Thomas Middleton (1) (1580–1627)

In 1611 two experienced London playwrights collaborated on a new play dramatizing a real-life contemporary wonder, Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, "a sometime thief and notorious cross-dresser" (ix). In Feb 2023 at the Blackfriars theater in Staunton VA a group of enthusiastic amateur players offered a staged reading of the rarely performed play, prompting me to revisit it. It's at once clear why it has become popular in recent years, after almost 4 centuries of neglect.

The real-life show more Frith was charged with theft and a host of notoriously male behaviors - drunkenness, swearing, dueling, swaggering, and cross-dressing. Middleton and Dekker's Moll affects some of those behaviors but is presented sympathetically as an outspoken free-thinker transcending the rigid constraints of her class and gender. Such froward behavior attracts some undesired admirers to this "maddest, fantastical'st girl" (2.1.192) for her "heroic spirit and masculine womanhood" (2.1.336-7), but much of the play rehearses the knee-jerk attacks on one who "strays so from her kind [that] Nature repents she made her" (1.2.214-5). Her non-binary gender presentation is at the heart of her offense: "It is a thing One knows not how to name; . . . 'Tis woman more than man, Man more than woman, and . . . The sun gives her two shadows to one shape" (1.2.129-33). The fact that such attacks come from the play's senex, Sir Alexander Wengrave, who blocks a heterosexual pair of true lovers from wedded bliss, makes clear where the plot's sympathies rest.

The play offers Moll several memorable bits of stage business. Twice in act 3 when in male garb she draws her weapon to engage with and defeat male opponents. Then act 4 finds her placing a viol da gamba between her trousered legs to perform two songs about transgressive wives, and in act 5 she engages in a bout of "canting," a slang duel that ends with yet another song.

Her verbal climax comes earlier, in an articulate attack on a would-be seducer, the poorly endowed Laxton (lacks stone): "Thou'rt one of those That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore. . . . What durst move you, sir, To think me whorish? . . . "Cause, you'll say, I'm given to sport, I'm often merry, jest? Had mirth no kindred in the world but lust? . . . I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, I that can prostitute a man to me. . . she that has wit and spirit May scorn to live beholding to her body for meat Or for apparel . . . Base is the mind that kneels unto her body . . . My spirit shall be mistress of this house As long as I have time in't" (3.1.72-140).

Though Moll is the play's featured character, her part in the love-plot is relatively small. It is mostly limited to unmasking plotters and dodging entrapment while allying with the young lover Sebastian Wengrave to cozen his father and marry his true love Mary (about whom the roaring girl says "I pitied her for name's sake, that a Moll Should be so crossed in love" (4.1.68-9). Much of the play is taken up with the misadventures of two city gallants, whose attempts to "wap, niggle and fadoodle" (5.1.189-95) with two housewives and bamboozle their husbands are thwarted by the wives themselves.

In the end, though this city comedy flirts with transgression at every turn, it ends up affirming heterosexual marriage and wifely wiles. Sir Alexander the senex apologizes for his errors and praises Moll as "a good wench" and the foxy housewives as "kind gentlewomen, whose sparkling presence Are glories set in marriage" (5.2.268-9). Perhaps the chief roarer speaks for her sisters as well as herself when she proclaims, "I please myself, and care not else who loves me" (5.1.332). show less

I could see that I had arrived at the autumn of the Bard's career when I reached his collaborations with hacks.

I would like to think that the parts of the play I didn't like were the work of the hack. I assume that he was responsible for the Alcibades scenes reading like some schoolboy was doing an adaptation of Coriolanus as an classroom assignment or the perfunctory setup of Timon's future woes or the dimwitted idea of having the hero die off-stage. By contrast, I credit the Bard with the show more stinging reproaches ("Uncover, dogs, and lap") and the magnificent rants (and the Bard can rant) and the unmasking of fraud and hypocrisy (take that, poet and painter). A bad play with great moments.

P.S. I just realized what it really lacked - no strong women characters!? show less

An uneven and incomplete play, failing to find either thematic juice or dramatic zest, Timon of Athens is, because of these middling qualities, sometimes excused as a collaboration between Shakespeare and one of his less-talented peers. Interestingly, the Introduction to the Arden edition I read disregards this theory, instead seeing Timon as a project that Shakespeare drafted but found too difficult to work up into a genuine, workable piece of drama.

And no wonder: there's no natural charm show more in a protagonist who is, first, a sucker for benefactors and unwittingly gives all his money away to shameless supplicants, and then, secondly, having fallen low due to his errors, becomes a bitter and unrepentant misanthrope. Despite a few moments that stir, such as Timon's initial eloquent invective against the low-grade temper of much of mankind, the concept has no natural structure or dramatic beats that emerge. Even a writer of genius like Shakespeare struggles to find them. It's a seed that proves to be a stone.

With this in mind, my Arden edition's claim that Timon was a Shakespeare attempt that ended up screwed up in the Tudor equivalent of a wastepaper basket not only becomes more plausible, but even appealing. The thought of the great Bard of the English language hitting the buffers, revising character motivations, reshaping scenes and working drafted lines up into iambic pentameter, is an interesting one. Shakespeare at his desk, labouring on a doomed WIP, is more fascinating to imagine than any reading of the actual play of Timon of Athens brings, but it does give the experience some worth. show less

A messy, uneven and disillusioned play, Timon of Athens is rarely studied or performed because of scepticism regarding both its authorship and completion. Like Pericles there seems little doubt that Shakespeare wrote the majority, but quite what he was trying to do is another matter. Timon of Athens is rich and generous, happy to provide his friends, servants and acquaintances with money whenever they require it. Only the cynical Apemantus questions the soundness of Timon's actions, and the show more motives of his supposed friends, wondering at "what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees 'em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood." When Timon's creditors ask for payment of their loans, Timon goes to his friends, but they all refuse to help him. Even worse, Timon's one loyal friend Alcibiades is exiled from Athens. After renouncing all his friends at one last banquet, Timon retires to a misanthropic life as a hermit in a cave. As he rails against "yellow, glittering precious gold", he completely renounces mankind, to die alone in his cave, his epitaph claiming that "Here lie I, Timon, who alive / All living men did hate". One of Shakespeare's more puzzling plays, Timon of Athens is unusually bleak and unforgiving, with Timon behaving like an unsympathetic version of Lear (they were both written within a couple of years of each other). --Jerry Brotton show less