The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [78]
We had to repeat certain sentences several times to grasp their meaning. We often stopped to look up words online. Petra frequently wanted to find a picture as well, to have a visual sense of the play’s flowers, towns, rivers, apples.
The play was more or less what I recalled from thirty years before, when I was fifteen and had a broken nose and Dana read the whole thing to me to cheer me up. I could almost feel that odd movement of shifting threads in my fractured sinuses when Petra and I came to the scene where King Arthur rallies his troops for the first time.
“What is this thing?” Petra asked more than once during our reading. She also said, “Oh, I love that line” and “I can’t believe we get to read this” and “Do you think Shakespeare ever touched this exact copy?” and “My God, he was so amazing” and “He was the best” and “I have goose bumps—look!” and “To read something new!” and I lost a breath as I recalled that we were coming closer and closer to a scene where Arthur kisses his new queen, and my desire and hope galloped far ahead of the main body, and my mouth went dry, and I prayed that Dana would not come home yet.
We had been at this for more than an hour, perhaps two, turning each page with the utmost care, the paper smooth and pale, the thread and glue that held the leaves together still intact but obviously stiff. We stopped to marvel at this wonder. “So is it yours? Did he give it to you?” she asked. “What does he want you to do with it? How does he have it?”
“I have no idea. Let’s keep reading.” I knew that the kiss was coming and, like a teenager, I imagined it would somehow transform everything if we could read it, like this, side by side, hunched over the booklet, taking turns being princes, kings, soldiers, dog trainers, shepherdesses, messengers. Our hands touched now and then, and if the play—if Shakespeare—told Petra to kiss me, I felt sure she would do it. Act III, Scene i:
Soft, kiss me, Guen, half-close thy lovely eyne
And in this wispen dawn of gold-flecked mist
We catch our breath and hear the lark’s first song.
Soft, kiss me, Guen, and take this flowered crown
And sit with me in shade and kiss me, Guen.
There were no stage directions. But she reached up and stroked my cheek with the latex-armored back of her hand, and I pressed my cheek against those twice-sheathed bones, certainly justifiable by the script, but my heartbeat betrayed a method actor’s seriousness.
“She’s waited so long for him,” Petra said. “She’s put up with all his wandering. It’s a strange sort of love, isn’t it? She’s literally watched him with other women and she’s ready to forgive him all of it.”
“You don’t believe him? He says he’ll give it all up for her.”
“I do believe him. I don’t believe her. I think she just wants to be queen and she’s taken the measure of him. She’s playing him. She knows she has nothing to offer politically. The French ambassador is in the hall ready to offer up a princess with land and wealth. Guenhera has nothing comparable—she plays dumb about it, but that’s pretty tongue-in-cheek. But she has something else: she offers up youth, doesn’t she?”
“She’s not that much younger than Arthur.”
“Not her youth, his youth. She reminds him of being a boy in the woods, playing at being a king. Before the war, before the double crosses, the politics. She offers him a new childhood, and he leaps at it. Look at this: he can’t propose fast enough. She plays his impulsiveness like a master. He could be drunk. He’s about ready to marry France, and she has him in a few minutes, begging her to believe his sincerity—not just to sleep with her but to give her the crown. He’s begging. Shakespeare in fifth gear—man, oh man.”
This was the second time I’d had this play explained to me by a woman.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He knows what she’s up to. He’s not a fool. He’s just done with the past, or wants to be, and he wants to erase