RSSAlan Yentob says that Leonardo da Vinci is a great artist. Michael Wood says that Shakespeare is a great playwright. There is nothing remarkable about saying these things, even on BBC1. All depends on how they are said. Long ago impressed by how much meaning remains packed into one of Wood's sentences even while he pounds it with emphasis from all directions, I have been living with his In Search of Shakespeare for some weeks, after securing a set of preview tapes well ahead of the launch date. The week that Barry Manilow broke his nose was a good time to start watching them. Weight-wise, Wood bears a sharp resemblance to Manilow: men like them are thin forever. Also the historian's nose is as salient as the singer's. Though more pointed than preponderant, it courts a similar danger as its owner lopes searchingly forward. The risk is increased by this presenter's habit of talking sideways while the camera tracks him. A potentially impacting object might get into range without his seeing it, so that when his head suddenly resumes a normal alignment it could be too late to take evasive action. In that event, of course, the footage would end up on the cutting room floor, but not before the abruptly rebuffed presenter ended up in the hospital. Wood's blithe courage as a walking talker is part of his boyishness.
Another part is an urge to update his frame of reference in keeping with the current buzz. In the context of lust and love in Shakespeare, Sex and the City gets a mention. "The Elizabethans were very up-front about sex." Well, it's true: they were. When Hamlet made his crack about country matters, the groundlings were probably elbowing each other's ribs in the same way those dreadful lads on Big Brother do at the hint of a double meaning. That's why the gag is there: it's one for the punters. Shakespeare's language is not pure. Even at its most exalted, it declines to be exclusive. It switches between one level of decorum and another as an electron shifts orbits without crossing the space between. Wood is right to shuffle his frames of reference, the better to cover the individual case, and to match the general fact of his hero's gargantuan appetite for synthesis. The Victorian commentators, who were not up-front about sex, were at a loss properly to discuss one of the crudest, and therefore one of the most important, of the elements that contributed to Shakespeare's richness — a richness that was not refined, like gold, but complex, like the world. Wood has a nose for that complexity. All the more reason to hold one's breath as he steers the nose around trees, along tow-paths and through forests.
Actually one should not be too strict even about the excessive walk-talking that eats up time in the broadcast version of his essay. As in his previous shows, he is always walking through exactly the right landscape. When in search of Alexander, he and his crew slogged up all the appropriate escarpments to reveal Alexander's knack for positioning the enemy so that a sudden charge into the centre would do the business. To match his feeling for words and rhythms, Wood has a feeling for terrain. (The connection is not rare in literature — it helped motivate the Augustans as well as the Romantics — but among today's TV presenters it is almost unknown, partly because for them the whole world has turned into what Americans call the Flyover.) Was Shakespeare, during his Lost Years, ever in Lancashire? Asking the question sideways while both hands weigh invisible melons, Wood strides through the Lancashire mud. If Shakespeare had ever been in Lancashire, he would have probably strode, or stridden, through mud like this.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)