What is “The Tragedy of Arthur”? Is it, as the evidence suggests, an edition of an unknown play by William Shakespeare, prefaced, quite properly, with a detailed history of the events leading up to the discovery of the 1597 quarto, the basis for the present Random House text? The reader must judge. Given our contemporary inclination to skepticism about everything, it is only natural that some uncertainties will always remain about the play’s authorship.
Much of the critical introduction by Arthur Phillips does sound — to be charitable — rather like typical family memoir. But then Phillips is no scholar of the Elizabethan stage, simply the lucky owner — in a sense, the “onlie begetter” — of the single surviving copy of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” By trade a novelist, he admits that his own feelings for Shakespeare, shaped largely by paternal bardolatry, are ambivalent at best. In these very pages he even names Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as “the real greatest writer in English literature”! Perhaps a kindhearted reader — grateful for Phillips’s role in bringing to light this masterpiece — should just shrug off the writer’s egregious allusions to his own life and every one of his books, starting with “Prague.” It does seem strange, however, that Jennifer Hershey, the Random House editor behind this project, permitted Phillips to quote at length from their sometimes heated private correspondence.
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
Given that none of the tests — of paper, ink and style, by several experts — have proved inconsistent with what the play appears to be, it’s little wonder that Random House has gone ahead and published, with considerable fanfare, “The Tragedy of Arthur.” The text is printed in its entirety, with explanatory footnotes, albeit with Elizabethan spellings modernized for the present-day reader. Such a presentation will hardly satisfy Shakespeare scholars, but for anything more sophisticated we will have to wait for the New Arden edition, which, we can only hope, will be overseen by someone at least as accomplished as the late William Henry Ireland.
Of course, there are those who deny outright the play’s authenticity and others who may even accuse Arthur Phillips of nothing less than fraud. To minimize any possible unpleasantness, Phillips has tried to cover himself, rather feebly, by insisting that the dust jacket of “The Tragedy of Arthur” declare, in tiny type, “a novel by Arthur Phillips.” But who’s fooling whom? The first line of the book’s actual preface forthrightly, boldly proclaims: “Random House is proud to present this first modern edition of ‘The Tragedy of Arthur’ by William Shakespeare.” One could hardly be less ambiguous than that.
Besides, would any sane 21st-century author spend uncounted hours fabricating a five-act drama in Elizabethan blank verse? Even without all the expert testimony, “The Tragedy of Arthur” certainly sounds Shakespearean: “Our backs are pressed to th’raging Humber’s waves; / There is no way but forward, as in life.” Admittedly, the speeches do contain a few unsettling observations about the relationship between the real and the counterfeit, as when Arthur tells his beloved Guenhera, “What can I say that was not elsewhere false?” or later soliloquizes, “So abjuration is forbidden me. / I am no author of my history.”
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