Book of the Month: July 2022

01.07.2022

Jan Mosch recommends The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (2011).

"Arthur Phillips's novel The Tragedy of Arthur (2011) rests on a few simple premises: William Shakespeare could have written a history play about the legendary British king Arthur. That play could have survived in a single manuscript, hidden in a private library. The printing rights for such an unknown, monopolised Shakespeare play would likely be bought by a publishing giant like Random House, which is, as it happens, the publisher of The Tragedy of Arthur.

Something is off, though, as different voices compete for the reader's attention. In a publisher's note, Random House asks us to focus on the second part of the book - the actual text of Shakespeare's Arthurian tragedy. Turning the pages, we do find the complete play but also two sets of footnotes: one by eminent Shakespeare scholar Roland Verre, who vouches for the authenticity of the play and confidently expounds its meaning; another by Arthur Phillips, the owner of the manuscript, who claims that the play is full of allusions to his family history and that it was, in fact, written by his father, a Shakespeare superfan and master forger.

Shifting our attention back to the first part of the book, we find that Phillips turns the introduction to the play (which he is contractually obliged to write and which Random House must print unchanged) into a memoir in which he ruminates on his and his sister's difficult relationship with their criminal father. Phillips reflects on the siblings' attempts to step out of their father's shadow and to tap into their own creative potential. He feels that his sister, an actress, has succeeded, whereas he - the novelist - has failed, gaining neither his father's approval nor creative independence from that most influential of Western writers, Shakespeare, whom the father adored and the son has come to hate.

Needless to say, the entire thing - the Shakespeare play but also the narrator Arthur Phillips, his bleak family history and his debilitating self-doubts - is a fiction that the actual Arthur Phillips has dreamt up. On the story level, however, i.e. with regard to the fictional universe, it is much more difficult to tell reality from fantasy. Is the narrator right in rejecting The Tragedy of Arthur as fake, or has his resentment of his father, and Shakespeare, blinded him to the truth?

Apart from its postmodern subversion of the notion of authenticity, this novel of ideas raises some fascinating questions regarding literature and literary scholarship. How does our reception of a text change when we believe that it was written by Shakespeare (or not)? Does it really matter who wrote it? Do we need literary patterns to structure the experiences of our lives - and can we (unlike Arthur, the narrator) avoid casting ourselves in our own 'tragedies'?

Poking fun at Harold Bloom's concept of the anxiety of influence (the esoteric notion that only the 'strongest' writers can distance themselves from their literary forebears and find their own voice), the novel ultimately celebrates creativity through intertextuality: its composition principle (fictional piece of literature with commentary) imitates Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, which in turn takes its title from a line in Timon of Athens, one of the tragedies written by, of course, Shakespeare."