In Search of Shakespeare
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Actor: Fred Melamed, Gerald Kyd, Michael Wood, Ray Fearon, Robert WhitelockBrand: PBS
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 240 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-03-09
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: PBS
DVD Reviews of In Search of Shakespeare
DVD Review: Get to know the Bard!
Summary: 5 Stars
This four-part documentary goes above and beyond in bringing us the true story of the life and times of William Shakespeare, the greatest writer who ever lived. Each segment runs about an hour, but those four hours flew by in the blink of an eye for me because the story was so riveting. The viewer gets to know Shakespeare as a person, not just as some writer who lived in a very distant land and time and wrote in a rather hard to understand language. Not a lot has previously been known about his personal life, but thanks to this wonderful series, there are now a lot more facts out there. It also really helps that Michael Wood, the narrator, is really enthusiastic about his subject, and has a very friendly and engaging demeanour, instead of being some boring overly academic suit.
Shakespeare did not exist in a vacuum; his life, and by extension his writing, were shaped by the outside forces around him. The man lived through a lot of turbulent times, witnessing such events as the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot, and the beginnings of colonisation in the Americas. Elizabethan England was also a major police state, and his family were often at the brunt of it, seeing as how they were originally Catholics. In the era before separation of church and state, to be the "wrong" religion was inviting a lot of persecution. He had also experienced firsthand a lot of highs and lows in his life; for a time his father held a lot of positions of prestige, honor, and respect, enabling him to go to a good private school, but at the age of fourteen, the family fortunes disappeared as quickly as they had sprung up, and he was forced to leave school, his literary awakening, and the promise of going to college and making something of his life. It's really an amazing story how this young man was able to go from a nobody farmer's son to a highly renowned and respected playwright starting in the 1590s, to say nothing of going down in history as the greatest writer ever. Though the series explores a lot of aspects of his life and times (such as the Globe Theatre, the earliest plays he acted in, the tragic death of his son Hamnet, his marriage, his Catholic roots, where he lived, his friends, and of course his wonderful plays), I was still left wanting more. Shakespeare was such a fascinating person, who lived in such fascinating times, that just 4 hours is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to delving into his life and what he was all about! Interspersed with this journey into who Shakespeare really was are scenes from the current players in England's Royal Shakespeare Company acting out some of his plays, such as 'Macbeth,' 'Hamlet,' 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' 'Romeo and Juliet,' and 'The Tempest.' In the end, the series shows how, though he wrote very much for his own time, in the end he was a man for all times. A lot of the things he wrote about and dealt with seem so very modern, as though they could have been written in much more modern times but for the often hard-to-understand Elizabethan English. Too many people make the mistake of seeing him as a balding middle-aged guy in an Elizabethan collar, not as someone who was once young and just starting out in his life and career, and as someone who's inaccessible to the modern era just because, to be honest, it can be rather hard to read and appreciate his works without seeing them on the stage or screen or at least studying them with a teacher. There are also some deleted scenes which go into further detail on some of the subjects explored, such as Shakespeare's rival playwright Christopher Marlowe and his family's Catholic roots.
As awesome as this series was, however, I was a bit shocked to see numerous scenes of Mr. Wood and some of his assistants actually handling these original books, documents, and other artifacts with their bare hands. There were maybe 5 scenes in which they actually wore gloves before touching these pages which are over 400 years old. I was also rather offended at how he even speculated on whether or not Shakespeare really loved his wife Anne (though at least in the end he admitted that it was very possible he always loved her). There was even some joking, when he was looking at the church record of their marriage, about how this 18 year old boy was being "forced" to marry this "long in the tooth" woman who was 8 years his senior. While it's true that Anne Hathaway was pregnant when they married, there's no evidence other than conjecture that this was a shotgun marriage. Is it really that unthinkable that an 18 year old boy could fall madly in love with a woman that much older, and truly want to marry her independent of the fact that he got her pregnant? I seriously doubt that there would be this question of whether he actually loved his wife if he had been the 26 year old and she had been the 18 year old. I say more power to him for picking an older woman to be his wife and going against the hypocritical convention in which it's normal and socially acceptable for the husband to be older, but suspect or strange when it's the wife who is older. We also hear the beautiful early sonnet he wrote to her, with the concluding line declaring "And saved my life," which sounds like "Anne saved my life" when read aloud.
All in all, it's a great introduction to the Bard, for both devotees and people who aren't that familiar with his life, times, or works yet. It's guaranteed to amaze those who never thought of him as so interesting, modern, lively, and accessible.
Description of In Search of Shakespeare
Studio: Pbs Release Date: 05/06/2009 Run time: 240 minutesBestsellers in DVD
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