The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (24 page)
Read The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Online
Authors: Arthur Phillips
I loved them both, loved their love of the play, how quickly and instinctively they both leapt to play with it, to build on it, to breathe life back into it. It was obviously a Shakespeare play because these two women I loved so differently each loved it so much the same. I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t know my part or how to play it, but a part was coming, and I imagined it somehow bringing us all together, me with Petra, and Dana satisfied to be our loving sister.
She came out of their bedroom with the red 1904 edition of
The Tragedy of Arthur
and started to compare the two texts. They weren’t perfectly matched. They weren’t so far apart as to be significant, but here and there a word was changed, a line was changed, even some sequences of four or six lines were in the 1597 quarto but weren’t in the 1904 hardcover.
“It has Shakespeare’s name on it,” Dana kept saying. “I knew it. I did. I always knew it. Pet, Dad used to ask me if I thought it was Shakespeare, and I did, and now this has his name on it! This is so huge. I’ve never seen anything on this anywhere. Lost
Arthur
plays, you hear about, but this—
so
huge.”
“It doesn’t settle it,” I said. “There were cases of printers using his name to sell books he hadn’t written.”
“It settles it for me,” Dana announced.
She sighed and made me take it with me after dinner, packed it in its bag and case and canvas and crate. “I wish I could keep it,” she said.
“So keep it.”
“No. I can’t. He wants you to do something with it. So. Please take it now and tell me as soon as you hear from him, please.”
“Okay.” I kissed her cheek.
“Bye, Arthur,” Petra called from across the room.
T
HE NEXT DAY WAS EMAIL DAY
at the big house, and I read my father’s long letter on my laptop at the hotel. The job he had in mind for me was larger than anything I had fantasized, and my predominant emotion was pride—he wanted me and only me to do this for him, with him, because he loved me and my abilities. And we would be partners in something unprecedented, earthshaking.
That pride, in turn, triggered some guilt. He was trusting me, and I still sometimes felt I was partially to blame for his lengthy term, and that old daft desire to make everything right rushed through me. By helping him, I would fix what I could of all that I had broken.
And guilt, in turn, triggered resentment, the nibbling feeling that if I was going to help, then I was also owed, or would be rewarded by some universal system we wishfully call karma or God’s bounty or whatever, but is really just the little child in us expecting a prize. And I thought of Petra.
And then came the scheming: this project would require me to stay in Minneapolis for quite a while. I shook that off, scolded myself, sent Dana and Petra my silent blessings.
D
ATE:
Tue, 4 Aug 2009 15:05:02 -0600
You went to Bert? You found it OK.? It was there? You have it somewhere safe? So now you have seen it. Do you need to put your
finger in my wound? Fine. Do what you need to be sure. Be careful with it Itis old. And it cannot be out of your sight with another person. They cannot copy it. That is important. This is the most important, No copies. It iss complicated. Do your worst. Be skeptical. I am counting on you for that now too because I do not have any doubts anymore and that is surely not helpful. Microscope it or x-ray it or bombard it with lasers. I do not know what they do nowadays. My residence here would imply that I never really did. Ask experts to read it and judge the words and style. I could recommend people for some of this, but you would not trust them if I do, so do your way. When you are done you will know what I already kno. Which means whatever you are doing now is a delay for us, so go fast. But do what you need to do to believe. Catch up with me. That is not fair, because I have a fifty year lead. But catch up. And when we are together, and you know you are holding a play written by William Shakespeare, then you and I will be partners, though you, my son, will be the senior partner (not including Shakespeare).
“The senior partner (not including Shakespeare).” That line still affects me strangely. I feel it like one of these twinges in my lower back that make me compensate immediately. The surge of pleasure (then the parenthesis with a counteracting dose of resentment). I am his favorite (except for others). I am necessary to him (though not as much as some). I am his writer (not including that other guy).
When you are ready, we start. But motives, I suspect. You suspect. I suspect you suspect my motives. O.K. that’s O.K. You should, of course you do, though I could wish you didnot. Or I could wish you need not That I had not done all this to make you need no suspicion of my motives. Or that despite all I had done, you would recall that I NEVER DID IT TO YOU, never sought your unearned confidence, or with your confidence filched a dime or a dime’s worth of prestige from anyone. So. Motives. The noise in this place
shatters concentration. I cannt keep a straight line. When I left you, I went and laid down. Someone was banging on his bunk up a few levels shouting “MARRY ME! MARRY ME!” Fine. Motives. Obviously money. I will explain when I see you next. When can you come again? No, I will write. Money obviously. There is a lot of money in this. But not for me. None for me. Arthur. I do not need money, and I wiill not be around to spend. Money for you. Dana. Your mother. Finally. And honorably gained! At last. What else? A gift to you. Fame for you. Your own writing is grand and you are rightly praised for it. And your name is crucial to our task. But this is a different magnitude and success in this gambit accrues to you (and Shakespeare).
(There it is again.)
You will be toasted for this! The proximity of your name next to his! You introduce this for him, and he then introduces you to millions of readers. You do him this favor and he owes you and repays you right away in spades. He lights the way and you can do whatever you want after this. You said publishing was in trouble. He will save it. And you.
I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do. I didn’t understand what it mattered if this quarto was real or what it proved, considering someone had published the play before—we had the 1904 edition, and my grandfather had acted in it in 1915. I was no expert in any of this and didn’t keep up with the latest Shakespearean discoveries, but finding a copy of a play that everyone already knew about seemed pretty minor, though if it was a museum-quality relic, then I assumed it would be worth some thousands, perhaps. I may even have fantasized that it was worth $10,000 or $50,000. Still, why so excited, Dad? Perhaps that sounded like a million to 1987 ears.
I do not claim to be above idealism. Old men have privileges. We all get to say that everything is going to hell in a handbasket, but I
get to do something about it. He deserves this, doesnth’e? The world will take pleasure in it. Think how many aggregate hours of joy you will bring the world. Add up everyone who reads this, who goes to see it. Theaters, classrooms, lecture halls, and bookclubs. Courtship moments in campus bars, letters to reluctant girls, boys quoting this play to make time. You will be responsible for all that. And say what you want, but your books are not good for that.
A touch, a palpable touch. I might also add now, considering my own semesters of unhappiness choking on dry bits of Shakespeare, that this aggregate of joy will not come without terrible cost to generations of schoolkids infinitely into the future.
You said you have no book in you right now. So the timing is swell. Publish this. Tell the world it is his and it is good. Get it onstage. Get a movie made in Hollywood. Movies! I could wish Olivier was alive. Is Branagh? Schools. Write about it. Write footnotes. Explain it in newspapers. Defend it. Get scholars onboard the ship. They have computers now that can count his words, prove he wrote it, what year, collaborators. Do all that. They will prove it is him and his. And you know it, don’t you, Arthur? Ask Dana. She knows. And when you know it, when you’re working hand in hand every day with me (and him)
(Sigh)
youwill feel it in every line. I envy you! You will be collaborating with him! Reading every line a hundred times. Those lost words, puns, allusions. Follow his creative path. Help everyone see how he worked his wonders. You will feel his presence. I have felt it. He will be a friend who visits. You will understand him as a fellow writer, as a peer. Read how he used his sources. Read Holinshed. It is almost a straight lift of the Arthur chapters in Holinshed. I envy you so much, my son! You are one of the real creators! You have made people, worlds, plots. In so many
ways, you are more of a creator than he was. He adapted, expanded other men’s characters, puffing meaning into other men’s flat worlds. But you! You have made things from nothing and none but your imagination. I am out of time. I will write in a week, but write me what you need from me. Always your loving father.
I floated along on the waves of his most excellent flattery for several hours, until I fell asleep, not even curious to open my
BANANAS
, as I was without Dana and Petra’s enthusiasm for them. Instead, I nodded off thinking my father loved me and judged me more creative than Shakespeare.
T
HE SWIRLING NONSENSE
of his email finally woke me and, still in bed, I called Dana.
“Is he mad at you about something?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then why is he asking me to prove this play? This is not my thing. This is your thing.”
“True, but he wants … I don’t know. Read it to me again.” And I read the whole email to her again.
“Well, maybe he just wants you because he knows you’re, you know, far from him. Farther than me. He and I are sort of square. He can give you this, you know, to say how he feels. It’s a handshake.”
“Oh.”
“And he wants you to publish it,” she said. “That’s why you, too.”
“But it was already published. What’s changed?”
And so I went online and started looking for this play. There must have been other copies, other editions, essays, some history of its controversial standing. This was the first time in my life I’d ever thought to look. I called Dana back.
“Why can’t I buy another copy of the 1904 edition on eBay?” I asked her.
“I have no idea.”
“Why is there no reference to it on Google?”
“I have no idea.”
“There’s an apocryphal Merlin play and an Arthur play by Thomas Hughes. But there’s no Shakespeare play about King Arthur. Not even a discredited one. Not a word.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Why haven’t you ever looked for it?”
“Because I already own it,” she said. That made a certain sense. Having learned of the existence of this play in 1975, having had it read to me once in 1979, I never gave it another thought. Dana, having loved it since 1975 and owned it since 1977, never doubted its reality, never thought there was anything to do other than to love it. We rarely go looking for proof of the things we own and love; their existence is usually pretty evident. “When I was doing all my research,” she said, referring to her years as an anti-Stratfordian, “it was pre-Internet. Mostly I just figured the play was lost, and lost things usually get more lost.”
“But listen: we’re post-Internet now, and it doesn’t exist,” I said. “Anywhere. Amazon, Alibris, Google, eBay. There’s no such play. It doesn’t exist.”
“But it does. It exists in that crate in front of you,” she said. “And in this book on my lap.” I heard Petra chime in, revealing that I’d been on speaker the whole time: “And I read it with you yesterday, Arthur. That existed, didn’t it?”
“No, seriously. Listen. This makes no sense, unless we admit the obvious.”
“Which is?”
“Are you kidding?”
Here is the billion-dollar question, with boffo money for me and Random House and lawyers and academics and theaters and now a film studio hanging in the balance. How did I travel from August 2009, scenting “the obvious,” to October 2009, when I signed a contract in all good faith with Random House in order to edit and publish (for the very first time) a previously unknown, undocumented play by William Shakespeare?
“Arthur, seriously?” said Dana. “He didn’t. Look at it. Touch it. Smell it.
Read
it. He couldn’t. He
didn’t.
”
I
THANKED MY FATHER
for his kind words, his trust in me, and I asked a few basic questions. They seem surprisingly polite now.
1) Where did you get this?
2) Since Dana has the red hardcover, why is this a big deal?
3) If it was published already, why can’t I find it anywhere on earth except Dana’s shelf?
And then I waited six days until he had email access again. He replied very briefly, just asked me to come in person. The next visiting day was three days later, August 14, and I pushed my rental car through the wall of mosquitoes that had descended onto the Minnesota prairie.
“Dad, what’s going on? First you can’t tell me in person, now you can’t tell me on email.”
We were back at the Formica of Infinite Gloom, but this time he was focused, intent. He leaned forward and made a visor with his hands, his middle fingertips meeting above his 3-D eyebrows. He whispered: “Answer me one thing first. You saw it. What do you think it is?”
“I have no idea. This really isn’t my thing.”
“Okay, fine. Okay.” He wasn’t angry, precisely, just frustrated and trying to hold that in check. “You doubt me. Okay. It’s just …
time.
”
