Michael Wood: In Search of Shakespeare

Michael Wood explains how Shakespeare became a star of the London stage, and uncovers a tale of religious conflict behind his lost years. Wood travels with the Royal Shakespeare Company, who perform the plays in a Tudor inn yard as Shakespare's company did, and using Tudor maps and remarkable Victorian photos, he brings Shakespeare's first London home back to life. He also follows Shakespeare's great rival, Christopher Marlowe, on his fateful journey by river to Deptford and the murder that left 29-year-old William the star of Elizabethan London.

In the third episode, Wood uncovers Shakespeare's rise to fame and fortune in Elizabethan London. Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream fuel this rise, but tragedy strikes as his son Hamnet dies at the age of 11. Plunged into a mid-life crisis, he falls in love with a teenage nobleman, has a passionate affair with a mysterious married woman and is charged with assault. Meanwhile, his theatre company builds the Globe and becomes caught up in the rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. In the midst of it all, Shakespeare creates some of the greatest characters in world literature.

In the final episode, Michael Wood examines Shakespeare's life in the era of King James I. He unearths Shakespeare's neighborhood in London and visits the current queen's robe-makers for evidence of Shakespeare's role in the royal coronation. Shakespeare's world is transformed in 1605 by the Gunpowder Plot, a Jacobean September 11. The entertainment industry responded, and Shakespeare contributed Macbeth, a daring play about the murder of a king. Finally, Wood follows Shakespeare back to Warwickshire and looks at the riddle of Shakespeare's will and its strange bequest to his wife, Anne.