Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  … hated be of Timon…

  Back we go to Timon's house, where Timon has called back his friends for another banquet. All the men who had just refused to lend Timon money are now back at their old places. They don't know how Timon has managed to recover, but if he is conducting feasts, they intend to be at the trough.

  They are as servile as ever and Timon appears as affable as ever, but when it is time to eat of the covered dishes, Timon reveals them to be full of water and nothing more. Timon throws the water in their faces, curses them, and drives them away, crying out:

  Burn house, sink Athens, henceforth hated be

  Of Timon man and all humanity.

  —Act III, scene vi, lines 105-6

  There is the transition. Timon goes from universal benevolence to universal malevolence. In both roles, he has held himself far removed from ordinary mankind, but in the latter he at least requires no wealth.

  Timon leaves his home and the city. He finds himself a cave outside Athens and spends his time in cursing. He digs and finds gold (a device borrowed from Lucian's dialogue), but that does not soften his hardened heart or soothe his poisoned soul.

  This fell whore…

  Now a parade of people comes seeking Timon in the cave. (After all, he is rich again.) The first, by accident rather than by design, for Timon's wealth is not yet known, is Alcibiades, who is marching against Athens at the head of a rebel army and who at first fails to recognize Timon.

  Alcibiades is accompanied by two prostitutes whom Timon does not fail to condemn. He says to Alcibiades concerning one of them:

  This fell whore of thine

  Hath in her more destruction than thy sword,

  For all her cherubin look.

  —Act IV, scene iii, lines 62-64

  The "fell whore" in question is Phrynia, whose name is inspired by a famous Athenian courtesan named Phryne who flourished in the time of Alexander the Great, a century after Alcibiades. She grew immensely rich from her earnings, for she had as her customers the most distinguished men of the time and she charged healthy fees. The most famous story told of her is that once when she was brought before a court, accused of profaning certain religious rites, she exposed her breasts to the judges and was acquitted on the spot.

  … proud Athens on a heap

  Alcibiades expresses sympathy for Timon, offers him money, and begins:

  When I have laid proud Athens on a heap-

  —Act IV, scene iii, line 102

  The historical Alcibiades, when he fled Athens, went to Sparta, his city's bitter enemy, and there advised that enemy how best to conduct its war. For a period of time he virtually directed Sparta's armies, much more intelligently and effectively than Spartan generals had been able to do. In that sense, Alcibiades was marching against Athens.

  But when, in the play, Alcibiades talks of destroying Athens, Timon interrupts to wish him all success in that task, together with the destruction of himself afterward. And before they go, he heaps bitter speeches on the courtesans as he gives them quantities of his own gold.

  The middle of humanity. ..

  Apemantus now comes in. The old and practiced Cynic can now bandy insults with the new-made Misanthropes. Shakespeare bases this on a tale of Plutarch's, intending to show how Timon, in his universal hatred, outdid the Cynics. He tells how Apemantus once, when dining with Timon, they two being all the company, commented on how pleasant it was to feast alone without hated mankind present, and Timon answered morosely, "It would be, if you were not present."

  Thus, when in the play Apemantus offers to give Timon food, and mend his diet, Timon says:

  First mend my company, take away thyself,

  —Act IV, scene iii, line 284

  But Apemantus is not fooled. He was not impressed by Timon playing god, and he is not impressed by Timon playing dog. (It is odd that in English, god and dog are the same letters in mirror image.) Apemantus says, cynically:

  Art thou proud yet?

  —Act IV, scene iii, line 278

  He says even more sharply:

  The middle of humanity thou never knewest,

  but the extremity of both ends.

  —Act IV, scene iii, lines 301-2

  The rumor of Timon's gold spreads. Thieves come to relieve him of it, but he gives it to them with such malevolent glee at the harm it will do them that they leave most uneasily.

  His old steward, Flavius, arrives weeping, and asks only to continue to serve Timon. Even Timon's withered heart is touched and he is forced to retreat one inch from his universal hatred. He says:

  I do proclaim

  One honest man.

  Mistake me not, but one.

  —Act IV, scene iii, lines 505-6

  Here Timon seems to have faced mankind and found himself momentarily to be neither god nor dog, but "the middle of humanity." Had he found himself permanently back to that middle, the play might have been more satisfactory, but Shakespeare blunders onward through the thicket of unrelieved misanthropy.

  … hang himself

  The Poet and the Painter arrive to get their share of the gold by pretending selfless love of Timon, but Timon overhears their plotting and drives them away.

  Then come Athenian Senators, pleading with Timon to take over the leadership of the city's forces in order to turn back Alcibiades, who is battering at the city's walls, but Timon states bitterly that he doesn't care what Alcibiades does to Athens. Shakespeare now makes use of still another anecdote in Plutarch.

  He announces one favor he will do Athens. He has a tree that he is about to chop down, but he urges the Senators to announce to all Athenians who wish to take advantage of the offer to:

  Come hither ere my tree hath felt the ax,

  And hang himself.

  —Act V, scene i, lines 212-13

  Those enemies of Timon's. ..

  Timon dies, unreconciled to the end, and Athens must surrender to Alcibiades.

  This did not happen quite so in history.

  Rather, Alcibiades finally fell out with the Spartans (the story is that he was a little too familiar with one of the Spartan queens and the Spartan King resented it) and returned to Athenian allegiance. They welcomed him back because the war was going more and more badly and they needed him. In 407 b.c. he made a triumphant return to Athens and in that sense, Athens might be viewed as having surrendered to him.

  The Athenians, however, could never bring themselves to trust him, and the next year he was exiled again, this time permanently.

  The play does not go that far. It ends with the reconciliation, as Alcibiades says:

  Those enemies of Timon's and mine own

  Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof,

  Fall, and no more.

  —Act V, scene iv, lines 56-58

  Alcibiades lets himself be placated and reconciled, where Timon did not, and it is plain that the former is displayed as the preferable course.

  Timon is dead by then, but the epitaph he wrote for himself is brought in and Alcibiades reads it-Timon's final word (taken from Plutarch).

  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.

  —Act V, scene iv, lines 72-73

  6. The Winter's Tale

  The winter's tale is a romance. It has no historical basis whatever and none of the events it describes ever occurred; nor are any of its characters to be found in history, however glancingly. Nevertheless, its background lies in the pre-Christian Greek world. I therefore include it among the Greek plays.

  It seems to have been one of Shakespeare's latest plays, too, having been written as late as 1611. The only later play for which Shakespeare was solely responsible was The Tempest.

  .., the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia …

  The play opens with two courtiers exchanging graceful compliments. The scene is set in Sicilia (Sicily) and one of the courtiers, Camillo, is native to the place. The other is
a vistor from Bohemia.

  The occasion is a state visit paid to Sicily by the King of Bohemia, and there may be a return visit in consequence. Camillo says:

  I think this coming summer the King of Sicilia

  means to pay Bohemia the visitation

  which he justly owes him.

  —Act I, scene i, lines 5-7

  There is a queer reversal here. Shakespeare takes the plot from a romance written in 1588 by the English writer Robert Greene, entitled Pandosto. The Triumph of Time. In Greene's original romance the story opens with a visit of the King of Sicily to Bohemia, rather than the reverse. This reversal is carried all through the play, with the King of Sicily in The Winter's Tale playing the role of the King of Bohemia in Pandosto, and vice versa.

  Did Shakespeare make a casual slip of the pen to begin with and then carry it through because he was too lazy to take the trouble to correct it? Or did he have some good reason?-I suspect the latter.

  The King who is being visited behaves, in the first portion of the play, as an almost psychotically suspicious tyrant. Should this king be the King of Bohemia, as in Greene, or the King of Sicily, as in Shakespeare?

  Suppose we look back into history. In 405 b.c., just ten years after the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of Athens (see page I-140), a general, Dionysius, seized control over Syracuse, the largest and strongest city of Sicily. By 383 b.c. he had united almost the entire island under his rule.

  Dionysius is best known for the manner in which he kept himself in power for thirty-eight years in an era when rulers were regularly overthrown by palace coups or popular unrest. He did so by unending suspicion and eternal vigilance. For instance, there is a story that he had a bell-shaped chamber opening into the state prison, with the narrow end connecting to his room. In this way, he could secretly listen to conversations in the prison and learn if any conspiracies were brewing. This has been called the "ear of Dionysius."

  He arrested people on mere suspicion and his suspicion was most easily aroused. Naturally, he left the memory of himself behind in most unsavory fashion and though he died in peace, he is remembered as a cruel and suspicious tyrant.

  If Shakespeare had to choose between Bohemia and Sicily as a place to be ruled by a tyrant, was it not sensible to choose Sicily?

  Of course, King Leontes of Sicily, the character in the play, is not to be equated with Dionysius. The Sicilian tyrant of old may simply have made Sicily seem the more appropriate scene for tyranny, but there all resemblance ends and nothing in the play has any relationship to the life of Dionysius.

  Nevertheless, because of this tenuous connection between Leontes and Dionysius, and the fact that Dionysius lived a generation after Timon, I am placing this play immediately after Timon of Athens.

  As for Bohemia… Later in the play there will be scenes of idyllic pastoral happiness in the kingdom of the visiting monarch. Shall that other kingdom then be Sicily, as in Greene, or Bohemia, as in Shakespeare?

  To be sure, in ancient times Sicily was an agricultural province that served as the granary of early Rome. It might therefore be viewed as an idyllic place in contrast to citified and vice-ridden Rome itself. However, Sicily was also noted for its brutal wars between the Greeks and Carthage and, later, the Romans and Carthage. Still later, it was the scene of horrible slave rebellions.

  What of Bohemia by contrast? The Bohemia we know is the westernmost part of modern Czechoslovakia and is no more a pastoral idyll than anywhere else. This Bohemia is inhabited by a Slavic people, in Shakespeare's time as well as in our own, and its origin, as a Slavic nation, dates back to perhaps the eighth century, something like a thousand years after the time of Dionysius.

  This discrepancy in time did not bother Greene, or Shakespeare either, and would not bother us in reading the play. However, is it necessarily our

  the winter's tale 149

  present real-life Bohemia that Shakespeare was thinking of? Was there another?

  Shortly after 1400, bands of strange people reached central Europe. They were swarthy-skinned nomads, who spoke a language that was not like any in Europe. Some Europeans thought they came from Egypt and they were called "gypsies" in consequence. (They still are called that in the United States, but their real origin may have been India.)

  When the gypsies reached Paris in 1427, the French knew only that they had come from central Europe. There were reports that they had come from Bohemia, and so the French called them Bohemians (and still do).

  The gypsy life seemed gay and vagabondish and must have been attractive to those bound to heavy labor or dull routine. The term "Bohemian" therefore came to be applied to artists, writers, show people, and others living an unconventional and apparently vagabondish life. Bohemia came to be an imaginary story land of romance.

  Well then, if Shakespeare wanted a land of pastoral innocence and delights, should he pick Sicily or Bohemia? -Bohemia, by all means.

  … tremor cordis.. .

  The courtiers let the audience know that Leontes of Sicily and Polixenes of Bohemia were childhood friends and have close ties of affection. In the next scene, when the two kings come on stage themselves, this is made perfectly clear.

  Polixenes has been away from home for nine months and pressing affairs must take him away. Leontes urges him strenuously to remain, and when Polixenes is adamant, the Sicilian host asks his Queen, Hermione, to join her pleas with his. She does, and after joyful badinage, Polixenes gives in.

  Then, quite suddenly, without warning at all, a shadow falls over Leontes. He watches his gay Queen and the friend she is cajoling (at Leontes' own request) and he says in an aside:

  Too hot, too hot!

  To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

  I have tremor cordis on me...

  —Act I, scene ii, lines 108-10

  An unnatural physical effect, a palpitation of the heart ("tremor cordis") has come over him. A sickness, an abnormality, makes of the genial host, without real cause, a jealous tyrant.

  The sickness grows on itself. He wonders if he has been cuckolded (see page I-108) and is at once convinced he is. He seeks supporting opinion and consults his courtier, Camillo, who listens in horror and recognizes the situation as a mental illness:

  Good my lord, be cured

  Of this diseased opinion, and betimes,

  For 'tis most dangerous.

  —Act I, scene ii, lines 296-98

  … sighted like the basilisk

  Camillo's clear wisdom is greeted by Leontes with a howl of rage. The King makes it clear that if Camillo were a loyal subject he would poison Polixenes. Reluctantly, Camillo agrees to accept the direct order, provided the King will then offer no disgrace to his Queen.

  By now, however, Polixenes notes that the warm friendship that had surrounded him but a short time ago has vanished and he is aware of an intensifying frigidity. He meets Camillo and questions him but Camillo can only speak evasively, and still in the metaphor of sickness:

  I cannot name the disease; and it is caught

  Of you, that yet are well.

  —Act I, scene ii, lines 387-88

  He is referring, of course, to the insane jealousy of which Polixenes is the unwitting and undeserved cause. Polixenes cannot understand and says:

  How caught of me? Make me not sighted

  like the basilisk. I have looked on

  thousands, who have sped the better

  By my regard, but killed none so.

  —Act I, scene ii, lines 388-91

  Another name for the basilisk is the cockatrice, a word that may have originated as a distortion of crocodile. The medieval European had little contact with crocodiles, though he had heard of them in connection with the distant Nile.

  The crocodile, like the serpent, is a deadly reptile. It might almost be viewed as a gigantic, thick snake, with stubby legs. To Europeans, unfamiliar with the crocodile except by distant report, the snaky aspects of the creature could easily become dominant.

  Once
"cockatrice" is formed from "crocodile," the first syllable becomes suggestive, and the fevered imagination develops the thought that the monster originates in a cock's egg and is a creature with a snake's body and a cock's head.

  The cockatrice is pictured as the ultimate snake. It kills not by a bite but merely by a look. Not merely its venom, but its very breath is fatal. Because the cockatrice is the most deadly snake and therefore the king of snakes, or because the cockscomb may be pictured as a crown, the cockatrice came to be called "basilisk" (from Greek words meaning "little king").

  Camillo cannot resist Polixenes' pleadings for enlightenment. He advises the Bohemian King to flee at once. Since Camillo is now a traitor, saving the man he was ordered to kill, he must fly also. Together, they leave Sicily.

  A sad tale's best.. .

  Meanwhile, at the court, Mamilius, Leontes' little son, is having a pleasant time with the ladies in waiting. His mother, Hermione, it now turns out, is rather late in pregnancy. (Polixenes, remember, had been at the Sicilian court for nine months.)

  The Queen asks her son for a story, and Mamilius says:

  A sad tale's best for winter; I have one