We hear the sound of a crowd clapping in unison, chanting an indecipherable name, faster and faster, and then exploding in applause. When the applause fades, we see a lone hand holding a quill to parchment. The quill forms a few letters, then pauses and scratches them out. The camera moves to show us a handsome face, eyebrows furrowed in thought.

“Who will want a play by William Shakespeare?” a female voice calls out, breaking the mood. We see a woman standing, arms crossed, in the corner of a candlelit room.

It’s the first of many wink-wink moments in Will, a new TNT show about the writer’s life. The show, created by Craig Pearce, who helped adapt the screenplay for Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film Romeo + Juliet, imagines an Elizabethan world of sex, drugs and theatre crowds resembling mosh pits. With its gory torture scenes and elaborately costumed but oft-nude cast, the show resembles such popular pseudo-historical dramas as The Tudors, Rome and The Borgias. This is the English Renaissance, Game of Thrones-style.

“It was a world divided by religion and religious fundamentalism,” Pearce says. And if you’re on the wrong side of the divide? “Your stomach is split open.”

Getting inside Shakespeare’s head

Which raises the question: Why William? It might seem that a poet would offer poor fodder for such a premise — at least compared with warring monarchs or conniving popes. Yet for centuries, writers have mined the Bard’s biography for drama — despite the fact that very little is known, and very much is debated, about the events of his life. (Did he love his wife? Did he sleep with other women — or men? Was he a secret Catholic? Did he even write his own plays?)

Perhaps it’s because there’s something titillating about unmasking the man whose name has become synonymous with genius, and whose plays embody universal ideas. Everyone knows Shakespeare — at least a line or two — but this is Will. Wink-wink.

One October morning in 1823, the American writer Washington Irving had an idea for a play. “Shakespeare as young man,” he jotted down in his notebook. “Seen with Ann Hathaway.”

Irving might have been inspired to write about Shakespeare by his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, a popular tourist attraction. There, local residents hawked armchairs and writing desks and bar stools graced, supposedly, with the Bard’s ghostly presence. Irving mocked the tourists who believed they could possess the Bard’s essence through cheap trinkets, but Irving understood their desire to get inside Shakespeare’s head. If furniture didn’t do it, perhaps fiction could.

As far as scholars know, Irving never wrote a play about Shakespeare. But as Samuel Schoenbaum documents in his book Shakespeare’s Lives, the Bard’s rise to cultural hero in the 19th century coincided with his emergence as a fictional character. The French playwright Alexandre Duval called a one-act comedy Shakespeare amoureux: Shakespeare in love (with an actress named Clarence). English playwright C.A. Somerset quickly followed with Shakespeare’s Early Days, which dramatised a popular story — never verified — about Shakespeare poaching a deer.

But these works pale in comparison with Robert Folkestone Williams’s expansive trilogy Shakespeare and his friends. The second instalment, published in 1839 and clocking in at 415 pages, concludes with the triumphant first production of Romeo and Juliet. Amid roaring applause, Folkestone writes, “one of famous strong lungs made himself heard above the rest by putting of the question ‘Who wrote this play?’ “ Shakespeare steps forward and declaims himself. It’s another wink-wink moment: to think of theatregoers not knowing who wrote Romeo and Juliet!

The Bard in three categories

Fast-forward to 2017, and Shakespeare has his own character page on IMDb. He crowdsurfs during a solo in the rock musical ‘Something Rotten!’ and inspires a Da Vinci Code-esque mystery in The Shakespeare Secret (published in the United States as Interred With Their Bones). He makes cameos on Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The Twilight Zone and Doctor Who. He even faces off against Satan in the video game ‘Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell’.

Alexa Alice Joubin, a professor of English and Shakespeare scholar at George Washington University, says that representations of the writer’s life fall into three categories. There are parodies, such as the BBC Two sitcom Upstart Crow, which imagines Shakespeare as a hapless Stratford dad with a daughter who rolls her eyes at his puns. Then there are dramas, such as Roland Emmerich’s film Anonymous (tagline: “Was Shakespeare a fraud?”), which draw on fringe academic theories about Shakespeare’s authorship. And finally, there are fantasies, such as the Academy Award-winning movie Shakespeare in Love, which imagine a Shakespearean life as full of romance and tragedy as a Shakespearean play.

Though these categories employ different means — mockery, conspiracy and romanticisation — all aim to show that “Shakespeare’s not the person he appears to be,” Joubin says. Or rather that he, the source of those lines so familiar as to seem origin-less, is a person at all.

Shakespeare in Love shows the Bard lying prone in an apothecary’s shop, like a patient in his psychoanalyst’s office. “Words, words, words,” he sighs to the apothecary, bemoaning his writer’s block and sexual frustration (“It’s as if my quill is broken”). The scene’s cleverness comes from its merging of two incongruous registers: the poetry of Hamlet and the complaints of a modern neurotic. The pleasure in making Shakespeare corporeal is the pleasure of imagining timeless wisdom emanating from a body as clumsy as our own.

A special Shakespeare

It helps, though, if that body has deep blue-green eyes and dark wavy locks of hair, as does Will’s Laurie Davidson. Because while we want a human Shakespeare, we also want a special Shakespeare. Show us the man behind the plays, we say, but don’t ruin the romance entirely. Let him be destined for greatness, like Folkestone’s Shakespeare, or love as deeply as any tragic hero, like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare in Love.

That’s the real wink-wink of Will: the curtain drops to show us the man, then goes back up again to present another spectacle. There’s a scene in the first episode, where the Bard and his players go to a pub to celebrate their first success. A well-known author begins to tease the young playwright, mocking his humble origins. The camera zooms in on Davidson as he swallows nervously and sputters, “Why?” For a moment, we’re in Shakespeare’s head, struggling with him to come up with a witty retort.

But then Davidson stands up and delivers insults, in rhyme. The spat becomes a rap battle.

Will a soap like Will help us probe the depths of genius? Or make sense of scholarly debates? No, but that has never been the goal of those who have fictionalised Shakespeare’s life, and it’s not necessarily Pearce’s.

“No one really knows if Shakespeare had a rap battle,” Pearce says. “But, hey, wouldn’t it be great if he did?”

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, July 11th, 2017