In Search of Shakespeare [Hardcover]

This is a review of the hardback version.

This is an excellent read, including so much more than the equally excellent TV series showed. In the prologue, Wood talks of Shakespeare's father John, leading the team covering over the religious paintings on the walls of Stratford's guild chapel: "So here's a parable at the start of our tale ... what lies behind actions and words in an age when covering up, concealment and dissimulation became the order of the day?" Hence the difficulties inherent in the `Search for Shakespeare'. Born on the cusp between two worlds, "Shakespeare may be ... the first modern man, ... but he was also the last great product of the Gothic Christian West." He crossed the gap between a fading medieval mindset and the new Renaissance thinking: "New worlds are discovered" in Shakespeare's works; "old worlds are lost. ... This period of cultural revolution [the ascendancy of Elizabethan Protestantism] spanned most of Shakespeare's lifetime and is crucial to an understanding of his mind and thought."

This forms the basis for Wood's account of Shakespeare's shadowy life and works. He digs up very little, if any new evidence, although he has some intriguing things to say about portraits and relationships: no, the beauty of his book is that it provides a radical new view of the man and his times for a popular audience. For example, "for most nineteenth-century scholars it was simply unthinkable that the bard's family should have been tainted by Catholicism". This link with Catholicism is probably Wood's major contention to Shakespeare studies. He writes how, "the battle for the [Catholic] soul of old England was almost lost. It would be left to John [Shakespeare]'s son to carry it down in a different guise to later generations."

In addition, Wood postulates that the young boy must have gone to Stratford's grammar school: "the myth that Shakespeare must have been a provincial" is surely that - a myth. Wood also sees references in his plays of his Warwickshire dialect and he goes on to explore what literacy and a grammar school education meant in Elizabethan England. In this way, Wood in the book can dig deeper into the detail than in the TV series, such as in Shakespeare's marriage or in the composition of his library. Indeed, rather than the book accompanying the TV series, the depth of detail and wealth of knowledge exhibited in the book leads me to conclude that the latter is a `mere', though substantial, introduction to the book.

Wood cleverly cross-references to Shakespeare's plays as evidence for his theories. And it is well that Wood is not blind to the defects of Elizabethan theatre: "To be sure, it often churned out mindless drivel, sentimental pap or blatant government propaganda, seamed with bigotry, jingoism and racism." But there are also problems and unanswered questions for the reader - or, at least, for this reader. It is not made clear, for instance, how Greene's publisher's apology alludes to Shakespeare. And why does Wood believe that the passionate love for the boy in the sonnets was "apparently not physically consummated"? We are not told and Wood fails to explore the concept of male bonding in Elizabethan England in any detail. And I was a little taken aback at Wood's declaration that "Themes such as the corrupting power of lust on the soul, guilt and infidelity run through the latter sonnets, which are all the more explicable if Shakespeare's upbringing was Catholic." Huh?

Bad points? There are no references, footnotes or endnotes. Wood is usually honest and clear in his doubts and in the paucity of the evidence behind his conjectures, but sometimes he can jump to conclusions without fully explaining the reasoning. For example, one of his sonnets is seen as being written in his youth, for his marriage day, and hints that he must have read Thomas Watson's collection, "So young Shakespeare was already ambitious to be a versifier." But throughout that sequence of intimated facts, there is precious little evidence provided to the reader for these conjectures. Indeed, one whole chapter (The Lost Years, 1582-1592) postulates "a tale held together by a chain of conjectures: plausible, suggestive, but no more." Nevertheless, Wood is usually generous in his quotes and explains his sources.

Other niggling points? It would have been useful to have had a family tree, especially as Wood concentrates a great deal - and thankfully so - on the early years. It would also have been beneficial to have had a plan of Stratford in a style similar to those of Shakespeare's London provided later in the volume. The illustrations are excellent; they are credited at the book's end but their sources are not. The index is found wonting: I wished to revisit the claims that William Shakeshaft in Lancashire might have been our man, but Shakeshaft is not listed. Neither is my home town of Plymouth despite more than one entry in the text.

At the end of his journey, Wood talks about the director of the TV series, who had previously worked for him on programmes about the conquistadors and Alexander the Great, having to swap the Andes and the Hindu Kush for the delights of the M40. Well, after having both read the book and bought the DVD, I can vouch that the search for Shakespeare was probably just as exciting, as intriguing, and as exhausting as the others. But it's a search worth exploring.

P>The book is dense with context, and Wood demonstrates how much biography can be teased out by a good historian. One nice touch is the reproduction of photographs taken in the late 19th century of Elizabethan-era buildings that are no longer standing. I am also surprised at how many buildings related to Shakespeare's family still exist.

I'm fairly familiar with Shakespeare's life, but Wood combines old information with fairly recent discoveries to come up with some new interpretations. He doesn't constrict himself by typical academic reticence to speculate on Shakespeare's inner life using the plays and the sonnets, but his speculations never seem far-fetched.

A fun and educational read; probably the second-best biography of Shakespeare, right behind Samuel Schoenbaum's *A Documentary Life*. Footnotes or endnotes would have been nice, though.

There is much music and excellent voice in Michael Wood's speculative quest for the Bard of Avon. However, Wood's attempt to capture Shakespeare for late medieval Catholicism (which forms the focus of this book) sometimes feels fanciful and clumsy. Falling-out with the Pope and dissolving the monasteries does not make Henry VIII a `Protestant' in any meaningful sense, but then the author does not provide a definition of what that Protestantism actually means. Neither is it particularly helpful to ignore Shakespeare's reliance - as a Bible-reading Christian - upon Tyndale and the Geneva Bible. Indeed, the emphasis placed upon Shakespeare's supposed recusancy actually undermines his claim to universal appeal, and turns him instead into the exclusive preserve of a persecuted minority. This is a shame, as the book offers an otherwise fascinating and moving account of Shakespeare's life, and is a joy to read.