The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [88]
The problem was harder than I’d expected. I had thought that with some effort, the play might crack under pressure, like a frightened suspect. But even our strongest doubts were very abstract. Petra thought time passed strangely in Acts III and IV, that it seemed too much like montage in a film. She couldn’t think of any Elizabethan play with the same structure. In I.iv, Arthur is explicitly seventeen. In III.i, he recalls his adolescence as if it were a long time ago. By III.ii, several more months have passed, and at least nine more between III.ii and III.iii. Several more months pass before IV.i, and so on. By IV.iv, Arthur must be at least about twenty-six, since he might have a twelve-year-old son, or at least be able to pretend so for political purposes.
“Yes, but no,” Dana argued, reasonably enough after all that wine. Maria slept on her lap, pointed outward toward her knees, and Dana smoothed his ears over her thighs. “He did all kinds of strange things with time. Hardly ever did the same thing twice. He was always trying to break up the unity. Time in Hamlet. It’s like the theory of relativity: a day or two seems to pass in Elsinore, but ships have gone all the way to England and back. Henry VI, Part Three is totally wacky. And in Part One: the historical king was actually an infant in those first scenes, but he seems to be at least a teenager. Years pass in Pericles. Winter’s Tale has a sixteen-year jump. He might have been trying something new here, way ahead of its time. Time-lapse or montage before the term. Maybe that’s why the play didn’t stick; maybe it made the audience feel queasy.”
In other words, things that weren’t like Shakespeare simply expanded the possible range of his innovations. If I was having a paranoid reaction, looking for signs of forgery where there weren’t any, Dana was having an opposite response, taking any oddity as proof that it must be authentic. If, for whatever reason, you choose to read the play, I am certain the same thing will happen to you: If you think it’s him, it sounds like him. If you think it’s not, it doesn’t.
“Does Arthur even seem like a Shakespeare character at all?” I asked when I hit that exhaustion common to circular debates. By then I was lying on the carpet in the middle of the room, and Maria had migrated to sleep on my chest, his nose pressed against mine. “Why does he do what he does? Is it how Shakespeare characters think?”
Dana was on the other side of the bar in the kitchen, opening wine. “He’s actually a fool,” she said as I was looking over Maria’s snout at the way Petra’s legs pressed against each other, folded under her on the couch. “He goes further than any of Shakespeare’s other kings. He questions his own legitimacy. He doubts his own fitness to rule. He’s really one of the fools, you know? He has that dangerous, licensed skepticism, but he’s dropped the cap and bells and carried that doubt all the way up onto the throne. To question kingship while you’re wearing the crown? The king himself doesn’t even believe in kingship? That’s a risky thing to put onstage.” Dana was tireless. She refilled our wine and turned the pages carefully back to Arthur’s remarkable soliloquy and read aloud:
“I know I have no right to wear this crown.
I’ll contradict no pope who calls me king,
But in this privy council kings speak troth:
No right have I, no higher claim than Loth.
A bastard, I, from bloody tyrant sire.
“That is not the same as the Harry-in-the-night stuff from Henry V. That’s him saying he’s not God’s chosen, and maybe no one is. That would make an audience queasy, or the Master of the Revels. And get a writer in some hot water, I would think. And be the end of a play: no more editions, no folio.”
She had a point and a semi-explanation for the play’s disappearance. From King John to Henry VIII and every king in between, Shakespeare’s audiences watched one after another variety