10. The Tragedy of Arthur, by Arthur Phillips, pp. 240-368

45

Arthur's preoccupation with his attempt to stifle the publication of the play is interrupted by Petra, who informs him that she is pregnant. She wants to keep the child and to go home to her country. But he urges her to stay and to live with him. The problem, as he sees it, is just how to tell Dana, but Petra insists that's not his problem. Unsettled by his reaction, she leaves.

In the meantime, he writes yet another e-mail to Jennifer vowing not to allow publication and even threatening to "burn this atrocity of an old criminal's fevered, feculent ambitions." But he doesn't follow through on his plans to tell Dana about his part in Petra's pregnancy. Instead, he leaves a message on her voicemail asking her to have dinner with him on the night when her play is off.

Then Petra calls to say, "I told her. I'm so sorry. Tonight I told her. You never did. And she told me to leave and I did." Dana has taken something, she says through her sobs.

46

He remembers his earlier life with Dana, and how, when they were sixteen, he passed his driver's license exam and she failed. The next day, he drove to see his father by himself, not thinking about how Dana might feel, which he takes to be an instance of his "limited empathy."

Nothing new there, I suppose: a famously vicious and dismissive New York newspaper book reviewer -- whom I made the career-bashing mistake of kissing a feeling up at a party at Yale decades earlier and then never calling -- faulted my last novel for "a curious absence of empathy."

Now, convinced that his sister has killed herself, he goes to her apartment.

47

He pounds on the apartment door, but it swings open at his first knock, and he finds Dana and Petra sitting on the couch. "Arthur Rex," Dana says mockingly. "Our mother was in the kitchen. I shook and hyperventilated and gagged, laughing and crying and shouting." When he calms down, Dana tells him that she has known about him and Petra all along, from the night it happened. She chides him for being a novelist unable to devise an ending to the story, and asks, "Did you really think I'd drown myself, Hamlet?" She asks him to pick his favorite Shakespeare ending, and Petra says, "Please don't pick Antony and Cleopatra, where the Middle Eastern girlfriend has to kill herself. I don't dig snakes."

She keeps at him, and says it has to be a comedy because neither she nor Petra is going to kill herself. Finally he settles on As You Like It: 'The one where everyone sort of dances around and gets married and forgives the one guy who ends up without a wife?" (Arthur notes that while writing about this experience, he looked up the play and noticed "that in that play the faithful shepherd-lover is called Silvius, so that name's appearance in Arthur isn't that suspicious after all.") He identifies himself as Jaques, the outsider who is "not utterly banished, their anger at me softening by their love for each other."

But Dana rejects the idea of Arthur as Jaques and insists that he try again. "A baby's on the way now, and everyone needs to know who you are in this." Their mother suggests The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Falstaff is tormented at the end for his lechery. But Dana says it's clear that Falstaff isn't really going to change his ways. She considers the plays in which the villain is forced "to marry the girl he's wronged. Measure for Measure. All's Well That Ends Well." But Petra nixes that suggestion.

Finally she decides on Love's Labour's Lost:

"For a twelvemonth, probably more, depending on publishing, you will not see any of us, or call, or email, or anything. Not one word. Right, Mom? Just nod, Mom. Not one word. None of us. And if in that period you can prove something to us, then you will be welcomed back, and we will be right joyful of your reformation. You will publish The Tragedy of Arthur. Yes, you will. don't talk. Listen. And you will divest yourself of your precious reputation and self-love, which has led us to so many unfortunate dead ends these long years.

He will, she insists, write about what he has done in the introduction to the play. And she sends him away without "a word until we've had a chance to read your book. Not the galleys, either. The hardcover. Go. No, just go."

48

Arthur summarizes Act V, in which Arthur's self-destructiveness brings about his death, calling it "this vile picture of me that my father drew, before I was even an adult (or, worse, that Shakespeare drew centuries before I was born)."

He has received a very threatening letter from Random House's lawyer in response to his own threat to burn the quarto, on top of Dana's threat of permanent banishment, so he has continued to work on the introduction, prepared to "cash my checks and send my winnings from this venture to bank accounts established for my boys, my ex-wife, my mother, and for Petra, Dana, and their little girl, whose birth I was not allowed to attend, whose face I have not yet earned the right to see." He doesn't even know her name, and the friend who told him what sex the child is has been enjoined from speaking to him and won't return his calls.

The Tragedy of Arthur by William Shakespeare

The play itself is kind of an anticlimax. It's a fairly well-done pastiche that won't really fool anyone into thinking it's real, but that's not Phillips's point. He's out to satirize bardolatry and picky scholarship and authorial reputation and any number of metaliterary topics. There is a synopsis by Professor Roland Vere (who unlike David Crystal is fictitious), who also contributes footnotes to the play in addition to Arthur's own, which often lead the two into a quarrel over the play's authenticity. For example, footnote No. 41 to line 113 in Act I, scene i, is Arthur's:

41. See Henry VI, Part One, III.ii.95, from which my father stole this line.

Vere counters with his own footnote:

42. Or in which Shakespeare quotes the same source material, or in which Shakespeare's likely collaborator on Henry VI, Part One -- Nashe, Peele, or Greene -- quoted Shakespeare's preexisting Arthur play. The explanations are both numerous and unconfirmable, but they do not with any likelihood point to the fraud Mr. Phillips endorses in his introduction.[RV] 

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?"

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.