It's Winter. A theater company is notified by a landowner from who they lease the plot of land where their theater sits, that that lease is coming up, and he is not interested in renegotiating with them -- the real problem: they built the theater there ten years ago, and when the lease runs out in a few days the construct becomes the property of the landowner, and they are out of a theater.. It'll be back on the road for them, unless ...
Here's what they do: in the middle of the night the actors, writers, and producers sneak back to their theater accompanied by every family member, patron, and drinking buddy they can find, and take the theater apart slat by slat, in one night, middle of winter. That's not the best part. They carry it board by board through the city, across a river, to a new location -- and rebuild it.
It's not a bad opening segment for a television pilot, but this actually happened -- this is how the Theatre became the Globe in 1599. People think of Shakespeare (to pull the famous Ben Jonson quote) as "of all time", rather than in his time, where he was an actor, writer, director, producer, and owner of the most successful entertainment company of his world; it would be like if Stephen Spielberg, Stephen King, Tom Hanks, and Bob Weinstein were the same person, but better at all those things; and this man had other talents, not the least of which is being the sexiest bald dude that side of Sean Connery. Leave Will where he is, in 1599, struggling with the death of his only son, his career at a crossroads, his theater just barely saved from a land-grab, titillating sonnets pushed up the pipe to royalty as a means of ingratiating himself to power, in effect buying protection for his company, writing Henry the V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and by the end of the year, likely starting Hamlet.. leave it.. and let me introduce the two main characters of this show:
Two actors. Two adolescent boy actors. The two greatest child actors in history -- why? These two kids were the main "female" actors of the company, and from 1599 to 1608 played the roles of Rosalind and Celia, Ophelia and Gertrude, Viola and Olivia, Desdemona and Emilia, Regan and Goneril: if you think of the lower class children that would be apprenticed to an acting troupe, how little education they would have, how little experience, to be thrown in at twelve or thirteen, and up until seventeen, live among this band o'bros, what kind of boys are these? Are they competitive with each the other? Have to be. What does the task of playing the woman's role, albeit the great woman's role, year after year, do to them? And when the day comes, when these fellows are men, do they continue in their careers as actors? Is one of these men playing King Lear in 1640, twenty-five years after Shakespeare's death? Is one butch, the other feminine? Is the feminine one the true ladykiller, does the butch have different predilections?
Plague, war, skullduggery, wine, women, song -- and Master Shakespeare, like a shadowy Godhead, at the mast of this ship, overseeing everything, as we follow our two protagonists into the worlds of theater, taverns, brothels, and the Court. They'll live through the death of Elizabeth, and the rise of James; and one day, performed in front of the King, they will/must compete to win the last great role of their adolescent careers: Lady MacBeth.
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