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?