8. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 185-211

35

After learning that his father has an inoperable brain tumor and has refused treatment that would delay his death, Arthur moves in with him. They take turns supervising the visiting scholars who examine the quarto, making sure that they abide by the rules: photograph no more than four pages and never take the play from the room. Among their visitors is David Crystal, "the world's leading expert in Shakespearean linguistics," whom Petra describes as "quite dishy."

The "dishy" David Crystal

Crystal calls the play "a lovely piece of creativity," and dates it as "No later than 1595, if it is him, perhaps much earlier, in fact." He suggests that it is the product of a collaboration, but asks for more time before authenticating it.

Then Dana calls, very upset. Petra had already left to pick her up at the theater, he tells her, but Dana insists that he come immediately. When he arrives and finds her alone, she explains that her rehearsal had gone exceptionally well -- thanks perhaps to a particularly effective experimental dosage of her antidepressants -- and in a fit of enthusiasm afterward  she had planted a kiss on the actor playing Palamon. Petra had arrived at that moment and, witnessing the kiss, had left.

They return to the apartment, where Crystal is still studying the manuscript. He observes, "All the rhymes rhyme in original pronunciation," which is, he informs a confused Arthur, "good." Dana sends Arthur to her apartment with some flowers and instructions to explain to Petra about the kiss. She kisses him, and he winds up spending the night.

36

When he returns to his father's apartment the next morning, Crystal is there again, and Dana is supervising. The contract from Random House is there for him to sign, and he goes out to have the document notarized while Dana sits "guard for another hour, my semi-comforting lies draped over her ears." When he returns, she sends him to her apartment to pick up some things, refusing to go there until Petra asks her to.

Petra refuses to talk to Dana, who spends fifteen days staying at one place or another. Arthur also avoids seeing Petra, though mainly in hope that things will work out so that Petra will permanently switch from Dana to him. But when Dana's play opens, Petra attends, and he leaves her to talk with Dana. The next day, he takes the quarto to a laboratory at the University of Minnesota, where his editor and a lawyer from Random House join him, along with two specialists in ink and paper who have been flown in for the tests.

The paper expert dazzles Arthur with his expertise even before he examines the quarto, but all of the tests conducted while Arthur is there go well. Samples of ink and paper are taken and the results are promised in a week or two.

Arthur goes home and finds that his father has died.

37

Arthur delivers a lengthy and heartfelt eulogy at his father's funeral, and afterward asks Dana to become his partner in publishing the quarto. "I suppose I thought it might make Dana feel better, when she learned about me and Petra." She declines, however, insisting that Arthur take full credit for the book.

38

Back at the apartment, Arthur goes through the box of letters his father had kept, finding family letters and prison reports, but nothing like what he's hoping for: "a comprehensive catalogue of his forgeries, the basis perhaps -- I felt the seductive whisper in the back of my mind -- for my next novel."

Then he finds an index card stuck to the back of a catalog for an art exhibition in 1967 in which his father had shown two paintings.

There are four lines of writing. Under a doodled comet or approaching cannonball, two stylized arrows mark ideas or a to-do list. The first line reads, "explain Arthur in York." The second arrow points to "Cumbria backs away." Below these is a line of verse, lightly seasoned with scansion marks: "When Ríghteous mén would stánd alóof." 

The line is almost the last line of Act III -- When righteous men in conscience stand apart -- from a soliloquy in which the Earl of Cumbria backs away from his plan to assassinate Arthur (who never explains what he was doing in York).

Arthur recognizes what he has found: The index card is numbered 14, and it survived only because something spilled on it so it stuck to the back of the catalog. It represents notes his father was taking as he wrote the play.

He is thunderstruck by the revelation, and embarrassed that he had not recognized the play for what it was: "What makes something rapidly and obviously a forgery after it was, sometimes for decades, so obviously genuine? Go Google the van Meegeren Vermeers. A child could tell you that those Navajos and Down's syndrome maids aren't by the same man who painted Girl with a Pearl Earring."

Han van Meegeren forgery, The Disciples at Emmaus

So he decides to stop the publication, to "end this farce." But, he notes, "obviously, you are reading this, and I have failed." He decides that sometime in the Fifties or Sixties, his father had realized that he was never going to get anywhere with a legitimate art career, so he came up with the most profitable idea possible: a new Shakespeare play. And he studies all the ways to do it.

When he presents the theory to his mother, she objects, "There were barely libraries in those prisons. Somehow he's concocting sixteenth-century ink?" So Arthur thinks he must have had a partner, perhaps Chuck Glassow. She objects that Glassow is "a grocer and a thief, not a genius." But Arthur is certain he's right, even when his mother asks, "are you sure that index card says what you think it says? This is a lot of money." So he promises his mother he will think about it before doing anything rash. "I waited and mulled over that index card, but I could (and still can) see only one interpretation."

Han van Meegeren forgery, The Smiling Girl

39

Then Bert Thorn calls to tell Arthur that his father left a will making him his "literary executor" and directing him to "see to the publication, protection, and promotion of the play The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain by William Shakespeare, so as to maximize the financial return from the play to its beneficiaries." Arthur is given a 28 percent share of the proceeds, with 24 percent each going to Dana, their mother, and "my friend, Charles R. Glassow." Moreover, if Arthur should do anything to indicate that the work isn't by Shakespeare, then his share would be distributed among the other beneficiaries. And the will had been drafted two months before he contacted Arthur about the play. "In other words, he could conceive only of a son as thieving as the father." Dana directs her own scorn at Glassow: "How many times did Dad go to jail while Chuck got off?"

After their meeting with the lawyer, Arthur asks Dana how things are going with Petra, hoping that it's over between them. She says, "I think she's already seeing someone else," which piques his interest, since he assumes he is the "someone else." She goes on to blame the meds she was taking and to "wonder what Shakespeare would have made of psychopharm":

"Hard to believe that would have seemed like a good idea to him. 'Here, take this: you'll be happy to be a glover like your dad. Here, take this: you'll be happy to be a Protestant. Here, take this: you'll be happy enough married to that old hag and living in Stratford.' I don't think so."

He leaves her at the theater and goes to see Petra. But she tells him they're through. When he asks if she is going to tell Dana about their night together, she says, "Of course not. Why would I want to hurt her?"

7. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 155-185

29

Arthur e-mails his father "a few basic questions" that he says "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?

His father suggests that he come visit him again. And he tells him that in 1958 he went "to England to do some work for a wealthy client" who "lived in a big country house." He was supposed to paint a "replica" of a picture "for insurance purposes" -- all very legitimate, he claims. When he wasn't painting he spent time in the house's library, which had a second edition of the Third Folio. Also in the collection were some specially bound anthologies, in which some previous owner had collected "pamphlet-size quartos." In one of these he found what the handwritten table of contents indicated was a grouping of four Shakespeare plays, a couple of Ben Jonsons, and the Elizabethan play Mucedorus, an unattributed play that was once thought to have been by Shakespeare. But as he examined the contents he discovered that an eighth play had been bound together with the others.

It's The Tragedy of Arthur, of course. Arthur keeps asking his father for the name of the man who owned the country house, but his father keeps putting off answering the question. His father discovered that the man has no interest in the books in his library, so he took his nail scissors and snipped the play from the anthology. Since it wasn't listed in the table of contents, he figured it would never be missed. He took the play back to Minneapolis.

Arthur asks again for the man's name, and this time his father says he's not going to tell him. For one thing, he discovered that the man did something illegal with the copy of the painting he made for him. And for another, he doesn't want Arthur telling the man or his heirs about his theft.

"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."

Arthur protests, but his father continues with his story. He was so taken with the play that he wanted to keep it secret. He discovered that there were no other records of the existence of the play. Arthur asks about Dana's poster of the Errol Flynn performance, and his father admits that it's a fake he made for her.

But the play, he insists, is genuine, and one reason he kept it secret is that he was in prison. He didn't want the true story of its provenance coming out. But the owner of the sole copy of the play has the rights to license any printing or performance of it. (Arthur claims that he checked with an English solicitor who confirmed this.) So now he proposes that, to remove any taint of felony from Arthur's possession of the quarto, he say that his stepfather, Silvius, found it in the attic of a house he once owned in Ely, Minnesota, and gave it to him.

But then Arthur asks about the 1904 edition, and his father admits that he forged it. Arthur is so stunned that he forgets to ask the follow-up questions: Why he forged the inscription to his father from the drama club, and his father's inscription to him, and the picture of his father that he included in it. "He gave Dana -- with sincere love, I'm sure -- a family heirloom going back generations that he'd made himself."

In any case, he had had to wait until the right time to reveal the existence of the quarto because his own past would have tainted its discovery. "My career is ideally suited to make my word on this useless. 'Read all about it! Convicted forger discovers Shakespeare play!'" But now that Arthur has become a successful author, he can use his own reputation to bring the play to light. (Arthur observes, "Novelist isn't much better than forger," but his father disagrees.)

So his father outlines the necessary procedure: There is no direct line of descent from William Shakespeare, but a claim might be made to it by the estates of the printer, William White, or the publisher, Cuthbert Burby, so there will have be proof that their lines have died out as well. Arthur is still upset by the fact that his father stole it from a country house, but his father insists that that secret will die with him. And anyway, his father won't get rich off of his theft: "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."

30

Arthur and Dana and Petra spend two days trying "to poke hole" in the play, reading it skeptically and attacking anything about it that didn't seem Shakespearean. But even the flaws in the play come to feel Shakespearean to them, and they finally decide that he wrote it.

31

His father e-mails asking for news on the progress with authenticating the play, and notes, "I never could fake anything of real quality. You said that once to me: a coupon faker is all I am, right?" And Arthur has to admit this:

I had never once thought my father wrote the play; I had at most only suspected he'd forged the relic from some other text, forged Shakespeare's participation, found some play by someone lesser, like Thomas Dekker, fiddled with the cover page, at most.

His father asks him to trust him, and Arthur remembers the man who conned him into faking crop circles and then blamed him when he got caught. But when his father notes that the time to trust him is "now ... when I am dying," Arthur is stunned into submission.

32

So he begins serious study of Shakespeare, reading everything he can, relying on Dana's greater knowledge of the canon for guidance, "trying to give myself fully to my father's project, to become the world's most devoted and loving son for his dying months." He transcribes the play, modernizing the spelling, and adding act and scene divisions and notes. He begins corresponding with scholars about a possible "once-in-a-century opportunity in Shakespeare studies." And finally he visits a Shakespeare scholar, Tom Clayton, at the University of Minnesota, to ask him about Arthur plays and the possibility that the quarto is genuine. (Tom Clayton is a real Shakespeare scholar.) Clayton is noncommittal without having read the play, however.

Arthur communicates his new-found enthusiasm in an e-mail to his father, and begins spending his evenings at Dana and Petra's, falling more and more into the fantasy of an affair with Petra.

33

Finally, he and his agent make a pitch at Random House, and receive an offer. Random House would take charge of the authentication process. And Arthur flies home to meet Dana, and they drive to the prison where their father is being released.

34

Arthur rents his father an apartment in Minneapolis. Preparing to write his introduction to the edition of the play, he asks why Arthur disappeared for four hundred years. "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." Essentially, he says that we don't know and therefore shouldn't ask.

Arthur reprints the notes he took in his conversations with his father, but there is an edginess and sense of unease that begins to creep into his accounts of their discussions, partly because of his father's defensiveness.

6. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 124-155

22

Arthur tells us that he is compelled to change the name of Dana's girlfriend, but he will tell us that she was ten years younger than he and Dana, "that she was of another race" and also "another religion." And that she was a musician who played the theremin and a composer. Eventually he'll call her Petra.

First, however, he has a talk with his widowed mother, who blurts out a confession that her life with Sil had been a bit of a bore, but "later said exactly the opposite to Dana ('Thank God for Sil. I got what I needed, I owe him everything, and I am so blessed'), demonstrating a mental flexibility that is evidence of wisdom or empathy or Alzheimers. Her conversation with me may just have been steam releasing, only a piece of her." He also notes that this kind of mentality is absent from Shakespeare:

If Dana and Harold Bloom are right, if we're all just walking figments of Shakespeare's imagination, then where in the canon is my mom, who could not quite say the truth about what she'd lived, that Sil's love was not enough, that kindness and best efforts were not enough?

But this conversation with his mother is only a prelude to his first meeting with Petra, with whom he instantly falls in love. Dana and Petra have a dog, "a male beagle they'd named Maria," because of Sir Toby Belch's description of the Maria in Twelfth Night as "a beagle, true-bred." They found her at a breeder who claimed, "My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind," quoting A Midsummer Night's Dream.

23

He goes to visit his father, who is two months away from the end of his prison sentence and is almost eighty: "A rickety man aswim in an orange jumpsuit, a visible skull, mottled lizard's wattle from chin to top button." He surprises Arthur by saying he is proud of him because of his success as a novelist: "You make wonders, Arthur." And then, after hearing that Arthur has finished his fourth book and is looking for something to write about, asks if his publisher is a good one. Arthur laughs and says, "Random House is a reputable publisher."

His father talks around the subject for a while, finally getting around to what he plans to do when he gets out of prison. "I was a serious person," he says. "And this city, your friend Constantine -- they owe me. You always told him about me. Helped him lock me up." Arthur keeps his temper, however, and his father admits that he is wrong about that: "You forget which conversations with yourself were settled a long time ago and which ones are still recent."

But now he gets to the point: "I don't have much time, and I want you to do something. With me." Arthur says in hindsight that he isn't sure how to punctuate that request, that it might have been "I want you to do something with me," or that it may in fact have been "I want you to do something for me." But what he heard was his "father asking for my unique help, not anyone else's, not Dana's."

What he wants Arthur to do is get in touch with Bert Thorn and tell him to give Arthur a key. Then he grows confused and emotional and leaves Arthur feeling a desperate need to help him. "Like all good pigeons, I took on most of the work of conning me myself."

24

So he drives to the office of Thorn, his father's old attorney, and on the way calls Jana to tell her that he is staying on in Minneapolis a while longer. She tells him that she has fallen in love with a friend of theirs, Jiři.

25

Bert Thorn gives him the key to a safe-deposit box. He decides to share this secret with Dana after all, but when he gets to her place she has been called to an audition, so Petra accompanies him to the bank instead.

26

At the bank, Petra treats the opening of the safe-deposit box as if it were a scene of intrigue from a movie. The box, which the clerk tells them hasn't been opened in twenty-three years, contains a small crate with BANANAS stenciled on one side. Inside it, under layers of canvas, is a small metal lockbox, and in it, "on a foam pad, inside a sealed plastic bag, was a book about the size of a thin paperback." It is the quarto of The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain.

Petra is excited, even frightened at the discovery. Arthur is, of course, skeptical: "My father, of all people, a forger, owned and had kept hidden for decades a real 412-year-old document? No. empirically disproven by everything I knew about it." But he tries not to let his skepticism stifle Petra's enthusiasm. He just says, "This is interesting."

They carry the box home and, using latex gloves, read the book. "A printed book from the 1500s is not immediately easy to read, even if you are not standing two inches away from a woman you are overwhelmingly attracted to." Arthur, however, knows the play from the book he had read thirty years earlier, so he is able to overcome some of the difficulties of orthography and printing. Petra is enthralled "and I lost a breath as I recalled that we were coming closer and closer to a scene where Arthur kisses his new queen, and my desire and hope galloped far ahead of the main body, and my mouth went dry, and I prayed that Dana would not come home yet."

When they get to the scene, Petra strokes his cheek with her gloved hand. They discuss the implications of the scene, but are interrupted by Dana's arrival. "She had come from her callback audition for a production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late-career Shakespeare collaboration and, with its intimations of lesbian love, one of her favorites." Arthur is forced to yield the book to Dana and watch as she and Petra read it together.

It was already too much for me. I played up my ignorance, my incompetence, my Shakespeare indifference, and especially Dad's confusion. I told her to keep it safe and do whatever should be done with it.

But Dana insists that their father had put Arthur in charge of it, though she and Petra are more excited by the book -- Petra wants to compose music for a performance of the play. He tells her to keep it, but she says, "He wants you to do something with it," and sends him away with the book.

27

The next day Arthur gets an e-mail from his father, telling him not to leave the book alone with another person, not to let them copy it, but to have whatever expert testing needs to be done on it. He insists, "you and I will be partners, though you, my son, will be the senior partner (not including Shakespeare)." He admits that the quarto is worth a lot of money, "But not for me. None for me, Arthur. I do not need money, and I will not be around to spend." This will be, he says, a big boost to Arthur's own career.

Arthur is uncertain. "I didn't understand what it mattered if this quarto was real or what it proved, considering someone had published the play before -- we had the 1904 edition, and my grandfather had acted in it in 1915." But his father goes on enthusiastically about what it will mean to readers and audiences. "You will be responsible for all that. And say what you want, but your books are not good for that." He encourages Arthur to promote it, to get it staged or even filmed, to write about it, and so on.

Arthur is infected by his father's enthusiasm, mainly in terms of his insistence that it will enhance his own literary reputation, but he doesn't open the box and take out the book, because it was Dana and Petra's enthusiasm for it that had moved him earlier. "Instead, I nodded off thinking my father loved me and judged me more creative than Shakespeare."

28

But he comes to his senses, realizing that his father's e-mail is full of "swirling nonsense," and he telephones Dana to ask, "Is he mad at you about something?" He doesn't understand why he should have pitched the project to him. She says he wants it published, and since Arthur has a publisher, it is logical that it should be his task. But Arthur says "it was already published. What's changed?"

He goes online and starts looking for references to the play, and discovers that he can't find any copies of the 1904 edition, even on eBay. There are no references to it on Google. "Anywhere. Amazon, Alibris, Google, eBay. There's no such play. It doesn't exist." He insists that they must confront "the obvious." Dana refuses to admit that their forger father could have faked something like this: "Arthur, seriously? ... He didn't. Look at it. Touch it. Smell it. Read it. He couldn't. He didn't." And so, for a time at least, Arthur is convinced she's right.

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?

5. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 96-123

17

In 1992, Arthur takes a business trip to London, and writes to Dana about his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he meets a couple of Germans, Heidi and Günter. Arthur lets his skepticism about and distaste for Shakespeare appear on his face when Günter is praising him, and Heidi notices it. When Günter stops to take a leak by the side of a building and is busted by a cop, she and Arthur beat a retreat, leaving Günter in the hands of the law.

She then confesses to Arthur that she dislikes Shakespeare too. She kisses him and launches into an attack on the improbabilities of the plots of various plays, including The Merchant of Venice:

"Okay, so all your Shylock has to tell to that little bitch is 'Hey, it is Antonio's debt to pay me, so he can cut his own flesh without me and give me my pound, and if he spill his own blood or cuts out too much, that is his problem. Now pay me, Christian bastards!' Am I not right?"

Arthur admits that he'd never thought of that either, and shares with her Dana's theory that all of the Antonios in Shakespeare are gay. (It's certainly true that the Antonios in Merchant and Twelfth Night can be, and often are, presented that way.)

18

Arthur's letter to Dana about meeting Heidi ends rather vaguely, he admits, and he tells us that he had fallen for her so hard that he decided to skip out on the rest of his business trip and run away with her. "I considered leaving behind everything of mine except wallet and passport but, as always, was terribly concerned with what others would think of me (in this case, that I'd been kidnapped)." He leaves his paperwork on the advertising account outside the door of his colleague's hotel room, and flies off to Venice with her.

But in Venice, as he is struggling through the streets with his suitcase and hers, she disappears. He doesn't even know her last name. He doesn't know whether he's been conned into buying her a plane ticket or she is lost and looking for him, or even if she has gotten into some sort of trouble. He goes to the police and tries to explain, but realizes the absurdity of his situation:

You did not know her last name? You had known her less than twenty-four hours when she vanished? At the time you were lovers, signore? You met when she left her previous lover in a London prison, because he had irritated her by taking her to too many Shakespeare plays? All of your conversation in that twenty-four hours -- perhaps two hours total -- was built on a mutual distaste for Shakespeare? The playwright, signore?

There are no documents in her suitcase by which he can trace her. He thinks that she would never have left her clothes and her toiletries, but realizes that he had left more than that in London, "traded it all for a new chapter of life." Moreover, he realizes that "she had had more effect on me than any woman in my life in New York except Dana." Once he recovers from the shock, he stays on in Venice, observing and writing. "Heidi was my muse, I came to understand in a flash of self-love. I have since wondered if I didn't imagine her."

Dana writes that she learned of his resignation from the advertising firm from one of the women in his office he had slept with, but she is not impressed with his claim to have broken free from his past, and particularly from Shakespeare:

It's all been done before, and you claim that you are free of influences? Anxious brother, he [Shakespeare] shares your birthday. Why do you have to deny him for that? You will somehow reduce him, beat him, ignore him, prove he doesn't own you? Even if those weren't contradictory, you miss that he has invented you already. The boy intent on being free of his family? The dreamy artist who roams Italy for inspiration? The Jew in Venice? You learned all this from him, or from people who learned it from him then mushed it into sitcoms and weepy movies for you. We are all his ideas.

Dana is here echoing two of Harold Bloom's books: The Anxiety of Influence and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. But the die is cast: "I fled from my father, my mother, my twin, my work, an entire life, which I at twenty-eight dismisses as unoriginal and a failure. Just like my father, I did not come home for years."

19

So Arthur goes to Prague and marries a beautiful Czech model named Jana. In 1995 they have twin boys "who for a while thought their foreign father was okay, but then grew increasingly embarrassed by his accent and general air of not belonging and his stupid answers to their czildhood predicaments." (That "czildhood" is evidently intentional and a rather silly joke.) He admits that he "did not find my lost half in Bohemia after all," but that he did become a successful writer, "publishing four novels from 2002 to 2009." (As did the actual Arthur Phillips, though not in Prague.)

After the publication of his first novel, he goes to see his father in prison, but is upset by his apparent indifference to the novel. "'I think he traded it for cigarettes,' I told Dana back in New York on the way home, futilely garbing pain in a joke for her." As usual, Dana finds the source for his resentment in Shakespeare: "The half-made man, self-loathing, comes to his wizardly father for approval, for his freedom to become fully human. Sound familiar, Caliban?" (Arthur notes here that Dana is reading Harold Bloom's book with "the maximalist and insane thesis that Shakespeare invented how people now live, communicate, think.")  Dana is also nursing a crush on "the young actress Anne Hathaway" -- with no overt recognition of the Shakespearean tie there.

He returns to Prague, but experiences a kind of psychological disassociation: "I started to lose my language skills. I had increasing difficulty recalling Czech vocabulary and grammar." He also reveals that he has been devising an anagram for his father to decipher: "The first letters of the titles of my novels are S, P, E, and A.  I planned to write, with all my remaining years, books initialed S, H, A, K, E, R, and E, and then, maybe, A, N, D, M, E. (The real Arthur's books do begin with those letters, except that The Tragedy of Arthur breaks the planned pattern.) But he prides himself that he has never titled a book with a quote from Shakespeare.

20

Returning to his plan to provide plot summaries of the play, he gives us one for the fourth act, in which Arthur names Philip of York his heir. "Is it the dialogue headings down the left margin over and over again -- 'ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP ARTHUR PHILIP' -- that make me leery?"

In 2009, Dana calls to tell him that Sil is critically ill, so he flies to Minneapolis. But before he leaves Prague, Jana confronts him with the suspicions of her mother and sister that Arthur has been having an affair. "My stead, then angry (and truthful denials launched her defensive weapon: she had slept with ... it doesn't matter whom. I said I didn't believe her, which was a serious tactical blunder because I thought she was unattractive, did I?"

21

He arrives in Minneapolis to find that his stepfather has died while he was en route. Dana has moved back to Minneapolis and is teaching drama at their old school. And she is living with a new lover.

4. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 74-96

13

Dana's insistence on her anti-Stratfordian theory begins to wane, but she continues to believe that The Tragedy of Arthur is a genuine Elizabethan play by Shakespeare, whoever he may have been. Arthur posits "that the authenticity of Arthur was tightly bound in Dana's subconscious to the authenticity of her father's love for her."

Their father was released on parole in March of 1986, their senior year, but he violated the terms of his parole by attending Dana's graduation ceremony at Brown. He was arrested for it, and therefore missed Arthur's graduation. Her obsession with the idea of the wager between the Earl of Oxford and Feivel-Phillips had led her to believe it was genuine, and that "she would inherit $9 million in 2014." When she realized that her father "had no congratulations or legacy to present, no key to a hidden world of elite secrets," she had a breakdown, but had recovered from it when she went to live with Arthur in New York that fall.

Unlike other anti-Stratfordians, once her initial psychological splinter was tweezed out, she let the whole stupid thing go. She came out of it where she began and gave Shakespeare back his life's work (and gave her father back a loving, wiser daughter). She still loved the plays.... She was converted by the fire of her experience into a lover of works, not authors.

Arthur goes to work in advertising, and Dana works as a waitress and in other odd jobs, trying to become a stage actress. 

14

Arthur Sr. serves six months for his parole violation, but when he is released in December 1986, Ted Constantine has him arrested on a new charge. Arthur flies to Minneapolis for the hearing, but Dana has "won the role of the Wicked Witch of the West in an off-Broadway children's theater production of The Wizard of Oz and didn't dare give her understudy an opportunity to bump her off."

Unfortunately, his father grows truculent with his public defender and quarrelsome with Arthur himself, contending that Arthur is wasting his life in advertising. Frustrated and offended, Arthur returns to New York. His father is convicted of the crime -- forging New York state lottery tickets -- and because Minnesota has introduced mandatory sentencing for repeat offenders is sent to prison, not to be released until 2009.

Back in New York, Arthur gets drunk with Dana and a girlfriend, and wakes up with a terrible pain in his crotch: He has had his penis tattooed.

I healed, and the result became clear (though only under certain conditions). Then it produces the effect of a sort of stylized medieval scepter (admittedly for a tiny king) inscribed with a regal motto of sovereignty -- Arthur Rex -- although a jester's belled baton has been occasionally cited by select viewers. 

15

Dana's play ends its run, and she goes to Minnesota to see her father. While she is there, their stepfather, Sil, is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Arthur flies out to see him, and struck by the mess he has made of his relationship with his actual father, tries to show affection for Sil, who he is convinced is going to die. "I told him that I loved him. He laughed for a while and nodded. And lived for another twenty-two years."

Then he goes to see his father in prison and says, "I think you're in here because of me, and I'm sorry." But his father assures him, "I put myself in here. Nothing you could have done or said could have stopped that." He tells his mother that he's moving back to Minneapolis, but she tells him to go back to New York and look after his sister instead. "And so I flew back to New York with Dana, decided -- in my next swing -- that I was irrelevant to them all, and that was okay, if I could just be a man about it." So he tries writing short stories about his relationship with his family members but "the stories always sucked."

He notes, in summarizing Act III, "After Arthur marries,one of his many abandoned loves finds comfort with a kindly shepherd named Silvius, willing to marry Arthur's sloppy seconds. This is more than the most lenient statistician can bear."

16

Dana is cast as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet in New Jersey, and Arthur goes to watch a rehearsal in which the Gertrude and the Claudius argue about the motivation behind Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death. Arthur observes that Shakespeare never indicates the way a line should be read. "This is, I believe, one of the reasons Shakespeare continues to be popular: he offers directors a share of credit, lets them add their two cents. It also makes actors and directors responsible for justifying weakness in the plays."

Later, he argues this point with Dana, saying, "That's why we keep going back to [Shakespeare] for the ten billionth production of this lame play.... You all talk it out until you make it make sense for him. He wrote it, so it must be right." But Dana accuses him of attacking Shakespeare when he's really mad at his father: "You've so conflated him with his favorite writer that you want to punish one by taking shots at the other." He retorts that she is "part of a vast, unconscious conspiracy of enablers, all of whom operate without central control but to the same end: to make a man who died four centuries ago into a god."

Arthur approvingly notes Samuel Pepys's judgment that Romeo and Juliet was "the worst [play] that ever I heard in my life." And that in 1850, "before the Shakespeare-industrial complex had crushed our spirit," Herman Melville dismissed the "absolute and unconditional admiration of Shakespeare" as one of "our Anglo-Saxon superstitions," and unworthy of Americans. "I liked Moby-Dick until I read that quote. Now I love Moby-Dick."

But it soon becomes apparent that this resentment of Shakespeare is founded in Arthur's sense that he isn't playing on a level field with Shakespeare. He claims, "If it didn't have his name on it, half his work would be booed off the stage, dismissed by critics as stumbling, run out of print." By contrast, he cites the harsh dismissal by a "blogger" of a work of his own (and of the actual Arthur Phillips), The Egyptologist. By contrast, Shakespeare is "let off easy all the time."

3. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 42-73

9

Arthur claims to be "CONTRACTUALLY BOUND" to write a synopsis of the play, but his reluctance shows in his decision to do it piecemeal: one act at a time. So this section begins with a summary of the first act of The Tragedy of Arthur, which he regards as no "more stilted or formulaic than other Shakespeare first acts."

Then he returns to the 1904 edition of the play, with whom Dana was fascinated. Their father, he tells us, "challenged her to prove its authorship to him, and she rose to the task" with her examinations of the play's vocabulary and style. They also discussed possible reasons why it was not included in the First Folio.

Meanwhile, in her adolescence, Dana discovers that she is a lesbian, accepting "it without a blink of shame or regret." Arthur's "love life was far more 'normal' than hers, more hormonal, less romantic, alternately sullen and grubby, swollen and grabby." But he also maintained a desire to be "perfectly joined, soulmated beyond the possibility of any rupture or misunderstanding" with her, though he insists that "this is not a report of rank incest."

Dana goes to Brown, where in the first six weeks, he tells us she transforms "into a ferocious-looking lesbo-pug." Arthur attends Harvard, where in his junior year he writes a play about apartheid that is staged. By then, Dana has "transformed herself again and again, leaving behind her bull-dykery for punk rock and had now become a flower child, a retro pose that fit her least well of all her looks so far." She attends the play but tells him afterward, "It wasn't like a play. It was just like ... like a tender for bids on your penis." He isn't offended, whereas when he told his father about the play, his "fainter uninterest had brutalized me."

10

Arthur analyzes his relationship with his father as part hatred: for his arrests, which he came to see as disregard for his family and as an "apparent preference for prison over my company."

In parallel, there was my love for him and my admiration for his work and for his theory that, as a doctor makes the world healthier or a lawyer makes it more precise, he made the world more wondrous. This belief must have had -- the shrinks and I are in concord about this -- some effect on my becoming a novelist.

He recalls his embarrassment when he was fifteen and his father was sent to prison "for a grubby little tax dodge." His father's friend Chuck Glassow had him forge coupons for his grocery-store chain that allowed Glassow to claim lower revenues than he actually had. Glassow was sentenced to five years and served two, Arthur's father to ten and served seven. Arthur "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." Later, he would blame his father for the breakup with Doug.

11

A summary of Act II begins this section, and Arthur observes of the dialogue between two characters: "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?" He wonders about the statistical likelihood of a man who had a dog named Socrates discovering a Shakespeare play referring to "a dog of the same name." But he also puts forth the possibility that his father "lied about having a dog named Socrates."

The summary also introduces a character: "Arthur's childhood friend Constantine, the Earl of Cornwall." But in commenting on this coincidence, he admits that "Holinshed's Chronicles (the Renaissance book of history that Shakespeare used for so many plays) tells the story of Arthur and Constantine, so it's probably on the up-and-up." He also reveals that when they were in college, Dana "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."

He also learns that Doug Constantine was the first boy Dana ever kissed, and it was then that she told him the truth about the crop circles. In the play, Arthur marries "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 imagination, which, ridiculously enough, is what one Shakespearologist claims: we are all the Bard's inventions.

Arthur expresses his anger at Dana for letting their father think for so many years that Arthur was the one who leaked the crop-circle story, but she insists, "He never thought it was you." He finds her insistence on this point irritating, but notes that her resistance to what he sees as the truth about their father "was a blister waiting to burst."

12

For Dana does rebel against their father when she is fifteen: "She became an anti-Stratfordian." She comes home from the library with books by the Marlovians, the Baconians, and the Oxfordians, and writes letters to her father in prison insisting "that his lifelong idol was a fraud and a loser (implicitly like him)." Her obsession grows so acute that her grades begin to suffer, "which is why I outperformed Dana in school, though she was, by any real measure, quite a bit smarter than I."

Dana's theory (not quite as clever or witty as those of Joyce or Wilde) posits that the plays were written by two people: the Earl of Oxford and a Jewish moneylender. They had discovered that they were both poets, but the earl's position prevented him from participating in the grubby world of the theater, and the young Jew was socially unacceptable, so they came up with a plan to use the middling playwright William Shakespeare as a front. Shakespeare can have all the fame and money he can milk out of their plays. All he has to do is sign a secret document attesting that he did not write them.

The earl and the Jew become lovers and competitors, each trying to outdo the other in inventiveness. And they make a wager: They will place £200 each in an interest-bearing account, and in 2014, "the 450th anniversary of their invented playwright's birth," their descendants will add up how many of each playwright's works were selected for royal command performance:

And the closest direct descendant of the greater writer -- the more royally demanded writer -- would collect the money and reveal (with that long list of Shakespeare's signed confessions as proof) that the greater half of the work of the upstart crow was written by either Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or a confused and secretive bisexual Jew named Binyamin Feivel (wrote the sexually secretive religionless Jewish girl from Minneapolis).

She explains the supposedly autobiographical nature of the sonnets as a competition between Oxford and Feivel, each of whom calls the other "Will": "these are two lovers writing to each other, not one poet writing to two lovers."

But at some point, Dana imagines, perhaps after the death of the earl in 1604, Shakespeare realizes how damning it would be if the document in which he admits he hasn't written the play should come to light, so when the time comes to sign it, he throws it in the fire. This leaves it up to the two families to make the case for their respective plays. Binyamin Feivel, she posits, "had converted and changed his name to Ben Phillips. (My religionless sister imagined herself as the heir to Shakespeare, and found in Judaism the trick to do it.)"

The difficulty of deciding on what constitutes a royal command performance increases over the years, especially with the advent of the movies: "Elizabeth II went to cinema premieres to see Olivier's Henry V and Branagh's Henry V, but what about her DVD rentals." But Dana does her best to calculate: "By 1985, with twenty-nine years until payday, the score stood nearly tied at 1,401 performances for plays be the Earl of Oxford and 1,384 for those by Ben Phillips, our ancestor, author of the unrecognized and never-commanded Tragedy of Arthur and -- Dana could prove textually -- of her other favorite Shakespeare plays as well."

2. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 14-42

5

While his father is out of jail when Arthur is ten, he and Dana spend weekends with him in a studio apartment he has rented, "above the bookbinder where his friend Chuck Glassow had found him a job." If Arthur gets his way, their father reads Dumas and Conan Doyle to them; if Dana does, it is Shakespeare, of course. And a line from the play -- "And I serve the fairy queen, / To dew her orbs upon the grass" -- apparently leads to a misdemeanor.

One night, the elder Arthur takes them out into the country where they do something that makes no sense to young Arthur while they're doing it, but elicits a warning: "You can't tell anyone because that sucks the life out of what we did. All the fun, all the magic bleeds out, and it's just a stupid thing." It involves some elaborate preparation, including the construction of a machine made out of a snowblower. "If you Google 'crop circles' you will find aerial photos of our work, although our circle, in 1974, was very basic, not like the overwrought ones nowadays." Arthur and Dana don't realize what they have done until later, when they watch the TV news with their mother, who "made fun of it without knowing we were involved." Arthur tells us that, ironically, "This may be the closest I ever felt to him. Together we had reshaped the world, changed how some people viewed life, the universe, everything."

But this closeness fades quickly: His father gets caught, and blames it on Arthur, whose best friend at school is the son of a prosecuting attorney named Ted Constantine. Arthur's father says, "No one is saying you squealed on us.... It's just that it must have been hard not to let your pal know about this great thing." Arthur denies squealing, but it's clear that his father doesn't believe him.

For his twelfth birthday, Arthur's father makes a fake Soviet passport for him, and for his thirteenth gives him a baseball signed by Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins' star second baseman. But "by the time I was thirteen, I had started to assume that anything that passed through his hands was fake. I threw the ball away." For Dana's sixteenth birthday, he gives her a fake driver's license because she has flunked the driver's exam twice. "Since Dad was in prison when we turned sixteen, the license was made by Chuck Glassow, Dad's college friend who, officially, owned a grocery store." Glassow, he notes, "now owns a quarter of my family's coming fortune."

6

At fifteen, Arthur gets in a fight with two bullies who call Dana a dyke, and loses. She tries to console him by reading Celia's advice to Orlando in As You Like It against fighting Charles the wrestler, but it doesn't work:

Like most fifteen-year-olds (and most people), I was not delighted by Shakespeare.... Most of it is a foreign language, excessively wordy, repetitive. It was either too much work to understand the characters or, alternately (since fifteen-year-olds are programmed to produce endless reasons why they don't like anything), too easy: those awful soliloquies where bad guys reveal their plans or good guys swoon because they're so in love.

But then she reads something that does work for him: "and for this one moment, and then a whole afternoon, I thought Shakespeare was okay." It is Arthur's battle speech from The Tragedy of Arthur. She has a "little red hardcover of The Tragedy of Arthur, a simple but nicely done 1904 edition." And then he anticipates the reader's reaction: If there is a 1904 edition, "Why is Random House bothering to publish the play with such fanfare...?" But he's not about to answer that question now.

Instead, he tells us that he has the book with him right now, that it has an inscription to his grandfather, Arthur Donald ("Don") Phillips, that shows it was presented to him by "the King's Men Dramatic Society, King's School, Edmonton, Ontario, June 14, 1915." And there is a photograph of his grandfather, reproduced in the introduction on page 29, in costume for the production of the play. The author notes, however, that the costume "has nothing to do with this play," and that his "grandfather seems to be dressed in leftovers from a production of H.M.S. Pinafore." There is another inscription that indicates the book was presented to Arthur's father by his grandfather in 1942, when his father was twelve.

Arthur says he learned of this edition of the play when he and Dana were eleven and his father was out of prison and living in another apartment. He overheard his father and Dana talking. "Dana was in one of her states that can go by a lot of different names. The modern ones (manic, polar, over-stimulated, hyperactive) never much appealed to her, for good reason." He investigated the reason for her excitement but "the discovery that her buzz was Shakespeare-induced" kept him from taking much interest in it. But she insisted to him that it was important and controversial and her father "thinks we should read it and make up our own mind about it!"

Arthur remained indifferent, so there is another inscription on the book's flyleaf: "April 22, 1977 For my Dana on her 13th birthday, with eternal love. Dad." But he gave her strict instructions never to lend it out or photocopy it. "The book's rarity and importance and ambiguous value were impressed upon her." Arthur kept his distance from Arthur, but there is, he says, a final inscription: "For Arthur, from Dana."

7

Also on her thirteenth birthday, he gave her a poster "for a 1930s London stage production of Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Arthur starring Errol Flynn as Arthur and Nigel Bruce as Gloucester."

Arthur is "thirty-eight or thirty-nine minutes" younger than Dana, and they celebrated their birthdays on different days because he was born on the other side of midnight from her. They were "something more than fraternal" twins, and he says he "used to think of us as essentially identical if physically dissimilar." Dana "cried when she learned of Shakespeare's own twin children, the brother dying young, the sister living on." He notes that "Shakespeare's work teems with twins," and that Dana's initial attraction to Shakespeare came from plays about twins: The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. 
I admit that this seems a long way from an Introduction to a newly discovered Shakespeare play; this essay is fast becoming an example of that most dismal genre, the memoir. All I can say is that the truth of the play requires understanding the truth of my life.

8

The focus thus far has been on Arthur and Dana's father. Their mother remarried, after divorcing their father, a man named Silvius diLorenzo "(Window Sil, our father called him, citing his transparent personality)." Like Shakespeare's mother, her maiden name was Mary Arden, "shortened from Sardensky somewhere between Vilnius and northern Minnesota." Her father was a grocer in Ely, Minn., where she was born in 1930. Silvius, whose mother worked as a maid in the Arden household, had courted her before she married Arthur's father, and proposed to her before she left to attend the University of Minnesota in 1949. She turned him down, citing the difficulty of a mixed marriage.

In her second year at the university, "she met A.E.H. Phillips, as my father styled himself at the U. of M." By the time she took him home to meet her parents, Sil had been drafted, but he never served because of a bureaucratic mixup. The elder Arthur proposed to her there, and Sil's mother overheard the proposal through an air vent. A wedding date was set for after their graduation, two years hence. Sil heard the news from his mother and sent Mary a congratulatory telegram.

1. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. vii-14

Preface

A faux preface -- "Random House is proud to present...." -- precedes the faux  introduction to the faux Shakespeare play. It asserts some of the basic faux facts: that the play in question "was published as a quarto in 1597," that it was "the first play to be printed with Shakespeare's name on the title page," that it was "Likely banned," and that this accounts for its failure to be included in the 1623 folio, that the tests affirming its authenticity have been conducted by on "Professor Roland Verre," and that "there is now no notable voice in Shakespearean studies who questions the authenticity of The Tragedy of Arthur."  It also suggests that one read the play first, and then go back to the "very personal Introduction," "a unique appreciation by a Random House author, Arthur Phillips."

Introduction: 1

The preface's steering-away of the reader from the "very personal Introduction" to the play itself is of course a ruse, since the very first thing the novel's Arthur Phillips (to be distinguished from the novel's author Arthur Phillips) does is to tell us that he has "NEVER VERY MUCH LIKED SHAKESPEARE," and to tell us that the book is "unstoppable and unfortunate." He has been propelled into the project by his "father and twin sister's adoration of his work," but underlying his distaste for Shakespeare is a certain amount of jealousy: He has "always hoped someday to hear them say they say they preferred me and my work to Shakespeare and his." (Notice that the jealousy is both personal and professional.) He is irked by "the daffy religion that is the world's mad love of him," and also by the "equally mad disbelief" of the anti-Stratfordians.

2

Narrator Arthur (again, as distinguished from Author Arthur) has a twin sister named Dana. Their parents are split up when they were six years old, but one of his early memories of his father is of being awakened to look through his father's telescope at Saturn, where he saw "a dozen of Saturn's inhabitants" looking back at him. The next morning, skepticism has crept in, so he asks Dana if she had had any dreams. No, she tells him, because their father woke her, too, to look at Saturn, which she says is "the best planet. Except for Pluto." When he asks if she saw the people, she says, "Yeah, but Pluto's better."

3

Their father started reading Shakespeare to them when they are six, but only Dana took to it, and was reading Shakespeare for herself within the year. The significance is that "this was the first time Dana and I did not agree about something important." (The disagreement over Saturn vs. Pluto was minor.) But then their father is arrested and convicted -- he doesn't say here what for, but we learn that it was forgery -- and Narrator Arthur tries "to read Shakespeare as a penance."

The father's incarceration is brief this time,  but two years later he goes away for a longer period, and their parents officially separate. He recalls being awakened early by their mother so they can drive to a prison visit. "Forced to eat and dress as if it were a school day, I crept along unwillingly, like a snail" -- one of many allusions to Shakespeare, in this case Jaques's "seven ages of man" speech in As You Like It. They present their "belated Hanukkah gifts" to him, and he remembers his disappointment that his father "wasn't shackled. I don't think I wanted him to suffer (although maybe I did; I don't underestimate children's preference for color over kindness)."

Dana's gift to her father is a recitation of Portia's "quality of mercy" speech from The Merchant of Venice. Her performance begins so exuberantly that the guards are alarmed and she has to proceed with it less energetically. Later she tells Arthur that she had meant to perform as if the room in which they were meeting their father was a Venetian courtroom, and had even picked out which guard "to look at on line 197 with a piercing 'therefore, Jew.' Of course, we were Jewish, but that didn't mean she identified with Shylock or his vindictive interpretation of the law against the gentle Gentile merchant Antonio." At the end of her speech, her father responds with Shylock's next line, "'My deeds upon my head! I crave the law." He was turning the original meaning ('don't waste time with mercy, give me what my enemy owes me') into something else ('punishment is what I deserve'). It seems to me now that it was an apology of sorts to his daughter, and an indulgence of his occasional taste for self-flagellation."

On the way back, Dana cries, but years later she tells Arthur it was "because she had just suffered a strange disillusionment, the grisly death of a childish fantasy: Shakespeare didn't crumble the walls, fell the guards, melt the system's heart."

4

Their father is out again in 1973, when they are nine. Narrator Arthur likens his father, Arthur Edward Harold Phillips, to the title character of The Tragedy of Arthur, "a charismatic, charming, egocentric, short-tempered, principled but chronically impulsive bastard." The narrator's father is "not bookish, as Jews in his day were meant to be, but flamboyantly literary. Not self-hating, but self-creating." His repeated incarceration he sees not as the result of criminality, but "just a market inefficiency," as when he forges a signature and a document of provenance for a painting, "transubstantiating the small picture, temporarily, from anonymity to Rembrandtivity." He tells the judge:

"The drawing was, and now again is, without much value. While it supported belief, thanks to me, its value swelled a thousand-fold, and people loved it a thousand times more. Punish me for doing it badly: all right. For getting caught: fine. For failing the world: guilty. But don't say I didn't make something!"

It is 1977, and the judge sends him to jail without parole. Years later, he tells his son that "most people like the brand name, and the brand name helps them enjoy the product and opens them to trust other products."