The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [121]
Jennifer sent me notices every time a professor from the Scholars List rendered his or her official opinion. Some were refusals to certify; there were even a few very well argued essays against Shakespeare’s authorship of the play, and she honorably sent me those as well. But as November rolled on, such emails and faxes were in the needle-thin and oppressed minority, and late in the month she sent me a digital photo of that big map over at 1745 Broadway, now a view of Mars from the pins of authenticating red. That email’s subject line was “Preponderance of scholarly opinion.”
It was torturous to watch these views come in wrong. I occasionally rose to the bait and clicked off angry little e-rants to her:
Seriously, listen to this guy: “Scholarly opinion now holds that he did write some or all of Edward III, and similarly Arthur is, in my view, largely or entirely written by William Shakespeare.” Well, which, Jen? Some or all? And why is scholarly opinion now ready to let him have Edward III, more or less, when, for two hundred years that same scholarly opinion was certain Shakespeare had nothing to do with it, a play they dismissed as beneath his talent? This is not a serious field. It’s fashion and PR.
Dear Mr. Phillips,
I wished to send you a copy of my report directly because you and your family were so hospitable to me during my stay in lovely Minneapolis. I do hope we might see one other again in the coming exciting months. Please send your father my very warmest regards.
Ours is not an exact science, but a matter of the most precisely described and fulsomely supported guesswork. Some things do strike one as so unlikely as to cross over into the absolutely impossible, it must be said, but other questions are not fully answerable these many centuries later. It seems to me that, from a textual perspective, Arthur is in the realm of the entirely possible.
Our taste and cultural point of view are not eliminated by computers. You know, the century before last, some critics simply knew that Shakespeare could not have written Titus Andronicus because they didn’t like it. Today, most of us do not think too much of Henry VI, Part One, and, lo and behold, the computers tell us he probably didn’t write too much of it. Well, we must be a little more careful than that.
The Arthur text is consistent with the Shakespeare whom we know in the early to mid-1590s, contemporaneous, in my opinion, with 3 Henry VI and Richard III or a bit later. The vocabulary is either attested to by sources of the period or, in cases where it seems he was inventing words and compounds (admittedly rather more heavily and rather earlier than we have seen him do elsewhere, if my dating is correct), it is in a manner consistent with his style. None of the hallmarks of forgery are present in the text. It should go without saying that this opinion does not take into consideration anything you have learned from examination of the paper, ink, and binding.
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