The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [24]
As the play opens, Prince Arthur is seventeen. In the midst of a boar hunt, he becomes distracted by a shepherd girl and abandons his hapless foster father, Gloucester, to pursue her. Gloucester worries what sort of king he is raising for Britain and, coincidentally, Shakespearily, a messenger then arrives with news of King Uter’s death; he was poisoned by the Saxons. Unaware of this, Arthur talks with the shepherd girl, attempting to seduce her. Their flirtation is broken up by the calls of courtiers hunting for the new king.
In the meantime, the northern kingdoms of Scotland and Pictland are thrown into turmoil by the news of Uter’s death and Arthur’s accession. Mordred, the heir to the more powerful Pictish crown, insists that Arthur is illegitimate and the throne of all Britain belongs to his family. He tries to rouse his father, the king, into fighting for the crown, but his dying father refuses.
Back in London, Gloucester, as lord protector, struggles to convince the squabbling English nobility to support their new king. They do agree to accept Arthur, but only in response to northern insolence: they torture the Pictish messenger bearing Mordred’s claim to the throne. Act I ends with Arthur in a soliloquy realizing the difficulties he faces, weighing his legitimacy, doubting his suitability to be king, ashamed that he is not the man his father was, yet daring himself to proceed, more out of anger with his rivals than any real desire to rule.
None of this, I suppose, strikes me as any more stilted or formulaic than other Shakespeare first acts.
Dana kept the 1904 edition of The Tragedy of Arthur for all those years, and except for the occasion when she read it to me and my newly smashed nose, I never opened it, never looked at it on her shelf, never thought about it. But after our father showed her the book when she was eleven, the two of them discussed it ad nauseam (my nauseam, anyhow). Dad challenged her to prove its authorship to him, and she rose to the task, producing letters and essays and comparisons of vocabulary and style. They also developed a bantering game about the play: they would propose explanations to each other for its exclusion from the collected works, the First Folio, bouncing theories back and forth. “It was a gift to a lover, a private closet drama,” Dana proposed at age fifteen, not coincidentally during one of her periodic all-encompassing romantic obsessions, the details of which only I knew. “He wrote it for a secret lover, and when she didn’t like it, he extravagantly promised it would never be performed. She made him swear he would burn it, and he agreed. He wouldn’t let his company have it. The play fell into oblivion. When it was time for them to publish the folio, none of them even remembered the abandoned play.”
Dad picked up the story and ran, all of us well behaved and calm now on these family visits to prison: “That’s good, Dana, that’s good. Then his widow found the manuscript. Anne tried to sell Arthur back to the King’s Men to include in the folio, but they didn’t offer her much for it, thought they could get it from her by preening, all prestige, ‘We’re the King’s Men, after all.’ She should be pleased just to have their attention.” Dad was in the first months of his third prison sentence, and his mind was much taken by treacherous and cheap colleagues, convinced as he was that someone had betrayed him in his latest downfall.
“While she was stewing over their haughty attitude,” Dana continued, “a strange man came to her door with flowers, saying he wanted to meet her, admired her. He listened to her complaints about dead Will, never at home, left the good bed to the kids, all his groupie girlfriends, and this stranger is very sympathetic. At the end, she agrees to give him the Arthur play for a few pounds, maybe a few kisses thrown in, and off he goes with the manuscript of the forgotten play. Now, what did he do with it?”
(Did I on this visit shyly, pathetically show him the short story I had had published in the high school literary magazine? I hope not,