Titus Andronicus & Timon of Athens (44 page)

The character of Timon is often seen as problematic; he’s been called “colourless and neutral”—what was your attitude to the character? Are we supposed to admire his prodigality or censure his lack of common sense?

MP:
Nothing could be less “neutral” than Timon’s character—he is a creature of two wild extremes, brilliantly summed up by Apemantus: “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.” In the first half he compulsively buys friendship to staunch a fearful loneliness; Freud would call him a narcissist, in the strictest sense of the term; he feels the glow of his kindness even more warmly than do its beneficiaries. Then his fear of solitude fulfills itself and releases an equally excessive misanthropy, expressed in some of the most virulently beautiful language Shakespeare ever wrote.

Admittedly, Timon can seem like a second-rate Lear, a curmudgeonly poor relation without Lear’s full cause of weeping, his journey from Camelot to Cardboard City no more than a massive petulance. But that has its own theatrical value when the psychology
is so astute and the writing of the second half is so beautiful in its wild, wintry way.

Timon
’s
not an easy play and not one of Shakespeare’s most popular; do you think it could be said to have contemporary relevance and did the production try to capitalize on that at all?

MP:
I think the play is hugely underrated. Its psychology is absolutely modern. It’s a study of the vanity of benevolence. And the resentment that creates in the recipients. Timon is the compulsive party-giver who always gives a gift out of proportion to the friendship; who insists on always paying for dinner, always, embarrassingly. We have characters like this in show business. Underneath it all he is a terrified loner who then dives headlong into what he always feared most, his own company, exchanging woozy altruism for comminatory rage, snarling in the wilderness. His misanthropy is just benevolence with its nap reversed. All this makes complete psychological sense to me.

It’s often seen as an unfinished play of two halves—did you feel the production succeeded in integrating the two halves satisfactorily?

MP:
I don’t think they are meant to be integrated in the conventional sense of the second half resolving the first. But you never forget the first half during the second—all the significant Athenians come and visit Timon in his cave; though Timon now feels “open, bare / For every storm that blows,” he always harks back to the days when he “had the world as my confectionary”; at the end there is a mysterious and beautiful death, like that of Enobarbus in
Antony and Cleopatra
without any apparent physical cause. There is something of a parable about the play—perhaps because characters like the Poet and the Painter have no name but simply represent their professions and the fact that Timon is turned down by the magic number of three flatterers.

The play’s said to be a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton: were you aware of any differences in the writing and did it affect your performance in any way?

MP:
None at all. The second half is unmistakably Shakespearean, I should say—it has a timbre not unlike
Lear
.

It’s been suggested that the play should be read as a fable or morality tale, or political allegory with the resonance of “Steward”/“Stewart” (or “Stuart”)—were you influenced by any of these theories?

MP:
I’ve never heard of that. Flavius is a steward, just that and no pun intended. Otherwise I imagine Timon and Alcibiades and the rest might be given punning names also. But I do think the play satirized James I’s court, which was fashion-obsessed, gluttonous, sexually corrupt; cash for official favors was rife, lobbyists everywhere, and the Crown made extravagant gifts to the courtiers to purchase their loyalty and create a confining net of obligations. That’s exactly the first half of
Timon
. Perhaps this is why it was never performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime—too close to the bone.

The role of Alcibiades has often puzzled critics; how do you think it relates to the Timon plot?

MP:
Clearly Alcibiades, who is implicitly connected to Timon—he is the first to greet him in the second half and speaks warmly of him at the end—is presented as an alternative; a man in whom anger at the city’s ingratitude has translated into positive action. So he returns to claim and clean up the society of Athens, whereas Timon just sulks, knocking his visitors’ heads together while sitting on his crock of gold.

Is there any significance in the negative characterizations of the Painter and Poet in the play?

MP:
Are they negative? They’re just doing their best to earn a living in this particular and somewhat corrupt world.

The only women in the play are Alcibiades’ whores; did the lack of women create any problems? Does this make it misogynist or just misanthropic?

MP:
No, it’s just unusual. The point is that unlike other Shakespearean heroes Timon is given no relationships or family at all, no women in his life or men either; we don’t even know the source of his wealth. That’s probably unique in Shakespeare, and a means of expressing his self-involvement. When I played it I was castigated by one proselytizing gay critic for not playing what was obvious—that Timon was gay. It hadn’t occurred to me, probably not to Shakespeare either; but it shows you can read your own preferences into such a man. But then I was castigated once for daring to play Oscar Wilde when I was a “known heterosexual,” so fame comes in odd forms.

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into
tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s
career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son, Hamnet, aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.

Elizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted
stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.

Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose Theatre in Southwark. The stage was wide and shallow, trapezoid in shape, like a lozenge. This design had a great deal of potential for the theatrical equivalent of cinematic split-screen effects, whereby one group of characters would enter at the door at one end of the tiring-house wall at the back of the stage and another group through the door at the other end, thus creating two rival tableaux. Many of the battle-heavy and faction-filled plays that premiered at the Rose have scenes of just this sort.

At the rear of the Rose stage, there were three capacious exits, each over ten feet wide. Unfortunately, the very limited excavation of a fragmentary portion of the original Globe site, in 1989, revealed nothing about the stage. The first Globe was built in 1599 with similar proportions to those of another theater, the Fortune, albeit that the former was polygonal and looked circular, whereas the latter was rectangular. The building contract for the Fortune survives and allows us to infer that the stage of the Globe was probably substantially wider than it was deep (perhaps forty-three feet wide and twenty-seven feet deep). It may well have been tapered at the front, like that of the Rose.

The capacity of the Globe was said to have been enormous, perhaps in excess of three thousand. It has been conjectured that about eight hundred people may have stood in the yard, with two thousand or more in the three layers of covered galleries. The other “public” playhouses were also of large capacity, whereas the indoor Blackfriars theater that Shakespeare’s company began using in 1608—the former refectory of a monastery—had overall internal dimensions of a mere forty-six by sixty feet. It would have made for a much more intimate theatrical experience and had a much smaller capacity,
probably of about six hundred people. Since they paid at least sixpence a head, the Blackfriars attracted a more select or “private” audience. The atmosphere would have been closer to that of an indoor performance before the court in the Whitehall Palace or at Richmond. That Shakespeare always wrote for indoor production at court as well as outdoor performance in the public theater should make us cautious about inferring, as some scholars have, that the opportunity provided by the intimacy of the Blackfriars led to a significant change toward a “chamber” style in his last plays—which, besides, were performed at both the Globe and the Blackfriars. After the occupation of the Blackfriars a five-act structure seems to have become more important to Shakespeare. That was because of artificial lighting: there were musical interludes between the acts, while the candles were trimmed and replaced. Again, though, something similar must have been necessary for indoor court performances throughout his career.