The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [87]
Of all the questions I remembered to ask, I forgot to ask the ones that matter most to me personally, if not financially: Why did he forge the inscription to his own father from the drama club? And then inscribe it to himself from his father? And include that picture of his father, if that is a picture of his father, with its fake caption on the back? He gave Dana—with sincere love, I’m sure—a family heirloom going back generations that he’d made himself.
But I did ask this: “Why aren’t you going to Dana on this? She loves Shakespeare. She still has that fresh eye, right?”
“You’re the writer. And we’ll have some fun, won’t we? Aren’t you having fun?”
“I kind of am, actually.” I kind of was. “But why now?”
Because he’d had to wait. He’d had no choice. Patience—enforced by prison—had been necessary. He’d had to wait to see if other copies emerged, wait for shouts of “Thief!” to ring out from that country house. He’d also had to wait until he couldn’t expect any personal profit from the venture, or the whole thing would be tainted by his record: “Boy-and-wolf problem. My career is ideally suited to make my word on this useless. ‘Read all about it! Convicted forger discovers Shakespeare play!’ I would sink him. And that would be an unforgivable tragedy. That would be a sin. Even if nobody makes any money, we have to do this for him.”
“Novelist isn’t much better than forger,” I pointed out.
“It is better.” He took a breath and started counting off things to do on his fingers, but he only got to one. “It’s going to take time for copyright investigators. You have to do that. The guy I bunked with explained this, and Bert agreed. Prove no one else has any right to the text. Obviously, there’s no line of Shakespeares anymore. The only serious claim would be the estates of William White or Cuthbert Burby”—the printer and publisher. “We have to prove they died out. You need a U.K. guy, I think. Then you win. You and your sister. And your mother.”
“What about the guy in his country house?”
“I won’t tell you who it was. Never. I don’t trust you not to go to his house and give his grandkids your mother’s oil well.”
“Thank you, I think.”
“It’s not really a compliment, under the circumstances.”
“So we’re all accessories to your theft.”
“Not accessories. There’s nothing you could have done about it. Beneficiaries, yes. Accessories, no. And really, it’s more like your father was some tycoon who outsmarted some people years ago to build his business, and now you’re inheriting stock certificates. What are you going to do, go apologize to his early partners he bought out when the stock was cheap?”
“You didn’t buy anyone out. You stole it.”
“You’re picking fly shit from pepper, Artie. And I never tried to score off Shakespeare. I don’t want to. But I do want your mother and sister to get rich off him. And I want you to get famous off him. That’s why you.”
30
FOR TWO AFTERNOONS AND NIGHTS, I sat with Dana and Petra and Maria in their apartment and reread the play aloud and tried to poke holes in it. I solemnly made Dana hold her hand to her heart and promise to read the play with a harsh, cynical eye, to play devil’s advocate and viciously attack anything that didn’t sound perfectly Shakespearean. We scribbled down any doubt we could muster: vocabulary that rang false, characters who seemed too modern, compositor’s marks on the bottoms of the pages, the thread that stitched those pages together, anything. I was out of my league; I mostly sounded like a fool or a smartass: “Oh, come on, Shakespeare wouldn’t do that, would he?” And then Dana or Petra would smile and cite some canonical play where he had done just that.