The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [38]
“And, come that distant day, which of us will be more admired?” asked the earl in Dana’s one-act play of this story. The question was as inevitable as the apple in Eden; they had to ask as they had to breathe. But how could such eternal adoration be measured? Both of them would be known as Shakespeare. That would make the answer more difficult to determine, but also more just: neither would have a name temporarily inflated or discarded. Even then it was clear to the loving competitors that reputations could swell undeservedly large and then, like soap bubbles, burst. They would be judged as equals, earl and Jew, though they were in no other way equal. They would wager on some more lasting fame.
Five hundred years before they lay in this fur-strewn bed (Dana later detailed this scene for a theater-design course), Chaucer had not yet been born and English was an entirely different language. Five hundred years into the future it might—the Jew saw far—be a new language again, and the playgoers of the English court in 2095 might speak a tongue with some different words or thoughts differently arranged. “And by such time, the brightness of true genius—like ours—will have outshone all those lesser lights that strut our stage today, that seem as hot as Suns only for being so near.” All style and fashion will have changed and changed back a dozen times, and true genius will blaze out, by sheer endurance. The brightest stars will be loved for longevity, not novelty.
How would one of the two men be judged superior? (In a poem for English class—written in modern anarchic randometer—Dana extracted this scene: “pillow talk between lovers / too excited by their visions to fall into sleep.”) They trusted posterity in general, but who specifically in posterity was qualified to declare a winner? Would sales of copies of the plays measure the difference? Numbers of people who attended all the productions over the coming five centuries? The number of our plays still performed by the King’s Men or the Queen’s Men in 2095? Use of their invented words in common conversation? suggested the Jew, who had already coined critic, fashionable, and eyeball.
I remember, when we were probably sixteen, that Dana came into my room and asked me, “How would you measure and prove real literary immortality?”
“Royal command performance,” said the earl. “That distant king or queen and all betwixt now and then will surely wish to see the best of her players’ tales at Christmas revels every year. And from this first Elizabeth to that fiftieth, each monarch will ask for this or that play of ours. How simple to number up all the requests and, at the end, account this the measure of the poet for all time, the scenic master whom all eternity will acknowledge as second only to that uncreated Creator.”
Dana elaborated on the wager’s mechanism for an economics class, modeling exchange rates and comparisons of currency value over time. If, she hypothesized, two men in 1595 were each to place £200 (say, the equivalent of £45,000 in 1982) into some sort of secure, interest-bearing account, what would be its value in 2014, the 450th anniversary of their invented playwright’s birth? A weak math student, Dana calculated the wager’s 2014 value at $9 million.
And? And the closest direct descendant of the greater writer—the more royally demanded writer—would collect the money and reveal (with that long list of Shakespeare’s signed confessions as proof) that the greater half of the work of the upstart crow was written by either Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, or a confused and secretive bisexual Jew named Binyamin Feivel (wrote the sexually secretive religionless Jewish girl from Minneapolis).
“Come now, Ms. Phillips, your fantasy bumps into certain textual realities. The sonnets mention the poet’s name as Will, an actor. They are plainly autobiographical, plainly revelatory of himself. Here is where we glimpse the true man Shakespeare in his world! The sonnets are not some mere literary game! So how