The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (27 page)

Methinks this bleak protestation should have given me a lot more pause than it did, but I brushed it off as a guilt-mongering straw man. 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.

Thus asks the man who forged crop circles with me when I was ten and then blamed his arrest on me.

Thus answers the man in his easy dialogue with my likely thoughts.

Those seven words struck me physically, with far more impact than anything Shakespeare ever wrote (or anything I ever wrote), and in the windless moment before I felt the heat in my neck and face condense into my eyes, I knew I had lost so much of him, wasted so much of him and of everything, and that I would do anything to make it right and to hold tight to every love and opportunity and moment that remained in his life and in mine.

And so now you have to pick up the tempo.

   I went directly to Dana’s. I had to be with her, be the one to tell her. I went without calling, for fear of breaking the news over the phone. She wasn’t home; I had forgotten she was at rehearsal for
The Two Noble Kinsmen
. Forgotten: that’s what it seemed at the time. Surely I didn’t forget. Is such mechanical self-delusion possible? Well, let us consider that the first person I told of my father’s terminal illness, the first person who comforted me in my shock and sorrow and regrets and resolution, was not my mother, wife, or twin but Petra, a semi-stranger with whom I was infatuated, who was there, alone, when I arrived, and if this was not a multitiered betrayal, I do not know what else to call it. Petra learned of Dana’s father’s doom before Dana did. I meant no betrayal; I followed my feelings, the dictatorial and ever-sacred feelings.

I wept for Petra, with Petra, on Petra’s golden hands. I apologized for all of it, and she brushed away my apologies as irrelevant, relics of a different kind of relationship than we now had, and she kissed my brow. “You love him, despite everything,” she said, using up words and gestures and caresses that her girlfriend would need from her in a few hours. She would have to forge facsimiles then, as I was stealing the originals. And she seemed original to me in every way, even in her sympathy: “You love him, despite everything.” The words are commonplace, but she seemed like an oracle extracting hidden truths from my clotted veins, reading the world to me. “Yes,” I agreed, amazed, “that’s exactly it. I do,” and I laid my head on her lap and she stroked my hair.

I spoke with Jana a few hours later, told her I would be staying longer in Minneapolis for work and because of my father’s failing health. She had seen my father’s effect on me for years, and she said, “You love your father, don’t you? Still. Even with all of your lives and what he has done.” It wasn’t the same when she said it.

M
Y CAREER
. Yes, after four novels in quick succession, I knew I was doomed to slouch in my study in Prague, if I still had a study there, in an apartment paid for by the novel of the same name, decorated with souvenirs of my publicity and publications. I was going to gaze, glazed, at a blank page until, dispirited, I would stare at a screen rendition of a blank page instead. My father had sensed how starved for inspiration I was. “You’re between books,” he’d said innocently. And for that reason, too, the
Arthur
project fell like rain onto a dying land.

I have never been strong at getting things done. Decisiveness and action are not my traits. I stumble into situations and then notice I like them well enough not to resist (so I take pleasure in creating characters who are my opposite, men of adventure and certainty). But now I began in earnest, fighting for my father’s life. I devolved into a sweaty, sparsely whiskered graduate student, eating strangely. I read the play at least twenty more times, making lists of vocabulary and grammar, noting references to research, labeling files: S
OURCES
, S
TYLE
, S
TRUCTURE
, D
ICTION
. I read the pertinent bits of Holinshed’s
Chronicles
and Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
. I read the RSC
Complete Works
, sitting on a bench in the park with my sister’s beagle at my side. I read Shakespeare biographies and analyses (Shapiro, Bate, Tanner, Bryson, Greenblatt, Wood, Garber, Bloom, Vendler), books and articles on Shakespearean language (Crystal) and computer stylometry (Elliott and Valenza), Jacobethan theatrical practice (Joseph and Verre), Shakespearean forgeries (Ireland), and books about those apocryphal plays that haven’t made the official roster (Tucker Brooke). It is a measure of my fever—money-hungry, lust-breathing, fame-thirsty, guilt-fueled, daddy-pleasing—that I enjoyed all of it. I let Dana guide my education, spending much of my time at her apartment or in her theater’s greenroom, waiting for her to come out of rehearsal, seeing Petra often, but trying to give myself fully to my father’s project, to become the world’s most devoted and loving son
for his dying months, proving that I meant no dishonor with Petra (and that I therefore deserved to have her).

I had my entertainment lawyer draft nondisclosure agreements, and I sent teasing letters to scholars at local universities, often the very men and women whose books and articles I’d been studying, tempting them with “a remarkable, once-in-a-century opportunity in Shakespeare studies.”

I finally began clumsily editing the play, transcribing it onto my Mac, counting out ten syllables per line, one slow syllable at a time, modernizing and standardizing the spellings, checking the online
Oxford English Dictionary
, footnoting, numbering the lines and acts, double-checking the entrances and exits, adding stage directions implicit in the text.

I no longer doubted what I was doing, and for a writer of fiction, that is a rare feeling, worth clinging to. I was doing something important to my family, to my father, and to the world. I was—though it appeared I was just pushing words around, as always—taking
action
, taking sides, standing up in the real world, coming out from behind the hiding places of fiction. I paid calls! I interviewed relevant experts and sought out their opinions! I hired people! I Googled until my keyboard keys were scuffed! I wondered what Petra was thinking of me.

“What is this thing?” I scribbled in my journal. “Is
TTOA
like we’ve discovered a previously unknown pyramid in Egypt? Or is it like we’ve just noticed the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre? Or is it like a Great Pyramid attached to a Vegas casino, complete with blond pharaonic parking valets who are all like, ‘Nice drive, man, sweet’?”

I liked the work. I liked the play. I liked the writers and professors and lawyers. I liked everyone and felt happy when discoveries went our way (Dad’s, Will’s, and mine) and unexpected corroborations slotted into place, such as the day I visited my first real Shakespearean in person, Tom Clayton, the University of Minnesota’s Shakespeare man.

His office was lined with books, like a lawyer’s, as if the Internet
didn’t exist. “Let’s look at 1597 then,” he said after I explained my case and he had cast a nonchalant eye at my quarto, which I wouldn’t yet allow him to open. “King Arthur? Well, here’s the first thing we look at.” He pulled down two books:
Annals of English Drama
, an index to every contemporary mention of any play in the Elizabethan world, and the reproduced diaries of Philip Henslowe, manager of the Admiral’s Men, rivals to Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men. “So there was an Arthur play by Thomas Hughes, a Gray’s Inn play, that’s in 1588. Makes sense: Shakespeare probably arrives in London about then. Might very well have seen
The Misfortunes of Arthur
. He tended to absorb things he saw, often for a few years. He might have seen that Hughes play, then written one of his own eight or nine years on. Then there’s
The Birth of Merlin
, Rowley in 1622. They used to try to say it was Shakespeare, but that’s discredited. And …” He turned to Henslowe’s diary. “There. Look at that. That’s good.” He slid it across to me. “Henslowe’s group put on a play called
Uther Pendragon
in 1597, and then here, in April of ’98, he paid Richard Hathway five pounds for an ‘Arthur play, now lost.’ ” He tapped his finger on the entry for me.

“That’s my play?”

Professor Clayton looked at me as at a not very bright child and spoke slowly, in case I had a disorder he hadn’t noticed at first. “No. Your play says it’s by William Shakespeare and was performed by Shakespeare’s troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men. This is a different play, by Hathway, to be performed by the Admiral’s Men. The year after your play. You see? That’s what they would do. They were rivals. Admiral’s Men do
Uther
in ’97 and buy an
Arthur
in ’98, it makes sense that the Chamberlain’s Men had an Arthur play right around ’97. And that it would be written by one of their playwrights: Shakespeare.”

“So it’s real?”

“I have no idea. May I read it?”

I loved the notion of Shakespeare as a man, a working writer given a topic and a deadline because the other guys—literally across the street—had a successful Arthur play. As a matter of honesty to the
record, I have to include the following email, playing no favorites. It cannot be excluded without distorting this whole story:

“Dad,” wrote the boy not even wise enough to be a fool,

I dined almost every evening at Dana and Petra’s, often without Dana as her rehearsals went later into the night in the weeks leading up to her opening. Petra cooked, without recipes but with inherited mastery, every bite an act of love dusted with fennel powder. Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug. When she was there, Dana practiced her lines; as rehearsals progressed, she was living more closely to her role as Emilia, an unmarried girl. It was a remarkable testament to Dana’s talent and beauty that at age forty-five she’d been cast in such a part. Petra ran lines with her:
“You shall never love any that’s called man.” “I am sure I shall not,”
Dana answered.
“I / And she I sigh and spoke of were things innocent, / Loved for we did, and like the elements / That know not what nor why, yet do effect / Rare issues by their operance, our souls / Did so to one another. What she liked / Was then of me
approved, what not, condemned …”
I ate, a gender-bent beagle’s snout snuffling for crumbs in my crotch, and my twin sister took her girlfriend’s hand and pressed it to her lips, and Petra looked across the table to me with an expression I took as embarrassment, confusion, encouragement, even apology.

In
Twelfth Night
, after all, a woman falls in love first with a female twin dressed as a man and then, when she meets the male twin, she has no trouble at all instantly transferring all that love to the man. I could almost see Dana wooing Petra on my behalf, preparing her for me by being her own open, lovable self, the better version of me that I would then become by the force of Petra’s transferred love.

For this imagined Petra (unlike 99 percent of the world), romantic love would somehow be prior to gender. Identity, the lovable essence, would exist separate from gender. She would not be
indifferent
to gender (as I hoped she would love my male body), but she would love my gender only because it was subsequently revealed to be attached to my sexless but romantically lovable personality. (Neuroscience has proven this, what Shakespeare described in
Twelfth Night:
the bit of brain that sparkles with lust is near but not identical to the bit that identifies the sex of others. They can, on rare occasions, operate entirely independently, lust without gender, love without gender, just souls finding each other.)

When we were sixteen or seventeen, Dana and I were walking along Hennepin. This was a spring evening, warm and light, so May or June. I can’t quite place the year, but I have a staticky notion that we were on our way to see a movie at the Uptown. I was complaining about a girl, though I can’t specify which, and I clearly remember Dana saying, “She may be out of reach, killer.” I know, too, that I had recently read a novel, I think by Graham Greene, though I can’t remember which, but I am sure the book had taken hold of me in the way adult novels can overpower a young reader’s own identity and shape him.