The Shakespeare Code

Chapter the 276th, which features the Greatest Hits of Shaky.

Plot:
The Doctor and Martha materialise in Southwark, London in 1599, near the Globe theatre. They go to see a performance and meet Shakespeare. The Doctor is intrigued that a famous lost play of the Bard's Love's Labour's Won is being performed the following day. Martha and the Doctor stay the night and some strange things happen: unexplained deaths, and Will finishing the play without remembering exactly what he wrote in the final speech. Martha sees a witch on a broomstick escaping from Will's London digs. The Doctor investigates and finds suspicious things about the construction of the Globe theatre; the architect Peter Streete went mad after it was built, babbling about witches. The TARDIS team, accompanied by Shakespeare, visit Streete in Bedlam. The Doctor pieces together that the witches are actually Carrionites, creatures whose science is based on words rather than numbers. They plan to harness Will's imaginative power when the words of Love's Labour's Won are spoken, amplified by the design of the Globe. When the final speech they have bewitched him into adding is read out, it will open a portal and all the rest of their kind will fly through to the Earth, and destroy all humans. A Carrionite arrives and kills Streete. Our heroes escape, with Shakespeare going to try to stop the play, and the Doctor and Martha to confront the Carrionites. All are unsuccessful, the plays final words are spoken, and the portal begins to open. The Doctor and Martha arrive at the Globe and tell Shakespeare to improvise his own words to undo the damage. He does, and the portal closes, pulling in every copy of the play so it is never seen or performed again.

Context:

Late August 2023, I decided to watch this one on my own as there was never a free moment to watch it with any of the family. I dialled it up on iplayer on my laptop and watched it one evening. I decided to view a streamed version rather than get the DVD box set down from the shelf as I wanted to double-check that The Shakespeare Code and all of new Who 2005 to 2022 was still available there (just because I was going to look a little at streaming and availability in the Deeper Thoughts section, see below).

First Time Round:

I watched this story as it was broadcast live on BBC1 in the UK on the Saturday of the Easter weekend in 2007. For some reason, the third run of the new series had started the week before Easter rather than on the holiday weekend itself, which was the usual form in those days. This meant we were lucky enough to be visited by friends two weeks running: Alex and Rachel, mentioned a few times before on this blog, came down to our old house in Hove after having visited us the previous week for the start of the season. That house was home for the family of three that we were at the time: me, the Better Half and our eldest who was not quite a year old. As I remember it, everyone around that day who was aged more than one year watched and enjoyed the story, while the little one enjoyed a kip.

Reaction:

As is probably inevitable, this episode is a showcase for the (condensed) greatest hits of Shakespeare. The opening shot in the pre-credit scene contains an allusion to Romeo and Juliet; there's regular quotes from his plays included in dialogue as a running gag (not as ostentatious as the similar inclusion of characters inadvertently mentioning Agatha Christie book titles in the same writer's story for the next season, The Unicorn and the Wasp); there's a reference to Hamlet and the similarity of that name to the Bard's dead son Hamnet; and, Will having an eye for Martha as his muse is a reference to the dark lady of the sonnets. The obvious big reference, though - as obvious as a story with Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts at Christmas - is the three witches from Macbeth, here played by three Carrionites. The story looks to be shaped like these sci-fi shenanigans will end up giving Will the inspiration for his Macbeth featuring three witches. Either by accident or design, though, Will never has a scene where he witnesses all three of them together doing witchcraft things around a cauldron - only the audience sees those scenes. Will sees one witch in the Bedlam cell, and the three Carrionites are together at the Globe during the climactic sequences. At that point, though, Will is on stage and they're up in the gods, and there's a distracting great portal to another dimension whipping up a storm between them. Did he ever clock them as a trio at all? Maybe this was a deliberate choice, to indicate that Shakespeare was creative enough to think of his own ideas without prompting. I can't help but think, though, that it was instead a loose bit of the story structure, that might have been fixed if it had been spotted before the final draft.

The other big historical Shakespeare inclusion is the famous 'lost play' Love's Labour's Won, and an explanation of why no copy of it has ever been found. This is a satisfying and fun addition (even though - spoilsport alert - it is most likely that Love's Labour's Won, as recorded in a couple of historical sources, is just an alternate name for another surviving play like The Taming of the Shrew or Much Ado About Nothing). Again, though, the script for the story reveals a lot more about this mystery than one might expect to the audience, with the characters playing catch-up. By approximately 10 minutes in, the viewers watching know that the Carrionites are using Shakespeare and his play to do some evil act. With five minutes to the end, the play is performed and the evil begins. In the 30 minute section in between, the story is treading water really, with not a huge amount going on except Shakespeare, the Doctor and Martha working out what we already know, plus uncovering the minor mechanics of how the plan works (the globe having 14 sides being significant, and so on) about which we don't really care. What keeps the action moving in that time is not really a set of well-ordered story beats, but rather a collection of different colourful or characterful moments that don't necessarily have much connection to the plot. There's moments of history / biography (the Bedlam visit, Peter Streete, Will talking about his son's death), the odd good idea (the Carrionites' science being based on words rather than numbers) or good gag (the physical business with Martha hitting the Doctor to restart his heart after he's attacked by witchcraft).

The other major engine the story has to propel it are the performances. Aside from the regulars, there are really only two significant roles, with everyone else appearing essentially in a cameo; these are Dean Lennox Kelly as Shakespeare and Christina Cole as the main Carrionite Lilith. Both give modern, sparky takes on the traditional idea of their characters. There are nice little touches like Shakespeare's being intrigued by the Doctor and Martha, and working out exactly who they are and where they come from; Cole too gets a nice confrontation scene with the Doctor and Martha. It's early on in the new dynamic between the David Tennant Doctor and new companion Martha as played by Freema Agyeman, so it's only right that there's a lot of focus on the two of them together. The Doctor being insensitive to Martha's feelings for him and his bigging up of Rose sticks out when watching now; it's a bit out of character for the Doctor to be quite so oblivious, and a little cruel of the writing to stick the knife quite so deep into Martha's emotions. It made more sense at the time to put something in there for fans of Billie Piper as Rose to show she'd not been forgotten: she'd only recently left the series, at a time when she was arguably more of the star of the show than Tennant. Perhaps that could have been done in a way that was kinder to the characters, though.

Other moments I liked: everyone in the Globe clapping once the sci-fi weirdness is over, thinking it was just very clever stagecraft; a Shakespearean style line from a 1960s Who story ("the eye should have contentment where it rests") being smuggled into the text of Love's Labour's Won as an in-joke; Elizabeth the First's reaction of seeing the Doctor, the time traveller somehow having upset her in the future of his personal timeline (a loose end that will be woven into Doctor Who's great tapestry in a few years' time); and finally, the rollickingly good trailer for Gridlock just before the credits, demonstrating that even the fun more throwaway stories at the start of a run can be stone-cold classics, and that this run of stories got better and better as it went along.

Connectivity:

Two stories on the trot that feature a real historical person, and the Doctor and other TARDIS travellers stopping over at least one night during the course of their adventure.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Very Missing Adventures. Doctor Who, unlike other similar TV science fictions shows like Star Trek, Blake's 7 and many others, is not complete - there are bits missing, as the show's archive was for a long time not seen as having value any longer, so a lot of it was junked. The full background to why this happened is too complex to go into here, and has anyway been definitively covered in Richard Molesworth's book Wiped (which I urge you to read if you have not already). We fans are lucky as various people have worked hard to find, restore or recreate those missing episodes. Nonetheless, we are used to scarcity and incompleteness, it's part of being a Doctor Who fan. It's probably paradoxically the reason why a lot of us fans are so obsessed with completion. We want everything to be available to us, every video, every audio, every book, CD, toy sonic screwdriver, you name it. Even if such an aim isn't fully possible, we live in hope like every collector. At least we can console ourselves that what exists is out there and available, and actions like the junking of old episodes could never happen again. Or could they? Though all of TV Who has been made available on different physical media over the years, and almost all of it is available on streaming services (Britbox / ITVX for classic series, BBC iplayer for new), it can't be guaranteed that this will remain the same forever, and there's much less guarantee when it comes to extended universe and tie-in material. Titles go out of print, or get deleted, and - though it's not happened yet with Doctor Who - sometimes episodes are removed from streaming services.

I'm sure there are people who are very angry about some comments made on gender issues in the past by the writer of The Shakespeare Code, and they may feel that his Who stories shouldn't be available for people to see on current streaming platforms. Anyone's free to hold this view, though it's not one with which I agree; it's not up to me, though. Companies and corporations can be sensitive about giving offence, and this can lead to decisions to exclude material. What if there was a call to remove The Talons of Weng-Chiang from Britbox because of its making-up of a white actor to look like someone from another ethnic group? Lots of different episodes and shows featuring the use of blackface make-up were pulled from streaming services when Black Lives Matter protests following the killing of George Floyd were in the news in 2020. Maybe this was the right decision for the companies and corporations involved, and maybe it was even something BLM protestors wanted (though I somehow doubt it was where they'd have chosen to start). In one case in particular, though, it looked like a knee-jerk reaction that hadn't taken into consideration the actual material. The comedy series Community's second season episode Advanced Dungeons and Dragons contained a comedic use of non-realistic blackface (it's brief, and it's called out multiple times in the narrative by characters including being referred to as a "hate crime") amidst a wider anti-bullying story (incidentally one of the very best episodes of Community IMHO). That episode is gone from Netflix with the numbering even altered as if it never existed. I don't think that was the right decision - maybe they should have just added a warning up front - but, again, it's not up to me.

This isn't another case of a middle-aged white guy ranting about cancel culture, I assure you. I have the Community episode (as well as The Shakespeare Code and The Talons of Weng-Chiang) on physical media. But what about those who don't? And what about other things that don't get physical media releases at all? It's a "tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear" type question: if something exists but there's no way to view it, is that really any different from it being junked? I can think of three significant examples of intriguing Doctor Who products that have never been released (and that's just off the top of my head, there are probably more). The first I was reminded of by reading Doctor Who Magazine 594: a pop record of Doctor Who related music by bands such as Saint Etienne and 808 State. It was prepared around Who's 40th anniversary, and a three-track sampler CD was given out to attendees of the Panopticon convention in 2003, of which I happened to be one. I still have the sampler, but the album never saw the light of day. A reorganisation in the BBC stopped the project, though a full album was recorded and exists in an archive somewhere. The second was from 10 years later, a new audiobook version of An Unearthly Child, the first ever Doctor Who story, written by Nigel Robinson and narrated by William Russell. It was delayed by the distributor AudioGo going into administration, and then caught up in rights issues, and has never been heard (except by British Airways travellers when it was briefly and mistakenly included in their in-flight entertainment catalogue in 2013).

The final one of the three is Big Finish's 2021 Torchwood audio Absent Friends, which reunited John Barrowman's Captain Jack with the Tenth Doctor David Tennant. When news reemerged of some historical bad behaviour by Barrowman - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details - the release was shelved indefinitely. The Torchwood range has continued without Barrowman, and it seems unlikely the story will ever now be released, even though it contains a performance by one of the most popular Doctor actors in the show's history. These are rare examples, and it's not evidence of any wider pattern in the worlds of Doctor Who product, but there are worrying signs in the wider industry. Projects canned after work has started but not been completed (like Mike Schur's Field of Dreams series for Peacock where they'd actually built the famous baseball field, even though the funding didn't come), stories that are finished and then written off for financial reasons with footage destroyed (Warner Brothers' Batgirl movie), or finished and put on streaming services but without any physical release, so availability only remains at the whim of that streamer. I suspect if you're reading this that you may be the same as me and have a long backlog of things you want to catch up on. The Sex Pistols series 'Pistol' by Craig Pearce and directed by Danny Boyle was on mine. Unfortunately, it wasn't close enough to the top. Pistol is gone from Disney+ after only a year, and is likely never to come back. It feels to me that this is a repetition of that historical mistake of underestimating the value of archive, the exact opposite of what I hoped streaming would provide. If there's a moral here, it's hold on to your physical media where you can, and watch a lot more telly. And to people who work or have worked for BBC Audio and Big Finish, a one word entreaty: bootlegs!

In Summary:

Such stuff as lightweight, throwaway Doctor Who stories near the start of the season are made on.