In reviewing Episode 1, I worried that Will was exposing the beautiful Alice Burbage to torture at the hands of the fiend Richard Topcliffe.  Will created that danger for Alice by telling her that he was a catholic.  Topcliffe acquires information by torturing it out of those who have it.  Will exposed Alice to that risk, but she managed to stay out of Topcliffe’s iron embrace for eight episodes, a good run.

She ends up in Topcliffe’s torture chamber in Episode 9 because of her own actions.  She has become a devotee of Robert Southwell’s brand of Catholicism.  He and a large group of his followers are gathering for prayer and in particular to baptize Alice[1].  One of their number has betrayed the location to Topcliffe in the hope of saving his son, then suffering Topcliffe’s tortures.

The raid comes right in the middle of the baptism itself.  Everyone escapes except Alice.  The next time we see her, she is hanging in irons and Topcliffe is about to go to work on her.  Topcliffe orders his minions to strip her.

As this show has progressed, I have developed the habit of putting my finger on the fast forward button on my remote whenever Topcliffe has a prisoner under his control.  The scenes often become too grisly for me.  I admire Olivia Dejonge’s piercing beauty, and had no desire to see her character degraded.  I was ready to skip to the next scene, but fortunately, this particular Topcliffe-hanger was resolved before that became necessary.

This show runs for ten episodes, so the writers at this point had only about one and a half episodes in which to solve the problems of getting Alice out of danger, getting Topcliffe out of the way, and setting Shakespeare on the path to greatness.  The course they chose required a thick slice of credulity from the viewers.  I decided to suspend disbelief, disengage any critical faculties, and let the writers and actors get on with it.

Christopher Marlowe was present at the baptism ceremony.  He has been staying with Southwell, possibly because he is seeking spiritual advice but also possibly because he is a secret agent of the Crown.  He and Francis Walsingham – the Queen’s spymaster and trusted advisor – enter Topcliffe’s house just as Alice is about to be degraded.  They tell Topcliffe that Alice was part of an undercover operation.  They want her released.  She foils their plan by refusing to play along.  Walsingham realizes that he is on thin ice.  He demands that Topcliffe either charge or release Alice but insists that he must stop torturing her.  Incidentally, this was a rare example of the writers taking liberties with historical fact.  Walsingham died in 1590, while every indication in the story is that we are nearing the end of 1592.

After they leave, Topcliffe ignores Walsingham’s order and continues to torture Alice.  She tells him that she forgives him, but that only enrages him more.  At this point, the fictional account of the early professional career of the greatest writer in the English language uses the hackneyed vehicle of an extended chase scene to move the story to its climax.  Will goes to Topcliffe’s house, persuades one of Topcliffe’s henchmen to allow him to take Alice away.  He carries her out of the house unconscious in his arms but minutes later Topcliffe and his minions are on horseback chasing the two of them.  They are assisted by vicious dogs who have Alice’s scent.

Naturally, Will is able to overcome these difficulties – there is an extended scene where he dodges behind workbenches in a slaughterhouse while carrying Alice in his arms — and deliver Alice back to the Burbage household.  Topcliffe and his men are searching everywhere for the “Catholic whore” but it seems they failed to take down her name when they had her in custody, so no one bothers to check the Burbage house.  She was a known associate of “Master Shakespeare” but no one tries to find him, either.  When you are trying to escape from evil SOBs, it’s better to be lucky than good.

Will, the Burbages, and the rest of the theater company realize that their only hope is to bring down the tyrant Topcliffe and the only way to do that is through a play.  Will has finished Richard III and persuades the company that the audience in the theater will immediately realize that the evil Richard in the play is really Richard Topcliffe.

The text is brilliantly written, the production is ready to go, but there is a problem over at central casting.  Richard Burbage would be perfect as Richard III, but he won’t take the stage.  When we last saw him at the end of Episode 8, Richard had entered a plague house and tended his friend and his friend’s lover through the bout of plague that will kill them both.  In Episode 9, he emerges from the house a changed man.  He has retained his exquisite face and form, but his spirit has been dimmed by the horrors he has witnessed.

We spend a lot of time watching Richard’s progress toward the inevitable.  At first, he refuses to have anything to do with the theater, then he settles in on the fringes of the company.  He rejects the part of Richard III, and finally, after he has agreed to perform but just before he is to premier the role on stage, he presents the worst bout of stage fright ever witnessed.  It’s fortunate that there was a bucket backstage for him to lean over.  Even better that it was a large bucket.

There have been millions of people who have seen Richard III acted on the stage or on screen or who have read the play.  Probably all or nearly all of them thought it was a play about . . . King Richard III, his evil scheming ways, and his ultimate replacement on the throne by Henry Tudor, the grandfather of the Queen who reigned at the time the play was written.

However, in this story, Will and the actors intend it to be a cipher play.  It is really about Richard Topcliffe, who was in the audience for that first performance, lured there by Will himself.  Thus, in this story Will is the founder of a thesis – the notion that Shakespeare’s works are really ciphers containing coded messages about events taking place at Elizabeth’s court (because the author is imagined to be someone other than the man from Stratford, someone working inside the government) or, at times, messages about the true authorship of the works.  This conceit has resulted in the publication of numerous books and pamphlets over the years using the forms of logic and reason to pound home the authors’ case.  One devotee of this theory built a giant “cipher wheel” that automatically decoded Shakespeare’s texts as it turned.[2]

After devoting pages to a study of these cryptanalysts, many of whom teetered on the edge of insanity, Samuel Schoenbaum says “Surely it is madness – if madness in reason – to believe that the hilarity of Falstaff, the agony of Othello, and the rage of Lear serve merely the puerile requirements of a game of words or numbers telling an impossible tale of courtly intrigue, conveying signatures or broken fragments of thought.”  And he asks rhetorically:

For this, the poet’s vision, the playwright’s craft?  For this the tangled skeins of metaphor, one figure melting before full realization into the next . . .?  For this the lyricism of Romeo and Juliet, the ripeness of Antony and Cleopatra?

To which the Shakespeare of Will can answer, “Yes, exactly for this, to keep our necks out of the noose; to keep our entrails neatly contained in the vessels of our skins.”

And what is more, the audience at that first production bought it.  The rest of us may think the play is a celebration of the victory of the wholesome Tudors over the vile Richard.  The first audience knew what the play was really about.  By the end of the play, Topcliffe is in disgrace.

With Topcliffe out of the way, the story can glide to a pleasant close.  Marlowe has finished Dr. Faustus.  With the soul-wrenching work out of the way, he can re-establish relations with his lover, the handsome fellow who served in Topcliffe’s troop.  Let us hope they enjoy their remaining time together.  Marlowe’s play was entered onto the Stationer’s Register in December 1592.  He died on May 30, 1593, stabbed in the eye by a man with whom, it seems, he argued over a tavern bill.

Before he re-unites with his lover, Marlowe asks Will what he is working on for his next play.  Will merely shrugs and ascends the stairs to his room, but I had the sense that Will is having a reckoning of his own.  He is beginning to appreciate the depth of his talent.  No point telling the competition what to expect.

In the final moment of the story, Will opens a letter left for him by Alice.  She tells him how much she loves him but also how she must leave him to pursue her own future in her church.  The final shot shows the three-masted ship in which she is sailing, heading away from us, into deep waters.  It’s a fitting metaphor for the journey that Shakespeare will take for the next twenty years.

[1] Wouldn’t she have been baptized shortly after she was born?  Does a person have to be separately baptized to move from Church of England to the Roman Catholic Church?  I know there are sects that believe that the only baptism that counts is the “full immersion” type.  However, neither CoE nor RCC requires that.  If any reader knows whether it is customary to be re-baptized when converting to Catholicism from another Christian faith, I would be interested to learn the details.

[2] A much more modest thesis is advanced by those who believe that the plays were written by the Earl of Oxford.  His name was Edward DeVere.  And sure enough, there is a sonnet (number 76) attributed to Shakespeare that contains the lines:  That every word doth almost tell my name//Showing their birth, and where they did proceed .  Surely this is the true author calling out to us – “Every word” – “DeVere” – what could be more obvious?

 But then, what to make of Sonnet 135:  So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will//One will of mine, to make thy large will more.// Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;// Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Is it possible that the author of this poem is named Will?

After being away from this show for nearly a month, I caught up on two episodes last night.  My initial hope was that Topcliffe had died while I was away, but I should have known that evil SOBs like him don’t die for the convenience of the audience.  He is still alive, full of zeal worthy of a better man.

Also, in reviewing Episode 6, I forgot to mention that the youth for whom Topcliffe lusted returned to Burbage’s theater (after stabbing Topcliffe) and, in his despair over the loss of his sister, set the place on fire.  Without a way to offer entertainment to the public, Burbage cannot operate his business. As Episode 7 opens, Burbage is ruined for about the third time in this story.

Things are looking very dark.  His creditors plan to send him to debtor’s prison for the rest of his life.  His business rival Philip Henslowe is also, we learn, his rival in love.  Henslowe visits Burbage to tell him that Mrs. Burbage will receive his special attention while Burbage rots in prison.

Will realizes that for the sake of his own career he must do something to alleviate Burbage’s financial problems.  He visits the Moroccan princess who had enchanted Richard Burbage.  He hopes she can help but it turns out that she has far less influence than we had been led to believe.  However, when Will arrives she is entertaining a visitor –  a wealthy elderly nobleman who is trying to win the hand of a willful Italian beauty half his age.  He and Will strike a bargain.  If Will can put on a play that softens the Italian’s heart to the point that she will accept a proposal of marriage, the noble fellow will pay a purse that will settle Burbage’s finances.  But not otherwise.

Will goes to work.  We see very little of the play; we do hear Will’s description of the plot. The work that he throws together seems to be a protean version of Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It.  The time to pick apart the various threads of his story to develop the individual works will come in time.  For now, the only thing that matters is that the Italian beauty accepts the old fellow’s proposal of marriage.  She does.  Will is able to carry a purse full of gold to Burbage just as his loan is about to be foreclosed.  The show will go on.

So much for the elements of the plot – seduction, romance, the cliffhanger avoidance of disaster – that bear some resemblance to conventional story-telling.  Other sub-plots range from the exotic to the bizarre.

To start with the least strange of these, Will decides that he would like to re-establish his connection with Alice.  Possibly a Platonic relationship, at least for starters.  Here’s a tip for you young fellows.  After you tell a woman you have slept with that she is a slut and a whore, she is unlikely to respond positively when you tell her you hope that the two of you can be friends.  It’s good information to tuck away.

While Will has been trying to make things up with Alice, she is being seduced in a different way by Robert Southwell.  I thought last time that he had an earth-bound relationship in mind.  I misjudged him.  He really is a saint.  He seduces her into the service of his church.  There is some kind of Catholic conspiracy afoot involving the use of coded messages to facilitate the transfer of sealed letters to secret destinations within England.  Alice enlists in this effort.

Nothing could be more dangerous.  Topcliffe is closing in on Southwell and will martyr everyone he can lay his hands on in the process.  For his part, Southwell is unconcerned with the number of martyrs that he leaves in his wake.  Will argues to Southwell that he is a hypocrite to allow so many of his followers to be crushed by Topcliffe while Southwell himself remains in hiding.  Neither Southwell nor any of his followers are moved by such arguments.

While all of this is going on, Topcliffe breaks a man in possession of critical information.  Topcliffe now proceeds to round up dozens of crypto-Catholics, to smash Southwell’s press, and to destroy his printed work.  He still wants to find some important manuscripts.

Meanwhile, Christopher Marlowe descends into realms stranger than anything we have yet seen, which is saying something.  His first love, an older man, has died in Christopher’s house.  The body has remained in Christopher’s bed since the end of Episode 5, so is becoming somewhat ripe.  Christopher has visions, hallucinations.  He wants to find out if the devil is real.  He engages in a witch’s coven.  He taunts an Elizabethan skinhead into beating him senseless. He is working himself up to write Doctor Faustus.

The Marlowe in this story writes therapeutically.  He is trying to solve a metaphysical puzzle that has been set by his own atheism.  He doesn’t believe in God, but he cannot find meaning without God.  As a result, he dances on the cliff-edge of sanity.  A philosopher would have avoided the histrionics but would not have produced the drama, either on or off the page.

In his torment, Marlowe says something interesting to Shakespeare.  He tells Will that what makes Shakespeare great is his faith.  I have no claim to be a scholar, but as someone who has dabbled in these works since reading Julius Caesar in high school, I can say that thought has never occurred to me.  No one could have created so many memorable characters without having an innate understanding of human nature, augmented by keen observation.  To plant in the heads of his audience the precise thought that he had four centuries earlier requires a clarity, a distillation of mind beyond the understanding of us mere mortals.  But to attribute any of these gifts to his religious beliefs?  I don’t see it.

Until these episodes, I thought that making Will a Catholic and working England’s religious and political settlement under the Tudors into the story was a plot device to take up the slack that would otherwise be left by a tale about a writer, however gifted, and his quill.  Perhaps the writers have been grinding an axe while they have Will play at sharpening his pen.

Richard Burbage adds his own strange element to these episodes.  Until now, Richard has been the id of this story.  His spectacular good looks bring him within the orbit of any number of attractive women, after which nature takes its course (usually).  As an aside, there is one hilarious moment when the crew is getting ready to put on the play that will result in the engaement of the young Italian beauty.  Richard’s costume is a codpiece and nothing else.  The Italian woman gets him alone and is obviously interested.  Richard realizes that if he were to do what he usually does, the play will not have the desired effect.  So, he runs away.  The young Italian shouts after him: “You English are all faggots!”  Old stereotypes are funnier than new ones.

Richard’s philandering leads to another bizarre plot twist.  In the course of one of his everyday seductions, Richard needs the help of his wingman, an old school mate and fellow actor, to separate Richard’s intended from her female companion.  It turns out that the wingman and the companion have an interest in common – bird calling – and fall in love after a formal courtship.

Unfortunately, the wingman and the companion both develop the plague.  They decide to die together in a house that is about to be shut by the authorities.  The bizarre plot twist is that Richard decides he must be shut up in the house with them.  The fellow is his oldest friend and in a sudden onset of responsibility, Richard determines that he will stay with his old friend to the end.  The real Richard Burbage lived to 1619, nearly 30 years after the time of this story, so I don’t think the writers can kill the fellow off.  It is possible that when he emerges from the plague-infested house he will be less pretty but more serious.  The real Richard Burbage was among the greatest actors of his time.  The fellow in this story has not yet shown that potential.  Perhaps the crucible of disease and death will produce gold.

Finally, Will realizes that he must do what he can to bring down the evil Richard Topcliffe.  He decides to write a play to expose him as a hypocritical, sadistic fanatic.  (Will knows about Topcliffe’s taste for boys dressed as girls.)  Will interviews Topcliffe, taking notes as he goes.  Topcliffe generates quite a few lines that the real William Shakespeare put to good use.  A great writer cannot afford to be picky about where he finds his material.

Still, Will cannot quite make the attack on Topcliffe work.  The material is too contemporary and therefore too dangerous.  Topcliffe is a man on the way up and he can have anyone tortured and killed who gets in his way.

And then Will has an inspired idea.  The play won’t be about Richard Topcliffe, but about a different Richard – Richard the Third, the last Yorkist king, who was defeated in battle by Henry Tudor, who took the crown from the evil Richard – scheming, misshapen, — Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them . . ..

But here is another irony.  Topcliffe is not only fanatically anti-Catholic.  He is the most slavishly loyal subject that Queen Elizabeth had.  And now, to send him up and to expose him to the world, Shakespeare will write a play around one of the most intriguing characters in the Canon, showing the heroic and saintly Henry Tudor (he should live so long), Elizabeth’s grandfather, as the man who saved England from the villainous and treacherous remnant of the House of York.  If his purpose was to throw down Topcliffe, he succeeded instead in romanticizing the dynasty that produced Topcliffe’s idol.

The plague closed the London theaters in 1593.  Shakespeare’s Richard III and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus may date from that year.  The writers have not stretched things as far as dates are concerned, so it appears that nearly four story years have gone by since Will arrived in London in Episode 1.  With the theaters closed, I suppose we must prepare ourselves to see Mr. Burbage ruined once again.  We’re used to it by now and I bet he is too.  1593 was an eventful year for Christopher Marlowe, as well.

The county court house in Seattle is located at the south end of downtown.  It is situated next to a park that has long been a place where people who live on the street pass their time.  As Seattle’s homeless population has grown in recent years, the demand for open air living space has exceeded the park’s capacity.  As the number of full-time residents living without sanitation has increased, human waste that would otherwise have entered the sanitary sewer system has found its way onto the public sidewalks that provide access to the courthouse.

Two judges have complained vocally.  There are reports that some jurors try to avoid service at the courthouse because of odors and other conditions related to health and safety.  The sheriff is asking for funds to hose down the affected sidewalks to reduce odors, if not improve sanitation.

I saw a report that a member of the County Council – an elected official – has complained that the use of hoses is inappropriate.  He recalls that water cannon were deployed against peaceful marchers during the civil rights movement, back in the 1960s.  He fears that the use of high-power hoses on the courthouse sidewalk would trigger painful emotional reactions to people sympathetic to the victims of those oppressive actions by governments decades ago.

I won’t repeat the name of the council member because the views attributed to him might be a hoax.  There is no point in adding to his unnecessary embarrassment.  However, if the story is true, I can imagine a future news item along these lines:

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON.  Property insurers in King County, Washington report that 23 homes have burned to the ground during the past month as firefighters looked on due to a policy newly mandated by the King County Council.  Fearing that the use of high pressure hoses would trigger memories of actions by southern law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators during the civil rights era, the council adopted a policy requiring fire fighters to consult with property owners prior to employing such hoses to fight residential fires.

Firefighters report that they cannot obtain homeowner consent in situations where the homeowner is absent or has been taken to a hospital with injuries sustained in a fire.  The result has been that 23 homes have burned while crews search for a homeowner who can assure firefighters that the owner is prepared to accept the risk that the use of hoses will trigger memories of some of this country’s most regrettable events.

A spokesperson for the Association of King County Fire Districts and Departments stated that any new policy requires a period of breaking in as fire crews adjust to a new routine.  She also noted that more than 99% of residential structures in the county remain in a safe and habitable condition.

County Council members claim that their action was intended to be advisory only and have denied that the policy is responsible for the loss of property due to fire.

The Firefighters National Brotherhood has pointed out that seven firefighters and a local fire department have been sued by homeowners for failing to obtain consent before using high pressure hoses.  An association of trial lawyers emphasizes that there are many ways of fighting a fire that don’t involve the use of “risky” high pressure hoses.  The state Insurance Commissioner says her office will not approve any request by insurers for rate increases based on losses following adoption of “common sense restrictions on the use of these psychologically hazardous relics of the past”.