Would You Still Love Me If I Were Broke?

William Shakespeare, Karl Marx, and Timon of Athens

Last week, I saw Sport for Jove’s production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with some friends. We decided we’d eat dinner at 6pm at a restaurant opposite the theatre and then walk across the road before showtime at 7.30. Having booked a table for three, I arrived at the restaurant shortly before our reservation and, having secured our spot, expected a bit of time to myself enjoying the ambience and some light reading. At ten past six, my friends called and told me they were going to be late – why don’t I come and have dinner at their place while they get ready? With faultless argumentative logic, I said that I was already at the restaurant, which – I thought prudent to remind them – was opposite the theatre.

My friends arrived at quarter to seven.

Preparing to commit double homicide with a bread knife, I was talked out of my murderous rage by my would-be victims who pointed out – correctly – that killing them would upstage the brilliant production going on across the road. Reluctantly, I agreed. Assassinating my friends would be terrible manners, especially after they offered to pay for dinner.

We made it to the theatre without bloodshed. Maybe it was the cold, maybe it was the glass of wine, maybe it was the rush of endorphins accompanying my anger – but I was excited to see the play. I’d never seen, never even heard of, a production of Timon of Athens. My excitement was tinged with a curiosity about how any troupe would perform this.

When I first read it, I was sceptical it would ever work on stage, and indeed – though it was likely written around 1606 – there’s no record of it being performed before the Long Parliament closed the theatres in 1642.¹ The reasons are clear: the psychological complexity, the warmth of loving relationships, the richness of humankind – all the merits we associate with Shakespeare are absent. The characters are merely types; the language sententious. The play is awkward, rough, possibly unfinished. Timon has no wife, no son, no daughter. Of all Shakespeare’s major characters, he is the most alone, and the stiff negativity of the play’s second half makes it hard to warm to.

So how do you bring this cold and pessimistic play to life? Director Margaret Thanos leaned into the frigidity, the dazzling excess, the moments of satiric humour. The strategy worked brilliantly: I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed it; I’ve never heard such a raucous applause at an intermission.

It starts with the anonymous “Poet, Painter, Jeweller, Merchant, and others” and their stiff courtesies: “good day, sir” “I am glad you’re well.” They regard as their patron Timon (white suit) who hosts huge banquets and generously gives money to everyone attending. Everyone is greedily festive except the cynical philosopher Apemantus (black suit) who drinks water while everyone else is having alcohol. The production does a great job showing us gaudy excess: strippers, champers, a bathtub full of cash. The merry centrepiece is a throne-sized disco balls-and-cock accompanied by dancers in gold leotards – all paid for by Timon, all on credit.

Apemantus provides cynical commentary, revealing that Timon’s banquet is a grotesque parody of the Eucharistic feast: “O you gods, what a number of men eat Timon, and he sees 'em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man's blood…”

And Timon’s steward Flavia (Flavius in Shakespeare’s text but here played by a matronly Greek yiayia) tells the audience she sees her master’s self-destructive generosity but is powerless to stop it:

What will this come to?
He commands us to provide, and give great gifts,
And all out of an empty coffer:
Nor will he know his purse, or yield me this,
To show him what a beggar his heart is,
Being of no power to make his wishes good:
His promises fly so beyond his state
That what he speaks is all in debt; he owes
For every word: he is so kind that he now
Pays interest for 't…

She warns him that the bootlickers and toadies praising him are interested only in his money: “Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise, / The breath is gone whereof this praise is made…” And, with Shakespeare’s incredible gift of compression, alerts him that praise won by buying meals will quickly pass: “feast-won, fast-lost”.

So how does the profligate party boy respond to these warnings?

He ignores them.

When Flavia – after about a million attempts – eventually convinces him that the money has run out, that the debts must be repaid, he rebukes her for not warning him earlier (a typically excellent psychological insight) but finally – finally! – understands he’s ruined: “you tell me true.” The stark monosyllables suggest that maybe he knew all along. He admits his mistake: “Unwisely, not ignobly, have I given.” Nevertheless, he remains calmly confident he’ll get the help he needs: “I am wealthy in my friends.”

Before us on stage, happening simultaneously yet illuminated one-by-one with alternating spotlights, the “friends” who received Timon’s gifts and dined sumptuously at his halls now reject his pleas with excuses flimsy and comic.

Sunbathing in a G-string, Stavros (Sempronius in Shakespeare’s text) is indignant that he is asked last. Had Timon asked him first, he would have happily given him three times the amount he’s requesting. But as he was the first to receive gifts from Timon:

It shows but little love or judgment in him:
Must I be his last refuge…

And does he think so backwardly of me now,
That I'll requite it last? No.

Then Timon morphs. As the creditors surround his door, as all mankind has shown him an “iron heart,” he rages. He holds a final banquet and calls his guests “Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears…” As the dishes are brought out, he gives the command, “uncover, dogs, and lap,” revealing nothing but warm water and stones. In Shakespeare’s text, Timon throws the water in their faces but in this production he memorably smears them with shit. With grandiloquence he proclaims: “Burn, house! sink, Athens! henceforth hated be / Of Timon man and all humanity!”

He flees Athens to live in a cave. Alone, he calls for anarchy:

…Piety, and fear,
Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest, and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live!

He ends with a prayer:

And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low!
Amen.

It takes extraordinary acting to pull this off, and Damien Ryan does an outstanding job. Not only does the actor need to carefully navigate this tonal shift, he also needs to show that, in some ways, Timon hasn’t changed at all. He’s still proud. Timon retains his egotism: exceptional in generosity; eminent in hatred.

His white suit exchanged for dirty rags, Timon digs for food but finds gold and talks about its omnipotence:

…Thus much of this will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! why this? What this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men's pillows from below their heads:
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless the accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee and approbation
With senators on the bench: this is it
That makes the wappen'd widow wed again;
She, whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To the April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind…

And later, ruefully:

… thou visible god,
That solder'st close impossibilities,
And makest them kiss! that speak'st with every tongue,
To every purpose! O thou touch of hearts!
Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue
Set them into confounding odds, that beasts
May have the world in empire.

Timon’s speech is not just a bitter rant from a social reject; it’s a diagnosis – a prescient economic argument that would re-appear centuries later. His disgust predicts Karl Marx’s critique of capital as a force that inverts all social and moral relations. In fact, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Karl Marx quoted this very passage and wrote that “Shakespeare excellently depicts the real nature of money.” Marx then riffs on Timon’s speech:

That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless? Besides, he can buy clever people for himself, and is he who has power over the clever not more clever than the clever? Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary?

…

Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

Timon is visited by Alcibiades and two (literal) gold-digging whores, disappointingly adapted to soldiers in this production. It’s a mistake because Shakespeare – the financially responsible son of a leatherworker – exposes that fiscal exchange replaces genuine social bonds, that the unnatural “breeding” of usury replaces procreative sexual intimacy, that lust for money is as vain and damaging as the lust for bodies.

As usual, Shakespeare was responding to his circumstances: in the early seventeenth century, as England was becoming an international trading power and tastes grew more refined, the credit market expanded to fulfill the desires of noblemen wishing to impress peers and subordinates with their bounty. The worst offender was King James himself, whose expensive gift-giving caused deficits in the Royal Exchequer.

But, as usual, Shakespeare knows us better than we know ourselves. Which society more than ours proves more clearly that money lends people unearned prestige and virtue? Nowhere is the equation of wealth and honour more nakedly and shamelessly paraded. On social media, Timons abound, but we call them “influencers” – flaunting fancy dinners, designer goods, and luxury holidays; buying attention and authority till the credit runs out and the followers vanish.

A recent TikTok trend had women asking their men “would you still love me if I were a worm?” But “would you still love me if I were broke?” is a much more revealing question. We don’t ask it – not because we fear the answer, but because we know it: love keeps receipts.

1. Though this is fairly common given how scanty the surviving documents are.