The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [84]
Permission granted, drowsy by lamplight, he flipped to the last play in the volume, but it wasn’t Mucedorus. Mucedorus was second to last. It was the seventh play, as promised in the table of contents. But there weren’t seven quartos stitched together. There were eight. The original anthologist (“the first Viscount Numbnuts”) had neglected to inscribe the eighth title on the front board. The eighth play was a 1597 quarto my father had never heard of, credited to William Shakespeare.
“Shakespeare’s name first appears on a title page in 1598,” he said, no longer the confused senile prisoner of two weeks before. “This was completely unknown. I’d never heard of it. That was odd, to say the very least. I read it that night.
“So. Breakfast. I ask my client if he reads much Shakespeare. He’s a boor. He doesn’t read anything in his staggering library, any more than he knows anything about the artworks he’s selling off to pay for his house. So I ask him: Does anybody in the family read the books? Is he going to sell them?”
“What was his name, Dad?”
And off my father went to the room given over to his work of “preserving the painting in duplicate.” That night he considers the anthology again, locked in his little guest room, considers this Arthur. He reads the play again, and he believes the cover without a doubt. And he realizes that if it is real, it is a discovery of monumental proportions. “Anyone who knows Shakespeare would realize it was him, that this was absolutely his.” Seeing a short distance into the future, he takes his nail scissors out of his toilet kit and trims the last quarto out of the book, lays it in the bottom of his suitcase, and the next morning makes a show of reshelving the violated volume in front of his much scorned host and employer.
“It came out very easily,” he said. “It all came off very easily. And philosophically quite pleasant: its owner never saw it in the book, and it wasn’t written in the table of contents, so the play can’t really be said to be missing, because it was never really there.”
He took it back home to Minneapolis, to Mom and their little prechild apartment in Dinkytown, smelling of oils and turpentine. “You told her?”
“No. I sat on it. It wasn’t her passion in the same way it was mine. That’s okay, that’s how marriages are. And I didn’t think of it as an object to do anything with. I just loved it. That’s why I took it. I loved it and the limey didn’t care. I loved it. I love it. And it was mine. I deserved it more than he did. Besides, it’s not stealing if the owner—no, not even the right term, the holder—doesn’t realize he owns it and then doesn’t realize he doesn’t own it. Nothing has been done to him. He has suffered no loss. There isn’t even a word for what happened to him.”
“Yes, there is. Stealing. That’s stealing. It’s a word. In English. Who was he?”
He smiled now, the first time, really smiled at me. “I’m not going to tell you, and I’ll tell you why I’m not going to tell you. Because you’d give it back, wouldn’t you? Or tell his heirs? You know you would. Besides, I was there helping him commit a crime.”
“You just said it was perfectly legal.”
“What I did was perfectly legal. What he then did with my work doesn’t require a genius to figure out. But that’s not the point. Please. I waited a long time to see if he ever noticed. It’s been more than fifty years. He didn’t notice because he never knew he had it in the first place. If he’s alive,