Shakespeare's Style

by Maurice Charney

  Off, pluck off:

  The sevenfold shield of Ajax cannot keep

  The battery [beating] from my heart. O, cleave, my sides!

  Heart, once be stronger than thy continent,

  Crack thy frail case! Apace, Eros, apace.

  No more a soldier. Bruisèd pieces, go;

  You have been nobly borne. (4.14.37–43)

  This is an important moment for Antony. He resolves to commit suicide with the help of Eros, but Eros kills himself instead. Antony does fall on his sword, but only wounds himself. He seeks in vain for someone to give him “Sufficing strokes for death” (4.14.116). He is now a pitiful, wounded figure. In the next scene, however, in Cleopatra’s monument, Antony will die nobly: “a Roman, by a Roman / Valiantly vanquished” (4.15.57–58).

  There is one further scene we should consider: act 4, scene 3, in which the god Hercules, Antony’s tutelary deity, forsakes him. It is a strange, allegorical scene, with Antony’s soldiers in all four corners of the stage. They hear “Music of the hautboys [oboes] is under the stage” (4.3.11 s.d.). It is a bad sign for the fortunes of Antony. As the Second Soldier says: “’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, / Now leaves him” (4.3.15–16).

  Act 4, scene 3 echoes what we have already learned from the Soothsayer in act 2, scene 3. Next to Caesar, Antony is always unlucky. The Soothsayer advises him:

  Therefore, O Antony, stay not by his side.

  Thy daemon [guardian deity, like Hercules], that thy spirit which keeps thee, is

  Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,

  Where Caesar’s is not. But near him thy angel

  Becomes afeard, as being o’erpow’red: therefore

  Make space enough between you. (2.3.17–22)

  This makes Antony’s fall inevitable, as if it were willed by the gods. The Soothsayer is specific in his warning: “If thou dost play with him at any game, / Thou art sure to lose; and of that natural luck / He beats thee ’gainst the odds” (2.3.24–26). Antony agrees, but he is determined to abandon Octavia and go to Egypt: “And though I make this marriage for my peace, / I’ th’ East my pleasure lies” (2.3.38–39). So Antony knowingly goes to his doom.

  Chapter 27

  The Cultivation of Excess

  in Timon of Athens

  This is an unusual play, probably written after Shakespeare’s major tragedies but reflecting their influence. It is a bitter play, full of invective about money and ingratitude—a favorite, by its subject, of Karl Marx. The first scene sets out a kind of allegory that will show us Timon in prosperity, enjoying to the fullest extent his bounty, then the last two acts, Timon in adversity, self-banished from Athens and digging for roots in the forest, where he, ironically, finds an unlimited supply of gold. The play has recently been thought to be a collaborative effort of Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, but it is problematic to establish who wrote what, so I will assume that it is all by Shakespeare.

  In the long first scene, Timon is besieged by suitors seeking his patronage. We begin with a poet, a painter, a jeweler, and a merchant, who display or speak at length about their wares. It is a commercial introduction to the play. The Poet is probably the most important of the suitors. He begins by celebrating Timon’s “Magic of bounty” (1.1.6), which has wide powers to attract: “all these spirits thy power / Hath conjured to attend” (1.1.6–7). All the persons seeking to receive Timon’s rewards express fulsome flattery for their master.

  The Poet, in commenting on the Painter’s portrait of Timon, is excessive in his praise:

  Admirable. How this grace

  Speaks his own standing! What a mental power

  This eye shoots forth! How big imagination

  Moves in this lip! To th’ dumbness of the gesture

  One might interpret. (1.1.30–34)

  Of course, the audience in the theater sees the painting, which is obviously not the masterpiece the Poet is describing. So the initial feeling in Timon is one of hucksterism, of persons offering things for Timon to buy. The entrance to Timon’s house is like a marketplace. All four of the suitors are full of pretense, and their pretentious language is associated with artists, or pretend artists. The Poet is the worst in speaking an abstract “artspeach.” For his conclusion, he says of the painting: “It tutors nature; artificial strife / Lives in these touches, livelier than life” (1.1.37–38).

  The Poet elaborates on his own poem, with disclaimers: “A thing slipped idly from me. / Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes / From whence ‘tis nourished” (1.1.20–22). The Poet is so carried away by self-love that he doesn’t seem to realize how unappealing a gum-like, oozing poetry is to his auditors. His poem is an allegory of the fickle goddess Fortuna, and it uncannily predicts the action of Shakespeare’s play:

  I have upon a high and pleasant hill

  Feigned Fortune to be throned. The base o’ th’ mount

  Is ranked with all deserts, all kind of natures

  That labor on the bosom of this sphere

  To propagate their states. (1.1.63–67)

  Fortune, “with her ivory hand, wafts” (1.1.70) Lord Timon to her.

  But the goddess Fortuna cannot be trusted, and Timon is not secure on the top of Fortune’s wheel:

  When Fortune in her shift and change of mood

  Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants

  Which labored after him to the mountain’s top,

  Even on their knees and hands, let him slip down,

  Not one accompanying his declining foot. (1.1.84–88)

  It is surprising that the sycophantic Poet doesn’t realize that this conclusion cannot be flattering to Timon—if he ever reads his special poem, which is doubtful.

  The lordly Timon doesn’t appear until line 94. He enters grandly, “addressing himself courteously to every suitor” (1.1.94 s.d.). He is like a preoccupied chairman of the board (a hint that has been picked up in many modern productions). He ardently desires that everyone love him, so that his bounty (a much repeated word) is showy and impersonal. He wants everyone to be his friend, another much repeated word in these early scenes. He overdoes it in a wild excess of generosity: “’Tis not enough to help the feeble up, / But to support him after” (1.1.107–8). The Poet, the Painter, and the Jeweler are all well rewarded, with Timon hardly regarding what is offered him. As he says to the Painter: “I like your work, / And you shall find I like it. Wait attendance / Till you hear further from me” (1.1.160–62). It is all so casual and so unexamined.

  The entrance of the Cynic philosopher Apemantus offers a moral commentary on Timon’s folly. Apemantus may be at the moral center of the play, but, like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, whom he resembles, he is rude, scurrilous, and generally unattractive. He is the unpleasant, even despicable, truth-speaker, a character Shakespeare seemed to be fond of (compare Jaques in Twelfth Night). When Timon graciously asks him to dine, he refuses:

  Apemantus. No. I eat not lords.

  Timon. And [if] thou shouldst, thou’dst anger ladies.

  Apemantus. O they eat lords; so they come by great bellies.

  Timon. That’s a lascivious apprehension. (1.1.206–10)

  So the imagery is both cannibalistic and bawdy, a combination that runs throughout the play. Apemantus has a series of moralistic apothegms, which have no effect on Timon, who takes them as pure invective. For example: “He that loves to be flattered is worthy o’ th’ flatterer” (1.1.230–31), “Traffic’s [trade’s] thy god, and thy god confound thee” (1.1.244–45), and “The strain of man’s bred out / Into baboon and monkey” (1.1.256–57).

  The second scene of act 1 continues the unstoppable excess of Timon. He refuses repayment of his loan by Ventidius, who has suddenly become rich:

  O by no means,

  Honest Ventidius. You mistake my love;

  I gave it freely ever, and there’s none

  Can truly say he gives, if he receives. (1.28–11)

  Timon is preoccupied with dispensing unlimited love,
friendship, generosity—call it what name you please. Repayment would only diminish his endeavor. Apemantus repeats his cannibalistic imagery: “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 them up too” (1.2.38–42).

  The entrance of Flavius, Timon’s steward, strikes the first discordant note. In a long aside, Flavius assures us that Timon is bankrupt and that his exaggerated giving is a fantasy, based on unpayable loans: “He commands us to provide, and give great gifts, / And all out of an empty coffer” (1.2.195–96). But, unlike Apemantus, Flavius is sympathetic: “I bleed inwardly for my lord” (1.2.207). The climax of Timon’s folly is spoken by an unnamed senator in the next scene:

  If I want gold, steal but a beggar’s dog

  And give it Timon—why the dog coins gold.

  If I would sell my horse and buy twenty moe

  Better than he—why give the horse to Timon;

  Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight,

  And able horses. (2.1.5–10)

  It is abundantly clear that Timon cannot maintain his histrionic image. In three wonderfully colloquial scenes (3.1–3), Timon’s so-called friends cannot lend him anything. Lucullus even comments negatively on Timon’s foolish honesty: “Every man has his fault, and honesty is his. I ha’ told him on’t, but I could ne’er get him from’t” (3.1.28–30).

  Timon leaves Athens and takes to the woods in a self-imposed exile. In the last two acts of the play, Timon digs for roots but discovers an unlimited supply of gold. By this convenient irony, we are brought back to the beginning of the play and the fact that money is at the root of all evil—a medieval moral apothegm. We can see why Karl Marx was so attached to the cash nexus of this play. The degree of excess is perhaps even greater in the last two acts of the play as Timon launches his vitriolic and misanthropic tirades against mankind. In act 5, scene 1, the Poet and the Painter reappear. They are the same grasping suitors as they were in act 1, but they think that Timon is only feigning poverty to test his beneficiaries. With utter cynicism, the Painter confides in the Poet: “Therefore ‘tis not amiss we tender our loves to him in this supposed distress of his. It will show honestly in us, and is very likely to load our purposes with what they travail for, if it be a just and true report that goes of his having” (5.1.12–17). They have nothing in hand to show Timon, but the Painter is convinced that they can gain their rich rewards without having to produce anything: “Promising is the very air o’ th’ time; it opens the eyes of expectation. 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” (5.1.23–27). The degree of corruption in the Poet and Painter has increased markedly since the beginning of the play.

  With Alcibiades’s whores in act 4, scene 3, Timon finds the perfect subject for his uncontrolled invective. Phrynia and Timandra are tough-talking street people who give as good as they get, provided that Timon gives them gold. Timon lectures Timandra about how to destroy mankind:

  Be a whore still; they love thee not that use thee.

  Give them diseases, leaving with thee their lust.

  Make use of thy salt hours. Season the slaves

  For tubs and baths; bring down rose-cheeked youth

  To the tub-fast and the diet. (4.3.84–88)

  Timon’s discourse is so full of references to venereal disease and its supposed cure that biographically inclined critics have assumed that Shakespeare must have had syphilis at this point in his career. Phrynia and Timandra pretend to listen carefully to Timon’s useful advice, but they have only one refrain, which they speak together: “Well, more gold. What then? / Believe’t that we’ll do anything for gold” (4.3.150–51) and “More counsel with more money, bounteous Timon” (4.3.168–69).

  Timon’s most significant exchanges are with Apemantus, who, like him, is also a rude misanthrope. Apemantus’s first words are in fact a rebuke: “Men report / Thou dost affect my manners, and dost use them” (4.3.199–200). Apemantus assumes that Timon is only acting a part that he is not comfortable with: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends. When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mocked thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou know’st none, but art despised for the contrary” (4.3.299–303). Apemantus speaks wisely but bitterly. He understands Timon as a misanthrope modeled on himself: “Thou hast cast away thyself, being like thyself: / A madman so long, now a fool” (4.3.221–22) and “Thou’dst courtier be again / Wert thou not beggar” (4.3.242–43). Of course, neither Timon nor Apemantus has any effect on each other, but Timon does pick up the suggestion that it is time for him to die.

  The one saving note in this scene is Flavius, Timon’s steward, who remains true to his master in adversity. He sympathizes with Timon in his fall: “What an alteration of honor has desp’rate want made! / What vilder thing upon the earth than friends, / Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!” (4.3.464–66). He forces Timon to acknowledge that all of mankind is not hateful:

  Forgive my general and exceptless rashness,

  You perpetual-sober gods. I do proclaim

  One honest man. Mistake me not, but one.

  No more I pray—and he’s a steward.

  How fain would I have hated all mankind,

  And thou redeem’st thyself. But all save thee

  I fell with curses. (4.3.498–504)

  But Timon seems uncomfortable with Flavius, who has driven him out of his absolute misanthropy. He is eager to corrupt him with gold so that he will be like himself:

  Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,

  But let the famished flesh slide from the bone

  Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs

  What thou deniest to men. (4.3.530–33)

  Timon’s excessive invective seems particularly futile at this point. It is mere rhetoric, with no effect on Flavius. Again, the only thing Timon can profitably do now is prepare to die.

  Chapter 28

  Coriolanus’s Manliness

  Coriolanus is represented as a Roman warrior in the play that bears his name. He is like other military protagonists in Shakespeare, such as Henry V and Macbeth. In fact, Coriolanus owes something to the way manliness is defined in the Ghost of Banquo scene in Macbeth (3.4). In King Lear, when Edmund sends a captain to kill Lear and Cordelia in prison, the captain agrees by saying only: “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. / If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t” (5.3.39–40). Killing is defined as a male function. We often see Coriolanus engaged in bloody combat, which is, of course, praiseworthy although represented savagely.

  Act 1, scene 4 shows us Caius Marcius—he will be called Coriolanus afterward—fighting the Volscians before the city of Corioli. Marcius prays to Mars, the god of war, to “make us quick in work, / That we with smoking swords may march from hence” (1.4.10–11). The swords will be smoking with the blood of the enemy. After Marcius is shut in the gates of the city, everyone applauds his heroism. It is truly astounding: “He is himself alone, / To answer all the city” (1.4.51–52). The Romans assume he will be killed, but we see him suddenly come on stage “bleeding, assaulted by the enemy” (1.4.62 s.d.). He appears again “as he were flayed” (1.6.22). So Marcius’s bloody wounds are a sign of his Roman valor. After the battle, he receives the honorific name of Coriolanus.

  The Roman commander Cominius describes Coriolanus’s military career: “At sixteen years, / When Tarquin made a head for Rome, he fought / Beyond the mark of others” (2.2.87–89). Cominius celebrates Coriolanus’s young feats of valor: “His pupil age / Man-ent’red thus, he waxèd like a sea” (2.2.98–99). In the present battle for Corioles:

  His sword, death’s stamp,

  Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot

  He was a thing of blood, whose every motion

  Was timed with dying cries. (2.2.107–10)

  This is super
lative praise for Coriolanus as a military hero.

  Cominius’s description is bolstered by what Volumnia says of her son. The imagery is still of blood and wounds as a symbol of Coriolanus’s indomitable courage.

  In a peaceful domestic scene (1.3), Volumnia cannot help boasting of how her son proves himself a man. Virgilia, Marcius’s tender-hearted wife, may be horrified by her mother-in-law, but Volumnia is not to be restrained in her account of her son’s honor: “had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action” (1.3.20–25). When Virgilia objects strenuously to Volumnia’s mention of Marcius’s “bloody brow,” the mother replies with vigorous contempt:

  Away, you fool! It more becomes a man

  Than gilt his trophy. The breasts of Hecuba,

  When she did suckle Hector, looked not lovelier

  Than Hector’s forehead when it spit forth blood

  At Grecian sword, contemning. (1.3.39–43)

  This echoes the cruel imagery of Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me” soliloquy (1.5.42f). Lady Valeria’s account of how Marcius’s son caught a gilded butterfly and cruelly tore it to pieces (“mammocked it”) (1.3.60–65) is in the same noble warrior spirit as Volumnia’s boasting of her son.

  After the battle of Corioles, again there is a conflict between Virgilia and Volumnia. Coriolanus’s mother is, perversely, glad to hear that her son is wounded: “I thank the gods for’t” (2.1.124). She considers his wounds as badges of honor and boasts that “He had before this last expedition twenty-five wounds upon him” (2.1.157–58). The wounds figure importantly in Coriolanus’s standing for consul in the gown of humility. Volumnia’s exaggerated praise is for her son as a kind of killing machine: “Before him he carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears. Death, that dark spirit, in’s nervy [sinewy] arm doth lie, Which, being advanced, declines, and then men die” (2.1.162–65).