The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [118]
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 whys, 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