Sir Ian McKellen gives a tour-de-force performance as Shakespeare's tragic monarch, in this special television adaptation of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of one of the playwright's most enduring and haunting works.

Shakespeare's comedy of gender confusion, in which a girl disguises herself as a man to be near the count she adores, only to be pursued by the woman he loves.

English-born Joan Stanley (Dame Judi Dench), a Soviet and Communist Party sympathizer, becomes employed as a British government civil servant, and gets recruited by the K.G.B. in the mid 1930s. She successfully transfers nuclear bomb secrets to Soviet Russia, which enables them to keep up with the west in the development of atomic weapons, and remains undetected as a spy for over a half a century.