It’s fortunate for those of us who enjoy reading and studying Shakespeare’s works and seeing the plays enacted that TNT’s account of his early years in London is fiction.  If the TNT version were true, the poor man would have had no time to write anything.  It takes an entire episode to deal with the complications that are holding him back.

First there is the distraction of his full-fledged love affair with Alice Burbage.  If this began as passion, it has blossomed into the real thing.  It does generate some poetry – Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds strikes a chord between them – but he doesn’t write it down.  He speaks it to her.  He melts her heart, but that doesn’t do posterity any good.

Then, right in the middle of the poetry and love-making session that opens Episode 5 – in broad daylight when he ought to be working on a masterpiece for us — Mrs. Shakespeare and the three children arrive for a surprise visit.  Alice gets away unseen, but Anne is observant and soon deduces the truth.

When Episode 4 ended, the evil sadistic Richard Topcliffe had assigned Will the task of producing a play that would rally the audiences of the day behind the queen.  That task is yet another barrier to the production of Will’s next hit for the stage.

How does he solve these problems so that he can get back to work or rather to The Works?  He hopes he can give the wife and kids a rapid tour of the sights of London and then send them back to Stratford.  That is not Anne’s plan.  She wants Will to come back to Stratford with her to take over his father’s glove-making business.  Getting him out of London will also solve Anne’s Alice problem.

In this she is being met more than halfway by Alice’s mother, who has a Will problem.  Mrs. Burbage wants Alice married off to a prosperous acquaintance who has eyes for her but nothing but his money and position to offer in return.  Alice wants to marry for love.  Her mother’s policy on marriage hovers somewhere between the practical and the mercenary.

While all this is going on, we visit Mr. Topcliffe at home.  He too is being visited by his wife and children: an older son, and a younger daughter.  The son is about to start his studies at Lincoln’s Inn.  (I think they called it Lincoln’s College, so perhaps it is a different institution.)  The son wants to live with his father.  Topcliffe is not sure this is a good idea, but reluctantly agrees when he realizes he can use his son’s help in the business of hunting and torturing heretics.  Topcliffe is a man who brings his work home, so the son would have to be all in for this arrangement to work.

Topcliffe’s daughter wanders around the house annoying father and brother by singing “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary”.  Topcliffe forbids her to sing the song, explaining that the Mary in the rhyme is Bloody Mary, Elizabeth’s older half-sister, who burned honest Protestants at the stake.  “Silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row” refers to her victims.[1]

That gives Topcliffe an idea.  He still has the letter that he got from the thief who stole it from Will.  The letter is in code of some kind.  Perhaps the code can be understood by focusing on certain Catholic keywords.  Topcliffe feels that he is making some progress on this letter when Will walks in to announce that he has not written the play that Topcliffe had ordered.

Topcliffe is about to become annoyed, which would be bad for Will.  The distractions presented by Alice, his wife, his children, his father’s business, and all the rest would soon fade to insignificance once Topcliffe gets Will fitted to his irons.

Will thinks fast and explains that his talent is too feeble to enable him to produce a play that would meet Topcliffe’s standards.  Apparently, he caught Topcliffe on a good day.  His only reaction is to dismiss Will with a gesture of contempt.

Topcliffe is about to resume his analysis of the letter, not knowing that the bearer of the letter is for a second time in his presence, when he realizes that a writer, even a dim-witted one like Shakespeare, could help him decode the letter intended for Southwell.  Will doesn’t help but he is in the room when Topcliffe and his clever son decode the message.  It contains an address in London.  They quickly assemble their henchmen, hop on their horses, and head for Silver Street.

Last episode, they shut down Southwell’s base of operations.  Now they are after the house where he lives. Will knows that Southwell is in imminent mortal danger.  He runs to the address and gets there just ahead of Topcliffe.[2]  They are able to hide on the steep roof of the house although they nearly fall to their deaths in the street below.

Topcliffe tries to beat Southwell’s whereabouts out of the house’s owner while the man’s wife, holding their infant, looks on in horror.  Topcliffe’s son watches his father lose control and finally shouts for him to stop.  The son is an embarrassment to his father.  In a late scene, Topcliffe sends his son away to live in Lincoln’s Inn.  It’s a somber reminder that even in our own time, few of the great and famous prosecutors had fathers or sons who had the same zeal.

Southwell reads into Will’s heroism a recommitment to the cause.  Will disabuses him.  He did it for Robert because he is family.  He is now fully and finally done.  He points out to Robert that yet another family – his host, now Topcliffe’s prisoner – has been sacrificed while Robert remains in safety, if only temporarily.  Speaking only for myself, I hope this little subplot has now been tied off.  I’ve had a full serving of Robert’s earnestness.

Two other subplots are worth mentioning, one because it so strange, the other because it is hard to guess where it is going to lead.

The strange one involves – brace yourself – Christopher Marlowe.  We find him lying on his floor, where he has had a circle drawn around an inscribed pentagram with mystical symbols sprinkled throughout.  Several individuals are in his room with him.  One of them was present in the wise men’s inner sanctum from the previous episode.  This time, the fellow is describing Marlowe’s own death to him.  Marlowe’s lover breaks in – the one who works for Topcliffe.  He is concerned for the welfare of his beloved Christopher.  Marlowe sends him away, snarling “I’m working.”  Ultimately, Marlowe is buried standing up in a grave.  He spends the night encased in the earth.  Only his head is above ground.  He hallucinates and raves until the morning, when his crew comes to dig him up.  This behavior does not connect to anything we have seen so far, nor is it clear why Marlowe thought this experience would advance his art.  The occult plays a role in Marlowe’s play Faustus (a work I have not read), but why spending a night buried in a grave up to one’s neck would assist in writing it, we are not told.  Anyway, the show’s title is Will and not Kit.

The second subplot, which unlike the other one actually relates to Will, involves the thief who stole the letter intended for Robert Southwell.  The thief is a boy of perhaps 10, a child of the street, skilled in the use of a knife as a weapon.  He has also stolen a dress from the property room of Burbage’s theater.  He earns some cash by pretending to be a lovely young girl lost in London.  There are plenty of lechers around who would like nothing better than to take sexual advantage of such innocence.  The lad holds them up at knife-point to earn some extra cash.

This youth’s older sister works full time as a prostitute.  The disgusting woman who runs the house has clients who are looking for the company of pretty young boys, but prefer that they be dressed as girls.  That seems like a highly specialized taste, but this is a madam who knows her customers.  If the sister won’t agree to the arrangement, the madam will throw them both out onto the street.  The young fellow is unaware of the fate that is being prepared for him.  Meanwhile, he has had encounters (non-sexual I’m pleased to say) with both Will and Richard Burbage.  How the boy’s descent into the sexual commerce of Elizabethan London is going to affect the author of the great works of the Elizabethan stage remains to be seen.

I wonder if Episode 5 will appear in retrospect to be the turning point of the story.  Will resolves each of the crises that were keeping him from his creative work.  He apologizes to Anne, tells her he wants them to be a family, but explains in the clearest terms that he will not return to Stratford to take up his father’s gloving trade.  He will provide a secure financial future for his family from London, while they remain in Stratford.

The crisis with Alice is resolved when she apologizes to him.  She owns that he had told her from the start that he was married.  She releases him as her lover but binds him even closer as her creative partner.  She intends to run the leading theater in England and needs him to scratch out the plays that will make that success possible.

Will has told Southwell that he is on his own from now on. He has told Topcliffe that he will not provide propaganda.  He has pled lack of talent but the real reason is a surfeit of talent, too much of it to waste on Topcliffe’s one-dimensional plans.  Southwell and Topcliffe as historical figures are on a collision course.  Ultimately, Southwell will die at Topcliffe’s hands.  It is my hope that in this story they will achieve their joint destiny without any further aid from Will.

The episode ends with a playbill being plastered to a wall announcing the play Henry VI by William Shakespeare, so it seems that for the moment, Mr. Shakespeare has climbed over every obstacle that was in the way of his life’s ambition when the episode began.  However, there are five more episodes still ahead.  I look forward to the new complications that the writers have in store.

[1] Believe it or not, there is a Wikipedia article on this nursery rhyme.  The Mary in the rhyme might be the Virgin Mary, or Mary, Queen of Scots, or Mary I (“Bloody Mary”), all of whom are Catholics (the Virgin Mary ex officio).  On any of these theories, it is a pro-Catholic nursery rhyme and therefore would be horrid to the ear of Richard Topcliffe.  The article also points out that there is no record of the rhyme any time prior to 1700, well more than a century past the events in this story.

[2] Because I can’t resist checking, I found that there is a Silver Street in London, far too distant from central London to be the place in question.  Silver Crescent, Silver Close, and Silver Road are also too far away. There is a Silver Place in Soho.  Topcliffe’s house was in Westminster.  Hard to believe that Will could have run to Soho in the time it took Topcliffe’s gang to mount their horses and ride there.