The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [202]
AND IS DEEPLY INDEBTED TO:
superstar editor Lee Boudreaux, Julia Bucknall, Tony Denninger, Peter Magyar, Mike Mattison, ASP, DSP, FMP, MMP, incomparable agent Marly Rusoff, Toby Tompkins, Daniel Zelman, and, of course, Jan.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARTHUR PHILLIPS was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, a national bestseller, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, received the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel, and has been translated into seven languages. The Egyptologist is his second novel. He lives in New York with his wife and two sons.
Visit www.TheEgyptologist.com
Continue on to read excerpts from
Arthur Phillips’s other novels
The Song Is You
Prague
Angelica
Read on for an excerpt from
The Tragedy of Arthur
A Novel
by Arthur Phillips
PREFACE
Random House is proud to present this first modern edition of The Tragedy of Arthur by William Shakespeare.
Until now, Shakespeare’s dramatic canon consisted of thirty-eight or thirty-nine plays, depending on whose scholarship one trusted and whose edition of the Complete Works one owned. Thirty-six plays were included in the so-called First Folio of 1623, published seven years after the playwright’s death. Two more—collaborations, likely delayed for copyright reasons—were added to subsequent seventeenth-century collections. A thirty-ninth play, Edward III, has over the last two decades garnered increasing academic support as having been written, at least in part, by Shakespeare, but it was published only anonymously in his lifetime and is by no means universally acknowledged as a Shakespeare play. A further two works—Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won—are referred to in historical documents, but no copies of either have survived. Another dozen or so plays—the so-called Apocrypha—do exist and are debated, but none have acquired anything approaching scholarly consensus as being the work of Shakespeare.
The Tragedy of Arthur was published as a quarto in 1597. Its cover’s claim that the text is “newly corrected and augmented” implies a previous version now lost, but this 1597 edition was, as far as we now know, the first play to be printed with Shakespeare’s name on the title page, pre-dating Love’s Labour’s Lost by one year. Likely banned, or at least judged politically dangerous and therefore excluded from the 1623 folio, the play apparently fell into disfavor, and only one copy of that 1597 quarto has so far been discovered. It was not found until the 1950s, and has been held in a private collection until now. The Tragedy of Arthur is, therefore, the first certain addition to Shakespeare’s canon since the seventeenth century.
The story it tells is not the legend of Camelot most readers know. There is no sword in the stone, no Lancelot, no Round Table, no Merlin or magic. Instead, Shakespeare seems to have worked from his usual source for history plays, Raphael Holinshed’s 1587 Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The resulting plot is something more like King Lear, a violent argument of succession in Dark Ages Britain. But, like Lear, it is about so very much more, and the white heat that courses through the whole structure is Shakespeare’s unmistakable imagination and language.
Many people have worked with great dedication to make this book possible. It could not have come to pass without the academic leadership of Professor Roland Verre, who has overseen the research and tests that have confirmed the play’s authenticity and