ABSTRACT
This essay builds on recent research on hospitality in Shakespeare to argue that the hospitality relationship raises philosophically important questions about what it means to give place to another person. While scenes of banqueting and fellowship dominate much of the opening part of Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens, the play also concerns itself with the ethics and rituals of mourning. Drawing mainly on the work of Jacques Derrida, I interrogate this intersection of hospitality and the mourning process by focusing on the enigmatic symbolism of tears that features throughout the text. The recurring image clusters of water, tears and other libations make Timon appear the embodiment of overflowing generosity. Yet, while seemingly lavish, Timon’s generosity is quickly problematised by economic calculation and, as the drama proceeds, he demands a return from the recipients of his former generosity. The play thus reveals what for Derrida—in his influential reading of Marcel Mauss’s anthropological study of the gift—is the central contradiction of giving: a gift demands reciprocation and so binds us to a logic of calculation. Derrida also argues that hospitality is never unconditional, as we always make demands of our guests and no house, no matter how welcoming, is truly open to everyone. My contention, then, is that the play’s well-known preoccupation with debt should be regarded not merely from an economic standpoint, but also from an ethical one. I demonstrate this by analysing the recurrent emblem of tears and emotional weeping in light of Derrida’s thinking on the gift. Timon’s strange death and burial at the end of the play reveal mourning to be another act of repayment, but one that can never fully be settled.
