The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [85]
“Proceed? Am I supposed to fence your swag? I’m not going to—”
“No. Please listen.”
At first, my father just kept The Tragedy of Arthur to himself because he loved it, and because he wanted to find out if he was going to get caught. He read it and studied it and looked up all the words he didn’t know and liked to touch it. “I was like those Japanese businessmen or gangsters who buy stolen art masterpieces and then keep them in their basement to look at all alone, naked.” (A comparison that vaults right to the forefront of the normal mind.) “And that was enough for me. I was the only one. I liked that. Shakespeare and I were secret chums. We only met in secret. I like the idea that if there weren’t many of these, then maybe he even touched this copy. He might have. At any rate, I was the only one reading it. Like he wrote it for me. I have to admit: his Arthur seemed familiar. I liked that, too.”
And then, unclenching a little, suspecting he’d scooted away unnoticed, he started to do some research. He corresponded and spent time in the libraries, in downtown Minneapolis and over at the U of M. And he slowly let himself believe as a fact what had dawned on him as a strong possibility back in England: he had never heard of the play, despite his knowledge of Elizabethan literature, because there was not a single other copy. Nor—and this was somewhat troubling—were there any references to it, as there are to the famously lost plays Cardenio and Love’s Labour’s Won. “Arthur isn’t in Meres, or the Stationers’ Register, the repertory listings of the Chamberlain’s Men, lists of court performances. What records we have of the theaters. Nobody mentions it. Not that I could ever find, but you might have more luck now. It would be very good if you could find a reference.”
“There was that Errol Flynn performance. Dana still has the poster.”
“What? No, come on. No, no, tell me you know I made that for her.” It had never occurred to me. “No, nobody ever mentioned an Arthur play by Shakespeare.”
“So it’s fake.”
“No. All I said was, nobody mentions it. That’s true of some plays we know are his: no mention at all until they are collected in the First Folio, after he’s dead. Arthur’s real, and we can guess why it’s not mentioned, but that’s another story.” The story my father was struggling to deliver in a straight line (despite the babies, bells, and doors, despite my twitchy questions and surges of doubt in him, like gastric reflux) was about his realization. “But this one is not in the folios, obviously. When his friends compiled the complete works from their own marked-up scripts in the playhouse, they didn’t include this.”
“So it’s a fake.”
“No. Stop saying that. It’s real. But for some reason, they didn’t include it. Please let me talk.”
“Sorry.”
Instead he only fell silent and started to shake his head and bite his lips. He pressed the knuckles of his thumbs to his eyes and asked, “Where was I?”
“Not in the folios. Not a fake, but not in the folios.”
“Yes. Not a fake, but not in the folios. Only one copy, no contemporary mentions, and not in the folios. Zero copies or four copies or what have you, but for there to be just one copy and for the play not to be in the folios: I owned the only text—”
“Stole the only text.”
“Owned the only text, and the importance of this did not dawn on me for many years.” (That was definitely a practiced line, and he sort of Gielguded it.)
He did some research with a lawyer with whom he’d once shared a cell, and with very hypothetical letters to Bert Thorn, back when he could afford his time. By the time my father finally understood the financial significance of owning the only text, he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it, as he was in prison. This, as it turned out, was lucky, and why—I now believe—imprisonment was not always too troubling for him. It kept him from acting prematurely.
That day, over Formica, my father had his legal situation firmly in mind. “We have to prove not only that it’s authentic, and that there isn’t