The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read online

  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 chemistr
y 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.

  FROM: “Hershey, Jennifer”

  DATE: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:46:09 -0500

  SUBJECT: 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.

  That smug certainty of modern science’s all-seeing eye, that conviction that there is no human ingenuity still to come: this gives me some faith in the falseness of the otherwise disorienting forensics report.

  I will only assert that there is always a way to fool a test. That the most complex tests are being fooled right now by someone who hasn’t been caught yet. The good forgers, recall, will never be known. Peter Bryce said as much to me: “I suppose by definition I only catch bad forgers, don’t I?” Tomorrow’s tests will catch today’s master criminal, just as today’s scientist feels safe mocking yesterday’s master criminal. There has always been erroneous, arrogant certainty on the part of some technicians that they could never be tricked by artistry. Always has been; always will be. I don’t know how my father did it, but he did it. If I’m the only one who can see it, that doesn’t make me wrong. He did it.

  Arthur, the more I think about it, the more I admire your tenacity in double-checking every possible explanation of your good fortune. I can understand—if I were holding a lottery ticket such as yours—the overpowering sense of disbelief.

  45

  PETRA CAME TO ME, shaking and wet from the snow, and she let me wrap a blanket around her and hold her, the first time in weeks. She said nothing, just stood there and let me hold her, and I knew everything was going to be fine.

  And then she stepped away from me, said she had just come from her doctor. She was pregnant. She had only meant to punish Dana, she said, maybe more, and Dana never wanted a baby and Petra did, and maybe she had felt something else about me last summer and fall, but it didn’t matter now, not at all. She wanted the child, and she wanted to leave Minneapolis and go home to her own family in a different city in a different country, and she had come to say goodbye and tell me this news, but she expected and wanted me to do nothing about it.

  “But I love you. That’s not nothing. No poetry, Petra. No lies. Just: I love you and I want us to take this gift and be happy. The end.”

  “That seems possible to you?”

  I laughed in my certainty. “Yes. Wait. Don’t you see? This fixes everything. It’s authenticating.” God help me, that was the first word that came to mind, and I can picture (I can’t stop picturing, unfortunately) Petra’s face in response. “My kids, our baby: you’ll see. We can put this all together. The pieces all fit. It’s a great thing, a great start to a great story. You have to trust me. Stay. Trust me. I’ll take care of everything.” I tried to hold her again, but she stepped away, shedding the blanket and me.

  “You’re wrong.”

  “But you’re not—you’re not indifferent to me?” I asked hopefully, though even as I said it, the expression before me was projected back over the faces, the poses, the images of our nights together, and they changed, recolored by how she was now, passion becoming indifference, wonder becoming regret, love becoming hate, shame smearing a gritty film over all of it. “What are we going to tell Dana?”

  “That’s not really your problem, is it?” she said, with a look of bottomless disgust.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said. “Tomorrow. After her matinee. I’ll pick her up at the theater. You can come if you want, or I’ll do it alone.”

  She left me in the dark apartment, watching the snow come down, my father’s ghost still snoring in the back bedroom. I sat alone on the couch. There was no more wine. That feeling of a con being revealed—the nausea and instant aging and fury and shame and humiliation: I tried to imagine learning that your brother has impregnated your girlfriend.

  DATE: Tue, 8 Dec 2009 21:51:08 -0600

  TO: Jennifer Hershey

  SUBJECT: The end.

  Dear Jennifer, my editor and friend, I hope,

  I have had a rotten couple of weeks. You keep sending me the good news, and I just don’t believe it, and I can’t bring myself to start writing some Introduction I know is a lie and I don’t want to make money on a lie and I keep staring at this very bullying letter from RH’s legal office, which I have to say pisses me off.

  My “failure” to deliver “The Tragedy of Arthur” by William Shakespeare is predicated (to talk like a lawyer) on the fact that no such item exists. I signed a contract with you in my good-faith belief that it did. I was wrong. It doesn’t. Something else exists, which, published over my name and your colophon, will make us both look like fools or worse. I am sorry for any damage this does to you. I really do sympathize. I know you put a lot of career capital into this. As for real capital, I’ll pay back the advance, and then you and I will both say goodbye to our mutual dreams of avarice and fame dreamt in other days. Hershey, “I charge thee, fling away ambition: By that sin fell the angels.” For my part, I’ll burn this atrocity of an old criminal’s fevered, feculent ambitions.

  I put off telling Dana. Characteristically, I suppose, even predictably, it appears. Friday, I resolved to do it. Kinsmen was off that night, and I left her a voicemail asking her to meet me for dinner. And I waited. And practiced what I would say. I think I would have done it. I was ready.

  Petra called instead. She was sobbing, just sounds, until a few words emerged, incoherent. “Do you want to come and do this with me?” I asked. She just cried and cried. “Pet?” I told her to calm down or some other pointless inanity. At last she said, “I told her. I’m so sorry. Tonight I told her. You never did. And she told me to leave and I did. Please, I’m so sorry. I’m here. Now. She took something. I don’t know. Arthur, she’s hurt herself. She’s … oh, God …” My sister was dead.

  46

  MY FATHER SPENT HIS LIFE pretending to be other people, the creator of other people’s work, creating pretend things, things everyone knew were impossible, whether they realized it right away or only later. He gave himself over to his unoriginality. At the end, he had stripped away everything but the unkillable urge to convince me (and the world) that Shakespeare wrote Arthur, when obviously Arthur wrote Shakespeare. As he lay dying alone, all that mattered was an act of self-immolation.

  To strive to break loose, to skin oneself down to the unique germ under all the layers of other people’s effects, and to try to rebuild on that one unique element, to avoid at all cost any hint of pastiche, imitation, anxiogenic influence, and then to burst out and display colors never before seen in combinations never before imagined: this is the chimera I have been scrambling after in response to what I thought of my father back when I was an ordinary, common disappointed child. But we all seem to pray at this cult of our own originality. This accounts for our flood of dull memoirs, which tend to be, ironically, quite similar: everyone feels they are unique and the story of themselves will be unique, too.

  But, on a planet of seven billion, it is unlikely that very many of us (if any) are literally unique. That blow to the beloved identity can feel fatal, and so the forger settles for second best: he finds the acknowledged and accredited unique figure (Shakespeare) and
says to himself either (A) “Well, if I can be him, then he’s not so unique, so I don’t have to feel bad for being a bundle of low-grade copies myself,” or (B) “Well, if I can be him, then I’m unique, too, just like him, unlike these seven billion walking duplicates.”

  But Dana. Beautiful Dana. Her job was to pretend to be other people, to speak words written by someone else, while other such people pretended to love or hate her, to make a darkened room full of strangers admire her in her artificial imitations and recitations.

  I sat between Petra and my mother on the opening night of The Two Noble Kinsmen. Dana made her first entrance.

  She was dressed in fanciful Elizabethan costumes in a play set in an imagined ancient Greece, a prequel of sorts to another, better play, and based on a story written by a fourteenth-century Englishman, adapted by two seventeenth-century Englishmen, one of whom was trying to write in the style of the other, including a scene that was patently an homage to a previous, much better play, based in turn on an eleventh-century Danish legend. Dana recited these men’s rhymes, took only those steps and made only those gestures predetermined by her director, a Croatian journeyman Antonio who, after finishing work on this play, hurried off to direct an episode of a well-loved and well-worn network hospital drama.