The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [97]
Banned in ’98, then forgot. 1623: collected works. But Scot James 6 now James 1 on Eng throne (TTOA’s worst case: Scot king of Britain.) Hemmings + Condell look through playbook, come 2 Arthur, share laugh, shake heads, leave out. No Folio = no survival. All quartos event. vanish. Only Folio guarantee memory of plays.
Until better theory.
King James complaining about anti-Scottish plays is precisely the argument used to explain the disappearance from Shakespeare’s canon of Edward III, which was printed anonymously in 1596 and 1599. But this explanation was not first proposed, as nearly as I can tell from my amateurish research, until the 1990s. I know that The Tragedy of Arthur existed in 1975 at the latest, when my father showed us the putative 1904 edition. And I know the quarto was untouched in a safe-deposit box as of 1986. So if Arthur itself is a fake, then it benefits from an amazing piece of luck: it can justify its disappearance with a historical footnote that came after the play’s putative forgery.
Dad made a little joke at this point, which I can reconstruct verbatim from my notes on the yellow legal pad: “Of course, there was no Anti-Defamation League or women’s lib in 1623, so Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew make the cut, but the Scotch were apparently very delicate souls, feelings easily bruised, and so two good plays are lost to assuage the tender kilted folk, ‘shrinking underneath the plaid.’ Amazed they didn’t demand a Macbeth rewrite.”
In my father’s fond and wishful notion of lifelong dedication and business-partner loyalty, Shakespeare’s friends come together in 1623 to make the folio. They oversee compositors of varying competence and sobriety at Isaac Jaggard’s print shop as they set nearly a million words of type in their late friend’s honor. Task complete, they retire to the pub and lift a glass to their monumental accomplishment, a second in old Will’s memory, and one each for every play they had to leave out. Pericles, Cardenio, The Two Noble Kinsmen: they can’t include acknowledged collaborations if the co-writers won’t agree (and far be it from me to criticize strict copyright protection). They can’t find a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won anywhere, because no one’s put it on for ages, and no one ever liked it anyhow. And they can’t include Edward III and The Tragedy of Arthur because now there’s a Scotsman on the throne, and he is not going to put up with that old anti-Scot stuff that audiences used to eat up back in the nineties. So they go with the thirty-six plays they can. It’ll have to do. They hire some Dutch guy to engrave a cover picture of Will, they liquor Ben Jonson into the right mood to compose a dedication, and he subdues his own ego long enough to write something quite nice (maybe too nice, Ben’s ghost would say, since his preface is the seedling of the mighty oaken myth that Will wasn’t one of many or even first among peers but a timeless god who left mere mortals below).
My father came out of the bathroom, his bathroom. “I just closed the door to use the toilet,” he said, laughing. “How about that?” He walked over to the fridge, hesitated at its handle, then remembered the new arrangement, went ahead. He drank his next Diet Coke lying on the carpeted floor, and he watched the last light of his last September. “I am so pleased you and I are working on this side by side. It makes me so proud, you know. I am so proud of your success as a writer. You don’t have to worry about me fouling this up. I will stay far away from the project. I know that it couldn’t possibly have happened without you. I love you, Arthur.”
The second-to-last line is certainly a lie: this publication could very easily have happened without