The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (25 page)

He started talking. “In March of 1958, I traveled to England to do some work for a wealthy client. I went by ship. You can probably find the records, ship manifests or whatnot, prove it to yourself. Please do that. Please. Anyhow, my client, this fellow, he lived in a big country house.”

“
What
? Come
on
. Who? What kind of work? What country house? Where was this? No offense, but this sounds total—”

“Stop. Just please. I’ll get to all of it. I promise. You’ll see. You can check
all
of it. Anybody can.”

In March 1958, he traveled to England to do “some work for a wealthy client.” This fellow lived in a big country house, even though since the war, he’d had to open it to tourists two days a week, to help pay for upkeep. On this vast estate, in his big manor (sketched once by Constable, Dad mentioned), he had one of those inherited libraries that the family had been adding to for centuries. My father in that library was a fat man at the Jolly Troll smorgasbord. “He had a Third Folio, second issue,” among other treasures. “When I wasn’t working, I was there. Gardens and grounds and horses were not my cup.”

“Working. What work?”

My father had been asked to make a replica, “for insurance purposes, perfectly legal,” of a small painting in the house’s art collection. “I was doing a lot of that back then. My own stuff didn’t sell, I don’t know if you know, but. I had a good run at this sort of job for a while.”

“What painting was it?”

“Stop. Will you stop? For a minute? I’ll get to it.”

It was a nice gig. He was resident at the great house for sixteen days. He worked six or seven hours a day, while the light was good. The rest of the time, he was something more than staff and something less than an honored guest. He slept in an extra room and was allowed unlimited access to the library in his non-painting hours. He explored every shelf. “I wasn’t going to read the Shakespeare. I had read all of it, memorized half of it. I was looking for things I hadn’t seen before. I read a ton there. There were things you couldn’t get in those days, unless someone like this guy let you see his.”

Alongside that 1664 Third Folio, on the Shakespeare shelf, were a dozen or more homemade anthologies. “This is pretty common,” explained my father. Apparently, people used to buy those pamphlet-size quartos, and once they owned six or eight, they would have them stitched together according to whatever system they fancied, like a playlist, and then they’d have the assortment bound in a nice cover, “Morocco leather, maybe stamped
Seventeenth-Century Drama
or
Shakespeare Comedies
, which they then kept in the ancestral library.”
They would handwrite a table of contents inside the front cover. “So this man, my client, had a couple long shelves of these homemades. Heaps of things to read.”

“Do you need to wear latex gloves with that kind of book?”

“What? Of course not. Why?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

So, one evening late in his stay, my father opens another of these books, and the handwritten table of contents on the inside front cover lists
The Taming of the Shrew, Sejanus, Every Man in His Humour, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mucedorus
. “It was a very odd grouping, this one,” he whispered to me conspiratorially, as if one mustn’t let Minnesota corrections officers catch a whiff of such delights. His hands were still over his eyes, his elbows on the table, not so much to protect the privacy of our talk but to screen out distraction, and he told his story without losing track of his thoughts. “Very miscellaneous. Four Shakespeare comedies, two Ben Jonson plays, and an apocryphal thing.” He’d never read the apocryphal thing,
Mucedorus
, so he asked his host if it would be a gross liberty to take the volume up to bed.

Permission granted, drowsy by lamplight, he flipped to the last play in the volume, but it wasn’t
Mucedorus. Mucedorus
was second to last. It was the seventh play, as promised in the table of contents. But there weren’t seven quartos stitched together. There were eight. The original anthologist (“the first Viscount Numbnuts”) had neglected to inscribe the eighth title on the front board. The eighth play was a 1597 quarto my father had never heard of, credited to William Shakespeare.

“Shakespeare’s name first appears on a title page in 1598,” he said, no longer the confused senile prisoner of two weeks before. “This was completely unknown. I’d never heard of it. That was odd, to say the very least. I read it that night.

“So. Breakfast. I ask my client if he reads much Shakespeare. He’s a boor. He doesn’t read anything in his staggering library, any more than he knows anything about the artworks he’s selling off to pay for his house. So I ask him: Does anybody in the family read the books? Is he going to sell them?”

“What was his name, Dad?”

And off my father went to the room given over to his work of “preserving the painting in duplicate.” That night he considers the anthology again, locked in his little guest room, considers this
Arthur
. He reads the play again, and he believes the cover without a doubt. And he realizes that if it is real, it is a discovery of monumental proportions. “Anyone who knows Shakespeare would realize it was him, that this was absolutely his.” Seeing a short distance into the future, he takes his nail scissors out of his toilet kit and trims the last quarto out of the book, lays it in the bottom of his suitcase, and the next morning makes a show of reshelving the violated volume in front of his much scorned host and employer.

“It came out very easily,” he said. “It all came off very easily. And philosophically quite pleasant: its owner never saw it in the book, and it wasn’t written in the table of contents, so the play can’t really be said to be missing, because it was never really there.”

He took it back home to Minneapolis, to Mom and their little prechild apartment in Dinkytown, smelling of oils and turpentine. “You told her?”

“No. I sat on it. It wasn’t her passion in the same way it was mine. That’s okay, that’s how marriages are. And I didn’t think of it as an object to
do
anything with. I just loved it. That’s why I took it. I loved it and the limey didn’t care. I loved it. I love it. And it was mine. I deserved it more than he did. Besides, it’s not stealing if the owner—no, not even the right term, the
holder
—doesn’t realize he owns it and then doesn’t realize he doesn’t own it. Nothing has been done to him. He has suffered no loss. There isn’t even a word for what happened to him.”

“Yes, there is. Stealing. That’s stealing. It’s a word. In English. Who was he?”

He smiled now, the first time, really smiled at me. “I’m not going to tell you, and I’ll tell you why I’m not going to tell you. Because you’d give it back, wouldn’t you? Or tell his heirs? You know you would. Besides, I was there helping him commit a crime.”

“You just said it was perfectly legal.”

“What
I
did was perfectly legal. What
he
then did with my work
doesn’t require a genius to figure out. But that’s not the point. Please. 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.”

“Proceed? Am I supposed to fence your swag? I’m not going to—”

“No.
Please listen.
”

At first, my father just kept
The Tragedy of Arthur
to himself because he loved it, and because he wanted to find out if he was going to get caught. He read it and studied it and looked up all the words he didn’t know and liked to touch it. “I was like those Japanese businessmen or gangsters who buy stolen art masterpieces and then keep them in their basement to look at all alone, naked.” (A comparison that vaults right to the forefront of the normal mind.) “And that was enough for me. I was the
only
one. I liked that. Shakespeare and I were secret chums. We only met in secret. I like the idea that if there weren’t many of these, then maybe he even touched this copy. He might have. At any rate, I was the only one reading it. Like he wrote it for me. I have to admit: his Arthur seemed familiar. I liked that, too.”

And then, unclenching a little, suspecting he’d scooted away unnoticed, he started to do some research. He corresponded and spent time in the libraries, in downtown Minneapolis and over at the U of M. And he slowly let himself believe as a fact what had dawned on him as a strong possibility back in England: he had never heard of the play, despite his knowledge of Elizabethan literature, because there was not a single other copy. Nor—and this was somewhat troubling—were there any references to it, as there are to the famously lost plays
Cardenio
and
Love’s Labour’s Won.
“
Arthur
isn’t in Meres, or the Stationers’ Register, the repertory listings of the Chamberlain’s Men, lists of court performances. What records we have of the theaters. Nobody mentions it. Not that I could ever find, but you might have more luck now. It would be
very
good if you could find a reference.”

“There was that Errol Flynn performance. Dana still has the poster.”

“What? No, come on. No, no, tell me you know I made that for her.” It had never occurred to me. “No, nobody ever mentioned an Arthur play by Shakespeare.”

“So it’s fake.”

“No. All I said was, nobody mentions it. That’s true of some plays we know are his: no mention at all until they are collected in the First Folio, after he’s dead.
Arthur
’s real, and we can guess
why
it’s not mentioned, but that’s another story.” The story my father was struggling to deliver in a straight line (despite the babies, bells, and doors, despite my twitchy questions and surges of doubt in him, like gastric reflux) was about his realization. “But this one is not in the folios, obviously. When his friends compiled the complete works from their own marked-up scripts in the playhouse, they didn’t include this.”

“So it’s a fake.”

“No. Stop saying that. It’s real. But for some reason, they didn’t include it. Please let me talk.”

“Sorry.”

Instead he only fell silent and started to shake his head and bite his lips. He pressed the knuckles of his thumbs to his eyes and asked, “Where was I?”

“Not in the folios. Not a fake, but not in the folios.”

“Yes. Not a fake, but not in the folios. Only one copy, no contemporary mentions, and not in the folios. Zero copies or four copies or what have you, but for there to be just
one
copy and for the play not to be in the folios: I owned the only
text—
”

“Stole the only text.”

“Owned the only text, and the importance of this did not dawn on me for many years.” (That was definitely a practiced line, and he sort of Gielguded it.)

He did some research with a lawyer with whom he’d once shared a cell, and with very hypothetical letters to Bert Thorn, back when he could afford his time. By the time my father finally understood the financial significance of owning the only text, he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it, as he was in prison. This, as it turned out, was
lucky, and why—I now believe—imprisonment was not always too troubling for him. It kept him from acting prematurely.

That day, over Formica, my father had his legal situation firmly in mind. “We have to prove not only that it’s authentic, and that there isn’t another copy, but that we have the right to own this, that we can treat the text as
ours.
”

“But Shakespeare wrote it.”

“Yes, but if there is only
one
copy, then whoever has it has the right to do with it as they please.”

A few days after this conversation with my dad, I paid out of my own pocket for the opinion of a copyright lawyer in the United Kingdom, since questions of English eminent domain over the work of an English writer demanded an English solicitor. About two weeks later, the lawyer confirmed, with slightly more detail and legal terminology, what my father had discovered all those years before (see
this page
).

That day in the Family Hall, my dad called it “a fountain of copyrights.” You don’t own the copyright on the play, but you are the only party permitted to license anything to be printed or produced
from
that copy. No one can copy those derived licensed works; you copyright
them
. Other people have to go to some other copy if they want to make a free copy. And there isn’t any other copy.

“And no one is going to say we don’t own this copy.” He was now speaking very quietly and very slowly, in the limited-lip-motion monotone of a veteran co-conspirator. “You’re going to say Silvius gave it to you, and that’s all you know. He told you he found it in an attic in a house he owned. That’s where the only copy of the
Titus Andronicus
quarto was: an attic in Sweden! An
attic
. Your stepfather found it in an attic. That’s all you know. Doesn’t matter, because now you own it because he gave it to you. Nobody else has one. Nobody else has the right to it. Not in England, though, Sil didn’t find it in England, because maybe the Crown will claim it, and then we’re out of luck. Ely. He owned a little house in Ely once. There are records of that. Your stepfather found this quarto in the attic of his house in Ely, Minnesota. In the 1950s, in a house your stepfather owned outright.”