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] 

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?