Lancashire, England, c. 1580: Two men sip wine in a stone-walled room whose dark and dampness are relieved only by a weak wood fire. One man, the elder, is a priest, a believer—in God, in the church, in a “harmony” worth pursuing. The younger man is an artist, or will be. He can’t hear the harmony; his head roils with a multitude of voices and characters clamoring to be heard and understood. For him, pursuing a harmony would mean shutting out some of those voices, which he cannot bring himself to do.

Shakeshafte is a brief but deep play of ideas, a what-if based on a tantalizing historical tidbit. Campion was indeed in Lancashire around 1580, holed up for a time in a Catholic safe house owned by one Alexander Hoghton. Also in the house around that time was a young man employed as a music teacher and a maker of household entertainments. His name was William Shakeshafte. Hoghton included him in his will, which came to light in the 1800s, and since then Shakespeare sleuths have speculated that this Shakeshafte was their man. Very little is known about the playwright’s life, but his father is believed by some to have been Catholic, and there’s a local tradition in Lancashire that young Will once worked for a Catholic family there. John Aubrey reports in the Brief Lives that young Shakespeare was at one time a “schoolmaster in the country.”

The artist: Once you choose which voices to listen to, once you choose which clothes to wear, which beliefs to put on in the morning, how can you say that one of them is truth?

The priest: You don’t choose like that . . . you surrender to the harmony that you hear . . .

Artist: And what if you just can’t help hearing more all the time? If what’s asking you to surrender is just . . . well, bigger than what you and the others say, bigger than the harmony you can imagine?

Williams’s play includes sexual rivalry, gossiping servants, filial betrayal, and more, but at its core it’s a contest between religion and art. The playwright doesn’t pick a winner, but he insists it’s important to understand the differences and to give the artist his ground. “As a priest I believe that in the longest of long runs, they converge,” Williams says. “But meanwhile, there’s a bit of rub, a bit of tension, and I just want to give that room.”  v

Fri 9/15, 7 PM Niles-Maine District Library 6960 W. Oakton St. Niles (reservations required)

Sat 9/16, 10 AM Newberry Library 60 W. Waltonshakespeareprojectchicago.org Free