CHAPTER 3Benefits and BondsMisanthropy and Skepticism in Timon of Athens

Words Are Rascals Since Bonds Disgraced Them

The word bond in Shakespeare is multifaceted and dense. I give a few brief instances across the Shakespeare canon to suggest the tensions and pressures on the concept of binding.¹² We come across it, for example, in a jocular pun of the fool Feste in Twelfth Night, in which he says to Viola: “Words are very rascals since bonds disgraced them” (3.1.18). Feste's words pun on bonds as written contracts, and he seems to mean we cannot trust words (they are rascals) because the agreements between men and women are now based on written contracts rather than on their word.¹³ He might also mean that people have broken their bond so often that words can no longer be trusted: It is men and women, through their words, who are no longer trustworthy. Either way or both, his words indicate that trust is at issue in the most fundamental ways in which we have a world with each other in so far as “our word is our bond.” Anthony Nuttall calls it “a remark of breath-taking cleverness, since ‘disgraced’ probably includes, as a subaudition, ‘dis-graced’, that is, ‘removed from the element of grace and gratitude.’”¹⁴ If we forgo our words in bonds of trust, we have in some vital way foregone ourselves for we make commitments in our speech acts in which we are necessarily implicated.

In The Merchant of Venice, we are reminded of that terrible bond secured by a pound of flesh: “Do you confess the bond?” asks Portia.¹⁵ Cordelia declares, in ways shattering to her father and vital to the play, that she loves her father according to her bond, no more nor less. In King Lear, as I argued in chapter 2, Cordelia's words struggle against the flattery that evacuates and empties out the essential relation between love and justice. Her words are impossible to understand if we reduce the idea of bond to contract. Cordelia keeps faith with language because it is impossible to utter words of love in the flattery competition Lear has established. When Posthumous is lying in chains (in bonds), imprisoned by the Romans at the end of Cymbeline, he prays to die to “cancel these cold bonds” (5.4.28).¹⁶ It is not simply his material chains of imprisonment but his life that he wishes canceled, paid in a poor exchange for Imogen's life. Posthumous's words are literal: He is in chains (bonds) at this point, but his words rely on a fundamental theological understanding of the whole of life as gifted, and therefore ontologically owed to God.

Even in these brief examples from Shakespeare's witty comedies, problem plays, tragedies, and tragicomedies, it is possible to see that an exploration of bonds is pervasive across Shakespeare's work. The language of bonds sounds out a domain of bondage that may, on different occasions, encompass legal, penal, verbal, theological, and ethical implications as well as explorations of kinship. Any inquiry into the language of bonds might take us into familial, legal, linguistic, and theological territory.¹⁷

If the word pervades Shakespeare's plays, it is also rich in semantic meaning in his culture, under pressure from various forms of covenantal theology, from new forms of indenture and service, from modes of credit and redefinitions of usurious relations in an increasingly market-oriented economy.¹⁸ What bonds can be disgraced or canceled? How are we bonded to each other? How is that bond connected to what we owe each other, and the ways in which we belong together?

Bonds allow us to recognize each other as human and define the ethical and tragic landscape of Timon and its adjacent plays. For whatever date we determine for Timon, according to one of its editors, it “belongs to the most magnificently productive phase of Shakespeare's tragic writing.”¹⁹ In plays such as King Lear, Coriolanus, and the later play The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare appears to explore figures who imagine that language is their possession or property, and thus that its power originates with them in isolation. Such first-person fantasies tragically de-realize the other: Other voices are ignored, stifled, and not acknowledged. Because acknowledgment is mutual, this is always a self-blindness. Coriolanus, also from the ancient world (although here Roman rather than Athenian), thus seeks to be “author of himself,” knowing no other kin, as I will go on to explore in chapter 5. King Lear and Gloucester too try to disown their children (unchilding themselves), as if those bonds are dissolvable, and unilaterally to boot. The play, as I have indicated, explores with great profundity what it means to ruin and devastate each other, the depth at which we live out our human bonds with each other through recognition and acknowledgment, and therefore what kinds of claims we have on each other that we can so disown and ruin each other.

A bond is what joins, links, or ties together. The bonds between people are constitutive, the second person coming before the first person, the you before the I, such that it is in the primary address of you to me that I learn I am capable of being a first person.²⁰ We are bound by these recognitive modes of address, bound by recognition, and bound by our capacities to understand and misunderstand, long before any more technical or restricted meaning comes into play.²¹ The kinship of bond with the Latinate term ligature show the roots of obligation, enacted also in the contractual language of agreement (of indenture, credit, and law). The kinship with band (from Middle English) as not only hoop, join, bandage, strap, truss, and tie but also as mark (as in the stripe on a bird) indicates the way binding language singles and marks us out for each other. When is a bond too tight a tie? When is it a shackle, a tether, manacle, or fetter, in short, a constraint? How can a word function as a bond? If our word is our bond, how does that make us answerable to, and implicated in, each other?

I suggest that grasping the nature and extent of bonds in Timon will help us see (in more than one sense) the depth at which Shakespeare works when it comes to bonds. Insofar as we share an overly contractarian view of language, we too will miss that depth.

I start by discussing how Timon imagines bonds and how his interlocutors appear to understand them. I then consider whether these understandings are problematic and why. (I take it to be axiomatic that we must involve the self-understanding of those engaged in these bondings.) Next, I explore the grammar of giving and gratitude in the Senecan tradition, and the phenomenology of trust in the play, before turning to the steward's important relation with Timon in the context of the servant's ethical fellowship. Last, I explore the fantasy of an end to all human exchange, including language. At this point, we will be in a better position to explore Shakespearean tragedy as an ethical practice.

The Problem with Timon's Bonds

Timon frees Ventidius of his financial debt and thereby frees him from prison (1.1.97–112); he funds his servant Lucillus with enough money so that he can make a love match, which the bride's father otherwise will not countenance (1.1.113–58). The recipients of his gifts understand themselves to be “bound to him” by virtue of his actions.²² Timon, however, tends to refuse the language of thanks, the gratitude appropriate to any gift. When Ventidius tells him “in grateful virtue, I am bound / To your free heart, I do return those talents, / Doubled with thanks and service” (1.2.5–7), Timon replies: “Honest Ventidius, you do mistake my love: / I gave it freely ever, and there's none / Can truly say he gives if he receives (1.2.10–11). Timon is refusing any return, seeing it as repayment, which would make his gift a loan. He is also unwilling to receive even thanks—for this, too, is what Ventidius offers him, his “talents, / Doubled with thanks, and service.” He makes even the expression of gratitude, a virtue of recognition, very difficult.

Timon's bonds are confusing. He defends the gratuity of the gift with the pure logic of Derrida or the gospel of Luke 6:34 (“If ye lend to them of whome ye hope to receive, what thanks shall ye have?”), thus making room for generosity and preserving the gift's freedom. But there is something very tricky in his giving.²³ His gifts are entirely one way; he cannot conceive of himself as a recipient. Even Marcel Mauss's agonistic theory of gift-giving, which discuss the potlatch and the “big giving men”, the men who give more than they receive, discussed three obligations of a gift: to give, to accept, and to reciprocate.²⁴ The latter two are absent in Timon's practice and imagination. Mauss is only echoing a much older examination of the gift from Seneca's De Beneficiis, a known source for Timon, which I will be examining in more detail. The gift, according to Seneca, is what binds a society: It is based on the reciprocal obligation to give, to receive, and to return. That is why the three Graces dance with hands interlinked because the circle needs to be unbroken for the gifts to return upon themselves.²⁵ Timon is incapable of understanding himself as receiving as well as giving; he will accept no givers in the world except for himself. Even before his self-imposed exile and isolation in the second half of the play, Timon is a solipsist, a twisted version—or commentary on—Aristotle's magnanimous man. His understanding of friendship is fantastical as is his version of a sovereign self.²⁶

In his book on generosity, Romand Coles has said that “insofar as the condition of the power of giving involves receivers, the giving ground is pierced with contingencies of possibility and danger that erode pretentions to independent sovereignty.”²⁷ Timon gives without receiving and is thus refusing bonds of reciprocity. It also becomes apparent that he has in fact misrecognized his generosity. He is giving what is not his to give.²⁸ In this way, he has fundamentally misconstrued both himself and his relation to others, but he has done so in a culture in which insincerity, flattery, and hypocrisy have become part of the very fabric of donation, as Apemantus churlishly realizes. It becomes clear soon enough that with every gift he gives, he incurs a further debt. His gifts are not an instance of his freedom, but rather its forfeiture, sounding an ambiguity in liberality.

It becomes clear—not immediately, but quite quickly—that it is by virtue of ignoring and dismissing his steward, Flavius, who has on many occasions and at the cost of numerous rebuffs, pointed out the nature of his debts to him, that he has been able to imagine himself as a giver in the first place.²⁹ His misrecognition of himself as giver is based on a refusal to listen to his steward, who with many of the other servants in the play, understands the true nature of fellowship. Timon's version of friendship is a fantasy, a kind of universal brotherhood of plentiful rich overlords who will fund each other's excesses. It is hard to make sense of his claim in response to Lord 1 that he might wish himself poorer so that he might “come nearer” to his friends (1.2.99). In retrospect, it is possible to see that he has simply imagined that all the wealth of his rich friends is at his disposal or that he has blanked out the possibility of being unable to fund his lavish gifts. On this fantasy, he can build his picture of himself as a generous man: “Why, I have often wished myself poorer that I might come nearer to you. We are born to do benefits, and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends? O, what a precious comfort is to have so many brothers commanding each other's fortunes” (1.2.101–103). But it becomes apparent that these “brothers” see Timon's gifts in fully commercial ways: To give something to Timon is to have it return “sevenfold above itself,” breeding the giver a return “exceeding all use of quittance” (1.1.285–87), where use, as the Arden editors note, may be both interest and “usual practice.”³⁰ “If I want gold, steal but a beggar's dog / And give it to Timon, why, the dog coins gold”—as one senator puts it (2.1.6). A gift from the Lords to Timon is an excellent investment.

Bonds in this play are tied up with complex forms of obligation (that word itself hinting at how we are tied to each other). The first time the language of bonding is invoked, as I remarked, is when the recipients of Timon's gifts declare themselves bound to him (1.1.107; 1.1.147; 1.2.5). But the bonds emerge as remarkably actual and material as the play progresses. Timon is handed writs, bonds, and promissory notes all with implacable, nonnegotiable due dates: “Take the bonds along with you, / And have the dates in” (2.1.35), says one of the senators who has lent Timon money and who now needs the liquidity because his own credit is failing. Timon is outraged and amazed, experiencing these wholly legitimate writs as extreme, utterly unanticipated affronts: “How goes the world, that I am thus encountered / With clamourous demands of broken bonds / And the detention of long-since-due dates / Against my honour?” (2.2.38–40). Unattractively, he reproaches his steward and blames him for the state of his affairs (2.2.124-127). If you had told me before I might have curbed my expense! We watch Timon slowly realize that he has nothing: What remains after the forfeiture and selling of Timon's land will not “stop the mouth / Of present dues” (2.2.147–48). Flavius's metaphor hints at cannibalism; the dues are insatiable and will consume him. His next words show the vulnerable fragility of a world that Timon had thought was secure: “O my good lord, the world is but a word; / Were it all yours to give it in breath, / How quickly were it gone” (2.2.152–3). “The world is but a word”—that's how we have a world at all, given with our words as light or substantial as they are. (We will return to this in more detail.)

The protracted and painfully extended scenes in act 3 show the senators and fraternal brotherhood of the super-rich squirming out of the claim that Timon is making on them. The “mouth-friends” in this scene are held firmly under the shocked scrutiny of those who serve—and observe—them. “Is’t possible the world should so much differ / And we alive that lived?” asks Flaminius (3.2.45-46) who has been casually brushed aside by Lucillus when asked for funds with the complacent expectation of his complicity: “Good boy, wink at me, and say thou sawst me not” (3.1.43–44). The satire is all too recognizable: “I love and honour him / But must not break my back to heal his finger,” says one of the senators blithely evacuating the words “love” and “honour” of significance, while helping themselves to their received and usual meanings (2.1.24–25). In Flavius's brilliant description: “They answer in a joint and corporate voice / That now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot / Do what they would, are sorry” (2.2.204–206). Flavius exposes their fantastic excuses, revealing the collapse of any fantasy of friendship. Why should they now give money on “bare friendship without security”? (3.1.41–42). The words “love,” “honour,” and “friendship” are as empty as the empty box Flaminius has asked the friend to fill (3.1.17).

This passage can be parsed out in various ways. Timon was utterly deceived in his wealth and was giving what was not his to give. (He has misunderstood what was his.) He has thought of himself as Aristotle's magnanimous man; but he is actually participating in a fully usurious economy.³¹ Fortune shined on him, but he accrued a great mass of dependents so imaged in the depiction of the poet at the very beginning of the play, and sycophancy and profit from his gifts have obscured his indebtedness to others. Timon is forced to see what he owes (rather than what he owns). The bonds brought to him function more like contracts. In that case, they are limited, entered voluntarily and freely (rather than being unchosen), subject to a set of articulated norms, legally sanctioned if transgressed, “a promise that law will enforce,” in the words of Regina Schwartz.³² This is to distinguish them from bonds of friendship, love, and charity. Charity is something you are in—rather than something you give, as I explored in chapter 2. It is a relation in which you are implicated, a position you are in in relation to others, rather than something you exclusively donate. Bonds of kinship, of love, are indeterminate, unspecifiable in advance, and exorbitant. They are often unchosen bonds we are in, as child, parent, or lover. A child does not contract to be born; a lover “falls in love” and has no reasons for her joy; a parent receives a child in a mysterious unknowingness. All these relations are capable of being experienced as gifts in a secular as well as a theological idiom, for lives lived in the key of gratitude. Notably, no children appear in Timon, as if nature's gifts cannot be acknowledged, and hardly any women are featured—all are borrowers and lenders; masters, servants, messengers, statesmen, and warriors. If we experience ourselves as given, however, we are already and always receivers and responders; we are already in relation with each other.

If Timon has simply been unaware that his bonds were actually contracts, then he is easily castigated as no more than a fool. But this is moralistic. It neither recognizes nor addresses Timon's primal rage; nor can it envisage his desire to revenge himself on the world in toto and without exception, or his all-purpose cursing, his sheer commitment to future hate.

A closer look at one of Shakespeare's intertexts, De Beneficiis, and some of its later insightful commentors will help us understand the centrality of noncontractual bonds, the moral not legal relations so entailed, the pivotal role of the steward and his model of service, and the way in which the depth of the bonds at stake expose the kind of betrayal of trust from which Timon speaks. It is these interlinked strands of the play that show its dramatic moral philosophy, counterpointed with any overtly philosophical position taken up by the plays’ cynical and churlish philosophers.

“We Are Born to Do Benefits”: The Vocabulary of Beneficium

“We are born to do benefits,” says Timon (1.2.99–100). What, then, are benefits? Seneca's treatise De Beneficiis, addressed to his friend, Aebutius Liberalis, sometime between 56 CE and 64 CE, during Nero's imperial rule, was the most influential and far-reaching consideration of benefits, available in more than three hundred manuscripts.³³ Widely copied from the late eleventh century onward, when print superseded manuscript as the main mode of transmission, it was translated by intellectuals and humanists such as Erasmus (1515), Marc Antoine Muret (1585), Justus Lipsius (1605), and Arthur Golding (1578) and Thomas Lodge (1614).³⁴ It was a treatise known to Shakespeare, a treatise that might well underly the contemplation of ingratitude that unites King Lear, Coriolanus, and Timon. ³⁵ Seneca's treatise can help us understand the moral philosophy at work in the Greco-Roman world of benefits in the play, for Timon is of Athens. It is not necessary to make an argument about “sources” to see that Seneca's treatise about benefits—with its striking picture of ingratitude as a monstrous disorder, destructive of the most fundamental social ties and bonds—illuminates Shakespeare and Middleton's bold experimental play.

The problem of how to translate this archaic word strikes us immediately. Is beneficium a good turn, a favor, a good deed, or a well-intentioned act?³⁶ What is good about it? How is the bene recognized? Miriam Griffin and Brad Inwood keep the Latinate word benefit in their translation because the term carries crucial and useful distinctions lost in the alternatives.³⁷ A good turn is too casual (although this term is favored by Golding); a favor is too close to bribery and preference; a good deed comes close but loses the telling historical difference; and a well-intentioned act nicely emphasizes the intention vital to Seneca's account but is too diffuse.

Seneca's philosophical concern is precisely to highlight the good intention and gratuity of benefit, preserving it from other words that might suggest bribes, loans, or transactions either legally obligated or commercial and pecuniary.³⁸ For Seneca, to contemplate a benefit is to explore a fundamental grammar of giving and receiving for people who have either lost or never mastered the practice. People do not know how to give, receive, or reciprocate gifts in imperial Rome (1.1.1). They are ignorant as to the very nature and concept of benefits. Benefits, he says are “bestowed badly” and “owed badly” (1.1.1). Seneca offers us numerous examples of such gracelessness: tactical evasion of requests; gifts ruined by arrogance or scorekeeping; lack of care; gifts framed by coercion and haughtiness; gifts forgotten; gifts confused with bribes, loans, and favors; and gifts received in ignorance of the good intentions of the giver. Do not send wine to a drunkard, he helpfully recommends, or medicine to the hypochondriac (1.11.6). Do not give someone something your recipient already has in abundance (1.12.3); do not be churlishly hesitant in giving (2.1.2); do not use your gift to single out the recipient or to enhance your good deed with good words. Do not give gifts that might humiliate the receiver, even if you are a prince (2.7.8). Do not give gifts as subtle or pointed criticism of the receivers’ vices or bad habits. Seneca gives sane and practical advice.

For Seneca, the stakes are high because the giving, receiving, and reciprocating of benefits is a practice that, more than any other, binds together human society: “quae maxime humanam societatem alligat” (1.4.2). Seneca's treatise covers the chief aspects of benefits—giving, receiving, and returning—to understand the moral, not legal, obligations entailed in the relations established through benefits. The donor must give freely (1.4.3) with a good intention that must be recognized as such for the gift to count as a gift (1.4.5). The gift lies not in the thing itself or in its monetary value (1.5.2), but in the good intentions of the giver (1.5.6).³⁹ The donor must forget that he has given the moment his gift is made, but the receiver must both recognize the good intentions of the donor in so giving and remember that good deed. His proper receiving of the gift is distinguished from his ability to reciprocate and these facts—the forgetfulness of the donor (2.17.7), the remembrance of the recipient—preserve both generosity and gratitude. For a persistent inability to receive is at the heart of the ingratitude that erodes the gift's gratuity.⁴⁰ Seneca is concerned throughout his treatise with the character of appropriate or fitting response. He dwells on the souring of human relations that occurs from corruptions and traducements of gift, gratitude, and thanks.

Seneca contemplates such vital questions as whether one can give a gift to oneself (one cannot), whether a gift can be given accidentally (it cannot), or whether a son can give to a father or a slave to a master (he can).⁴¹ The gift comes from the man as a man, “a bare man” outside of his duties and offices, and in this sense, importantly, there is no office of giving (3.18.20).⁴² Benefits, in fact, refute solipsism, for the gift is not possible without others.⁴³ Indeed “no none can give except to another person; no one owes except to another person, no one returns except to another person. What on each occasion requires two people cannot take place within one person” (5.9.4).⁴⁴

The benefit is not an obligation: The gift must be freely given to count as such, and this means that it establishes neither legal nor financial obligations or exchanges, but rather moral relationships.⁴⁵ This becomes clear when Seneca addresses the question of why ingratitude, if it is so terrible and destructive of human relations, should go unpunished. Were ingratitude subject to legal sanction, the gratuity of the act is vitiated: Men would receive and return benefits only “gratefully” because they would be punished otherwise. A benefit is honorable because of the risk of losing: Legal sanctions would ruin “two of the finest things in human life, the grateful person and the benefit itself” (3.7.1). Seneca's entire account makes space for gratitude: gratitude as response to benefaction, to generosity, and as a crucial acknowledgment of it, not owed but freely given, and made distinct from the return or reciprocation of a gift.⁴⁶ The good intentions of the giver must be recognized for it to count as a benefit, and in this respect, the relations involved are moral relationships bound by recognition. Among what is recognized is the goodness of the deed. The benefit is a test case for trust: to put trust in souls not seals (3.15.3). Seneca worried that benefits were misrecognized; he understood the gravity of such misrecognitions. De Beneficiis was of use to Shakespeare as he dramatized the horrors of ingratitude, for it is only by virtue of seeing the terrible personal and social costs of ingratitude that one might understand how such a social order might be bound together by such fragile recognitions.

Benefits are, on this account, the chief factor in tying human societies together: “quae maxime humanorum societatem alligat” (1.4.2). It is precisely because these benefits are the very bonds and ligatures of a society that a gift should never be given carelessly, or coercively; and benefits should be given with judgment. A gift should not just be given to anyone indiscriminately; it should single out the recipient as special to him or her. Seneca insists that the way the gift is given is a significant aspect of the gift: “It matters not what is done or what is given, but with what attitude, since the benefit consists not in what was done or given but rather in the intention of the giver or agent” (2.6.1.). A benefit is an act of virtue: “It is utterly shameful to confer one for any other reason than to see it conferred” (4.3.1).

Seneca's account is almost unrecognizable from the “pure gift” in twentieth-century theories of the gift from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida.⁴⁷ For one thing, it is not a scandal in Seneca's account that receiving and returning are part of benefits.⁴⁸ Seneca's separating these two acts is in itself significant: It is this very separation that preserves the benefit's grace, for it makes appropriate room for gratitude. Gift theory has been rather singularly focused on the gift giver and her impossible purity. In Derrida's influential, rigorous, and emphatically purist conception of the gift, the very whiff of reciprocity cancels out the gift as given: “For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift.”⁴⁹ Seneca might have responded as he did to his own interlocutors: “No benefit is so complete that an envious gaze cannot pick it apart; but none is so limited that a generous interpretation will not enhance its impact. If you look at benefits with a negative attitude you can always find grounds for complaint” (2.28.4). Gift theory has sometimes been caught then between cynicism and “a fideistic leap to the impossibility of generosity, giving, love, friendship, and so on.”⁵⁰ What gets left out is the ordinary naturalness of gratitude and thanks in the acceptance of a gift, whose status as gift is not negated by any ingratitude by which it may be received. The etymology of benefits, as John Barclay has shown, tells us that Greek bequeaths us the same word for charity as it does for thanks (charis).⁵¹ The expression of gratitude in thanks is part of an ethical relationship in the recognition of the benefit, the good deed: part of the realm of ethics, not etiquette, part of practical relations, not mere sentiment.⁵²

Judged by Seneca's lights, Timon is right to understand the monstrousness of ingratitude and the suffering it induces. But he might have learned from a judicious reading of Seneca that you cannot give what you do not have; that to give indiscriminately and extravagantly is to be blind to the needs of the recipient and to avoid the thoughtful singling out that is in the nature of the gift's good intention; he might have learned that you need to be able to receive as well as to give. The denial of reciprocity—a reciprocity honored in thanks and services and not alone in material return—is ungracious and does not acknowledge the other. The gift is not possible without others (and the recognition of others I add): “beneficium sine altero non est” (5.10.1). It requires a second person (5.10.4) and is an intrinsically social act (5.11.5). Seneca's work might even be seen as a repudiation of Aristotle's magnanimous man whom Timon mirrors. Aristotle's magnanimous man confers benefits but is ashamed to receive them. But for Seneca, “he who is unwilling to owe is ungrateful” (4.40.3).⁵³

Trust and Betrayal

Seneca helps us to understand the differences between moral and legal bonds, a distinction central to Timon of Athens. If contracts, not bonds, are broken, we would be mystified by Timon's desire to revenge himself so entirely on the world, his all-purpose cursing, his emphatic refusal of all exceptions to his misanthropy. Timon might be severely disappointed if his friends broke a contract. He might feel let down; they were, after all, unreliable. He might even be angry and filled by a sense of injustice. But he would not rage or hate; he would not be entirely consumed in obsessional and biting disgust and utter contempt, his implacable hostility fueled by his sense of helplessness, the impossibility of redress. His untrammeled resentment and all-consuming detestation are a response to a much deeper sense of betrayal. It is not broken contracts but broken trust that explains Timon's outraged, bitter, exorbitant cri de coeur and fuels his unending invective. Timon's sense of the torn fabric of his world is a horrifying realization of the gossamer threads by which any social order hangs. Trust, says Annette Baier “comes in webs, not in single strands, and disrupting one strand often rips apart whole webs.”⁵⁴

In Timon, trust is revealed as an ethical relation. This is the primordial trust that, as Ludwig Wittgenstein says, comes before doubt.⁵⁵ Prereflective and primal, it is not an act of the will, nor is it informed by reason. It begins in unchosen relations and continues as an unspoken and invisible capacity to talk and be with others, to walk down a street in a city of strangers, to believe what people say to you unless you have a specific reason to doubt (trust and truth being thereby connected). It is, as Knud Ejler Løgstrup points out, “given,” but not “of our own making.”⁵⁶ It is taken for granted, wholly under the radar of our attention except when it makes itself known as mistrust, that is, when trust is broken. It shows the depths at which human bonds operate. Yet it is a perfectly ordinary part of our interactions with each other. I address you and I am accountable to you for what I say. You address me and you are accountable to me; my trust in you entails my assumption of your responsibility to me. But this is an open-ended assertion in that I do not trust you between Mondays and Fridays, or between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m., nor do I trust you in just this one instance: I trust you rather than trust that you will do this one thing I asked you to do (in which case I rely on you rather than trust in you). Trust allows us to give and take each other's words.

Trust is grammatically related to truth, for in general—unless for a good reason—we mean what we say. Of course, trust is related to justice and the good, for we trust in the good, and it is also related to, and posthumously revealed by, betrayal.⁵⁷

Broken bonds, not broken contracts, push Timon into a tragic register, moving out of satire or comedy where he—and types like him—are gulls or fools. In the world of city comedy, it is usually possible to have been cleverer than we turn out to be, to have seen through the untrustworthiness of others, and thus in a sense, we might have avoided our humiliation. But Timon offers no such recourse. Mistrust, not trust, has need of reasons. In Shakespeare and Middleton's play, Timon's broken trust reveals his gifts to friends, not returning to him in that graceful dance, as retrospectively something more like daylight robbery, profiteering, or rapacious exploitation.⁵⁸

Timon's hatred resulting from his sense of betrayal, is all inclusive, and thus a defense against self-knowledge and relation. His cursing, his hyperbolically totalizing detestation of everyone and everything is, I am suggesting, a useful shield against the kinds of dependencies and vulnerabilities that run wholly beneath any contracts we might make with each other. Timon's rage cannot be understood in the thin language of contract. A contract, as I suggested earlier, is limited, entered into willingly but with a certain set of conditions of fulfillment, and with a distinct terminus.⁵⁹ Timon's rage can be explained only by the kind of betrayal that runs between people in what Avishai Margalit has called “thick relations,” thus my fellow Jew, my mother, my friend, and my husband, but not my lawyer or my psychiatrist. When we are betrayed in these relations by abandonment, infidelity, or rejection, we are more likely to feel rage, despair, and utter shock, and perhaps those who are in these thick relations with us, those who have betrayed, abandoned us, or sold us down the river, might be expected to feel remorse, or guilt. “Can thick relations of belonging be terminated?” asks Margalit. He gives this example: “After leafing through one's Stasi file one can say, ‘My ex-son-in-law betrayed me to gain promotion in the party.’ But one cannot make literal sense by saying, ‘My ex-son betrayed me to get promotion in the party.” . . . One can turn from a son-in-law to an ex-son-in-law, but one cannot turn from a son into an ex-son: once a son, always a son.” He might be able to terminate his relationship with his son, but not his relation to him. In Timon trust is revealed as an ethical relation, and so is betrayal.⁶⁰

At his great inverted feast for his mouth-friends, his trencher-friends, in which he feeds them nothing but lukewarm water (perhaps an echo of Revelation 3.15–6), he gives his anti-grace, the second in the play (3.7.68-83). His guests are nothing to him, and so he calls on nothing in them to be blessed. It is an antiblessing, an antithanks, an attempt to negate the very idea of welcome and hospitality. From the moment of his realization of betrayal he adopts invective, and the inverted language of prayer, welcoming the violent cutting and tearing of bonds of trust that line every social, civic and familial relation: “Matrons turn incontinent / Obedience, fail in children; slaves and fools / Pluck the grave wrinkled senate from the bench / And minister in their steads . . . Bankrupts hold fast; Rather than render back, out with your knives / And cut your trusters throats!” (4.1.3–6, 4.1.8–10).⁶¹ It is trust that underlies “peace, justice and truth, / Domestic awe, night-rest and neighborhood, / Instructions, manners, mysteries and trades, / Degrees, observances, customs, and laws” (4.1.15–20). He could, I sense, go on and on in an endless list, with hardly a pause for breath, brooking no interruption, no disruption of his forceful detailing of all the relations that can be ruptured and ruined. Trust is the fabric of relation: Pull one thread and all those adjacent threads pucker and crumple. His manic and proliferating itemization, piling up possibilities, shows him in a task of negative realization. The point, however, is that once distinguished, they must all be “confounded,” mixed up together so that they cannot be told apart. The point is “confusion” (4.1.21). Let it live.

Before I return to the purposes and effects of Timon's exceptionless misanthropy and its relation to our word as our bond, I want to extend my analysis of Seneca into his scholastic afterlife, because it is here that we see the extraordinary, central role played by the play's numerous servants. These materials can help us examine the play's continuing probing of moral relation.

Can a Servant Give Anything to His Master?

The play offers us an astonishing, unprecedented cast of twelve servants—some named individually, and some named after their masters.⁶² Flavius, differentiated as the steward, is pivotal in both halves of the play. The go-betweens and messengers from the rich, oblivious, and self-interested masters of Athens’ patrician class are invisible except as functionaries to their masters. Their point of view not only discloses and exposes their master's rapacious self-regard and the patricians’ moral impoverishment but also offers gentler, kinder affinities and social and ethical possibilities.

Three strangers are brought in precisely to offer their views on the creditors refusal to reciprocate Timon's benefaction: “Religion groans” (3.2.78) at “the monstrousness of man”:

When he looks out in an ungrateful shape—

He does deny him, in respect of his,

What charitable men afford to beggars.

(3.2.75–79)

But it is the servants of the play, bonded in service to their masters, who clearly see their masters’ profound limitations. One of Timon's servants roundly castigates Lucius's “politic love” (3.4.35); Flaminius throws back the coins given to him by Lucillus, who has told him it is “no time to lend money, especially on bare friendship without security” (3.1.42–4), exclaiming that this is a disease of a friend. When the servants of Isodore and Varro meet to collect dues from Timon, Caphis's pun—“Would we were all discharged”—can be taken to express a hope that their dues be paid, but it can just as easily indicate a reluctance to perform the duty of collection assigned to them (2.2.14).

After Timon's household has been left destitute and he has left in a flurry, forgetful altogether of his dependents, a touching scene unfolds among the community of servants. Although they now must be out of the bonds of service (hence vagabonds), their “hearts” still wear Timon's livery (4.2.17). Their loyal society will continue to serve in shared sorrow (4.2.19). “We are fellows still”; “Good fellows all”, “Let's yet be fellows” (4.217, 22,25): These words suggest a commitment based on a shared history. “We have seen better days” (4.2.28) reflects a shared experience as “broken implements of a ruined house” (4.2.16), informing a commitment to future fellowship. The experience of ruin intensifies their links with each other.⁶³

Flavius shares money, a responsibility altogether neglected by Timon: “Nay, put out all your hands-not one word more, / Thus part we rich in sorrow, parting poor” (4.2.28–29). The open hands are not stretched out in a performative “dream of friendship” (4.2.34) but rather express a common need. Then, as the stage direction instructs, they embrace, sharing love and sorrow.

This is a model of giving as sharing. Their fellowship will remain as part of a shared history and thus will create a new bond, based on their grief and loss and the fact of sharing it. They are fellow fellows betrayed by their master's oblivious “dream of friendship” to destitution; they are broken but capable of repair, offering the possibility of a more graceful community.

This scene immediately succeeds Timon's terrible inverse prayer for universal hatred, which ends with a plea: “Grant as Timon grows his hate may grow / To the whole race of mankind, high and low!” (4.1.39–40). Different models of loving and living are right under Timon's nose, if only he could see them, offering a striking example of loyalty, outside the bonds of service: “Yet do our hearts wear Timon's livery” (4.2. 17). Flavius addresses them as “my fellows” (4.2.2); the second servant calls Timon “our companion” (4.2.9): To share is not simply to “divide,” divvy up, and apportion, but rather to participate and to partake in something common. We are offered an illuminating and powerful form of affinity.

Seneca pays some attention to the relationship between masters and servants. In book 3 of De Beneficiis, Seneca embarks on a revelatory discussion about whether a slave can confer a benefit. Seneca's treatise—and later scholastic commentaries on it—can help us see the moral rather than legal relations under analysis. They reveal what the narrower version of bonds as contracts misses, and they help us see how central those who serve prove to be in the play, and the implications of Timon's failures of acknowledgment.

Seneca is arguing with those who think that if a slave cannot hold back a benefit, he cannot give one (3.18.1). On this account, a slave's legal situation is such that “nothing he provides gives him a claim on his superior” (3.18.1). He has nothing to give; because everything he is and does is owed as a condition of service. From this point of view, a servant's “services,” his duties, simply exclude the concept of benefit, and a servant cannot do a good deed for his master. Seneca understands that complying with this logic would render every social subordinate unable to do good turns or favors. Seneca argues passionately to the contrary.

A slave can benefit his master because it is not his legal status that is important but rather “his state of mind (3.18.2). To deny the slave that capacity to do a good turn, to be able to give to his master, is to fail to see the autonomy of his mind and to deny his capacity to freely give something he is not obligated to do (3.21.1). The entire discussion is a vital test case for the free agency of the giver: “Why should the social role degrade the deed, instead of the deed ennobling the social role of the agent?” (3.28.1)

Seneca is struggling with the question of the duties and legal obligations that attach to the roles we occupy in relation to each other. But for Seneca the free state of mind is central in the act of giving. In his defense of the gratuity of giving, he separates out gift from loan or bribe, or a merely rivalrous grandiosity designed to outdo or humiliate the receiver. What we owe to each other by virtue of our roles needs to be separated from what we owe and give to each other as human beings and this distinction preserves our gracious acts. Anyone who denies that a slave can benefit his master is “just ignorant of the rights he has as a human being” (ignarus iuris humani; 3.18.2) and is guilty of a refusal to recognize virtue. Seneca is at his most inspirational when he says: “Virtue shuts the door to no one. It is open to everyone and lets us all in, invites us in: the freeborn, ex-slaves, slaves, kings, and exiles” (3.18.3).

When Thomas Aquinas read Seneca, he had fully absorbed the implications of such distinctions. In the second part of the second part of the Summa Theologica, in his discussion of thankfulness, he cites Seneca declaring that when a slave “does more than a slave is bound to do, it is a favor; for as soon as he does anything from a motive of friendship, if indeed that be his motive, it is no longer called a service.”⁶⁴ Although Seneca's influence is pervasive in these sections, Aquinas approaches master-slave relations in a slightly different manner. His concern is not so much whether a slave can give to a master, but whether thanks are owed to the slave for what he gives. They are. This is part of Aquinas's exploration of gratitude as a part of justice. Aquinas makes an elegant Latin pun underscoring Seneca's point: “enim beneficium magis in affectu consistit quam in effectu” (for a benefit/favor consists more in feeling than in deed).⁶⁵

For Seneca and Aquinas write from the virtue tradition: What is at stake is precisely the “bene” in “beneficium,” what is good in the deed. It is precisely where the servant or steward surpasses what is owed that the gratuity of gift is seen. Aquinas relates the giving of thanks and the repayment of a favor as belonging to three virtues—justice, gratitude, and friendship.⁶⁶ When it concerns the virtue of gratitude, he is unequivocal: “It has the character of a moral debt.”⁶⁷ Finally, Aquinas says that the debt of gratitude is linked to love: It flows from charity. The more it is paid, the more it is due, citing Romans 13:8.

Thomas treats ingratitude in his discussion of the virtue of justice and under the heading of religio, which concerns what people owe God (ST 2-2, 81, 4). Gratitude, he says, is an aspect of justice, but it is paid freely and not because of legal obligation.

In the fourteenth century, as Andrew Galloway has shown, interest emerged in gratitude as mercantilism began to trouble canonists and theologians. Gratitudo is, in fact, a scholastic coinage from gratia, and the powerful middle English word kynde is recruited to translate gratus, with unkynde as ingratus. ⁶⁸ The refusal of reciprocity in Timon's giving and in the Lords’ rejection of his claims is not only ingratus, but unkynde, that is, a refusal of kinship. So the dimensions of gratitude take up both a theology of grace as well as a moral ontology of human being.

No wonder then that one of the strangers says in the face of the Lords’ ingratitude: “Religion groans at it” (3.2.78), activating precisely those forms of binding and rebinding (re-ligare) of joining and fracture the “bond in men” (1.148).⁶⁹

A Failure of Acknowledgment: The Rhetoric of “All”

Flavius is just one of the many visitors who disrupt Timon's attempt at isolation. All of Athens appears to seek him out. Alcibiades and his train of women approach. The churlish philosopher seeks out the man who “affects his manners” (4.3.198); then there is a visitation of thieves, upstaged in their ministry, at least one of whom is reformed by virtue of Timon's more cosmic and thorough-going vision of banditry. Flavius visits him before the return of the poet and painter; finally, the senators return. I focus on the scene with Flavius because it is Flavius who highlights Timon's commitment to misanthropy without exception, and thus to Timon's hyperbolic skepticism.

Flavius's scene with Timon moves out of the flyting, competitive emulation, and vindication, the rebuff and repulses, that set the tone for Timon's inverted hospitality with his nonguests. It offers a vital and touching glimpse of kind fellowship. That mere glimpse threatens—for just a moment—to stop in its tracks Timon's hurtling momentum of hatred, his abhorrent efforts to unbind himself from all the others of the world.

We now see Timon not as the vituperative subject but as the pitiful object of Flavius's compassionate regard as he views Timon without yet being seen by him. Flavius's words recall Christ's commandment to love your enemies (Matt 5:44): “How rarely does it meet with this time's guise, / When man was wished to love his enemies.”⁷⁰ We are hearing love sounded, and it is almost shocking. There has been more language of estimating and prizing than loving. The word is used: “You mistake my love” (1.2.9), says Timon, when Ventidius tries to repay him. One senator declares he loves and honors Timon—but only as he is about to shaft him with bills and due dates (2.1.23). There is “small love among these sweet knaves” as Apemantus says (1.1.255).

Flavius decides to present his “honest grief” and service to Timon (4.3.464). The word present happily carries the sense of offer, attend upon, make a gift of, and make known, and the scene draws on all these facets of acknowledgment. To present yourself is to offer yourself, to give yourself up to another. Thus, in the possibility of rebuff, it is to be in your words, to reveal yourself in them, and to mean them. Flavius wishes to offer to serve Timon, whole-heartedly “with my life” (4.3.465).

His affectionate greeting “my dearest master” is greeted with rejection and disavowal: “Away!” (4.3.466). Flavius asks if Timon has forgotten him: Timon's reply is that he has forgotten all men, and so this includes Flavius in arrogant choplogic. He is right, however, that he cannot differentiate Flavius from other men. So Flavius introduces himself as “an honest and poor servant” of his, referring to the past history they share. Timon stops at the term “honest” (4.3.472) and claims honest men were never around him. It might seem as if Timon is thinking about his putative rich fraternity, but because he talks about the “knaves” he kept, he must be referring to those who served him. “I know thee not” (4.3.471) is brutal. It is as brutal in its way, as Prince Hal to Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man,” and perhaps, in its oblivious cruelty, even more so.⁷¹ Flavius's loving persistence is remarkable; he carries on waiting on him, presenting himself to him, wishing to be known, but also so that Timon can own his history and see himself true. What he cannot help presenting now are his tears, involuntary witness of his love and grief: “What dost thou weep?” (4.3.476).

Once again, Timon's misanthropy is deflective: Because you cry, you must be a woman, and therefore technically excluded, because flinty mankind never cries. Even when pity is right under his nose, he avoids it in his wider abstraction: “Pity's sleeping” (4.3.480).

Flavius's tears are the warrant of his care for his master, but as he begs for acknowledgment—“I beg of you to know me” (4.3.482)—and asks Timon to accept his grief and allow him to serve still, it becomes clear that Timon cannot connect the man before him with the past as he conveniently remembers it.⁷² He pauses enough to question himself—“Had I a steward / So true, so just and now so comfortable?” (4.3.486)—and is halted enough to look at Flavius: “Let me behold thy face” (4.3.488). This man is indeed “born of woman”—and he asks Flavius to forgive his “general and exceptless rashness” (4.3.490). Exceptless appears to be a Shakespearean coinage and hits the scene's logic. The universal and all-encompassing hatred cannot be total if there are exceptions. He must be “exceptless,” convinced of the total depravity of all humankind, to fund a misanthropy that can brook no distinctions or qualifications. He proclaims, “one honest man” (4.3.493)—but please, gods, do not send more! What is the tone of “No more I pray, and he's a steward” (4.3.493)? Is it wonder and gratitude that there might be such a man? Is it more like Sir Toby Belch's sense of stewardship in his withering words to Malvolio (“Art any more than a steward?”) or the Cornwalls’ terrible question, “A peasant stand up thus?”⁷³ Does Timon's scornful patrician condescension imply that stewards do not count? If he is honest only he can count as honest because the avowal cannot be allowed to compromise his misanthropy.

Whatever momentary glimpse of true service and honesty there is, suspicion and doubt quickly contaminate it. Is his kindness “usuring” (4.3.504)? Does it expect return? Is it merely mercenary? For Flavius, “doubt and suspect” (4.3.507) come too late and are directed against the wrong actors. With his momentary allowance that Flavius is honest, Timon tries to give him treasure on the condition that he lives apart and hates all, curses all, and shows charity to none, in other words, he withdraws or seeks to overcome the very conditions of a gift. ⁷⁴

What then has Timon failed to remember when he does not recognize Flavius? We learn from King Lear that all failures of recognition are failures of self-recognition. Three things need to be stressed. The first is that in not recognizing Flavius, he refuses a knowledge of himself as the man who rebuffed the truths Flavius offered him. It is from Flavius that we know that Timon is severely in debt, that he owes for everything he gives, and that he has made this known on several occasions to Timon and has been rebuffed. So his failure to acknowledge Flavius on this occasion is a more conscious and emphatic reprisal of his earlier failure. Flavius is indeed the only man honest enough to tell him the truth, and so his failure to acknowledge where he stands in relation to Flavius is also a failure to acknowledge where he stands in relation to all other men in the play. Flavius tells him that his suspicion and doubt come too late and indeed are directed toward the wrong man. Timon is just another one of Shakespeare's magnanimous men who cannot recognize love: “That which I show heaven knows is merely love” (4.3.520).

Second, in rebuffing Flavius again, he also rebuffs the only true friendship offered in the play, but it is one that necessarily involves seeing Flavius as a fellow fellow, the model for which, as we have seen, is the fellowship of servants in act 4, scene 2.

Third, Timon cannot recognize the “bene” in a beneficium, when it is right under his nose, right before him in Flavius's offer of service. Timon's final words to Flavius are “Let me never see thee” (4.3.531), which are a refusal not only of seeing him, and thus risking recognizing him, but also of being seen, being recognized, and having his unmitigated hatred compromised by Flavius's redemption.

This failed recognition scene shows us Timon's refusal as a rejection of Flavius's single claim on Timon. Simply put, Timon can no longer be wedded to his hatred if he allows Flavius's claim on him—that is, if he not only acknowledges that Flavius was his honest steward (hence he was his oblivious Lord) but also acknowledges him and his capacity for grief and love (hence Timon is himself honestly served and truthfully loved). Flavius shows the significance and cost of this universality with no exemption.

The extravagant “all” is the characteristic mark of Timon's misanthropic rhetoric. “Henceforth hated be / Of Timon man and all humanity” (3.7.103–104), he declaims, “and grant as Timon grows his hate may grow / To the whole race of mankind, high and low!” (4.1.39–40). If one man is a flatterer, then “so are they all” (4.3.15–16), “all's obloquy (4.3.17), and “all feasts, societies and throngs of men,” he disdains (4.3.21). Timon's all-encompassing philosophy of disdain, his contempt for every social relation, shows the point in disdaining all distinction, confounding every single claim in universal repulsion.

Timon's “all” deals death. “It is vain” (5.2.1) to speak with him, says Flavius, because there is no point in speaking if all is confounded, if you cannot enact the differences and distinctions of speech.⁷⁵ Timon responds, “Speak, and be hanged!” at Flavius's invitation to speak, as the senators approach during the last visitation to Timon's fecund and sociable wilderness. You will be hanged if you speak; I will speak and then I will kill myself; if you speak, you can go and hang yourself (an invitation he repeats late in the scene). Quite what he says is indeterminate, except that in each option there is an association of speaking with dying. Let words—true and false ones—“blister” and “cauterize” to the “root ’o’ th’ tongue” (5.2.17–18). To speak at all is to die of self-consumption, to consume oneself with speaking (5.2.19). Timon has lost all conviction in speech. For speech to be intelligible action, there must be a point in it, and a point to it. The very project of speech as intelligible action has collapsed. The word of others can no longer be taken: They are not oathable (4.3.136). He thus can no longer give his word.

Nothing is left to speak but an epitaph. When the senators approach, Timon is writing his: “I was writing of my epitaph” (5.2.70). Timon's last words are a crux: Is it “Let four words go by, and language end,” as the folio has it? If so, then which are the four words? (He continues to speak for more than four!) Or, is it, as Rowe emends, “Let sour words go by, and language end” (5.2.105)? The logical end in either case is the end of language—an end to speaking, talking, and communing; an end to the necessities of speech.

It is part of the play's unquenchable artistic generosity, even in this most harsh and gravid play, that it offers this extravagant, despite-itself gift: Timon's bequeathing of himself is regenerative. For he tells the senators that his “everlasting mansion” (his grave) will lie “upon the beached verge of the salt flood, / Who once a day with his embossed froth / The turbulent surge shall cover” (5.3.100–113). The gravestone will speak: It will be an oracle. The nature that has kept on offering itself to Timon so abundantly in his “wasteland” will now—at that limen where sea meets shore, where the ground gives way to a different element—diurnally cover and recover his grave. It is a kind of self-abandonment of which he has hitherto been incapable. In giving himself to death, he speaks in epitaph—and he goes on speaking, for his words are reprised both by the soldier who visits and takes a wax imprinting of them and finally by Alcibiades at the play's end. To speak is to give words and take them—to pledge ourselves.

The logic of the hyperbolic “all” is not local to Timon; it is part of the play's investigation of the political economy of speech. “Let not thy sword skip one” (4.3.110), he says to Alcibiades, and the “exceptless” rhetoric is sounded again in Alcibiades's parleying with the senators as Athens faces a total destruction at the play's end. Timon's lethal misanthropy is rhetorical, and it consumes him to death: Alcibiades's payback is ruthlessly military, and he is credited with the power to annihilate Athens. The survival of Athens, however, depends on abandoning the “all,” in relinquishing the habit of “confounding” that funds Timon's misanthropic skepticism.

One of the senators pleads with Alcibiades to spare some of the city: “We were not all unkind, nor all deserve / The common stroke of war” (5.5.21–22). Another senator urges that Alcibiades distinguishes between the guilty and innocent (5.5.23–24) and repeats: “All have not offended” (5.3.35). Their offer is that Alcibiades “decimate” the city—kill one person out of ten, an indiscriminate and arbitrary path but at least not killing every single citizen: “Kill not all together” (5.5.44). “Use the wars,” they urge, “as thy redress” and “not as our confusion” (5.5.52). This “confusion,” to my ear, reprises the Timonian rhetoric of mixing it altogether, disdaining distinction again.

Alcibiades accedes to this; he offers his glove and pledges that the senators shall choose the offenders who will be publicly tried according to the city's laws. He invites them to “descend” (from the ramparts of the city) and “keep your words” (5.5.65). The safety of the city, the enaction of its laws, and the future prospects of Athenian civitas will depend on the giving and taking of words in trust.

News of Timon's death interrupts the scene, and Alcibiades reads his epitaph: “Here lie I, Timon, who alive all living men did hate” (5.5.70). There it is again—that emphatic, exceptionless “all”—Timon's baleful words in his mouth, sounding out a bitterness and animosity with no reprieve, falling on all alike. Does this allow him to begin to make just those distinctions Timon did not care to make? Timon “abhorred’st us in our human griefs”; and he scorned “our droplets . . . which from niggard nature fall.” (We might recall that particular turning away from the weeping Flavius.) But “rich conceit” taught Timon to make Neptune “weep for aye / On thy low grave” (5.5.77). Your rich imagination taught you to build right there, where tears are nature's donation. Or—the imagination is not entirely his—it comes to him, and it is given to him. By planting his grave next to the sea, the whole sea will always weep for him. The epitaph is redeemed by what abundantly surrounds it, the sea's vast yet daily rhythms, drawn out and returned, by energies that dwarf and resituate the fat, relentless ego. Alcibiades's conceit about the grave by the sea leads him to the idea of weeping for faults forgiven, to the olive branch, and to the breeding of the peace with which the plays ends (5.5.80).

Our Word Is Our Bond: Moral Relation

Timon of Athens has revealed that the political economy of money in the play is just a part of its meditation on the political economy of speech. We credit someone when we believe them: We count something as worth saying when we say it and when we speak; we say what counts for us. Counting, recounting, and accounting, as claiming, reclaiming, and acclaiming, are part of our speech and show that speech is essentially owed.⁷⁶

In his brilliant and underread third section of The Claim of Reason on morality, Cavell investigates the rationality of moral claims. The point of moral argument is not to reach agreement but to establish what we are prepared to take responsibility for, the extent of our cares and commitments. Cavell's redescription of skepticism is, through and through, an ethical project, provoking us to confront ourselves and others, to determine where we stand in relation to each other, to find and be answerable to the responsibilities of our responses.⁷⁷ Cavell developed this understanding in relation to J. L. Austin's work, charting that underworked domain of his teacher's insight: passionate utterance. His work can be regarded as the work inaugurated and prepared for in part 3 of The Claim of Reason.

When Cavell began again with Austin in his late work, feeling the perlocutionary to have been neglected, he opened up the analysis of what we do when we speak to both passion and morals. Cavell painstakingly and precisely makes analogies with the conditions of illocutionary speech that Austin had outlined in How to Do Things with Words. For those speech acts to do the work they do, a whole set of conditions must be in place: There must be an accepted conventional procedure, and the particular person and circumstances must be appropriate; the procedure must be correctly executed. But in the perlocutionary utterance, there are no conventional procedures and effects—the speaker is on his own in relation to them—and appropriateness is decided and is at issue in each case.⁷⁸ In each exchange of words, one person, being moved to speak, singles out another and demands a response here and now. At stake is not correct procedure but moral relationship. In passionate utterance, our authority is not given by virtue of a particular role and its attendant rituals and conventions—such as the office of judge or priest—but rather is worked through in our everyday and more or less ceaseless claims and answerabilities. This is the domain not of what we ought to say, and not of speech regulated by rule or ritual, but rather “what we must or dare not say, or have it at heart to say, or are too confused or too tame or wild or terrorized to say or think to say.”⁷⁹ It is in our passionate utterances that we expose and reveal ourselves, and show how we stand toward each other. We single ourselves out and are singled out.⁸⁰ When Austin said our word was our bond, he understood all our words as speech acts, doing things that ritual makes explicit, but that puts us in relations quite outside the conventions he sought (but failed) to hive off as illocutions. Any word of mine commits me and marks me out in relation to you in a specific way. The bonding cannot be reserved alone for explicit binding performatives, as in I promise, I swear, I vow, but it is part of a routine and fundamental way in which we offer and take each other's words. We naturally have trust in each other's words; such trust is implicit in every speech act. It is distrust that makes trust only retrospectively come into view. Although the promise is singled out for philosophers as foundational, it is my word, no particular word, but all my words, that are my bond, as I unremarkably, take your words to be too. For Cavell, however, Austin did not take the threat and truth of skepticism seriously enough. He failed to take seriously the idea that insincerity is often unfathomable. Criteria can tell you only what something is, but not whether or not it exists (criteria tell us what something is, not that it is).

This analysis helps us to see that misanthropy is a reprieve. Timon's characteristic “all” relieves him from all this singling out, and being singled out, from the distinctions necessitated by speech. It also means he will be spared the self-knowledge and the knowledge of others that emerge from this relation to our words. That is why Flavius's loving approach to Timon in his wilderness is such a challenging call, even a temptation to Timon. Cavell helps us see that Timon's failure is moral; his misanthropic skepticism is a cover the play blows.

If we are creatures who can only come to an understanding of ourselves through others, if, we are second persons, before first persons, then our dependency on others is virtually limitless, as are our capacities to deny that vulnerability. Both capacities are at stake in tragedy and in our attempts to define it. After brilliantly surveying the myriad attempts to define the form of tragedy, a misguided enterprise from the start, Terry Eagleton says that in everyday language, the word tragedy means something like “very sad.” The truth, he suggests “is that no definition of tragedy more elaborate than very sad has ever worked.” Very sad, however, is to my mind sufficient. For it asks that any play we call tragic depicts us as the kind of beings who can ruin and devastate each other, who can be capable of experiencing and naming such ruin as violation, yet in the tragic retelling of such ruin can be sustained by each other in response. In this way, to respond to tragedy is to be hopeful, because only hope takes despair seriously enough, hope being a form of love.

Timon is a fallible human being, not a gullible fool. Shakespeare prizes him from his comic, Lucianic tradition to see if he can be tragically inherited. Nevertheless, Timon's commitment to the “all” can mean that he cannot single out what is precious in that which is lost. Timon's despair negates the hope that might cure it. So he stands in the way of tragic hope, both his own and ours. To this extent, his hatred also stands in the way of the loving, mournful, hopeful retelling that renders even the saddest stories of suffering capable of being spoken about and thus participating in the possibility of moral repair.