The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  I spoke with Jana a few hours later, told her I would be staying longer in Minneapolis for work and because of my father’s failing health. She had seen my father’s effect on me for years, and she said, “You love your father, don’t you? Still. Even with all of your lives and what he has done.” It wasn’t the same when she said it.

  32

  MY CAREER. Yes, after four novels in quick succession, I knew I was doomed to slouch in my study in Prague, if I still had a study there, in an apartment paid for by the novel of the same name, decorated with souvenirs of my publicity and publications. I was going to gaze, glazed, at a blank page until, dispirited, I would stare at a screen rendition of a blank page instead. My father had sensed how starved for inspiration I was. “You’re between books,” he’d said innocently. And for that reason, too, the Arthur project fell like rain onto a dying land.

  I have never been strong at getting things done. Decisiveness and action are not my traits. I stumble into situations and then notice I like them well enough not to resist (so I take pleasure in creating characters who are my opposite, men of adventure and certainty). But now I began in earnest, fighting for my father’s life. I devolved into a sweaty, sparsely whiskered graduate student, eating strangely. I read the play at least twenty more times, making lists of vocabulary and grammar, noting references to research, labeling files: SOURCES, STYLE, STRUCTURE, DICTION. I read the pertinent bits of Holinshed’s Chronicles and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. I read the RSC Complete Works, sitting on a bench in the park with my sister’s beagle at my side. I read Shakespeare biographies and analyses (Shapiro, Bate, Tanner, Bryson, Greenblatt, Wood, Garber, Bloom, Vendler), books and articles on Shakespearean language (Crystal) and computer stylometry (Elliott and Valenza), Jacobethan theatrical practice (Joseph and Verre), Shakespearean forgeries (Ireland), and books about those apocryphal plays that haven’t made the official roster (Tucker Brooke). It is a measure of my fever—money-hungry, lust-breathing, fame-thirsty, guilt-fueled, daddy-pleasing—that I enjoyed all of it. I let Dana guide my education, spending much of my time at her apartment or in her theater’s greenroom, waiting for her to come out of rehearsal, seeing Petra often, but trying to give myself fully to my father’s project, to become the world’s most devoted and loving son for his dying months, proving that I meant no dishonor with Petra (and that I therefore deserved to have her).

  I had my entertainment lawyer draft nondisclosure agreements, and I sent teasing letters to scholars at local universities, often the very men and women whose books and articles I’d been studying, tempting them with “a remarkable, once-in-a-century opportunity in Shakespeare studies.”

  I finally began clumsily editing the play, transcribing it onto my Mac, counting out ten syllables per line, one slow syllable at a time, modernizing and standardizing the spellings, checking the online Oxford English Dictionary, footnoting, numbering the lines and acts, double-checking the entrances and exits, adding stage directions implicit in the text.

  I no longer doubted what I was doing, and for a writer of fiction, that is a rare feeling, worth clinging to. I was doing something important to my family, to my father, and to the world. I was—though it appeared I was just pushing words around, as always—taking action, taking sides, standing up in the real world, coming out from behind the hiding places of fiction. I paid calls! I interviewed relevant experts and sought out their opinions! I hired people! I Googled until my keyboard keys were scuffed! I wondered what Petra was thinking of me.

  “What is this thing?” I scribbled in my journal. “Is TTOA like we’ve discovered a previously unknown pyramid in Egypt? Or is it like we’ve just noticed the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre? Or is it like a Great Pyramid attached to a Vegas casino, complete with blond pharaonic parking valets who are all like, ‘Nice drive, man, sweet’?”

  I liked the work. I liked the play. I liked the writers and professors and lawyers. I liked everyone and felt happy when discoveries went our way (Dad’s, Will’s, and mine) and unexpected corroborations slotted into place, such as the day I visited my first real Shakespearean in person, Tom Clayton, the University of Minnesota’s Shakespeare man.

  His office was lined with books, like a lawyer’s, as if the Internet didn’t exist. “Let’s look at 1597 then,” he said after I explained my case and he had cast a nonchalant eye at my quarto, which I wouldn’t yet allow him to open. “King Arthur? Well, here’s the first thing we look at.” He pulled down two books: Annals of English Drama, an index to every contemporary mention of any play in the Elizabethan world, and the reproduced diaries of Philip Henslowe, manager of the Admiral’s Men, rivals to Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men. “So there was an Arthur play by Thomas Hughes, a Gray’s Inn play, that’s in 1588. Makes sense: Shakespeare probably arrives in London about then. Might very well have seen The Misfortunes of Arthur. He tended to absorb things he saw, often for a few years. He might have seen that Hughes play, then written one of his own eight or nine years on. Then there’s The Birth of Merlin, Rowley in 1622. They used to try to say it was Shakespeare, but that’s discredited. And …” He turned to Henslowe’s diary. “There. Look at that. That’s good.” He slid it across to me. “Henslowe’s group put on a play called Uther Pendragon in 1597, and then here, in April of ’98, he paid Richard Hathway five pounds for an ‘Arthur play, now lost.’ ” He tapped his finger on the entry for me.

  “That’s my play?”

  Professor Clayton looked at me as at a not very bright child and spoke slowly, in case I had a disorder he hadn’t noticed at first. “No. Your play says it’s by William Shakespeare and was performed by Shakespeare’s troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men. This is a different play, by Hathway, to be performed by the Admiral’s Men. The year after your play. You see? That’s what they would do. They were rivals. Admiral’s Men do Uther in ’97 and buy an Arthur in ’98, it makes sense that the Chamberlain’s Men had an Arthur play right around ’97. And that it would be written by one of their playwrights: Shakespeare.”

  “So it’s real?”

  “I have no idea. May I read it?”

  I loved the notion of Shakespeare as a man, a working writer given a topic and a deadline because the other guys—literally across the street—had a successful Arthur play. As a matter of honesty to the record, I have to include the following email, playing no favorites. It cannot be excluded without distorting this whole story:

  “Dad,” wrote the boy not even wise enough to be a fool,

  I am having an amazing experience, a peak of my life, truly. Thank you. I have to admit to a sort of astonishment. I feel like I am getting to know him as a peer, as a friend, as a guy whose path I cross now and then at the theater or the pub. Watching him work—following his thinking from Holinshed to the play. Sensing what was on his mind as a writer—seeing how Arthur leaks over from the other plays at the time, how it seems like a first stab at plays that came later. Do you see seeds of Hamlet and Henry V in Arthur? I think I do sometimes, in the shape of the soliloquies. He’s moved way past Edward III, but he’s not at Hamlet yet, but he’s figuring out how to write something more introspective than Richard III, for example. Dana has been amazing, helping me think all this out. You know I’ve never really been there with you and her on Shakespeare, but I’m catching up, and I’ve never felt happier with work than I do now. It’s not even my own stuff, but I feel better, closer at times to this than I have even to my own books.

  I dined almost every evening at Dana and Petra’s, often without Dana as her rehearsals went later into the night in the weeks leading up to her opening. Petra cooked, without recipes but with inherited mastery, every bite an act of love dusted with fennel powder. Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug. When she was there, Dana practiced her lines; as rehearsals progressed, she was living more closely to her role as Emilia, an unmarried girl. It was a remarkable testament to Dana’s talent and beauty th
at at age forty-five she’d been cast in such a part. Petra ran lines with her: “You shall never love any that’s called man.” “I am sure I shall not,” Dana answered. “I / And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent, / Loved for we did, and like the elements / That know not what nor why, yet do effect / Rare issues by their operance, our souls / Did so to one another. What she liked / Was then of me approved, what not, condemned …” I ate, a gender-bent beagle’s snout snuffling for crumbs in my crotch, and my twin sister took her girlfriend’s hand and pressed it to her lips, and Petra looked across the table to me with an expression I took as embarrassment, confusion, encouragement, even apology.

  In Twelfth Night, after all, a woman falls in love first with a female twin dressed as a man and then, when she meets the male twin, she has no trouble at all instantly transferring all that love to the man. I could almost see Dana wooing Petra on my behalf, preparing her for me by being her own open, lovable self, the better version of me that I would then become by the force of Petra’s transferred love.

  For this imagined Petra (unlike 99 percent of the world), romantic love would somehow be prior to gender. Identity, the lovable essence, would exist separate from gender. She would not be indifferent to gender (as I hoped she would love my male body), but she would love my gender only because it was subsequently revealed to be attached to my sexless but romantically lovable personality. (Neuroscience has proven this, what Shakespeare described in Twelfth Night: the bit of brain that sparkles with lust is near but not identical to the bit that identifies the sex of others. They can, on rare occasions, operate entirely independently, lust without gender, love without gender, just souls finding each other.)

  When we were sixteen or seventeen, Dana and I were walking along Hennepin. This was a spring evening, warm and light, so May or June. I can’t quite place the year, but I have a staticky notion that we were on our way to see a movie at the Uptown. I was complaining about a girl, though I can’t specify which, and I clearly remember Dana saying, “She may be out of reach, killer.” I know, too, that I had recently read a novel, I think by Graham Greene, though I can’t remember which, but I am sure the book had taken hold of me in the way adult novels can overpower a young reader’s own identity and shape him.

  We were walking through the darkening air, and the streetlights were buzzing on, one at a time. On the sidewalk in front of us we saw a sparrow. It was injured. It did nothing to escape our approach. One of its legs dangled uselessly. When I knelt down, it tried to hobble away but I picked it up. I was surprised and a little uneasy at how fragile it seemed. There was blood on one of its wings and on its chest. There could be no nursing it back to health.

  “Oh, we have to help it,” Dana sighed.

  “I will,” I said, feeling her pity for the bird as pressure to prove my hard fitness for life and adulthood. I had to channel humane feeling into realistic manly action. “There were things a man had to be able to do,” I thought, likely misquoting the character from the possibly Graham Greene novel. In the book, the protagonist comes upon a wounded pigeon while walking in a London park with a woman he means to impress, and then shyly, almost embarrassed, he rapidly, manfully, mercifully twists the bird’s neck and drops it into the rubbish bin so the woman doesn’t have to see the creature suffer. He knew precisely how to protect her and end the animal’s pain.

  I, on the other hand, was probably not very calm, never having done this before, as well as being overexcited at this chance to prove myself. I had never even touched a bird before this fateful moment. We walked from streetlight to streetlight, Dana repeating, “Oh, oh, the poor little thing,” and me trying to turn my back on her near a garbage can so she wouldn’t witness the simple, necessary act, although I can no longer fathom why I thought Dana would need protecting from it. I petted the bird and jogged ahead to the trash can on the corner, green and ribbed, with a black liner bag and painted with the words CITY OF LAKES. “What are you doing?” I heard her call. “There’s a …”

  I hurried to do it. I twisted the little bird’s head, waiting for a quiet crack and quick, grateful immobility. Instead, it emitted a tiny squeak: I was only hurting it, perhaps merely annoying it, and in my alarm and panic that Dana would witness this secret ritual of kind men, worried that I couldn’t do what I had to do and what Dana needed me to do (whether she realized it or not), I then wrenched the bird’s head so hard that I tore its body nearly in half.

  I held its head and much of a wing in one red hand. In the other clenched fist, shivering with adrenaline, was the organ-bunched breast, the other wing, the bubbling interior, the tendons and straw bones connecting the bird’s still-trussed halves. My hands and shirt were sprinkled with blood and clots of stuffing, and I looked down and watched the bird finally, but by no means instantly or gratefully, die.

  I pushed it all away from me into the trash, wadded some waiting newspaper over the body, smeared my hands on my jeans, and turned to Dana, whose face reflected my severe distress.

  “You looked like a serial killer,” Dana said when I recounted this story over one of Petra’s flaky, honeyed desserts.

  “It was not my finest moment.”

  “Tell her what I was going to say, psycho, before you freaked on that bird.”

  “Yeah, it gets worse. Dana stood there looking at me. And then she said she’d been trying to tell me that there was a vet still open on Lake Street.”

  “And then you burst into tears,” Dana added, finishing the old story.

  “And then I burst into tears, and Dana hugged me.”

  “And I got sparrow guts all over my Suburbs T-shirt.”

  “Oh, my God, you two must have been so cute,” Petra said, pinching both our cheeks.

  33

  MY AGENT AND I made our brief, understated pitch to a roomful of people at Random House in New York, and more people were called in as we proceeded, each one signing nondisclosure documents as the price of admission. The publisher and the corporate counsel stayed in the meeting throughout.

  To say the least, this was not the manner in which my previous contracts had been negotiated. My father was right: Shakespeare was holding doors for me that I could not open myself. The next ten minutes were unique in my agent’s experience. We were asked to stay in the room with water and fruit while everyone else left. Jennifer Hershey (my usual editor), the publisher, and the lawyer returned with a preempt offer eight minutes later.

  I had presented the quarto along with the tentative reports of those few local Minneapolis professors I had consulted and a list of other professors around the country who were eager to be advisers and authenticators. I would be paid a very small fee pending the authentication process. Assuming that verification proved my claims, then the prepublication advance would be larger by multiples than any in my career, larger in fact than the total of my entire career, more than any sum my agent had ever negotiated in her career, and that advance still represents only a fraction of what everyone expects to happen next.

  Random House would take over the Hydra-headed chore of authentication, collating reviews from Shakespeare scholars and from forensic tests of the document itself, though one of my terms (as Dad had coached me) was that the play would remain in my constant possession, with all testing done in my presence, in Minneapolis or elsewhere. (“All Arthur’s expenses paid first class if he has to travel for any testing,” Marly Rusoff, my agent, noted as if that were a mere formality, and everyone nodded as if that were a mere formality.) All examiners of the play would be required to study it in controlled conditions where copying would be impossible and only after being bound by bloodcurdling nondisclosure agreements. Random House legal would offer any assistance they could to my U.K. copyright attorney to accelerate the clearance of my right to assert ownership of the text.

  Jennifer Hershey, the editor, cleared her throat and very tactfully, very sweetly said that they certainly wished to spare me any work I didn’t “feel like doing.” This included the editing, annotatio
n, and Introduction. I didn’t have to put my name on any of it, if I wanted to “get back to your next novel, which we’re all really looking forward to.” We weren’t here to talk about me, plainly. I was free to go prepare some kind of high-tension financial instrument that could catch and contain the tsunami of royalties rolling my way.

  But I refused to yield to my senior partner. I spoke with unpracticed and sincere eloquence. This was my family’s project. And I loved it. It mattered to my family and to me that our name be represented in the process and in the publication. It had to be that way. Everyone happily nodded. Jennifer asked again, just to be sure I understood what kind of workload I’d be taking on, if I was certain I didn’t want to hand off the editorial tasks to an acknowledged Shakespeare scholar? I did not. “I would rather not publish with a house that didn’t trust me to handle this responsibility.” Silence.

  “Fantastic then.” Someone new chimed in that they liked “the publicity story line,” but I could see them regrouping to attack again on this point later.

  As the authentication process achieved “agreed-upon benchmarks of physical and textual authenticity,” I would be fed larger slices of my advance. In the meantime, Random House would manage all publicity and marketing, including the cover design and any supplementary material in the final edition. I would write an Introduction, which, I insisted (based on their obvious unwillingness to let me do the job at all), could not be abridged or altered without my consent. They inhaled, smiled, agreed. The Introduction would include a synopsis, a presentation of general historical context, and an essay outlining the evidence for the play’s authenticity. I would also oversee, with Jennifer, any other necessary work preparing the play for a “general audience.” I would give talks and publicity interviews as needed after publication. I also sold them the license to produce at a later date a paperback for theater use and to co-publish with the university of their choice an academic edition, with essays by eminent professors.