a second round of thoughts on "The Shakespeare Code"

[tempestsarekind]

I watched the episode again on the SciFi Channel last night, and while I still loved it, I was also slightly disappointed by it at the same time.

Comments

[angevin2]

About Shakespeare, I can see your point, but I wonder if it doesn't get back to the idea that Shakespeare as a "real individual" is, in a lot of ways, someone really inaccessible to us -- I mean, we don't really get a sense of him as a person or a personality from his plays, at least, not very clearly like we do with, say, Milton. It's one reason fictional Shakespeares rarely work for me unless they're comic. (It's also the premise of Borges' Everything and Nothing, actually, which takes the idea to extremes.) And I felt like to some degree the construction of Shakespeare in this episode played with that a bit...

Agreed about Martha and Bedlam, though -- I liked that a lot too.

[tempestsarekind]

No, I absolutely agree with all of that. Shakespeare is far more inaccessible than Milton--or Dickens and Queen Victoria from other Who episodes. And intellectually, that totally worked for me. But on a second viewing, I felt as though that interpretation is at odds with the premise of the show, since if you're going back in time, you're going to meet a "real individual." So Shakespeare *shouldn't* exist in the fictional past in the same way that we see him (or don't see him) as modern readers/viewers of his plays.

[angevin2]

Okay, that's fair, yeah. The other thing, though, is that I think it's just really hard to write Shakespeare without the portrayal seeming slightly off (because he's sort of all things to all men). So I guess the writers didn't try to do it, and maybe you're right and they ought to have.

I am sort of ridiculously easy to please in some ways, though. ;)

Also I sort of have a plotbunny about the thing with Elizabeth and this is bad because I don't know nearly enough to write it.

[tempestsarekind]

I can't *imagine* trying to write Shakespeare, really. (Or rather, I have tried to imagine it, and come up blank each time.) So I get why they may have shied away from that a bit. It's just because I had so much squee for the episode in most other respects that it stood out as the one thing I might have changed. The basic message is still "Shakespeare + Doctor Who = massive amounts of awesome." (I had a student who wrote about this episode for her final paper last term. It was really hard to read without just geeking out all over the margins.)

As for Elizabeth plotbunnies, I say you should go for it. Because I'd want to read it! :)