The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (11 page)

Dana and Doug kissed when they were ten, I learned with the long straw running from my mouth down into the plastic tub of alcohol. “My first try,” she slurred. “And I told him—well, I made him guess. I talked about the news on TV about the UFO, and I let on that I knew how it happened, and then we kissed again, and then I think I told him all of it.” So was she giving him a secret in order to win a kiss, making her the john and Doug the gigolo? “No, he wanted to kiss me.” So did she let the secret slip and then hope to seal his secrecy with a kiss, making her the incompetent sexual manipulator? “No, it wasn’t an accident exactly.” So Doug snatched a secret by kissing her into indiscretion, making him his father’s agent and her the poor trusting sap? “No”: Dana was a women’s studies major, and so she described the event as her futile attempt at some sort of “idealized, media-transmitted, societally endorsed, heterosexual intimacy, secrets and flesh co-opted simultaneously.” This seems the saddest of all interpretations.

“How could you let Dad think it was me?”

“He never thought it was you.”

He’d openly blamed me for years, and continued to associate me with any betrayal he suffered for years to come. That association spread so that every time he was arrested, some part of him wondered if I’d blown the whistle on him “again.” Dana’s blithe wishful thinking—
he never thought it was you
—was impenetrable. She refused to see how I could take this badly, refused to admit she should have told him the truth.

Her resistance to reality on this point, her insistence that Dad somehow just “knew” truth and always acted in our interest, was a blister waiting to burst.

A
BSENTEE PARENTS DESERVE
their kids’ anger. Kids have to get mad to get over it, and if they hurt their parent in the process, that is the healing astringent necessary to everyone. As with many things, Dana was better and faster at this than I was.

Back in 1979, a month after my father began serving that ten-year sentence, fifteen-year-old Dana finally staged her only adolescent rebellion, expressing her pain at Dad’s incompetent wonder-working and abandonment of her. Her attack may not impress anyone who’s given their parents a truly rough ride, but you have to judge her act in context. Considering that her own personality (gay) was already an unwilling blow against parental expectations, she had never felt the need to “act out,” all rebellious energies spent on navigating a world that contained a fair amount of hostility to her. But now she aggressively struck at our father, harder than I could have, because she was braver and more honest, because he loved her more, and because what she did was so piercingly fired at him and him alone.

She became an anti-Stratfordian.

She consciously chose to believe, or tried to believe, or at least pretended to believe—and then feigned amazement at Dad’s anguish—that the author of the works of “William Shakespeare” could not conceivably have been William Shakespeare, the semieducated part-time actor/part-time real estate speculator son of a provincial glove-maker from Stratford-upon-Avon, that no such person could have composed the greatest works of English literature, embodying the finest of all psychology, storytelling, artistry, linguistic brilliance, and so forth.

She came home from the Minneapolis public library with first one, then stacks of anti-Stratfordian books, each proving that Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford had written Shakespeare’s plays and then decided for obscure reasons to pretend they hadn’t. She studied the loony ciphers and the theories of angry outcasts, researched grammar school curricula in Elizabethan England, cross-referenced what those kids learned with what the playwright
showed he knew in his plays, read dictionaries of falconry. She spent more time on this project than on her schoolwork and soon dropped her efforts at sculpture. She wrote letters to our father that she would revise and annotate and read aloud to me, to double-check their tone before mailing them. “I don’t want to sound
angry
,” she claimed sweetly as she composed letter after letter explaining to the friendless convict that his lifelong idol was a fraud and a loser (implicitly like him). The correspondence shuttled quickly back and forth, Dana citing her new books, reading as fast as she could to stymie him (with his limited library privileges).

“Dana, before I go into all the factual errors and half-truths behind every single one of these theories, I have to tell you that at the bottom of all of these notions is a mean idea: only the rich, only the university-educated or the noble can have an imagination, can feel empathy. I know
you
do not believe that, but you are reading books by people who do, and I want you to know where their hearts lie in this. Besides the obvious snobbery, does your own experience confirm it? What do you make of the well-educated rich in your world? In your school? In their houses on Lake Minnetonka? Are they more imaginative and empathetic than you, for example? Do they convince you of this theory?”

“Dad. You are missing the point and clouding the issue. I am sure a drunk street person
could
have written
Hamlet
, if he had the right tools. All I’m saying is: your guy didn’t have the tools. He didn’t leave any books in his will. Kind of weird for the greatest writer in human history.”

Dad replies: “Many people did not leave books in their will. Bacon, who some of your people credit for writing the plays, did not leave them either. That does not mean he did not read books or write them. It just means he did not distinguish them in his will any more than he itemized his socks. If I were to die tomorrow, I would not have a private library to distribute.”

“Well, exactly. You’re a criminal. That’s different. Nobody is claiming you should leave behind evidence of being the greatest writer in the world. But your man is supposedly reading Ovid and Holinshed and Seneca and Chaucer and Terence. Not bad if he can’t
speak Latin very well and dies without any books.
You’re
not expected to leave a will to anyone.
You’re
not expected to do anything.”

Tone slipped away from her a bit on that one. She did her best to keep the indictments disguised as literary criticism, waiting for his literary discussion in response to amount to an apology to her. She saved all the letters. I don’t see an apology in any of them, but maybe it’s in ciphers. (It’s also worth noting that anti-Stratfordian theories in some sense “expand the world’s possibilities,” but my father certainly couldn’t bear them.)

It was around this time that Sil and Mom had to sit Dana down for the talk about sliding grades and notes home from concerned teachers.

I still admire Dana for all of this. She fought Dad on his own terms and hit him where it hurt. She took chances. I was just sullen, and so required much longer to achieve a safe and healthy adult indifference and separation, and I
still
couldn’t make it last. She stormed into battle. She threw herself into something, this massive research project: she had charts up on her bedroom walls, like a Mafia investigator, showing the whereabouts of all her suspects in different years (“1599: de Vere is all over London—why???”), and she was obviously letting the unimportant stuff sag. I was much too worried about the unimportant stuff—grades, college applications—which is why I outperformed Dana in school, though she was, by any real measure, quite a bit smarter than I. False modesty, O coy memoirist? Not at all. Let’s call in the real greatest writer in English literature: “My dear Watson, I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one’s self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one’s own powers.”

Dana wasn’t a fool. She soon saw how feeble all the anti-Stratfordian arguments are, but she wouldn’t give up. Like all anti-Strats, she was driven by something other than logic. Unlike them, she had a first-class mind and enough creativity to develop her ideas along unexpected paths. Since none of the existing theories worked, she devised her own. Forced to deal with school, she channeled her anger at Dad (and his playwright friend) into her academic work and produced
a series of papers and extra-credit assignments that pulled her out of the ditch she’d dug herself into over the previous months. A clever revision of those papers carried her through her college application essays, and she still recycled and refined her work even through some freshman courses at Brown. (The part about the banking system over centuries became a freestanding paper in her Economics 1 class, and mine as well, with my thanks.)

Whenever a teacher pointed out particularly weak scholarship or blatant wishful thinking (“Really, Miss Phillips, what possible source do you have for the bet?” or “Dana, I think you’ve gotten ahead of yourself here” or “Why would Shakespeare agree to that?” or “If you’re right, do you stand to make a fortune in the year 2014?”), she revised and tried to smooth the newest wrinkle.

Her complete project was a strange and beautiful hybrid of historical research, literary interpretation, parody, and outright fiction. She cast her anger into ammunition and—never denying that she loved the plays—she opened a withering barrage of ordnance upon the man credited with writing them and the convict who stood next to him, claiming special friendship.

Starting with a close analysis of the use of
you
versus
ye
, she argued that a preference for one in some plays but not others could not be explained by fashion or formality or topic. They seemed to vary by personal choice. “There is only one conceivable explanation,” she asserted with the barking dogma of the frothing scholar. “The plays were written by more than one person.”

While many canonical Shakespeare plays were collaborations (
Pericles, Henry VI, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen
, etc.), Dana’s view was starker: “Two separate men wrote all of these plays, individually, and, for reasons we will explore, allowed an obscure actor to take the credit.” This was a unique argument, as far as I know. All the other revisionists handed out Shakespeare’s work to
one
of the fanciful alternatives. Dana had a dynamic duo working to write “Shakespeare.”

Her theory is, in the end, unprovable, of course, but she insisted (as all anti-Strats do) that it is no more unprovable than the absurd patsy we call “Shakespeare.” Her version goes like this:

In 1589, or a little earlier if necessary, a nobleman—Edward de
Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford will do just fine—and a Jewish moneylender found they had something in common besides the string of debts that bound one to the other. The earl and his moneylender’s son were both poets, and neither was able to participate fully in the booming theatrical world of Elizabeth’s London. It was beneath the earl to throw himself into rehearsals and company business (though he did write a few things under his own name for court), and the Jewish boy, at age twenty-three or twenty-four, desperate to be a part of it all, was, of course, unacceptable in that milieu.

The earl was a Cambridge man, and the banker’s boy was a tireless autodidact, spending his devoted and kindly father’s ducats on a beautiful library, where he loved Ovid best of all but read everything an Elizabethan gentleman ought.

The earl was not going to have an open friendship with his Jewish banker, but was humane (or financially needy) enough that when the moneylender asked him to read a few of his son’s verses, the earl condescended to agree. The father gratefully showed him a poem, the first scene of a play perhaps, and, in his own variety of condescension, granted some leniency on the terms of a bill coming due. The earl read the sample and was immediately aware that he was reading the work of someone with great ability. He summoned the father back and invited him to bring his son.

A strange and rivalrous friendship was born. The earl and the Jewish youth read each other’s words, peered across the social abyss carved deep between them, and recognized each other with mutual admiration and jealousy. They met again and again, without the father. Their conversations would have been productive educations for both of them. The earl would have known about the military, the law, court behavior, Latin. The younger man would have provided Old Testament fluency, financial expertise, and, if he had spent time outside London, an eye for the natural world—the plays’ rich language of birds, flowers, country fairs, apples. Each boasted that if he were able to write for the public stage he would be hailed as the greatest poet of the time, outshining Kyd, Marlowe, Lyly. Naturally, one of them suggested a plan.

Next in Dana’s fantasy comes a scene that other squinting anti-Stratfordians
imagine as well: a young actor, Will Shakespeare, new to London from the Warwickshire town of Stratford, ambitious but of only middling talent, is invited one night to a private audience with the Earl of Oxford in his London residence and is presented with an irresistible offer. The actor would be given a role to act in his own life, forever. He would play a better version of himself and would win great fame for his performance. He would be slipped works to stage under his own name. He could even take them to a printer and publish them, if he wished. Whatever money he could squeeze out of this was his to keep. The renown would be his as well. The women or boys he charmed with his honeyed verses were his to bed. (“Really, Miss Phillips, is there any evidence of such proclivities in Shakespeare the man?” huffed the twelfth-grade teacher, angry that Dana was saying much more about his hero’s unknowability than his sexuality.) Changes made by the acting company in rehearsal were fine; the scripts should be brought back to the earl for reworking, and the earl would have felt the frisson of slumming it, toiling like some common artisan. No mention was made of the Jew at this early meeting where devilish Shakespeare won the souls of two other men and was paid for the victory.

Readily agreeing, the impostor went off with two plays:
The Taming of the Shrew
and
Edward III
. Before he could leave, however, he signed a document, twice, a long empty sheet. At the very top, above a blank expanse of future possibility, he took dictation and wrote: “I, William Shakespeare of Stratford, did not write the play
The Taming of the Shrew.
” And, directly below: “I, William Shakespeare of Stratford, did not write the play
The Raigne of King Edward III.
”