The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [39]
With ease, as Dana showed in a staging she directed of The Sonnets during the fall of her sophomore year at Brown, 1983: The two men (played at Brown by brown women) write the poems to each other. Soon after their scheme had begun, they were calling each other “Will,” both of them, since as Shakespeare’s fame grew they both came to identify themselves to each other as him. The autobiography of the Stratford actor that “dimmer readers” thought they perceived in The Sonnets, Dana explained, was actually a “photonegative” of reality: these are two lovers writing to each other, not one poet writing to two lovers. First, in Sonnets 1 through 17, the two men take turns encouraging each other to marry and have heirs, not some mysterious youth, for how else could their descendants collect on the wager? Subsequent poems reveal varying degrees of submission, love, emotional strife, separation, and reconciliations. One of them accuses the other of stealing a mistress. Then 127 through 152 are all by Oxford: the supposed “Dark Lady” (for whom people speculate Shakespeare seems to have a tormenting, vaguely taboo love) is none other than Feivel himself, dark, as a Sephardic Jew would have appeared by Elizabethan standards. The Dark “Lady” seems to betray the poet. “Swear to thy blond soul that I was thy Will,” the black actress recited, dressed as a bisexual English lord writing cross-dressed verse to his Jewish lover.
By the time the two men published The Sonnets, their dummy had become a reasonably celebrated figure. The Sonnets—the comet dust of their genius—became a bestseller, just like the Jew’s Venus and Adonis and the earl’s Rape of Lucrece. The real man, William the actor, found himself embroiled in a bit of a scandal. His colleagues—who admired him, profited from his genius, drank with him—now learned from the published poems that he had had some sort of an affair with … a Mooress? A Jewess? An Italian?
By then the actor Shakespeare realized that he had sold something back in that first fateful meeting in the spring of his career, and by the time he was filling up that confessional sheet—“… did not write The Tragedy of Lear … did not write The Tragedy of Macbeth”—he understood that he no longer possessed all the power. He had made his name and liked the name he had made, but by 1604, when the Earl of Oxford died, the potential disgrace of discovery had shifted: it would now be far worse for Shakespeare than for the Jew or the late earl, were the ruse to be revealed. Shakespeare’s life, his friends and money, his loves were all products of this lie, and the tangled web in which he had ensnared himself would, if cut, drop him from a dizzying altitude onto a hard surface.
A term paper about confidence men and professional liars that Dana wrote for sophomore psych made no mention of Dad, but hypothesized that a man in Shakespeare’s position would have increasing difficulty, at least sporadically, not believing that he had written the plays for which he’d been paid and praised (“made such a sinner of his memory / To credit his own lie”). And if he were in such a state when forced to admit that he had not written them (when he signed the document in exchange for new manuscripts), he might have found the cognitive dissonance so painful that he would have been prone to violence.
A man in such a position—“ … did not write Cardenio … did not write All Is True”—would have found that document excruciating, would have viewed it as, alternately, a forgery, a coerced lie, or the damning evidence of his teetering life of dishonesty. Its continued existence would have ruined his sleep and his days, drained his every act of reality and meaning. His real estate investments were built on money earned from a lie; his application for a family coat of arms was based on honors won from a lie. With every passing year, the honest proportion of his life was shrinking. The document was unacceptable, but its destruction would