King Shakespeare or It's All True

Shakespeare has had enough of the stormy life in theatre and unheated offices. He enjoys his retirement in the quiet town of Stratford, which gets rudely interrupted when his former actors Burbage and Kemp show up and impetuously demand a new play. And they actually convince him to get to work - but they just as soon come to regret this, after they read the first scenes. The bourgeois lifestyle did not do Shakespeare any good. Gone are the adventures and the romance, his new play deals with financial issues instead. So without much ado, Burbage hauls him off to London. Living in a house with a widow and her two grown daughters, Anne and Mary, should provide the writer with new ideas. And indeed, the combination of Anne's wit and Mary's more physical assets bring the expected inspiration: King Henry VIII blends private and historical, facts and fiction into one grand and final Shakespearean phantasm. But while the play comes more and more into shape, a bitter rivalry develops between the two muses, threatening not only Shakespeare's work, but also his private life.