The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  When I came home from baseball practice Dana was on her bed, her eyes bruised from crying, her knees drawn up to her chest under that Errol Flynn poster: The Tragedy of Arthur! Held Over! she had added as a handwritten banner diagonally across the top. I was raving: “He’s a criminal, and that’s all he is! All that talk about art and love and wonder. He’s just a low-life!” Dana started to defend him, but I was in full howl and would not hear a word for him. “You’re the one mourning this!” I shouted. “He’s not coming to your show, is he?” (Adolescent disappointment is so common because the opportunities for damning parental absence are berries on a bush: if not her sculpture exhibit, my baseball game, her recital, etc.) She didn’t say anything, finally, and the pleasure of being angry and right was (and still is) a delicious brain-chemical cocktail, and a moral license unrevokable until the mood passes. “He’s a bastard for doing this to you,” I nobly concluded. My sister crying harder and harder proved that I was right and that I was helping.

  The next day was the last of the school’s short fall baseball season, and my anger was the star. I took it out on Doug Constantine, my on-again, off-again best friend since I was six years old and the son of Ted Constantine, persistent prosecutor of my father. My anger was equally unjustifiable and natural. The proximate cause was a collision over a fly ball, me wheeling back from second base, Doug coming in from right field, both of us knocked to the ground with the ball dribbling behind us, two runs scoring, game over. Later, I told him that he’d been typically unwilling to back off where he wasn’t needed while he screamed—screamed—that I was a pig, that nothing was good enough for me, that I had to be loved for everything and by everybody, had to snatch up everything.

  The most remarkable element of this—far more remarkable than two friends shrieking at each other, then pushing each other, then wrestling, then swinging hard at each other’s faces in a locker room while other friends and teammates circled around to watch, none of the twenty boys tempted to step in and end the flailing fisticuffs—was the display of the fractured adolescent mind. Here were two promising young men who could do trigonometry, speak French, recall dates of presidential elections, map atoms, analyze Hemingway and Twain, yet neither one of them could have accurately said why he was fighting his best friend. Both would have cited a common display of baseball clumsiness, but they would have been wrong. I was angry that his father had imprisoned mine and that my father probably still thought I was the snitch; he was angry (to carry on the baseball terminology) that I had reached second base with Ellen Harrison, a girl I hadn’t known he liked and in whom I’d had very little interest to begin with and, oddly, exactly zero interest after my hands had touched her breasts, all desire vanishing like October snow on a Minneapolis sidewalk. The battle was joined again in the woods behind school, our wet hair picking up leaves and moss as we rolled in the dirt and smacked at each other’s faces with pinioned arms, like boxing T. rexes.

  This scene of two friends fighting without understanding the cause gives me some respect for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it is a pity we had no fairies to clean up the mess we made of our friendship in that disenchanted forest. The green, hazy enmity from that day floated on and on and never quite dissipated. Later, in a new twisting away from reality, I convinced myself that it was my father’s fault that my friendship with Doug ended. If my father had not been a criminal, Doug’s honorable, dull father would not have been forced to prosecute him, and I would not have been forced to choose (as I later interpreted the situation, forgetting Ellen Harrison’s role entirely) between friendship and family. I chose family! I told myself. Like a fiery Capulet! And in spite of my own self-interest! I wasn’t invited to Doug and Ellen’s 1988 wedding.

  11

  ACT II OPENS WITH one of those ostensibly “funny” scenes, in which characters speak in something more like the normal manner of Shakespeare’s time, not iambic pentameter. They are often lower-class characters and are supposed to be both comic and wise, or at least that’s how they’re treated now. In the case of The Tragedy of Arthur, it’s the servant in charge of King Arthur’s hunting dogs, reminiscing about what a fun kid Arthur used to be. He discusses with his apprentice boy whether Arthur will be a warlike king or will bring peace to Britain. Does it prove anything that they refer to a dog named Socrates and that my father supposedly had a Scottie named Socrates when he was a boy? I don’t honestly know that this is definitive. There must be some statistical likelihood we could calculate: What are the chances that my father could have a dog as a child and then grow up to discover the only copy of a play that referred to a dog of the same name? One in a … Or he lied about having a dog named Socrates. Or he lied about finding a play by William Shakespeare. I’m trotting ahead of myself.

  Arthur then leads his troops in the siege of York, beating the allied Pict-Saxon-Scot army, forcing them to retreat to Lincoln, where they have secret reinforcements lying in wait. Arthur, thinking he has won the war, decides to stay in York for some vague purpose, telling Gloucester to lead the army to Lincoln in his place, disguised as the king. Arthur promises to arrive before any battle. A chorus of common soldiers leads us to Lincoln, with another dreary scene of earthy “humor,” boring me enough to convince me that the whole play is authentic. Lincoln turns out to be a large battle. Arthur is late arriving from York, so Gloucester leads the fight dressed as Arthur and wins a tremendous victory, killing Hebrides, the heir to the Scottish throne. Arthur arrives in time to take all the credit and review the prisoners, including the Saxon chief as well as Mordred and his brother. Feeling generous, even proud of his generosity, and trying to be unlike his father, he frees most of the prisoners on promises of good behavior, keeping Mordred’s brother as a hostage. Arthur’s most militaristic noble, the Earl of Cumbria, is disgusted by the show of mercy.

  Arthur’s childhood friend Constantine, the Earl of Cornwall, arrives to offer reinforcements and to share Arthur’s vision for a unified, peaceful Britain, a world totally unlike the dark years of his father’s reign. Before Arthur can achieve that goal, however, the paroled Saxons break the truce and attack yet again. Arthur is enraged by his own leniency and charges off to yet another battle. Mordred’s father dies, making him King of Pictland, and he maneuvers to become King of Scotland as well. Mordred also learns that Arthur has killed his brother in anger over the Saxon attack, and Mordred’s hatred for the English king continues to grow. He vows revenge.

  Yes, Arthur has a childhood friend named Constantine. I noticed that, too. But Holinshed’s Chronicles (the Renaissance book of history that Shakespeare used for many plays) tells the story of Arthur and Constantine, so it’s probably on the up-and-up.

  When Dana visited me in college, October of freshman year, Dad was three years into that sentence for the coupon scam. She came to my dorm straight from the train station, and my roommates and I had her stand in front of a red curtain, directly behind the giant hanging cardboard Ohio driver’s license we had made, with a space cut out for a face. Bill attached the removable letters with her new name and new birth date, I took the Polaroid, Ivan trimmed, and Ronnie laminated. An hour after she arrived, we went out drinking on our new IDs, and on our second Scorpion Bowl at the Hong Kong, she confessed that she had squealed about the crop circle to Doug Constantine, back when we were ten. She had kept her mistake from everyone for eight years, and I cycled between awe at her discretion, shame at her indiscretion, and anger that she had let Dad think for all those years that I was to blame.

  In the play, Arthur’s father kills a noble and replaces him with Constantine’s father. Then Arthur kisses and ends up marrying Constantine’s sister, rejecting a better offer from the French. In real life, Constantine French-kissed Arthur’s sister before she rejected him, and then Constantine’s father reported Arthur’s father to the sheriff of Nobles County. (If my father did not distort our family life to forge this play, I am left with the uncomfortable possibility that we have lived a distorted version of Shakespeare’s im
agination, which, ridiculously enough, is what one Shakespearologist claims: we are all the Bard’s inventions.)

  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.

  12

  ABSENTEE 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.”