WILL SHAKESPEARE

Portraying in robes
the kings of glory,
unfolding their costumes
of royal linen;
a much cruder story,
when the Tudor plays the grooms
in the Globe's theater rooms;
was Will abiding
or hiding,
as a loyal Elizabethan?

Ben Jonson, Spenser, Marlowe
play out for a genius;
did Will play both sides
to circumvent and choose
his way to a state of mind
as an arbitrary Papal-Catholic
or a Protestant dissident,
with an insolvent government
refusing to disclose
his own bent for mankind.