Shakespeare's Forgotten Play

[00:00:01][music] Time of Athens is um not entirely ubiquitously wellreceived and also why it's perhaps uh less performed than other plays is because from the first copy of Time in of Athens that we actually have which comes from the first folio this compendium of many of Shakespeare's plays from 1623.

[00:00:29]Well, it seems unfinished, right? That there is um speculation that actually this play was never finished. We have no evidence of it even being performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. From what we understand, the first performance of Time of Athens was all the way over in 1674.

[00:00:48]Uh long after, of course, the um civil war and even the restoration.

[00:00:54]uh long you know some trying to think 50 60 years after Shakespeare's death. So it didn't exactly hit the ground running uh when it came out. There is a theory that actually a good amount of time in Athens uh the actual writing of it is not Shakespeare's actual hand and that this play may have indeed been a collaborative project and the person who's most speculated to have fit uh that person that mystery uh or the writer is Thomas Middleton who went on to be become a very very famous Jackabian playwright in his own And one of the things that um points towards Middleton being uh the other man on this project is that it favors a lot of uh Middletonian contractions. You see the way that it puts um oeth and stuff like this, the way it's a th to thee. Um this is something that Middleton does a great amount. Also in the banquet scenes, uh they really lend themselves to a particular genre of play that was very popular in the Jacabian period known as city comedies. And these were something that Middleton himself absolutely excelled at in plays like a mad world and my masters. So there are those aspects of it too. The other thing is that this comes to this may explain in having two separate writers working on it simultaneously and on top of that the fact that it seems that the play may never actually have been performed. It might have been discarded. It may have been finished but simply never had any revisions put to it. There is a lot of conjecture and all of these questions are asked by scholars far more capable than myself. But um to just simply give you the information on this uh one of the things that uh people often point to as evidence of the being two writers other than the things that I've just outlined is also the fact that when it comes to the the the talents right this measurement of money these large sums of money uh there seems to be a bit of an inconsistency there. Uh for example at the beginning of the story uh Thyman of Athens gives five talent to pay the debt of um Ventilius. However, he also then goes on to pay three talents for a dowy and this is made out from the reactions of people around to be a sizable chunk of money. However, later on in the play, we see the same measurement, the same unit of talents being used um much more broadly, like 500 talents. And this is seen as actually not a great deal. Um so there seems to be some disagreement between the hands that is working on this as to the very idea of how much a talent is actually worth, which would have been a large sum of silver uh back in the day. Um, and they're they've obviously got their own metrics and their own way of measuring it within the story. Um, without seemingly a great deal of cross referencing with one another. Uh, but this is all conjecture.

[00:04:17]This is all speculation. We truly don't know for it may well have been an entirely Shakespearean work. This is something that people will probably continue to debate for long here after me recording this now. But let's just actually talk about some things that we do know for certain. Uh for one, uh Tyman of Athens, long before he became the main character of a Shakespearean tragedy, uh was a very often cited figure across sources from antiquity. Uh this is very famously the case in time and the missenthrop by the Greek satist Lucian. And he also features briefly in Plutarch's lives as well uh where he's talking about the life of Alabiades.

[00:05:05]And in fact the extract is so short that I'm actually just going to read for you now uh that part from Plutarch's lives so you can get an idea of the sources that Shakespeare was working from.

[00:05:17]Plutarch's lives was one of Shakespeare's main resources. was always one of his go-tos when he was writing anything about the antiquity period.

[00:05:28]This is also true of Coral Elenus and his play Anthony and Cleopatra which were also being written around this time right that Shakespeare had this phase of writing these antiquity plays amongst also just to say uh this is also the period of about605 to608 when Shakespeare is writing many of his most famous tragedies as well such as King Leah. Um so let's I'll just read you this part from Plutarch and then we'll carry on. Now Tyman was an Athenian and lived about the time of the Pelpeneisian war as may be gathered from the plays of Aristophanes and Plato for he is represented in their comedies as peevish and misanthropical.

[00:06:16]But though he avoided and repelled all intercourse with men, he was glad to see Albabi, who was then young and headstrong, and showered kisses upon him. And when Appamantis was amazed at this, and asked the reason for it, Thyman said he loved the youth because he knew that he would be a cause of many ills of Athens. This Appamantis alone of all men, Tyman would sometimes admit into his company, since Appamantis was like him, and tried sometimes to imitate his mode of life, and once at the festival of the pictures, the two were feasting for themselves, and Appamantis said, "Timon, what a fine symposium is."

[00:07:01]"It would be," said Thyman, "if thou wer not here." We are told also that when the Athenians were holding an assembly, he ascended to Bema, and the strangeness of the thing caused deep silence and great expectancy. Then he said, "I have a small building lot, men of Athens, and a fig tree is growing in it, from which many of my fellow citizens have already hanged themselves." Accordingly, as I intend to build a house there, I wanted to give public notice to that effect in order that all of you who desire to do so may hang yourselves before the fig tree is cut down.

[00:07:43]After he had died and been buried at Helia uh near the sea, the shore in front of the tomb slipped away and the water surrounding it and made it completely inaccessible to man. The inscription of the tomb was here after snapping the thread of a wretched life I lie yet shall not learn my name but my curses shall follow you. This inscription he is said to have composed himself and that in general circulation is by uh Kimicus. Thyman hater of men dwells here. So pass along heap many curses on me if thou wilt only pass along. And so you can get just from that short extract uh an entire flavor of the temperament and manner of Thyman and also his relation or lack thereof to the other Athenians and men of the city. And what we have here in Tyman of Athens is of a man who is the entire opposite of this depiction. It is the man who is endlessly benevolent, endlessly magnanimous.

[00:08:53]um he is philanthropic to the point of absurdity in comedy and it's a story of how that man is portrayed and will become the man that Plutarch outlines in his lives as a man who becomes that sinister cynical and canankerous and venomous character uh who will go on to die and have a tomb by the sea away from society right he's not buried in Athens in the city. He is away from the city, away from civilization on his own where he might finally have some peace. And as it says there, even um uh lay your curses on me and then just pass along, but just make sure that you pass along.

[00:09:39]Um yeah, not a not a not a sound guy.

[00:09:42]Not one you'd want to spend any amount of time with whatsoever. Uh but there is another reason why Shakespeare is writing this play. other than the fact that it is it makes for a very colorful type of character from antiquity, which is of course the themes that it allows uh Shakespeare to explore and Middleton indeed if he did in um collaborate on this, which is the fact that well it has somewhat eternal uh questions to ask about credit and debt and to what extent um gold and giftgiving actually seal friendship with one another. uh one of the things that's spoken about at the beginning of uh Katherine Mouse's analysis of um time of Athens um who writes the the preface for uh the version of time and that is in the Norton complete works is one of the things that Katherine says is the fact that whenever you see an advertisement, right, and you see the man giving the woman the golden ring or you just see a man giving a woman an expensive gift at all or indeed just a gift amongst friends. Right there we have in it. It only works on our minds. If I were to go into water stes and look on the shelf and find a copy of Timing of Athens and give it to someone as a gift, then that would be probably appreciated. But if I went out of my way to look online for a really really old copy that was worth hundreds and hundreds of pounds and I were to give that as a gift, then that would prove to be probably a stronger display of that friendship, it it speaks in some way of the fact that because I am willing to pay so much money into a gift that that is somehow correlatory with um how much I value that friendship, right? And this is something somewhat eternal. The more expensive the gift, then it is. But it's also something else as well. It's not just that. It also can be a um a reflection on your own sense of pride, your own ability to give, to provide to people to tell them that uh yes, I have within my power the ability to ravish uh this bounty upon you. And the word bounty is used constantly throughout the play time of Athens. And the other thing as well is the fact that Thyman is in doing this. And when we meet him at the beginning of act one, he is constantly giving and giving and giving, but he never actually receives any gifts back.

[00:12:32]And so he's constantly keeping people within his power. Only he is allowed to ex display his own magnanimity.

[00:12:42]And this entire uh social arrangement of giving gifts is all illusur. It's all an illusion. Uh because behind it, Thyman finds himself in a great amount of debt to his creditors. And this would have been a very topical aspect of conversation at the time when the play was written for a Jacabian audience because as Katherine Mouse points out here in her analysis of time of Athens, in the first decade of the 17th century, the traditional aristocratic virtues of openhanding generosity and carelessness of expense were coming into increasingly acute conflict with the limited means upon which the great nobles could actually draw. As England became an international trading power, luxuries once unheard of became available to people with the money to buy them. As tastes grew more sophisticated, noblemen who wished to impress peers and subordinates with the splendor of their bounty were forced into ever greater expenditures. The result was an extraordinary expansion in the credit markets. The worst offender in this respect was King James who rather like Thyman showered his favorites with expensive gifts, a habit that created staggering deficits in the royal exjecker. By608, royal indebtedness had reached crisis proportions and other members of the upper aristocracy were likewise floating on a sea of debt. As I say, this is one of the main aspects that the play directly deals with in a brutal and a very blunt manner and perhaps may even explain why this play may not have been performed. Perhaps as a subject, it was too close to the bone for many of the aristocrats and even the king that it would have likely been performed to, especially with Shakespeare and his company being the king's men at this time for King James. So, and it might have seemed a little um uh a little too on the nose even compared to a play like McBTH, which was at least able to uh tell a story in a in a in a way that was uh kind and honorable to King James's own ancestors, mythical ancestor of Banquo. and also the fact that it's about it comes together with a unity of the Scottish and English at the end to restore order.

[00:15:28]So whereas with this one, it's speaking to a genuine warning about what happens when that balance between the creditor and the debtor falls into an openly parasitical nature. And we see that reflected in also the way that a character like Alabides um who features prominently in the play is constantly railing against the fact that these senators of Athens have allowed Athens to become so corrupted by usery um as to basically uh need a fresh start and he's als Biders is going to bring his army in, scourge the Senate of its corruption and start again. Uh, but these are all things that we can get into much much more when we talk about the actual analysis of the play. So, let's now talk about the play, every act of it, go through the synopsis as we often do. I will read some of the saliloquies and um, you know, put on some of my voices.

[00:16:33]And I hope you enjoy the story. If you enjoyed this piece of [music] premium content from the Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.