The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel (35 page)

I
N HIS TIME
, Shakespeare was one of many writers. He was admired, but not out of all sane proportion. Others were rated more highly. Opinions varied, as they should, outside of dictatorships. The poet Michael Drayton composed an ode to all the great authors of his day: Shakespeare was one of more than a dozen, just above Samuel Daniel, right in the middle, praised for comedy and “clear rages,” whatever that means. The playwright John Webster listed the men he admired around him: Shakespeare was buried in a long roll, recognized not for being the creator of the universe but for being
prolific
, of all things, like Joyce Carol Oates. William Shakespeare was, in other words, a man, a working writer, one of many. So why is he now forced on us as the single greatest? How did he pull this scam, and who abetted?

It isn’t an obvious answer, and for the newcomer to Shakespeare,
or to those of you who stopped paying attention as soon as tenth-grade English was blessedly over, the idea of someone being unconvinced or even bothered by Shakespeare’s easy, royal afterlife may seem a bit odd.

But we have allowed this man to be inflated, to our disadvantage and his (and certainly to the disadvantage of all those other writers of his time whom we never study or read or perform because they’re cast as eternal also-rans). But this is a trick of perspective, a rolling boulder of PR, a general cowardliness in us, a desire for heroes and simple answers. Laziness: it’s easier to think one guy had it all.

(A) We judge him the best. (B) He has survived all this time. But, really, what if it’s the other way around? Is he who we’ve got because he’s good, or do we judge him good because he’s who we’ve got? We now find it hard to enjoy any of his contemporaries very much, but at the time, the same people who liked his plays liked the other guys’, too. We’ve lost the ability to appreciate those others, because we’ve been too obsessively appreciating him.

His business partners—for love, money, sincere belief—published that folio, the collected works, and in so doing preserved far more of him than we have of anyone else. A sixth of all Elizabethan plays that survive to this day are his, a huge share because his friends had that canny business idea to publish a collected works and include an over-the-top blurb from Ben Jonson, inventing modern literary publicity, pushing a blockbuster. That disproportion—a sixth of all the stage!—gives us a disproportionate view of his value and importance. Another contemporary ranked Shakespeare as one of
four
who were “the best for tragedy,” including Thomas Watson. But
none
of Watson’s work survives. What might we teach in schools and print on T-shirts and quote to get girls to sleep with us if Watson’s friends had been as devoted and savvy as Shakespeare’s? How might we speak English differently, or reimagine human psychology?

Because he survived, Shakespeare set our rules for quality (although at the time he was sniped at for breaking previous rules). And who fulfills his rules the best? If “Shakespearean” means “good,” then which Elizabethan writer is the best? The one who is the most Shakespearean. And that isn’t Dekker.

Merely by surviving time’s withering breath, by being studied and taught, he has shaped the world’s tastes. We are trained to appreciate him and his distinct qualities, and we ignore the others. Only he does what he does (yes, Tom, his fingerprint), and that’s fine. But then we call him the best because we have been shocked and rewarded and bullied into believing that that one fingerprint is the standard of all truth and beauty.

And now we program computers to count up all the phrases he used and scan other texts, and if one of those texts has enough of “his” phrases, then we say he wrote that, too. Jennifer emailed me the computer stylometry results on the twelfth of November. One hundred and twenty-three pages of report for a seventy-six-page play, covering enclitic and proclitic microphrases, semantic bucketing, feminine ending percentages, modal blocks, and on and on.

But as my father used to say, “There’s one thing that stylometry doesn’t measure, and that’s style.” It also can’t measure my father, who would dig crop circles for the fun of convincing people that aliens had landed, and who colors
The Tragedy of Arthur
in every line.

One faces these terrible
why
s, frustrating in their nearness yet total impenetrability, like strippers behind glass. Why did he do it? Why did he hide it and then reveal it but still lie about it all the way to death? I can untangle a knot of explanations (plausible, partial, plausibly partial, partially plausible), but they always seem to lead me to some other
why
and leave me feeling foolish, made foolish again by my feelings for an incomprehensible father (or for an unknowable playwright).

Let’s say, just for the length of this paragraph (because that’s now the maximum length of time that I can fake it), that Claremont College’s Shakespeare Clinic’s stylometry computers are right and that
Arthur
“scores the closest match to core Shakespeare since the foundation of the Clinic.” Then why did my father give it to me and not Dana? It’s not as if my literary connections and luminosity are so potent—anyone walking into a publishing house bearing a newly discovered Shakespeare play would be whisked to the top floor. You don’t have to say you wrote
The Song Is You
to win their attention.
Dana says it was to show me he loved me, to apologize. But if it’s a forgery, then those claims are worthless.

And, no matter the stylometry report, it is a forgery. And since the play isn’t authentic, we have to ask instead: why did my father write it? The forgery of a nonexistent item requires a very particular trick of the mind, as an artist friend explained to me over drinks in his studio in Minneapolis after I bemoaned my predicament. “Beyond facility with the brush and being on top of the science of the paint and the canvas and the tests for age, beyond talent, there is a skill that the copied artist didn’t have or didn’t need. Empathy. That’s a forger’s real knack. The technical stuff can be second-rate and we won’t mind.”

It is difficult to think of my father as empathetic in the usual sense of the word. Though, semantically, the prison psych report in his box of papers concurs: “Mr. Phillips is capable of remarkable leaps in empathic reasoning, able to rapidly assess the emotional state and needs of others. However, this capability is significantly narcissistic in its orientation.” He could see into other people very well, but only so he could manipulate them.

The revealed forgery demands of us, “What sort of person
bothers
?” Well: “The act is paradoxically arrogant and self-effacing. In extreme cases, it can be read as a form of psychic suicide. It is a plea for attention and an ashamed desire to be invisible (as unimportant compared to the esteemed original). It is simultaneously a desire to fool the whole world and, by fooling it, to be assured of one’s own unrecognized greatness. Those who accept the forged work as authentic participate in building a monument to the ego of the criminal.” That’s the psychiatric casebook speaking, and this classical description generally fits. Take van Meegeren (“That pathetic little man,” as my artist friend described him). He forged a whole period of Vermeers. “He couldn’t really paint like Vermeer, of course, so he invented the idea of Vermeer’s poor early efforts. Clever idea, dismal paintings,” my friend remarked.

“Remember, the experts couldn’t tell; they swore these for Vermeers until van Meegeren painted one right in front of them.
People couldn’t see it because the sense of knowing the subject, of knowing Vermeer, was so strong in van Meegeren that he could feel like Vermeer, even if he couldn’t paint like him. He could still make us feel like we were in Vermeer’s presence, seeing the world as Vermeer did.”

Is that my father, then? But my father didn’t forge juvenilia; he aimed for the 1590s, when Shakespeare was beginning to break from the pack. Certainly the monument to his ego sounds right: as the professors write in with their tentative or gushing authentications (“It’s not unconvincing,” said the one from East Anglia, “not unconvincing at all”), they each polish my father’s monument.

How large the monument is! The editorial team at Random House excitedly hung up a giant map, and as each university professor weighed in, assistants pushed in a little labeled pin—red for yes, blue for no. Oxford, England, and Oxford, Mississippi. Two Cambridges. Hampshire and New Hampshire, York and New York, Jersey and New Jersey, Wales and New South Wales, and on and on. The red tide seeped across the map, the swath of a flying epidemic of credulity flu.

Was that my father? A man so gifted with empathy—specifically, empathy for a glover’s son born four centuries earlier—that Shakespeare experts read his fake and scratch their heads? If my father wrote
The Tragedy of Arthur
, then we have an unpalatable portrait of the artist with a capability for extraordinary love and understanding who was unable to direct any of it toward me. “Can you see how I would find this embarrassing?” I asked him, age fifteen, when Career Day required an essay by me about a parent’s job.

“I don’t,” he snapped. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. I’m me and you’re you.”

A biographer asks, “What would my subject likely have done, even if I have no record of it?” The forger asks a slightly trickier question: “What would my subject have done that he definitively
did not do
?” And in turn, the forger makes all of us ask ourselves the potentially terrible question, “What actions or thoughts out there are like mine—are
me
—even though I’ve never done or thought them?” This
leads to that paranoid and extreme Shakespeare-philic/Shakespeare-phobic idea that there is nothing we can do or think that some actor from Warwickshire didn’t plan for us between 1589 and 1613.

My mother was a victim of my father’s inability to be empathetic to the living. I am another of his victims, and yet I have in turn treated my children and wife and sister no better, and day after day Petra did not come to my door to say I was forgiven and that a new start would be granted me. All my empathy has gone into trying to understand fictional characters, fantasies of my own making.

Of all Shakespeare’s pithy quotes, most people recall the one that goes something like “First, we kill all the lawyers.” My father cited it often enough, and I hear it from a lot of people who, I am certain, have never read or seen a Shakespeare play but who like his authority for their natural instinct.

The sentiment shouldn’t really be credited to Shakespeare (as it was on the T-shirt that Chuck Glassow once gave my father). Shakespeare was in the business of making up characters with fictional views, and should not be held responsible for advocating, for example, mass advocatocide. The character who speaks these words in
Henry VI, Part Two
is a henchman of Jack Cade, a revolutionary, a blood-covered ideologue not interested in fine justice or sparing the theoretically innocent in his passion to scrape away the existing order. Cade is a Lenin, a Pol Pot, and he is often cited as an example of Shakespeare’s quasi-prophetic powers: Shakespeare wrote Cade, and then Pol Pot appeared three hundred years later to fulfill the imagination of the creator.

Unless … what if Pol Pot, as a student in Paris, read
Henry VI, Part Two
? Saw a French production? What if Lenin read it? Or Hitler? And a man of certain tendencies and politics sighed with pleasure to find a role model, a character with whom he so closely identified that he adopted some of his policies? “First, we kill all the people with glasses … First, we kill all the kulaks … First, we kill all the mentally ill.” I think a case could be made that Shakespeare has twentieth-century blood on his hands.

An absurd position, I know, but if critics insist that he showed us how to live and think and love, then surely he taught us how to run an efficient terror-based revolution and how to commit genocide, too.

A Buddhist critic wrote that Shakespeare helped ruin Western civilization by giving such eloquence to resisting change, to analyzing emotions, to the despair over passing time, to exerting one’s will: in short, to enunciating so stirringly the opposite of a Buddhist world-view.

He can’t win, I suppose. That’s the price of his deification. To be fair, I don’t hate Shakespeare, and that’s to his credit as a writer, because I can’t imagine anyone who’s been given more good cause to
hate him than I. But I cannot find myself in his works. I identify with none of them, no matter how many fawning critics bleat to me that he captured all of humanity in his eye and pen.

Dana saw me splattered all over the canon, citing Richard II’s arrogance, Iago’s pointless and free-range resentments, Benvolio’s friendship, Mercutio’s loyalty, Tybalt’s fire, Romeo’s idealism, Falstaff’s appetites, Arthur’s passions. Arthur most of all, and I still have to laugh, because if Shakespeare can be so easily imitated by one of those he cast in his likeness, then he is no god at all.

“Of course he’s not,” she would have chided me now. “He’s just a writer. Like you. He deserves only what you deserve: to be read and treated like a writer. A reader likes something you wrote, but something else not so much. Good. That’s what he deserves, too, not to be punished with this religion of his perfection and prophecy. Who wants to read something unquestionably perfect for all of us? That’s not good for us or him. He wouldn’t have wanted it.”