The Associated Press reports that a man driving his car in Pierce County, Washington lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a tree in a single-vehicle accident.  He was carrying two passengers: a woman in the front seat and a three-year-old in the back.

Witnesses reported that they weren’t wearing any clothes.  I mean, witnesses reported that the two adults exited the car without clothes.  No, I mean witnesses reported that both of the adults were naked when they exited the car.  The police report that the driver was impaired and the couple were having sex as the driver attempted to drive.

Either of these conditions could cause a driver to lose control of a vehicle negotiating the dark roads of rural Pierce County, Washington.  But how did the couple think they were going to manage their rendezvous?  A driver behind the wheel of a car, even one who is intent on having sex with his front seat passenger, and even when both of them have already shed their clothing, would have to negotiate daunting physical and mechanical challenges.  When you consider that the car was moving, it’s a testament to the power of the forces that urge each species to reproduce.

What was the driver doing out on the road at all?  The AP reports that he has been convicted three times for driving under the influence.  How many traffic stops does it take to yield three convictions, and how many times has he driven in that condition without being stopped?  The fellow may have decided that mere drunk driving does not sufficiently test the limits of the judicial system’s willingness to jolly him along.

Was he driving his own car?  How do you buy insurance to maintain registration when you have three DUIs?  And if it wasn’t his car, who would lend a car to someone who is known to drive under the influence habitually?

But the most nagging question was raised by a statement from the police spokeswoman, Brooke Bova.  Quoting from the story:

Bova says the woman, who was also naked, was hospitalized with broken bones. Bova says her 3-month-old child in the back seat was uninjured.

What was the state patrol spokesperson’s child doing in the back seat of the car?

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”.

So far in this story we have witnessed the composition of two sonnets: No. 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) in the prior episode and No. 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) in this one.  Both of them were written after or during sessions of intense lovemaking with Alice.  By the end of Episode 6, Will has ended the relationship.  Consulting my copy of the Collected Works, I see that Mr. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets.  The way things were going with Alice before the break-up, Will would have been through 154 sonnets in a couple of weeks.  As it is, I don’t know where he is going to find the inspiration for the remaining poems.

Sonnet 29 was written for a fee.  Richard Burbage has his eye on a Moroccan princess and feels that a little poetry, when combined with his good looks, is all that is needed to close the deal.  She loves the poem, realizes that Richard didn’t write it – they must teach advanced literary criticism at Casablanca University – and wants to meet the man who did.

Writing the sonnet required Will to take time away from his next play.  He intends it to be a sequel to Henry VI, which has been a smash hit with a run of eight performances so far, but he can’t get going.  To tell the story of the sequel requires the audience to have experienced some of the drama that precedes the Henry VI currently on the stage.  Will is struggling to find a way around this problem when Alice suggests that he write the first part before trying to tackle the sequel.  She calls it a “prequel” so now we know that the term was coined four centuries before the Star Wars people thought of it.  It also explains why Henry VI, Part Two predates both Part One and Part Three.

In addition to the sonnet and Henry VI, Will is again working on a play for Topcliffe.  The assignment this time is to write something that will show Robert Southwell to be a hypocrite, a lecher, a pervert, whatever it takes to discredit him.  Topcliffe ensures Will’s cooperation by threatening to harm Will’s wife and children.  Their safety can be bought at the price of a play that will betray Will’s cousin, friend, and co-religionist.

Will may be able to avoid writing this play against his (pardon the expression) will due to a surprising twist in the plot.  The young fellow who stole the letter in the first episode has been recruited into the sex trade by his sister’s madam.  The madam beats the sister almost senseless until the lad agrees to go to work.  The boy is fitted out with a lovely dress and a wig and sent to wait in a lavishly appointed room until his first customer arrives.

The customer enters wearing a mask.  When he takes off the mask, we see that this first customer is none other than Richard Topcliffe.  The boy recognizes Topcliffe but Topcliffe appears to be so blinded by lust that he fails to recognize the boy.  The boy puts his knife-fighting skills to use and stabs Topcliffe three times.  He and his sister run away, but she dies in the course of the escape.

If Topcliffe is dead – something we don’t learn in this episode – it would save Will having to write an attack on Southwell’s character.  It would also remove one of the most thoroughly distasteful characters I have ever seen on a TV show.  The real Richard Topcliffe lived to 1604.  If the writers have elected to send him to the devil fifteen years ahead of schedule, they have my full approval.

But even if the projects that might have competed for Will’s attention with Henry VI, Part One are accounted for, Will’s personal life is in such a state that it’s hard to see how he will manage to write that next play.  First, his wife and children have extended their stay in London.  Anne wants to find a nice place for them all to live.  Second, the red-hot relationship with Alice that was off last week is back on this week.  Third, Anne doesn’t want just to live together with Will as a family.  She wants to share in his work, to experience his thoughts as he thinks them.  He tells her that he cannot easily speak his thoughts, which is why he has to write them.  This is a problem for Anne, who can’t read.

The mother of all complications comes to Will via Alice’s mother.  She and Mr. Burbage had arranged a nice marriage for Alice to a prosperous brewer.  In this episode, the brewer realizes that Alice doesn’t love him.  He has his pride.  He calls off the wedding.

Mrs. Burbage takes Will aside to explain how he is ruining Alice’s life.  He has to break things off, and in such a way that the relationship can never be restored.  He must be cruel to be kind, is how Mother Burbage puts it.  Will does what he has to do.  In fact, he overdoes it.  He blames Alice for seducing him and calls her a whore.  She leaves in tears, wounded.  He remains behind, also in tears.  Mrs. Burbage, knowing what has happened, is also crying.  A tough moment for all concerned.

The one bright spot is that Will’s life outside the theater starts to simplify.  The relationship with Alice has ended (it seems) and the relationship with Anne is put on a new footing.  She has seen Henry VI.  Like everyone else in the theater, she thought it was great.  She realizes that Will must remain in London and she must return to Stratford.  He will provide for his family but will not live with them.  As far as I know, the real Anne Shakespeare never traveled to London, but the arrangement that she and Will came to in this episode seems to be the one the Shakespeares reached in the 1580s.

At the end of the episode, Alice is in what looks like a country or possibly a suburban setting.  She is wearing a long gown and is standing near a body of water of some kind.  Is she going to throw herself into the water like Ophelia?  Not right away, for who should appear but Robert Southwell, who is likely to turn up anywhere.  In fact, for a man who is hunted as Robert is, he spends a surprising amount of time out in the open, in streets and fields.  He expresses sympathy for Alice’s problems with his cousin Will.  I ask – is this the future Saint Robert Southwell, come to soothe the aching soul of a heartbroken young woman, or is this possibly Robert Southwell in his pre-beatified flesh, seeking to receive comfort as well as to give it?

We shall see.  In the meantime, I await the next sonnet.  I make no prediction, but I won’t be shocked if the Moroccan princess has something to do with it.

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.

I learned a couple of days ago that the City of Seattle has a service that allows citizens to use an app to notify the city about potholes or other defects in city rights-of-way.  A neighbor and a delivery person had both told my wife that there was a deep hole in the parking strip adjacent to our street, possibly dug by a mole or other critter.  One of my network-connected children fired up the app and reported the problem to the city.  The city’s goal is to respond within 48 hours.

When another problem involving public rights-of-way emerged in my neighborhood this morning, I put the city’s responsive, customer-oriented attitude to the test.  My house is very near to an Olmsted-designed park that the City of Seattle has allowed to decay. Between the western edge of the park and the abutting street, the city has installed an attractive sidewalk that separates the park from the community arterial that traces a gentle curve along the top of the ridge from which the park descends to Lake Washington.

This morning, there was a shopping cart loaded with goods sitting on the sidewalk.  Next to it, lying on the pavement was a person with a blanket over his head.

I was on the opposite side of the street dealing with a dead car battery.  After ten minutes, I saw no movement from across the way.  Several walkers and joggers had passed by as had many cars.  There had been enough activity to disturb a responsive individual.  I decided to call 9-1-1.

The difference between the way the city responds to a pothole – damage to public property – and a person sleeping on the sidewalk – using public property for an improper purpose – was eye-opening.

The 9-1-1 operator gave me two choices.  If I thought the individual was putting himself or others at risk, she would connect me to the police.  I had no intention of swearing out a complaint because someone was sleeping on the sidewalk.  My other option was to talk to a medical response unit.  However, she warned me, they would send someone out only if I told them that I was witnessing a medical emergency.  I was not prepared to make a medical evaluation of a person lying immobile on the other side of a public street.

I told the 9-1-1 people that I felt I had done my part by alerting them to the issue.  I would leave any further action to them.  Their response made it clear that no further action was going to take place.  While I was talking to them, the fellow’s foot twitched, so I knew that he had cheated death, even if my car battery hadn’t.  Later, my temporary neighbor got up and walked away with his cart.

In 2005, the City of Seattle and King County made a solemn pledge to end homelessness within ten years.  In the fall of 2015, at the end of the ten years, the City declared homelessness to be a state of emergency.  Eighteen months later, the number of homeless counted in a one-night census – not necessarily reliable – had gone up by some 20%.

Clearly the City of Seattle has no idea how to improve this condition, let alone end it.  This is not to their shame.  I don’t know anyone who has a solution to the problem.  Seattle’s mayor famously said some months ago “We are literally making this up as we go along.”  One difference between those of us who know we don’t know and the city is that we are not demanding to be paid significant sums of money while standing in front of armed collection agents.  I don’t value my ignorance above its true worth.  I don’t think my good intentions entitle me to take anything from anyone else.

My experience trying to engage the city in addressing one homeless individual gets multiplied hundreds, then thousands of times.  Doubtless, many others have had the same response.  I won’t bother calling next time.  Meanwhile, the city has enacted an income tax to help it better address the problem of homelessness.  When the funds start pouring in, someone should tell 9-1-1.

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.

My good friend David Hval died on July 4 at the age of 70.  We first met when we were college freshmen in the fall of 1964.  We were assigned to different rooms on the same long corridor on the third floor of a dorm.

David soon became the leader of a crew of troublemakers known as the DV5.  (The Dave Clark Quintet was a British band that came to the U.S. after the Beatles.  They changed their name to the DC5 when they learned that no one knew what a quintet was.  Their name inspired the Hval gang.)

Their rivals on the floor were a group named Dirt, Incorporated.  As a taunt, the DV5 would sing “Stronger than Dirt,” which were the words to a jingle connected to Ajax cleaning products.  The two groups played practical jokes on each other to keep themselves and the rest of us entertained.

The two gangs would call a truce from time to time to carry out work that neither of them cared to do separately.  It was here that David could put his spectacular athletic talent to use.  David never participated in sports.  He wouldn’t have wanted to engage in an activity bounded by rules, coaching, or competition.  But his athletic freelancing outside of sports was impressive.

The third floor of a dorm presents challenges if you want to haul a lot of beer from ground level.  You can carry it, but you might get caught (and have to share).  Anyway, who wants to carry a lot of beer up two winding staircases?  People go to college so that they don’t have to do that kind of grunt work.

The far end of the dorm, the end away from where the RAs were housed, had a small elevator, a dumb waiter, for carrying cleaning supplies and the like.  Unfortunately, it could not be operated without a key.  David solved that problem.  With complete ease, he climbed a three-story high drain pipe, hoisted himself onto the roof, and figured out how to work the dumb waiter’s key override.  The two gangs’ beer could flow uphill without further trouble.

Sometimes a truce was more spontaneous.  Someone would crank up a record player and play “Wipeout” at full volume.  Someone else would yell “Surf’s Up!”  The two rival gangs would instantly join forces and flood the hallway with soapy water.  The individual rooms had doorsills so nothing more than a few towels at the end of the corridor was needed to keep the floor well lubed.  The game was on to see who could surf the farthest in bare feet without wiping out.  I understand that the college authorities tried to prohibit this activity.  Why would anyone object to soap and water?

We knew some people in common, found the same things funny, and became friends.  We stayed in touch after college.  I would occasionally visit him and his then-wife in the town of Brockton, Massachusetts.  They later moved to Mystic, Connecticut, where their daughter was born.  By that time, I was married myself.  Margy and I arranged to visit the new member of the Hval clan shortly after she was born.

When we got there, the house was empty.  There was no sign of them.  I knew the woman next door – she was known as Gramma Durphy – well enough to say hello.  I asked her where David and his family had gone.  Gramma Durphy was a woman whose mind entertained only a limited range of subjects.  She was a superb baker, but she baked only one thing – white bread.  David told me that he once asked her how to make rye bread.  She said she had no idea and invited him to try a slice of her white bread.

That same one-track mind was at work when we asked Gramma D what happened to Dave, wife, and child.  She told us that there had been a falling out with the landlady – Dave’s mother-in-law – and invited us in to have some bread.

I’m proud to say that we tracked them down.  This was 1972.  There were no cell phones, no internet, nothing.  The Dark Ages.  We figured that they had to be camping somewhere.  We used a pay phone – everyone carried change in those days in case you had to make a call – and got hold of a (maybe the) helpful person in the Connecticut State Parks system.  It was a slow time of year – October if I recall correctly – and Hval is an unusual name (outside of Norway), so he was able to locate them.  We bought some supplies for them and less than an hour later, we pulled into their campsite.

I can still see the look on David’s face.  He was on alert at first – who is pulling into my campsite?  Then he was relieved when he saw it was us.  Then he broke into a huge smile, something he didn’t often do.

We were friends for life, but with very little in common.  Different skills, different interests, diametrically opposed political views, differing goals in life.  None of that mattered.  Whenever we got together, we started a new and interesting conversation.  The frequency of those conversations diminished as time went by but not the quality.

At some point, he and his wife divorced and he connected with another woman (I don’t want to use the names of living individuals).  The same spirit of adventure that launched a college freshman to the roof of a three-story building was still alive.  They worked for Greenpeace for a while, whether as employees or volunteers I don’t know.  They sailed in a Greenpeace ship (forget the name) as true believers. After that, they spent some time coasting in Spain, earning money by doing odd jobs.  David never studied Spanish that I know of, but he was able to conduct business in Spanish with native speakers.

They had four children together, three boys who are fairly close in age and a daughter who is several years younger.  They returned to the U.S. and settled in Kerhonkson, New York, a small town in the Catskills, also known as the Jewish Alps.  (Just think about how many of the great comedians got their start only a few miles from David’s house.  Henny Youngman: The Doctor says, “You’ll live to be 60!”  “I AM 60!” “See, what did I tell you?”)

Our family was on an east coast trip and we stopped by to visit overnight shortly after they moved in.  They had indoor plumbing – I remember that very well – but no indoor facilities for cooking.  The stove was a circle of rocks in the back yard surrounding a wood fire with a metal grate on top.  At our next visit, the kitchen had been fitted out with an antique gas stove that must have come from a restaurant, or maybe a soup kitchen.  It was the size of a small room.

Dave had excellent cabinetmaking and wood-working skills.  At one point, we wrote to tell him that we had bought a house.  (This would be about 1977.)  He sent a package in reply.  The note inside congratulated us on buying a horse, but gently suggested that it was long past time for us to consider settling down and buying a house instead.  He included a hand-carved spatula with a beautiful serpentine handle as a way of encouraging us to take that bold step.

Dave ran a small business where he used his fine woodworking skills to help remodel houses.  His work exposed him to a lot of people in the area.  He developed a wide range of acquaintances notwithstanding his serious and taciturn demeanor. (Not to stereotype the people of Norway, but it’s not a huge surprise that a person named Hval would present these characteristics).

One of those acquaintances was Pete Seeger, the folk singer, composer and instrumentalist.  Seeger greatly admired David.  David – never one to brag about himself – proudly reported that Seeger had told him that it was a lucky day for their valley when David moved into it.  Dave enjoyed having the approval of such a well-known and widely admired person.

Seeger died in 2014 at the age of 94.  By then, David had been diagnosed with cancer.  His symptoms had baffled the local doctor.  David had worked on the house of someone who knew a prominent oncologist at Sloane Kettering in New York.  She bought him a couple of extra years through an aggressive course of treatment.  The disease seemed to be at bay.

Margy and I visited him shortly after he got back from “cancer camp” as he called it.  When we got there, we saw no one in front but heard activity in the back.  There was an old guy working with a younger guy to load some wood into a truck.  I couldn’t figure out who the old guy was until I saw that smile again and saw it was David.  Cancer and chemo had taken a horrific toll, but he was the same David.  Grizzled, run over by something powerful and bad-tempered, but the same guy, looking at life the same way.

His birthday is also our wedding anniversary.  I sent an email last December to congratulate him on reaching 70 and to mention that we were celebrating our 45^th anniversary.  He wrote back to say that Margy and I must be getting used to each other by now.

He would send some writing every now and again.  He mostly retold his adventures over the years, profiled interesting people he had met, that kind of thing.  I loved reading about his travels and asked for more.  I hope he got a lot more down on paper, but I have probably seen as much of the Collected Works of David Hval as I am going to.

By the fall of 2016, cancer had resumed its attack.  Our last few exchanges related to an incident where David had damaged some property and was looking for a way to make things up to the other person.  I had just come into a collection of pie recipes, a free add-on to the purchase of some oven mitts.  I suggested that the gift of a home-made pie would probably set things right.  Dave asked me to send a recipe.  This got tricky because the author of the collection warns that any transmission of her recipes is a violation of international copyright laws carrying a minimum fine – a minimum – of $150,000.

This put us both in a tight spot, but he got his recipe.  The pie dough is made using lard and David was able to get his hands on ten pounds of lard from a recently slaughtered pig just a few miles away.  They say that when you need the lard, you find the pig.  I hope the pie turned out well and that the gift of food solved the little problem that Dave had caused.

The last thing he wrote to me was that he was about to start an experimental treatment.  Apart from my wife, children, and grandchildren, there is no one on earth to whom I feel as close a bond.

David Hval. December 19, 1946 – July 4, 2017.

My household runs a significant deficit with our two principal trading partners: Amazon and the neighborhood supermarket.  On a smaller scale, we run a chronic trade deficit with Seattle City Light, a government agency that supplies electrical power.

Unlike my principal trading partners, City Light sends a letter every couple of months telling me how much of their product – electrical power — I am using compared to my “average” neighbors and my “efficient” neighbors.

City Light is not subtle.  They want me to reduce my consumption of electrical power.  Their letter underscores how much my use exceeds my neighbors’.  It points out how much money I could save by being as thrifty as even my average neighbors, let alone the efficient ones.

If you care to know, my average neighbors – average in their use of electricity, extraordinary in every other way in my opinion – spend $476 a year less than I do on electricity on their home power bill.  That comes to about $1.30 a day.  It’s worth $1.30 a day to me not to have to think about how to save it.

These so-called average neighbors – they’re special to me no matter what City Light says about them – might use more electricity than at first appears.  If you wash and dry your clothes at a laundromat or if you send them out to a cleaner, you’re using electricity, but it’s not on your household utility bill.  Same if you eat a lot of meals out, drink your beer in a bar, buy your ice at a convenience store, and so on.

Methodological problems aside, it’s a strange message from a seller.  Why does City Light want me to use less of what they sell?  When I wheel my cart to the checkout at QFC, they don’t tell me that I am spending more than my neighbors.  They never give me tips on how I might get by with less food.  Nor does Amazon encourage me to use smaller quantities of the countless items they have on offer.

I think the difference is that City Light is politically constrained in its ability to acquire new sources of power.  It must be difficult for them to expand their supply.  A proposal to acquire power from a facility that burns fossil fuels would cause audible retching in City Hall.  Hydropower or nuclear power?  A game farm where customers can shoot baby panda bears for sport would have a better chance of gaining approval.

There is also a political constraint on prices.  Amazon, QFC, and my other mutually voluntary trading partners offer goods and services at prices I can take or leave, but they are prices that they know they can live with if I take them.  If their prices are too low, they may run out of stock quickly without sufficient return to justify restocking.  If their prices are too high, inventory will sit on the shelf.  They have to get the pricing right.  They have stayed in business for a considerable time, so it appears that they have acquired this skill.

City Light’s pricing, like their supply, is subject to political discipline.  The price of electricity has to be “affordable” which means that it is almost certainly too low to dampen demand to the level that would allow City Light to avoid worrying about constraints on supply.  They can’t raise prices without bringing pitchforks into the street, so they have to use moral suasion to control consumption.  I don’t think it’s an effective tool.

I would give more respect to their plea that I use less power if they would level with me about these issues.  Cheap plentiful electrical power is one of the keys to the spectacular lifestyle that modern Americans enjoy.  The average American in our time enjoys more convenience at the push of a button than a member of the highest stratum of the Roman Empire or the British Empire could have imagined – to name two civilizations whose influence in the world of their time compares to ours.  I can’t help it that the purveyors of electrical power and those who regulate them value their product so far below its true worth.

But it’s beneath their dignity and that of their customers to use some weak brew of guilt and shame to try to alter the behavior of their customers.  Anyone who grew up hearing parents ask “Why can’t you be more like your [fill in the blank – brother, sister, cousin, neighbor, friend]?” will, by the time he or she is old enough to pay his or her own electric bill, be immune to a plea to be more like one’s “average” neighbors.