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A talking head shrugs it off with the observation that the distinction between emotional and physical attraction was regarded somewhat casually at the time. 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. Wood quotes at some length from an extravagant love poem. And there is an occasional ironic twist given to some of the material. 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. A lot of things popped up that were surprises to me. There is about equal time allotted to Shakespeare's life, his work, and his cultural environment. The structure takes us from Shakespeare's birth, through his youth and successful maturity, to his death. 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. It's sort of an "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Shakespeare." It's systematically organized.

How he can read that blocky script and those archaic expressions - when they're in English instead of Latin, that is - is beyond me. Or William Shakespeare's distant cousin, or the head of the household of William Shakespeare's wife. He searches through four-hundred-year-old parchments and runs a gloved forefinger down the page until he locates the name of William Shakespeare. Michael Wood, our narrator and host, seems like a knowledgeable and likable guy.

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. 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.

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. "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.