Looming over the head of every writer who puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is the specter of William Shakespeare. Renowned as one of the greatest writers in human history, the Bard has set the bar for literature that both delights in the playfulness of language and penetrates into the deepest corners of the soul. Which is why so many writers are enamored with his genius — and perhaps why so many loathe it.
This anxiety of influence (to borrow a phrase from scholar and Shakespeare groupie Harold Bloom) is at the heart of "The Tragedy of Arthur," the wily new novel by Arthur Phillips. Immediately calling to mind the metafictional antics of Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire," the novel is centered on the remarkable discovery of a new Shakespeare play about the life of the mythical King Arthur. The play itself, which appears at the end of the novel, is prefaced by a long and winding introduction penned by Arthur Phillips himself, whose father is credited with the discovery of this dramatic Holy Grail.
Except there's just one problem: Arthur's father is a notorious con artist; a man whose life has been spent forging paintings, government documents, and crop circles. Who's to say that this rediscovered play, found nowhere else, isn't just another one of Arthur pere 's schemes? But if so, then why do scientific tests on the document prove otherwise? And why does the language itself sound so Shakespearean?
Arthur's introduction is a wonderful riff on the art of the memoir, a wry critique of academic scholarship, a touching look at father-son and brother-sister relationships, a window into the writer's struggle for originality and a subtle jab at the publishing industry. Pages into the faux introduction, it becomes obvious that Arthur doesn't intend to properly introduce the play — specifically because he doubts its truthfulness when everyone else is so eager to believe.
And yet all Arthur seems to want, all it seems he's ever wanted, is to please his father and prove his own worth as a writer. And when you consider Shakespeare as the father of all modern Western literature, this makes perfect sense. In fact, the aforementioned Harold Bloom even credits Shakespeare with inventing our perceptions of what it means to be human — something Phillips' literary doppelganger clues in on as he begins to notice strange connections between his childhood and the possibly forged play, between his life story and all of Shakespeare's works.
As the fictional Phillips writes deep into his mysterious and compulsively readable introduction: "The boy intent on being free of his family? The dreamy artist who roams Italy for inspiration? The Jew in Venice? You learned all this from him, or from people who learned it from him then mushed it into sitcoms and weepy movies for you. We are all his ideas."
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