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.