The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [16]
“Who waits for us within, fell Englishmen?
This Saxon pride set sail o’er Humber’s tide
And then conjoined to Pictish treachery
For but to cower, spent and quaking-shy,
Portcullised fast behind the walls of York,
As guilty lads will seek their mother’s skirts
When older boys they vex come for revenge.
But Arthur’s at the gate! ’Tis Britain’s fist
That hammers now upon the shiv’ring boards.
An English blood be thin as watery wine,
Then sheathe we now our swords and skulk away
With Saxon language tripping from our lips.
You’d con th’invader’s tongue? Absit omen.
Let’s school them then in terms of English arms,
Decline and conjugate hard words—but hark! Chambers
She sighs with gentle pleading that we come!
Now wait no more to save her, nobles, in,
And pull those Saxon arms off English skin!”
When she finished, she said, “Listen to it again. Arthur starts out with: the enemy is a little boy hiding in York because he pissed off us bigger boys, and we’re going to kick his ass. The soldiers don’t really go for that, so you reach again and you say, ‘If they conquer us, we’ll have to learn their language, and that’ll be like Latin class, which was a drag, wasn’t it? Anybody?’ Figure by now the troops are getting a little dubious about you. And then the cannons go off”—Chambers—“the battle’s going to start, and so you try one more time, last chance, and this time you nail it: York’s a babe and she wants us in her. And suddenly everyone starts to nod and grip their hilts, if you know what I mean.
“You could do that,” Dana said softly. “That’s what I saw today. You could figure out how to be a hero when you have to. You were outnumbered, didn’t know what you were doing, and you still fought like a hero.”
The Tragedy of Arthur was not necessarily her favorite back then, but she gave it to me that afternoon in April, in our living room, read the entire play to me. It took more than four hours, I’d guess. She patiently stopped to answer my vocabulary questions, stopped to replace the softening ice on my hardening face, stopped to make me something in the blender that I could bear to swallow, and April spring floated in and out through the open window, our mother and stepfather both late at work, our father far away in prison (no threat or irritant or better man), just me and Dana and this play, her thank-you to me for fighting for her honor.
She read to me from her little red hardcover of The Tragedy of Arthur, a simple but nicely done 1904 edition that has managed to accrue contradictory sentimental value for several members of our family. Its Edwardian frontispiece engraving (in a very nineteenth-century style) was of Act II, Scene iv, in which Arthur (depicted in an anachronistic late medieval suit of plate armor) hands over his shield and regalia to the Duke of Gloucester, the crucial scene in which Arthur orders the duke to swap armor with him and do battle in his colors so that Arthur can chase some Yorkish girl instead of going back to war.
I own that 1904 edition now. I have it in front of me. It is, as they say in the used-book trade, “slightly foxed,” with two or three small stains inside the boards. The cover is slightly frayed at the bottom corners, and the spine is faded. But otherwise it’s in excellent condition.
If curiosity has nibbled at you while reading this, you may be asking yourself why you can’t find your own copy in these easy Internet days. Where is the $285 used edition on your preferred online outlet? Where is the recent reissue by a small press looking for something quirky to win some buzz? Why is Random House bothering to publish the play with such fanfare if there was already a 1904 edition? Patience, please.
After the publisher’s information and date, the first blank page bears an inscription in faint pencil and formal early-twentieth-century handwriting: For Arthur Donald “Don” Phillips, with the compliments of the King’s Men Dramatic Society, King’s School, Edmonton,