The outrage over the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border was delayed – some of the triggering photos were more than three years old and were taken during the previous administration. In defense of the protestors, you can’t take action against a policy that you don’t know about, and the news media had taken an interest in the story only recently.  The opposition was heartfelt even if late.

Minor children who arrive at the southern border in the company of an adult create a problem for an administration that intends to enforce the law.  A consent decree dating from 1997 (the “Flores settlement”) says that children in this situation cannot be kept in custody for more than 20 days.  When the adult claims a right to asylum, the problem is compounded.  It takes a lot longer than 20 days to process an application for asylum.

What is a problem for the administration is an opportunity for its opponents.  The photos and video of children wrapped in foil blankets, being processed in facilities walled with chain-link fence, or crying for their mothers forced the administration to change course.  The age of the photos and their provenance were less important than their impact.

The photo that made the cover of Time magazine tells the story.  The crying child was not alone.  She was set down by her mother so that the mother could be processed.  The two were not separated.  The iconic photo misled Time’s readers. In fact, the mother had left three other children behind in Guatemala.  Her husband, gainfully employed, reports that his wife has always dreamed of living in the U.S.  This was the second time she had been caught trying to enter the country illegally.  Her claim for asylum is not well founded.

Time stood by the photo.  They might as well have said out loud that the purpose of the cover was not to present news but to influence policy.

The gambit worked. The president quickly changed course and allowed children to stay with their parents. Despite his self-proclaimed skill as a negotiator, he seems to be influenced more by the last thing he sees or hears than by any firmly held strategic plan (except when it comes to free trade, where he holds fast against it).

I had been wondering how the administration would finesse the problem in its new form.  How would they keep families together, adhere to the Flores settlement, and enforce the law on entry into the country? Twenty days is not a long time to wait to find out how they would square the circle.

I thought they might argue that minor children united with their parents in a detention facility are not being detained.  After the 20-day holding period is over, minor children in that situation could be considered visitors.  They would be free to leave if another family member, lawfully resident in the U.S., would take them and if their parents agreed.  But for as long as the parent agreed to have the child remain a visitor in the facility, parent and child would be free to remain together.

I don’t know if the administration would have used that argument or if it would have succeeded if challenged.  The question may no longer be in play after the latest court decision on the subject.  The president’s opponents may have accomplished more than they intended.

Opposition to the policy on reunification has led to an attack on enforcement itself.  The opponents of the president’s policy were not satisfied with the executive order reuniting parents and children.  The thousands who marched this past weekend did so after the president changed course and allowed reunification.  Last week, the ACLU obtained a court order requiring children under 5 to be reunited with their parents within 14 days and other minor children to be reunited within 30 days.

Why press for legal relief when you have already won politically?  Could the objective be to achieve the suspension of immigration enforcement at the border?  The judge did not order families to be released from custody.  He does not have the authority to do so (but that may not matter if the case comes before him again).  I think the judge and the ACLU have solved the administration’s immediate problem.  If children and parents are to be kept together in detention centers, it will be pursuant to the judge’s order rather than in violation of the Flores settlement.  Implementing the Flores agreement – removing the children from the detention center after 20 days – would contravene the order in the ACLU litigation. The ACLU is running a TV ad touting their victory over the Trump administration.  They may have succeeded in helping to overturn the Flores settlement, something the administration might not have been able to accomplish any other way.

It has been three years since the calamity of Super Bowl 49 (or XLIX if you insist) passed before the unbelieving eyes of Seattle Seahawks fans.  Time dulls the pain but does not erase it.  The Seahawks’ final offensive play of the game – a Russell Wilson pass intercepted by Malcom Butler at the goal line – is what twists the knife, but the wound had already been inflicted.

The Seahawks had the best defense in the NFL that year.  Some thought it was the best defense in the history of the league, although fans of the 1970s Steelers or 1980s Bears might disagree.  Entering the fourth quarter of that game, the Seahawks had a ten-point lead.  In the 48 previous Super Bowls, no team had ever come back from a fourth quarter deficit of ten points or more.

The Patriots erased that deficit against the best defense in the NFL and took the lead.  Even after that, in the final minute Seattle had the ball a yard away from the New England goal line with enough time left to pull off a miracle of their own.

Instead of giving the ball to a premier running back, Marshawn Lynch, they threw a pass that was intercepted at the goal line.  Suppose you were the manager of a baseball team down a run in the bottom of the ninth inning with two outs, the bases loaded, and Barry Bonds at the plate.  Your slowest runner is on third base.  If you decided to have the guy on third steal home instead of letting Bonds swing away, your call would not have been as monumentally bad as the decision to throw that pass.  Fifty years from now, they will be showing that play as they warm the audience up for Super Bowl 102 (sorry, CII).

The result of last years’ Super Bowl eased the pain of this Seahawk fan, admittedly in a perverse way.  The Patriots won a game in overtime after trailing 28-3 in the second half.  The outcome was due less to a collapse by Atlanta than to an overpowering will to win by New England.  If they are that good – and fans in Seattle, Atlanta, and now Jacksonville have to admit that they are – then it really doesn’t matter how big a lead you have on them.

Will Philadelphia be the next victim, or will they find a way to break the spell?  I would like to achieve a clinical detachment as today’s game unfolds, but I am pulled in two opposite directions.  My son-in-law is an Eagles fan.  For that reason, but for that reason alone, I pull for Philadelphia whenever they play anyone but the Hawks.  Incidentally, when the two teams met in December, the Seahawks crushed the Eagles.  But of course, that doesn’t matter now.  Not one bit.

At the same time, how will I feel if Philadelphia does what Seattle could not? Fans in Atlanta and Jacksonville will have to take care of themselves, but how are we Seahawks fans going to feel about our personal football tragedy if Philadelphia is hoisting that trophy later today?  “Of all sad thoughts of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.”  I will be glad for my son-in-law, the father of one of my grandchildren, but I know that my joy will be alloyed with grief and regret.

If anyone reading this is a fan of This is Us, one final word – a safety tip.  When the game is over and you are closing up for the night, make sure that your slow cooker is not only turned off, but unplugged.

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.