The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (6 page)

“No,” Dana admitted. “He beats the bigger guy and goes off to make his fortune. But that’s not the point.”

“The point is,” I hurried to conclude in self-pity, “I’m not a hero, and if you had stopped me you would have saved yourself this embarrassment.”

She was silent for a while. In my darkness, I complimented my stupid self that I had stymied her. After a bit, I heard her sigh, stand up, sit down again, more pages turning. “More? Really? Do I have to?”

“Wait,” she said.

Like most fifteen-year-olds (and most people), I was not delighted by Shakespeare, despite or because of my father’s indoctrination of us. The little of it I had read under duress in school had only confirmed the damage done by my family and had put me off the man forever. 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.

“Here,” she said at last, a little victory in her floating, disembodied voice. “Here. Now listen. You’re seventeen years old. You don’t know how to fight, but you’re brave. And suddenly, you’re in charge of real soldiers. They push you out front, tell you that you’re king, tell
you
to rouse
them
to war. You don’t know anything about anything, about men in a group. You’re a kid. You’ve been raised as everyone’s favorite little boy, sheltered, coddled by women, and suddenly men are listening to you. To Arthur. Relying on Arthur. You don’t know war. Here’s what you know: girls, school, getting in trouble. But you’re naturally a hero, even if you’re not trained yet. So now listen to yourself.”

And she read his battle speech from Act II, Scene ii. Her voice was just deep enough an alto to pass as a teenage boy’s, and it worked. For the first time, it worked. The scene came to life for me, in my enforced darkness, and for this one moment, and then a whole afternoon, I thought Shakespeare was okay.

When she finished, she said, “Listen to it again. Arthur starts out with: the enemy is a little boy hiding in York because he pissed off us bigger boys, and we’re going to kick his ass. The soldiers don’t really go for that, so you reach again and you say, ‘If they conquer us, we’ll have to learn their language, and that’ll be like Latin class, which was a drag, wasn’t it? Anybody?’ Figure by now the troops are getting a little dubious about you. And then the cannons go off”—
Chambers
—“the battle’s going to start, and so you try one more time, last chance, and this time you nail it: York’s a babe and she wants us
in
her. And suddenly everyone starts to nod and grip their hilts, if you know what I mean.

“You could do that,” Dana said softly. “That’s what I saw today. You could figure out how to be a hero when you have to. You were outnumbered, didn’t know what you were doing, and you still fought like a hero.”

The Tragedy of Arthur
was not necessarily her favorite back then, but she gave it to me that afternoon in April, in our living room, read the entire play to me. It took more than four hours, I’d guess. She patiently stopped to answer my vocabulary questions, stopped to replace the softening ice on my hardening face, stopped to make me something in the blender that I could bear to swallow, and April spring floated in and out through the open window, our mother and stepfather both late at work, our father far away in prison (no threat or irritant or better man), just me and Dana and this play, her thank-you to me for fighting for her honor.

She read to me from her little red hardcover of
The Tragedy of Arthur
, a simple but nicely done 1904 edition that has managed to accrue contradictory sentimental value for several members of our family. Its Edwardian frontispiece engraving (in a very nineteenth-century style) was of Act II, Scene iv, in which Arthur (depicted in an anachronistic late medieval suit of plate armor) hands over his shield and regalia to the Duke of Gloucester, the crucial scene in which Arthur orders the duke to swap armor with him and do battle in his colors so that Arthur can chase some Yorkish girl instead of going back to war.

I own that 1904 edition now. I have it in front of me. It is, as they say in the used-book trade, “slightly foxed,” with two or three small
stains inside the boards. The cover is slightly frayed at the bottom corners, and the spine is faded. But otherwise it’s in excellent condition.

If curiosity has nibbled at you while reading this, you may be asking yourself why you can’t find your own copy in these easy Internet days. Where is the $285 used edition on your preferred online outlet? Where is the recent reissue by a small press looking for something quirky to win some buzz? Why is Random House bothering to publish the play with such fanfare if there was already a 1904 edition? Patience, please.

After the publisher’s information and date, the first blank page bears an inscription in faint pencil and formal early-twentieth-century handwriting:
For Arthur Donald “Don” Phillips, with the compliments of the King’s Men Dramatic Society, King’s School, Edmonton, Ontario, June 14, 1915
.

Always kept inside the book is the photo of my grandfather Arthur Donald Phillips appearing in that boys school production of the racy, violent
Arthur
play and the folded playbill, on canary-yellow paper, canary feather–soft at its creases, listing his name in the title role. The photograph is, as you can see, insane:

Whatever he is wearing, it has nothing to do with this play. The costume is neither of Arthur’s ostensible period (around
A.D
. 500, if he even existed) nor of the style worn by actors in Shakespeare’s time to depict the early Middle Ages (some bits of armor over contemporary sixteenth-century clothes). No, my grandfather seems to be dressed in leftovers from a production of
H.M.S. Pinafore
, or something else eighteenth- or nineteenth-century and decidedly weird. The back of the photo, though, insists in black ink (and female handwriting?) that it depicts
Don, as Arthur in Shakespeare, June ’15
.

“Your grandfather, I gotta say, would have been perfect for that part,” our father used to claim, shaking his head at this photo and chuckling with hard-earned wisdom and acceptance. “The flawed hero. His personal charm wins him everything and his personal failings lose him everything. That fit your grandfather to a
T
,” sighed my dad.

And, sure enough, the second inscription inside the book, in multidimensional ambiguity, in blue ink, under the blue ink line drawn beneath the penciled school inscription, reads:
To a new Prince Arthur, from his ever-loving Papa. 11/1/1942
. My father would have been twelve when he received this gift.

I first learned of this 1904 edition when Dana and I were eleven, I think. I’m reasonably confident about the era: Dad was out of prison but had moved to a different apartment downtown. This one was above the Gay 90s, a progressive nightclub on Hennepin Avenue. I was lying on the sofa bed reading a comic book (Archie? Spider-Man?). Dana and Dad were in the kitchen, talking in low voices until Dana burst out with, “No way, José! And you have it? How long have you had it? Why didn’t you ever tell me? Can I please see it? Where is it? How did you get it?” 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. It was an excitement my father found endearing but that my mother tried to tamp down as soon as she saw signs of it. Later, Dana would take pills, which she hated if they too much dulled these moods, but when she was a child, they were still just part of her “bubbliness.”

I came into the tiny kitchen at this point. She could not calm herself down; there was a slight edge of anger to her voice. I could detect it, at least, even if my father was laughing with a sort of condescending pleasure at having triggered her state. She resented the existence of a secret from which she had been excluded, even one to which she was now about to be admitted.

Usually, the more excited Dana became at that age, the more my mood matched hers. She was the emotional leader, quicker to both joy and despair, and I would generally rise or descend after her, never quite as high or low, though always wishing I was up or down there with her. This day, however, the discovery that her buzz was Shakespeare-induced prevented me from joining in with anything other than the most quenchable curiosity, and I wandered back and forth between couch and kitchen.

I tried not to care, but it was impossible not to want to be part of their excitement and to win back, a little, some piece of both of them. “Arthur, good, you’ll find this interesting, too,” Dad said, but not very convincingly. “Grab a perch.”

They were sitting very close to each other, and my father had the book on the table, with his hands pressed on it, holding it closed and holding it close, away from Dana’s impatient fingers sliding back and forth on the wooden table’s white plastic surface. He began to explain to me again what he had told her, but she interrupted, bouncing in her chair: “No, no, let me tell him, please, let me.” She almost swallowed her own lips trying to push the words out to me, childishly taking credit by retelling it, proudly sharing knowledge, but shaking mostly because this stuff made her happier than anything else, especially since it was her primary connection to Dad.

The news bursting from her: Dad owned a very rare copy of a Shakespearean oddity, a play that people argued about, that no one could decide about, and “he thinks we should read it and make up our own mind about it!”

He nodded along to her pleasure. “That’s it exactly.” He was very interested in her opinion of the play. He wanted her to read it as often as she liked, change her mind as often as she liked, but to report back to him what she made of it. “And you, too, of course, Arthur, if
you’re interested.” I took a quick look at the play, which seemed no different from all the rest, and I retreated to the sofa and my comic book.

Dana had long since read all of Shakespeare, had cried when she’d reached her last play, despondent that there was nothing new to explore, faintly consoling herself with Dad’s promise about the joys of rereading. She had already, at that young age, experienced something coming to an end, a love affair’s first flush, and now, to discover that there was still (possibly) one left: she was torn between wanting to stay up all night reading it and rationing her last virgin pleasure over weeks or months.

My father only had the one copy and, in those pre-Internet days, didn’t know if he’d ever be able to find another, as it was long out of print, long discredited, just a novelty item, and so he attached very strict rules to Dana’s borrowing of it. She could read it only in his home. She could never lend it to anyone. She was free to tell people about it, of course, but under no circumstances was she allowed to Xerox it for herself or others. The book’s rarity and importance and ambiguous value were impressed upon her. Unsurprisingly, the next inscription on the flyleaf reads,
April 22, 1977 For my Dana on her 13th birthday, with eternal love. Dad
.

The fussy rules, the improbable interest in her eleven-year-old opinion, the clubby and ceremonial sentimentality: all of this bothered me. I was forced to be bored so as not to face my anger at my father’s obsession, which took my best friend, Dana, away from me, not only in the close quarters of his sad-sack parolee apartment, but increasingly in the relative space of my mother’s small house as well, where Dana read Shakespeare and wrote my father self-assigned book reports.

I am reminded of a childhood fantasy from about this time, which now appears quite explicable, a recurrent daydream, conjured in moments of solitude and boredom. If, for example, I peered through the glass porthole behind which wet clothes leapt and fell in graceful arcs in their hot drum, the hypnotic effect of the abstract patterns numbed and nudged my mind off its tracks, and William Shakespeare sat at my side on the laundromat bench, where he would ask me what the
dryer was and how it worked. Shakespeare was stranded in the twentieth century, helpless and desperate to understand everything he’d missed in the intervening years, relying on me.