Shakespeare in Hate by Peter Kishore Saval

Author:Peter Kishore Saval
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

PAINTER: I am glad you’re well.

POET: I have not seen you long: how goes the world?

PAINTER: It wears, sir, as it grows.

POET: Ay, that’s well known. For—

How should we read the tone of these lines? Are they only conversational? Are they friendly? The key, for Tambling and for me, is in Painter’s response: “It wears, sir, as it grows.” The line itself expresses weariness – “it wears” – and implies criticism, but of a kind so unchallenging that the Poet marks it as “well known.” The tone suggests a boredom and a pessimism about the world in which even a criticism is well known and has very little effect. As Tambling puts it: “The play has begun with boredom and exhaustion in the Painter and the Poet, and their cynicism, which aligns them with the Senators. It continues with Apemantus’s melancholic complaints.”24 I like Tambling’s implicit connection between the cynicism of the other Athenian citizens and that of Apemantus. The mood of cynicism and exhaustion helps explain why the citizens can listen to the harangues of Apemantus and not be upset by his criticisms. The implication is that everyone in the city already knows the truths that Apemantus is leveling. Their knowing participation gives them the alibi of “self-knowledge,” or (worse yet) “self-awareness” that allows them to compromise knowingly. In interpreting the Poet’s statement “It wears, sir / As it grows,” as the language of fatigue, or wearing out, Tambling is right that exhausted cynicism is exactly the opposite of Timon’s wish, that “as Timon grows, his hate may grow / To the whole race of mankind, high and low (4. 1. 39–40).”25 The distinction between Timon’s growing hatred and the Poet and Painter’s weary cynicism helps to explain a particular crux in the play, when the Poet delivers these lines to the painter while he is gazing at a jewel:

When we for recompense have praised the vil’d

It stains the glory of that happy verse

Which aptly sings the good. (1. 1. 14–16)

Many editors, including that of the New Arden, have marked the speech as an aside. The assumption behind that editorial judgment is that such a criticism ought to have provoked some reaction in the Merchant, whereas in the play it doesn’t. Yet the failure to provoke a reaction is likely the point. Angus Fletcher observes, “the elevated moral reflection has no effect on the Merchant, who continues to scrutinize the jewel in a professionally expert manner,”26 Precisely that fact, Fletcher points out, makes the line funny. The openness of the Poet’s moral criticism, combined with its total lack of effect, reinforces the atmosphere of cynicism. The Poet may write poems of moral criticism in which he does not believe, and his moral point can be met with total indifference by the painter.

That contrast is precisely the kind we see between Timon and Apemantus. Apemantus in this play is full of angry denunciations against the world in which he finds himself. Yet in those denunications he somehow seems not to risk anything, or to lay himself bare in any way.

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