‘I’ll beat thee, but I should infect my hands.’

This insult works by refusing contact. Timon is saying: you deserve a beating, but you are so foul that touching you would contaminate me. Even violence would be too much intimacy.

It lands mid-volley in a long insult match. Apemantus has just told Timon his speech is a disease: ‘There is no leprosy but what thou speak’st.’ Timon answers that the disease only appears ‘if I name thee’, then delivers the line.

Apemantus gives as good as he gets. His reply is the wish that his own tongue could rot Timon’s hands off.

Act 4 Scene 3 is set in woods and a cave near the seashore. Timon, who spent the first half of the play giving his fortune away, has been refused by every friend he made and has left Athens to live alone, cursing mankind.

Apemantus is a professional cynic, a philosopher who mocked Timon’s generosity when he was rich. He visits the cave, partly to sneer that Timon is now imitating his own way of life, and the two spend the scene trading abuse. This line is the most quoted blow in the exchange.

Online versions often render the line as ‘I would infect my hands’. The text reads ‘I should infect my hands’. In Shakespeare’s English, should here carries the sense of would: beating you would infect my hands.