The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel

  “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.”

  “And why didn’t this alleged stepfather of mine do anything with it for fifty years?”

  “You have no idea why. What’s it to you? What’s it to them? Keep it simple. Stick to the truth. Much easier to remember.”

  “But this isn’t the truth.”

  “You’re missing the point. No one is going to be able to say this isn’t Shakespeare, because it is. That’s the truth. It’s got his name on it, the paper is authentic, the ink, all that. I’ve had it tested enough that I am sure. Fire photons at it, whatever you want—it’s real. And I’m confident that there aren’t any others in the world. If there are, we’re out of luck. A second copy turns up, and then ours is just nifty, not without some value, of course, a museum piece, fascinating, but the only money—the real money—is in having the only copy. An oil well. A gusher. A field of gushers. That’s what we have. What I’m giving you to manage for your mother and sister. And to make you famous as a writer.”

  As Mr. Piers Strickland later clarified on the phone when I told him what the document in question was: “Every edition. Every version for theater use. Every school copy. Every audiotape. Every children’s illustrated edition with tear-out coloring pages in German or Swahili. Film. Film in Latvian. DVD sales in Malaysia.” Strickland was unknowingly echoing my dad, whose eyes became younger as he explained the loot he was leaving his poor misused family: “William Shakespeare just signed over to you one hundred percent of his worldwide profits on his newest play. On a play the world will be endlessly curious to read, see, evaluate, interpret, debate. Even if they hate it.”

  “No, Dad, you’re forgetting. I’m sorry to ruin this. It’s not the only copy.”

  “What? Really? Someone …” He was as sickened and horrified as I’d ever seen him. His hands fell to the table.

  “You gave Dana that 1904 edition.”

  And then he wheezed a little laughter and started to guffaw. “Jesus Christ, you almost gave me a stroke. No, no, I made that.”

  “What? Why?”

  He brushed off my idiotic question. “Please. I couldn’t walk around with a quarto. I couldn’t read a quarto on the bus. I didn’t want to damage it. If it was worth a hundred million dollars, I thought it was worth hiding. Are you …” He stopped himself before he asked if I was smart enough for this, I could tell. “I couldn’t take it to the library to do research, you understand? To get opinions on it. You—more Dana, really—are the best readers. When Dana reads Arthur, she can tell it’s the same writer. She knew right away. I wanted her opinion back when her eye was educated but still fresh.”

  Of all the questions I remembered to ask, I forgot to ask the ones that matter most to me personally, if not financially: Why did he forge the inscription to his own father from the drama club? And then inscribe it to himself from his father? And include that picture of his father, if that is a picture of his father, with its fake caption on the back? He gave Dana—with sincere love, I’m sure—a family heirloom going back generations that he’d made himself.

  But I did ask this: “Why aren’t you going to Dana on this? She loves Shakespeare. She still has that fresh eye, right?”

  “You’re the writer. And we’ll have some fun, won’t we? Aren’t you having fun?”

  “I kind of am, actually.” I kind of was. “But why now?”

  Because he’d had to wait. He’d had no choice. Patience—enforced by prison—had been necessary. He’d had to wait to see if other copies emerged, wait for shouts of “Thief!” to ring out from that country house. He’d also had to wait until he couldn’t expect any personal profit from the venture, or the whole thing would be tainted by his record: “Boy-and-wolf problem. My career is ideally suited to make my word on this useless. ‘Read all about it! Convicted forger discovers Shakespeare play!’ I would sink him. And that would be an unforgivable tragedy. That would be a sin. Even if nobody makes any money, we have to do this for him.”

  “Novelist isn’t much better than forger,” I pointed out.

  “It is better.” He took a breath and started counting off things to do on his fingers, but he only got to one. “It’s going to take time for copyright investigators. You have to do that. The guy I bunked with explained this, and Bert agreed. Prove no one else has any right to the text. Obviously, there’s no line of Shakespeares anymore. The only serious claim would be the estates of William White or Cuthbert Burby”—the printer and publisher. “We have to prove they died out. You need a U.K. guy, I think. Then you win. You and your sister. And your mother.”

  “What about the guy in his country house?”

  “I won’t tell you who it was. Never. I don’t trust you not to go to his house and give his grandkids your mother’s oil well.”

  “Thank you, I think.”

  “It’s not really a compliment, under the circumstances.”

  “So we’re all accessories to your theft.”

  “Not accessories. There’s nothing you could have done about it. Beneficiaries, yes. Accessories, no. And really, it’s more like your father was some tycoon who outsmarted some people years ago to build his business, and now you’re inheriting stock certificates. What are you going to do, go apologize to his early partners he bought out when the stock was cheap?”

  “You didn’t buy anyone out. You stole it.”

  “You’re picking fly shit from pepper, Artie. And I never tried to score off Shakespeare. I don’t want to. But I do w
ant your mother and sister to get rich off him. And I want you to get famous off him. That’s why you.”

  30

  FOR TWO AFTERNOONS AND NIGHTS, I sat with Dana and Petra and Maria in their apartment and reread the play aloud and tried to poke holes in it. I solemnly made Dana hold her hand to her heart and promise to read the play with a harsh, cynical eye, to play devil’s advocate and viciously attack anything that didn’t sound perfectly Shakespearean. We scribbled down any doubt we could muster: vocabulary that rang false, characters who seemed too modern, compositor’s marks on the bottoms of the pages, the thread that stitched those pages together, anything. I was out of my league; I mostly sounded like a fool or a smartass: “Oh, come on, Shakespeare wouldn’t do that, would he?” And then Dana or Petra would smile and cite some canonical play where he had done just that. “P-L-A-I-D-E?” I bleated, pointing at the cover. “Dad’s pulling our leg, right?” They went online and found legitimate quarto covers with just that spelling of played.

  The problem was harder than I’d expected. I had thought that with some effort, the play might crack under pressure, like a frightened suspect. But even our strongest doubts were very abstract. Petra thought time passed strangely in Acts III and IV, that it seemed too much like montage in a film. She couldn’t think of any Elizabethan play with the same structure. In I.iv, Arthur is explicitly seventeen. In III.i, he recalls his adolescence as if it were a long time ago. By III.ii, several more months have passed, and at least nine more between III.ii and III.iii. Several more months pass before IV.i, and so on. By IV.iv, Arthur must be at least about twenty-six, since he might have a twelve-year-old son, or at least be able to pretend so for political purposes.

  “Yes, but no,” Dana argued, reasonably enough after all that wine. Maria slept on her lap, pointed outward toward her knees, and Dana smoothed his ears over her thighs. “He did all kinds of strange things with time. Hardly ever did the same thing twice. He was always trying to break up the unity. Time in Hamlet. It’s like the theory of relativity: a day or two seems to pass in Elsinore, but ships have gone all the way to England and back. Henry VI, Part Three is totally wacky. And in Part One: the historical king was actually an infant in those first scenes, but he seems to be at least a teenager. Years pass in Pericles. Winter’s Tale has a sixteen-year jump. He might have been trying something new here, way ahead of its time. Time-lapse or montage before the term. Maybe that’s why the play didn’t stick; maybe it made the audience feel queasy.”

  In other words, things that weren’t like Shakespeare simply expanded the possible range of his innovations. If I was having a paranoid reaction, looking for signs of forgery where there weren’t any, Dana was having an opposite response, taking any oddity as proof that it must be authentic. If, for whatever reason, you choose to read the play, I am certain the same thing will happen to you: If you think it’s him, it sounds like him. If you think it’s not, it doesn’t.

  “Does Arthur even seem like a Shakespeare character at all?” I asked when I hit that exhaustion common to circular debates. By then I was lying on the carpet in the middle of the room, and Maria had migrated to sleep on my chest, his nose pressed against mine. “Why does he do what he does? Is it how Shakespeare characters think?”

  Dana was on the other side of the bar in the kitchen, opening wine. “He’s actually a fool,” she said as I was looking over Maria’s snout at the way Petra’s legs pressed against each other, folded under her on the couch. “He goes further than any of Shakespeare’s other kings. He questions his own legitimacy. He doubts his own fitness to rule. He’s really one of the fools, you know? He has that dangerous, licensed skepticism, but he’s dropped the cap and bells and carried that doubt all the way up onto the throne. To question kingship while you’re wearing the crown? The king himself doesn’t even believe in kingship? That’s a risky thing to put onstage.” Dana was tireless. She refilled our wine and turned the pages carefully back to Arthur’s remarkable soliloquy and read aloud:

  “I know I have no right to wear this crown.

  I’ll contradict no pope who calls me king,

  But in this privy council kings speak troth:

  No right have I, no higher claim than Loth.

  A bastard, I, from bloody tyrant sire.

  “That is not the same as the Harry-in-the-night stuff from Henry V. That’s him saying he’s not God’s chosen, and maybe no one is. That would make an audience queasy, or the Master of the Revels. And get a writer in some hot water, I would think. And be the end of a play: no more editions, no folio.”

  She had a point and a semi-explanation for the play’s disappearance. From King John to Henry VIII and every king in between, Shakespeare’s audiences watched one after another variety of human and incompetent monarch walk in front of them and reveal his inner failings. Shakespeare let people see their kings as men, fallible, far enough from divine right that they should submit to man’s law. If Arthur was Shakespeare’s, then they saw this king go so far as to admit he was nothing special. It’s amazing the English managed to hold off from executing a real king of their own until 1649. (To this day, theater can still do that, provoke rebellion in subjects or phobia of rebellion in authorities. I was in a comedy revue in college that in one performance was particularly disrespectful to the administration. We were then blamed when some drunk took a dump in a dormitory elevator later that night, just as Shakespeare’s company was blamed for a coup attempt after putting on a play about a coup.)

  “So?” Petra poked my side with her toe. “What are you going to do?” Dana was in the bathroom.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “Me? Well, I think Shakespeare wrote it.” She ran her bare feet over Maria’s back, one beagle-thickness above my chest.

  “Me, too.” I put my hands on her feet, held them on the dog.

  “So there you go.” She smiled and held my eye.

  There you go: accepting the play, believing in my father, and her feet and eyes not pulling away. Arthur, my father, and Petra: all three of them became credible at the same instant. Can you reset history, go back to where things broke down and “begin anew upon our proper path”? So that the decades that followed would change their essence, shed tragedy to become softly sentimental comedy?

  31

  DATE: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:23:52 -0600

  What news, plaese. Have you had results yet? Are you there yet? I know you lack trust in me. Why would you trust me on any of this? As likely a candidate as ever there was to tiptoe into the Fakespeare bog and claim his finery as my own. Too true, your honor, dead to rights. I could die laughing if after all the abuse I have taken at the hands of others I could put one over on the world like that. To die with them worshipping me as Shakespeare! I will not deny the appeal, Arthur. You would not believe me if I tried to deny it. But I could not make it happen. I could never—infinite typewriters, infinite monkeys, infinite time. I could never write anything as beautiful as this play. I am a faker, in every way. But I never could fake anything of real quality. You said that once to me: a coupon faker is all I am, right?

  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.

  Can you just trust me? Can you just know?

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

  No, I know you can’t.

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

  But now is the time this is going to happen. Because now is the time that you are a famous writer. Now is the time you and your mother and your sister all need money, and I can give it to you. And now is when I am dying.

  Those seven words struck me physical
ly, 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.