James I and Timon of Athens

James I and Timon ofAthens David Bevington and David L. Smith Timon explores the lethal ambiguities underlying the gifts and loans through which power was brokered in the courts of Elizabeth and James. —Coppélia Kahn1 It might be argued that Shakespeare's Timon ofAthens presents a malign version ofthe dangers of prodigality, fitting a time when the monarch lived on credit and depended on others to manage his affairs. —Jonathan Goldberg2 Kahn and Goldberg have laid before us the proposition that Timon ofAthens needs to be understood in the context of Jacobean court politics, along with other plays like Measurefor Measure , Macbeth, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and Henry VIII, for which similar claims have been made. Whereas Goldberg mentions Timon only briefly in his absorbing study James I and the Politics of Literature, his argument that representation provides the essential link between politics and literature in the period has important implications for Timon. Kahn provides a substantial and fascinating analysis of the play in relation to Jacobean patronage , stressing the immense scale on which the Jacobean court indulged in "socially coded gift-giving." King and courtiers alike spent beyond their means, borrowing heavily without realistic hope of being able to repay. Kahn's anecdotes do indeed resonate with suggestive parallels to Shakespeare's misanthropic play about extravagant borrowing and ingratitude. The present authors are especially indebted to Kahn's article and agree with its premises and conclusions. But whereas her methodological interest is in bringing together New Historicism, feminist criticism, and psychoanalytic theory to explore Timon's infantile need for identifying with a maternal but fickle figure of inexhaustible supply, our method focuses more on historical documentation and the vexed critical problem of determining whether it is possible to argue for a topical correlation between fiction and reality. One author of the present essay is a historian, the other a literary scholar. We have been trained in ways that 56 David Bevington and David L. Smith57 ought to be compatible, and yet acknowledge that the cross-over between the disciplines is notoriously difficult. Our hope is that we can at least establish in some detail the richness of materials available for such a comparison between the historical record and the play. Our argument for a meaningful correlation between play and historical event rests ultimately on extensive parallels and chronological coincidences rather than on verbal similarities or on fictional details that can be explained only by topical identification . (This is true of Goldberg's and Kahn's arguments as well.) The parallels apply to many of James's courtiers as well as to the King; we focus on James not because he was unique but because he was indisputably the most visible and influential practitioner of large-scale extravagance. Granted these difficulties, we will argue that the parallel situations are pointedly similar in important respects: the epic scale of the giving, the lack of awareness on the part of the giver that disaster is lurking despite repeated warnings, and (as Kahn stresses) the complex and sometimes unflattering nature of the motivation for extravagance. We begin with the history, hoping to show that extravagance was not only a fact of life in James's early years (something that has long been known), but was the subject of intense political debate at the time when Timon was written. I When James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne in 1603 as James I, the English people breathed a sigh of relief to be governed still by a Protestant. In the opening weeks of his reign, "nothing was talked of but the religion, virtue, wisdom, learning, justice and many other most noble and worthy praises ofKing James."3 From the time ofhis accession, contemporaries such as Bishop Andrew Willets frequently likened James to Solomon ,4 and he was indeed a major intellectual in his own right. The learned author of the treatise Daemonologie (1597), he had also shown himself well versed in the theories of divine-right monarchy and covenant theology in works such as The Trew Law ofFree Monarchies (1598) and the Basilikon Doron (1603).5 He was an internationalist eager to establish a reputation as a peacemaker : James's personal motto was "beati...