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By Root 796 0

of human and incompetent monarch walk in front of them and reveal his inner failings. Shakespeare let people see their kings as men, fallible, far enough from divine right that they should submit to man’s law. If Arthur was Shakespeare’s, then they saw this king go so far as to admit he was nothing special. It’s amazing the English managed to hold off from executing a real king of their own until 1649. (To this day, theater can still do that, provoke rebellion in subjects or phobia of rebellion in authorities. I was in a comedy revue in college that in one performance was particularly disrespectful to the administration. We were then blamed when some drunk took a dump in a dormitory elevator later that night, just as Shakespeare’s company was blamed for a coup attempt after putting on a play about a coup.)

“So?” Petra poked my side with her toe. “What are you going to do?” Dana was in the bathroom.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Me? Well, I think Shakespeare wrote it.” She ran her bare feet over Maria’s back, one beagle-thickness above my chest.

“Me, too.” I put my hands on her feet, held them on the dog.

“So there you go.” She smiled and held my eye.

There you go: accepting the play, believing in my father, and her feet and eyes not pulling away. Arthur, my father, and Petra: all three of them became credible at the same instant. Can you reset history, go back to where things broke down and “begin anew upon our proper path”? So that the decades that followed would change their essence, shed tragedy to become softly sentimental comedy?

31

DATE: Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:23:52 -0600

What news, plaese. Have you had results yet? Are you there yet? I know you lack trust in me. Why would you trust me on any of this? As likely a candidate as ever there was to tiptoe into the Fakespeare bog and claim his finery as my own. Too true, your honor, dead to rights. I could die laughing if after all the abuse I have taken at the hands of others I could put one over on the world like that. To die with them worshipping me as Shakespeare! I will not deny the appeal, Arthur. You would not believe me if I tried to deny it. But I could not make it happen. I could never—infinite typewriters, infinite monkeys, infinite time. I could never write anything as beautiful as this play. I am a faker, in every way. But I never could fake anything of real quality. You said that once to me: a coupon faker is all I am, right?

Methinks this bleak protestation should have given me a lot more pause than it did, but I brushed it off as a guilt-mongering straw man. I had never once thought my father wrote the play; I had at most only suspected he’d forged the relic from some other text, forged Shakespeare’s participation, found some play by someone lesser, like Thomas Dekker, fiddled with the cover page, at most.

Can you just trust me? Can you just know?

Thus asks the man who forged crop circles with me when I was ten and then blamed his arrest on me.

No, I know you can’t.

Thus answers the man in his easy dialogue with my likely thoughts.

But now is the time this is going to happen. Because now is the time that you are a famous writer. Now is the time you and your mother and your sister all need money, and I can give it to you. And now is when I am dying.

Those seven words struck me physically, with far more impact than anything Shakespeare ever wrote (or anything I ever wrote), and in the windless moment before I felt the heat in my neck and face condense into my eyes, I knew I had lost so much of him, wasted so much of him and of everything, and that I would do anything to make it right and to hold tight to every love and opportunity and moment that remained in his life and in mine.

And so now you have to pick up the tempo.

I went directly to Dana’s. I had to be with her, be the one to tell her. I went without calling, for fear of breaking the news over the phone. She wasn’t home; I had forgotten she was at rehearsal for The Two Noble Kinsmen. Forgotten: that’s what it seemed at the time. Surely I didn’t forget. Is such mechanical self-delusion