AS FASCINATION with Shakespeare's dramas and poems endures, the desire to know more about the inner life of the greatest literary figure in the English language intensifies--though scholars have always failed to satisfy it, because "there is no evidence, you know." That was the pithy response of Simon Schama when he warned British historian-turned-documentary filmmaker Michael Wood about the pitfalls in trying to make the first-ever film that would make Shakespeare come alive.

But Wood persisted. The result is both an impressive film and a companion book entitled "In Search of Shakespeare." The four-hour BBC film will air nationally on various PBS channels in segments throughout February. Many who watch this film may not be aware that Wood's exposé of Shakespeare's family's abiding attachment to Roman Catholicism, and perhaps his own, is quite controversial. Since the mid-1980s, scholars have had sharp differences concerning the "Catholic question." For his part, Wood seems perplexed that others fail to appreciate that his exploration of how this religious heritage colored the bard's life and writings helps greatly to overcome the paucity of other evidence illuminating the man's inner life.

Indeed, the dreary bottom line is that between his birth in 1564 and his purchase of an expensive home in Stratford town in 1597, this particular William Shakespeare (there were several with this name at the time) only left records pertaining to his shotgun marriage to Anne Hathaway and the birth of his children. While biographers can pad their narratives with "could have" or "might have" speculation, as every Shakespearean biographer has done since the eighteenth-century, a documentary filmmaker cannot get away with it so easily. To fill up the videotape and to give us a more compelling picture, Wood astutely decided to ride the new wave in Shakespeare scholarship: the growing evidence that young William emerged from a family deeply imbedded in a network of hard-core Catholics from South Warwickshire.

Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, due to publish yet another Shakespeare biography within the next year, once encouraged Hollywood producers to make a film exploring this Catholic connection. He had no success, as filmmakers concluded, with "Shakespeare in Love," that sex was easier for moviegoers to grasp than the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics four hundred years ago.

Hollywood isn't alone. The idea of a Catholic Shakespeare troubles some scholars as well. He was for two decades on the royal payroll as the senior dramatist of the acting company directly tied to Queen Elizabeth's court. And after the queen's harsh new edicts in the early 1580s, anyone who failed to appear regularly at Anglican services, or who sustained Catholic faith in secrecy, risked ruinous fines, imprisonment, and even execution.

Wood notes that this was the fate of several close friends and relatives of Shakespeare's parents. And he provides a map in his book showing the location of an execution scaffold next to the Curtain Theater in the first theatrical district in London, just north of the city walls in Shoreditch. Wood doesn't mention that the queen in August 1588 had several English Catholics executed to reinforce and celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, including one Jesuit on this particular scaffold.