The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [40]
The remainder of Dana’s work was openly fiction. Some of it turned up in her creative writing workshop in college, but most of it was viewed as “symptomatic” by her doctor, and even she had to agree.
At some point, the beard decided to shave itself from the face that supported it and walk off a bard. Shakespeare, having decided to retire from the theater, simply stormed into their next secret meeting, grabbed the confessional document, pushed the dainty Jew aside, and thrust the paper into the waiting fire. The evidence was gone. All that remained were stylistic differences within the two men’s plays and the money now in the Jew’s family’s system of interest and accounts, though he himself—Binyamin Feivel—had converted and changed his name to Ben Phillips. (My religionless sister imagined herself as the heir to Shakespeare, and found in Judaism the trick to do it.)
The intervening centuries. Two families, alike in dignity, the Phillipses and the Deveres, carried on a bizarre and secret war, staged in Swiss banks and school boards, critical editions, university tenure committees, by agents witting and unwitting, each family attempting to discredit the opposition’s plays so as to discourage performance, having them cited for obscenity or forgery so they would be forgotten, uncommanded. Throughout, the families kept one eye on the increasingly peculiar question of what the reigning British monarch requested for entertainment and the other eye on a deposit of cash, moved periodically from one account to another, slowly amassing. Why was it never stolen by a trustee? The trust documents—now and then updated in a new country to adhere to new banking law—were always managed jointly by one member of each family, and only by joint signature of the head of the Deveres and the head of the Phillipses could that swelling amount be moved or altered, despite war, depression, history, greed.
Greed: all it would have required was the simultaneous arrival of a Devere and a Phillips who cared more for half the growing fortune than for a share of the increasingly dubious claim to have descended from the unacknowledged author of half of Shakespeare’s plays. And though both families did produce such fathers over the years, ready to trade pride for cash, it never happened at the same time, no matter the financial climate. (Dana, a scholarship kid at Brown while I was a scholarship kid at Harvard, was working two jobs to pay her share of school, and the attack on our financially useless father was evident to me.)
Instead, family pride steadily swells over four centuries, and the moment of revelation from father to eldest child takes on ceremonial significance. A dying Devere explains the situation to his heir. A Phillips boy is usually told of the secret the night before his bar mitzvah (we apparently converted back to Judaism at some point). The bet, the secrecy, the issues, the feuding school boards were all explained to the next head of the family. Papers were signed, introductions made, running tallies of royal command performances updated.
The score was maintained by the same trusteeship, always with the decreasingly science-fictional date of 2014 in mind, when the winner would cash in. But here complexities arose, especially as command performances became rarer and the monarch no longer kept an official company of actors. It’s easy to say that between 1603 and 1616, Shakespeare’s troupe, the King’s Men, performed 187 times for James I, but should they count a 1712 performance of Coriolanus where Queen Anne fell ill in the first act? What of walkouts? In 1888, the future Edward VII commanded a performance of Troilus and Cressida but was nowhere to be seen at the curtain call, as he was off leading his secret life as Jack the Ripper.
And what of films? Elizabeth II went to cinema premieres to see Olivier’s Henry V and Branagh’s Henry V, but what about her DVD rentals? Pay-per-view? Dana wrote to the public relations office of Buckingham Palace, but didn’t feel the answers