The Shakespeare Code: Ranking - 204

  The Shakespeare Code

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 7/4/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Gareth Roberts, director: Charles Palmer) 

'Shall I compare thee to a Summer's Day?

Or to a Slitheen that's coloured grey? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

Except when you cry 'exterminate!'

So long as cybermen can breathe or have eyes to see

You'll always be as pretty as Alpha Centauri'

Ranking: 204

 

Heh heh heh meets nonny nonny. At last, revenge for all those awful Shakespeare plays I had to sit through for years (as a joint English-History major there were more than I could, well, shake a spear at, there really was no escaping him). Yes that’s right, Shakespeare is a bad writer. I’ve said it. In DW terms he’s like the Pip ‘n’ Jane writer of the series: incomprehensible people talking incomprehensible words that nobody would really say, in situations that make little or no sense. And don’t get me started on how badly he misunderstands his history! I have just honestly never understood the fascination. Everyone praises old Shakey for his intricate plots, but he’s one of the least original plot writers that ever lived, nicking his ideas either from real history (and worse tampering with it) or from other writers. He’s not much cop on characters, or at least I can’t say I’ve ever much cared for any. He’s not great on dialogue either, even – perhaps especially - compared to contemporaries like Kit Marlowe (a real writer’s writer!) People seem to forget too that Shakespeare wasn’t all that respected in his day – he was popular enough to keep having new plays on but wasn’t seen as anything special until after his death when a ‘first folio’ of his plays was put together (would that I have publicity agents like John Heminges and Henry Condell when I die). In short, stick the likes of Russell T Davies and Malcolm Hulke in pantaloons and send them back in time a few hundred years and they would eat him for breakfast. So it does the heart good to see DW roast The Bard the way they do so many historical characters, showing a ‘hero’ to be just another flawed mortal, one whose flirty and more than a little narcisstic (his first line uttered is the decidedly un Shakespearean ‘shut your big fat mouths!’) Gareth Roberts’ script is full of little jokes and asides which are funny if you get them but aren’t intrusive enough to get in the way of the story if you don’t and thankfully the script doesn’t try and put him in a jealousy/love triangle the Doctor the way they did with Robin Hood or turn him into an alien werewolf the way they did with Queen Victoria (even if there is a bit too much flirting with Martha). Placing the script round the central idea of the ‘missing’ play ‘Love’s Labours Won’ is a clever idea: it appears on lists of Shakespeare plays but nobody can agree on exactly what it was (a mis-spelling of ‘Love’s Labours Lost? A Sequel? A prequel? An entirely different story? A clerical error?) so with no contradictory evidence why not make it an incantation to summon evil from three alien witches known as Carrionites? Mercifully despite the title this isn’t the spin-off of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (another of the era’s big fads that was inevitably going to be in DW somewhere; they should have stuck with working title ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’) for a much subtler story about a writer entrusted with saving the world whose suddenly struck by the importance of choosing the right word. The filming in the real (well, the real modern re-creation of the) Globe Theatre is fabulous and as we keep saying on here the BBC’s attention to detail with historical details is impeccable too. It’s all good fun, albeit everyone takes everything seriously enough for it to work as drama too. It’s just (and now here is the Winter of my discontent)…Aliens that feed off the psychic energy of words? Really? Of all the many DW monsters and their odd fuel sources we’ve had done the years that seems…unlikely? Also why go back in time to here to hear those words? Wouldn’t the Carrionites get a better feed from somebody who writes a lot (take Jeffrey Archer – and do us all a favour…) or someone who talks really really fast? (I had money on the Carrionites coming back when Catherine Tate joined the show!) Making them witches like the ones in MacBeth seems…a trifle odd? Then to top it all off Martha rescues the supposedly greatest wordsmith of his day by quoting Harry Potter! As surprisingly good as Dave Lennox Kelly is in the part too, with just the right balance of drama and comedy, he looks nothing like the Shakespeare portraits or silhouettes we know and I’m really not buying the whole modern-day re-casting of Shakespeare as some heart-throb (I blame ‘Shakespeare In Love’ for this as nobody used to think like that at all; just see how Shakespeare is portrayed in ‘The Chase’ in 1965 as slightly plump and balding for how we used to see him and what in all likelihood The Bard really looked like). Still, if I have to sit through Shakespeare this is the version I’d choose in twin timelord heartbeats – an actual plot that’s highly inventive and original, one that doesn’t contradict what we know from history, filled with characters I actually care about, sparkling dialogue and some fine acting. It’s as good as people always tell me Shakespeare is, in fact. I was shooketh, dear reader, shooketh!   

+ Martha actually does it, she tells Shakespeare the joke about him walking into a pub and landlord saying ‘get out mate, you’re bard!’ A hit, a very palpable hit!

-          Egads, the moment when Shakespeare writes a (real) sonnet (‘no 18’) for Martha as his ‘black Lady’ is just cringe. Especially when it it’s addressed, like 17 others, to a fictional young man reading the work.  There is a much later series of sonnets addressed to a ‘dark lady’ but if they are intended for Martha then I hope she goes back in time and thumps him one, given that she’d described as ‘not aristocratic, young, beautiful, intelligent or chaste’. And all this just as the rest of the episode does so well with something that people wrongly complained about: yes London really was this multi-cultural in 1599 with a lot of black travellers from around the empire passing through its docks. Chances are people’s first re-action to Martha in 1599 would be ‘gosh there goes a black person in funny clothes who talks posh!’ not ‘gosh a black person!’  Exit left till tomorrow. Pursued by a Bandril.