“The Shakespeare Code.” By Gareth Roberts. Perf. David Tennant, Freema Agyeman, and Dean Lennox Kelly. Dir. Charles Palmer. Doctor Who. Season 3, episode 2 (New Series). BBC Wales. 7 April 2007. DVD. BBC Warner, 2007.The third derivative was a Shakespeare-related episode of Doctor Who (the New Series). I’ll have to divide my comments on it into several different posts.
Briefly, the episode is (in Rothwell’s terminology again) something of a review (The Doctor, in his time-travelling TARDIS, takes us back to London in 1599 to give us something of Shakespeare’s Biography), something of an educational film (I’m sticking to it that anything you can learn from is educational!), and something of a recontextualization (in this case, a recontextualization of Shakespeare’s age rather than of Shakespeare himself--more on that later).
But it’s also a sort of mirror movie! Shakespeare and his company are about to put on a new play: Love’s Labour’s Won! You won’t find that title in modern Shakespeare anthologies—it’s a lost play (unless, as some scholars argue, the title of that play is just an alternate title for an existing play).
The show has always loved playing with lost things throughout history. I vaguely recall an episode where the Doctor interrupts Samuel Taylor Coleridge just as he’s trying to write “Kubla Kahn,” turning that potential epic into the fragment we have today.
This is another instance of that. The Doctor’s machinations in time and space are (partly) responsible for the lostness of that play.
But to tell you about that, I’ll need a new post . . . and a spoiler warning.
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