In Search of Shakespeare (2003)--The strength of this enthusiastic production is the visuals—to see the house, the countryside, the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the lanes of London, and the many historical documents such as Shakespeare’s will. This documentary is written and presented by historian Michael Wood in his series “In Search of . . .” the Trojan War, and Alexander the Great, and so on. Michael’s breathless delivery reminds me of a gaggle of excited teenage girls, but equally of a historian and literature aficionado trying to solve a mystery, getting to handle the 400-year old documents, tramping among the beer kegs in the cellar of Shakespeare’s 1613 house in London, and coming up with theory after theory about why things happened.
As one famous Shakespeare commentator said, what we know for certain about William Shakespeare could be written on a note card. Everything else is extrapolation and interpretation. The salient feature of Michael Wood’s take on Shakespeare is that Will was a closet Roman Catholic. It is worth noting that many Shakespeare scholars, such as Frank Kermode and Stanley Wells, do not buy this. Kermode suggests that even statistically, Shakespeare was unlikely to be Catholic, as one estimate has about 5% of the English population Catholic in 1585. Yet Michael Wood hammers the religious theme through all four segments of the documentary. He thus has to give a novel interpretation as to why Shakespeare lived with a Huguenot (Protestant) family for so long in London: The Mountjoys did not have to attend church and so maybe he could slip by undetected as well. And it requires him to gloss over Shakespeare’s daughter Susannah’s marriage to a Puritan and why Shakespeare left most of his possessions to Susannah and her radicaly Protestant husband.
In Search of Shakespeare brings out some interesting points. One: Although we know the outcome of the religious conflict, Elizabethans did not. So, when Stratford-area folk were instructed to deface the old Roman Catholic images in their churches, they simply white-washed them. If you’ve seen churches in Turkey or eastern China where religious faces were erased by gouging into solid rock, you’re struck by how tentative Stratford Christians were. Two: William’s father was a successful glove maker, I knew, but I did not realize that he sold his leather-work over a fair portion of England. When his business crashed and he refused to show up at the town council meetings he’d attended for 12 years, you get a sense of how traumatic the downfall was for Shakespeare family. Three: Elizabethan England was a police state. Of course, we knew England was an absolute monarchy, but when Michael Wood says it so plainly, it hits home and helps us understand why William Shakespeare was so circumspect about what he wrote. Ben Jonson thought playwrights should criticize current foibles through satire, and Robert Suttle (sp?), a relative of Shakespeare’s, thought drama should serve religious purposes. But Shakespeare focused on human emotions such as love, hatred, and jealousy, and showed at least both sides of nearly every situation.
The documentary does a good job of relating historical and personal events to Shakespeare’s dramatic works. For example, when Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet died, aged 11, in 1596, Shakespeare soon after bought a large house back home in Stratford, and 10 weeks after the death, he applied for a family coat of arms even though he no longer had a male heir. The following year he wrote several sonnets addressed to a young man, maybe his son. Shakespeare also wrote sonnets to the enigmatic Dark Lady, and Michael Wood does not hesitate to identify the likely candidate for Shakespeare’s affair: Emilia Lanier, a Venetian Jew, who was married and came from a prominent musical family. Is it co-incidence that at this time Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice starring a money-lending Venetian Jew?
Although this kind of thing is speculation, it is interesting for fans of Shakespeare. In a couple of other instances, controversial issues are touched upon too briefly. In a short scene, Michael Wood asks an art expert if his poster portrait of Shakespeare could have been painted by the Shakespeare’s friend Richard Burbage, as the expert has Burbage’s self-portrait on an easel. Maybe. But that is not the point. The point is that we do not have a single portrait of Shakespeare made during his life time. The engraving in the Folio (1623) is after his death, as is the bust in the Stratford church. Many portraits have been presented as The Bard, but the huge wave of forgeries and frauds in the 1700s makes it difficult to not be tricked. (See Shakespeare’s Face by Stephanie Nolan for a fascinating account of the latest almost successful candidate.) If I’m not mistaken, the portrait Michael Wood keeps showing as Shakespeare—what is known as the Chandos portrait—has recently been shown to be . . . you guessed it . . . not Shakespeare.
Although I highly recommend this documentary for anyone interested in The Bard, I wish Michael Wood had given more support for some of his claims. “Shakespeare was Roman Catholic” (which I do not believe) receives a lot of support, and “Elizabethan England was a police state” (which I do believe) is substantiated numerous times. But a few could have used more examination. For example, “Shakespeare’s play Cardenio is lost, and we only have Robert Johnson’s song from it.” Yet Charles Hamilton (1994) makes a strong case that an untitled manuscript labelled “The Second Maiden’s Tragedy” by the Elizabethan censor is in Shakespeare’s handwriting and is probably Cardenio, co-written with Shakespeare’s colleague Fletcher. On the one hand, Wood does not have the time to pursue this enticing controversy, but on the other, he maybe should not even allude to it.
Throughout the documentary, actors—the Royal Shakespearean Company no less—act classic scenes from Henry IV, Othello, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Henry VIII (All is True), and other Shakespeare plays. I’m not sure how meaningful these are if you don’t know something of the plays, but if you are familiar with the plot and main characters, they bring the drama to life and remind us amid all the history that the play’s the thing.