1 00:00:00,510 --> 00:00:06,900 Thank you for coming. This is the last of my Shakespeare lectures this time, and it's on time in the. 2 00:00:06,900 --> 00:00:14,280 Talk about timing of action. I was always, in a sense, a kind of afterthought or something that you might do at the end of the series. 3 00:00:14,280 --> 00:00:24,660 It's a late play, although probably not as late. The Simple have tended to dated the most recent dating of Plato, somebody about 60 No. 4 00:00:24,660 --> 00:00:30,780 Five to six. But the thing I want to focus on about the play today is that we pretty much unanimously 5 00:00:30,780 --> 00:00:37,260 recognise it now as a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton. 6 00:00:37,260 --> 00:00:40,290 So what I want to try and do in the lecture, and I hope this will be useful, 7 00:00:40,290 --> 00:00:43,980 both are thinking about time and but also we're thinking about a large number of 8 00:00:43,980 --> 00:00:49,620 collaborative plays in the canon is to try to think about what to do with Middleton. 9 00:00:49,620 --> 00:00:55,140 How should the fact of collaboration in the history of this play affect our interpretation? 10 00:00:55,140 --> 00:01:04,540 What kinds of critical methodologies have we got for thinking about collaborative playwriting and how might they be helpful or not? 11 00:01:04,540 --> 00:01:14,610 OK, so firstly, this is what the play is about. A party of petitioners gathered at the House of Time in a wealthy Athenian. 12 00:01:14,610 --> 00:01:22,710 They all want his patronage time and it's a generous philanthropic host who welcomes all of them, 13 00:01:22,710 --> 00:01:29,280 pays off their debts, gives them money to marry and all those kinds of things. 14 00:01:29,280 --> 00:01:36,380 This is a this is a great scene of sort of conspicuous consumption, showcasing timeless generosity, 15 00:01:36,380 --> 00:01:40,860 the greedy self-interest of the guests and a kind of Mariscal like celebration. 16 00:01:40,860 --> 00:01:50,490 A dance of Amazon's Timeline's Stuart Flavia's knows that time is actually almost bankrupt. 17 00:01:50,490 --> 00:01:56,520 He sends to try and get some of the money back or some repayment for Taiwan's generosity. 18 00:01:56,520 --> 00:02:06,720 But no one will give time and any money. And he is besieged by his creditors time and is bewildered and stages another banquet 19 00:02:06,720 --> 00:02:13,080 to the power of the first one where he invites his close friends again to dinner. 20 00:02:13,080 --> 00:02:21,420 This time serves them stones and water, berates them for their ingratitude and vows misanthropy time, 21 00:02:21,420 --> 00:02:34,200 and then leaves up and live like a beast in the wood, followed by his steward digging for roots to eat out in the wood time and find gold, 22 00:02:34,200 --> 00:02:45,300 which he gives to the soldier asked by these to fight Athens unto two [INAUDIBLE] to spread venereal diseases. 23 00:02:45,300 --> 00:02:51,360 So we've got a kind of two part play to half play where time it is. 24 00:02:51,360 --> 00:03:05,670 It's generous in the city and then time and is money left hand in the wood and it ends up with a kind of attack on Athens led by our Savides time. 25 00:03:05,670 --> 00:03:09,690 It is indifferent to the fate of Athens. He predicts his own death. 26 00:03:09,690 --> 00:03:15,180 And then a talk on talk talk about in a few minutes, we have a strange series of three epitaphs. 27 00:03:15,180 --> 00:03:23,230 We don't quite know how time and dies also by these morns Timon and vows to enter Athens in peace. 28 00:03:23,230 --> 00:03:26,700 So there's an odd set. I hope that gives a sense of how or not plated. 29 00:03:26,700 --> 00:03:31,080 Actually, that's a kind of somebody which attempts to establish two things about it. 30 00:03:31,080 --> 00:03:36,510 One is that there are pretty much two halves. So we're going to talk about that as we go forward. 31 00:03:36,510 --> 00:03:44,580 The Hafitz in Athens, where time has got his money and is in in the encounter with people who want it and the Hafitz in the woods. 32 00:03:44,580 --> 00:03:52,860 There's a strange kind of politics about the invasion of Athens, but really an anticlimax at the end. 33 00:03:52,860 --> 00:04:03,720 It's quite unclear to think what actually happens at the end, both to time and until this belated political clout of our savides against Athens. 34 00:04:03,720 --> 00:04:10,410 So it's a play above anticlimax about money and about alienation. 35 00:04:10,410 --> 00:04:13,990 This is the play that Karl Marx most enjoyed of Shakespeare. 36 00:04:13,990 --> 00:04:16,980 And we'll talk a bit about why that was. 37 00:04:16,980 --> 00:04:24,200 There's also some question mark about whether this play exists in a final form and whether it ever had an early modern performance. 38 00:04:24,200 --> 00:04:28,660 Though no record of performance from the early modern period. 39 00:04:28,660 --> 00:04:35,100 And those questions about whether it's completed generated both by the play itself. 40 00:04:35,100 --> 00:04:42,300 So it's a very short play compared with the other tragedies is only about two thirds the length of the other tragic plays. 41 00:04:42,300 --> 00:04:54,120 And by the fact that time was apparently an afterthought in its only early edition in the 16 23 First Folio and the textual history. 42 00:04:54,120 --> 00:04:59,950 This is quite easy to sketch out, although quite complicated to. 43 00:04:59,950 --> 00:05:06,160 Too much detail, I'm not going to go to a lot of detail. Let's do the sketch. When I have Jagged and Edward Blunt, 44 00:05:06,160 --> 00:05:13,330 the folios publishers were buying up the rights to Shakespeare's plays in order to produce their collected edition. 45 00:05:13,330 --> 00:05:23,050 It seems that the owner of Toilsome Cressida, Henry Walli, who would publish that play in 69 nine in a quarter, did not want to play ball. 46 00:05:23,050 --> 00:05:30,790 He does not want to sell his rights. Troilus and cross-border negotiations about how to get hold of this play went right up to the wire. 47 00:05:30,790 --> 00:05:42,490 The Folio catalogue page was printed without trying to some precedent, and it seems from various extant copies that work started on the play. 48 00:05:42,490 --> 00:05:47,600 Work started on the on the volume when it was thought that Transgresses would not be included. 49 00:05:47,600 --> 00:05:53,740 Timon was the make wait. So time and reference was the play that was brought in when it suddenly see that there was a 50 00:05:53,740 --> 00:05:58,960 big hole in the collected edition and it was printed instead of trying to compress it down. 51 00:05:58,960 --> 00:06:03,610 But what happened right at the last minute was the trove of crises that also became free and 52 00:06:03,610 --> 00:06:10,450 that was printed as a kind of insert its differently patinated from the rest of the book. 53 00:06:10,450 --> 00:06:15,700 But the status of time and therefore was always already marginal. 54 00:06:15,700 --> 00:06:25,270 It seems to have come in only as an afterthought or only as a contingency without that problem with getting the rights to troublesome precedent. 55 00:06:25,270 --> 00:06:29,470 It's pretty clear we wouldn't have this play. It wouldn't have survived at all. 56 00:06:29,470 --> 00:06:37,930 So it becomes a kind of a to me at the contingency, which surrounds most of Shakespeare's plays and indeed most modern drama. 57 00:06:37,930 --> 00:06:43,210 Perhaps the man preparing the First Folio knew that timing was not quite finished. 58 00:06:43,210 --> 00:06:47,440 Perhaps they did not want to include it because they knew that it was collaborative. 59 00:06:47,440 --> 00:06:57,310 One of the things the Folio is trying to do is to present a single author collection and single authority is a very important part of its brand. 60 00:06:57,310 --> 00:07:03,040 That's why we get that image of Shakespeare, that very iconic engraving by Drew should. 61 00:07:03,040 --> 00:07:08,080 And there's no other writer, no playwright, no NoCal, no collaborator is ever named in the Folios, 62 00:07:08,080 --> 00:07:12,790 and none of the plays is acknowledged as having a co-author. 63 00:07:12,790 --> 00:07:18,280 So perhaps they didn't want to include Timon in the first place because they knew that it was collaborative. 64 00:07:18,280 --> 00:07:26,230 They also don't include paraphilias or two Noble Kinsman or Corbino, a play that is not lost. 65 00:07:26,230 --> 00:07:30,460 Another Shakespeare and Fletcher collaboration. 66 00:07:30,460 --> 00:07:36,910 But current scholarship does, however, find quite a large amount of collaboration in plays that are in the folio. 67 00:07:36,910 --> 00:07:47,740 So that's not a very stable kind of criterion, and that includes work by Middleton at the moment. 68 00:07:47,740 --> 00:07:57,370 We think that Middleton, as Shakespeare's successor right with the King's men, was responsible for revising some of Shakespeare's plays. 69 00:07:57,370 --> 00:08:10,240 Perhaps for new performance on both Macbeth and Measure for Measure are now thought to be post Shakespearean revisions by Middleton, 70 00:08:10,240 --> 00:08:18,850 some measure for measure, and that there are already understood to be Shakespeare plays overlaid with some work by Middleton. 71 00:08:18,850 --> 00:08:28,720 The extent of which is hard to judge because, of course, we don't now have the purely Shakespearean text, if indeed it has existed. 72 00:08:28,720 --> 00:08:34,240 Now it seems likely that more middle term will probably be found in Shakespeare's works. 73 00:08:34,240 --> 00:08:37,600 I think that's pretty clear quite where it will be found. 74 00:08:37,600 --> 00:08:46,360 It isn't so clear at the moment, but the examples of Macbeth in measure for measure suggests that many of the plays, 75 00:08:46,360 --> 00:08:54,180 which are not printed at a date close to their first performance, will have been changed during their life. 76 00:08:54,180 --> 00:08:59,080 A script with the Kingsmen before the date of the first solium. 77 00:08:59,080 --> 00:09:09,190 So no play tax exists as a as a property of a play company being revived occasionally in the repertoire without being changed. 78 00:09:09,190 --> 00:09:12,220 That's just that's kind of unthinkable, really. 79 00:09:12,220 --> 00:09:19,600 So a large number of the plays, particularly from the second half of Shakespeare's career, don't get published until the First Folio. 80 00:09:19,600 --> 00:09:25,030 And it seems quite likely that those many of those texts may represent plays originally 81 00:09:25,030 --> 00:09:31,660 by Shakespeare and to some extent a greater or lesser extent revised by someone else. 82 00:09:31,660 --> 00:09:40,330 Most probably Middleton, the new Oxford Shakespeare, which will come out in the summer of 2016. 83 00:09:40,330 --> 00:09:49,210 Well, I think, Major, on the issues of collaboration. The one thing that will give us is a much more collaborative Shakespeare so that these 84 00:09:49,210 --> 00:09:56,410 are questions which are really the point of being explored and at least for the moment, 85 00:09:56,410 --> 00:09:59,900 resolved. So currently we think about. 86 00:09:59,900 --> 00:10:04,190 Quarter of Shakespeare's plays have elements. 87 00:10:04,190 --> 00:10:13,040 By other writers can are different forms of collaboration, of course, that can be a joint enterprise from the start or a revision later. 88 00:10:13,040 --> 00:10:17,840 Kind of posthole provision by another writer, which is the case with Macbeth or measure for measure. 89 00:10:17,840 --> 00:10:21,710 So a quarter of Shakespeare's plays a thought currently to be collaborative. 90 00:10:21,710 --> 00:10:24,500 I think that's going to quickly look like a real understatement. 91 00:10:24,500 --> 00:10:31,910 That's the theme which is going to change about Shakespeare studies over the next two or three years. 92 00:10:31,910 --> 00:10:34,430 Studies of collaboration, though. 93 00:10:34,430 --> 00:10:43,430 Like all movements in Shakespeare, criticism are based on cultural and desire for what we want to be true at any particular time. 94 00:10:43,430 --> 00:10:48,590 So authorship studies tend to deploy a rhetoric of specialists. 95 00:10:48,590 --> 00:10:54,560 Linguistic analysis, kind of computer generated statistical tables and all that kind of stuff. 96 00:10:54,560 --> 00:11:05,410 But as we know from other forms of quasar scientific criticism, they are, of course, already looking for what they want to find. 97 00:11:05,410 --> 00:11:05,570 Okay, 98 00:11:05,570 --> 00:11:16,400 so this is no more scientific than the science of editing that we've talked about before or the science of other kinds of critical method in our age. 99 00:11:16,400 --> 00:11:22,490 We can see that the values of teamwork, of kind of collaborative web authorship. 100 00:11:22,490 --> 00:11:29,870 What we understand about commercial entertainment, the whole leanin kind of philosophy, suspicion of individual genius, 101 00:11:29,870 --> 00:11:39,170 all of these combined to make it inevitable, perhaps, that our Shakespeare early 21st century Shakespeare might look more collaborative than sodomy. 102 00:11:39,170 --> 00:11:44,090 20TH century Shakespeare. And no doubt the pendulum will move again to go on to suggest we're on the 103 00:11:44,090 --> 00:11:48,430 brink of a of of a sudden new and kind of final understanding of Shakespeare. 104 00:11:48,430 --> 00:11:52,730 Of course we're not. We're but we're on the brink of a quite an interesting new critical movement, 105 00:11:52,730 --> 00:11:57,590 which has some new things to say about Shakespeare as a collaborative writer. 106 00:11:57,590 --> 00:12:02,810 So we're asking about how understanding Timon of Athens is as Shakespeare Middleton collaboration. 107 00:12:02,810 --> 00:12:09,630 I should say that so far this is the only play that is broadly accepted to be a collaboration between the two writers. 108 00:12:09,630 --> 00:12:18,500 There's something that they're both working on at the same time. Presumably discussing together, dividing up the work in some way between them. 109 00:12:18,500 --> 00:12:25,130 So it's the only collaboration of that sort that we think that Shakespeare Middleton have done at the moment. 110 00:12:25,130 --> 00:12:30,440 But we're asking how understanding the players are that kind of cooperation might affect our reading of it. 111 00:12:30,440 --> 00:12:38,210 And by extension, what can critical methodologies are appropriate to the study of collaborative works? 112 00:12:38,210 --> 00:12:41,870 Identifying the work as collaborative has, of course, 113 00:12:41,870 --> 00:12:50,240 historically been a way of excusing the things we don't like about it or the ways in which we think it's fair to statically. 114 00:12:50,240 --> 00:12:58,310 Let's just spend a couple of minutes on the debate about who ran to some drug makers as kind of an instructive example. 115 00:12:58,310 --> 00:13:02,540 For centuries, critics comforted themselves that this brutal, 116 00:13:02,540 --> 00:13:08,780 grotesquely comic play could not be mostly by Shakespeare, just couldn't be by Shakespeare. 117 00:13:08,780 --> 00:13:12,920 So value and authorship went together. We didn't think it touched on drama. 118 00:13:12,920 --> 00:13:18,680 This was very good. We knew that Shakespeare was very good. So therefore, Shakespeare could not have written Titus Andronicus or not. 119 00:13:18,680 --> 00:13:27,110 Mostly when Jonathan Bate rehabilitated the play's critical reputation in the early 1990s. 120 00:13:27,110 --> 00:13:35,330 In the Autumn three edition, he also made a very strong case that Titus Andronicus was solely by Shakespeare. 121 00:13:35,330 --> 00:13:40,760 Okay, so authorship and value are still going together. Now, Titus Andronicus is really good. 122 00:13:40,760 --> 00:13:48,290 Shakespeare is really good. Therefore, Shakespeare wrote some problem. He it's the same argument, but just flipped, flipped around and. 123 00:13:48,290 --> 00:13:55,520 Very honest about this. He said he couldn't have both made a case of the aesthetic qualities of Titus and the case that it was collaborative. 124 00:13:55,520 --> 00:14:00,440 But those cases could not be made at the same time because you couldn't make a case that the play 125 00:14:00,440 --> 00:14:06,410 was really good and and at the same time say it was it was written by more than one author. 126 00:14:06,410 --> 00:14:11,990 The consensus now is both that Titus Andronicus is an interesting, valuable, 127 00:14:11,990 --> 00:14:20,050 sophisticated play and that it is a collaboration between Shakespeare and George Pell now. 128 00:14:20,050 --> 00:14:26,990 Timerman has not yet had the work of major critical rehabilitation that bakes Synthesise for Titus. 129 00:14:26,990 --> 00:14:31,190 And that's because most recent editions of the play have been concerned to sort out the 130 00:14:31,190 --> 00:14:37,970 issue of collaboration rather than to work on the issue of ascetic or cultural value. 131 00:14:37,970 --> 00:14:45,860 A recent stage production, though, by Nick Hytner at the National Theatre with Simon Russell Beale as Timon did much 132 00:14:45,860 --> 00:14:50,390 to bring out the play's topical consciousness by attaching it pretty effectively, 133 00:14:50,390 --> 00:14:58,100 I think, to the collapse of the banking system. I think it's a play ripe for reassessment. 134 00:14:58,100 --> 00:15:03,210 We all feel working on Shakespeare. Everything has already been said about Shakespeare. 135 00:15:03,210 --> 00:15:08,660 If that's not true generally. But it's most certainly not true of timing of our friends. 136 00:15:08,660 --> 00:15:12,560 Unlike many aspects of the critical reception of Shakespeare's plays, 137 00:15:12,560 --> 00:15:16,100 this echoes a bit in my mind with what I was saying about Coriolanus a couple of weeks ago. 138 00:15:16,100 --> 00:15:21,940 For instance, attitudes to the play mirror attitudes within it. 139 00:15:21,940 --> 00:15:31,550 Timing is a play about rejection and being shunned underplay that has itself often been rejected and shunned. 140 00:15:31,550 --> 00:15:37,190 And I guess one aim of our work on the collaborative here is to move beyond simply rationalising, 141 00:15:37,190 --> 00:15:43,250 not liking the play by identifying it as a feature collaboration. 142 00:15:43,250 --> 00:15:47,510 Saying we don't like time because it's not very good and it's not very good because it's collaborative. 143 00:15:47,510 --> 00:15:51,800 That's a bit of a dead end. A critically and not where we want to be right now. 144 00:15:51,800 --> 00:15:59,810 So if we're going to understand collaboration as the dominant writing practise of the early modern theatre, most plays in this period are co-authored. 145 00:15:59,810 --> 00:16:08,900 We need to move beyond seeing the product of that practise as invariably split, coherent and aesthetically divided. 146 00:16:08,900 --> 00:16:15,260 But having said that, one common way to understand collaboration in Timon is to use use it to think 147 00:16:15,260 --> 00:16:21,840 about or even to emphasise gaps or inconsistencies or problems in the play. 148 00:16:21,840 --> 00:16:24,140 That's a collaboration can be a way of, 149 00:16:24,140 --> 00:16:31,490 instead of smoothing over a kind of problematic element of the play that we foregrounding and splitting it apart. 150 00:16:31,490 --> 00:16:36,320 Introducing Tyran in the best modern edition box with Worlds Classics text, 151 00:16:36,320 --> 00:16:44,480 John Jarratt argues that the oscillation between satire and rage results in part from the shift between Middleton and 152 00:16:44,480 --> 00:16:52,280 Shakespeare because he's making a night point out that the play's tonal differences are actually differences of authorship. 153 00:16:52,280 --> 00:16:54,140 There are lots of other examples, too. 154 00:16:54,140 --> 00:17:01,250 We could argue that the two writers each have a quite different idea of what the character Alsup by this is for. 155 00:17:01,250 --> 00:17:06,000 I suppose it's quite difficult character to understand what his motives are, what is meant to represent in the play, 156 00:17:06,000 --> 00:17:12,140 and maybe because Middleton is shaped for a quite different view of what what what is there for. 157 00:17:12,140 --> 00:17:18,450 They both, however interesting, they suppress the rumour of homosexuality that such a part of our society's classical 158 00:17:18,450 --> 00:17:23,990 biography is something that Spencer and Maya are both quite interested to bring out. 159 00:17:23,990 --> 00:17:29,120 We can see that there are two styles in the play to linguistic styles. 160 00:17:29,120 --> 00:17:35,510 One is more tolerant of irregular verse lines and more inclined to rhyming couplets. 161 00:17:35,510 --> 00:17:38,530 So irregular verse lines and rhyming couplets. 162 00:17:38,530 --> 00:17:48,780 That's really a hallmark of Middleton's work, and it's unusual in Shakespeare's later work to use rhyme at all. 163 00:17:48,780 --> 00:17:56,490 Another linguistic difference is the characteristically Shakespearian preference for the I do verb form shapes, 164 00:17:56,490 --> 00:18:05,250 but always, almost always uses the older form. I did go back marks a kind of generational difference, but also a provincial difference. 165 00:18:05,250 --> 00:18:08,930 That's if that's a bad form, if you know anything about the development of English, which is on its way out. 166 00:18:08,930 --> 00:18:13,530 He's looking old fashioned by this point. Middleton uses the modern form. 167 00:18:13,530 --> 00:18:18,180 I went, so I did go. It's a Shakespearean collocation. 168 00:18:18,180 --> 00:18:20,370 I went. It's a Middleton one. 169 00:18:20,370 --> 00:18:28,250 It's quite interesting to think of a Shakespeare who we tend to praise for being inventive and kind of modern linguistically, 170 00:18:28,250 --> 00:18:32,730 but in verbal forms and syntax. He's a distinctly old fashioned writer. 171 00:18:32,730 --> 00:18:37,740 That must have occurred to people who heard his parents. 172 00:18:37,740 --> 00:18:46,620 We also can see that Middleton tends to conceptualise the play's attitude to money around the word debt. 173 00:18:46,620 --> 00:18:50,940 So debt is an economic relationship between people. 174 00:18:50,940 --> 00:19:00,140 It's a kind of relational understanding of money, whereas for Shakespeare, the crucial noun about money seems to be gold. 175 00:19:00,140 --> 00:19:13,560 So that's the thing. It's a prop on the stage, but it's also a thing with more kind of fairy tale, less nakedly economic connotations. 176 00:19:13,560 --> 00:19:18,900 The play is structured, as I've already hinted, around a kind of echo of the first half time. 177 00:19:18,900 --> 00:19:26,820 And in the city, the second in the woods, the first half philanthropy, the second misanthropic. 178 00:19:26,820 --> 00:19:35,200 It's a split or dual play structurally, that's to say. But this is not a division that maps onto the division of writing between the two characters. 179 00:19:35,200 --> 00:19:40,050 It is not the case of Shakespeare has a kind of philanthropic time and a Middleton 180 00:19:40,050 --> 00:19:43,620 has a misanthropic time and but there is some echo of divided authorship, 181 00:19:43,620 --> 00:19:46,710 perhaps in the place, divided structure. 182 00:19:46,710 --> 00:19:54,060 Shakespeare seems to have worked on the very beginning of the play on the end and in particular on the current of time. 183 00:19:54,060 --> 00:20:01,470 But much of the central portion of time in Athens is attributed to Middleton, particularly those banquet scenes that I already mentioned. 184 00:20:01,470 --> 00:20:13,610 They're going to talk about again in a minute. OK, so one way to think about collaboration is to use it to make to put at the centre of the analysis. 185 00:20:13,610 --> 00:20:20,660 This continuity's or splits structural, linguistic, ideological in the play. 186 00:20:20,660 --> 00:20:33,170 And to make those splits somehow that the dynamic of how to interpret the play and the evidence for dual authorship. 187 00:20:33,170 --> 00:20:44,120 Another way to think about timing or by any collaborative play is to think about the way it is or is not like other plays by Shakespeare. 188 00:20:44,120 --> 00:20:52,190 So for many critics, Simon stands alone in Shakespeare's canon as a central character who has no family. 189 00:20:52,190 --> 00:20:55,850 When you think about it, it's a really significant observation. 190 00:20:55,850 --> 00:21:02,090 Crucial to Shakespeare's plotting in all genres is the relationship between family members, 191 00:21:02,090 --> 00:21:07,250 between fathers and daughters, in comedies and in the late plays between fathers and sons. 192 00:21:07,250 --> 00:21:13,400 In the history plays in particular between siblings, between married couples, 193 00:21:13,400 --> 00:21:19,840 it's hard to think of another protagonist who is so completely alienated from those structures. 194 00:21:19,840 --> 00:21:25,340 And it's one of the ways, I guess, we could think about a difference between Shakespeare on the one hand and Johnson on the other. 195 00:21:25,340 --> 00:21:31,010 If Johnson is a playwright, he rarely shows us family relationships. 196 00:21:31,010 --> 00:21:40,760 One really interesting parallel to time and I think is both Pony Johnson's play Volpone. 197 00:21:40,760 --> 00:21:44,690 So timing is a distinctly isolated figure. 198 00:21:44,690 --> 00:21:51,950 In some ways. He's the kind of ideal, tragic figure because he hasn't really got anybody to separate himself from in order to 199 00:21:51,950 --> 00:21:58,340 achieve the tragic hyphenation that characters are trying to get to by the end of that play. 200 00:21:58,340 --> 00:22:05,660 But while the isolation does seem distinctive, it also chimes in with some aspirations of Shakespeare's contemporaneous plays. 201 00:22:05,660 --> 00:22:08,870 Lots of other characters would like to be like Timon. 202 00:22:08,870 --> 00:22:19,880 In this regard, we might think of Coriolanus, his desire, that man, what all four of himself and knew no other king said. 203 00:22:19,880 --> 00:22:28,130 That man were author of himself and knew no other kings could discourage its oppressed by his family, 204 00:22:28,130 --> 00:22:33,130 his mother, his wife, his sense of obligation to them. 205 00:22:33,130 --> 00:22:40,130 Or we might think of the superhuman strength bestowed on Macduff in the play Macbeth. 206 00:22:40,130 --> 00:22:47,660 Remember the witches tale Macbeth that Macduff can't be beaten because he is not born of woman. 207 00:22:47,660 --> 00:22:52,010 And of course, Macduff Duff neatly sidestepped being massacred by leaving. 208 00:22:52,010 --> 00:22:59,120 His wife and children are saying remark quite sharply in that for the play. 209 00:22:59,120 --> 00:23:07,980 So by separate himself from his family and having this strange kind of metaphysical separation from femininity, MacDuffie is unbeatable in the play. 210 00:23:07,980 --> 00:23:14,450 So like Coraline, it's he too aspires to a kind of family. This family, less state. 211 00:23:14,450 --> 00:23:22,040 Even Leers attempts to disown his daughters participate in this male fantasy of self-sufficiency. 212 00:23:22,040 --> 00:23:30,200 Time is the Shakespeare play, which has least interesting all scope for women. 213 00:23:30,200 --> 00:23:35,980 But there are other ways, too, in which Tollman is a play closely integrated with Shakespeare's other works. 214 00:23:35,980 --> 00:23:40,790 Its sources include Plutarch's Lives of the Noble, Grecians and Romans. 215 00:23:40,790 --> 00:23:50,300 We've talked about this on a number of occasions. So he shares that with Julius Caesar, with Antony Cleopatra and with Coriolanus Kleiman's Epitaph, 216 00:23:50,300 --> 00:23:55,190 or one of them, at least as quoted almost directly from Plutarch. 217 00:23:55,190 --> 00:24:05,090 And while it's a play that's tended to be seen as emblematic rather than realist, more like a fable than a kind of psychological exploration, 218 00:24:05,090 --> 00:24:17,900 it does have lots of points of contact with King Lear, Flavia's, who is time, and Stewart follows him loyally into exile, a bit like Lears. 219 00:24:17,900 --> 00:24:32,390 Phou Coleridge dumped time in a Lear of domestic or ordinary line, a layer of domestic or ordinary life. 220 00:24:32,390 --> 00:24:36,080 Amongst Shakespeare's tragedies, perhaps its closest to Coriolanus, 221 00:24:36,080 --> 00:24:41,900 both plays have got this bitterly alienated protagonist turning against the former city state 222 00:24:41,900 --> 00:24:46,790 and the sense that these kind of private relationships turn into the public antagonism, 223 00:24:46,790 --> 00:24:56,720 the military antagonism against the city. I think the play's depiction of money under bonds, 224 00:24:56,720 --> 00:25:05,180 of gifts and of the way they do or don't connect people is interestingly linked with the Merchant of Venice. 225 00:25:05,180 --> 00:25:09,600 It's a kind of Merchant of Venice told from her point of view of Antonio. 226 00:25:09,600 --> 00:25:14,600 And when there's no Porsche to save him, this is so, so time. 227 00:25:14,600 --> 00:25:20,780 And it's an Antonio who's given away all his money but doesn't get anything back for it. 228 00:25:20,780 --> 00:25:32,870 And we might think about comedy of errors, too, as another kind of city comedy city play about money and and the interactions it enables. 229 00:25:32,870 --> 00:25:36,770 And finally, thinking about the relationship of this play to other Shakespearean plays, 230 00:25:36,770 --> 00:25:44,990 the idea of a four to degree in the world so away from the selfish city time then finds in nature just 231 00:25:44,990 --> 00:25:50,540 a perverted version of the economic relationships is left behind and finds this gold under the tree. 232 00:25:50,540 --> 00:26:00,860 What he's looking for food. The idea of a thwarted green world goes back again to King Lear and its perverse pastoral politics. 233 00:26:00,860 --> 00:26:05,990 And it's the play's depiction of a nightmarish pastoral or the parallels and contrast 234 00:26:05,990 --> 00:26:11,000 between the city and the woods might also link it with another play set in Athens, 235 00:26:11,000 --> 00:26:19,430 Midsummer Night's Dream and another distinctly commercial pastoral as you like it. 236 00:26:19,430 --> 00:26:22,100 So these connexions with other Shakespeare plays are fruitful, 237 00:26:22,100 --> 00:26:30,350 and there are also some really interesting ways that timing could be much more integrated critically into the Shakespeare canon than it has been. 238 00:26:30,350 --> 00:26:37,940 But there are also, of course, implicitly ways of suppressing the middle, Tony, in aspects of the play and incorporating it, 239 00:26:37,940 --> 00:26:43,610 incorporating time and more fully on thematic grounds with the work of Shakespeare. 240 00:26:43,610 --> 00:26:49,040 It's an attitude to collaboration that effectively ignores it. 241 00:26:49,040 --> 00:26:54,680 On the one hand, it refuses the aesthetic implications of the collaborative as bitter or incoherent. 242 00:26:54,680 --> 00:27:00,320 But in doing so on the other, it refuses collaboration as a theme at all. 243 00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:04,490 So in this kind of analysis, Milton is at best a kind of gofer, 244 00:27:04,490 --> 00:27:16,050 a sort of artistic blank whose work does little to change the play's dominant experience, and that maybe puts in a few rhyming couplets alongside it. 245 00:27:16,050 --> 00:27:21,740 Of course, it's entirely possible, although much less usual, to flip this model. 246 00:27:21,740 --> 00:27:25,200 The Oxford collected Middleton looks at time, 247 00:27:25,200 --> 00:27:30,200 and just as it looks at my back and measure for measure as Middleton plays rather 248 00:27:30,200 --> 00:27:34,340 than a Shakespeare one that contextualises them amongst what Middleton is writing, 249 00:27:34,340 --> 00:27:39,110 rather than thinking of them as kind of outposts of the Shakespearean canon. 250 00:27:39,110 --> 00:27:45,980 This is a really interesting, critical manoeuvre and it makes a whole new set of affinities and into text jollity is visible. 251 00:27:45,980 --> 00:27:53,900 We can see, for example, timecards affinities with city accommodate is a really popular contemporary early 17th century qara, 252 00:27:53,900 --> 00:27:57,950 which Shakespeare never really enters. We used to say he entered it in measure for measure. 253 00:27:57,950 --> 00:28:02,570 But I think we now think that was Middleton that the board didn't measure for. 254 00:28:02,570 --> 00:28:07,130 Measure called mysteries overdone must only look to have been a Middleton name. 255 00:28:07,130 --> 00:28:13,680 Really a very Shakespearean way of thinking about characters names and Athans time. 256 00:28:13,680 --> 00:28:18,500 And Athans is only nominally a foreign place. 257 00:28:18,500 --> 00:28:22,880 It has recognisably Jacobean London elements. Just ask. 258 00:28:22,880 --> 00:28:31,400 Measure for measure does so like the other plays in city comedy. It's really set in contemporary London characters in time. 259 00:28:31,400 --> 00:28:41,150 And are the generic types typical of city comedy? It's a system of individuation that's more like Middleton than Shakespeare and that 260 00:28:41,150 --> 00:28:46,550 kind of contextless hero that seems so strange in the Shakespearean context at time. 261 00:28:46,550 --> 00:28:51,080 And as a man with no family, no lover, no profession and no background. 262 00:28:51,080 --> 00:29:01,430 It's quite common in Middleton where effective or blood bonds are much less important than commercial ones for time, 263 00:29:01,430 --> 00:29:06,050 and there is nothing that defines him other than his money. 264 00:29:06,050 --> 00:29:10,670 And therefore, when he loses that, he has lost everything. 265 00:29:10,670 --> 00:29:18,530 There is no character to time and only a row, or that's two roles that fit philanthropic and then the misanthrope. 266 00:29:18,530 --> 00:29:22,580 It's an arrangement we tend to associate more with comedy than with tragedy, 267 00:29:22,580 --> 00:29:33,550 and particularly with the kind of satirical comedy which gives characters names that represent their dominant characteristics. 268 00:29:33,550 --> 00:29:39,250 At one point in the play time, it is called a naked dive and naked gull. 269 00:29:39,250 --> 00:29:44,770 The goal is a term for someone tricked or made to look foolish by a comic plot. 270 00:29:44,770 --> 00:29:58,240 It's a perennial feature of the period satiric comedies so looked at as a Middleton play times dark city comedy satire comes much more to the fore. 271 00:29:58,240 --> 00:30:07,720 So a Shakespearean view of time, and that's to say, takes King Lear and Coriolanus as its primary argumentative coordinates a middle 272 00:30:07,720 --> 00:30:13,030 Ternium view of time and would be interested to trace the connexions with a mad world. 273 00:30:13,030 --> 00:30:22,510 My Masters a trick to catch the old one and Middleton's transition about this time to the tragedies he wrote for The King's Men. 274 00:30:22,510 --> 00:30:28,990 The awkward tragedy, which is bewilderingly associated with Shakespeare, is attributed to Shakespeare in print. 275 00:30:28,990 --> 00:30:34,630 It's another point where Shakespeare, Middleton's reputation somehow are intersecting at this point. 276 00:30:34,630 --> 00:30:37,720 So the auto tragedy and the Revengers tragedy. 277 00:30:37,720 --> 00:30:46,810 Not quite a collaboration with Shakespeare, but one which is deeply dependent on Middleton's reading of Hamlet. 278 00:30:46,810 --> 00:30:52,780 So I guess we could think of Timon of Athens as a point of connexion between Middleton and Shakespeare, 279 00:30:52,780 --> 00:31:02,020 which from both sides is that collaboration looks interesting and looks to some extent inevitable or looks part of a kind of pattern. 280 00:31:02,020 --> 00:31:06,220 So a line this play with Middletons rather than Shakespeare's work reorders our 281 00:31:06,220 --> 00:31:11,830 priorities and it can undo an assumption about their relative roles in the writing. 282 00:31:11,830 --> 00:31:21,280 We always think that Shakespeare must have been the boss, and that's probably not quite justified. 283 00:31:21,280 --> 00:31:26,130 Like the Book of Sir Thomas Moore, to which scholars now believe Shakespeare contributed around 60 No. 284 00:31:26,130 --> 00:31:30,140 Four and poetries sixteen hours, 285 00:31:30,140 --> 00:31:36,100 seven time and is a collaborative play that messes up the old acceptance that theatre 286 00:31:36,100 --> 00:31:42,430 collaboration worked on the model of the painting maestro and his apprentice. 287 00:31:42,430 --> 00:31:48,130 So we used to think the collaborative work was firmly located at the beginning of Shakespeare's career. 288 00:31:48,130 --> 00:31:54,040 Titus may be handed a six point one where Shakespeare is clearly in The Apprentice role. 289 00:31:54,040 --> 00:32:01,150 He's learning to be a playwright and then at the end of his career, the work with Fletcher on two never kinsmen and Henry the eighth here. 290 00:32:01,150 --> 00:32:06,960 He's the old master and Fletcher is The Apprentice. So that's the model we used to have and how collaboration work. 291 00:32:06,960 --> 00:32:13,060 It worked on a deeply unequal basis where one person had all the kind of experience and 292 00:32:13,060 --> 00:32:20,710 cultural capital and the other person was learning by painting the sky or the equivalent. 293 00:32:20,710 --> 00:32:27,770 So it's a model that suggests that collaboration is always unequal and that the younger writer is always the junior partner. 294 00:32:27,770 --> 00:32:30,460 That's the kind of apprentice model. 295 00:32:30,460 --> 00:32:37,510 I think we all feel that we now need to look at that again, prompted by evidence that Shakespeare is in collaborative writing environments. 296 00:32:37,510 --> 00:32:42,670 Pretty much all the way through his career. 297 00:32:42,670 --> 00:32:49,960 It's also not necessarily the case that the younger writer has more to gain from the collaboration than the older one, 298 00:32:49,960 --> 00:33:00,870 competitive arts industries like the theatre, then like music now tend to prefer younger new talent over old stagers. 299 00:33:00,870 --> 00:33:08,740 Middleton's prowess in the kind of satirical, unsentimental scifi comedy which was so fashionable in 17th century London may have looked 300 00:33:08,740 --> 00:33:13,570 like a much more desirable theatrical commodity than Shakespeare's old romantic comedies. 301 00:33:13,570 --> 00:33:24,580 Because it may be Shakespeare who looked out of date, a Middleton who was bringing some vyn into this well established playwright. 302 00:33:24,580 --> 00:33:27,940 Shakespeare may have needed Middleton more than the other way around. 303 00:33:27,940 --> 00:33:34,910 Perhaps there is one argument that suggests that Shakespeare is getting much, much less popular as his career continues. 304 00:33:34,910 --> 00:33:40,580 He's the second half of his work is much less likely to be printed than the first half, for instance. 305 00:33:40,580 --> 00:33:50,990 Is his divert his diversion all the way to digresses from what's generally popular and where people are put looking for theatrical entertainment? 306 00:33:50,990 --> 00:33:57,530 That's much more obvious in the second half of his career than in the first. 307 00:33:57,530 --> 00:34:02,790 Okay, so we've looked at the critical models for talking about collaborative plays as if they are intrinsically broken, 308 00:34:02,790 --> 00:34:07,630 so that what's most interesting about them is dividing up the play into the separate contributions of the two 309 00:34:07,630 --> 00:34:15,430 writers and explaining away the things that don't work as a failure of communication or execution between them. 310 00:34:15,430 --> 00:34:19,420 Then we've talked about an alternative view in which the play is aligned with the 311 00:34:19,420 --> 00:34:24,360 solo work of the writer who is considered to be dominant in contempt criticism. 312 00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:29,930 That's usually Shakespeare, but it's worth flipping that to think about Middleton. 313 00:34:29,930 --> 00:34:38,890 That's a model which we try to load parallels to the tax and can be really useful in in making it feel less orphaned. 314 00:34:38,890 --> 00:34:48,190 But it's also a model which minimises the contribution of the other writer or turns away from thinking about what collaboration is saying. 315 00:34:48,190 --> 00:34:54,640 And I hope that what this makes clear is that our models for thinking about collaborative work are still pretty undeveloped. 316 00:34:54,640 --> 00:35:00,910 It's hard to think after all of the work of art we all acknowledge is a masterpiece that is jointly created. 317 00:35:00,910 --> 00:35:09,880 It's as if the aesthetic value, aesthetic appreciation and single authorship across all kinds of genres go together. 318 00:35:09,880 --> 00:35:16,370 Maybe it's worth looking at modern creative partnerships and their account of their work has revealing interview with the artist. 319 00:35:16,370 --> 00:35:19,900 Gilbert and George. The arguments about Lennon and McCartney. 320 00:35:19,900 --> 00:35:25,870 Perhaps it's easy, easier still to think about creative partnerships in other art forms than in literature, 321 00:35:25,870 --> 00:35:30,430 because all of the collaborate co-operative arguments that have Shakespeare is one of the parties can't really 322 00:35:30,430 --> 00:35:39,190 get away from the overwhelming reputation of Shakespeare to think about collaboration in a more creative way. 323 00:35:39,190 --> 00:35:44,230 I think our models for thinking about collaborative work are unable to think about how to writers might form a 324 00:35:44,230 --> 00:35:52,820 partnership that's more effective or more powerful or at least different from either of them on their own at the moment. 325 00:35:52,820 --> 00:36:00,670 That's to say our model for thinking about early, modern, dramatic collaboration could be said to be a search for marks of its failure. 326 00:36:00,670 --> 00:36:12,750 We only see collaboration points when two styles don't match together or they pull in different narrative, characterological or stylistic directions. 327 00:36:12,750 --> 00:36:21,100 OK. So is everything we might want to say about Timon shaped by the fact of its being collaborative? 328 00:36:21,100 --> 00:36:27,700 I guess probably not. No more than everything we might want to say about a different play would be all about. 329 00:36:27,700 --> 00:36:33,790 It's been written by a single writer. All kinds of theories from Roland. 330 00:36:33,790 --> 00:36:41,740 Parts per structuralism of authorial demise to more modern work on performance and theatre at intrinsically 331 00:36:41,740 --> 00:36:48,850 collaborative would suggest that authorial collaboration should never be the most interesting thing about to play. 332 00:36:48,850 --> 00:36:56,170 In fact, who wrote a play is almost certainly the least interesting thing about it. 333 00:36:56,170 --> 00:37:00,970 So in the last 10 or so minutes, I just want to develop a couple of other points of interest, 334 00:37:00,970 --> 00:37:04,780 although I think maybe because of the way I've set this lecture up, 335 00:37:04,780 --> 00:37:11,010 authorship keeps coming back as one aspect of the critical purchase of these things. 336 00:37:11,010 --> 00:37:23,260 I want to talk about gifts and money and bonds first and then to talk about the idea of tragedy and of anticlimax appropriately at the end. 337 00:37:23,260 --> 00:37:30,370 So at the beginning of this play, Timon seems limitlessly wealthy and generous. 338 00:37:30,370 --> 00:37:34,660 They would seem to be really positive terms. To be generous seems to be positive. 339 00:37:34,660 --> 00:37:40,710 But in fact, timeline's largesse is a form of propaganda tape, a form of excess, 340 00:37:40,710 --> 00:37:46,510 a form of what led a later theorist would call conspicuous consumption. 341 00:37:46,510 --> 00:37:52,660 Time then becomes a figure for the kind of unrestricted capitalism that is based on nothing. 342 00:37:52,660 --> 00:37:59,680 Money based on nothing. Money divorced from a kind of gold standard. 343 00:37:59,680 --> 00:38:08,950 Early on in the play, the Stuart notes that his lounds put to their books, his lands put to their books and the early signal that time. 344 00:38:08,950 --> 00:38:13,030 And like Richard, the second is mortgaged to the hilt. 345 00:38:13,030 --> 00:38:23,080 The idea of mortgaging away proper assets like planned in order to have money to spend on fripperies is one of the early modern period. 346 00:38:23,080 --> 00:38:28,030 Great fears about how how the economic world is developing so that you can raise a 347 00:38:28,030 --> 00:38:38,560 mortgage on a real tangible asset and spend all the money on on on shows of display. 348 00:38:38,560 --> 00:38:41,790 So timeline's displays of wealth are just daft displays. 349 00:38:41,790 --> 00:38:54,940 They frittering away the money rather than reflecting its endlessness, like the friendships and the networks they purportedly support then timings. 350 00:38:54,940 --> 00:38:58,450 Generous displays are hollow. 351 00:38:58,450 --> 00:39:09,070 His second banquet, when the friends have proved themselves false, serves up stones and water in an elaborate parody of his earlier lavishness. 352 00:39:09,070 --> 00:39:18,220 But it also symbolises the ultimate emptiness of his unsecured expenses and the relationships it has engineered. 353 00:39:18,220 --> 00:39:22,030 A number of men eats, Kleinman notes. 354 00:39:22,030 --> 00:39:28,780 One onlooker, a number of man beats Tirman. There's a sense in which time he himself is being consumed. 355 00:39:28,780 --> 00:39:39,250 There are shades of a perverse last supper in which Simon Sacranie timely sacrifices himself for his greedy and worthless followers. 356 00:39:39,250 --> 00:39:47,470 But the play is unsympathetic both to the hangers on who show no loyalty to Timon and instead are interested only in his money. 357 00:39:47,470 --> 00:39:52,270 So something pathetic to them. But it's also unsympathetic to Time and himself. 358 00:39:52,270 --> 00:39:58,240 His philanthropy is excessive. It's needy. 359 00:39:58,240 --> 00:40:07,630 So debt and laziness. Along with conspicuous consumption are both criticised. 360 00:40:07,630 --> 00:40:14,260 Perhaps this is intended as some kind of critique of the Jacobean courtly gift economy. 361 00:40:14,260 --> 00:40:26,110 James was known for lavish expenditure banqueting masking, including a mask of the Amazons, which time in himself brings to his table. 362 00:40:26,110 --> 00:40:32,530 He was known for the exchange of expensive gifts with particular favourites. 363 00:40:32,530 --> 00:40:38,530 The bankruptcy of the play's economic vision is symbolised in the empty box. 364 00:40:38,530 --> 00:40:46,550 That time in Serban takes to be filled by his old debts as he keeps taking this box to say, filled this box up to help Timon. 365 00:40:46,550 --> 00:40:58,290 And of course, none of them will do it. The empty box is exactly the symbol of the economic bankruptcy of the play play world. 366 00:40:58,290 --> 00:41:03,880 So if you're interested in political economy, in finance and metaphore, you'll enjoy Timon. 367 00:41:03,880 --> 00:41:11,420 Just like Marx, Marx quoted time and extensively as a critique of the. 368 00:41:11,420 --> 00:41:16,250 Capitalist money economy. And in particular, 369 00:41:16,250 --> 00:41:30,290 he brought out two elements of the way money operates in time in which you felt were indicative of the power of money in the economy more generally. 370 00:41:30,290 --> 00:41:34,160 So the idea that it is the visible divinity, 371 00:41:34,160 --> 00:41:43,680 the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries impossibilities are sold together by it. 372 00:41:43,680 --> 00:41:50,600 An interesting idea that money might smoulder over or attempt to smoulder over 373 00:41:50,600 --> 00:41:57,440 the distinctions between the two writers or other kinds of breaks in the play. 374 00:41:57,440 --> 00:42:09,380 And then secondly, Mark says in a quotation from the play itself, it is the common [INAUDIBLE], the common procurer of people and nations. 375 00:42:09,380 --> 00:42:16,370 Money, says Marx, is the alienated ability of mankind. 376 00:42:16,370 --> 00:42:20,600 Now, for Marx, this power of money was a deeply renaissance invention. 377 00:42:20,600 --> 00:42:26,660 He juxtaposes quotations from Toman with quotations from Columbus on the riches of the 378 00:42:26,660 --> 00:42:33,620 new world that have transformed the European economy of the 16th century and beyond. 379 00:42:33,620 --> 00:42:40,400 And interesting that the plays coy about the origins of tomans gold that you find in the wood. 380 00:42:40,400 --> 00:42:50,920 Having given away all his money to his factories, parasites timeline finds while searching for roots to eat under a tree, a new cache of gold. 381 00:42:50,920 --> 00:42:57,290 The play is absolutely unclear about whether this cash should be interpreted as the fruit of human ingenuity. 382 00:42:57,290 --> 00:43:01,910 Does he find a lot of gold coin buried there by someone else? 383 00:43:01,910 --> 00:43:07,460 A bit like the money that Aaron buries in tight Titus Andronicus. 384 00:43:07,460 --> 00:43:15,860 Or does he find some natural beneficence, the kind of gold or that is this is the kind of fruit of nature. 385 00:43:15,860 --> 00:43:18,290 So is this about culture or about nature? 386 00:43:18,290 --> 00:43:29,240 That's a question which is always, always present in Shakespeare's pastoral has time and escaped from corrupted systems of human value. 387 00:43:29,240 --> 00:43:37,070 Is he being rewarded in some cosmic sense that his generosity by giving been giving money back? 388 00:43:37,070 --> 00:43:49,410 Or is it revealed that he cannot escape the tentacles of economics and finance? 389 00:43:49,410 --> 00:43:55,990 Time and zone, scornful depiction of that goal description of baffled that he finds when searching for food 390 00:43:55,990 --> 00:44:04,090 was from marks the epitome of the realisation that money was the alienated ability of mankind. 391 00:44:04,090 --> 00:44:13,460 Pointless, conspicuous consumption such as for milk, white horses trapped in silver for milk, white horses trapped in Silvo, 392 00:44:13,460 --> 00:44:21,880 which is sent as a gift at two time and in the opening scene, are seen as a cynical version of gift exchange. 393 00:44:21,880 --> 00:44:31,750 So altruism and generosity are just 50 leads for deeply manipulative manoeuvres in a financial game of escalating value. 394 00:44:31,750 --> 00:44:37,390 So critics of the plan have often been interested in anthropological theories of the gift. 395 00:44:37,390 --> 00:44:47,470 The gift, as Marcel Marceau and others have written, is always implicated in an ongoing reciprocity of bonds. 396 00:44:47,470 --> 00:44:53,320 Max and the critics following him are clear that the gift is never freely given. 397 00:44:53,320 --> 00:44:59,230 It's always part of asserting, consolidating and manipulating bonds of loyalty. 398 00:44:59,230 --> 00:45:13,870 The gift requires another gift in return. Site tandems celebrity lifestyle in the opening scenes is a parable of moral and spiritual emptiness. 399 00:45:13,870 --> 00:45:22,880 And it is a parable in which literature too is implicated. We talked in the lecture on Julius Caesar about the role of sinner, the poet. 400 00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:26,240 Remember that there are two professional poets in Julius Caesar. 401 00:45:26,240 --> 00:45:33,230 The only other character in the Shakespearean canon who is identified with that profession is here in time and of Athens. 402 00:45:33,230 --> 00:45:40,850 He, in conversation with a painter, opens the play and he's one of the few elements to link the plays, often rather distinct. 403 00:45:40,850 --> 00:45:49,130 Two halves. He returns again towards the end to try to ingratiate himself with time and again. 404 00:45:49,130 --> 00:46:00,710 The poet promises to shape Simon's reputation, fingering him in the role of bountiful fortune and in depicting the self-interested poet in this way. 405 00:46:00,710 --> 00:46:11,720 The play's opening gets to the heart of the patronage system, in which both authors operated poetic publication like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, 406 00:46:11,720 --> 00:46:21,620 or the rapidly creese dedicated to the Earl of Southhampton and theatrical publication or opera production time and 407 00:46:21,620 --> 00:46:28,850 produced under the patronage of the King were both part of a complex economy of patronage in which protection, 408 00:46:28,850 --> 00:46:39,530 money and praise circulated. Perhaps the implication here is that these systems of value are as unsecured as the financial. 409 00:46:39,530 --> 00:46:47,060 One of the many ironies of this satirical play is that it can atomise the system of patronage even while it is implicated within it. 410 00:46:47,060 --> 00:46:54,680 There's no sense at all and Timon of Athens that poetry has a privileged status outside the distorting claims of capital. 411 00:46:54,680 --> 00:47:05,480 Rather, it is deeply expressive of human relationships, understood not as effective bonds, but almost always as monetised ones. 412 00:47:05,480 --> 00:47:13,880 The opening scene goes into a lot of detail about how artworks might be seen as almost a kind of act frantic scene, a crisis, 413 00:47:13,880 --> 00:47:19,370 the rhetorical term for the verbal description of an artwork and that sets up the 414 00:47:19,370 --> 00:47:24,890 aesthetics of patronage and the economics of patronage as crucial to the play. 415 00:47:24,890 --> 00:47:30,800 From the very beginning, the only character who really sees through all this is Upper Mantas. 416 00:47:30,800 --> 00:47:36,800 He's called a churlish philosopher in the Photios character, least on the stage directions. 417 00:47:36,800 --> 00:47:45,530 His entrance in the in in the second act of the play is typical of Middleton's tendency towards a narrative stage directions, 418 00:47:45,530 --> 00:47:49,220 a great banquet surfing and then enter Lord Time in the States. 419 00:47:49,220 --> 00:47:54,230 The Athenian lords voted yes to which time and redeemed from prison. 420 00:47:54,230 --> 00:47:59,280 So which time then redeemed from prison is a kind of phrase you would never get in a Shakespearean stage direction. 421 00:47:59,280 --> 00:48:03,260 And never they never clarify or recap the plot for us. 422 00:48:03,260 --> 00:48:08,270 But Middleton does that quite often. Perhaps partly because Middleton's place has a lot of plot. 423 00:48:08,270 --> 00:48:15,710 Then comes dropping. After all, opponents discontented Li like himself. 424 00:48:15,710 --> 00:48:27,140 So there's a clear kind of stage choreography here in which this bright group of revellers are followed by this physically quite distinct, 425 00:48:27,140 --> 00:48:33,250 much less cheerful figure. After months of discontented, contentedly dropping. 426 00:48:33,250 --> 00:48:38,210 But we might feel that subcommanders like himself is a tautology. 427 00:48:38,210 --> 00:48:45,970 Nobody has been explicitly described in this stage. The action has been in disguise, which is tends to be what stage directions suggests. 428 00:48:45,970 --> 00:48:50,570 Ask himself is in opposition to. But there's the suggestion. 429 00:48:50,570 --> 00:48:59,630 Therefore, the stakes are actually set. Everybody else is pretending to be something that they're all living some kind of lie or some kind of display. 430 00:48:59,630 --> 00:49:04,990 And the top amount is only a house, a kind of personal integrity. 431 00:49:04,990 --> 00:49:11,660 You can also see a from the stage direction that the characters in the scene, apart from Time and himself, 432 00:49:11,660 --> 00:49:18,340 are hardly differentiated as individuals, their representatives rather than people. 433 00:49:18,340 --> 00:49:23,570 And the final thing I want to talk about really briefly is Tynan's death. 434 00:49:23,570 --> 00:49:32,540 We all know that death in tragedy is paradoxically that moment of dramatic self-assertion, even at the point of self annihilation. 435 00:49:32,540 --> 00:49:39,920 That's to say at the moment of dying, Shakespearean character, Shakespeare and tragic characters are most at the centre of their plans. 436 00:49:39,920 --> 00:49:45,460 They tend to have extended death scenes in the early modern equivalent of a theatrical spotlight, 437 00:49:45,460 --> 00:49:53,120 a dramaturgical technique that isolates them, makes the audience focus on them, and makes them supremely important to their own story. 438 00:49:53,120 --> 00:50:02,870 In its final moments. So key to this plays off key indication of the tragic form is its treatment of time instead. 439 00:50:02,870 --> 00:50:09,560 Unlike most tragic heroes, Time's death gives us no moments of pathos or still focus. 440 00:50:09,560 --> 00:50:18,570 We don't exactly know how he dies. His withdrawal from human society is so complete that he withdraws from tragedy itself and from the stage. 441 00:50:18,570 --> 00:50:22,040 He dies offstage in a way which is not at all clear. 442 00:50:22,040 --> 00:50:29,930 The play's evasive, whether he succumbs to his miseries, whether he commit suicide, or whether he simply wills himself to die. 443 00:50:29,930 --> 00:50:38,020 Certainly he's angry in a way that seems self consuming and unsustainable. 444 00:50:38,020 --> 00:50:44,950 But in place of our actually seeing how time and guys, what the play gives us instead is three distinct epitaphs. 445 00:50:44,950 --> 00:50:49,600 The first one is from time and from. So this is his farewell to the stage. 446 00:50:49,600 --> 00:50:57,910 Come up to me again, but say Sacre Arthur's time and have made his everlasting mansion upon the beach verge at the salt flood. 447 00:50:57,910 --> 00:51:06,760 Who wants a day with his embossing from the turbulent surf shall cover that kind of Sematary seems to suggest, 448 00:51:06,760 --> 00:51:12,280 but confound that sense of regeneration we get from the sea the place. 449 00:51:12,280 --> 00:51:18,070 There's a common migration beyond Oracle lips. Let forewords go by and language. 450 00:51:18,070 --> 00:51:24,580 And what is a mixed plague and infection? Mend graves only remains worse than death. 451 00:51:24,580 --> 00:51:34,240 Their gay son hide Bybee's time and half done his reign in time and leaves the stage offstage. 452 00:51:34,240 --> 00:51:40,780 He seems he dies. And moments later, an unnamed soldier appears to come across his grave. 453 00:51:40,780 --> 00:51:44,610 But he reads out something quite different. Timing is dead. 454 00:51:44,610 --> 00:51:49,360 Who hath outstretched his spine? Some beast. Read this. 455 00:51:49,360 --> 00:51:53,550 That does not live. A man goes on to say dead. Sure. 456 00:51:53,550 --> 00:51:59,260 And this his grave. What's on this, too? I cannot read the character I'll take with wax. 457 00:51:59,260 --> 00:52:02,980 Our Captain half in every figure of skill. An aged interpreter. 458 00:52:02,980 --> 00:52:12,870 They're young in days before proud Athens, who sat down by this, who's for the mark of his ambition is. 459 00:52:12,870 --> 00:52:18,100 So somebody has written some different kind of at the top, which isn't times own, 460 00:52:18,100 --> 00:52:24,900 the soldier takes an impression, a kind of rubbing of the lettering could take back to Athens for deciphering. 461 00:52:24,900 --> 00:52:28,780 And that idea that you would copy out the epitaph and try and get it deciphered 462 00:52:28,780 --> 00:52:35,170 seems to point again to the difficulty of interpreting at the time its last words. 463 00:52:35,170 --> 00:52:35,620 The big, sad, 464 00:52:35,620 --> 00:52:44,250 comfortless notes of this inscription is hollowly underlined when asked by these reads the top for the third time in the play's final lines. 465 00:52:44,250 --> 00:52:48,250 So this is up. What else? Ubaidi says Time's epitaph is. 466 00:52:48,250 --> 00:52:52,210 Here lies a wretched cause of wretched soul. Bereft seek. 467 00:52:52,210 --> 00:52:55,720 Not my name. A plague consume you. Wicked cakes. 468 00:52:55,720 --> 00:52:59,380 HIP's left here. Lie I Teichmann who alive. 469 00:52:59,380 --> 00:53:04,030 All living men did hate. Pass by and curse by Phil. 470 00:53:04,030 --> 00:53:12,310 But pass and stay. Not here thy gate. So something can some kind of strange and self-defeating about that epitaph seek. 471 00:53:12,310 --> 00:53:16,630 Not my name. Here lie I time the some. 472 00:53:16,630 --> 00:53:22,000 There's something very kind of weird about this over generation of epitaphs 473 00:53:22,000 --> 00:53:26,080 for someone whose death remains so mysterious instead of the death of time. 474 00:53:26,080 --> 00:53:31,990 And then we have three different epitaphs, as if they are a record of the difficulty of summarising his life and securing 475 00:53:31,990 --> 00:53:38,710 his legacy time and leaves the stage to a confusion of funerary remembrance. 476 00:53:38,710 --> 00:53:43,600 The alternative epitaph sketch out timeline's life is subject to interpretation 477 00:53:43,600 --> 00:53:48,100 sardonically pre-empted by time and himself and by the source material. 478 00:53:48,100 --> 00:53:58,910 That's always a feature of these possible plans. It's a bleak ending, I think, to a harsh play, which has no truck with transcendent values. 479 00:53:58,910 --> 00:54:04,250 We have historically liked to attribute to tragedy. Interestingly, 480 00:54:04,250 --> 00:54:08,870 most of the engagement with time and has been in the later 20th century had been in the 20th 481 00:54:08,870 --> 00:54:15,170 century and beyond a series of vortices drawings by the modernist writer and artist Windom Lewis, 482 00:54:15,170 --> 00:54:21,770 in which the alienation of time as misanthropic rage resound was the ascetic culture of modernism, big time and as a play. 483 00:54:21,770 --> 00:54:26,930 But like Coriolanus, that modernism begins to understand for the first time and time, 484 00:54:26,930 --> 00:54:32,420 and unflinching bleakness has had its echoes in the 20th century theatre of the absurd. 485 00:54:32,420 --> 00:54:36,080 What I've been talking about today is cooperation and Timon of Athens. 486 00:54:36,080 --> 00:54:41,420 And I've tried to think through some of the models we've got for thinking about co authorship. 487 00:54:41,420 --> 00:54:45,020 In addition, I've tried to identify some of the current critical hotspots, 488 00:54:45,020 --> 00:54:50,210 but also the blindspots of thinking about plays which are collaboratively written. 489 00:54:50,210 --> 00:54:59,091 This is the last of my lectures in this series for this time. Thanks a lot for being here.