .35 
 
 2 
 
 .12* 
 
 
 
 .00 
 
 V, iv. 
 
 «5 
 
 10 
 
 .12 
 
 35 
 
 .41 
 
 4 
 
 .05- 
 
 I 
 
 .01+ 
 
 Totals. 
 
 1215 
 
 265 
 
 .22 
 
 326 
 
 .27 
 
 54 
 
 .04+ 
 
 46 
 
 .04— 
 
 The Spurious Verse 
 
 Passage. 
 
 Verses. 
 
 Feminine 
 Endings. 
 
 Run-or 
 
 Lines. 
 
 Rimes. 
 
 Irregular Lines. 
 
 
 No. 
 
 "^ 
 
 No. 
 
 i 
 
 No. 
 32 
 
 .21 
 
 No. 
 
 ^ 
 
 I, ii. 
 
 1.56 
 
 24 
 
 •15 
 
 19 
 
 .12 
 
 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 
 
 « 
 
 .36 
 
 6 
 
 .27 
 
 IV, iii, 362-375. 
 
 13 
 
 
 
 .CO 
 
 I 
 
 .08 
 
 
 
 .oof 
 
 2 
 
 •15 
 
 V, iii. 
 
 10 
 
 
 
 .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.
 
 ciiArTi'.k IV 
 
 SlIAKSriCKli's rklORITY 
 
 " To be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus." So far we 
 have been bent on taking our play ajiart. distributing its scenes 
 anil passages between the authors; our work is only half done 
 until we tind 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 otlier 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 Ti)non 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 ofif 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 Ventidius^ offer to repay Timon's 
 loan. With this error behind him, the author found it difflcult 
 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 lattcr's defection 
 
 ^ 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.
 
 60 
 
 where Shakspcrc apparcmly im'anl lo make it a climactic scene, 
 arc the work of another author. If so, tliat aiillior widtc last. 
 For Shakspcre has the plot of the X'entidius matter; the other 
 man subverts it. Shakspere's parts of it had a source;- the 
 others none. Less significantly. Shakspere spells the name 
 J'cntidius or J'ctitiddius; the other man corrupts it to J'oi- 
 tiifius or J'cntidijius.'^ It must needs he 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 \^entidius 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. FIcay ; 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 
 
 ' Page 19. 
 
 ' Compare I, i and II, ii with I, ii and III, iii.
 
 61 
 
 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,* one Servilius,^ 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 
 might be negligible. We could call it spurious, if so doing 
 would explain it, and be through. But the fact is that this bit 
 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 Plaminius 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. 
 
 " As may be told from the second scene following.
 
 62 
 
 many of thoni strangely ami suspiciously connect, with the hit 
 of prose or with its context. We have just been speaking, for 
 instance, of the part X'entidius has in the i)lay. His part 
 begins in the first scene, where Shaksperc makes him borrow 
 of Timon ; is perverted in the banciuet scene, where the other 
 writer makes him olYer 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 tiiat scene, 
 but nowhere else, the steward's name is Flavins. Now in the 
 line preceding our prose extract, Timon, talking with the 
 steward, calls forth another servant named Flavins. 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." A Lucius, too, comes forth there; 
 
 'Line 112,
 
 63 
 
 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 Luculkis, 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 Flavins turns to Flaminius. Outside 
 of it we may learn something more about Ventidius ; find the 
 relation of the Flavins in the banquet to the Flavins 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-
 
 64 
 
 sperc was revising the whole scone Ik- was content to leave 
 ten crucial lines untouched, breakinsj; it in the niiddle. We 
 must also believe that he made the hhuulers ; for on this 
 theory the latter evidently fall, not in the prose itself, hut in the 
 context Shakspcre wrote before it. Thus a theory intended 
 to accjuit Shakspcre of the blunders only ends in accusing him 
 of them anew, and this without attempting to explain how he 
 or any man couUl naturally have made them. Over such a 
 solution, soon to disprove itself anyhow, wc 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 Shakspcre summoned 
 Flavins and Servilius, to send them, one to the senators, the 
 other to \'entidius; and that these two requests were all that 
 Shakspcre 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. Shakspcre 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-
 
 65 
 
 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,'^ Timon closes 
 this scene boasting that " his fortunes cannot sink among his 
 friends," and opens the next^ 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.'' 
 
 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 
 Flavins was turned into Flaminius ; what he has to do with the 
 other Flavins 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. 
 
 ''New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1874. 
 
 * The verse of the mock-banquet ; the five and a half scenes intervening 
 Mr. Fleay thinks spurious. 'See page 41. 
 
 6
 
 66 
 
 That theory is that oiu' hno only in cur bit of prose is 
 spurious; that notliing but the iusertion of tliat Hue made 
 prose of the rest of it, which Shakspere wrote and wrote in 
 verse; and that in the passage as he wrote it tliere was no more 
 contradiction in the names and number of the servants than 
 appears in the c|uotation now to be made. 
 
 The hunting trip of Timon and Lucullus was not Sliak- 
 spere's device. The other author jijlanned it in his banquet 
 scene.^** 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- 
 
 "I, 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.
 
 67 
 
 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 
 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;
 
 68 
 
 that he cut it ami replaced it with his own ScinprDiiiiis scene 
 — making some effort to npair tlie hreak hy just mentioning 
 therein that \"enti(Hus hail proveil faithless; ami that these 
 were the only reasons why he hriMij^ht 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 him^^ — 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 v/e have left unsolved about our 
 bit of prose — why Flavins 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 
 
 "III, iv, 112. The acme of subtlety is attained in Leo's labored argu- 
 ment that Ullorxa =: Vliorxa = Vliorxa=: Five pounds or ten angels ! 
 See Jahrbuch, XVI, 400. 
 
 "Ill, iv, 112.
 
 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 Flavins. Shakspere never gave him any 
 name; on the contrary, he made Timon, while talking with 
 the steward, call another servant named Flavius.^^ 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 Flavins, 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.^* 
 
 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 " 
 
 "II, ii, 194. 
 
 " It may be repeated that this Flavins, 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.
 
 that have chiniu-il him.'* A scene iiuhspensahle in Shak- 
 spero's play, one he presupposes and refers to. cainmt he in- 
 terpolateil ; and in giving it to Shakspere we merely certify, 
 again, esthetic cviilence. 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 ccjually 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 possihly have been written by 
 the man who wrote the dunning itself.^" 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 ofif 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- 
 
 " II, ii, 238. "> See page 38.
 
 71 
 
 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. 
 
 HI 
 
 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- 
 tion 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.
 
 72 
 
 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 
 inteq^olated. the misanthropy of Timon had no motive, and 
 Shakspere's play was cloven through the middle. P>ut we 
 have found that two of these scenes are Shakspere's, and that 
 the third replaces, probably, a better scene of his. Shakspcre 
 did motivate his misanthrope. But what then? Timon goes 
 oflf 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_stateJ_s_thereiore.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 
 of Athens ; a better reason why Alcibiades should be the instru- 
 ment of that revenge ; in fact so good a reason that Alcibiades 
 w-ill 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
 
 73 
 
 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 leggc^'^ 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 : 
 
 "The word is doubtless a corruption (III, vi, 89).
 
 74 
 
 " Thou cold sciatica, 
 Cripple our senators, that their limhs may lialt 
 As lamely as their manners." I\'. i. 23. 
 
 But it is only wluii wo imiiu" [o Tinion's scene with Alci- 
 biailes that we learn tlu- full uuasurc of his service to the 
 state. " I have heanl, and grieved," says Alcibiades, 
 
 " How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth, 
 Forgetting thy great deeds 7chcn neighbor states, 
 But for thy szvord 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 faulty 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 
 
 " In the Folio, " fall."
 
 75 
 
 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 \\\\\ 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.^'' 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- 
 
 '" See page 45.
 
 lutioti wmiKl bo natural, iiu-vitaltU'. Tlius iiuu-li wo nii<:;ht 
 roasoiiably ask. ami yot, ovon witlunit such a boiul, ovon thout^h 
 \vc might fool that Shaksporo has told us far too littlo about 
 Alcibiados, wo might still acooj^t tho latlor as a fairly natural 
 avongor if wo know otily what Shaksporo has told us of him. 
 Tho trouble is, wo know a good doal more. The inteqio- 
 lator has seen tho gap just mentioned and has been at pains 
 to till it by exhibiting the banishment of Alcibiadcs. The 
 wrongs of Alcibiados 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."^° 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,^ though in general part we were opposed. 
 Yet our old love made a particular force, 
 
 »IV, iii, loi. 
 
 ° The sentence is not strictly grammatical.
 
 77 
 
 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
 
 78 
 
 squares it in the conquest of tlio city, tlic restoration of the 
 state to justice, ami tlie 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 possihle, he made the main 
 cause of his fight. Then the vindication would he natural and 
 full. But the second author has rohhed 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 Alcihiades fights first and 
 foremost in his own redress. He has all l)iil l)lin(le{l us to the 
 fact that the only business of Alcibiadcs in the play — the only 
 puq")ose 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 Alcihiades 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 Alcihiades 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 Alcihiades 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
 
 79 
 
 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 scene 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.-' 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 
 
 ^ Timon, sending to Lucullus for money, says, "I hunted witli his 
 honour to-day " (interpolated line, II, ii, 198) ; connecting with the invita- 
 tion to the hunt received in the banquet scene.
 
 80 
 
 no one wouKl svispcct lliat anvthinjj had over conic l)ct\vocn. 
 As for the Senipronius scene, we have noted already that 
 Senijironius was never mentioned by Shakspere. Leave out 
 the interpolator's references t© him, and we should never 
 dream that a Senipronius 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."-^ 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;-* 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. 
 
 ^ V, iv, ZT. *'III, vi, 60.
 
 81 
 
 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.
 
 cii.\pri-:R \- 
 
 Siiakspi'rr's Plot 
 
 We have just found that if we take out the interpolations 
 \vc 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 hy 
 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, w'ith 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- ,o 
 self courteously to every suitor," we know he is addressing [ 
 sycophants. His first act is to pay Ventidius out of prison ; j 
 his next to give-a-dow-Fyua.nasked to speed a servant's wedding. 
 Kind words ensue to all his~parasTtes> ;TtTey~must needs dine 
 wnth 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 
 
 82
 
 83 
 
 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. H 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 — 
 
 " Never speak, or think, 
 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; l)ul these, if
 
 84 
 
 Shakspcrc wrote tlu-m. tlic interpolator now displaces with 
 his Sonipronius anti-oliniax. Then he goes on with more 
 dunning: scraping up three cretiitors iniknown to Shakspcrc, 
 ami a fourtli — Lucius — either unknown to him, (m- unidentifi- 
 able with his Lucius. Worse than all, the author now inserts 
 the scene of Alcibiatles' banishment, in which he quite forgets 
 the hero and the main plot of the play, l-'or he feels only that 
 he must give Alcibiadcs 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 drum, and 
 get thee gone," rejoins Timon. He offers Timon sympathy. 
 "How dost thou pity him whom thou dost trouble? I had 
 rather be alone." He offers money. " Keep it, I cannot eat 
 it." But finally, about to go, he offers revenge : " When I have
 
 85 
 
 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 Timon 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-
 
 ciicd with iiiipciuliiij^ niiii. Will Tiinon f()i\i;\'l llic wroiiij^s 
 they iliil him, ccmuc haoU imw to lioiiors, love, and wealth in 
 Athens, take the fichl for thcin with ahst)lutc power, and drive 
 ort" Alcihiailes? "Lend nie a fool's heart, and a woman's 
 eyes," he answers them, "and I'll heweep these comforts, 
 wi">rthy senate»rs." 
 
 "If Alcibiadcs 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 arc 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-
 
 87 
 
 queror, who, [the ten-hne 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- 
 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 seven-tenths as 
 long as Macbeth, 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.^ Shakspere's company was fitted to present 
 two or three important female characters, and in all his oilier 
 plays he furnished them ; to say nothing of the fact that a play 
 
 MV, iii.
 
 88 
 
 without rt woman is a tara ax'is. Ai,'aiii. except in the last half 
 of tlio tirst scone, Shakspcrc gives the play practically no comic 
 rcUcf; a feature which liis audience expected and he usually 
 supplied. We know how he jirovided comedy, perhaps almost 
 went out of his way for it, in IloDilct and Macbeth; how in 
 Lear he made it copiously subserve the deepest pathos. Now 
 here in Timon he has made as fine a chance for wit as a grave- 
 iligger or a porter or a jester could atYord him — a chance to 
 make Apemantus immortal. But he fails to improve it. His 
 Apemantus only has a little fun in the first scene- — then dis- 
 appears until the fourth act, where, in Shakspere's part at 
 least, he is naturally anything but 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 arc inclined 
 to think that Shakspere must have meant to show us more of 
 it, and to improve the splendid chance it gave for the creation 
 of a character, in the first three acts. The case of Alcibiades 
 is similar — and here at least w^e 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 u ntil the f ourth act, where he 
 comes forth playing an important and ra'lhrf " startling part. 
 For some reason we can hardly guess at, he is fighting against 
 Athens; and for reasons which we ^d are insufficient, he re- 
 solves to fight in ^pa.rt for Timon. It i^s very hard to think 
 that Shakspere did not mean to give us all these reasons 
 earlier in the play; that he dicl hot" 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 
 
 ^ Unless — as is improbable — the second author wrote the Apemantus sec- 
 tion of that scene. See page 33.
 
 89 
 
 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 his main interest in the char- 
 acter and in the play. Timon the misanthrope therefore as- 
 sumes magnificent proportions ; 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^oJily 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
 
 DO 
 
 sucli a numiKT. lucatiiiii^ to return ami lill up the omissions 
 when convenient. In this case we might expect the scenes 
 that he completeil to betray at least some hint of what he 
 meant to sliow 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 Shaksj>ere'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 ofifer 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
 
 91 
 
 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-banc|uct. The end may not have 
 been ill-advised. Even more dunning could be made effective,
 
 92 
 
 it well managed. Timon's fury might luit bo out of koii)ing, 
 if somewhat more articulate. lUit to attain the end by bring- 
 ing on a set of unknown characters was to make a breach 
 wider than the one — if there was one — which the author was 
 Irving to fill. His first attempt at real addition to the i)lot 
 thus ends in a digression from it. 
 
 At his busiest now. the interpolator found and tried to fdl 
 another breach. He had left Alcibiadcs 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 Alcibiadcs had been exiled from 
 Athens.^ 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 Alcibiadcs, and 
 so, in his attempt to motivate one character, broke up the mo- 
 tivation of all the plot remaining — a scene wdiich, midw^ay 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 stew^ard'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.
 
 93 
 
 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. 
 
 ^'lost 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 oft' 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 ? * — 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 miglit have made of his 
 Ventidius scene.
 
 94 
 
 spcre may himself have meant to write the scene — to show a 
 Httle more of N'entidius. to brinjj out Apcmantus, to intro(hice 
 Lords Lucius and Luculhis, to draw the tic of Alcihiades 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 lavishncss 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 
 acts'' 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 w^as 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 
 
 * 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.
 
 95 
 
 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
 
 96 
 
 have to be placed in the iiiicUlle of the tliird 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 w^ith 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 w^e 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
 
 97 
 
 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." 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 Antoniiis, 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 ihcy had 
 been written by 1623. There has been a theory, none too well 
 
 9 IV, iii, 92.
 
 98 
 
 creilitetl. that tlu-v were written in that very \\-:\v : not for 
 stage-purposes, hut to cnlari,'o the phiy for puhheation in the 
 Foho. " IioUl oven to iniinulenee," in the confession oi its 
 father, Mr. IMeay." that theory rested solely on certain stranj^e 
 irrei^ularities in the paj^ination of the Folio Tiinon. It has 
 receiuly lost even that sujijiort. In an article which seems to 
 say the last wonl as to those irregularities. Mr. Josiah Quincy 
 Adams'' has demonstrated that they have no bearing on the 
 authorship or date or purpose of the interi)o!ations in the play. 
 Mr. Atlams therefore leaves us no more reason to believe that 
 Tiinon 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 : 
 
 ' Verplanck hinted at the theory, but Mr. Fleay first argued it. 
 
 * 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 Crcssida. (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.
 
 99 
 
 "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." ]\Ien 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.
 
 100 
 
 Brinslcy Xicholson." howovor. found in certain advance stage- 
 directions — entrances indicated, seeniins^ly 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 Tinton 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 
 miilst of dialogue, appears this stage-direction: "Sound tucket; 
 cuter the tuasqucrs of Amazons, icitli lutes in their luDids, 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 arc " 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.^" 
 
 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. W^e 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. 
 "See also I, i, 173; III, vi, 44.
 
 101 
 
 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 scquitur 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
 
 101> 
 
 of its nccils. l^nless some (locuincnt is lost, wo know the 
 sources that had served that play. I'lilcss \vc have unwar- 
 rantably stretched the eviilence, wi- can now diviik- the play 
 between its authors with considerable accuracy. Unless the 
 author who cut down \'entidius' part was i)rior 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 autiior 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, 
 
 18SS-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. 
 
 n. 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 lahrbuch 
 
 der dcutschen Shakespeare Gesellschaft, vol. H. 
 Delius, Nikolaus. Uber Shakespeare's Pericles, in the lahrbuch, vol. IH. 
 Tschischwitz, Benno. Timon von Athen, ein Kritische Versuch, in the 
 
 lahrbuch, vol. IV. 
 
 103
 
 104 
 
 Fleay, F. G. On the Authorship of Timon of Athens, foUowiil by an 
 edition of The Life of Timon of Athens, " the usual insertions by 
 another hand in the play l>einK left out ; " in the Transactions of the 
 .V»-tf Shaksfere Society. 1874. 
 
 Kullmann, Georg. Shakespeare's Antheit an dem unter scinem Namcn 
 leroffcnihchlen Trauerspiele Timon, in the Archiv fiir Lilcratur- 
 geschichte. vol. XI. 
 
 Wendlandt, Wilhelm. Shakespeare's Timon von Athcn. in the Shake- 
 speare Jahtbuch. vol. XXIII. 
 
 Adams, Josiah Quincy. Timon of Athens and the Irregularities «n the 
 I'irst I'olto, in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, January, 
 1908.
 
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 cloth, pp. ix+251. Portrait and figures. Price, $1.50 
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