Read The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Online
Authors: Arthur Phillips
I
AM NOT A FEARLESS PERSON
. I am not proud of it, but I cannot claim much courage when faced with letters like that one from the Random House lawyer. That sort of letter, I know, is designed to cow people. I was cowed. There it is. I sat back, did nothing, wrote nothing, was not openly uncooperative, responded noncommittally to every email from Jennifer and Marly, and waited for someone smarter and more persuasive than I to settle this.
Something
would come along to prove it, even to them, and it would all go away. I would be right, but I would not stand up to be right. Or to be sued.
Jennifer sent me notices every time a professor from the Scholars List rendered his or her official opinion. Some
were
refusals to certify; there were even a few very well argued essays against Shakespeare’s authorship of the play, and she honorably sent me those as well. But as November rolled on, such emails and faxes were in the needle-thin and oppressed minority, and late in the month she sent me a digital photo of that big map over at 1745 Broadway, now a view of Mars
from the pins of authenticating red. That email’s subject line was “Preponderance of scholarly opinion.”
It was torturous to watch these views come in wrong. I occasionally rose to the bait and clicked off angry little e-rants to her:
Seriously, listen to this guy: “Scholarly opinion now holds that he did write some or all of
Edward III
, and similarly
Arthur
is, in my view, largely or entirely written by William Shakespeare.” Well, which, Jen? Some or all? And why is scholarly opinion now ready to let him have
Edward III
, more or less, when, for two hundred years that same scholarly opinion was certain Shakespeare had nothing to do with it, a play they dismissed as beneath his talent? This is not a serious field. It’s fashion and PR.
Dear Mr. Phillips,
I wished to send you a copy of my report directly because you and your family were so hospitable to me during my stay in lovely Minneapolis. I do hope we might see one other again in the coming exciting months. Please send your father my very warmest regards.
Ours is not an exact science, but a matter of the most precisely described and fulsomely supported guesswork. Some things do strike one as so unlikely as to cross over into the absolutely impossible, it must be said, but other questions are not fully answerable these many centuries later. It seems to me that, from a textual perspective,
Arthur
is in the realm of the entirely possible.
Our taste and cultural point of view are not eliminated by computers. You know, the century before last, some critics simply
knew
that Shakespeare could not have written
Titus Andronicus
because they didn’t like it. Today, most of us do not think too much of
Henry VI, Part One
, and, lo and behold, the computers tell us he probably didn’t write too much of it. Well, we must be a little more careful than that.
The
Arthur
text is consistent with the Shakespeare whom we know in the early to mid-1590s, contemporaneous, in my
opinion, with
3 Henry VI
and
Richard III
or a bit later. The vocabulary is either attested to by sources of the period or, in cases where it seems he was inventing words and compounds (admittedly rather more heavily and rather earlier than we have seen him do elsewhere, if my dating is correct), it is in a manner consistent with his style. None of the hallmarks of forgery are present in the text. It should go without saying that this opinion does not take into consideration anything you have learned from examination of the paper, ink, and binding.
The computer stylometry report I read certainly does not conclusively prove that Shakespeare wrote
Arthur
. Such tests are not perfect, of course. They are just a little supportive of our hunches, one piece of the puzzle, if you will. (There are passages of Shakespeare that fail the tests, you know!) In this case, some of the phrase and frequency tests imply that Marlowe might have had a hand, which I think unlikely. Perhaps Robert Greene. Some elements point to Thomas Kyd, which I do find somewhat more persuasive. Do I sense Dekker? Perhaps. But, yes, certainly, examining the data over the length of the entire play, there is nothing to rule out Shakespeare, specifically the Shakespeare who still finished his sentences at the ends of his lines, who rarely used caesuras or broke his verse. Shakespeare of the early to middle 1590s, no later, in my opinion, than 1594.
If our generation does not like something Shakespeare wrote, we are tempted to say he did not write it. And if someone, imitating Shakespeare carefully enough, writes something we do like, we are tempted to say Shakespeare did write it. In that way, he edits himself, and he has the luxury, every generation, of receiving help in crafting only the best possible collected works. He keeps the best of the day and can rely on us to pooh-pooh his own worst stuff for him. Which brings us to the question of
Arthur
.
I must say, I think it reads quite well, and I like parts of it very much indeed. I think Arthur and Guenhera’s courtship scene is especially fine. The play in its entirety is not my
favourite, but I feel similarly, for example, about
All’s Well That Ends Well
. Thus, when a computer says it isn’t
not
Shakespeare, I am tempted to give it to him. It has his name on the cover and a date that makes sense, which—I expect you know—hardly proves it is him, but also does not weigh against him. All told, I enjoyed the play, and, more to the point, I rather
like
the idea of it being his. I like that he might have written that scene of Guenhera’s labour pangs. (Not terribly scholarly of me, I confess!) I am glad to offer you this good news. I am happy to add my name to the authentication process. Congratulations, and I sincerely hope you and
Arthur
continue to win over fans.
A nice old lady, certainly. I don’t wish to mock her scholarship or her kindness. But, really. A science dedicated to proving that all the bad ones
were by someone else
? This is typical of the industry. “After God, Shakespeare has created most,” mooed Alexandre Dumas, another better man kowtowing to the plaster bard. Shakespeare could not conceivably write bad plays; therefore, bad plays with his name on them are fraudulent. Even the bad parts of the things we know he wrote! The worst of
Pericles
is now by Wilkins. The computer says so.
If all this is circumstantial, speculative, well, there is something else. I remember Dana’s responses to our “old” “1904” edition, back when she thought she was being shown a play many people debated, like
Edward III
or
A Yorkshire Tragedy
. She read it in a frenzy, failing to ration her pleasure, and she rushed back to our father with
her
stylometric report, which, as an eleven-year-old, she was very proud to deliver, proud that he cared about her opinion. “I think it’s him,” she declared, every bit as scholarly as that Irish don whose letter I just transcribed.
“Yes! You just
know
, don’t you?” he told her. “When you read it, aloud, you know it’s him. It’s his—don’t count the
you
or
ye
, the
’em/them
, forget all that nonsense. Just read it out loud like your performance matters, like you can impress the groundlings and the nobles, maybe the queen, and you
know
it’s him. It makes you laugh like him, gives you gooseflesh just the same.” He recited from memory a few lines of Arthur’s from II.vii:
“Imperfect is the glass of other’s eyes
Wherein we seek in hope of handsome glimpse
Yet find dim shapes, reversed and versed again,
Which will not ease our self-love’s appetites.”
Dana applauded. “It
is
him,” she said, a girl with an idol—my father and Shakespeare interblended in her loving gaze. “It
has
to be.”
“It does have to be,” he agreed. “His attitude, his amused skepticism—of kings, of knowing ourselves, of knowing all our own motives, of love. He loves all of life, but he tells the truth even about the bad parts.”
“So why doesn’t everyone see it’s him?” Dana demanded. “Why don’t people put it on?”
“They don’t have a
license
to like it. They need precious proof, a piece of paper, an explanation. They don’t trust what you and I can hear. They want trivia: Where did the play go? Why this, why that, why isn’t it proven? But we don’t know. How could we? Anything’s possible: maybe it was censored, maybe he meant to work on it a little more. We can’t know, but really, who cares?
You
know, don’t you. You can hear it. God, Dana, that’s wonderful.”
At the time, I thought they were just annoying. Now I know what he was doing, because he told me as much: he trusted her opinion, and if she was convinced—
an eleven-year-old girl in 1975
—then he felt his play had passed some test.
Even after stylometry and the Scholars List, the argument isn’t really any further along than that: some people (he and Dana, some professors, some software) have loved
The Tragedy of Arthur
as much as they love if not
Hamlet
, not
Lear
, then
King John, Richard III
—and with the
same
love. “I love you because you look like your mom,” Dad once said to Dana, and she hugged his shoulders from the side at this odd disclosure, which he then quickly amended: “And because you’re you, and all that. But you do look like her.” I wasn’t there for this conversation, reconstructed here for memoiresque purposes from Dana’s testimony and my knowledge of my father, as he conflated his loves for his estranged wife and his daughter. “When I haven’t seen your mom for a few years, because, you know, and she appears at her door
when I come to pick you and Artie up, and she’s wearing clothes I’ve never seen and glasses she didn’t need the last time and a new hair color and all, you think I don’t recognize her? Don’t love her as much as ever? That stuff doesn’t hide
her
. Well, it’s the same.”
That’s precisely how the computers feel. And with that, the argument in favor of
The Tragedy of Arthur
comes to its end. Contract fulfilled.
These professors! Once they wager their egos, they never quit. More than a reputation or tenure is at stake. They bet their very souls. By the time you are (to pick one of these indistinguishable biographies at random) “one of the world’s leading experts on Shakespeare’s history plays,” the possibility that you can’t recognize a Shakespeare history play when you see one would be enough to make
you
feel like a forgery. That must sicken you, a very hollow thud in the heart, which is why only the most courageous critics are going to come out strongly for or against this play.
“A work of a creative genius,” writes an English fence straddler, on the other hand, “though whether it is by the same genius as the one born in Stratford in 1564, I am not yet prepared to say.”
It’s maddening that it’s even close. It should be intolerable to any of you who actually love Shakespeare that
Arthur
has made it this far. It should be obvious, plain in every line that it can’t be him.
Arthur
is bad. The play is bad. It is bad. Don’t read it.
I love this one: “Shakespeare was drawing on his own experience of lost fatherhood in Gloucester’s wrenching soliloquy in Act I. I think it might only have been written by a man with a painful loss in fatherhood. Recall as well, please, that Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died in 1596. I would wager any sum that this play is by his hand and dates from ’96–’97.” Give that man a Pulitzer.
Still, there was one last hurdle that my father absolutely would not be able to clear with his pre-1986 technology and his almost perfect career record of getting caught. When the forensics report came in, we would all just go home and forget this ever happened.
“As of 19 November, we have found nothing out of period in the materials or production of this document. We must stress that this is not a certification of authenticity. Further investigation could still
produce evidence of an anomaly.” The forty-eight-page report went on to declare the ink as being of appropriate chemistry and the paper as unbleached sixteenth-century Genoese printer’s stock. The font used to produce the text showed no evidence of differing from the equipment responsible for the 1598
Love’s Labour’s Lost
quarto. The print history examination included comparisons of variable spelling, signature numbering, et cetera. I stopped reading.
F
ROM:
“Hershey, Jennifer”
D
ATE:
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:46:09 -0500
S
UBJECT:
FW: Blinded me with science!
AP!
I love that stuff like this even exists. It’s amazing what they know, isn’t it? Be sure to read the print historian’s sub-section.
LOVE
it! Read page 41. He goes into what they can trace to White’s print shop. They can say how many little p blocks he had in his font case in 1598 because when he set a page with a lot of p’s, for the last few he had to use inverted d’s. And the same thing happens,
after the same number of p’s
, on two pages of Arthur. Unbelievable.
Verre says the forensics battery is now an all-clear. I honestly can’t believe there’s anything to doubt here. Do you still? I think it is impossible that a forger could fool all these tests.