Synopsis "I Ridde My Soule of Thee at Laste"
With the English language at its zenith and England needing a lift of spirit due to the changing of the reign, King James has commissioned a new Bible, set in the language of the day. He has appointed more than fifty scholars and clerics from Cambridge, Oxford, and Westminster, and yet for all their wit and pedigree, there is not a poet among them. It is 1608. Four years have passed and the new translation is almost finished. James then acts upon an idea. Gathering what intelligence he can from those who the man, he meets with William Shakespeare in secret and commissions him to be the last editor of his grand new book, in the hope of giving it a singular voice cover to cover, that it may bear the marks of genius. Ben Jonson, playing Salieri to Shakespeare's Mozart, and weary of Shakespeare's very existence, finds an ally in the First Minister, Robert Cecil, whom Shakespeare has slighted in his plays. The two men plot to end the life of the Poet, with the help, of course, of the sexually rampant astrologer-apothecary-occultist Simon Forman to do so.
