So I commemorated the Fifth of November by attending a reading of Equivocation<\/em>, Jesuit priest Bill Cain\u2019s tragicall comedy about an alternate history in which James I commissioned Shakespeare (here \u201cShag,\u201d whatever, we all know who this is) to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot. It\u2019s not a perfect play; it does get preachy, and you can see contemporary Catholic obsessions and tics peeking out from amid the Jacobean trappings. E.g. the idea that destruction of community bonds are the destruction of \u201cfaith itself.\u201d This is very Alan Bray and it\u2019s very 2017 well-meaning US Catholics but it is not all that much like the words of Jesus, who came not to bring peace but a sword. We also get some of the contemporary obsession with Who Tells Your Story.<\/p>\n But if you love Shakespeare or have any interest in Reformation England\u2019s repression of the Catholic faith, Equivocation<\/em> offers plenty of toothsome lines and images. You could call it Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Damned<\/em>. There\u2019s literary criticism: \u201cOne thing follows another. That\u2019s how people talk!\u201d an exasperated player protests, even as the scene playing out around him suggests that people rarely have such coherent reasons for what they say and do.* There\u2019s a lovely, strange description of how actors serve the audience, which culminates with: \u201cOur bodies become their souls made visible.\u201d There are jabs at Bardolatry, and even the occasional perfect Wildean line like, \u201cI must say, I\u2019m growing tired of the moral superiority of the criminal classes.\u201d There\u2019s a crown handled as if it were a suicide\u2019s gun.<\/p>\n *I just realized<\/em> this bit is a defense of the theory of equivocation itself! Lol this play outsmarts me on many levels.<\/p>\n There\u2019s fun \u201cwoman is the irony of the community\u201d stuff, as Judith Shakespeare gives the play\u2019s only soliloquies, even though she hates soliloquies. The scenes about Shakespeare\u2019s family life use his love of twin mixups and cross-dressing to express tragedy rather than creating comedy. There are unexpected, poignant moments, like Shakespeare\u2019s penance\u2013which is also one of the play\u2019s many examples of double-meaning phrases. It\u2019s a twisty play; it has its historical crackpot theories, the validity of which I am not fit to judge as this is not one of the Reformation things I know anything really about. Equivocation<\/em> hits hard on the idea that the Gunpowder Plot is the real \u201cend of the beginning\u201d for modern, Protestant (\/post-Protestant) England: the birth of a new country, after a long labor under Henry and Elizabeth. Equivocation<\/em> often makes you feel the fear, the actual repression experienced in a country full of paid informers. It makes you feel the losses: One character laments, in re: Purgatory, \u201cThey closed it, the bastards.\u201d<\/p>\n If you\u2019ve spent too much time chasing the Swan of Avon you will truly thrill when you realize that this play has its own version of \u201cThe Mousetrap,\u201d and when you figure out what they\u2019re doing with the Porter. Judith\u2019s speech about her father\u2019s last four plays is simply lovely. There\u2019s just so much good stuff here.<\/p>\n