Shakespeare's Critique of Friendship in Timon of Athens

Abstract

This essay argues that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens dramatizes Timon's four types of human relationship in terms of both the possibilities and impossibilities of friendship. It further claims that the play uncovers the complexities and ambiguities inherent in the practice or ‘malpractice’ of friendship. Timon's relationship with what I call “false friends” is the first case in point. Timon takes them for his true friends, but they betray him. This mistake, however, is not something that gullible, giving Timon can only make. Rather, it is a structural problem of friendship within which his own experience with “false friends” is possible. Anyone who desires to pursue friendship would face the same dilemma as Timon has. Betrayal, in other words, is the very condition of friendship. Or to say the least, it is the only way to experience the possibilities and impossibilities of friendship at the same time. Timon's three other types of relationship with Steward, Alcibiades, and Apemantus respectively can be understood in this context. For instance, Timon's relationship with Steward is complex and ambiguous. Whether or not Steward is Timon's true and faithful friend depends on one's perspective. Shakespeare seems to intentionally open both possibilities in order for the audience to see the ways in which the complexities and ambiguities operate in the name of friendship. In a similar fashion, the bard creates his own version of Alcibiades from a historical figure presumably for the sake of his dramatic purpose. In doing so, Shakespeare seems to suggest that Alcibiades's apparent or dubious acts of friendship may or may not fulfill his alleged purposes. One can interpret them one way or another, to simply put. This is why Timon's relationship with Apemantus can be addressed in the light of friendship as well. When true friendship is always already a matter of the future tense in both Shakespeare's dramatic world and the world in which we live, Apermantus's unfriendly, or even antagonistic relationship with Timon can be seen as a quasi ideal case in which deception and falsity in the guise of friendship might be hardly at work. Perhaps Apermantus is Timon's true, if not best, friend in an ironical sense. The tragedy, of course, is that Timon's relationship with him ought to be understood only in terms of the self and the other, which absolutely resist any possibilities of unity. Their friendship, in other words, is an ironic and paradoxical case in which something is possible only by negating itself. To conclude, this play hardly dramatizes exemplary friendships as best shown in relationships between Hamlet and Horatio, Antonio and Basanio, and Prince Hal and Falstaff, but it nevertheless successfully examines the fundamental nature of friendship.