“…The Shakespeare Notebooks is an astonishing document that offers a unique insight into the mind of one of history’s most respected and admired figures. And also, of course, William Shakespeare.”
Tomorrow marks 400 years since William Shakespeare shuffled off this mortal coil. In that time his reputation has grown from a somewhat well-known playwright to the most famous writer in the English language. I’m sure fans of Shakespeare have dreamed of traveling to early seventeenth century Stratford-upon-Avon and meeting the great playwright at least once; imagine how often a centuries-old Time Lord with access to his own TARDIS could make the trip.
Newly discovered “The Shakespeare Notebooks” is a comprehensive collection of journal entries, rough drafts, additional characters, annotated scripts, and many other snippets from the Bard’s personal writing which will give you an idea of just how much of an influence that a mysterious “Doctor” had on his life.
DOCTOR:
Alas, I fear you have no choice my dear.
When I the word ‘run’ sayeth, thou must run!
Run!
The exact nature of how some of these early drafts and notes came to exist is left a little vague. Shakespeare himself writes in the intro that it was the production of Love’s Labor’s Won which made him realize that he’d met The Doctor before. The incident inspired him to comb through his notes and journals, collecting together all references to the mysterious stranger (who’s form changed over the years), wondering how he could possibly have forgotten him until now.
Some of the notes are story ideas or journal entries. These are particularly entertaining when Shakespeare is writing things down and then crossing them out (The Extremely Strong Wind? Oh William, honestly…) or when Hamlet’s soliloquy is annotated with “helpful” footnotes by the Fourth Doctor. And then there are the times when he starts arguing with the Doctor, either in person or when the Doctor starts writing messages on a sheet of paper two months before Shakespeare bought the paper.
“Sorry, it’s probably just me, but you will present a boy playing a woman who dresses as a man who then falls in love with a man who I assume is really a man, but while still pretending to be a man. And then the woman the man loves, who is also I assume in reality a boy, falls in love with the man who is actually a woman played by a boy pretending to be a man.”
Other items are harder to explain. Did Shakespeare really dream of the Sontaran gathering that eventually turned into a scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or was his headache the next morning a side-effect from whatever was done to make him forget being there? And I can imagine the Doctor telling the story of how he and his companions met Macbeth and may have accidentally inspired him to murder the king (Psst. Jamie. Stop talking now.), but it seems less likely that Shakespeare would have written down every one of their missteps in script format.
The idea that Shakespeare might have been pressured to write a “happy” version of Romeo and Juliet seems very believable, so having Rory, Amy, and the Doctor show up to provide stand-in corpses for two suicides and a couple of murders – shortly before pairing up everyone including the secondary characters with their one true love – was exactly as silly as you would want.
“That which we call a Rose
by any other name would still be Tyler”
It wouldn’t be Shakespeare without sonnets, so this collection has fourteen alternate versions of some of the more well-known ones. It’s fun to try to figure out which Doctor is being referred to in each one, even though they can come across as a little clunky when the writer has to shoehorn in familiar buzzwords from the series. (My favorite is Sonnet #18. It’s awfully sweet.)
Actually, since the items in this book cover all of the Doctors, not just the ones from the new series, there’s bound to be something here that will appeal to every Doctor Who fan: alien invasions, snippets of familiar quotes with random words replaced with “Dalek”, a version of Pericles with an imperious Time Lady who’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to a certain house of ill repute, a transcript of Shakespeare’s lost play that accidentally captures a hilarious whispered fight between a playwright and a poet, the Fourth Doctor having a specific interest in a skull at a grave site, and the first draft of a scene from The Winter’s Tale which shows that “Exit, pursued by a bear” was more plausible than the way it was written before.
The last few items in the book are more modern discoveries. “Academic Notes” is an exhaustively annotated script of a speech from Julius Caesar. It looks like a wade, but it’s definitely worth the effort since the woman writing the annotations is bored, easily distracted from the task, wishing for a snack, and getting pestered by a strange man who keeps sending her emails. And Facebook messages. And cryptic notes in the appendices of 80-year-old reference books. It’s effectively creepy.
In an odd reversal, we also have a Shakespearean version of a very familiar story, “Ye Unearthly Childe”, and the collection wraps up on the perfect note with a short story that features The Tenth Doctor and Donna, and which gives a possible explanation for an odd bequest that really does appear in Shakespeare’s last Will (Ha! I see what you did there.)
Black-and-white illustrations by Mike Collins. Writing credit is given solely to Shakespeare and the Doctor (although there’s a brief bio given for writers James Goss, Jonathan Morris, Julian Richards, Justin Richards, and Matthew Sweet, for some unexplained reason.)