Philip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
Just read this, because I'd seen it compared with Nabokov's Pale Fire and it has an Arthurian theme. It's not as good as Nabokov's Pale Fire, and any recognisable Arthurian aspect is minimal.
It's a very clever technical exercise, but not a great read.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15861804-the-tragedy-of-arthur
The Tragedy of Arthur

The Tragedy of Arthur is an emotional and elaborately c…

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Show threadPhilip Purser-Hallard
It takes the form of a lost Shakespeare play (based on Holinshed's very prosaic account of Arthur's reign) preceded by a much longer, predominantly tangential and autobiographical, introduction from the novelist whose father, a convicted forger, "discovered" it.
The unresolved question, of course, is whether it's "genuine" within the fiction, with plenty of clues to point one either way. Which is obviously very clever.
Sep 30, 2023 at 7:53amWeb
Show threadPhilip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
But I found the self-obsessed narrator's life story had almost completely alienated me by the time I reached that point.
(This is the opposite approach to Pale Fire, where the monomania and self-obsession of Kinbote's notes is contrasted with the generous humanity of Shade's poem, but crucially the reader gets to read the latter first.)
Show threadPhilip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
Unfortunately, I wasn't interested in the framing narrator, his daddy issues, his sexual incontinence, or his petulant opinions on Shakespeare. And since the play's Arthur is written to reflect him, I wasn't very interested in him either.
The question of authenticity, especially as applied to Shakespeare, is intellectually interesting, and there's a lot about the treatment of it here that's very clever.
Show threadPhilip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
The issue is whether a play's value is intrinsic or derives from the idea that Shakespeare wrote it.
But since we know full well that the novelist Arthur Phillips wrote this one, it's a spurious question.
It's like the readers of Pale Fire who speculate that Shade wrote Kinbote's bits or vice versa, and in doing so collapse the whole structure. Guys, Nabokov wrote all of it.
Show threadPhilip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
Anyway. There's a lot to appreciate here, from an intellectual point of view, but it's emotionally alienating and it's not as much fun as it should be. Which is a shame.
Show threadPhilip Purser-HallardSep 30, 2023
(Incidentally, I'm almost sure there's a hidden message in the words which are "accidentally" repeated from line to line in the prose dialogue. I'd assume they were typoes, except that the first two are "its" and "will" -- i.e. "It's Will". I haven't managed to find all of it.)