Monday, December 5, 2022

A Henry V–Adjacent Moment in Doctor Who

“The Woman Who Lived.” By Catherine Tregenna. Perf. Peter Capaldi and Maisie Williams.  Dir. Edward Bazalgette. Doctor Who. Series 9, episode 6. BBC One. 24 October 2015. DVD.  BBC Home Entertainment, 2016.

I'll admit that I haven't kept up with my Doctor Who. I lost interest somewhere in Series Seven. And I haven't really recovered it. But I've had some episodes on in the background while doing other things, and that enabled me to notice a brief reference to the Battle of Agincourt. 

The plot involves a character that the Doctor last saw back in the age of the Vikings. He healed her—but the healing granted her a kind of immortality. 

In this scene, the character (a woman named Ashildr who is calling herself "Me") recounts some of her life experiences between the Viking era and the Interregnum. It turns out that she was at Agincourt:


No, that's not much.  And yes, alas, we don't get any direct connection to Shakespeare. Still, I thought I'd mention it! After all, it's a bit of Joan of Arc (think 1 Henry VI) meets Nym (among the "regular" soldiery in Henry V).

I don't expect any of the Doctors will revisit Shakespeare—the episode "The Shakespeare Code" (for which, q.v.) covered it well. But we can hope for Shakespeare-related plots and allusions to and quotations from Shakespeare. I'll keep my eye out.

Links: The Episode at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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