1608 London. In the court of James I. With the English language at its zenith and England needing a lift of spirit due to the changing of the reign, the new king has commissioned more than fifty scholars from Cambridge and Oxford, including clerics, to produce a new translation of the bible, set in the grand language of the day. James hopes this enterprise will bring unity and a measure of confidence to a weary kingdom. But there is not a poet among them. The broods over an idea then acts upon it. Gathering what intelligence he can from those who the man, James meets with William Shakespeare in secret and commissions him to be the last filter, the last editor of his grand new book. Ben Jonson, ever wary of his poet friend, suspects something. Playing Salieri to Shakespeare's Mozart, and weary of Shakespeare's very existence, Jonson 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 the sexually rampant astrologer-apothecary-occultist Simon Forman to do so.