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?"

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?