The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [91]
I finally began clumsily editing the play, transcribing it onto my Mac, counting out ten syllables per line, one slow syllable at a time, modernizing and standardizing the spellings, checking the online Oxford English Dictionary, footnoting, numbering the lines and acts, double-checking the entrances and exits, adding stage directions implicit in the text.
I no longer doubted what I was doing, and for a writer of fiction, that is a rare feeling, worth clinging to. I was doing something important to my family, to my father, and to the world. I was—though it appeared I was just pushing words around, as always—taking action, taking sides, standing up in the real world, coming out from behind the hiding places of fiction. I paid calls! I interviewed relevant experts and sought out their opinions! I hired people! I Googled until my keyboard keys were scuffed! I wondered what Petra was thinking of me.
“What is this thing?” I scribbled in my journal. “Is TTOA like we’ve discovered a previously unknown pyramid in Egypt? Or is it like we’ve just noticed the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre? Or is it like a Great Pyramid attached to a Vegas casino, complete with blond pharaonic parking valets who are all like, ‘Nice drive, man, sweet’?”
I liked the work. I liked the play. I liked the writers and professors and lawyers. I liked everyone and felt happy when discoveries went our way (Dad’s, Will’s, and mine) and unexpected corroborations slotted into place, such as the day I visited my first real Shakespearean in person, Tom Clayton, the University of Minnesota’s Shakespeare man.
His office was lined with books, like a lawyer’s, as if the Internet didn’t exist. “Let’s look at 1597 then,” he said after I explained my case and he had cast a nonchalant eye at my quarto, which I wouldn’t yet allow him to open. “King Arthur? Well, here’s the first thing we look at.” He pulled down two books: Annals of English Drama, an index to every contemporary mention of any play in the Elizabethan world, and the reproduced diaries of Philip Henslowe, manager of the Admiral’s Men, rivals to Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men. “So there was an Arthur play by Thomas Hughes, a Gray’s Inn play, that’s in 1588. Makes sense: Shakespeare probably arrives in London about then. Might very well have seen The Misfortunes of Arthur. He tended to absorb things he saw, often for a few years. He might have seen that Hughes play, then written one of his own eight or nine years on. Then there’s The Birth of Merlin, Rowley in 1622. They used to try to say it was Shakespeare, but that’s discredited. And …” He turned to Henslowe’s diary. “There. Look at that. That’s good.” He slid it across to me. “Henslowe’s group put on a play called Uther Pendragon in 1597, and then here, in April of ’98, he paid Richard Hathway five pounds for an ‘Arthur play, now lost.’ ” He tapped his finger on the entry for me.
“That’s my play?”
Professor Clayton looked at me as at a not very bright child and spoke slowly, in case I had a disorder he hadn’t noticed at first. “No. Your play says it’s by William Shakespeare and was performed by Shakespeare’s troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men. This is a different play, by Hathway, to be performed by the Admiral’s Men. The year after your play. You see? That’s what they would do. They were rivals. Admiral’s Men do Uther in ’97 and buy an Arthur in ’98, it makes sense that the Chamberlain’s Men had an Arthur play right around ’97. And that it would be written by one of their playwrights: Shakespeare.”
“So it’s real?”
“I have no idea. May I read it?”
I loved the notion of Shakespeare as a man, a working writer given a topic and a deadline because the other guys—literally across the street—had a successful Arthur play. As a matter of honesty to the record, I have to include the following email, playing no favorites. It cannot be excluded without distorting this whole story:
“Dad,” wrote the boy not even wise enough to be a fool,
I am having an amazing experience, a peak of my life,