The Shakespeare Code is the second episode of the third series, starring the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), and written by Gareth Roberts. Set in London 1599, the Doctor and Martha meet William Shakespeare. The witch-like alien Carrionites manipulate Shakespeare into writing the play Love’s Labour’s Won, which when performed will break the rest of their species out of eternal imprisonment and in the process, destroy the human race. The Doctor, Martha and Shakespeare prevent the plot at the last minute, banishing all the Carrionites once more.
The main historical focus of the episode is the individual: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was an English playwright, widely seen as the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems and a few other verses. The earliest date we have for him is his baptism on the 26th April 1564; his birth is presumably around that time. His death was on the 23rd April 1616.
In the episode, Shakespeare is portrayed by Dean Lennox Kelly. While the broad details of his appearance (brown hair, white male, bearded) are accurate, Martha rightly comments that Shakespeare looks nothing like his portrait. He is portrayed with a notable Midlands accent, which is a reference to that he came from Stratford-Upon-Avon. The Doctor tells Shakespeare to stop rubbing his head or he’ll go bald; Shakespeare’s hair is thinning in his portraits. He also gives Shakespeare a ruff at the end of the episode, as he is often portrayed to be wearing, as a neck brace. There is an academic debate about Shakespeare’s sexuality, since several of his sonnets seem to be addressed to male figures rather than female ones – when Shakespeare starts to flirt with the Doctor as well as Martha, he comments: “57 academics just punched the air.”
Shakespeare, despite his attempts to seduce Martha, is married, admitting to having a wife living in the country. This wife is Anne Hathaway, who he married in 1582. Hathaway was 8 years Shakespeare’s elder, but outlived him by 7 years. There is very little known about her beyond reference in some legal documents. Shakespeare also mentions his dead son, Hamnet, claiming he was killed by the Plague. Hamnet did indeed die at the age of 11 in 1596, and possibly from the Bubonic Plague (although that is not certain.) As Martha’s response to finding out his son was called Hamnet would imply, it is believed by some scholars that the play Hamlet was inspired by Hamnet. Not mentioned in the story, Shakespeare also had two daughters Susanna and Judith. Susanna was intended to appear in the story in earlier versions.
The Carrionites’ plan was dependent on “new” words. Shakespeare is credited with inventing thousands of new words for the English language. These include: Addiction (Othello), Assassination (Macbeth), Belongings (Measure for Measure), Cold-blooded (King John), Eventful (As You Like It), Eyeball (The Tempest), Inaudible (All’s Well That Ends Well), Manager (A Midsummer’s Night Dream), Swagger (Henry V) and Uncomfortable (Romeo and Juliet).
The particular words that the Carrionites need are added to the play they make Shakespeare write: Love’s Labour’s Won. There are actual rumours of a lost play called Love’s Labour’s Won, and it is often mentioned in lists of his plays, but copies have never turned up. It is believed to be a lost play by some scholars but accepted as an alternative title for one of the existing plays by many others. References to Love’s Labour’s Won actually predate the construction of the Globe Theatre in 1599 though, mentioned in 1598 in Francis Meres’ Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury.
There are numerous quotations from and references to Shakespeare’s work throughout the episode. An Ontological Paradox is when something creates/becomes its past self – this is exercised frequently throughout the episode with the Doctor quoting future Shakespeare plays and Shakespeare making note to use them later. The Doctor quotes “all the world’s a stage,” from As You Like It, and “the play’s the thing,” from Hamlet. He also quotes “once more unto the breach” from Henry V but Shakespeare quickly realises that is actually a quote he has already written. Henry V is believed to have been written in early 1599; the prologue refers to the theatre as “this wooden O” believed to be a reference to the Globe Theatre. A further play on this joke is when the Doctor quotes “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” from Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night and has to tell Shakespeare it belongs to someone else.
The Doctor also quotes “brave new world” from The Tempest to Martha just before stepping out of the TARDIS at the start of the episode and uses the phrase ‘A Winter’s Tale’ later in the episode while in Bethlem Asylum. Shakespeare comes up with his famous phrase from Hamlet, “to be or not to be”, during the episode but when the Doctor tells him he should write it down he dismisses it as ‘a bit pretentious.’
Other references to Shakespeare’s work include the Doctor commenting that a stage prop of a skull reminds him of a Sycorax – the alien race who invaded Earth in this Doctor’s first adventure The Christmas Invasion, who wore skull helmets – and Shakespeare again claims the word from him to use as his own, using it as the name of a character in The Tempest. Martha comments that Shakespeare has written about witches, but he denies it – the time the episode is set in means he has yet to write Macbeth or Hamlet which would prominently feature paranormal elements such as witches and ghosts. The inn that features in the episode is revealed by a sign early in the episode to be called The Elephant, the name of the inn from Twelfth Night.
Shakespeare refers to Martha as his ‘dark lady’, the name of a mysterious female figure many of his sonnets are addressed to. He then starts to compose Sonnet 18 for her (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day), although bizarrely this is one of his sonnets seemingly addressed to a male character, in this case the ‘Fair Youth’.
The Carrionites themselves are obviously based on the Three Witches of Macbeth, even quoting them when Lilith says the Doctor will watch the world become a “blasted heath.” Gareth Roberts had also considered the fairies from A Midsummer’s Night Dream for the villain before deciding on the Witches. The Doctor describes Elizabethan belief in Witchcraft as having ‘one foot in the dark ages’ and when a man drowns on dry land, lies about the cause of death to avoid panic and accusations of witchcraft. In Tudor times, witchcraft was widely believed in, and it was made punishable in 1542 for witchcraft to be used to discover treasure, injure others or be used for unlawful love. By 1569, the list also included curing men or beasts, summoning wicked spirits, and telling where things were lost. While all three Carrionites were female, Tudor Witches were not exclusively so – only 7 out of 10 people accused of being witches were women. Around 100,000 people in Europe were killed for ‘being witches’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
The next most prominent historical entity in the story is the Globe Theatre. The Globe was opened in 1599, hence the Doctor describing it to Martha as ‘newly opened.’ It was destroyed by a fire in 1613. A second Globe was opened in 1614 but closed in 1642. A reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe was opened in 1997 and that is where this episode is filmed. Doctor Who was in fact the first TV drama allowed to actually be recorded in the Shakespeare’s Globe, although still restricted to three nights of filming only.
In this story, the Globe is shown to be a Tetra-Decagon with 14 sides. In real life, it might have had any amount from 8 to 24 sides. The Doctor and Martha watch a performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost in the Globe, where Martha comments on the men dressed as women on stage. All actors were male in Tudor times, so the female parts had to be played by young boys in female dress. The play is performed at night, which is one of the few anachronisms in the episode: night performances did not become a thing until much later. Shakespeare’s plays would have been performed during the day because of poor lighting – theatres like the Globe had no roof because the Sun was needed to light up the stage.
The two actors seen rehearsing a scene from Love’s Labour’s Won in the Globe and accidentally summoning a Carrionite, are actually interpretations of actual Elizabethan actors: William Kempe and Dick Burbage. Kempe was a highly regarded comic actor of the time. It is known that he was one of the company’s core five actors at the end of 1598, he appears to have left the group soon after though possibly due to a disagreement and died in poverty around 1603.
The Globe’s architect is believed to be Peter Street (who is also believed to have been the architect for the Fortune Playhouse). Street appears as a character in the episode but is listed in the credits as Peter Streete. Streete is shown to have been driven insane by visions of witches while constructing the Globe and to now reside in Bethlem Royal Hospital. This is a fiction invented for the episode. Street remained perfectly sane and free until his death in 1609.
Bethlem Hospital is a famous psychiatric hospital, which has inspired several horror books, films and tv. Although now reformed as a modern psychiatric facility, historically it was representative of worst excesses of asylums earning the nickname Bedlam. In the episode the asylum is shown to keep the prisoners in poor conditions, and they are regularly whipped to entertain the gentry. While Martha and the Doctor are suitably disgusted by this treatment, Shakespeare claims that he was driven mad by the death of his son, but fear of this place set his mind straight. A notable anachronism though is that the architecture of Bedlam in the episode is about 100 years out of date.
Other examples of Elizabethan England are present or referenced throughout the episode. It is dramatically demonstrated at the start of the episode that the toilet has not been invented yet in 1599, when one citizen’s waste is poured out of his window from a slop bucket, narrowly missing Martha. The Master of the Revels appears after Shakespeare announces Love’s Labour’s Won determined to stop it, as every new script must be registered with him before it can be performed. Shakespeare laughs at the idea of Martha being a doctor since she is a woman. The first female doctor would be Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849.
Martha worries that she might be ‘carted off as a slave’ since she is “not exactly white.” The Doctor assures her that she will be fine as long as she walks around like she owns the place. Slavery was in fact relatively new to England at this point, introduced to the country by a man named John Hawkins around 1555. By the mid-18th Century, London would have the largest black population in Britain, and this consisted of both enslaved and free people.
Queen Elizabeth I appears at the end of the episode, calling the Doctor her ‘sworn enemy’, though being a time traveller, he has yet to discover why. Her appearance clearly resembles that of her portraits. Her arrival at the end reflects her patronage of Shakespeare, but it is claimed she never comes to see the plays and has only come now because she has heard of the Carrionite incident at the performance of Love’s Labour’s Won, believed to be part of the play. In fact, she is known to have visited for performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1597, and both parts of Henry IV in 1598.
Several comparisons are made between Elizabethan England and the present-day Martha comes from (2008). The Doctor describes a man shovelling horse manure back into a bucket as recycling. He refers to two men talking over a water barrel as a ‘water cooler moment.’ A man on the street shouting that ‘Earth will be consumed by fire’ is compared to Global Warming. The Doctor also points out both times enjoy entertainment, in this case referring to the theatre, and when Martha asks about the men dressed as women on stage, he jokingly replies: “London never changes.” When Martha takes offence to Shakespeare calling her a ‘Blackmore lady’, Shakespeare questions what the term they’re ‘supposed’ to use is now, listing ‘Ethiop girl’, ‘swarth’, and ‘queen of Affric’, and the Doctor compares it to modern day ‘political correctness.’
The Shakespeare Code uses a huge wealth of history to support its story, remaining largely very accurate throughout, with some changes made for the stories and only a few other anachronisms. A large amount of the historical detail is centred around William Shakespeare himself, with many references to the bard and his work, some more subtle than others. The majority of the other uses of history are for comedy but very effectively.
Trivia
· As this is Martha’s first trip in the TARDIS, she asks about the effects of stepping on a butterfly (a reference to the Butterfly Effect, originally from Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder) and killing her grandfather (a reference to the grandfather paradox – that inconsistencies emerge from changing the past, such as a time traveller killing their own grandfather before their parents are conceived and preventing their own existence)
· The Carrionite lair set was reused as Sarah Jane’s attic for the Sarah Jane Adventures Spin-Off
· Christina Cole (Lilith) kept the fake teeth she wore as a Carrionite
· The Doctor claims to Shakespeare that Martha is from Freedonia. Freedonia was the name of a fictional country from the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup. Freedonia is also the name of a planet in the Doctor Who expanded universe
· Lilith was named after a storm demon in Mesopotamian mythology.
· The character of Wiggins, the young man seduced and murdered by Lilith in the opening sequence, was named after Doctor Who fan and Shakespearean professor Martin Wiggins
· Gareth Roberts had prior experience writing Doctor Who and Shakespeare, having written a comic where the 9th Doctor and Rose met Shakespeare in 1592, called A Groatsworth of Wit. He also wrote a novel called The Plotters where the First Doctor and his companions Ian and Barbara visited the Globe Theatre in 1605 and became involved with the Gunpowder Plot.
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