Probing the whodunit of Shakespeare’s life

In the marvelously detailed four-part series “In Search of Shakespeare,” which premieres tonight on PBS, Michael Wood -- writer, historian, filmmaker and, by the look of it, the most enthusiastic man in England -- embarks on a quest for clues that might fill in the blanks of Shakespeare’s elusive personal life.

Attacking the job like a detective in an Elizabethan whodunit, the ceaselessly jubilant Wood skips through the streets of Stratford and London, tramps through woods, clomps through muddy embankments and pays many a cheerful, sunny visit to the descendants of Shakespeare’s (presumed) patrons. Poring over court records, diaries, reports from royal spies and merchant logs, he re-creates the (apparently) remarkable life of the mysterious Elizabethan playwright in such painstaking, psychologically motivated, crisis-fueled detail, it’s practically E! channel-ready.

Wood, who has written and presented roughly 60 TV documentaries, including “In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great,” and who has written several bestselling books, attributes much of the fresh information he presents to the recent discovery of several new Shakespeare-related documents, and he fills in many of the blanks in Shakespeare’s life, dispelling the old Marlowe-wrote-Shakespeare hypothesis while he’s at it.

New details about Shakespeare’s family background, including the discovery of his maternal grandfather’s will, suggest that the family was Catholic at a particularly inopportune time. They also suggest that the Shakespeares -- both William’s father, John, and William himself -- probably harbored lifelong secret allegiances to the old faith, which was tantamount to treason in the Elizabethan era and led to Shakespeare’s father’s undoing. With these new facts in hand, Wood basically reimagines Shakespeare’s life as a dramatic saga shaped by political instability and religious infighting, and his family’s loss of fortune and social prominence.

Forgoing the usual TV documentary-style mix of still photographs, talking heads and cheesy theme park reenactments, Wood chooses instead to travel throughout present-day England looking for traces of a life. It is rather remarkable how much of it he finds. Wood’s trek reveals as much about modern England as it does about its past, building a seamless, invisible bridge between past and present.

The school where Shakespeare studied as a boy, for instance, still functions, and as we hear about Shakespeare’s passion for Ovid as a schoolboy, we watch a class full of contemporary Harry Potters study and put on plays.

This is a large part of what makes “In Search of Shakespeare” -- which airs from 8 to 9 tonight, with subsequent installments airing on successive Thursdays -- feel so speedy and inexorable. Wood also describes historical events, whenever possible, in present-day terms. For instance, Elizabeth’s England was a “police state” in the midst of a “cultural revolution,” and it had a complex intelligence gathering system in place. Shakespeare’s father was essentially arrested for dealing in illegal substances (or, perhaps more in keeping with his bourgeois status, for brokering an illegal commodity).

A “terrorist” attempt against King James I (the Gunpowder Plot) is referred to as “the Jacobean 9/11.” And an older, successful Shakespeare is characterized as a proto-movie mogul: The biggest fish in the Elizabethan “entertainment industry.”

In the second episode of the series, Wood speculates on the possible jobs -- actor or teacher -- that might have led Shakespeare to his new incarnation as dramatist. The third episode looks at the emotional blitzkrieg that inspired the sonnets.

Wood reveals a Shakespeare as well-drawn as one of his characters: adventurous, passionate, deceptive and poignant. However, from time to time, certain documents are subject to wishful thinking, such as one that identifies a “Shaxberd” at King James’ Court. (Is that the guy? It could be. Or it could just be some dude named Shaxberd.)

In the final episode, we learn of Shakespeare’s life in the era of King James I, whose coronation the playwright attended. We know this because of records kept by the current queen’s royal robe maker, successor to the then-queen’s robe maker. This is the name Shakespeare would have gratefully announced on the red carpet had the Elizabethan Joan Rivers inquired as to whom he was wearing. (He wore, by the way, a scarlet wool robe.) It’s not quite filling in the life of Jesus with dry-cleaning receipts, but it’s close.