skygiants | (no subject)

I learned from a shitpost on tumblr that Arthur Phillips -- who wrote one book (The Egyptologist) that I remember liking very much a long time ago and a couple other books that I read around the same time that have not stuck in my memory at all -- had written a book a few years back called The Tragedy of Arthur, around the premise of 'what if someone found a lost Shakespeare play about King Arthur'?

As someone who is deeply interested in a.) weird Arthuriana and b.) Shakespeare it seemed extremely necessary for me to read this book, and I regret to report that I ended it somewhat frustrated.

It's a kind of a fun and funny conceit structurally -- sort of a William Goldman & The Princess Bride situation run amok -- in which Arthur Phillips, writing as the author Arthur Phillips, declares that he has been contracted to write the introduction to a lost Shakespeare play discovered by his father and this is said introduction and fortunately it is written into his contract that the introduction cannot be abridged or edited without his approval. Then he spends three hundred pages complaining about said con artist father, how much his father and his twin sister love Shakespeare, how much he himself dislikes Shakespeare, and every bad decision that everybody in his family ever made. Some of those bad decisions are fun and interesting (my favorite bit is the loving description of the period during which the twin sister rebels against her father by deciding to become a passionate anti-Stratfordian and writing lots of fanfictional theories about the forbidden romance and writing partnership between the Earl of Oxford and an Unknown Brilliant Young Jewish Man) and others are extremely boring (every single time Fictional Arthur Phillips made a bad heterosexual decision I immediately went to sleep, and during the heavily foreshadowed and agonizingly slow period leading up to Fictional Arthur Phillips making a pass at his sister's girlfriend I very nearly never woke up again).

Taken on a broader level, the book has some interesting things to say about art and forgery and the Cult of Shakespeare and why we care about the particular stories that we care about. It does not really have any interesting things to say about King Arthur. Nonetheless, I am interested in art and forgery and why we think the way we do about Shakespeare and so I did have fun with the large swathes of the book, between passages of Fictional Arthur Phillips being annoying in a way that I suspect is intentional and dull [for me] in a way that I strongly suspect isn't.

And then, of course, by virtue of the structural conceit, it is required that we have the Whole Play to which the rest of this book has been the introduction. A Whole Fake Shakespeare Play! about King Arthur! which unfortunately commits the unforgivable crime of being perhaps technically plausible, but extremely tedious. Occasionally we do get Fictional Arthur Phillips arguing in the footnotes with noted Shakespeare scholars about whether particular lines in the fake play are evidence of Shakespearean authenticity or shout-outs to things that Fictional Arthur Phillips' dad particularly liked, which is fun for a little while and then also gets tedious once it becomes clear that these footnotes are building to no greater meta-narrative catharsis or resolution but just the continuation of Arthur Phillips' Fun Little Game.

Coming at the end of the book as it does, I was really expecting the structure of the fake Shakespeare play to pull some kind of interesting narrative rug out from under me or provide some more commentary or resolution of the three hundred pages of narrative that came before, but instead it really does just seem to be Arthur Phillips showing off that he can write technically plausible but fairly tedious Arthuriana-Shakespeareana. After three hundred pages of Fictional Arthur Phillips making boringly bad decisions, I admit that a further ninety pages of yet another Fictional Arthur making boringly bad decisions in blank verse was kind of a grim slog. I am sure the pastiche was a ton of fun to do but please, Mr. Phillips, couldn't you at least make the play a little bit zanier? Couldn't you put in any of the weirder Arthurian lore instead of just endless battle scenes and angst about bastardy and inheritance? You couldn't even have Kay or Gawain in there? For me? No? Alas, and ah well.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thistleingrey

Alas.

Has someone done something fictional on Milton's missed Arthurian epic? (He did Paradise Lost instead, and got a bit disenchanted (sorry) with Arthur while meandering through History of Britain.)

From:

skygiants

What an amazing question -- I hope someone has, and that it's good, and that I can read it!

From:

pauraque

That sounds like it could have been awesome if it had stuck the landing. Alas indeed!

From:

skygiants

It's such a wonderful premise! Ah, well.

From:

troisoiseaux

I'm pretty sure I know what shitpost you're talking about haha. (The "crying about Lancelot" one?)

Anyway, SO disappointing to hear that this does not stick the landing (and bits of the middle) because the concept itself is very much up my alley. The sister's teenage rebellion sounds hilarious.

From:

skygiants

That's indeed the one! 😂

Although I am not recommending the book per se I WOULD be very curious about your thoughts if you decide it's far enough up your alley that it's worth reading anyway...

From:

graycardinal

As one who shares these interests in (a) weird Arthuriana, (b) Shakespeare, and also (c) meta of the Princess Bride sort, I'm here to say three things:

(1) Clearly I need to have a look at this book, though I strongly suspect I'm going to find it equally frustrating.

(2) In the interests of shameless self-promotion, you may want to have a look at the Yuletide story I wrote a decade ago in which there is a supposed lost Shakespeare play entitled The Life and Death of Gwenevere. (I admit to wondering for about five seconds whether Mr. Philips might have read that story, but on reflection that seems very highly doubtful.)

(3) In the interests of full disclosure, I assure prospective readers that I did not attempt to reproduce so much as one line of faux-Shakespearean dialogue; OTOH, I did arrange matters such that the play in question received an off-Broadway production. (It may be worth noting that the fandom in which this happens is Disney's Gargoyles...)

From:

skygiants

sajd;kfldj incredible, thank you for the link!

From:

sovay

You couldn't even have Kay or Gawain in there?

I have preemptively noped out.

(I am sorry the play is not actually in dialogue with the other half of its book!)

From:

skygiants

In fairness to Phillips it is somewhat in dialogue -- the Arthurs are paralleled -- but .... boringly ...... and by the time we hit the actual play we have already had the ways in which it is in dialogue excruciatingly explained to us anyway! There's nothing new to learn there! Even aside from the fact that the people demand Kay WHICH THEY DO.

From:

kore

Damn, how long is this thing?

From:

skygiants

It is only ... 360 pages? About. But it feels longer.

From:

kate_nepveu

... you know what this means.

Yuletide request!!

From:

skygiants

"this book, but if the play were good --"

From:

adrian_turtle

This reminds me (well, partly reminds me, as I still forget the details) of the notion that much of Earth's culture was lost during Barraryar's Time of Isolation, but they did preserve the plays of Shakespeare. They preserved them so well they had 3 plays not known elsewhere. One was a tragedy about Tam Lin, which I saw performed at a convention long ago. Another was about Arthur, and I don't remember if it was a comedy or a history. I don't recall anything about the other.

Edited (change icon) Date: 2024-12-08 04:26 pm (UTC)

From:

skygiants

omg I'd ALSO forgotten that element of the Vorkosigan worldbuilding, now I'd desperately like a time machine to see the convention Tam Lin!

From:

sovay

One was a tragedy about Tam Lin, which I saw performed at a convention long ago.

By Jo Walton! I saw it at Boskone also.

From:

graycardinal

And now I am back from an extended glance at The Tragedy of Arthur (thanks to my local library's ebook collection). As SF novelist Jerry Pournelle used to say - online, at least - "Ye flipping gods."

I spent more time in the back half of the book (the play and notes thereto) than in the front half, and came away from that half wholly unimpressed. We have had better faux Shakespeare in Yuletide (see especially this full play from 2007 for which I would dearly love to see an actual stage production). The verse is dull, the plot is depressing (and not at all Arthurian in character), and the extended war of footnotes makes it clear that Phillips (wholly unlike William Goldman) has absolutely no understanding of how to actually make meta interesting.

[For another instance of how to write faux Shakespeare well, there's a really brilliant and wholly chilling passage from Mirror-Universe Shakespeare in Diane Duane's Star Trek novel Dark Mirror.]

One should not be surprised that I found the front half equally unappealing (and I have to wonder how the author's actual family reacted to this book, not to mention how deeply weird the "reader's guide" in the back of my ebook got, featuring a supposed interview between Phillips and Patricia Conroy).

For a much, much more interesting look at Shakespearean meta, see James Shapiro's nonfiction volume Contested Will, deconstructing the authorship controversy with an unusual degree of thoughtfulness.

From:

kore

Contested Will is really good!

From:

skygiants

We have DEFINITELY had better Shakespeare in Yuletide.

From:

osprey_archer

Oh, this sounds like SUCH a missed opportunity. Alas!

From:

skygiants

I truly wish it had managed to be fun for more than a chapter at a time!

From:

chestnut_pod

There is so much zane by volume in both Shakespeare and Arthuriana that it actually seems like it would be difficult to make such a pastiche plodding! What a shame.

From:

skygiants

RIGHT. In a way it takes skill! And like -- I can't fault him, it does feel a bit like the duller bits of some of the history plays, but why would you write a faux-Shakespeare that's all dull bits?