Another result from my London trip: this miniseries from 1978, the existence of which had been unknown to me before. It stars a young Tim Curry as Shakespeare, a young Ian McShane as Christopher Marlowe, and was written by John Mortimer of Rumpole of the Bailey fame.

Structure wise, it consists of six episodes covering the ca. 16 years Shakespeare spent in London, each episode putting one of the works in central focus. (Mostly plays, but episode 3 picks the Sonnets for plot obvious reasons.) As far as attempts to tackle the Bard in screen fiction are concerned, this works far better than the Rupert Graves starring movie I came back with last year. Not least because the Lord Chamberlain's Men players actually get to do more than cameos and are real characters - especially Jack Rice, who in this version plays most of the Shakespearean heroines (and btw, the staging of the Elizabethan theatre scenes does this without attempt at camp when he's playing them, as opposed to the brief excerpt from the A Midsummer Night's Dream mechanicals scene, which goes for the traditional broad comedy) -, and because the characterisation keeps the balance between sympathetic and flawed for Shakespeare himself. Which is to say: he's likeable and he's a lousy husband and father, which the series is aware of, not either/or, and there's no attempt made to blame Anne for either. (Anne and the kids don't show up before episode 4, but when they do, it's clear whose fault the situation is.)

Given the 1978 production date and the fact the miniseries does inevitably go the "the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady were real people" route, I was curious how they handle the sexuality question. Turns out that while we don't get as much as an m/m kiss, the Will/Southhampton relationship (the miniseries goes with Southhampton as Mr. W.H.) is unambigiously romantic. In fact, he solely beds the Dark Lady because he's jealous that Will's spending time with her, while Will partly goes into that affair because he wants something not-Hal (Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southhampton, goes by the "Hal" moniker here, and draw your Shakespearean conclusions) in his life. The narrative isn't very interested in the Dark Lady per se - here, she's a fictional character named Mary Fleminge, wife of a Judge - and she's far less on screen than Hal who shows up in episode 2 and remains in the series till the end. He's one of the more interesting Mr. W.H.'s, not just drop dead gorgeous to look at (actor: Nicholas Clay), which is a requirement given all the sonnet praise, but charming enough to make it clear why Will sticks around for more than patronage and aesthetics; reckless; also completely privileged and incapabable of seeing other povs, until the disaster of the Essex rebellion and his stint in the Tower give him a wake up call, at which point he belatedly grows up, but into self serving courtier ridding himself of his scandalous past. He doesn't exactly tell Will "I know thee not" when the later commits the faux pas of calling him "Hal" at court (in Will's defense, this is the first time they've seen each other since Southampton was released from the Tower), but he does pretend not to know him.

Curry, whom I've mostly seen in over the top roles, plays Will as mostly a low-key keen observer with something of a wild streak that Marlowe and Southampton bring out, a good friend and colleague to the players but also with a streak of selfishness re: anyone from Stratford. He adores his son but only as long as the kid doesn't make uncomfortable demands, and has zilch interest in his daughters. (This being a 70s series, you could of course argue whether or not this is intentional male chauvinism as a flaw, but given that we get a scene where Will makes up a story (a Midsummer Night's Dream, btw, which makes me wonder, since this predates Sandman, whether Neil Gaiman watched this) for Hamnet and then cut to Judith asking Anne whether her father will ever invent a story for her the way he does for her twin, I'm going with "intentional". (Seriously, though, there are a lot of echoes/foreshadowings/what not to the Sandman "Dream" story if you've read it - Hamnet is welcomed by the players in costume as Titania and Oberon and Jack Rice-as-Titania tells him he'll stay in their realm, for example.)

Except for Marlowe, no other writer shows up (so much for you, Johnson, Beaumont and Fletcher), and Marlowe is only in the first episode (which is very much about him and called "Dead Shephard"), but young Ian McShane has predictable fun in the part; the series' interpretation of Marlowe is that he craved real life danger and excitement, not just the written variety, thus volunteered for spying, but made no bones of the fact he had equal distate for both Protestants and Catholics, which ended up getting him distrusted and killed. The "those who do not love boys or tobacco" quote is used, and the two scenes where Marlowe first gets young Will to write Henry VI, Part I for him since he's too bored by the premise ("baronnial bullies waring with each other, none better than the others") and later beta-reads/edits in his Marlowian way (where he gets Will to come up with a personal nightmare scenario to spice up the play, and Will's personal nightmare is, of course, a father killing a son) in their McShane/Curry combination are golden.

Other memorable scenes: the sequence where Jack Rice blackmails the other players into letting him play Lady Anne in Richard III, pulls off a good performance and then later tells Richard Burbage not to stand in a way that makes it impossible for the groundlings to see Rice-as-Anne's face; Will and Hal smouldering at each other; Anne making verbal mincemeat out of Will when he tries to pull the "at least I send money!" defense; Essex and Southampton persuading the players to stage Richard II (that entire episode works like a tense political thriller) in order to promote Essex' rebellion, and then the actual staging (Bolingbroke's player none too subtly costumed in a way that echoes Essex); Elizabeth I. in the fallout orders Shakespeare to play Falstaff scenes for her, and there is a lot of cross cutting from the Queen's face to Will's (that episode parallels Elizabeth/Essex with Will/Hal in that both Elizabeth and Will know the object of their affection is really not worth it but care, and in that scene there's the added layer that Will doesn't know yet whether the players are truly off the hook re: rebellion participation, plus he's worried that Southampton will follow Essex to the block, while the playwright in him is also fascinated by Elizabeth having ordered a man she loves to die, and how she deals with that - he's observing her all the tie); and the already mentioned scene where newly reformed and in King James' favour Hal snubs Will (who is at court because the Lord Chamberlain's men have just become the King's Men).

Faults: the series has so little interest in the Dark Lady/Mary Fleming that we open the relevant episode in medias res, i.e. she already knows Will, and her decision to have sex with Southampton basically happens between two eye blinks with no more motivation than "he's there, I might as well". And while Jack Rice is a fascinating character in the first half of the miniseries, he's reduced to minor supporting player in the second, which may not be a fault given what else is going on, but it irks me because I liked the character so much. Also, I'm still waiting for the Shakespeare bio tv or movie that uses Ben Jonson (and by use, I don't mean him just being name dropped but being his colorful self), and while we're at it, uses Will's younger brother Edmund who was a player, too, for a while.

In conclusion: worth watching, if you can get your hands on it. Oh, for youngsters: this being a 70s series, it also has a 70s pace.