In January 1600, Neville was being eaten out of house and home. English gentlemen kept arriving at his embassy in Paris, and he could neither close his gates nor refuse them a place at his table. Writing to Thomas Windebank, he asked for help in securing his return to England:
the burden is to heavye for mee every way, especyally
for my purse: and is like rather to grow every day, then to
diminish, by reason of the continuall repaire over hither of
English gentlemen, to whome I can not shut my gates, nor
refuse my table
The guests, he continued, accepted his hospitality so readily that he had “somtimes a dozen or sixteene at once besides my owne company.” His position required him to keep feeding them:
I will hold out as long as I can for the queenes honnour & mine owne credit, hoping there willbe som compassion taken of me in the end. And ever heereafter my mot shallbe fie vpon honnour that brings no profit.1
Keeping an open table sustained Neville’s standing while consuming the money needed to maintain it. That conflict runs through Timon of Athens. Timon’s creditors can see where his hospitality is taking him. One describes the household in Timon of Athens 2.1:
SENATOR
[…] No porter at his gate
But rather one that smiles and still invites
All that pass by. It cannot hold. No reason
Can sound his state in safety.–Caphis, ho!2
Neville’s “I can not shut my gates” gives the host’s side of the predicament. The obligations of hospitality continue while his means diminish. By the time Timon’s creditors send their servants to collect, the money is gone. In Timon of Athens 3.4:
LUCIUS’ MAN
’Tis deepest winter in Lord Timon’s purse:
That is, one may reach deep enough and yet
Find little.
Honour and credit keep Neville’s table open, but his anger breaks through in “fie vpon honnour that brings no profit.” Timon’s steward Flavius likewise sets the host’s reputation against what it costs to maintain. In Timon 2.2, he repeats the praise Timon’s hospitality purchases, then exposes its dependence on money:
FLAVIUS
[…]
Great Timon, noble, worthy, royal Timon!
Ah, when the means are gone that buy this praise,
The breath is gone whereof this praise is made.
Feast-won, fast-lost. One cloud of winter showers,
These flies are couched.3
Both passages expose the expense concealed inside an honourable reputation. Neville resents having to pay for it; Flavius sees how quickly it will vanish when the money runs out.
From the open table to the forest
Neville’s next sentence turns from the cost of honour to a specific escape: he will leave public life and become a hermit in the forest.
when I com home I will becom an hermit in Ashridge or somwhere in the forrest, and do pennance for the faults I committe heere.
Timon follows that course after his former guests refuse to help him. He repudiates them at a final banquet and leaves Athens. In Timon of Athens 4.1:
TIMON
Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th’ unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.4
“You may see I am not in love with my place,” Neville tells Windebank. His forest retreat is the answer to the crowded embassy: he imagines exchanging a house he cannot close to visitors for a life apart from them.1
The play gives that withdrawal a sustained woodland setting. North’s Timon has a house and yard; Painter’s has a cabin in fields and an adjoining garden. Lucian places him on a stony plot on the slopes of Hymettus and later has him plan a fortified dwelling for himself and his treasure. In the play, the woods and cave become Timon’s refuge from the society he once entertained.5
Neville’s complaint already brings the pressures and the imagined escape together. He cannot shut his gates; honour requires him to bear the expense; resentment follows; and he longs to disappear into the forest. The letter moves in a few sentences through the conflict the play develops at length. Its force lies in how closely the host’s predicament, anger and desired retreat belong together.
Neville wrote the letter in January 1600, before the usual dating of Timon to about 1604–06.6
Poverty and contempt
The cost of the embassy did not end when Neville came home. On 14 January 1609, seeking Salisbury’s help, he said that his French service had cost him about £4,000 of his own money. With many children to provide for, he had struggled to conceal his necessities:
although poverty be no vice, especially not growing by any disorder of a mans own, but by service imposed, yet whatsoever the cause is, the effect is contempt for the most part.7
In Timon of Athens 4.2, the Second Servant describes how Timon’s former companions slip away as his fortune disappears, leaving him to walk alone:
SECOND SERVANT
[…]
With his disease of all-shunned poverty,
Walks, like contempt, alone.8
Neville’s letters give this conflict a personal history. In 1600, honour kept his table open while he wished himself a hermit in the forest. In 1609, still burdened by the cost of that service, he feared the contempt that poverty brought. Timon gives dramatic form to the same bitter relationship between hospitality, honour and money: the man who pays to sustain his standing finds that his standing depends on his continuing ability to pay.
Notes and sources
Henry Neville to Thomas Windebank, Paris, 10 January 1599/1600, The National Archives, SP 12/274, f.15; State Papers Online, Gale MC4304580829. TNA piece record. Transcription by John O’Donnell. Manuscript line breaks are retained in the opening block quotation; the subsequent extracts follow O’Donnell’s transcription without reproducing manuscript lineation. The final short quotation regularizes its initial capital. The letter does not identify which forest.↩︎
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 2.1, Folger Shakespeare Library. The speaker is the Senator, a creditor, not Timon’s steward. Shakespeare quotations retain Folger’s printed line breaks, including in prose speeches. Bold marks verbal or conceptual correspondences, distinguished in the accompanying prose.↩︎
Shakespeare, Timon, 2.2, Folger, Flavius on praise bought by hospitality; and 3.4, Folger, Lucius’s Man. The following scene of renewed hospitality is 3.6.↩︎
Shakespeare, Timon, 4.1, Folger.↩︎
Plutarch, Life of Marcus Antonius, trans. Thomas North (first published 1579), the Timon digression: North’s Timon passage, transcribed by the Pulter Project, citing the 1579 edition, sig. 4P4r–v. North describes the fig tree in Timon’s yard and his proposed building there; Painter describes a cabin in fields and an adjoining garden. Lucian’s opening and the speeches surrounding the discovery of the gold place Timon on the lower slopes of Hymettus, digging a stony plot, and planning a small fortified dwelling. William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure, first tome, novel 28, pp.112–113 in the Jacobs/Haslewood edition. Lucian, Timon the Misanthrope, especially the opening account of Timon’s expenditure and abandonment; H. W. and F. G. Fowler’s translation, The Works of Lucian of Samosata, I (Oxford, 1905). The Fowler translation is used to describe the classical dialogue, not proposed as a source available to Shakespeare. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s source account identifies North as the main source and Lucian, through translation, as a possible additional source. The extent and route of Lucian’s influence remain uncertain. A further brief reference occurs in Le vite de filosofi cavate da Laertio et altri (Venice: Gioacchino Brugnolo, 1602), p.66: the life headed “Timon Niceo” distinguishes its philosopher from the Athenian who refused human company. This edition is recorded in the 1780 Billingbear catalogue and identified with the surviving Audley End volume, English Heritage object 81035055. The illustrated biography concerns the philosopher, not the Athenian misanthrope; the catalogue does not establish when the family acquired it. Anonymous, Timon: A Play, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Shakespeare Society, 1842), 5.3, p.85, and 5.5, p.91; digitized edition. Both printed pages were checked against the scan. At p.85 Timon chooses a secluded place shaded by cypress trees; at p.91 Eutrapelus urges him to “forsake the woods.” The manuscript is conventionally dated about 1600; see the Royal Collection catalogue. Dyce’s introduction discusses, without establishing, its possible use by Shakespeare. A woodland retreat is thus also present in this separate dramatic treatment; the comparison with Neville does not depend on the setting being unprecedented.↩︎
Royal Shakespeare Company, Timon: dates and sources, for stylistic dating to about 1604–06 and the unsettled textual history.↩︎
Henry Neville to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, 14 January 1609 (1608/9), The National Archives, SP 14/43, f.29; transcription by John O’Donnell, checked against the manuscript. Spelling is modernized here; manuscript lineation is not retained. The letter and its £4,000 claim are calendared in Mary Anne Everett Green, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, James I, 1603–1610 (1857), p.486, no.22 (British History Online). This letter follows the play’s usual composition dating; it documents Neville’s continuing concern with poverty and reputation.↩︎
William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 4.2.16–17, Folger Shakespeare Library, Second Servant. The association was not unique: in Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine tragicall discourses (1567), the story of Perillo likewise connects poverty with contempt (EEBO-TCP A03432). The comparison here concerns Neville’s experience of financial loss and social standing, rather than the rarity of the two words.↩︎