Arthur Phillips. The Tragedy of Arthur. Random House, 2011.
The Tragedy of Arthur can be fun for those with a literary bent, especially those who enjoy Shakespeare or enjoy making fun of Shakespeare.
The author observes, quoting Moby-Dick:
“This absolute and unconditional adoration of Shakespeare has grown to be part of our Anglo Saxon superstition…Intolerance has come to exist in this matter. You must believe in Shakespeare’s unapproachability, or quit the country. But what sort of belief is this for an American?” I liked Moby-Dick until I read that quote. Now I love Moby-Dick. (95)1
The author may be a bit jealous of Shakespeare and is trying to prove that he can write just as well as Shakespeare can.
We know this is going to be a little different because one of the first pages has the typical “Other works by” page. This has two authors listed: William Shakespeare, with a list of all his works including collaborations and lost works, and Arthur Phillips, with a list of the four titles under his name. Similarly the back matter includes the “About the Authors” page with two short paragraphs, one on each man. Immediately, we understand that much of this tale is going to be tongue in cheek.
This is really two stories. The first story is reminiscent of Tristram Shandy. If you have ever read or even flipped through that eighteenth century novel, you know that it purports to be an autobiography of Mr. Shandy. It is very discursive. Indeed Tristram is not even born until about a quarter of the way through the novel!
So we learn that Arthur Phillips’ family has discovered a lost play of Shakespeare, a folio edition printed in 1597 by a well-known London printer. Mr. Phillips has agreed to publish it if he can write the introduction. But the introduction is over 250 pages long, and in it he tries to show that the play is a forgery. Well, maybe he does.
The remaining hundred pages or so is the play attributed to Shakespeare.
You see, Arthur Phillips’ father is a forger. His father was attracted to his mother when he met her in college as soon as he learned her name: Mary Arden, the same as the maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother. Now Mary keeps this suitor at arm’s length because she has a bland but earnest boyfriend back home in Ely, Minnesota, by the name of Silvius. (Like the bland but earnest shepherd in As You Like It?)
Ely, Minnesota, is the gateway to the Boundary Waters region along the Canadian Border where Rainy River and the Lake of the Woods, made famous by Tim O’Brien, are located.
His father gets Silvius out of the way (this is the sixties) by forging a draft notice to him. Silvius arrives at boot camp in North Carolina, and no one can find any records, but it is obviously a genuine draft notice. After a few months of trying to decide what to do with him, the army gives him an honorable discharge, but by then Mary is engaged to Mr. Phillips. They will live in the Minneapolis area where Arthur becomes a Twins fan. At one point his father gives him a baseball autographed by Hall of Famer Rod Carew. Arthur later assumes it is, like most things from his father, a forgery.
Mr. Phillips really only figures in the life of Arthur and his twin sister Dana a when they are aged 5 to 8 and a bit when they are in their teens. The rest of the time he is in prison for various forgeries or only has visitation weekends because Mrs. Phillips divorces him after his second imprisonment when the kids are nine. Silvius is still patiently waiting, and she marries him on the rebound.
Both Arthur and Dana have identity crises partly related to the fact that their father is incarcerated. Phillips observes:
Adolescence produces all sorts of variations of incomplete emotional development; it’s the Island of Dr. Moreau of human personality. (45)
Dr. Moreau, who ran the island named for him in H. G. Wells’ sci-fi novel, experimented with people and animals, crossing them genetically and making half-men and half-beasts. (Crichton’s Next is in some ways merely an update of Dr. Moreau.)
So much for the thin background. Dana and Arthur are not unlike Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Like many twins, Arthur describes how close they identify with one another. It is really very moving.
They grow up. Like others with a distant or uninvolved father figure they both have some identity problems. Arthur is simply a cad. You would not want him around your sisters or daughters. Dana becomes a lesbian.
They do sometimes go out looking for women together. If see a woman they both find attractive, they make a friendly bet whether she is gay or straight. Eventually, after many years, Dana moves in with a woman whom Arthur is convinced is his soul mate. I suppose that would be Twelfth Night for the twenty-first century.
This could be considered the first tragedy of Arthur because he is lonely at the end. But this is hardly a tragedy. We are supposed to feel pity for the tragic hero, as we do for Hamlet or Othello or King Lear. All I can say about Arthur is from the musical Chicago: “He had it coming!” He does love his sister, but he is a cad.
He is amoral and seems to gloat about it. At one point he does admit, though, that “…the pleasure of being angry and right was (and still is) a delicious brain cocktail, and a moral license unrevokable until the mood passes.” (56) True enough!
Although I have skimmed over the plot of the Introduction of the book, this is not much of a spoiler. What is fun is reading between the lines about Shakespeare and the cleverness of Mr. Phillips’ forgeries. He gets even with someone whom he does not like by making a crop circle in his corn field one night when Arthur is ten. Everyone in southern Minnesota is talking about the alien visitation!
Gradually, we learn that Mr. Phillips was a talented artist but had trouble selling paintings. He started working for an insurance company by painting copies for its art-collecting clients. He learned his craft well.
Phillips notes the uneasy irony of his own occupation as a novelist. He also is creating a kind of forgery.
It also equates writing with a sort of con job (building illusions with a reader’s own imagination, then being far away when the pigeon realizes there’s nothing real at all in the experience). (79)
Mr. Phillips, Shakespeare fan that he is, reads Shakespeare out loud to the twins when they are young. All three of them can quote Shakespeare fluently. The last time Mr. Phillips is arrested, he is nearly sixty. He is penniless and is given a public defender. He is frustrated with her because she does not recognize Shakespeare. He complains that twenty or thirty years before if he quoted Shakespeare, a good lawyer would know what lines came next. Times are changing. (I think of my Great Uncle Jim who was a lawyer born around 1880. He quoted poetry frequently.)
There are allusions to many Shakespeare plays in the course of the story. Arthur even spends time in London and Venice. He is Jewish, so The Merchant of Venice strikes a chord with him. But even there it seems people do not understand him when he speaks of a pound of flesh. Of course, one could argue that Arthur is looking for about a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh at any given time.
Without giving too much of a spoiler, there is even a spot where the Introduction alludes to probably the most famous stage direction in Shakespeare and maybe in all theater: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (The Winter’s Tale 3.3.58). At one point he notes titles of numerous other classics which themselves allude to Shakespeare such as The Sound and the Fury and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Dana becomes a stage actress. Some of the humor comes from the way she and other actors and directors interpret the same scene or character. For example, is Ophelia tragic or on the make like Gertrude? A recurring theme is that since there are few stage directions and no production notes, interpretations are largely up to the director and actors.
One example from personal experience: Usually A Midsummer Night’s Dream is played as a comedy. One of funniest productions of any play or film I have ever seen was done by Hartford Stage around 1989. Still, I once saw a version that played it like a horror film. With mischievous spirits, rivals threatening to kill each other, and a nighttime setting, one could do it that way. That production was not funny, nor was meant to be.
In his Introduction, the author notes that not all of Shakespeare’s plays were that great. Phillips notes that only recently have people thought Shakespeare might have had a hand in Edward III. I have read or at least watched some version of most of his plays, but I had never seen anyone do Henry VIII. I read it. There is probably a reason why no one performs it. It is pure plotless propaganda, kissing up to the queen.
While I do not recall Phillips mentioning Henry VIII, it fits in with some interpretations of the Arthur play. Many of Shakespeare’s history plays have troubled monarchs: Lear, Henry IV, Henry VI, the two Richards, Macbeth. These may have barely made it past the censors. Henry VIII might have been a sop to the government. And perhaps there was only one copy of The Tragedy of Arthur extant because it presents Arthur as merely lucky and barely competent (based on Holinshed) rather than the legendary hero of Camelot in many other stories. (The Introduction perhaps paints King Arthur as even less royal than the play itself.)
There are also questions about the provenance of other Shakespeare plays. Dana goes through a stretch of being mad at her father for abandoning the family by going to prison and develops a list of arguments why Shakespeare did not write the plays. At first she cannot make up her mind on whether Marlowe, Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford wrote them, but she settles on the Earl. She then imagines him having a Jewish catamite who helps him write the plays—the Earl knows politics and the Jew knows the Bible, together they nail the tales. (Technically, there were no Jews living in England between 1290 and 1656. You can look it up.)
Since there is a lot about who wrote any of the Shakespeare plays and about Mr. Phillips’ escapades…so, then, the obvious question is this: Is The Tragedy of Arthur folio a forgery?
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Have fun with that.
The last 110 pages are the purported Tragedy of Arthur by Shakespeare. It is awkward enough, no one would confuse it with Hamlet or Macbeth, or for that matter even Two Gentlemen of Verona, though it does borrow a little from that play. However, let’s face it, not every play Shakespeare wrote was a huge hit. The Tragedy of Arthur is certainly no worse than Henry VIII.
I should emphasize Phillips presents it as if it were a Shakespeare play. This is not an updated telling of a Shakespeare story like The Mayor of Casterbridge or A Thousand Acres. Nor is it a send-up like Pynchon’s “Fear and Loathing in Vienna.” The Tragedy of Arthur play is written in late sixteenth-century English iambic pentameter. It could probably pass for the era if not for Mr. Shakespeare himself.
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about this King Arthur story is that is nothing like most of them. No round table, no French knights. Indeed, the only recognizable names from most versions (Mallory, Tennyson, White, etc.) are Arthur, Mordred, and Uter (Uther). His queen’s name Guenher is close to Guinevere. Like many of Shakespeare’s historical plays, it is based on Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland.
At one point in his Introduction, Phillips notes that Prince Hal or Henry V could go in several directions, but ends up redeeming himself for the good of the country and crown. Arthur reminds us a little of the young Hal, only he is like the Phillips persona in the introduction, more of a womanizer. He is likely illegitimate, though Uter’s only son. He is surprised when he is made king, and he does try to do his best. So, yes, he dies fighting Mordred after killing him, which is pretty much universal in the Arthur legends.
Perhaps Phillips tries to show that anyone could write a Shakespeare-ish play. And the play is definitely more tragic than the Arthur Phillips in the Introduction. Together, the two parts do make a whole. Readers who have strong ideas about Shakespeare, positive or negative, should get a kick out of The Tragedy of Arthur.
1 I recall reading that Melville thought Shakespeare was overrated. At some point after he had already done some writing, he got a new pair of reading glasses. He had owned a set of Shakespeare plays, but it had small print. With his new spectacles, he developed a more positive view of the Bard, and used a few of his techniques in Moby-Dick. Lack of eyestrain does contribute to more enjoyable reading.