The Forger’s Shakespeare Library This essay explores the literary strategies used in a contemporary novel that engages with key questions in Shakespeare studies, book history and authorship research - something not usually considered a promising topic for a novel. The essay is in two parts: first, it addresses current ways of thinking about the relationship between Shakespeare and the history of the book, including questions of Shakespearean authorship and ownership; then it uses by Arthur Phillips (2011) as a case study of how a contemporary novel explores these questions creatively. Connecting this case study with current research in early modern bibliography, textual studies and authorship studies should lead to an improved sense not only of the kind of writer that Shakespeare was, but also of the ways in which the possible-world scenarios of fiction can illuminate the limits of our understanding. How can Shakespeare studies contribute to contemporary fiction, and what - if anything - can a novel contribute to Shakespeare studies? “Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare”: in 2011, the BBC used this headline to report on a project whose goal was to test whether millions of networked computer programmes generating random sequences of text would ultimately arrive at Shakespeare‟s works (“Virtual” 2011). Such experiments are based on the famous theorem that typing monkeys, given enough time, will almost certainly produce any conceivable text in the world. It is no surprise that, in the English-speaking world, this popular theorem is regularly connected with Shakespeare. Even in many non- Anglophone countries, Shakespeare has become a cultural presence to an - 126 Ingo Berensmeyer extent that no other writer and no body of texts apart from the Bible or the Quran have achieved. Shakespeare‟s lasting presence, moreover, is not confined to “capital-C „high-brow‟” culture (Reinfandt 2009: 199) but also extends to lower-case popular culture: entertainment, tourism, and advertising. Next to theatre, cinema, schools or universities, Shakespeare can be encountered in numerous popular media products such as the and Youtube mashups, not to mention merchandising items or collectibles like the Shakespeare rubber duck or beer mat (see Lanier 2002). Shakespeare has survived the ages not merely as a museum item but, to use Jan Kott‟s classic phrase, as “our contemporary” (Kott 1974): a reservoir of cultural meanings that are constantly being reinterpreted for new generations and applied to new situations. Arthur Phillips‟s (2011) is a contemporary example of using Shakespeare in order to make a literary point about modern authorship and the history of books - fields that are closely connected to Shakespeare in literary studies today. It is also an example of a recent trend in printed literature that uses the formal qualities and functional features of the material book and its history (layout, typography and the affordances of the codex) for non-traditional narrative and stylistic effects and purposes. It confronts the authority of Shakespeare with the budding prospects of an emerging modern author, reflecting on questions of originality, imitation and attribution; it pits the (cultural and economic) value of authenticity against the dangers of deceit through forgery and the literary fake; and it creates an elaborate literary game for its readers, whom it leaves the less deceived at the end. (Spoiler alert: readers unfamiliar with should first read the novel before potentially ruining the experience by reading this essay.) But first things first. Studies of authorship in the early modern period, especially when they discuss Shakespeare, can always count on a certain amount of attention. In the Internet age, the so-called „Shakespeare authorship question‟ has been filling more blogs and books than ever before. Most of these are concerned with conspiracy theories that merely want to replace Shakespeare‟s name with a different one who is taken to be the „real‟ Shakespeare. It appears to be fruitless to remind the selfproclaimed „anti-Stratfordians‟ that their romantic concept of authorship does not fit the writing practices of early modern poets and dramatists, or that Shakespearean authorship questions are already interesting enough without having to postulate a conspiracy and thus create an even greater enigma involving the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon or anyone else. As is well known, Shakespeare‟s authorship was not questioned until his fame took on glorious proportions in the late eighteenth century, when his prestige attracted sceptics eager to have their moment in the spotlight by means of retrospective character assassination or by discovering hidden ciphers in the texts, or both (Shapiro 2010: 1). The genuinely interesting questions are not about replacing one name with 127 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Library another, but about how to understand early modern dramatic authorship as a set of material practices and socio-cultural ascriptions within textual culture, between the stage and the page. Consider the following two scenarios: 1) In Suffolk, in 1823, Sir Henry Bunbury finds an old book in the manor house of Great Barton that he has recently inherited. The book, described as “a small quarto, barbarously cropped, and very ill-bound,” (Bunbury, qtd. in Lesser 2015: 1) contains twelve plays by Shakespeare, including a previously unknown version of : a version with a much shorter text and several important variants. Its name for Polonius is “Corambis” and it includes new stage directions such as “Enter the ghost in his night gowne” in the closet scene. This discovery causes a sensation in Shakespeare studies, and the First Quarto of has remained an enigma ever since. - Sir Henry Bunbury? Doesn‟t that sound like a character invented by Oscar Wilde? But indeed, in this case truth is stranger than fiction; these are the facts behind the actual discovery of the first quarto of 2) In 2009, Random House - “the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world” (“Random” 2016), jointly owned by Bertelsmann and Pearson - announces a publishing sensation: a newly discovered play by Shakespeare, “the first certain addition to Shakespeare‟s canon since the seventeenth century” (Phillips 2011a: vii). This play was found in the 1950s and had been held in a private collection; its quarto print dates from 1597, making it the first to bear Shakespeare‟s name on the title page. The preface to this publication speculates that the play‟s topic may have been too “politically dangerous” (ibid.) for it to be included in the First Folio of 1623. This forgotten play is Shakespeare‟s take on the legendary British king. Now it is not unlikely that a major publishing house would pay a substantial sum for a previously unknown Shakespeare play that passes all the tests of authentication, stylistic and forensic. Here is a brief sample of the play, from Arthur‟s soliloquy at the beginning of act 5, scene 3: Our backs are pressed to th‟raging Humber‟s waves; There is no way but forward, as in life. Our feet are pulled into this water-turf, So eager is some fate to see us earthed. What chronicle will soon be writ of us In this so yielding and unyielding ooze? Is this the promised end to such a realm As I had built upon my father‟s wars? If Arthur‟s story ends in quaggy field, How will it play and how best fill a stage? (Phillips 2011a: 359; 5.3.1-10) 128 Ingo Berensmeyer Seasoned Shakespeareans might wonder why they have never heard of this putative publishing sensation. This is because the scenario is fictional: it is part of the novel by Arthur Phillips, first published by Random House in 2011. It will lead us to the topic of „Shakespeare and the book‟, a vast but still fairly young area of research. For all we know, Shakespeare wrote for theatrical performance first and foremost, not with an audience of readers in mind - or did he? For a long time, the dominant consensus was that Shakespeare was not interested in seeing his plays printed. As late as the year 2000, the authors of a standard handbook article on the topic claimed that Shakespeare “never showed the least bit of interest in being a dramatic author while he lived” (Berger and Lander 2000: 409). A few years ago, Lukas Erne, Patrick Cheney and others seriously challenged this established doxa by claiming that Shakespeare was also (if not predominantly) a dramatist, and that Shakespeareans still had a lot to learn from studying the earliest printed texts of Shakespeare's plays and their place in the early modern book trade. The old, rather artificial distinction between drama as performance and drama as literature, between stage and page, was revived, and camp formation followed suit, with both sides accusing the other of wilful ignorance or worse. Only recently, and most notably in the work of Tiffany Stern, print and performance have come together again in mutually informing and illuminating ways (see Erne 2003 and 2013, Cheney 2008, Stern 2009). Shakespeare and the book, then, may seem somewhat of a marginal matter or even a misleading route, away from the plays as they were originally performed and as they are still being performed on stages all over the world, away from the „real‟- the dramatic - Shakespeare. But just a casual look at the holdings of any Shakespeare-related library will reveal how Shakespeare‟s works, for at least three hundred years, have not only been put on stage but also edited, studied, translated, written about in all possible kinds of ways - indeed, as if a horde of typing monkeys had set about to fill a Borgesian library of Babel with their commentaries. Few scholars nowadays would dispute the claim that Shakespeare is as much a part of book history as he is of theatre history. It is now no longer controversial to acknowledge Shakespeare‟s place in the early modern book trade. As far as we know, his narrative poem was a bestseller of the late sixteenth century. In contrast to the sonnets of 1609 that are now much better known, was reprinted several times during Shakespeare‟s lifetime. From the late 1590s onwards, many plays published in quarto format carried his name on the title page - even many plays that today are excluded from the Shakespeare canon; Shakespeare‟s name had become an attractive brand in the book market. And then, in 1623, the First Folio preserved many plays by Shakespeare that would otherwise not have survived; while this publication may have had a more prosaic purpose, namely to assert own- 129 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Library ership of the plays for the King‟s Men (see Marino 2011), it certainly documents the respect that Shakespeare enjoyed, seven years after his death, and contributed to his lasting fame (on the early popularity of Shakespeare in print, see Rhodes 2013). But fame has its discontents: while we can infer many details about the creation and publication of Shakespeare‟s works, our desire to know this author more personally or intimately will always be frustrated, and the gaps in the documentary record are always filled by imagination. We know too little about his inner life, his working habits, and other interesting details like his religion or sexuality. Speculation enters where facts are unavailable or thin. Even without the numerous modern conspiracy theories about Shakespeare‟s authorship, his life is enigmatic enough. The desire to know more about Shakespearean authorship is an important and entirely legitimate motivating force in Shakespeare studies as well as a stimulus for artistic production, for films and novels that try to fill the gaps in the record. Both scholarship and the arts respond to the desire to come closer to the „real‟, the „authentic‟ Shakespeare (see Greenblatt 1997, Orgel 2002). Where does the desire to possess the „authentic‟ Shakespeare come from, and what does it mean to „own‟ Shakespeare? Shakespearean authorship questions have returned to the foreground of attention with the rise of the New Textualism in literary studies: a renewed attention to textual dynamics and the material processes of writing and publishing in manuscript and print media. A conceptual transfer from legal studies, the phrase “new textualism” was used by Gallagher and Greenblatt (2000: 8) but has more recently evolved towards a shift to “textual bibliography and textual biography” (see Lesser 2015: 25-71). In Shakespeare studies, this return of philology coincides with an interesting cultural dynamic: on the one hand, acknowledgement of Shakespeare as a transcultural presence and an author who now belongs to the world at large, and on the other hand, a narrowing focus on national tradition, with Shakespeare a predominantly British or English cultural figure or figurehead. This question of belonging and ownership became acute during the Brexit campaign of 2016, when both the Leave and Remain camps tried to use Shakespeare to buttress their arguments. It was already noticeable in 2012, in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics: when Sir Kenneth Branagh recited Caliban‟s lines “[t]he isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs [...]” (Shakespeare, 3.2.135-136), these lines referred to the “isle” of Britain, eliding their colonial resonance altogether and transforming Shakespeare into a soundbite shorn of its historical roots, depoliticized and made „safe‟ for watching by hundreds of millions of people worldwide (Dickson 2015: xiv-xii; Bryant 2016). In this instance, the link between Britain and Shakespeare was simultaneously evoked and set adrift. Although this is common practice in cultural appropriations and adaptations of Shakespeare, it is also highly problematic both from a philological and a political perspective. 130 Ingo Berensmeyer Research on such processes of cultural appropriation should meaningfully supplement inquiries into problems of Shakespearean textuality. Where is the author in all this? While authors had never fully disappeared from view in earlier critical paradigms such as the New Criticism, Deconstruction, and the New Historicism, they functioned rather as a “principle of thrift” in those movements “that sought foundationally to decenter that figure” of the author (Lesser 2015: 12). As Lesser explains (12), “it is ultimately the author who allows New Historicism to locate its texts in time, and these texts are rarely allowed to escape „their‟ time.” Recent studies, by contrast, have “shifted the relevant historical context away from the moment of authorial composition and toward other events in the life of the work.” For example, they have focused on processes of authorial or theatrical revision, acknowledging or debating the various textual sources of a play such as or that exist in various forms (see e.g. Vickers 2016; Bourus 2014). They have looked at the history of a work‟s publication, or to traces of readerly engagement with a text in the form of annotation, compiling, or cutting and pasting into new textual forms. Earlier generations of critics sought to locate textual stability in Shakespeare‟s “foul papers” - a term introduced by the New Bibliographers W. W. Greg and Fredson Bowers in the 1940s and 1950s to designate an author‟s original drafts or the last complete draft before the fair copy (Greg 1942, Bowers 1955). These autographs have of course never been found, but they remain a tantalising possibility; only a few signatures on legal documents show the material traces of what a 2016 exhibition in London had the cheek to refer to as “a life in writing” (National Archives 2016). This desire for the autograph is caricatured to great effect in the film comedy (1998) where we see a young Shakespeare trying again and again to write something down, then crumpling the pages and throwing them away in anger, until we realise that he has merely been practising his (notoriously unstable) signature (Madden 1998). In contrast to this fascination with a narrow focus on Shakespeare‟s own hand, recent textual scholarship by Gary Taylor, Paul Werstine, and others emphasises the multiple agencies involved in producing dramatic texts and further removes the life of the work from the life of the author (see e.g. Taylor and Lavagnino 2013, Werstine 2013, Taylor and Egan 2017). The scholarly view of Shakespearean authorship has changed considerably in the last forty years or so: from the solitary genius who - in Ben Jonson‟s phrase - “never blotted out line” (qtd. in Chambers 1930: 2.210) to a writer who did revise his own work and was not above collaborating 131 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Library with other writers in producing plays. Gary Taylor was among the first to detect traces of authorial revision in the early printed texts of Shakespeare‟s plays (Taylor 2004). Concerning collaborative authorship, it is now commonly accepted that parts of for example, are by Thomas Middleton, and other hands are involved in and possibly many more (Vickers 2004, Holland 2014, Purkis 2016). In fact, to acknowledge co-authorship is merely to take into account what was common practice in early modern drama. As a writer, Shakespeare had many parts to play, including single authorship, coauthorship, and lyric authorship. Ironically, what is possibly the only extant literary manuscript in Shakespeare‟s own hand (though not unanimously accepted as such) is evidence of authorial collaboration: a manuscript of Anthony Munday‟s and Henry Chettle‟s play (c. 1592c. 1604) contains revisions and additions by different hands, one among them being “Hand D,” which has been identified as possibly Shakespeare‟s (Cooper 2006: 154; see Purkis 2016 for indepth discussion). The topic of Shakespearean authorship has thus returned to the foreground of current research. This coincides with a more general trend: the revival and renewal of authorship studies. Recent approaches have moved away from a focus on the singular author as origin and sovereign owner of the work, the “Author-God” that Barthes and Foucault decentred in the 1960s, to a more differentiated view of authorship in multiple forms and various institutional contexts, social, legal, political, economic, literary. Authorship is thus not singular but plural, a compact collective term for a number of different and distinct functions. In 2002, Harold Love introduced the useful term “authemes” for these functions, in analogy to phonemes as the smallest meaningful units in language. These “authemes” refer to “a set of linked activities […] which are sometimes performed by a single person but will often be performed collaboratively or by several persons in succession” (Love 2002: 39). Love‟s model allows us to think of authorship as an activity or performance, but also as a result of ascriptions without having to postulate a singular active focus of textual origin. For example, Love refers to if a significant contribution from a previous writer is integrated into a new work; to if the author is a maker, an „artifex‟ who writes alone or in collaboration with others; to if the author is responsible for the work but has not himself written it (think of the King James Bible or celebrity autobiographies); and to if a work is revised by an executive author or someone else, such as an editor or censor (Love 2002: 40-49). This model no longer takes the author to be the central controlling instance over the text, but breaks down authorship into a set of practices that are located on a scale between the autocratic solitary genius and the anonymous hive mind: editing, correcting, revising, printing, etc. Love‟s 132 Ingo Berensmeyer approach (which was developed for the field of authorship attribution) moves away from exaggerated claims such as the “death of the author” (Barthes) to turn instead towards the connection between empirical authorship, on the one hand, and culturally and historically variable sets of concepts or models of authorship, on the other hand (for a useful discussion of authorship theories, see Lamarque 2009, 84-131). In a somewhat simplified manner, one could distinguish between four such cultural historical variables of authorship concepts, arranged along a scale from the extreme poles of strong autonomy to strong heteronomy (Berensmeyer, Buelens and Demoor 2012): | _____________________ | __________________ | ____________________ | strong autonomy weak autonomy weak heteronomy strong heteronomy In this model, strong autonomy designates the position of the author as an independent creator and ruler over the work and its meaning, an original genius who creates out of her own essential self. Weak autonomy still defines the author as the creator of a work, but in a less assertive fashion that acknowledges extraneous influences or material constraints. Weak heteronomy refers to the author as a producer of text who has a certain degree of freedom but is no longer thought to be independent; this is a writer who follows rules and conventions and whose principal goal is not self-expression but communication of what is already known or considered as culturally valuable. Finally, strong heteronomy denotes the author as a compiler or recorder, or an author who receives inspiration not from his inner self but, for example, through divine intervention (Berensmeyer, Buelens and Demoor 2012: 14). Rather than emphasize concrete practices of making and distributing texts, this model focuses on culturally inflected ideas and ascriptions: what authors are be or do by readers, publishers, scholars and writers. How much authority are they supposed to have over the text? How independent or dependent from social, legal or formal constraints are they thought to be? Naturally, this can vary to a great extent in different places and at different times. This leads us back to the question how Shakespearean authorship was and still is imagined in scholarship, but also by a larger public. What kind of author did Shakespeare think he was? What kind of an author did his contemporaries and subsequent generations imagine him to be? These questions are closely linked to a subfield in Shakespeare studies that explores how Shakespeare the man and Shakespeare the writer have been imagined and staged in contexts far removed from the original „time of the author‟: in novels, films and other media forms that shape our ideas of Shakespearean authorship by filling the gaps in the evidence with the aid of imagination. One could point, for instance, to popular biography, 133 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Lib such as Stephen Greenblatt‟s (2004), which fabricates an inspired life story as an inventive page-turner. Like the much-discussed historical portraits of Shakespeare, such narratives are “fictions that work with the idea of the real, arranging a series of motifs [...] into a synthetic image” (Pointon 2006: 217). The public yearns for authenticity, but also for fantasy, when faced with the elusive image of Shakespeare. While this desire used to be connected to narratives of national identity in the nineteenth and to some extent still in the twentieth and twenty-first century (understanding Shakespeare as a national English or British poet, and in the US as a significant cultural link between the new world and a racially defined „Anglo-Saxon‟ mother country), I would argue that this has changed in recent years from a national narrative towards the discourse of cultural heritage that is globally shared, highly marketable, and that can be recognized and consumed by a worldwide audience. and a New ‘Problem Play’ What can literary fiction contribute to the questions raised by the history of the book and Shakespearean authorship? How can it address problems of textual ownership, descent and belonging, as well as the economic conditions of authorship and publication in today‟s world? The novel by Arthur Phillips, published in 2011, is probably the best example of a contemporary literary text that tackles these questions head-on. The closest model or inspiration for Phillips‟s novel is Vladimir Nabokov‟s postmodernist classic (1962), in which the story is told through an editor‟s comments on a narrative poem by a fictional poet. Like also contains a complete text within the novel, in this case a play in blank verse, but this time not by a fictional writer but - ostensibly - by Shakespeare (Phillips acknowledges this influence in Reilly 2013: 6). This play, is a fullfledged five-act tragedy about King Arthur. It takes up about of a quarter of the book. Although it cannot quite compete with Shakespeare at his best, there is arguably quite a lot in Shakespeare, especially before 1600, that sounds somewhat like this, so it is a credible pastiche (see the sample quoted above). But it does not merely imitate a Shakespeare play, it imitates the of a Shakespeare play in its physical form: it comes with stage directions added in square brackets and explanatory notes to the text, like an Arden, Oxford or Cambridge edition, and a lengthy introduction, in this case an excessive 256 pages in 48 chapters, signed by “Arthur Phillips.” Some notes to the text are by this Arthur Phillips, others by one (fictional) Professor Roland Verre; while Arthur uses his notes to affirm 134 Ingo Berensmeyer his belief that the play is a forgery, Professor Verre‟s notes uphold the play‟s authenticity. 1 In the introduction, Arthur Phillips introduces himself as a novelist whose father was a convicted forger, who had been to prison for a long time and who, towards the end of his life, reveals what he claims to be the actual discovery of a previously unknown Shakespeare play. Arthur‟s father wishes for Arthur and his twin sister Dana to publish this text as authentic Shakespeare. It gradually becomes clear that Arthur, who had always seen his father as a failed artist and as a failure in general, is now almost ready to believe him. Arthur‟s father has a credible story: he claims that he discovered this Shakespeare quarto in an English country house in the late 1950s and that he had kept it in a bank safe in order to give his children a better future. The play, too, is credible even though it will not be considered a masterpiece: it is quite possible that Shakespeare might have written a play based on the Arthurian chapters in Holinshed‟s a source that he had also used for numerous other plays, most notably the histories. This single surviving copy then, like the famous first quarto of that was only discovered in 1823, had been bound together with other playtexts and then forgotten on the shelves of a private library. The book contains a facsimile of the title page of this quarto, dated 1597, “as it hath beene diuers times plaide by the right / Honourable the Lord Chamberlaine His Seruants,” and also the information that the photo copyright of this facsimile belongs to “2011 Arthur Phillips” (Phillips 2011a: xi). Arthur‟s publishing company, Random House, agrees to publish the new Shakespeare play if the quarto passes all the available scientific tests: paper, ink, individual letter forms are examined for their authenticity, and everything points to a genuine sixteenth-century print. Numerous genuine Shakespeare experts, including the linguist David Crystal and Columbia professor James Shapiro, confirm the play‟s stylistic authenticity as a Shakespeare play from the late 1590s. But then the novel‟s turning point comes when, in a moment that replays philological procedures in textual studies, Arthur discovers among the papers of his deceased father a note card that hints at an earlier draft of the play (Phillips 2011a: 202). This is incontrovertible evidence that the play a forgery by Arthur‟s father, after all. But now Random House are no longer willing to withdraw the book. The novel contains another facsimile: a letter by the Senior Vice President of Random House responding to Arthur‟s wish to destroy the forged play, or rather what this letter calls “the original edition of the play” (253). The letter also threatens Arthur with litigation if 1 Although Roland Verre is no Oxfordian, his name has an uncanny resemblance to Edward de Vere; it might also be a pun on Latin verus („true‟) or a number of other Latin words beginning with „ver‟ such as vereor („to worry‟, „to fear‟, „to worship‟) or verres („boar‟). 135 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Library he does not comply with his contract, which stipulates that he has to write an introduction - and this introduction is now the text that the reader has just read. The father‟s ultimate success in producing the perfect forgery is the son‟s final disappointment. In terms of genre, does this make the novel into a tragedy? Not quite, according to its narrator, who argues that it is “not quite a tragedy” and “not quite a comedy” but rather a “ ” (255, emphasis original). Yet obviously the novel‟s title not only refers to the (edition of) the play included in the book, the tragedy of King Arthur, but also to the „tragedy‟ of the fictional Arthur Phillips, whose illusions about his father - and arguably also about the ethical standards of the publishing industry - are tragically shattered in the course of the novel, and who is forced to confirm his father‟s forgery against his own will. Arthur as author is no king in this story, as the elision of the word „king‟ from the book‟s title may suggest; instead, he is bound to the terms of his contract with his publishing company, whose very name Random House - though as real as the real author‟s - might be read as an ironic comment on the arbitrariness of fate, tragic or otherwise, in the world of contemporary publishing. The novel‟s metafictional juxtaposition of elements of reality and fiction, truth and falsehood, authenticity and deception also draws on the long history of literary forgery and its modern and postmodern heritage (see, e.g., Dutton 1983, Stewart 1994, Lynch 2019). Its take on the problems of authorship and authenticity is informed by the history of Shakespeare scholarship, including the notorious forgeries of John Payne Collier (1789-1883) in the mid-nineteenth century, who was wont to insert forged manuscript corrections into genuine copies of early printed texts (see Freeman and Freeman 2004). Phillips‟s experimental approach to writing a play that Shakespeare might have written raises important questions about literary originality, authority and property in contemporary culture. It also sheds light on the economics of commercial publishing, turning book history into a pragmatic sounding board for speculative fiction: What happen if a new play by Shakespeare were to be discovered today, even if its provenance proved to be dubious? In the novel, the publishing giant Random House (which also happens to be the real Arthur Phillips‟s real publisher) insists on Shakespeare‟s authorship of the play. But the actual „executive author‟ of this play is Arthur senior, the master forger, and Shakespeare‟s collaborative role in this is that of „precursory authorship‟ in the terminology established by Harold Love. If we apply the scale model of authorial positions to this novel, one can see several author functions competing in this text: the strong heteronomy of Arthur Phillips junior, who is forced by his publisher to put together the text, write an introduction and a summary of the play. We also find the author as a weakly heteronomous producer of a text conforming to rules and conventions: Arthur senior, the forger, clings closely 136 Ingo Berensmeyer to the precursor Shakespeare as a model author in order to write an ideal, a perfect „new‟ play by Shakespeare. Shakespeare is declared to be the creator of the work which is made materially present in the text (weak autonomy and declarative authorship). And finally, the position of strong autonomy, of authorship as sovereign ownership of the work, resides in this case with the publishing house and its legal division. They decide, based on the advice of external experts, that the play is a genuine, authentic Shakespeare play - it is Shakespeare and not what this novel calls “Fakespeare” (Phillips 2011a: 168). Authenticity, then, is shown to be the product of an institution, based on economic and legal deliberations and, of course, on the enormous prestige of Shakespeare‟s name: “anyone walking into a publishing house bearing a newly discovered Shakespeare play would be whisked to the top floor” (227) simply because there is so much money to be made from this. Moreover, the novel picks up on a topic that is at the heart of Shakespeare‟s plays: the theme of mistaken or concealed identities that is almost omnipresent in the established canon of plays from the via to The Winter’s Tale. The novel also contributes to debates about Shakespeare's super-canonical status and value. It cites Harold Bloom‟s claim that “we are all the Bard‟s invention” (60) and that we all live our lives and experience our feelings based on the model of Shakespeare‟s works. In contrast to his sister Dana, who admires Bloom‟s book , Arthur is more sceptical, also because, as a writer, he feels oppressed by the weight of Shakespeare as the single greatest writer of all time, whose gravity distorts the force field of literature. He proposes a different, a more democratic view of Shakespeare as “one of many writers [...] admired” by his contemporaries “but not out of all sane proportion” (225): we have allowed this man to be inflated, to our disadvantage and his [...]. But this is a trick of perspective, a rolling boulder of PR, a general cowardliness in us, a desire for heroes and simple answers. [...] Merely by surviving time‟s withering breath, by being studied and taught, he has shaped the world's tastes. We are trained to appreciate him and his distinct qualities, and we ignore the others. Only he does what he does [...] and that‟s fine. But then we call him the best because we have been shocked and rewarded and bullied into believing that that one fingerprint is the standard of all truth and beauty. (226-27) Ironically, it is the lawyers hired by Random House who have the last word on this standard, „shocking and bullying‟ Arthur into fulfilling the terms of his contract, even though he knows that is his father‟s forgery - its beauty, in a romantic, indeed Keatsian way, transfigured into truth. On yet another level of irony, the real novelist Arthur Phillips has found a way to frame what must have been a labour of love - 137 The Forger’s Shakespeare Library The Forger’s Shakespeare Library the imitation of a serious, full-fledged Shakespearean tragedy - as a text worthy of consideration by contemporary readers. In combination, these two levels of irony serve to reconnect the - by now somewhat tired - mode of postmodernist experiment in a Nabokovian vein back to the material book as a physical object and to the economic realities of authorship and publishing. Like a Shakespeare portrait, the novel is a fiction that “work[s] with the idea of the real, arranging a series of motifs [...] into a synthetic image” (Pointon 2006: 217). In a way that is now sometimes referred to as „artistic research,‟ 2 Phillips contributes to an exploration of Shakespearean authorship. And beyond the technical feat of producing an imitation of a Shakespeare play, or rather an edition of a „Shakespeare‟ play, amounts to more than just a postmodernist glass-bead game. It uses the cultural capital of Shakespeare to draw the reader‟s attention to the institutions and processes of constructing, mediating and claiming literary authorship and textual authority in the twenty-first century. In making readers more aware of problems of textual authentication, Phillips‟s novel also does a service to Shakespeare studies, or several services in fact: first, it turns away from a hyperbolic, ultimately spurious pseudo-religious reverence for Shakespeare as the „greatest author of all times,‟ and secondly, it defeats the elitist „anti-Stratfordian‟ argument that only an aristocratic genius could have had the necessary educational and professional background to produce Shakespeare‟s plays - a good writer is all it takes. As Phillips remarks in another interview: The more I got into writing the play, the more irritating [sic] the anti- Stratfordians made me. I started to feel, after a while, that I actually did write a Shakespeare play, and so I sort of know what it takes to do one. It doesn't require nobility. It requires imagination and empathy and research skills, and it requires discipline and hard work and a dictionary and things that are well within the realm of the possible for the guy who is credited with having written these plays. (Phillips 2011b) is part of a more general trend in contemporary literary fiction to make use of book history and the format of the material book in order to create new kinds of reading experience by manipulating the physical space of the page and the codex format, such as J.J. Abrams‟s and Doug Dorst‟s (2013), Jonathan Safran Foer‟s (2010, or Mark Z. Danielewski‟s (2006). These multimodal works also explore the possibilities of the material book to probe (possibly unique) epistemological affordances of literature, as imaginative writing, and the format of the book as an artefact and a me- 2 See, for instance, the Society of Artistic Research, founded in 2010, and the . 138 Ingo Berensmeyer dium (on multimodality and the contemporary novel, see e.g. Gibbons 2012; Hallet 2014). is, so far, unique among these in engaging with Shakespeare studies and the early modern book. In this article, I have tried to approach Shakespearean authorship from two different angles: recent developments in textual studies that reassess the material conditions of writing and publishing in Shakespeare‟s time, and a novel that reflects on the cultural and economic capital of Shakespeare in the publishing world today by engaging in a provocative thought experiment. Shakespeare‟s fame is both boon and bane for Shakespeare studies: his immense status, now as part of global cultural heritage, intensifies the desire to ascribe authority over the work to a single person rather than to accept the historical reality of authorial collaboration and the textual dispersal of authority in manuscript and print. In showing how a publisher might suppress evidence of forgery in order to present a new Shakespeare play to the world, creates a wrily Shakespearean narrative of mistaken identities and intergenerational dynamics that questions and decentres the impulse towards a monolithic and singular „Shakespeare‟ and that uses the possibilities of the printed book to question our assumptions of authorship and authority. In this case, then, the imaginative filling of gaps in a novel and the scholarly work of getting closer to the forever unattainable authentic Shakespeare turn out to work together towards a common critical goal. 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