In Search of Shakespeare: the Executive Producer
US Executive Producer, Leo Eaton
Maya Vision Crew film The Royal Shakespeare Company
Over the years, Michael has taken PBS audiences to so many exotic places.... ancient Troy, Iran, Africa, India, China. He's escaped Iraq one step ahead of Saddam's secret police and left Kabul days before it fell to the Talaban. He's followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, the Conquistadors and Hitler's archaeology unit as it travelled the world seeking the Holy Grail. But this time he's staying close to home and the journey's no less exotic, or fascinating.
Shakespeare-the-man has always been a mystery. Did he really write the plays? What about his personal life, his wife (Anne Hathaway), the dark lady, the beautiful boy? What sort of a person was he, the greatest writer in the English language, perhaps the greatest writer in the world? Amazingly the information's all there, if one knows where to look, in Elizabeth's secret police documents (and there's lots of them), in diaries, hostile critiques of his early plays, wills, parish registers and, most interesting, in Catholic records at a time when being Catholic in England put your life in danger. So this is another Michael Wood journey, through the secret history of England, a detective story to uncover the real truth about Shakespeare.
RSC perform A Winter's Tale
Did he write the plays? Of course he did. As Michael will show in this four part series, the evidence is clear and incontrovertible. And it's the plays that are the heart and soul of who he was. To help us see these plays in the same fresh and exciting way as Shakespeare's own time saw them, when the theatre was a vigorous-and dangerous-new art form in England, the Royal Shakespeare Company put together a special company for us (you'll recognise many in this stellar cast). Together this RSC company and Michael tour England just as Shakespeare's company toured England 400 years ago, performing in the same places, putting the plays in context as a mirror of dangerous and treacherous times. This isn't the balding Shakespeare of ruff and gown we see on the frontispiece of the first folio; he's a young blade, living through a Cultural Revolution every bit as harsh as the one China went through under Mao. In a world turned upside down, poets are dangerous, and often in danger, as is shown again and again through history. So join us, on the search for Shakespeare, a man and a poet for all times.