Shakespeare was really into blood. It saturated his work and literally soaked the floorboards in many of his productions. James Shapiro explains what blood meant to The Bard, in a time when the world was just on the cusp of understanding how the powerful, perplexing liquid really worked.

Then, Edward Dolnick describes a set of experiments aimed at unlocking blood's mysteries. Though they were designed by one of the greatest scientific minds of Shakespeare's day, the experiments sound utterly ridiculous to us today. That is until producer Lynn Levy introduces us to some startling new research that suggests those 17th century folks might have been onto something big.