The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (26 page)

“And why didn’t this alleged stepfather of mine do anything with it for fifty years?”

“You have no idea why. What’s it to you? What’s it to them? Keep it simple. Stick to the truth. Much easier to remember.”

“But this isn’t the truth.”

“You’re missing the point. No one is going to be able to say this isn’t Shakespeare, because it is.
That’s
the truth. It’s got his name on it, the paper is authentic, the ink, all that. I’ve had it tested enough that I am sure. Fire photons at it, whatever you want—it’s real. And I’m confident that there aren’t any others in the world. If there are, we’re out of luck. A second copy turns up, and then ours is just nifty, not without some value, of course, a museum piece, fascinating, but the only money—the real money—is in having the
only
copy. An oil well. A gusher. A field of gushers. That’s what we have. What I’m giving you to manage for your mother and sister. And to make you famous as a writer.”

As Mr. Piers Strickland later clarified on the phone when I told him what the document in question was: “Every edition. Every version for theater use. Every school copy. Every audiotape. Every children’s illustrated edition with tear-out coloring pages in German or Swahili. Film. Film in Latvian. DVD sales in Malaysia.” Strickland was unknowingly echoing my dad, whose eyes became younger as he explained the loot he was leaving his poor misused family: “William Shakespeare just signed over to you one hundred percent of his worldwide profits on his newest play. On a play the world will be endlessly curious to read, see, evaluate, interpret, debate. Even if they
hate
it.”

“No, Dad, you’re forgetting. I’m sorry to ruin this. It’s not the only copy.”

“What? Really? Someone …” He was as sickened and horrified as I’d ever seen him. His hands fell to the table.

“You gave Dana that 1904 edition.”

And then he wheezed a little laughter and started to guffaw. “Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a stroke. No, no, I made that.”

“What? Why?”

He brushed off my idiotic question. “Please. I couldn’t walk
around with a
quarto
. I couldn’t read a quarto on the bus. I didn’t want to damage it. If it was worth a hundred million dollars, I thought it was worth hiding. Are you …” He stopped himself before he asked if I was smart enough for this, I could tell. “I couldn’t take it to the library to do research, you understand? To get opinions on it. You—more Dana, really—are the best readers. When Dana reads
Arthur
, she can tell it’s the same writer. She knew right away. I wanted her opinion back when her eye was educated but still fresh.”

Of all the questions I remembered to ask, I forgot to ask the ones that matter most to me personally, if not financially: Why did he forge the inscription to his own father from the drama club? And then inscribe it to himself from his father? And include that picture of his father, if that
is
a picture of his father, with its fake caption on the back? He gave Dana—with sincere love, I’m sure—a family heirloom going back generations that he’d made himself.

But I did ask this: “Why aren’t you going to Dana on this? She loves Shakespeare. She still has that fresh eye, right?”

“You’re the writer. And we’ll have some fun, won’t we? Aren’t you having fun?”

“I kind of am, actually.” I kind of was. “But why now?”

Because he’d had to wait. He’d had no choice. Patience—enforced by prison—had been necessary. He’d had to wait to see if other copies emerged, wait for shouts of “Thief!” to ring out from that country house. He’d also had to wait until he couldn’t expect any personal profit from the venture, or the whole thing would be tainted by his record: “Boy-and-wolf problem. My career is ideally suited to make my word on this useless. ‘Read all about it! Convicted forger discovers Shakespeare play!’ I would sink him. And that would be an unforgivable tragedy. That would be a sin. Even if nobody makes any money, we have to do this for him.”

“Novelist isn’t much better than forger,” I pointed out.

“It is better.” He took a breath and started counting off things to do on his fingers, but he only got to one. “It’s going to take time for copyright investigators. You have to do that. The guy I bunked with explained this, and Bert agreed. Prove no one else has any right to the text. Obviously, there’s no line of Shakespeares anymore. The only
serious claim would be the estates of William White or Cuthbert Burby”—the printer and publisher. “We have to prove they died out. You need a U.K. guy, I think. Then you win. You and your sister. And your mother.”

“What about the guy in his country house?”

“I won’t tell you who it was. Never. I don’t trust you not to go to his house and give his grandkids your mother’s oil well.”

“Thank you, I think.”

“It’s not really a compliment, under the circumstances.”

“So we’re all accessories to your theft.”

“Not accessories. There’s nothing you could have done about it. Beneficiaries, yes. Accessories, no. And really, it’s more like your father was some tycoon who outsmarted some people years ago to build his business, and now you’re inheriting stock certificates. What are you going to do, go apologize to his early partners he bought out when the stock was cheap?”

“You didn’t buy anyone out. You
stole
it.”

“You’re picking fly shit from pepper, Artie. And I never tried to score off Shakespeare. I don’t want to. But I do want your mother and sister to get rich off him. And I want you to get famous off him. That’s why you.”

F
OR TWO AFTERNOONS AND NIGHTS
, I sat with Dana and Petra and Maria in their apartment and reread the play aloud and tried to poke holes in it. I solemnly made Dana hold her hand to her heart and promise to read the play with a harsh, cynical eye, to play devil’s advocate and viciously attack anything that didn’t sound perfectly Shakespearean. We scribbled down any doubt we could muster: vocabulary that rang false, characters who seemed too modern, compositor’s marks on the bottoms of the pages, the thread that stitched those pages together, anything. I was out of my league; I mostly sounded like a fool or a smartass: “Oh, come on, Shakespeare wouldn’t do that, would he?” And then Dana or Petra would smile
and cite some canonical play where he had done just that. “P-L-A-I-D-E?” I bleated, pointing at the cover. “Dad’s pulling our leg, right?” They went online and found legitimate quarto covers with just that spelling of
played
.

The problem was harder than I’d expected. I had thought that with some effort, the play might crack under pressure, like a frightened suspect. But even our strongest doubts were very abstract. Petra thought time passed strangely in Acts III and IV, that it seemed too much like montage in a film. She couldn’t think of any Elizabethan play with the same structure. In I.iv, Arthur is explicitly seventeen. In III.i, he recalls his adolescence as if it were a long time ago. By III.ii, several more months have passed, and at least nine more between III.ii and III.iii. Several more months pass before IV.i, and so on. By IV.iv, Arthur must be at least about twenty-six, since he might have a twelve-year-old son, or at least be able to pretend so for political purposes.

“Yes, but no,” Dana argued, reasonably enough after all that wine. Maria slept on her lap, pointed outward toward her knees, and Dana smoothed his ears over her thighs. “He did all kinds of strange things with time. Hardly ever did the same thing twice. He was always trying to break up the unity. Time in
Hamlet
. It’s like the theory of relativity: a day or two seems to pass in Elsinore, but ships have gone all the way to England and back.
Henry VI, Part Three
is totally wacky. And in
Part One:
the historical king was actually an infant in those first scenes, but he seems to be at least a teenager. Years pass in
Pericles. Winter’s Tale
has a sixteen-year jump. He might have been trying something new here, way ahead of its time. Time-lapse or montage before the term. Maybe that’s why the play didn’t stick; maybe it made the audience feel queasy.”

In other words, things that
weren’t
like Shakespeare simply expanded the possible range of his innovations. If I was having a paranoid reaction, looking for signs of forgery where there weren’t any, Dana was having an opposite response, taking any oddity as proof that it must be authentic. If, for whatever reason, you choose to read the play, I am certain the same thing will happen to you: If you think it’s him, it sounds like him. If you think it’s not, it doesn’t.

“Does Arthur even seem like a Shakespeare character at all?” I asked when I hit that exhaustion common to circular debates. By then I was lying on the carpet in the middle of the room, and Maria had migrated to sleep on my chest, his nose pressed against mine. “Why does he do what he does? Is it how Shakespeare characters think?”

Dana was on the other side of the bar in the kitchen, opening wine. “He’s actually a fool,” she said as I was looking over Maria’s snout at the way Petra’s legs pressed against each other, folded under her on the couch. “He goes further than any of Shakespeare’s other kings. He questions his
own
legitimacy. He doubts his own fitness to rule. He’s really one of the fools, you know? He has that dangerous, licensed skepticism, but he’s dropped the cap and bells and carried that doubt all the way up onto the throne. To question kingship while you’re wearing the crown? The king himself doesn’t even believe in kingship? That’s a risky thing to put onstage.” Dana was tireless. She refilled our wine and turned the pages carefully back to Arthur’s remarkable soliloquy and read aloud:

“
That
is not the same as the Harry-in-the-night stuff from
Henry V
. That’s him saying he’s
not
God’s chosen, and maybe
no one
is.
That
would make an audience queasy, or the Master of the Revels. And get a writer in some hot water, I would think. And be the end of a play: no more editions, no folio.”

She had a point and a semi-explanation for the play’s disappearance. From King John to Henry VIII and every king in between, Shakespeare’s audiences watched one after another variety of human and incompetent monarch walk in front of them and reveal his inner failings. Shakespeare let people see their kings as men, fallible, far enough from divine right that they should submit to man’s law. If
Arthur was Shakespeare’s, then they saw this king go so far as to admit he was nothing special. It’s amazing the English managed to hold off from executing a real king of their own until 1649. (To this day, theater can still do that, provoke rebellion in subjects or phobia of rebellion in authorities. I was in a comedy revue in college that in one performance was particularly disrespectful to the administration. We were then blamed when some drunk took a dump in a dormitory elevator later that night, just as Shakespeare’s company was blamed for a coup attempt after putting on a play about a coup.)

“So?” Petra poked my side with her toe. “What are you going to do?” Dana was in the bathroom.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Me? Well, I think Shakespeare wrote it.” She ran her bare feet over Maria’s back, one beagle-thickness above my chest.

“Me, too.” I put my hands on her feet, held them on the dog.

“So there you go.” She smiled and held my eye.

There you go: accepting the play, believing in my father, and her feet and eyes not pulling away.
Arthur
, my father, and Petra: all three of them became credible at the same instant. Can you reset history, go back to where things broke down and
“begin anew upon our proper path”
? So that the decades that followed would change their essence, shed tragedy to become softly sentimental comedy?