Robert J. Maxwell Michael Wood, our narrator and host, seems like a knowledgeable and likable guy. He searches through four-hundred-year-old parchments and runs a gloved forefinger down the page until he locates the name of William Shakespeare. Or William Shakespeare's distant cousin, or the head of the household of William Shakespeare's wife. How he can read that blocky script and those archaic expressions -- when they're in English instead of Latin, that is -- is beyond me. Wood is a monument to patience.It's sort of an "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Shakespeare." It's systematically organized. I'm sure Wood knows just where he's going as he meanders along but the path he takes seems to depend on his whim as writer. The structure takes us from Shakespeare's birth, through his youth and successful maturity, to his death. But that's just the broad outline. There are a lot of divagations.There is about equal time allotted to Shakespeare's life, his work, and his cultural environment. A lot of things popped up that were surprises to me. I never knew, for instance, that Queen Elizabeth I set a movement afoot to deport all the Africans from England, even the high-class ones. And there is an occasional ironic twist given to some of the material. Wood quotes at some length from an extravagant love poem. then he looks up from the manuscript with a smile and recites the last line, dedicated to "my fair and lovely boy," and Shakespeare wasn't referring to his son, Hamnet, either. A talking head shrugs it off with the observation that the distinction between emotional and physical attraction was regarded somewhat casually at the time. (That's pretty much the attitude given to "WS" by Anthony Burgess in his novel, "Nothing Like the Sun." No big deal.) Some of the material in Wood's documentary has little pieces of information that were a bit startling. One of the centuries-old manuscripts he examines refers to a "Saucy Jack." Well -- that was one of Jack the Ripper's noms de plume, wasn't it? Just a coincidence I guess.Let me just mention something that affects my response to this series, something that measures it. About twenty years ago I did something I felt very guilty about and condemned myself to study two things I'd been forced into contact with in high school and had loathed -- algebra and Shakespeare. I've forgotten all the algebra. (The human mind has a great capacity for suppressing the memory of pain.) I've even forgotten the act I felt guilty about. But I've carried on a distant but affectionate relationship with Shakespeare ever since I rushed through all 37 or so plays, plus the essays and footnotes included in the Signet editions.But this series is a long and drawn-out sucker and told me more than I felt I needed to know about the man. However, the additional stuff wasn't a complete waste of time. I learned quite a lot about the social and material history of the time. Shakespeare's Dad was a glove maker. Well, I knew that much, but I never knew how the hell you "made" a glove without a machine before. Now I know. A scholar would unquestionably get more out of it than I did, though I gather some of Wood's claims are arguable.There are excerpts from some of the plays and I shouldn't skip them. Most are only famous scenes that last a few minutes, without giving the viewer time to adjust to the mise en scene or the artificiality of the acting. But the little bit in which Iago first noodges Othello was quite effective.

Nick Dets I've never been a huge Shakespere reader. I like what I've read and definitely respected him like anyone else. Even with this minimal background on Shakespere, the docu-series "In Search of Shakespere" was still fascinating. The details of William Shakespere's life are obscure and sometimes shrouded in mystery. The brilliant angle of this series is how host Michael Wood chronologically journeys through Elizabethan England to uncover them.One can be in touch with the life of William Shakespere better than ever before in going along this journey with Michael Wood. The series chronicles background information (like the rise and fall of his bureaucrat father and the connections his family has with historical people and events) as vividly as it does the trials and tribulations of William. It is truly amazing seeing all the places William was as he was shaped into the legend he became. Wood looks at documents (most interestingly an employee list) to discover aliases and occupations William had- and uses them to find all the nooks and cranny's of Willaim's life.There are many possible revelations about where William got some of his ideas. For example, the priest who married him to Anne Hathaway did illegal off-season marriages-much like the friar in Romeo and Juliet. Also, Michael Wood encounters a river William once had to cross which seems to be referenced in Henry VI.Michael Wood's inspired adventure is one you must go on! "In Search of Shakespere" is a truly fascinating insight into the world's favorite author. One need not be a fan of his work to appreciate it, either.

George Parker "In Search of Shakespeare" is a beautifully presented historical documentary in which the always enthusiastic and energetic host/narrator Michael Wood ("In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great") retraces the footsteps and life of the man know to us simply as the Bard. At the outset Wood dismisses any question or controversy about Shakespeare's credibility and attributions as mere conspiracy theory and then launches into a telling of the Shakespeare's biography in a sort of detective story format by rediscovering the bits and pieces of historical evidence of Shakespeare's life which exist outside his body of work. Taking the audience to those places still intact which the Bard frequented, sifting through archives for fragments of information, and showing excerpts of Shakespeare's works performed by a group of players, all the while explaining the relevant history of Elizabethan England, Wood assembles a sort of conventional wisdom version of the William Shakespeare biography as though discovering it for the first time. The result is an engaging, colorful, and fun historical perspective of the life and times of William Shakespeare worth a look particularly by those who know the Bard only through his work. (B+)

sargonthesorceror It is amusing to see the conspiracy-mongers attach themselves to a subject, and prattle nonsense endlessly to hide the fact that they have no evidence--merely lunatic conjecture. An endless declaration of the "Shakespeare's plays were written by the Earl of Oxford/Francis Bacon/Kit Marlowe/Your Name Here" is that William simply did not have the LIFE necessary to write his plays. As Wood shows, this simply isn't true--Shakespeare's life included growing up in a virtual police state that could compare with Stalin's Russia or Mao's China in its relentless efforts to stamp out dissidents and encourage "rightthinking", very likely as a hidden member of the increasingly persecuted Catholic faith--seeing his father's meteoric rise and quiet fall in Stratford society--losing his only son at age 11--and meeting (and sometimes being related to) some of the most notorious individuals of Elizabethan England. Wood offers facts where they're available, and plausible theories backed up by circumstantial evidence where they're not. A virtual love letter to Shakespeare (in fact occasionally Wood's enthusiasm is a tad TOO overwhelming), England's lovely countryside, and theater in general, this series is an excellent biography/study of a man who while somewhat obscured by the historical record, is brilliantly illuminated in his poetry and plays.