SHAKESPEARE

The companion volume to Wood's four-part PBS documentary, to air in early 2004, this life of Shakespeare has all the vividness of a good television profile, backed up with a keen and contentious historical perspective on his turbulent era. Like many of the Bard's biographers who want to surpass the few official documents and brief contemporary testaments that form the official record, Wood's lively portrait is half hypothesis and half argument, embellished with speculative digressions. Addressing both Shakespeare's artistic universality and his religious beliefs, Wood considers him a Catholic with a capital "c" as well as a small one. Wood doesn't have new evidence to support this necessarily, but he does delve into the Warwickshire region's history as a flashpoint of crypto-Catholicism, which may have touched Shakespeare's family and their neighbors and distant relatives. As an old medieval hand, Wood (In Search of the Dark Ages) also positions Shakespeare on the cusp of the modern age, but with a firm background in the old traditions. He's also superb at bringing together the Warwickshire idiom and rural nomenclature that run through the plays. Wood brings 16th-century London to raucous life—even if his view of the Elizabethan era concentrates on its grim politics at the cost of its cultural renaissance. Throughout, Shakespeare is treated as a living person inhabiting his time (although sometimes Wood draws parallels too close, such as between the Diggers' revolt and Coriolanus). The absence of source notes will frustrate serious readers, but the copious color illustrations and lively readability will satisfy others until the TV documentary airs. (Oct.)