The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [123]
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 chemistry 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