Episode 3 tells of Alice’s contribution to Will’s development as a poet and playwright, the part of the tale that interests me the most.  I recognize that I am not part of the target demographic for this show.  The sub-plots contain enough variety to pull in viewers whose focus lies elsewhere.

Episode 2 ended with the triumph of Edward III, a play sometimes attributed to Shakespeare.  In Episode 3, Will has written a flop (unnamed). Alice’s father, James Burbage, is so disgusted by this weak material that he tells Will to quit the theater, to go home.  Will takes the play to Philip Henslowe, the Gimbels to Burbage’s Macys.  Henslowe is even less interested.  He tosses Will’s manuscript to the floor and tells Will to get out of his sight.

Now Alice plays a crucial role.  Will needs bucking up. She provides encouragement, but she also provides some critical coaching.  She tells him that his characters and his poetry are good, maybe very good, but his plotting needs serious improvement.  He promises to work harder on developing more interesting material.  She tells him that he would save a lot of time and effort by simply stealing stories from other writers.  Everyone else is doing it, so why not Will?

The two of them go off to an open-air market in search of a book, a story, a chronicle, anything that Will can turn into the hit that he, Alice, and we viewers know he has it in him to write.  They find a bookseller who has a beautiful leather-bound edition of a tale about two gentlemen and their love affairs, originally written in Spanish and newly translated into English.  It’s the only copy available anywhere in England. (Right.)

Will can’t afford the asking price and the seller won’t give credit to an unknown writer.  It’s a shame that the lack of a mere five shillings will prevent the creation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Alice solves the problem by grabbing the book and running off with it.  Having a plot ready to hand saves energy that Will invests in the script’s poetry – Except I be by Silvia in the night / There is no music in the nightingale made a deep impression on Alice and on the actors.  He even had time to create a nice little bit of stage business with a dog that has been delighting audiences for more than four centuries. Alice’s dad loves it, the actors love it, particularly the fellow who gets to play the dog.  And most important, the audience loves it.  Will is visibly transformed as he soaks in the cheers and applause from the groundlings at the play’s end.

Alice is also transformed.  As Will prepares for sleep, Alice comes to his room and the two of them do what we all knew they were going to do eventually.  What surprised me was how quickly the writers got them together.  I had figured that we had two or three episodes ahead of us filled with unresolved sexual tension.  If you haven’t watched the episode, I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I can say that the sexual tension is no longer unresolved.

With the benefit of more than four centuries of hindsight, we know that Will was going on to bigger hits than Two Gentlemen.  But in 1589, Alice couldn’t have known that.  She might have been throwing herself away on a one-hit wonder.

In the meantime, other plots are unfolding (speaking of plots).  Will makes contact with his cousin Robert Southwell.  Robert is a historical person but was not related to William Shakespeare.  Robert is among the most hunted men in England.  While he stays one step ahead of Elizabeth’s spies and inquisitors, he is working on a treatise in favor of religious toleration.  His plan is to enlist Will to work Robert’s rough draft into a polished product that will persuade Good Queen Bess to stop persecuting her Catholic subjects.

This is naïve almost beyond belief.  Elizabeth was not a religious fanatic who persecuted Catholics out of zeal.  Her concern and that of her councilors was political not religious[1].  The Pope had issued an edict in 1570 declaring that Elizabeth was an unlawful ruler because she was not the legitimate child of her parents.  She was born of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn while Henry’s first wife was still alive.  Further, the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth and threatened to excommunicate any English Catholic who obeyed her.[2]

In fact, most English Catholics were English first and Catholic second and remained loyal to the Crown.  Most but not all, and the government thought it prudent to keep an eye on any adherents to the old faith who appeared a bit too enthusiastic or who wished to organize their co-religionists.

Will already has a full plate what with writing and acting and spending quality time with Alice.  Asking him to edit a manuscript that could get him killed – after a long bout of torture by experts – was over the top.  Maybe that’s why Robert Southwell became a saint and William Shakespeare didn’t.

Elizabeth’s agents are on Southwell’s trail and actually raid the house where his underground operation is based.  When they get there, no one is home.  The reason they come up empty is that Christopher Marlowe has quietly intervened on Southwell’s behalf.  During and after his lifetime, Marlowe was believed to be a government spy, gay, and an atheist.  The TV show leaves us with no doubt that he was all three.  Marlowe is not only gay but wildly promiscuous and a leading host in the London orgy scene.  One of his lovers is part of the crew looking for Southwell and has given vital information to Marlowe.  Marlowe has tipped off Southwell’s party to stay clear of the house.  It’s a high stakes game for everyone involved but so far Marlowe has kept his head out of the noose.

Complications continue to compound.  Marlowe wants to introduce Will to the inner circle of England’s intellectual elite.  You get to the inner sanctum by stages.  The first step is to attend a wild party filled with out-of-control wanton libertines.  Will has insisted on bringing Alice, her actor brother Richard who is as handsome as Alice is beautiful but far vainer about his appearance, and a young woman named Moll who likes Richard.  As a demonstration of the depths of his charity, he permits her to hang around with him.

One oddity about the party scene is the music.  As the characters travel to the party, enter the hall, and start to mingle with the guests, there is no dialogue.  Instead, some raucous electronic music (no attempt at Elizabethan authenticity) accompanies their actions until the story is ready to resume.

Will and some of the female party-goers have fun flirting with each other, which frosts Alice.  In her anger, she soliloquizes about her ambition to one day run her father’s theater company.  It’s odd that a country that had been capably governed by a woman for thirty years would balk at Alice’s ambition.  I doubt, though, that the real Alice would have had much luck in achieving her goal.  Perhaps a better fate awaits her character in the story.  We shall see.

Marlowe drags Will off to the inner sanctum where the real party is being held.  The separation deepens the rift between Will and his friends.  They want to come, too, but Marlowe does not deem them worthy.  When we get to the real party, we meet a dozen or so older men, bearded, dressed in black.  First among equals is Francis Bacon.  Marlowe tells Will that Bacon’s library is larger than that of Cambridge and Oxford combined.  That’s how smart he is.

Walter Raleigh is also there, so in one room we have three people (Bacon, Raleigh, Marlowe) who have been nominated at one time or another as the true author of the Shakespeare canon.  And since some people think the work was done by a group[3], the attendees of the inner sanctum taken as a group are a further candidate.

So, what do these profound geniuses do when they are all together enclosed in a room with no other distractions?  They smoke dope.  Then they take turns staring into a blue flame at the center of the room.  How the participants avoid death by suffocation, carbon monoxide poisoning, or fire remains unexplained.

When he looks into the flame, Will realizes the danger he has put himself in by associating with Southwell and by keeping the manuscript.  As he hallucinates, he sees Richard Topcliffe race through the scene.  Will flies from the room and leaves the party.  He is out of the Catholic treatise editing business.

Back at the theater, Richard Burbage, like his sister, has some ideas about how Will might use other writers’ work to develop some new material for the stage.  Richard’s motives are self-centered, as is every other aspect of his life.  He wants Will to write him some juicy material.  Richard’s idea is that Will should adapt Holinshed’s Chronicles, a popular work on English history, for the theater.  Will says, “Hasn’t that been done?”  Richard has the funniest line of the show so far: “Will, it’s 1589.  Everything has been done!”

Will says he’ll think about it.  He soon gets some encouragement to think about it very seriously. A gang of officials employed by Topcliffe arrive to request Shakespeare’s presence at Topcliffe’s house.  It’s the kind of request that Don Corleone would have made, an offer you can’t refuse.

The last scene of Episode 4 shows us Will sitting at Topcliffe’s table.  We have seen two other characters sitting there in previous scenes.  They both ended up enduring unspeakably cruel torture.  (The torture scenes are so graphic that I have started fast-forwarding to avoid looking at them.)

Topcliffe smiles his false smile at Will.  Does Topcliffe know that he is facing the Catholic agent who carried the letter that was intended for Robert Southwell?  He does not.  As the episode ends, Topcliffe is proposing that Will place his talents in the service of the Crown.  Is this why the early plays include so many histories (the three parts of Henry VI plus Richard III)?  Were the early comedies the product of Will’s day job while the histories were his government work?  Perhaps future episodes will tell the tale.

[1] The pamphlet in the story may be based on Robert Southwell’s “An Humble Supplication” to Elizabeth asking her to stop persecuting Catholics.  I skimmed its 86 pages to get some sense of his argument. He never backs down from his view that his is the one true faith.  He tries to assure Elizabeth that she has nothing to fear from her Catholic subjects. One of his talking points is that in the short reign of her sister Mary there were several Protestant uprisings.  In Elizabeth’s 35 years (at time of writing) there had been only one Catholic-inspired rebellion.  This is not a point you would want to emphasize when arguing for relief from government inquisition.

[2] In King John, written in the mid-1590s (probably), a Cardinal threatens King John with excommunication:

Then, by the lawful power that I have,
Thou shalt stand cursed and excommunicate.
And blessed shall he be that doth revolt
From his allegiance to an heretic;
And meritorious shall that hand be call’d,
Canonized and worshipped as a saint,
That takes away by any secret course
Thy hateful life.

The contours of this thought must have been present frequently in Elizabeth’s mind, far more prominent than any disagreement over matters of theological detail.

[3] These people are called Groupists.  Delia Bacon, probably the first person to state in public that her famous namesake was the true author, saw Francis Bacon as the head of a group of profound wits who worked together to fashion the works that the rest of us attribute to the rude uneducated townsman of Stratford.