The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [37]
After the actor departed to try his luck in the world with this unlikely gift, the Jew emerged from behind the arras and shared the earl’s wine, and the earl marveled at this dark-haired, dark-eyed, magnificent creature, able to write nearly as well as the earl himself. Though this friendship, this love, was forbidden, still the earl proceeded. (The historical earl also dabbled in bestiality, but Dana let that go.)
“In cases of young artists and older mentors,” wrote Dana for a freshman psychology paper, “jealousy and mutual manipulation are hallmarks of the relationship.” The younger man surely envied the earl’s power and social acceptance; the earl surely feared revelations of his situation and used his threats and superior position to intimidate the youth. Still they produced new material, each in his own world, composing in secrecy before presenting the other with his latest creation.
The actor was summoned again, signed his name twice more by the flickering firelight: “… did not write The Two Gentlemen of Verona … did not write The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster.”
Here, Dana went on, it might have ended, and Shakespeare “would have gotten away with it.” But people are unpredictable, and people in love—“as we have seen in so many of the wondrous fantasies credited to the dull glover’s boy”—are least predictable of all, prey to passions and confusions “overflowing reason’s sanded bounds.”
With unsurprising success, a name was being made (literally): “Shakespeare” was hailed, paid, even publicly mocked as an upstart by an envious rival. Both of the real artists had accepted their necessary anonymity back at the beginning, but tensions between them were unavoidable: each wanted the other to acknowledge his superiority. The author of The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York faced off against the writer of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and each claimed to be the greater poet. Their debate flared, cooled, was diverted into more plays, into spats and moody reconciliations, vows of love, sonnets, loans and refusals of tokens, yet more plays. “All the while, young Mr. Shakespeare produced new work at twice the rate of any other Elizabethan playwright, and in a dizzying variety of styles, as if he contained multitudes,” wrote Dana. “He was credited for being best at comedy and tragedy. Most suspicious!”
These two star-crossed lovers met again and again in the hothouse of the earl’s estate, between flowers of the New World and Africa. They read each other’s latest with envy and pride, competing to outdo each other, stealing phrases from the other’s work for later use, leaping ahead to address the other’s themes in their next play, collapsing into each other’s arms when ribaldry burst through rivalry, and they inevitably wondered how they would be received if they were allowed to be themselves, if they played the roles they had created, if they strolled to the back of the theater to collect the playwright’s fees from the box office at the evening’s end, earl and Jew, exposed to the world’s judgment. They assured each other it could never be.
It did not matter, they insisted to each other—a mutual act of kindness. Their competition was not Marlowe, and their audience was not Shoreditch groundlings or half-brained lordlings. Their peers were Terence, Plautus, Seneca. Their audience was immortal and eternal. Just as men were still reading, these centuries later, the Ancients, anyone of their stature and skill (each included the other but meant only himself) would be read and performed centuries into an unknown future when England’s throne would be filled by Elizabeth XXI or Henry LIV. No one would be performing Kyd’s absurdities.