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Summary
A Senator discourses on Timon’s unending bounty, unable to believe he can keep being so generous without running out of cash. Timon’s money seems to reproduce itself, and his goods appear to multiply as if under some magical spell. He can’t believe that Timon’s financial situation is sustainable. As it happens, Timon owes him money, so he calls for his servant, Caphis, and sends him to Timon’s house to demand his debt be paid. He instructs Caphis not to take no for an answer and to insist on getting the payment, for the Senator has immediate need of gold.
Meanwhile, standing in front of Timon’s house, Flavius marvels at his master’s spending. Timon takes no account of his expenses, he says, and no one was ever so careless in the pursuit of being kind. He predicts that Timon will refuse to hear anything about his expenses until he comes to misfortune. Caphis, Varro’s servant, and Isidore’s servant enter. They encounter each other and find they are all there for the same purpose: to ask Timon for the money he owes their respective masters. Timon enters with Alcibiades, and the three servants make their case to Timon. Timon asks them to come back the next day, but they reply that they have been put off in a similar manner on repeated occasions. Timon asks Flavius why he is beset with people asking him for money, so Flavius asks the servants to leave them alone briefly while he explains the situation to Timon.
As Flavius and Timon go off together, the servants are left alone when they notice the approach of Apemantus and a Fool. The three servants bombard Apemantus and the Fool with absurd questions. The Fool finds out that the servants work for usurers, or moneylenders, and announces that he works for one too. He tells a riddle about how people come to borrow money from usurers, arriving sadly and departing happy, but people who visit his mistress have the opposite emotions. Recognizing that the Fool’s mistress runs a brothel, the servants laugh and agree that the Fool isn’t completely foolish.
Flavius and Timon return, and Flavius temporarily dismisses the servants. Timon asks Flavius why he never told him about his diminished expenses, but Flavius says that Timon refused to listen whenever he tried to alert him. Timon orders his land to be sold, but Flavius says it has already been mortgaged. Flavius says that everyone loved Timon and his generosity, but now that the means to buy their praise and fondness is gone, he predicts that his friends will disappear as well. Timon is shocked that Flavius would suggest his friends might abandon him. Intending to prove Flavius wrong, he calls for three servants. He sends one servant to each of three of his friends, ordering them to ask for a loan.
After Timon sends the servants off, Flavius says that he had already tried to take out new loans. He used Timon’s signet ring to authorize an earlier request for a loan, but his friends were unwilling to help. When Timon refuses to believe it, Flavius assures him that all three friends answered in the same manner: they are sorry about his unfortunate situation, but they can’t help. Timon replies that these men have a history of ingratitude, but not his friend Ventidius, whom Timon just had released from prison, and whose father recently died, leaving him newly wealthy. Timon asks Flavius to go to Ventidius and ask for a loan. Timon commands him never to imagine that his fortunes could sink, but Flavius remarks that this is the illusion of generosity: philanthropists wrongly imagine that everyone else is equally generous.
Analysis
In act 2, Timon’s downfall looms as his creditors decide in concert to call his debts due. As we learn in these scenes, Timon has not only spent all his own money, but he’s also borrowed heavily from several others. It is this borrowing that has enabled the illusion that Timon’s bounty is inexhaustible. The Senator in scene 1 remarks on this mystery, in which Timon seems to have a magical ability to make wealth produce more of itself. In this way, Timon’s generosity appears as the more virtuous opposite of usury. The term usury refers to the practice of lending money that is to be paid back with interest. Usury has a similarly magical capacity to produce money from money, which is why its earliest uses were suspected of involving demonic powers. Timon’s generosity is linked to usury in the sense that his wealth seems mysteriously to produce more wealth. However, it’s also important to note that his ability to be generous is underwritten by those usurers who have lent him money, and who now come to claim their debts and make money on their money.
Of course, the key question is, Where will the money come from? Timon has already spent everything he’s borrowed, and since his land is all mortgaged, he has no equity to take out more loans. But despite being on the brink of bankruptcy, Timon is sure that his friends will come through. He therefore remains emotionally invested in the philosophy of friendship he first articulated in act 1. Recall that Timon’s understanding of friendship is rooted in an economy of gift-giving. Rather than being about immediate exchanges of favors, he wants to be generous with others while believing that if and when he finds himself in need, they will reciprocate with generosity of their own. Put differently, and in terms more familiar to modern readers, Timon believes in a gift economy. In a gift economy, value isn’t strictly regulated, and material wealth flows between people in ways that secure their social bonds. But as Timon is quickly finding out, he lives in a rather different economic reality where material wealth is closely accounted for, and exchange is a strict matter of tit-for-tat. The conflict between two economic modes is now leading to his downfall.
Although one of the play’s major plot elements relates to the fickleness of people whom Timon believed were his friends, it’s curious to note how Shakespeare highlights the economic undercurrents of Timon’s crisis. It is true that his friends don’t reciprocate his generosity and thereby prove that they were never really his friends, as Apemantus has been saying all along. But it is also true that all these men are moneylenders, so their first priority is the growth of their own wealth. Timon powerfully critiques this way of operating in the world when he implies that these men somehow aren’t fully alive: “Their blood is caked, ‘tis cold, it seldom flows” (2.2.218). Shakespeare slyly echoes this critique of moneylenders when he places usury in relation to prostitution. He does this through the Fool, who claims that his mistress is also a usurer, though it's clear that she’s actually a “bawd,” meaning a brothel owner. Apemantus makes a similar link between the bawd and the usurer when he refers to the debt collectors as “bawds between gold and want” (2.2.62). As these examples indicate, the moral dimension of moneylending is very much in question in this play.
