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

 

HHeh heh heh meets nonny nonny as Dr Who finally makes good on the tease from ‘The Chase’ and spends a whole episode in Shakesperian England. Now this was an episode I confess I wad dreading before it was first on. While I’m always pleased to see writers in Dr Who, the lifeblood of any civilisation (and a welcome change from politicians and monarchs), I would rather be stuck squashed in a lift with a farting slitheen and ‘The Creature From The Pit’ than have to spend more time with Shakespeare than I can help (and as an English major I ended up spending more time on his wretched plays than I could, well, shake a spear at). Yes that’s right, I’m going to blow your mind and say what everyone is always too scared to say: Shakespeare is a terrible writer. 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. 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 his lifetime he was just one of the crowd and not at the front of it, outwitted by Marlowe, outwritten by Bacon. Even Robert Greene, his longstanding rival now only remembered for his Shakespearian feud, could write him under the table. Far from being the best writer England ever had he isn’t even the best writer of his generation. He has no idea of sentence construction, character development, plot development, how to handle emotions, how to make deeper poignant comments, nothing that is associated with good writing. And it’s not just the period style either: I love all his contemporaries who’s work is full of a fire, an energy, a passion, an emotion that simply isn’t there in Shakespeare’s work, as if alien wrote his words by remote and sucked all the authenticity away. In Dr Who terms he’s the Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker of the series: incomprehensible people talking incomprehensible words that nobody would really say, in situations that make little or no sense. Even watching the Russell T Davies adaptation of ‘A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’ was one of the worst TV hours of my life (and if he can’t make an adaptation of something work nobody can).

Don’t get me started on how badly Shakespeare misunderstands his history either! It’s like he went time travelling to an ‘Inferno’ style parallel universe and took all his information from there. Never mind his awfulness as a human being, with a head so large I’m amazed it could ever fit inside a ruff. Other writers made it their life’s work to make the world a better place. Shakespeare spent his work attacking people who didn’t think like him, incessantly. If he was around today he’d be writing plays about King Richard Tate and giving the true heroes of the day a hump. In short, stick the likes of David Whittaker and Malcolm Hulke in pantaloons and send them back in time a few hundred years and they would eat him for breakfast (indeed, a lot of reviewers in the press praised Roberts for what they considered the very Shakesperian line ‘the eye should have contentment where it rests’, without apparently knowing it was a cheeky steal from Whittaker’s script for ‘The Crusade’ episode three). So I was dreading another one of ‘those’ historicals where everyone fanboys over the celebrity and he saves the universe by being magnificent, especially given writer Gareth Roberts’ reputation as a Shakespeare-o-phile.

Luckily that isn’t what we get at all with Shakespeare a puppet out of his depth, controlled by aliens while other scenes show him to be the big-headed conceited womanising ass he was. While Dean Lennox Kelley is far handsomer and sexier than the real bard was in 1599 (when he was thirty five, practically old age back then) and we know for a fact from portraits that he more closely resembled the baling nobody in pantaloons of ‘The Chase’, nevertheless in most other respects The Bard is the butt of all the jokes. He’s a put upon playwright who promises more than he can fulfil, who freezes when asked to come up with words to short order when facing down an alien invasion. He’s a small man out of his depth in a bigger universe with all the chaisma of a used car salesmen. Most of his new words? They were invented by the Doctor. Most of his ideas? Stolen. Most of his reputation? It’s all a big act. It does the heart good to see Dr Who roast The Bard where other academics swoon, without the respect of Dickens (in ‘The Unquiet Dead’) or Agatha Christie (Roberts’ next script ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’). After fearing a ‘Crusade’ or ‘Marco Polo’, treating Shakespeare with a respect he doesn’t deserve, we get an update of ‘The Romans’, one that’s forever throwing us off by showing us the flawed messy version of history that might not be in the history books but somehow feels more accurate even so. 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 with 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. And indeed The Doctor).

It’s also a very Dr Who contribution towards who wrote the actual Shakespeare plays. Academics have been discussing this since at least the 19^th century and I’ve often wondered to, so having alien witches from outer space works for me! You see, Shakespeare seems to have come from nowhere, with most of his reputation grown after his death, while his own headstone carries no mark of being a writer. In tandem with the way Shakespeare’s writing style varies wildly from play to play and the fact that we have a number of plays known to have been unofficial collaborations (‘Timon Of Athens’ ‘Henry VI’ ‘Henry VIII’ and ‘Titus Andronicus’) it’s led many scholars to wonder if contemporaries like Marlowe or Bacon wrote his more famous works (though, frankly, both men would have written them better). ‘The Shakespeare Code’ takes the very Dr Who twist that at least some of Shakespeare’s work was written in a form of hypnotism, by an alien race named The Carrionites who look like witches (the hint is that Shakespeare uses them as inspiration when he sits down to write future play ‘MacBeth’). Well, it works for me (although my favourite take on Shakespeare is still Terry nation’s 1964 ‘dalek Book’ which reckons they were all written by The Emperor Dalek’- they invented iambic pentameter, you know. It helps go with the monotone voices).. It also fits with the contemporary early 2000s obsession with ‘conspiracies’ – the title refers back to ‘The Da Vinci Code’, the weird Dan Brown book about hidden symbols in the painter’s work (ideas that had actually been written about since the 1970s when Henry Lincoln wrote books on the subject – the same Henry Lincoln who created ‘The Abominable Snowman’ and collaborated on two future Who scripts). It’s a clever way of making sure the audience aren’t put off by the past history, although the script does rather over-ape this with The Doctor’s comparisons of ‘global warming’ (fires), ‘recycling’ (cow dung) and ‘entertainment’ (treating going to the theatre like watching TV, none of which is strictly true). They even have actress Andreee Bernard playing barmaid Dolly Bailey in the exact same way she plays much the same character in bars in ‘Only Fools and Horses’ and ‘Hollyoaks’. Well, it could have been worse. There was originally a scene that had Martha auditioning to join the Shakespeare company, which would have been a send-up of ‘The X Factor’. 

We’re a long way from the early Dr Who historicals where the past was real and brutal and every bit as alien as any alien planet, but it works for this one story. Shakespeare’s historicals were all really about the time he was writing in anyway, which is why its so annoying whenever a director gets the idea to ‘modernise’ one of his plays and thinks they’ve invented something new: that was how they were meant to work. Like most Dr Who stories the ‘historicals' were really about the worries of the times the people watching were going through (like the cavemen in separate tribes destroying each other with fire just like the cold war in ‘An Unearthly Child’ or the sense of doom that permeates ‘The Myth Makers’) while the ‘comedies’ were exaggerated visions of futures that might be if current court intrigues worked out the same way. This is what Shakespeare most has in common with the Dr Who formula, so it makes perfect sense t- for this one time only – that Roberts should spend the whole story making 1599 seem like 2007. Shakespeare is a rockstar, with an entourage, buxom groupies and a manager, up against a jealous concert promoter who wants to put a stop his success. The most accurate part of all of this is that the public have come for a rowdy night out and a bit of entertainment away from the hangings and bear baitings: they’re not treating Shakespeare’s work with the reverential hush most writers would have given him.    

If you had to choose an episode in Shakespeare’s life, too, then this would be the one to go for (well, one of two actually: more on that in a moment). The construction of the globe theatre in 1599 (not strictly the way it looks on telly – laws that considered the theatre on a par with prostitution and gamkling sidelined it to the edges so it would have backed onto the Thames rather than been surrounded by houses on all sides) coincided with a ‘missing’ play. There are actually a few in Shakespeare’s portfolio,  mentioned by other people, but ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ is in many ways the most recorded and the most intriguing. It’s mentioned in two places by two different authors in different years, which suggests it isn’t just a misprint: Francis Meres’ guidebook ‘Palladis Tannia’ (1598) and a literary catalogue offers it for sale (1603). Of course it could just be a misprint of the existing play ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ – however that play all but promises a sequel, ending in a more sudden and confusing way than even some Colin Baker Dr Whos, one of those typically unfunny ‘misdirection’ plays where characters all assume the worst things about each other. For the only time in his catalogue, though, Shakespeare doesn’t resolve this anywhere and the play ends, if it can be called that, on a morris dance sequence interrupted by one of the actors telling the audience to go home and the play’s over (‘You that way, we this way’). It could well be that the play went down so badly even Shakespeare’s ego wouldn’t allow him to write a sequel (of all his works it’s the one most rooted to the time it was written in, full of court intrigue that sounds like gibberish to us now – the morris dancing is the ‘fun’ comprehensible bit) – and yet if you had to have a Shakespeare plot in a scifi series writing around this tantalising detail makes as much sense as any. With no contradictory evidence, why not make it an incantation to summon evil from three alien witches known as Carrionites in a Theatre created to a certain fourteen-sided design by an architect with the same alien-witches whispering in his ear?  (Actually The Globe Theatre was fourteen sides to best cater for that many regular people for the theatre to come out even and amplify the voices on stage: the reason it doesn’t quite work today is because all the modern traffic outside rather counts this aspect out – I’d be intrigued to see someone drive a horse and trap past one day to see if that sound carries as well). However I do think Roberts lost a trick there as there’s an even better hook to have hung this plot: the destruction of the Globe Theatre in 1613 by fire during another Shakespeare play ‘Henry VIII’ (yes, the same one written in collaboration: it’s the odd one out in so many ways coming so long after the others, when Shakespeare had worked perfectly well for years without a collaborator. And ‘John Fletcher’ sounds like a typical alien pseudonym to me).  Officially The Globe burnt down because of a canon on stage with the spark setting alight to the thatch roof but a) enough performances went off without a hitch and b) surely nobody would actually be that stupid?

This story’s saving grace is the fact that they’ve actually been allowed to film in the remade Globe Theatre (opened in 1997 – almost certainly not on the site of the old one but in roughly the right area). This was a huge coup for Dr Who at the time and a sign of how much goodwill there was for the series back then because no other fictional series had ever filmed there before. It was a bureaucratic nightmare getting permission and it was pulled at least once close to the wire. An alternative script had been readied too just in case, set a few months earlier when The Globe was being constructed and set in a nobleman’s house (filmed in Wales, naturally).In the end there was a compromise where the production team had to work through the night (in order not to interfere with the plays on in the day) and only had six hours to film, but they use it well with fifty extras multiplied by the wonders of computer technology to thousands (the ‘new’ one was created to match theories about the ‘old’ one, specifically that it had a 2000 person capacity). Of course it leads to the one great anachronism of the story (no way would any theatre be open at night in the days before gas lighting: acting by candlelight was far too dangerous, making that cannon-shot seem doubly silly), but on the plus side it makes the story seem super atmospheric. While they seem to insist on filming everything in the dark nowadays we didn’t get many night shoots back then and it’s Shakespeare seen in a way it never has been before even before the witches turn up.

Ah yes, the witches (and now here is the Winter of my discontent) – that’s where ‘The Shakespeare Code’ rather falls apart, with another of those Dr Who stories that was doing okay until the Dr Whoness of it in the second half sinks the promise of the first. They look stupid, with ‘pretty’ actresses switching to ‘old hags’ who are wearing prosthetic makeup that just looks as if they’re wearing poor quality Halloween masks. It looks like a low budget parody. Apparently in the before-time there was a group of aliens who happened to exist in the before-times when different kinds of science rules which makes their powers work more like ‘magic’, the start of a slippery slope of ‘impossible beings’ that’s takes Dr Who a long way from scifi that it’s still falling down now … Eh? Aliens that feed off the psychic energy of words? Really? Of all the many Dr Who monsters and their odd fuel sources we’ve had done the years that seems…unlikely? While I’ll buy that the Carrionites somehow look just like legends of Earth witches (even if the timing seems a bit out: people were afraid of witches before this story even if some survivors spread the word) their ‘magic’ is said to work like a computer programme, with words and curses in place of numbers. Double eh? Language doesn’t work like that: you can see, if you’ve ever read a translation o a work in another language, that words are open to multiple meanings and simply don’t work like that. You can’t have a curse that works when the people saying the words have a different meaning to the ones you intended – language doesn’t work that way, it’s forever changing and evolving and twisting for the different cultures that use them (on a side note that’s why they can just about get away with Shakespeare speaking like that, with a Mancunian twang, rather than having a pronounced Midlands burr). It’s not like numbers that are fixed and static, which is why basically the same plot used in ‘Logopolis’ works: any visiting alien would recognise our numbering system straight away, even if they most likely use a base count other than ten for going round again (I like to think, in honour of Douglas Adams,  that most use forty-two). Also, the Carrionites don’t want just any writer but one that’s grieving. Triple eh? Shakespeare had indeed lost a son, but it’s one he had barely even met as he was with his (much older – Shakespeare got her pregnant when he was 18 and she was 26. Remember this next time your English teacher tells you that kids today are uncouth and didn’t act like they did in Shakespeare’s time) wife back in Stratford-Upon-Avon while Shakespeare stayed in London. If it’s grief you want then in this era everyone in the crowd would have lost someone and almost certainly recently.  In order to deliver this ‘curse’ the Carrionites have come to the world’s ‘greatest ever writer’^TM  to say them because…Quadruple eh? Well why exactly? It can’t be audience as they want to take the Earth over and feast off human carcasses otherwise they wouldn’t be talking to a single theatre in 1599. Even if they somehow know that Shakespeare’s works are going to be written down and performed for centuries to come (and I have images of it being an alien that somehow kept Shakespeare’s name alive and growing after his death because there’s no other logical reason for it) they would at most only affect future theatre-goers and degree students. If you really want an audience to enslave for all time with words that add up then you got for a writer who’s more prolific and better read (take Jeffrey Archer – no please seriously, take Jeffrey Archer, preferably back to your planet…) Or if you want people in one go then go for any old thing read by someone who talks really really fast (I had money on the Carrionites coming back when Catherine Tate joined the show!) Or if you want the most possible people in one go you head straight for a high profile writer that people actually did read, for a while – like J K Rowling.

This is where ‘The Shakespeare Code’ starts to look uncomfortable with hindsight. Even though most of her best ideas were pinched, Shakespeare style, from Jill Murphy’s ‘Worst Witch’ series nevertheless there was a general feeling of warmth towards the Harry Potter franchise in this era, matched only by love for the comeback Dr Who. In 2007 both were seen as safe spaces for everyone (well, not bullies – never bullies. Or psychopaths. Or people practising bad magic. Or actually the people who picked up on the anti-semitic tropes of the goblins. But everyone else) and their fanbases crossed over a lot (most young Dr Who and are big readers after all). In 2007 having The Doctor and Martha take over from a dumbfounded Shakespeare by quoting Harry Potter spells like ‘expelliarmus’ felt ‘right’, a mixing of eras and cultures. At the time I was just pleased that someone had put a modern writer on the same level if not a little higher than The Bard. Then Jo Rowling (rhymes with ‘Clare Balding’ or ‘the semiotic thickness in the text unfolding’ or whatever it was we all used to say back then) did a Shakespeare of her own and began to believe her own reputation, sure that everything she had to be ‘right’ because look at how many people bought her books. So she started talking about complex issues as if she spoke for everyone, when actually she was in the minority. Though her books are full of moral justice and a Dr Who sense of karma (especially her best work, the local council novel ‘The Casual Vacancy’) she’s made the world a very unsafe space for lots of the Trans community who were doing no harm whatsoever to her. The fact that she’s now a witch on a Carrionite level makes the ending of this story uncomfortable. Times a quadzillion when Gareth Roberts became a similar pariah in the Dr Who community for making similar nasty remarks about the Trans community (and this despite the fact that, as a member of the LGBTQ community himself, he should know better what being in a minority feels like). At the time it felt like the fun cultural reference it was probably meant to be. Nowadays it feels like some icky conspiracy it’s best not to think about (not helped by the fact that the first draft had a cut sub-plot about Shakespeare’s daughter in drag as a player in his company without his knowing, because it was the only way she could spend time with him. Remind my why Shakespeare’s grief for his family was so overpowering it caused an alien invasion again). Few scenes of Dr Who are tarred by this same feeling we didn’t have at the time (well, only the ones with John Barrowman maybe, but we sort of knew that at the time if not the extent of it). 

Another thing that seemed good at the time but less so as time wore on…Poor Martha. The Doctor is going to be mooning about Rose for the rest of the year, treating her as a second-rate traveller even though she’s clearly far handier to have in the Tardis than Billie Piper ever was (would a Rose by any other name smell as sweet?) Look at the way Martha does everything Rose would do (be excited, curious and brave in equal measure) but on top can actually save lives, using her skills as a Doctor. The Doctor should be proud, not making cracks about how ‘if Rose was here’ she’d be saying something ‘useful’. Roberts, a Douglas Adams fan through and through, has made no bones of the fact that ‘City Of Death’ is his favourite story and the 10^th Doctor here is painted much like the 4^th there, a real aliens’ alien who doesn’t have the first clue about Humans and especially when it comes to romance.   He even admits this when a Carrionite starts trying to use their charm on him. But that’s not how the other writers have seen the Tennant Doctor. He’s usually charming, flirty, totally sure about what he’s doing and sure of his impact on people.  Even if he was too mopey over Rose to properly invest in a relationship the way Martha wants in any previous story he would have found a way of letting Martha down gently, not rubbing her face in it by sharing a bed with no sexual thoughts whatsoever while talking about his ex. He’s never been that heartsless before. Alas every future writer from Russell T Davies on down will take their cue from this script and write Martha as if she’s in the way somehow while she looks up dreamily at him, hoping. Much as I love Martha this is the one story this year that would have worked better without her there too. Roberts completely fudges the issue of race: for what it’s worth England wasn’t like a lot of countries in 1599. Thanks to the British Empire you did have people of colour passing through London especially and not as slaves either: that all came later. But they tended to be rich nobelemen or businessmen or immigrants from wars we started  (we’ve always been like that, despite what the illiterate and uneducated Nigel Farages  -rhymes with ‘garages’ or ‘disparages’ or ‘seeing immigrants of the world everywhere that are really mirages’ - of the world might tell you. 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!’ They would still have at least stared, though. There also most definitely wouldn’t have been a handful in the stands at the Globe with the riffraff. You’d think as well that someone used to hygiene and sterilisation as Dr Martha would be more appalled at the (admittedly very clean looking) unhygienic streets, but then she takes to time and space travel remarkably well this newbie,  talking about stepping on butterflies and accidentally killing Grandads that Rose never thought of; just compared ‘Smith and Jones’ and this episode back to back with the episode ‘Rose’ (the only previous time new Who had introduced a long-running companion from Earth) where it took Billie Piper more or less a whole episode and a false start where she turns the Doctor’s offer down, before remaining in culture shock throughout ‘The End Of The World’.

Then there’s Shakespeare himself. Zounds he’s annoying! All that flirting, all that bluster, all that arrogance: though it feels very true to life and makes for some good jokes it still doesn’t stop you wanting to drop him down the nearest Elizabethan mineshaft. Though they make out he’s an intellectual genius there’s nothing that demonstrates that (well, only a misguided joke about him seeing through The Doctor’s use of psychic paper. Which is nonsense. Intelligence has nothing to do with powers of suggestion and anyway Shakespeare was as gullible as they come given the historical inaccuracies he took as fact in his day). He gets precious little to do, too, unless you count being hypnotised into writing one page of a play. Every generation gets the Shakespeare they want just as every era gets their own Doctor, best suited to fighting the fights necessary. Some say that’s a sign of what a marvellous writer Shakespeare is that every audience finds something new to latch on to and that where there’s a Will there’s a way of shoehorning him into becoming what you want him to be. I say it’s a sign of how weak and empty a writer he is that he’s everything to everybody: racists and nationalists love his jingoistic work, liberals latch on to his more tolerant depictions of societies. In the 1960s we had a very counter-cultural version who defied the conventions of the day and what authority figures told him to do (just look at ‘The Chase’ where he thinks Queen Elizabeth I is a nutcase for her suggestions and writes his own). Alas ‘The Shakespeare Code’ was written in the era of perhaps the least interesting and accurate one of all: the ‘Shakespeare In love’ version that’s sexy, hip, contemporary, creative, cool.  Dave Lennox Kelly is brilliant at portraying the Shakespeare as written in the script and almost makes him likeable (which is some going from me), but it’s a caricature: we all know Shakespeare wasn’t really like this and that he was the balding portly man from the portraits and contemporary documents (Martha does, at least, mention his halitosis, said to be a problem). Will’s even less likely to have been (at least openly) bisexual, despite how Roberts writes him here, chatting up anything going. It’s a shame this story wasn’t written a decade later when we’d adjusted to the acerbic grumpy moaning Shakespeare of David Mitchell’s comedy ‘Upstart Crow’, one that feels far closer to true life.

There’s also that deeply confusing ending (added, to be fair, by Russell – it wasn’t in Roberts’ draft script) when Queen Elizabeth I arrives to tear a strip off the Doctor and ban him from her kingdom. It was meant as some sort of joke (though in actual fact it’s the only one in a funny script that misses its target), explained away in retrospect a little nervously by a line in Russell T Davies’ ‘The End Of Time’ and a whole scene in Steven Moffat’s ‘The Day Of the Doctor’. We’re meant to think, since those stories, that it’s the result of some sort of romantic tryst gone wrong, but that’s not how it’s played here: it’s more a xenophobic thing, that this alien has been harbouring other aliens on this fair knighted sceptered isle. Which is a particularly dumb thing for one of our most colonial Queens to say (if she’s assumed the Doctor was Spanish then it would have made more sense, but we were on fairly friendly terms with most people back then – even the French were sort of loosely tolerated). It just doesn’t work and ruins the ending. It’s a shame, too, that the eternals from ‘Enlightenment’ don’t make a return appearance despite being name-checked. While having the audience dismiss the events of this night as a ‘special effect’ has far more confidence in what could be done on stage in 1599 than I have.

Still, overall, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ still kind of works. It’s not the smartest, funniest or most sensible scripts and the second half goes to sleep a bit, but the first half more than makes up for it. Even when this story is doing something stupid at least it’s doing it against a backdrop that looks quite magnificent. There’s a nice mixture of a very arch, knowing, winking script delivered with utter seriousness by the performers and filmed with typical BBC beauty (even away from the Globe the London of 1599 feels beautifully real, with the first substantial British filming of the ‘new’ series that isn’t in Wales or London: Coventry and Warwick were picked as they still had a few Tudor houses. There aren’t any near Cardiff for once). There’s a lightness to this story that enables it to get away with all sorts of things it shouldn’t. There’s a nice in-joke for instance about Shakespeare getting the name ‘Sycorax’ from The Doctor (when Russell T got it from Shakespeare!) There’s another nice in-joke where Roberts named the character Wiggins after a friend-rival, fellow Who fanzine writer and Shakespeare expert on the grounds that ‘if anyone was going to trip me up on something not quite right it was going to be him so I thought I’d butter him up first’. There’s another nice joke purely for Shakespeare fans: ‘The Elephant’ was the name of the inn in ‘Twelfth Night’ (and if you think to yourself ‘hang on, that sign didn’t look much like an elephant’ that’s actually very clever: no one in that pub would have known what a real elephant looked like back then and it looks like one based on a ‘description’ not a ‘photo’). There’s one really clever line designed to please both sets of fans (when Martha points out that the Globe is like the Tardis ; a small wooden box that holds ‘great power’). Finally there’s dig at Taunton, chosen deliberately (as it’s the one town in England roughly the size it was in Shakespeare’s day so the joke works for him and us – most towns are bigger of course, though a few shrunk completely; Taunton’s an anomaly). They cut a lot of the long boring stuff, including an unnecessary swordfight (dropped after the stuntman was accidentally stabbed in the eye with  sword – he was fine, but sent to hospital just in case). It’s far from perfect for all sorts of reasons, butthis is the way to do it if they had to do it. If I have to sit through Shakespeare this is the version I’d choose in twin timelord heartbeats – a story with 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, some genuinely funny moments and some fine acting. They say never meet your heroes and if Shakespeare was one then I’d be appalled at what they’ve done to him here, but as he represents everything I see as being wrong with snooty people who have a certain ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ when it comes to believing somebody they’ve all been taught to admire is good, I say: hurrah! This story is as good as people always tell me Shakespeare is, in fact. I was shooketh, dear reader, shooketh! Now that’s me over for another week. Exit left till tomorrow. Pursued by a Bandril.

POSITIVES + 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!

NEGATIVES - Egads, the moment when Shakespeare writes a (real) sonnet (‘no 18’) for Martha as his ‘black Lady’ is just totes cringe. Especially when it’s actually 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’ too (127-152) 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’.

BEST QUOTE: Shakespeare: ‘It made me question everything, the futility of this fleeting existence, to be or not to be…Ooh that’s quite god!’ Dr: ‘You should write that down’. Shakespeare: ‘Hmm, maybe not. Bit pretentious, no?’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There are more than a few similarities between ‘The Shakespeare Code’ and ‘The Witches!’, a 2^nd Doctor comic strip that ran in the pages of TV Comic between issues #837-#841 across the end of December 1967 into January 1968. Then again a lot of other stories seemed to pinch from this one, not just ‘Code’! It turns out that the witches from Macbeth are real (and not Carrionites either in this version), holding druid-like festivals once a year on different planets and this year they’ve chosen the Earth-like planet Vargo. There’s a speech by The Grand Witch who promises that ‘since last we met our forces have spread deeper into the universe bringing terror to more and more people’ and then gives a demonstration of her powers by turning a nearby tree into granite (well, it beats turning a person into a tree a la ‘Mark Of The Rani’ I suppose). Into the middle of this arrives The Doctor, who tells companions John and Gillian that his special utility belt is a match for any witch’s magic. Interestingly he pretends to be ‘The Great Wizard Omega’ even though Omega hasn’t appeared in the TV series yet (see ‘The Three Doctors’ or, given the events of this story, maybe that should be ‘The Tree Doctors’, I’m here all week folks); come to that nor has the idea that ‘advanced science is indistinguishable by magic’ which underpins the plot of both this strip and a future TV story (‘The Daemons’). The witches respond to by sending a Godzilla-type creature after him, but an unusually bloodthirsty Doctor uses a disintegrating ray on it. Most of the witches flee, but not old Grand-boots, no: she lurks nearby The Tardis and hears The Doctor boasting about his utility belt and calls back her sisters to ‘pluck him from his metal box’ (you think witches who’d just been turning trees into things would recognise wood when they see it). They send an armour-plated crab after The Doctor (that looks just like the Macra, with ‘The Macra Terror’ a story that actually had been on telly at this point; John shielding Gillian is exactly like the one surviving fragment we have of Ben shielding Polly). The Grand Witch takes a struggling Doctor to her lair, complete with pool of boiling lead in the centre, which The Doctor gets thrown (just like, ooh, lots of TV stories past, present and future). John uses the echo in the cave to throw his voice and pretends to be a wizard (very like ‘The Underwater Menace’, another story that had been on TV) and demands they free their prisoner ‘or die!’ The Grand Witch uses x-ray vision to see through their escape plan and throws a giant web over The Tardis (much like ‘The Web Of Fear’ – they hadn’t made this one yet). The Witches are then fooled by the Tardis trio simply sneaking back round them and into their own lair while they’re off searching for them, with The Doctor finding their magic spell book and casting a ‘spell’ of his own. To his shock, it works: they all turn to dust (very like the finale of ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, on TV almost two years earlier to the day), which means that to his surprise magic is ‘real’ after all. Far-fetched as it is, this is one of the better TV comic strips of the era with some gorgeous illustrations by John Canning and The Grand Witch is one of the best of the comic strip’s original foes (most of them tend to give me the Trods).

The strip was popular enough for a sequel, sensibly titled ‘Return Of The Witches’ that appeared in the 1968 TV Comic Holiday Special. A simpler, shorter piece, this one is more like your generic 3^rd Doctor story, with the 2^nd Doctor riding in a space buggy on a swamp planet when he accidentally runs into The Grand Witch again. Thinking on his feet The Doctor tells the amazed witches that his buggy is a ‘swamp monster’ that will eat them if they don’t do what he says. Amazingly, they believe him! The Grand Witch tries to send a bunch of man-eating bats after The Doctor (like ‘State Of Decay’) but it’s too little too late: science wins the day this time. This story isn’t anywhere near as strong as the first and the illustrations are all in black and white not colour this time.  Oh well, it wouldn’t be the first Dr Who sequel that’s a pale copy of its predecessor.

Gareth Roberts based ‘The Shakespeare Code’ loosely on a comic strip of his own, ‘A Groatsworth Of Wit’, which ran in Dr Who magazine across December 2005-January 2006 (issues #363 and #364, later reprinted as part of the 9^th Doctor graphic novel collection ‘The Cruel Sea’). Not that the stories are all that similar: this isn’t really about Shakespeare for the first half at all but his intended absence (in the same way that ‘Turn Left’ is really about The Doctor but barely features him) and is more like ‘Amadeus’, about a fierce rivalry between Shakespeare who’s fame is going to pass down through the centuries (for unexplainable reasons that just have to be the work of aliens) and someone forgotten, even though they were more or less equals in their lifetimes: Robert Greene, a writer today best known for his angry deathbed tirade against his bitter rival whom he famously calls an ‘upstart crow’ (which we see him writing at the start). There are yet more alien witches, though these aren’t Carrionites either but Shadeys, a race that feeds off ‘negative emotions’ and look like a big ball of green light. The Shadeys keep Crowe alive to feed off his bitterness and jealousy, depositing him in the present day as a side effect, like a sort of reverse Weeping Angel (it’s the first time the ‘comeback’ series had done ‘modern day’ in the comic strips and it looks even better than the TV 9^th Doctor stories, all neon lights and busy crowd scenes, some of artist Mike Collins’ best work). Greene is utterly lost in this new world but, spying a bookshop, his ego gets the better of him and he demands to see the Robert Greene section. He expects to see millions of his books still in print but is horrified when the bookseller can only find one – and it’s the deathbed letter about Shakespeare that he was in the middle of writing at the start of the story. He’s even more appalled to find shelves and shelves by his upstart rival and horrified when the bookseller mentions how its ‘lucky Greene wrote about the bard or we’d never have heard of him’. The Shadeys then pull on all that fire and anger one last time to try to get Greene to destroy London, then plan to nip back in time and destroy Shakespeare. The second half then reflects ‘The Shakespeare Code’ right down to the flirting, as Shakespeare re-writes half his sonnets to the pretty mysterious lady who’s just arrived in funny clothes (only it’s Rose of course in this era, not Martha), while The Doctor fills in for a knocked-out Shakespeare who was due on stage. The Shadeys head for a big final battle at The Globe Theatre, aiming to kill Shakespeare outright, but The Doctor appeals to Greene to make them stop (‘You have to die so the funny beautiful world – the one you believed in and wrote about – so it can live!’) Rose adds that saving the world is a much bigger thing to be remembered for than anything Shakespeare ever did and she’ll remember him always. Finally a roaring Greene yells ‘begone ye fiends!’ and aims the Shadey’s negative energy back at them, waking up in his deathbed where he finished off his tirade about Shakespeare and dies happy, with the knowledge for one brief shining moment he was the most important human in the world.  Eccleston-related events backstage meant that this ended up being the final 9^th Doctor comic strip and so Collins and Roberts add a last minute poignant coda, as Rose tells The Doctor ‘nobody’s ever gonna forget you’, with a final close up shot of her putting her arm round the 9^th Doctor in profile. One of the best comic strips, even better than ‘The Lodger’ in comic form and with a story that I’d take over ‘The Shakespeare Code’ itself any day.       

‘Toil and Trouble’ (2017) is a short story from the BBC audio anthology ‘Tales Of Terror’ released for Halloween. This turns out to be the Carrionites’ first meeting with the Doctor from his point of view – it’s a 4^th Doctor story with Sarah in tow. They clearly know him from ‘Shakespeare Code’ though as they’ve set up a trap for him, putting a voodoo doll of Sarah into a cauldron and even gagging her so she can’t call out in what’s one of the more gruesome Who stories out there (so much for this being a children’s set…) The Carrionites are working in league with The Reapers (see ‘Father’s Day’)  and want The Doctor’s real name so they can end a curse placed on them by The Eternals. He won’t give it, even to save Sarah’s life. It’s Harry who saves the day in a very Harry way, by dropping the crystal ball he’s been entrusted with and told to treat with care, accidentally releasing the Carrionites that way instead. Butterfingers! The story ends with the Carrionites being devoured by the Reapers who, once full, return to the time vortex of their own accord. It’s an odd pastiche of styles this: in some ways it feels like a modern Who story but in other respects its very keeping with the Hinchliffe era, just with everything turned up to eleven.  

‘The Carrionite Curse’ (2017) is the 6^th Doctor’s entry in the second series of Big Finish’s ‘Classic Doctors, New Monsters’ line in which the Carrionites have warped history, causing Salem-style witch hunts in Britain as late as the 1980s. The 6^th Doctor’s moralising and dramatics make him a worthy match for these most Shakesperian of monsters and you sense that Colin Baker is having the time of his life reading these lines. That’s not necessarily the same of the listener though and the Carrionites are a pretty poor monster really, shorn of the Globe trappings from ‘Code’ in a story that doesn’t really go anywhere.

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