Timon and Melancholia

Commentators on Timon of Athens since Karl Marx have suggested that the play has significant things to say about the external, and material conditions of the world. ² Timon, in his frenzied alienation, sees beyond the burnished surfaces of affluent life, attaining a disillusioned and partially truthful understanding of human nature and what it means to exist in a brutally material world. In this way, with disconcerting Shakespearian pliability, the play speaks with immediacy to the crises of today.

There is, however, an obvious objection to making this direct link between the play and our recent lives. In the play, there is no objective catastrophe. Timon forges his own personal mishap. He lives his life and expresses his apocalyptic vision as if dwelling in a world perched on the very brink of man-made disaster; he is, nevertheless, the prophet of a disaster that cannot actually happen to the world because it is purely the invention of his mind. So who or what is mad, disordered, excessive, hateful and cruel: Timon or the Athens he lives in?

This article attempts to navigate this question by relating the play to a film that was first screened in 2011: the controversial Danish director Lars von Trier's Melancholia, an emotionally extravagant disaster-from-outer-space movie. I do not argue that von Trier consciously modelled the film on the play, though it is perfectly possible that he did so. ³ The similarities in their treatment of the catastrophic experience of life are striking, to the point that the two works may be considered as a diptych, each exploring the linked themes of catastrophe and personal sadness. Melancholia helps to explain how Timon might be understood in a period anxiously surviving Covid-19, witnessing war, and expecting further ecological disasters of human origin.

Starring Kirsten Dunst as Justine and Charlotte Gainsbourg as her sister Claire, Melancholia was filmed at Tjolöholm Castle, an early twentieth-century mansion built in a pseudo-Tudor style in Halland on the coast of Sweden. Though geographically claustrophobic, the visual imagery of Melancholia is sumptuously rich if not overwhelming. So too is its musical score. The film unfolds to the swelling music of the Liebestod section of the overture to Richard Wagner's 1865 opera Tristan und Isolde: in von Trier's own words, ‘that's what we pour all over this film, pushing it for all it's got’. ⁴

The film is formally presented in two parts, the first titled ‘Justine’, the second ‘Claire’. Part 1 depicts Justine's wedding, a costly high society event taking place at a family mansion that seems eerily marooned from the rest of the world. The celebration goes disastrously wrong. A sense of foreboding goes beyond the event, for reasons that will become apparent. But the immediate disruption stems from Justine herself. Despite struggling desperately to feign the joyful bride, she fails to engage with the event in any positive way, and bombshells her own marriage by having sex with one of the guests on the golf course.

As Amy Taubin writes, ‘The best that can be said about such a social catastrophe is that it isn’t the end of the world. And then, of course, it is’. ⁵ Part 2 depicts the real impending disaster – the approach of a previously unknown planet ten times the size of the Earth: Melancholia. It appears as a bright star, then as a second moon, implacably and silently growing as it approaches. Official predictions say that there will be a near miss, a fly-by. They prove incorrect. The location remains around the mansion, but everyone has departed except for the two sisters and Claire's son Leo, and the scenes are mainly set outdoors: on the patio, the golf course, and surrounding parkland. For the remnant and uncompromisingly isolated quasi-nuclear family, there is no wider world to mediate or fill in between them and the oncoming planet. By night, Melancholia begins to outshine the moon, casting a second baleful shadow of its own. As the reality of the Earth's impending destruction looms, Claire is unable to cope. Justine comes into her own, as though she found strength in planet Melancholia as an objective-correlative to her catastrophic sense of the world. Finally, the two women and the child cluster under a laughably inadequate physical and psychological shelter, a tepee Justine and Leo have made of a few uncovered sticks on an exposed grassy mound. They wait as the air begins to blast, and so the film ends. ⁶

The most striking point of comparison between play and film lies in the division of both into two contrasting halves, as has been described in Melancholia. Both works are built on a structural technique of parallel replay epitomised in the shifts from Athens to the woods, from ‘Justine’ to ‘Claire’. The insistence on this division has a dragging effect, as the action is slowed towards pictorial images and emblematic tableaux. These emblematic spaces are displayed in forms appropriate to the genre in both the play and the film, undercutting the activity of plot and action we expect in both, and developing a pictorial and symbolic mode of signification based on pre-existing tropes and schematic oppositions. ⁷

According to Caroline Bainbridge, describing Melancholia:

At the most basic level of the plot, splitting is in operation throughout, as von Trier contrasts sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), their individual experiences of close, personal relationships, and the approach of the deadly planet. The film itself is also in two parts, evoking even in its structure the concept of splitting. ⁸

Timon's decisive exodus from Athens, marked by his vitriolic soliloquy outside the wall in sc. 12, establishes an equally decisive partition of the play. ⁹ As in Melancholia, the first part, a species of failed comedy, is focussed on an extravagant if oddly dysfunctional social gathering in a great house. As in Melancholia again, the second part is a tragedy without hubris, showing alienated figures exposed to the raw forces of nature. Justine tells Leo that the stick shelter is a ‘magic cave’, as though it could offer protection from the devastation wrought by Melancholia. Timon withdraws to his own cave in the woods, a primitive but safe place well away from humanity. As with the film's magic cave, Timon's cave is perhaps the very space in which he will eventually die.

The schematic structure corresponds to other shared forms of dividedness found within both works. They embrace sub-genre (modified comedy/modified tragedy), location (indoors/outdoors), theme (dysfunctionality/disaster), and characterisation (Justine and Claire/Timon the hospitable gift-giver and Timon the misanthrope). ¹⁰

Timon has no sibling comparable to Justine's sister Claire, but we might think of his friends as offering some equivalents, especially as he describes them in terms of siblings as ‘like brothers’ (2.100), meaning both ‘as though brothers’ and ‘equal brothers’. ¹¹ Some of them visit him in the woods before he dies: like Claire, they are final companions. Just as Claire can’t cope with Melancholia, Apemantus is unable to tolerate Timon's bleak vision of human existence. The warrior Alcibiades, like Timon, becomes disillusioned with the Athenian élite, leaves in disgust, and levies an army to raze the city – a physical equivalent of Timon's invective, in function comparable with Melancholia in the film.

These characters, and even Flavius the steward, are all, like Claire, contrapuntal alter egos.

Given the condition of schematic parable in both works, do the audiences see a depiction of presumptively real events or a kind of allegory of the soul? To consider Melancholia first, the film has a confessional aspect; it is based on von Trier's own experience of depression, as he himself has pointed out: ‘I think that Justine is very much me. She is based on my person and my experiences with doomsday prophecies and depression’. ¹² Despite its poignant confessionalism, this is a teasing thing to say, for Justine is reshaped by the presence and approach of the malign planet. If she is very much von Trier, is the planet merely a metaphor? The director's words offer to empty out the narrative facts of the film, revealing them as a symbolic vehicle to express a mental state.

Moreover, the impression that the film is, so to speak, really about melancholia as a state rather than Melancholia as a planet is reinforced by its preoccupation with the representation of melancholy from a long historical perspective (an equivalent in time to the insistence on planetary space). Melancholia, not depression: the film avoids presenting itself as an accurate depiction of the mental disease as described today. It was issued five years after Michael Taylor and Max Fink's influential study advancing ‘Melancholia’ as an umbrella term for depressive illnesses, ¹³ very obviously meditating on the history of depicting melancholy and depression from Shakespeare's time to our own. Emphasising its own status as an artwork rather than a clinical study, the film develops a network of intercultural references to confirm a deep awareness of cultural history, ranging from the title invoking ancient concepts of sadness crystallised by Albrecht Dürer in his engraving ‘Melencolia 1’ (1514), to Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), to Wagner's immersive love-death soundtrack. Shakespeare's Ophelia as depicted by John Everett Millais (1851/52), the modern archetype of the depressed woman, is referenced in the film's camera-facing upper-body image of Justine as bride lying in a shallow water-lily stream holding a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley. ¹⁴ Early in the film, Justine replaces modernist paintings decorating the house with Renaissance prints – Pieter Bruegel's wearily melancholy The Hunters in the Snow (1565) and Caravaggio's melodramatic self-portrait as Goliath in David with the Head of Goliath (1605–10) – as if constructing a gallery expressive of her own periodised melancholy.

The tension between the detachment of dense, historically deep intercultural referencing such as this and the immediate expression of human feeling has its own equivalent in Timon of Athens. For instance, we may consider the meditation on art in the opening scene, with its emblematic properties of poem book, painting, and jewellery, properties immediately comparable with Justine's paintings. The Poet praises the Painter's depiction of Timon: ‘Artificial strife / Lives in these touches livelier than life’ (1.37–8). His words seem to assert that art is both livelier and more life-like than life itself. ¹⁵ This flamboyant and excessive claim on behalf of hyper-reality sounds like the oversell of the marketplace, using a flourish of aesthetic judgement in an instrumental way to generate the expectation of value. The Poet has already commented that ‘To the dumbness of the gesture / One might interpret’ (1.33–4), admitting that the painting, unlike the human it represents, has neither speech nor motion; he suggests that the sense of life is something not inherent in the painting, but brought to it by the viewer and interpreter. Whatever the source of the liveliness, the idea has a deadening effect on life itself.

By way of contrast, Timon's raw outcries in the woods express naked emotion. Muriel Bradbrook remarks forcefully that ‘[t]his rôle touches the very frontiers of the articulate, the borders of what can be known of the state of dereliction, where conflicts are revealed so deep and elemental, so painful and relatively inaccessible, that only through the most lightly established form can they be projected in words’. ¹⁶ And yet, paradoxically, nakedness is itself an artificial emblem: it is emblematic of truth. The naked Timon is a far more convincing depiction of truth to life than the painter's artwork. Taking the terms broadly, the conflict between nakedness and artifice lies at the heart of the play. It is developed in thematic diptychs such as art and nature, civility in society and life in the raw, and also in the generic question as to whether the play presents a pageant or a living depiction of life.

It is far from incidental that in Melancholia Justine too appears naked, lying on rocks surrounded by trees, with the Ophelian brook below her. She exposes herself to the light of the planet Melancholia, as if it were in an erotic embrace, not drowning in water but bathing in pale light: her body glows in and with the luminosity of Melancholia. Timon reminds us that lunar light is itself reflected: ‘her pale fire she snatches from the sun’ (14.437); so too is planetary light. His awareness of extra-terrestrial exchange is that of the naked man. In both works, there is a correspondence between the mental state of the protagonists and the elemental surroundings to which they expose themselves. In the second part of the two works, as though by astrology gone monstrous, the very existence of Justine and Timon seems constituted by those forces. Timon's cynical friend Apemantus describes:

‘Wreakful’ means ‘vengeful’, but the word is a variant of ‘wrackful’, which also means ‘destructive’. ‘Elements’ suggests planetary forces as well as harsh weather. Timon makes himself vulnerable to these elements. He speaks of the sun, the moon, the sea, the earth, all as thieves. He digs in the earth, the primordial act of mankind; he finds roots, the hidden, anchoring part of a plant and the raw substance of pre-agricultural sustenance; he finds gold, an ‘element’ both in the modern chemical sense and in the early modern sense of a raw material. He addresses the earth in foundational terms as ‘Common mother’, mother of all creatures from ‘thy proud child, arrogant man’ to ‘the black toad and adder blue, / The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm, / With all th’abhorrèd births below crisp heaven’ (14.178–84). For Timon, nature consists of baleful celestial bodies. Shakespeare devoted his richest imagery to this comfortless and utterly stripped-back depiction of the world. This, we understand, is the world as it is, a reality too often hidden from view by the walls of cities, by possession of artefacts, and by indoor social gatherings of friends. Timon expresses what von Trier calls, with reference to Justine, her ‘longing for something of true value’, even if that means the rejection of social humanity and the embrace of disaster. ¹⁷

There is, then, a sense in which Melancholia seems to reach out towards Timon, seeking common ground specifically in the area of depressive psychology. Justine makes doomed attempts to join in with the celebration of her wedding. Timon extravagantly plays the lead role in his own party (sc. 2). However, even more than Justine, who has the excuse of the unavoidable planet Melancholia, he is paving his own way to disaster. His cheerfulness is not convincing. Every aspect of his behaviour at his banquet is mis-socialised: his conceited elation, his strained geniality, the hints that he is ambitiously creating a new Utopian community of friends, his determination to be destructively lavish in patronage and gift-giving. He is over-occupied, over-generous, and over-emotional; his ‘eyes cannot hold out water’ as he weeps to make his friends drink (2.102–4), as though emotion were an inexhaustible commodity. These are signs, surely, that, even at the beginning of the play, he is compensating for an underlying sadness. Timon's cheerfulness, like Justine's, is a strained performance, and is overshadowed from the beginning with the threat of collapse into alienated hostility. Unaware, he positively nurtures the disaster that will underpin the triumphant emergence of his hatred, setting up his friends to fail him, and so creating the conditions that will vindicate his rejection of humanity.

In modern terms, over the play as a whole, Timon's behaviour suggests that he suffers from something like bipolarity. This claim is no doubt crudely over-medicalising and anachronistic, and it risks over-limiting both the role in the play and the mental condition reflected in it. However, it corresponds exactly with Apemantus's judgement: ‘The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends’ (14.303–4); ‘When thou wast in thy gilt and thy perfume, they mocked thee for too much curiosity; in thy rags thou know'st none, but art despised for the contrary’ (14.304–6). ‘Curiosity’ here suggests the detached, fastidious, and hyper-human, its opposite being Timon's current animalistic lack of self-care. Neither option is that of the comfortably socialised person.

However, the psychological state of the main character is only part of the story. In Melancholia, the destroying planet is real, affecting Claire and Leo as well as Justine, and it is an expression of Justine's experience of depression, and it alludes to early modern theories of planetary influence on the human mind, and it is a vehicle for invoking melancholy as a surging troubled Wagnernian gloom that saturates the consciousness in ways that go beyond Justine as an individual. The image of the destroying planet is therefore extravagantly over-determined. It is both the event and the response to the event, the mainspring of the plot and a metaphor. Much the same could be said also of the saturated malaise of greed and self-interest in Timon's Athens, which are both preconditions for Timon's doomed generosity and its effects of it. Melancholia helps us to see Timon of Athens better. The either/or with which this article began, a choice between a corrupted world and a corrupted mind, is a false choice. The structural splitting so prominent in both works demands a splitting of response whereby contraries can be held in suspense without resolution.

In Melancholia, this suspense has its inevitable collapse when the planet strikes, with the resolution of Samuel Johnson kicking the stone but with a more devastating effect. The ending affirms the ending that was anticipated in the film's opening sequence, which shows the collision of the two planets as seen from space as an a priori event seen even before humans are made present. ¹⁸ As Jennifer Friedlander puts it, ‘we may say of the interplanetary collision that “before it actually happened, there was already a place opened, reserved for it in fantasy-space.” To be specific, before the fatal, final moment has appeared onscreen, the space of the event was already prepared for us by the dreamily expressive prologue’. ¹⁹ For all the film's artfulness – and its playful manipulation of empirical science – and despite its power as a tone-poem of the mind, the anticipated ending happens, and it consumes not just Justine but the world, the wished-for catastrophe of the depressive perhaps, but made real. If the opening is ‘fantasy’ in that it lies ‘dreamily’ beyond human experience, the ending subjects humans to the unfolding event.

At this point in my own narrative of two gravitationally attracted works, the film Melancholia, unlike von Trier's planet, can recede. Comparatively speaking, Timon is comedic, because, prospectively, the city of Athens survives. Unlike the film, it is premised on a return from the future, ²⁰ as testified in its origin in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, an ancient text revived in the early modern period, telling of events revisited and made pressing here.

By the end of the play, ‘Timon is dead’, as we are told twice (16.3, 17.66). He has in effect been absorbed into the natural elements, to occupy an ‘everlasting mansion’ in a peripheral zone contested by earth and water: ²¹

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,

Who once a day with his embossèd froth

The turbulent surge shall cover. (14.750–3)

The celestial and luminous ‘marbled mansion’ of 14.192, with its echoes of Christ's words in John 14:2–3, ²² has been brought down to earth – and water. Enclosed in it, Timon is constantly washed over. As an eruption of signification, he has become almost extinct. Nevertheless, the end of the play depends on the final outburst articulated in his self-composed epitaph, the impression of which is brought to Athens by a soldier and read out only 12 lines before the play ends. The epitaph closes with ‘A plague consume you wicked caitiffs left’ (17.72). As this curse implies, humanity in some shape remains. The final scenes, far from staging an Apocalypse, stand at the meeting point between residue of the past and anticipation of the future. In Shakespeare, curses tend to be potent. Queen Margaret's in Richard III are just one case in point. The words of Timon's epitaph suggest that the future holds outbreaks of real or metaphorical plague, and that human existence remains perilous. Epidemics are what they are, and have not been eliminated. Disasters move into the past, but disaster remains.

The subdued closing scene offers several keywords that cast their colouration on an otherwise scarcely imagined future. ‘Plague’ is one of them. The others are ‘decimation’ and, in the play's final full speech, the pairing of ‘olive’ and ‘leech’. Alcibiades, having raised an army that offers a real threat to Athens, will not fulfil his mission to destroy the city, as though the death of Timon represented the death of the spirit of annihilation. But there are conditions:

The Senator offers Alcibiades the death of one in ten of the city as though it would be a mercy for him to accept revenge in such a thin sliver. The victims will be chosen by the roll of the dice. If only the dice were agents of justice, the spots on it would then correspond with the moral spots of the guilty. But the analogy proposed in the repetition of ‘spotted’ offers barely a fig leaf of plausible justice, for the roll of the dice represents, definitively, a purely arbitrary process of selection.

Fortunately, Alcibiades seems to be magnanimous:

Those enemies of Timon's and mine own

Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof

Fall, and no more; (17.56–8)

This raises a question: who were Timon's enemies? Apparently, they had included everyone: ‘Destruction fang mankind’ (14.23). ²³ How can Timon's own identification of his enemies as universal be reconciled with Alcibiades's apparent diminution of death, from all, to one in ten, to the few? Uneasy, the play provides no clear exit route from the prospect of annihilation that Timon has proposed. The reintegration of Alcibiades into the city, the affirmation of ‘regular justice’ (17.61), an ambiguous nod to ‘faults forgiven’ (17.80), a vague offer to memorialise a trauma past (‘of whose memory / Hereafter more’, 17.81–2): these are the uncertain nods of the ‘wild’ Alcibiades (14.699, 738) towards building back better.

In the play's final speech, Alcibiades, apparently softened by his reading of Timon's epitaph, proposes:

The repeated words are now ‘each […] other’. They appear first as separated subject and indirect object of the action, ‘make each / Prescribe to other’, then as a conjoining of the terms that collapses any such separation, ‘each other's leech’. The image is surreal: war and peace suck on each other as two leeches in a reciprocal embrace, extracting diseased blood from each other in a closed system that offers no convincing prospect of closure. ‘Destruction fang mankind’ has been rewritten as ‘mankind fang mankind’, even as Alcibiades proclaims peace. War and peace, cure and damage, are locked into one another. Necessarily, Melancholia is here of less relevance than it had been. Instead of universal extinction, the city, as metonymy for human life, will survive, in some sort.

It is entirely possible that the action of bringing Timon's grave inscription to Athens, with the conflicting explanatory narratives of removal of the object versus copying in wax, is contrived precisely so that his last words can be left physically embodied onstage when the actors leave. They would then speak to the audience as a parodic epilogue offering the last judgement of malediction instead of the conventional flattery eliciting applause. The audience's space for relief in remembering that the disturbing events of the play do not belong to life as actually lived is correspondingly narrowed.

Timon makes his own ruin, but there is an inevitable melancholy in high consumerism; ²⁴ that is what makes Timon, and helps to explain him. For Timon, the flip side of excessive consumption is the annihilation of humanity. His desire is to inflict punishment. However, his imagery of natural, geographical, and astronomic theft intimates a universal mechanism that transcends the wishes of him as an individual. For Shakespeare, writing a couple of years after one of the worst outbreaks of plague in early modern London, the image of plague was a natural expression of how a wished-for destruction might happen, as, in more recent times, planetary collision was for von Trier, but a reminder too of material connections between lifestyles and consequences. Whether COVID-19 originated in a wet market or in a laboratory for biochemical research, it is clearly an effect of excessive human intrusion into the biosphere. Whether we read the war in Ukraine as the projection of a malignant mind or a catastrophe in the lives of millions, the degradation of earth and air is part of its meaning. The residue of curse remains in the air around us indefinitely.