The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  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.

  28

  THE 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.”

  29

  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.”

  He started talking. “In March of 1958, I traveled to England to do some work for a wealthy client. I went by ship. You can probably find the records, ship manifests or whatnot, prove it to yourself. Please do that. Please. Anyhow, my client, this fellow, he lived in a big country house.”

  “What? Come on. Who? What kind of work? What country house? Where was this? No offense, but this sounds total—”

  “Stop. Just please. I’ll get to all of it. I promise. You’ll see. You can check all of it. Anybody can.”

  In March 1958, he traveled to England to do “some work for a wealthy client.” This fellow lived in a big country house, even though since the war, he’d had to open it to tourists two days a week, to help pay for upkeep. On this vast estate, in his big manor (sketched once by Constable, Dad mentioned), he had one of those inherited libraries that the family had been adding to for centuries. My father in that library was a fat man at the Jolly Troll smorgasbord. “He had a Third Folio, second issue,” among other treasures. “When I wasn’t working, I was there. Gardens and grounds and horses were not my cup.”

  “Working. What work?”

&nb
sp; My father had been asked to make a replica, “for insurance purposes, perfectly legal,” of a small painting in the house’s art collection. “I was doing a lot of that back then. My own stuff didn’t sell, I don’t know if you know, but. I had a good run at this sort of job for a while.”

  “What painting was it?”

  “Stop. Will you stop? For a minute? I’ll get to it.”

  It was a nice gig. He was resident at the great house for sixteen days. He worked six or seven hours a day, while the light was good. The rest of the time, he was something more than staff and something less than an honored guest. He slept in an extra room and was allowed unlimited access to the library in his non-painting hours. He explored every shelf. “I wasn’t going to read the Shakespeare. I had read all of it, memorized half of it. I was looking for things I hadn’t seen before. I read a ton there. There were things you couldn’t get in those days, unless someone like this guy let you see his.”

  Alongside that 1664 Third Folio, on the Shakespeare shelf, were a dozen or more homemade anthologies. “This is pretty common,” explained my father. Apparently, people used to buy those pamphlet-size quartos, and once they owned six or eight, they would have them stitched together according to whatever system they fancied, like a playlist, and then they’d have the assortment bound in a nice cover, “Morocco leather, maybe stamped Seventeenth-Century Drama or Shakespeare Comedies, which they then kept in the ancestral library.” They would handwrite a table of contents inside the front cover. “So this man, my client, had a couple long shelves of these homemades. Heaps of things to read.”

  “Do you need to wear latex gloves with that kind of book?”

  “What? Of course not. Why?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  So, one evening late in his stay, my father opens another of these books, and the handwritten table of contents on the inside front cover lists The Taming of the Shrew, Sejanus, Every Man in His Humour, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mucedorus. “It was a very odd grouping, this one,” he whispered to me conspiratorially, as if one mustn’t let Minnesota corrections officers catch a whiff of such delights. His hands were still over his eyes, his elbows on the table, not so much to protect the privacy of our talk but to screen out distraction, and he told his story without losing track of his thoughts. “Very miscellaneous. Four Shakespeare comedies, two Ben Jonson plays, and an apocryphal thing.” He’d never read the apocryphal thing, Mucedorus, so he asked his host if it would be a gross liberty to take the volume up to bed.

  Permission granted, drowsy by lamplight, he flipped to the last play in the volume, but it wasn’t Mucedorus. Mucedorus was second to last. It was the seventh play, as promised in the table of contents. But there weren’t seven quartos stitched together. There were eight. The original anthologist (“the first Viscount Numbnuts”) had neglected to inscribe the eighth title on the front board. The eighth play was a 1597 quarto my father had never heard of, credited to William Shakespeare.

  “Shakespeare’s name first appears on a title page in 1598,” he said, no longer the confused senile prisoner of two weeks before. “This was completely unknown. I’d never heard of it. That was odd, to say the very least. I read it that night.

  “So. Breakfast. I ask my client if he reads much Shakespeare. He’s a boor. He doesn’t read anything in his staggering library, any more than he knows anything about the artworks he’s selling off to pay for his house. So I ask him: Does anybody in the family read the books? Is he going to sell them?”

  “What was his name, Dad?”

  And off my father went to the room given over to his work of “preserving the painting in duplicate.” That night he considers the anthology again, locked in his little guest room, considers this Arthur. He reads the play again, and he believes the cover without a doubt. And he realizes that if it is real, it is a discovery of monumental proportions. “Anyone who knows Shakespeare would realize it was him, that this was absolutely his.” Seeing a short distance into the future, he takes his nail scissors out of his toilet kit and trims the last quarto out of the book, lays it in the bottom of his suitcase, and the next morning makes a show of reshelving the violated volume in front of his much scorned host and employer.

  “It came out very easily,” he said. “It all came off very easily. And philosophically quite pleasant: its owner never saw it in the book, and it wasn’t written in the table of contents, so the play can’t really be said to be missing, because it was never really there.”

  He took it back home to Minneapolis, to Mom and their little prechild apartment in Dinkytown, smelling of oils and turpentine. “You told her?”

  “No. I sat on it. It wasn’t her passion in the same way it was mine. That’s okay, that’s how marriages are. And I didn’t think of it as an object to do anything with. I just loved it. That’s why I took it. I loved it and the limey didn’t care. I loved it. I love it. And it was mine. I deserved it more than he did. Besides, it’s not stealing if the owner—no, not even the right term, the holder—doesn’t realize he owns it and then doesn’t realize he doesn’t own it. Nothing has been done to him. He has suffered no loss. There isn’t even a word for what happened to him.”

  “Yes, there is. Stealing. That’s stealing. It’s a word. In English. Who was he?”

  He smiled now, the first time, really smiled at me. “I’m not going to tell you, and I’ll tell you why I’m not going to tell you. Because you’d give it back, wouldn’t you? Or tell his heirs? You know you would. Besides, I was there helping him commit a crime.”

  “You just said it was perfectly legal.”

  “What I did was perfectly legal. What he then did with my work doesn’t require a genius to figure out. But that’s not the point. Please. I waited a long time to see if he ever noticed. It’s been more than fifty years. He didn’t notice because he never knew he had it in the first place. If he’s alive, he won’t be filing a claim if we proceed with this.”

  “Proceed? Am I supposed to fence your swag? I’m not going to—”

  “No. Please listen.”

  At first, my father just kept The Tragedy of Arthur to himself because he loved it, and because he wanted to find out if he was going to get caught. He read it and studied it and looked up all the words he didn’t know and liked to touch it. “I was like those Japanese businessmen or gangsters who buy stolen art masterpieces and then keep them in their basement to look at all alone, naked.” (A comparison that vaults right to the forefront of the normal mind.) “And that was enough for me. I was the only one. I liked that. Shakespeare and I were secret chums. We only met in secret. I like the idea that if there weren’t many of these, then maybe he even touched this copy. He might have. At any rate, I was the only one reading it. Like he wrote it for me. I have to admit: his Arthur seemed familiar. I liked that, too.”

  And then, unclenching a little, suspecting he’d scooted away unnoticed, he started to do some research. He corresponded and spent time in the libraries, in downtown Minneapolis and over at the U of M. And he slowly let himself believe as a fact what had dawned on him as a strong possibility back in England: he had never heard of the play, despite his knowledge of Elizabethan literature, because there was not a single other copy. Nor—and this was somewhat troubling—were there any references to it, as there are to the famously lost plays Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. “Arthur isn’t in Meres, or the Stationers’ Register, the repertory listings of the Chamberlain’s Men, lists of court performances. What records we have of the theaters. Nobody mentions it. Not that I could ever find, but you might have more luck now. It would be very good if you could find a reference.”

  “There was that Errol Flynn performance. Dana still has the poster.”

  “What? No, come on. No, no, tell me you know I made that for her.” It had never occurred to me. “No, nobody ever mentioned an Arthur play by Shakespeare.”

  “So it’s fake.”

  “No. All I said was,
nobody mentions it. That’s true of some plays we know are his: no mention at all until they are collected in the First Folio, after he’s dead. Arthur’s real, and we can guess why it’s not mentioned, but that’s another story.” The story my father was struggling to deliver in a straight line (despite the babies, bells, and doors, despite my twitchy questions and surges of doubt in him, like gastric reflux) was about his realization. “But this one is not in the folios, obviously. When his friends compiled the complete works from their own marked-up scripts in the playhouse, they didn’t include this.”

  “So it’s a fake.”

  “No. Stop saying that. It’s real. But for some reason, they didn’t include it. Please let me talk.”

  “Sorry.”

  Instead he only fell silent and started to shake his head and bite his lips. He pressed the knuckles of his thumbs to his eyes and asked, “Where was I?”

  “Not in the folios. Not a fake, but not in the folios.”

  “Yes. Not a fake, but not in the folios. Only one copy, no contemporary mentions, and not in the folios. Zero copies or four copies or what have you, but for there to be just one copy and for the play not to be in the folios: I owned the only text—”

  “Stole the only text.”