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By Root 906 0

I have felt it. He will be a friend who visits. You will understand him as a fellow writer, as a peer. Read how he used his sources. Read Holinshed. It is almost a straight lift of the Arthur chapters in Holinshed. I envy you so much, my son! You are one of the real creators! You have made people, worlds, plots. In so many ways, you are more of a creator than he was. He adapted, expanded other men’s characters, puffing meaning into other men’s flat worlds. But you! You have made things from nothing and none but your imagination. I am out of time. I will write in a week, but write me what you need from me. Always your loving father.

I floated along on the waves of his most excellent flattery for several hours, until I fell asleep, not even curious to open my BANANAS, as I was without Dana and Petra’s enthusiasm for them. Instead, I nodded off thinking my father loved me and judged me more creative than Shakespeare.

28

THE SWIRLING NONSENSE of his email finally woke me and, still in bed, I called Dana.

“Is he mad at you about something?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why is he asking me to prove this play? This is not my thing. This is your thing.”

“True, but he wants … I don’t know. Read it to me again.” And I read the whole email to her again.

“Well, maybe he just wants you because he knows you’re, you know, far from him. Farther than me. He and I are sort of square. He can give you this, you know, to say how he feels. It’s a handshake.”

“Oh.”

“And he wants you to publish it,” she said. “That’s why you, too.”

“But it was already published. What’s changed?”

And so I went online and started looking for this play. There must have been other copies, other editions, essays, some history of its controversial standing. This was the first time in my life I’d ever thought to look. I called Dana back.

“Why can’t I buy another copy of the 1904 edition on eBay?” I asked her.

“I have no idea.”

“Why is there no reference to it on Google?”

“I have no idea.”

“There’s an apocryphal Merlin play and an Arthur play by Thomas Hughes. But there’s no Shakespeare play about King Arthur. Not even a discredited one. Not a word.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Why haven’t you ever looked for it?”

“Because I already own it,” she said. That made a certain sense. Having learned of the existence of this play in 1975, having had it read to me once in 1979, I never gave it another thought. Dana, having loved it since 1975 and owned it since 1977, never doubted its reality, never thought there was anything to do other than to love it. We rarely go looking for proof of the things we own and love; their existence is usually pretty evident. “When I was doing all my research,” she said, referring to her years as an anti-Stratfordian, “it was pre-Internet. Mostly I just figured the play was lost, and lost things usually get more lost.”

“But listen: we’re post-Internet now, and it doesn’t exist,” I said. “Anywhere. Amazon, Alibris, Google, eBay. There’s no such play. It doesn’t exist.”

“But it does. It exists in that crate in front of you,” she said. “And in this book on my lap.” I heard Petra chime in, revealing that I’d been on speaker the whole time: “And I read it with you yesterday, Arthur. That existed, didn’t it?”

“No, seriously. Listen. This makes no sense, unless we admit the obvious.”

“Which is?”

“Are you kidding?”

Here is the billion-dollar question, with boffo money for me and Random House and lawyers and academics and theaters and now a film studio hanging in the balance. How did I travel from August 2009, scenting “the obvious,” to October 2009, when I signed a contract in all good faith with Random House in order to edit and publish (for the very first time) a previously unknown, undocumented play by William Shakespeare?

“Arthur, seriously?” said Dana. “He didn’t. Look at it. Touch it. Smell it. Read it. He couldn’t. He didn’t.”

29

I THANKED MY FATHER for his kind words, his trust in me, and I asked a few basic questions. They seem surprisingly polite now.

1) Where did you get this?

2) Since Dana has the red hardcover, why is