The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

by Arthur Phillips

  The house’s publicity machine was ignited. Jynne Martin, my usual publicist—and an award-winning poet in her own right, since, in this century, poets cannot rely on earls for their patronage—was excited on behalf of both her expertises and began mapping out how much to leak and when. In this dark era of a publishing industry out of joint, with omens of our destruction lighting up the night sky all around us, Shakespeare was galloping to the rescue, a man who’d cared almost nothing for the publication of his own works during his life. He would save our belief in ourselves as literate people.

  My contract was drawn up faster than any Marly had seen in thirty years in New York publishing, and conciliatory replies to her clausal quibbles were softly sighed by Random House legal in hours, not days.

  Simultaneously, she opened similarly fruitful and nondisclosable negotiations with theater producers in London and New York, and with Hollywood studios. The results of those conversations are even now being rehearsed, financed, scheduled, scouted, shot.

  I flew home to my sister waiting for me (alone) outside baggage claim. It was Dad’s release date, and Dana and I drove together to pluck him from prison.

  34

  I RENTED MY FATHER A FURNISHED one-bedroom apartment with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out over Lake Calhoun and the channel to Lake of the Isles, a place found for me by the novelist Robert Alexander, with whom I share an agent. These were my father’s first moments inside a building other than a prison or a hospital since 1987. Sailboats bobbed semi-inflated on the lake, and the slim wave crests were beginning to turn green and gold under the settling sun. He was sitting on a couch for the first time in twenty-two years. He wasn’t saying much, nor was I, other than obsessively offering him things. But he was more interested in the fine details of the world, an ancient infant. He would pick up throw pillows, squeeze them and laugh, then rise and walk to the window, press his hands against its warm glass. He made me recount and re-recount the meetings with the professors, the publishers, the details of our good fortune in the wilds of Manhattan. And I asked him why he thought the play had disappeared from history until he came upon it in that unmentionable country house.

  “You didn’t tell them that, did you?”

  “Of course not. Silvius’s attic.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “So what happened to Arthur all those years?” I asked with the most tenderness I had felt for him in decades, my hand on his dying back as he watched the boats like a little boy.

  “It’s a natural question, Artie, but it’s the wrong question. No one can prove what happened. I can suggest a possibility that hasn’t yet been disproven. I know people will want answers, but the question is unreasonable: Where did this come from? What happened four hundred years ago that nobody wrote down?”

  No, that reads too polished, coherent. He couldn’t talk like that last year. That was the gist of his answer, but it was not so smoothly spoken.

  “People are going to want to know,” I said, pushing back, because I needed an answer for my Introduction, not because I had any doubt of my own.

  But he said: “Stay calm about this.” That, he definitely said, and I laughed. I had asked as an interested believer, but he answered me as the chief of a criminal enterprise who has to talk down a jittery confederate, just when everything’s coming together so perfectly. “We don’t have to know everything. We can openly admit what we don’t know. What we may never know. It in no way reduces the wonder that is Arthur to say we don’t know where or how many times it was staged—diverse times, according to the cover. We don’t have to know how many copies were printed, or where the rest of them are. The cover says ‘corrected and augmented.’ That means there was probably an earlier printed version, an unauthorized bad quarto. But we don’t know. We don’t know and we don’t have to know if it was censored or banned or ignored. We know as little about some canonical plays. Remember: most things didn’t survive at all. There was probably more Shakespeare lost than we know. Most things don’t survive. This is what passing time means, Artie.” I remember those very words, and as he mumbled them he turned to watch the lake, and I felt at that moment—as I did several times in flashes over the coming month—a pity so profound that I would have (were he a sparrow) gladly torn him in half to end his scalding regret.

  He turned to me and asked permission to look in the fridge.

  “It’s yours.” I smiled with loving condescension. “You don’t have to ask. Dana and Petra filled it for you.”

  He drank a Diet Coke, extremely frustrated (and knowing his frustration was ridiculous) that Tab could no longer be had. “I was really looking forward to that. I’ve missed it.” He smiled at me and nodded several times as he drank, and I assumed it was love and relief, excitement for our project, and I’m sure it was all that, although eventually he asked, “What were we talking about?”

  “What happened to Arthur between 1597 and the country house?”

  “You didn’t tell them about the country house, did you?” he asked, again for the first time.

  “No. Trust me. Attic.”

  I took notes, the basis for an essay on this topic, an essay I am contractually bound to place in this Introduction, but which I can no longer honestly write. That was a different time. So now, to fulfill my terms, I offer my sincere notes of September 30, 2009, still preserved in the amber of my abbreviations, unedited. Contract fulfilled:

  Try theories that work with little we know. Dad: 1597 makes sense, but maybe not for composition. Written earlier? “Corrected and augmented” implies yes. Also, early WS: iambic pentameter rigorous throughout. Later WS bends it, stops mid-line, wraps around lines. This is early. Comp stylometry will confirm. Prob/possib perf’d earlier in decade, maybe even before plague closed theaters ’93–’94. Then perf’d again, later, does well enough 4 Burby 2 think he can make $$$ publishing → prints in ’97.

  Other evidence “squishier.” Theme: WS often stuck w/idea from I play to next, tried diff. angles. Explored fully before moving on. John, Richard 2, and both Henry 4, all between ’95 and ’98. All look at king’s fitness to rule. All variations on theme, four men (inc Prince Hal in H4), each with diff. ability diff. vocation, legit’acy, rel’ship to legit: desperate, arrogant, worried, cynical. Arthur fits perfect: slightly diff. from those 4, but absolutely of family, maybe 1st try at this, right after H6 and R3. New angle on WS’s preoccupation: What makes good king? Who should be king? What happens when king unsuited, or wishes didn’t have to be king? Arthur = Hal’s opposite, at least when Hal becomes H5. Arthur can’t become Henry V. Arthur never becomes hero, try & try. Too flawed, stained by birth. Idea WS can only safely explore 1,100 years in past.

  Squishier: people like to look for WS autobiog. in plays. Total squishy, but here: WS’s son dies in ’96. Maybe it’s in TTOA. Dad feels it. “Feels something.” TTOA “manifestly about lost fatherhoods & lost childhoods.” Written by a father? Definitely. By a father who lost a child? Very poss. So: writ in ’96, perf’d that year or next, pub’d in ’97? Maybe.

  Seems to Dad to fit between H6/R3 on one side and R2/H4 on other.

  No record of perf’s, but not damning. No record 2 Noble Kinsmen and others ever perf’d in WS’s life. Likely just not recorded. Cover probab. tells truth: “played diverse times.” Maybe at Court—no records for Eliz’s reign, don’t know every single 1 of 100S of plays at Curtain, Theater, Inns, Stewington (?), etc.

  Arthur is 1st x WS on cover page. ’98 Love’s Labour’s Lost now 2nd x. So WS name popular enuf 2 sell plays by ’97. But TTOA never printed again and excl’d from Folios, even 2nd and 3rd Folios. So. Have to try best guess 4 Y. Y?

  Dad’s speculate 1: play about sterile queen—bad idea w/60+ y.o. QE1.

  Dad spec 2: answer is here, timing explains: 1598: George Nickleson (sp?), Queen’s agent in Edinburgh sends letter to Lord Burly (sp?), Lord High Treasurer/adviser, complaining how Scotch portrayed on London stage!!! Very serious. Msg really from King James 6 of Scot. Most pe
ople know he will be Eng king when Queen Eliz dies. Absolutely poss. because of this letter, plays banned, publications stop, even copies destr. Not just Arthur. Recall: theaters closed, companies shut down, actors/writers imprisoned, even tortured, for doing wrong play wrong time. 1597 printing Arthur. 1598: anything anti-Scot is out. Arthur more than enuf anti-scot. TTOA Scots and Picts: craven, scheming, villainous, rebellious, murd., kidnappers.

  Banned in ’98, then forgot. 1623: collected works. But Scot James 6 now James 1 on Eng throne (TTOA’s worst case: Scot king of Britain.) Hemmings + Condell look through playbook, come 2 Arthur, share laugh, shake heads, leave out. No Folio = no survival. All quartos event. vanish. Only Folio guarantee memory of plays.

  Until better theory.

  King James complaining about anti-Scottish plays is precisely the argument used to explain the disappearance from Shakespeare’s canon of Edward III, which was printed anonymously in 1596 and 1599. But this explanation was not first proposed, as nearly as I can tell from my amateurish research, until the 1990s. I know that The Tragedy of Arthur existed in 1975 at the latest, when my father showed us the putative 1904 edition. And I know the quarto was untouched in a safe-deposit box as of 1986. So if Arthur itself is a fake, then it benefits from an amazing piece of luck: it can justify its disappearance with a historical footnote that came after the play’s putative forgery.

  Dad made a little joke at this point, which I can reconstruct verbatim from my notes on the yellow legal pad: “Of course, there was no Anti-Defamation League or women’s lib in 1623, so Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew make the cut, but the Scotch were apparently very delicate souls, feelings easily bruised, and so two good plays are lost to assuage the tender kilted folk, ‘shrinking underneath the plaid.’ Amazed they didn’t demand a Macbeth rewrite.”

  In my father’s fond and wishful notion of lifelong dedication and business-partner loyalty, Shakespeare’s friends come together in 1623 to make the folio. They oversee compositors of varying competence and sobriety at Isaac Jaggard’s print shop as they set nearly a million words of type in their late friend’s honor. Task complete, they retire to the pub and lift a glass to their monumental accomplishment, a second in old Will’s memory, and one each for every play they had to leave out. Pericles, Cardenio, The Two Noble Kinsmen: they can’t include acknowledged collaborations if the co-writers won’t agree (and far be it from me to criticize strict copyright protection). They can’t find a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won anywhere, because no one’s put it on for ages, and no one ever liked it anyhow. And they can’t include Edward III and The Tragedy of Arthur because now there’s a Scotsman on the throne, and he is not going to put up with that old anti-Scot stuff that audiences used to eat up back in the nineties. So they go with the thirty-six plays they can. It’ll have to do. They hire some Dutch guy to engrave a cover picture of Will, they liquor Ben Jonson into the right mood to compose a dedication, and he subdues his own ego long enough to write something quite nice (maybe too nice, Ben’s ghost would say, since his preface is the seedling of the mighty oaken myth that Will wasn’t one of many or even first among peers but a timeless god who left mere mortals below).

  My father came out of the bathroom, his bathroom. “I just closed the door to use the toilet,” he said, laughing. “How about that?” He walked over to the fridge, hesitated at its handle, then remembered the new arrangement, went ahead. He drank his next Diet Coke lying on the carpeted floor, and he watched the last light of his last September. “I am so pleased you and I are working on this side by side. It makes me so proud, you know. I am so proud of your success as a writer. You don’t have to worry about me fouling this up. I will stay far away from the project. I know that it couldn’t possibly have happened without you. I love you, Arthur.”

  The second-to-last line is certainly a lie: this publication could very easily have happened without me. And that, like a canker in a rose, spreads corruption into all the neighboring sentences, too, and no argument of authenticity is ever enough to prove what cannot be proven.

  35

  I MOVED OUT OF MY HOTEL and into my father’s apartment as his roommate and caretaker. He had finally revealed the details of his medical condition to me and then to Dana, the inoperable and growing lump in his brain, for which all treatment seemed to him (and to me) far worse than the eventual death it promised. He wanted no sympathy and no treatment. He couldn’t prevent the former, but he could in exchange for it insist on doing his part for “our work.”

  “Yard sale,” he announced, intending to raise money for the project, though we needed none.

  His worldly goods consisted of a few boxes of books, some jazz LPs and 45s from the fifties, papers and letters, some art supplies, all of which he’d stored in my mother’s basement. “Seriously? She let you do that?”

  “I hope so. Will you call her?”

  “You should call,” Dana said, the ridiculous, last-moments-of-a-romantic-comedy matchmaker tone convecting through her voice. She opened her phone and dialed for him, held it to his ear until he finally used his own hand, held Dana’s hand with his other.

  “Hello, Mary,” he said, then paused for so long that Dana and I looked at each other with brows lifted, stunned that Mom had so much to say right out of the gate. Finally, he went on and our fantasies deflated: “This is Arthur. I’m in Minneapolis. Artie and Dana got me a place. I hope you’re keeping well. Say, I have some boxes with you, I hope, still. I need them. Maybe we should speak on the telephone. You must know how to call the kids. Or there’s a phone here, I think. So. Goodbye.” He handed the open phone back to Dana. “She has an answering machine,” he explained helpfully.

  At Mom’s request, I picked up the boxes without him. (“Good sense,” Dad said, surrendering at once, the same man who two decades earlier had intended to outlive Sil and win her back.)

  Meanwhile, Dana and Petra took him clothes shopping, though both of them adamantly denied responsibility for the T-shirt he was wearing the next day that read I WOULD DO ME.

  He laid his few salable possessions on a blanket on the small patch of grass in front of the apartment building, everything but his private papers, and we sat on the stairs next to them, drinking Diet Coke. “Too sweet,” he said. “Lacks that lingering bite that Tab had.”

  “That was the cyclamate. Turns out to be bad for you.”

  “Literary executorship is a lot to ask.” He seemed worried about me, offering me an out. “It can certainly demand a lot of your time. Worse, probably put your own writing in the shade for a spell.”

  I savored the concern; it was well made. “Don’t worry about that. My work will be there when we’re done. Besides, this is more important than my writing. It is, and that’s okay. We’re doing something world changing. And we’re doing it together.”

  A year later, I am writhing to escape this web spun by two dead men, and literary executorship has become the most self-eradicating punishment Dante could have devised for an egotistical author. There was another writer born on my and Will’s birthday, a hero of mine, whose son also signed his life over to promoting and protecting his father’s works. I think of them both as these two other laughing corpses fling their bolas around my ankles.

  But that day, I was eager to reassure: “You’ll be with us for a while longer, Dad. And, even after, you can count on me.” We sat under the painted bedsheet he’d strung up between two posts: YARD SALE—I’M DYING.

  “You’re dying? Seriously?” asked a typical customer, torn between looking for a bargain and paying her last respects to the chipper old man.

  “Well, it’s serious for me.”

  “You’re really dying? You seem so cheery.”

  “There are limited options for my mood. You’ll see someday.”

  “Ha, ha, true enough, I suppose. Well, I’m sorry. And that’s amazing. You’re inspirational. How much for the Stan Kenton?”

  A child’s memory is poor because extraordinary events—I went to a party!
I tied my shoes!—occur in a world where Fridays are frequent but irregular, and hours swell and shrink. Older brains fritz because no event is sharp enough to trench into memory’s gravel. Eventually, little occurs that hasn’t occurred in a thousand identical yesterdays, yesterday and yesterday and yesterday sinking back and out of view behind you, and your neck is daily stiffer, resists turning to look. Life in prison only exaggerates this. He swam in the blue October sky.

  “You know, you start, when your eyes are fresh, you look at a painting like A View of Delft, and you say, ‘My God! Look what that fellow can do! He can paint like that, and it looks just like the sky over Delft!’ and you are happy or ambitious or jealous or all of those. And then, all these years hurry by, all the middle part that clouds your eyes and your brain. And then, you look at real clouds like these, and you think, ‘Hmph. That looks like that painting by what’s-his-name, the Dutch fellow.’ ”

  “I remember the weather the day we did the UFO,” I said. “Like this.”

  “Well, you should exert your memory a little more forcefully,” he said with a non-sequiturial whip crack of anger, “because that was July.”

  We took in about sixty-five dollars that day, deducting the cost of the painted sheet. We threw out what didn’t sell, and after that my father owned some clothes, toiletries, and a box of letters. I asked him if he wanted to go to a museum, a library, a bookstore, a movie, a park, the beach, for a boat ride, if he wanted some cash and to be left alone. “I want to help with the play,” he said. “And sleep.”