Troilus and Cressida overflowed with contempt for the feminine sex as such, for love as a comical or pitiable sensuality, for mock heroics and sham military glory. Coriolanus is brimful of scorn for the masses; for the stupidity, fickleness, and cowardice of the ignorant, slavish souls, and for the baseness of their leaders.
But the passionate disdain possessing Shakespeare's soul is destined to a stronger and wilder outburst in the work he next takes in hand. The outbreak in Timon is against no one sex, no one caste, no one nation or fraction of humanity; it is the result of an overwhelming contempt, which excepts nothing and no one, but embraces the whole human race.
[1] The matter is interestingly discussed in Kreyssig's instructive and sympathetic work: Vorlesungen über Shakespeare, 1859, vol. ii. p. 110.
[XIII]
TIMON OF ATHENS—HATRED OF MANKIND
Timon of Athens has come down to us in a pitiable condition. The text is in a terrible state, and there are, not only between one scene and another, but between one page and another, such radical differences in the style and general spirit of the play as to preclude the possibility of its having been the work of one man. The threads of the story are often entirely disconnected, and circumstances occur (or are referred to) for which we were in no way prepared. The best part of the versification is distinctly Shakespearian, and contains all that wealth of thought which was characteristic of this period of his life; but the other parts are careless, discordant, and desperately monotonous. The prose dialogue especially jars, thrust as it is, with its long-winded straining after effect, into scenes which are otherwise compact and vigorous.
All Shakespeare students of the present day concur in the opinion that Timon of Athens, like Pericles, is but a great fragment from the master-hand.
The Lyfe of Timon of Athens was printed for the first time in the old folio edition of 1623. Careful examination shows us that the first pages of the play of Timon (which is inserted between Romeo and Juliet and Julius Cæsar) are numbered 80, 81, 82, 81, instead of 78, 79, 80, 81, and end at page 98. The names of the actors, for which in no other case is more than the necessary space allowed, here occupy the whole of page 99, and page 100 is left blank. Julius Cæsar begins upon the next page, which is numbered 109. Fleay noticed that Troilus and Cressida, which, as we remarked, is unnumbered, would exactly fill the pages 78 to 108. By some error, which furnishes us with another hint, the second and third pages of this play are numbered 79 and 80. Obviously it was the publisher's original intention to include Troilus and Cressida among the tragedies. On its being subsequently observed that there was nothing really tragic about the play, they cast about, since Julius Cæsar was already printed, for another tragedy which would as nearly as possible fill the vacant space.