The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel Read online

  Her theory is, in the end, unprovable, of course, but she insisted (as all anti-Strats do) that it is no more unprovable than the absurd patsy we call “Shakespeare.” Her version goes like this:

  In 1589, or a little earlier if necessary, a nobleman—Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford will do just fine—and a Jewish moneylender found they had something in common besides the string of debts that bound one to the other. The earl and his moneylender’s son were both poets, and neither was able to participate fully in the booming theatrical world of Elizabeth’s London. It was beneath the earl to throw himself into rehearsals and company business (though he did write a few things under his own name for court), and the Jewish boy, at age twenty-three or twenty-four, desperate to be a part of it all, was, of course, unacceptable in that milieu.

  The earl was a Cambridge man, and the banker’s boy was a tireless autodidact, spending his devoted and kindly father’s ducats on a beautiful library, where he loved Ovid best of all but read everything an Elizabethan gentleman ought.

  The earl was not going to have an open friendship with his Jewish banker, but was humane (or financially needy) enough that when the moneylender asked him to read a few of his son’s verses, the earl condescended to agree. The father gratefully showed him a poem, the first scene of a play perhaps, and, in his own variety of condescension, granted some leniency on the terms of a bill coming due. The earl read the sample and was immediately aware that he was reading the work of someone with great ability. He summoned the father back and invited him to bring his son.

  A strange and rivalrous friendship was born. The earl and the Jewish youth read each other’s words, peered across the social abyss carved deep between them, and recognized each other with mutual admiration and jealousy. They met again and again, without the father. Their conversations would have been productive educations for both of them. The earl would have known about the military, the law, court behavior, Latin. The younger man would have provided Old Testament fluency, financial expertise, and, if he had spent time outside London, an eye for the natural world—the plays’ rich language of birds, flowers, country fairs, apples. Each boasted that if he were able to write for the public stage he would be hailed as the greatest poet of the time, outshining Kyd, Marlowe, Lyly. Naturally, one of them suggested a plan.

  Next in Dana’s fantasy comes a scene that other squinting anti-Stratfordians imagine as well: a young actor, Will Shakespeare, new to London from the Warwickshire town of Stratford, ambitious but of only middling talent, is invited one night to a private audience with the Earl of Oxford in his London residence and is presented with an irresistible offer. The actor would be given a role to act in his own life, forever. He would play a better version of himself and would win great fame for his performance. He would be slipped works to stage under his own name. He could even take them to a printer and publish them, if he wished. Whatever money he could squeeze out of this was his to keep. The renown would be his as well. The women or boys he charmed with his honeyed verses were his to bed. (“Really, Miss Phillips, is there any evidence of such proclivities in Shakespeare the man?” huffed the twelfth-grade teacher, angry that Dana was saying much more about his hero’s unknowability than his sexuality.) Changes made by the acting company in rehearsal were fine; the scripts should be brought back to the earl for reworking, and the earl would have felt the frisson of slumming it, toiling like some common artisan. No mention was made of the Jew at this early meeting where devilish Shakespeare won the souls of two other men and was paid for the victory.

  Readily agreeing, the impostor went off with two plays: The Taming of the Shrew and Edward III. Before he could leave, however, he signed a document, twice, a long empty sheet. At the very top, above a blank expanse of future possibility, he took dictation and wrote: “I, William Shakespeare of Stratford, did not write the play The Taming of the Shrew.” And, directly below: “I, William Shakespeare of Stratford, did not write the play The Raigne of King Edward III.”

  After the actor departed to try his luck in the world with this unlikely gift, the Jew emerged from behind the arras and shared the earl’s wine, and the earl marveled at this dark-haired, dark-eyed, magnificent creature, able to write nearly as well as the earl himself. Though this friendship, this love, was forbidden, still the earl proceeded. (The historical earl also dabbled in bestiality, but Dana let that go.)

  “In cases of young artists and older mentors,” wrote Dana for a freshman psychology paper, “jealousy and mutual manipulation are hallmarks of the relationship.” The younger man surely envied the earl’s power and social acceptance; the earl surely feared revelations of his situation and used his threats and superior position to intimidate the youth. Still they produced new material, each in his own world, composing in secrecy before presenting the other with his latest creation.

  The actor was summoned again, signed his name twice more by the flickering firelight: “… did not write The Two Gentlemen of Verona … did not write The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster.”

  Here, Dana went on, it might have ended, and Shakespeare “would have gotten away with it.” But people are unpredictable, and people in love—“as we have seen in so many of the wondrous fantasies credited to the dull glover’s boy”—are least predictable of all, prey to passions and confusions “overflowing reason’s sanded bounds.”

  With unsurprising success, a name was being made (literally): “Shakespeare” was hailed, paid, even publicly mocked as an upstart by an envious rival. Both of the real artists had accepted their necessary anonymity back at the beginning, but tensions between them were unavoidable: each wanted the other to acknowledge his superiority. The author of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York faced off against the writer of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and each claimed to be the greater poet. Their debate flared, cooled, was diverted into more plays, into spats and moody reconciliations, vows of love, sonnets, loans and refusals of tokens, yet more plays. “All the while, young Mr. Shakespeare produced new work at twice the rate of any other Elizabethan playwright, and in a dizzying variety of styles, as if he contained multitudes,” wrote Dana. “He was credited for being best at comedy and tragedy. Most suspicious!”

  These two star-crossed lovers met again and again in the hothouse of the earl’s estate, between flowers of the New World and Africa. They read each other’s latest with envy and pride, competing to outdo each other, stealing phrases from the other’s work for later use, leaping ahead to address the other’s themes in their next play, collapsing into each other’s arms when ribaldry burst through rivalry, and they inevitably wondered how they would be received if they were allowed to be themselves, if they played the roles they had created, if they strolled to the back of the theater to collect the playwright’s fees from the box office at the evening’s end, earl and Jew, exposed to the world’s judgment. They assured each other it could never be.

  It did not matter, they insisted to each other—a mutual act of kindness. Their competition was not Marlowe, and their audience was not Shoreditch groundlings or half-brained lordlings. Their peers were Terence, Plautus, Seneca. Their audience was immortal and eternal. Just as men were still reading, these centuries later, the Ancients, anyone of their stature and skill (each included the other but meant only himself) would be read and performed centuries into an unknown future when England’s throne would be filled by Elizabeth XXI or Henry LIV. No one would be performing Kyd’s absurdities. Monarchy would be admiring the heirs of the two lovers’ invention.

  “And, come that distant day, which of us will be more admired?” asked the earl in Dana’s one-act play of this story. The question was as inevitable as the apple in Eden; they had to ask as they had to breathe. But how could such eternal adoration be measured? Both of them would be known as Shakespeare. That would make the answer more difficult to determine, but also more just: neither would have a name temporarily inflated or discarded. Even then it was clear to the l
oving competitors that reputations could swell undeservedly large and then, like soap bubbles, burst. They would be judged as equals, earl and Jew, though they were in no other way equal. They would wager on some more lasting fame.

  Five hundred years before they lay in this fur-strewn bed (Dana later detailed this scene for a theater-design course), Chaucer had not yet been born and English was an entirely different language. Five hundred years into the future it might—the Jew saw far—be a new language again, and the playgoers of the English court in 2095 might speak a tongue with some different words or thoughts differently arranged. “And by such time, the brightness of true genius—like ours—will have outshone all those lesser lights that strut our stage today, that seem as hot as Suns only for being so near.” All style and fashion will have changed and changed back a dozen times, and true genius will blaze out, by sheer endurance. The brightest stars will be loved for longevity, not novelty.

  How would one of the two men be judged superior? (In a poem for English class—written in modern anarchic randometer—Dana extracted this scene: “pillow talk between lovers / too excited by their visions to fall into sleep.”) They trusted posterity in general, but who specifically in posterity was qualified to declare a winner? Would sales of copies of the plays measure the difference? Numbers of people who attended all the productions over the coming five centuries? The number of our plays still performed by the King’s Men or the Queen’s Men in 2095? Use of their invented words in common conversation? suggested the Jew, who had already coined critic, fashionable, and eyeball.

  I remember, when we were probably sixteen, that Dana came into my room and asked me, “How would you measure and prove real literary immortality?”

  “Royal command performance,” said the earl. “That distant king or queen and all betwixt now and then will surely wish to see the best of her players’ tales at Christmas revels every year. And from this first Elizabeth to that fiftieth, each monarch will ask for this or that play of ours. How simple to number up all the requests and, at the end, account this the measure of the poet for all time, the scenic master whom all eternity will acknowledge as second only to that uncreated Creator.”

  Dana elaborated on the wager’s mechanism for an economics class, modeling exchange rates and comparisons of currency value over time. If, she hypothesized, two men in 1595 were each to place £200 (say, the equivalent of £45,000 in 1982) into some sort of secure, interest-bearing account, what would be its value in 2014, the 450th anniversary of their invented playwright’s birth? A weak math student, Dana calculated the wager’s 2014 value at $9 million.

  And? And the closest direct descendant of the greater writer—the more royally demanded writer—would collect the money and reveal (with that long list of Shakespeare’s signed confessions as proof) that the greater half of the work of the upstart crow was written by either Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or a confused and secretive bisexual Jew named Binyamin Feivel (wrote the sexually secretive religionless Jewish girl from Minneapolis).

  “Come now, Ms. Phillips, your fantasy bumps into certain textual realities. The sonnets mention the poet’s name as Will, an actor. They are plainly autobiographical, plainly revelatory of himself. Here is where we glimpse the true man Shakespeare in his world! The sonnets are not some mere literary game! So how do your imagined lovers settle that?” One hundred and fifty-four fourteen-line poems, conceivably autobiographical: how indeed?

  With ease, as Dana showed in a staging she directed of The Sonnets during the fall of her sophomore year at Brown, 1983: The two men (played at Brown by brown women) write the poems to each other. Soon after their scheme had begun, they were calling each other “Will,” both of them, since as Shakespeare’s fame grew they both came to identify themselves to each other as him. The autobiography of the Stratford actor that “dimmer readers” thought they perceived in The Sonnets, Dana explained, was actually a “photonegative” of reality: these are two lovers writing to each other, not one poet writing to two lovers. First, in Sonnets 1 through 17, the two men take turns encouraging each other to marry and have heirs, not some mysterious youth, for how else could their descendants collect on the wager? Subsequent poems reveal varying degrees of submission, love, emotional strife, separation, and reconciliations. One of them accuses the other of stealing a mistress. Then 127 through 152 are all by Oxford: the supposed “Dark Lady” (for whom people speculate Shakespeare seems to have a tormenting, vaguely taboo love) is none other than Feivel himself, dark, as a Sephardic Jew would have appeared by Elizabethan standards. The Dark “Lady” seems to betray the poet. “Swear to thy blond soul that I was thy Will,” the black actress recited, dressed as a bisexual English lord writing cross-dressed verse to his Jewish lover.

  By the time the two men published The Sonnets, their dummy had become a reasonably celebrated figure. The Sonnets—the comet dust of their genius—became a bestseller, just like the Jew’s Venus and Adonis and the earl’s Rape of Lucrece. The real man, William the actor, found himself embroiled in a bit of a scandal. His colleagues—who admired him, profited from his genius, drank with him—now learned from the published poems that he had had some sort of an affair with … a Mooress? A Jewess? An Italian?

  By then the actor Shakespeare realized that he had sold something back in that first fateful meeting in the spring of his career, and by the time he was filling up that confessional sheet—“… did not write The Tragedy of Lear … did not write The Tragedy of Macbeth”—he understood that he no longer possessed all the power. He had made his name and liked the name he had made, but by 1604, when the Earl of Oxford died, the potential disgrace of discovery had shifted: it would now be far worse for Shakespeare than for the Jew or the late earl, were the ruse to be revealed. Shakespeare’s life, his friends and money, his loves were all products of this lie, and the tangled web in which he had ensnared himself would, if cut, drop him from a dizzying altitude onto a hard surface.

  A term paper about confidence men and professional liars that Dana wrote for sophomore psych made no mention of Dad, but hypothesized that a man in Shakespeare’s position would have increasing difficulty, at least sporadically, not believing that he had written the plays for which he’d been paid and praised (“made such a sinner of his memory / To credit his own lie”). And if he were in such a state when forced to admit that he had not written them (when he signed the document in exchange for new manuscripts), he might have found the cognitive dissonance so painful that he would have been prone to violence.

  A man in such a position—“ … did not write Cardenio … did not write All Is True”—would have found that document excruciating, would have viewed it as, alternately, a forgery, a coerced lie, or the damning evidence of his teetering life of dishonesty. Its continued existence would have ruined his sleep and his days, drained his every act of reality and meaning. His real estate investments were built on money earned from a lie; his application for a family coat of arms was based on honors won from a lie. With every passing year, the honest proportion of his life was shrinking. The document was unacceptable, but its destruction would mean the end of new plays, which he needed and felt he deserved.

  The remainder of Dana’s work was openly fiction. Some of it turned up in her creative writing workshop in college, but most of it was viewed as “symptomatic” by her doctor, and even she had to agree.

  At some point, the beard decided to shave itself from the face that supported it and walk off a bard. Shakespeare, having decided to retire from the theater, simply stormed into their next secret meeting, grabbed the confessional document, pushed the dainty Jew aside, and thrust the paper into the waiting fire. The evidence was gone. All that remained were stylistic differences within the two men’s plays and the money now in the Jew’s family’s system of interest and accounts, though he himself—Binyamin Feivel—had converted and changed his name to Ben Phillips. (My religionless sister imagined herself as the heir to Shakespeare, and found in Judaism the trick to do it.
)

  The intervening centuries. Two families, alike in dignity, the Phillipses and the Deveres, carried on a bizarre and secret war, staged in Swiss banks and school boards, critical editions, university tenure committees, by agents witting and unwitting, each family attempting to discredit the opposition’s plays so as to discourage performance, having them cited for obscenity or forgery so they would be forgotten, uncommanded. Throughout, the families kept one eye on the increasingly peculiar question of what the reigning British monarch requested for entertainment and the other eye on a deposit of cash, moved periodically from one account to another, slowly amassing. Why was it never stolen by a trustee? The trust documents—now and then updated in a new country to adhere to new banking law—were always managed jointly by one member of each family, and only by joint signature of the head of the Deveres and the head of the Phillipses could that swelling amount be moved or altered, despite war, depression, history, greed.

  Greed: all it would have required was the simultaneous arrival of a Devere and a Phillips who cared more for half the growing fortune than for a share of the increasingly dubious claim to have descended from the unacknowledged author of half of Shakespeare’s plays. And though both families did produce such fathers over the years, ready to trade pride for cash, it never happened at the same time, no matter the financial climate. (Dana, a scholarship kid at Brown while I was a scholarship kid at Harvard, was working two jobs to pay her share of school, and the attack on our financially useless father was evident to me.)

  Instead, family pride steadily swells over four centuries, and the moment of revelation from father to eldest child takes on ceremonial significance. A dying Devere explains the situation to his heir. A Phillips boy is usually told of the secret the night before his bar mitzvah (we apparently converted back to Judaism at some point). The bet, the secrecy, the issues, the feuding school boards were all explained to the next head of the family. Papers were signed, introductions made, running tallies of royal command performances updated.