The Shakespeare Code

Well, I was wrong...

? after that horrendous Dickensian howler in The Unquiet Dead, I would've bet money on Shakespeare saying "What the Chaucer?" upon seeing the ghosties in this episode!

Mind you, that was about the only thing which they didn't do, this being a production team which absolutely does not do things by halves! Not only does the Doctor give Shakespeare some of his best lines, he gives him one of Dylan Thomas' as well, and unwittingly provides him with the 'Dark Lady' (literally ? oo-er!) who would inspire so many sonnets! All in 45 minutes of comedy-drama! I'm amazed they had time to fit in a coven of witches (three, as in Macbeth, did you notice? Doomfinger! Bloodtide! And, um, Lilith, sexily played by Christina Cole.)

There was a fair bit riding on this, in a way. Just as The End of the World was the make-or-break episode for Series One, The Shakespeare Code would decide for us whether Series Three maintained its very strong start or came crashing back down to earth. I wouldn't really like to say whether it was better or worse than Smith and Jones ? suffice to say that it was very different, and good. The dialogue had all the lurid richness that you would expect from a writer trying to cram the Elizabethan era into 45 minutes (oh, what a shame the episodes aren't longer), and although in the past I've accused the special effects of gaudy unrealism, this time round they were fine, with some super shots of 16th century London. One especially nice one had the tiny figures of the Doctor and Martha running through it in one corner, and it, like so much else these days, was too easy to miss. TV Doctor Who is still telling stories that are visually 'too broad and deep for the small screen', but this time actually with appropriate SFX. We ought to be watching this in cinemas.

Writer Gareth Roberts was, of course, the author of two astonishing 4th Doctor novels in the 1990s, The Romance of Crime and The English Way of Death, both of which are easily up there with the soon-to-be-televised Human Nature as contenders for 'best Dr Who novel', and it may be just for this reason that I felt that some (not all) of his scripted lines recalled Tom Baker's Doctor. "Night-night, Shakespeare" in particular was a line that would have suited Tom to a tee, and it was immediately noticeable that DT seemed a bit uncomfortable with it ? it must've been hard to deliver while at the same time maintaining an appropriate air of dark, mysterious, Time Lord-y gravitas!

In fact, the whole script felt at odds with the Tenth Doctor's character as established so far in the series; it requires him to be enthusiastic and enchanted practically all of the time in a way to which this anguished, fiery incarnation is not very well suited, but which Tom Baker would have got on with like a house on fire. David Tennant's performance carried it through with flying colours though, and in fact the Doctor's obvious happiness was extremely charming, and served to make the Rose references still more jarring. I really wish they would forget about her, at least for a while. I know the idea is that she made such an enormous impact on him that he's still mourning her loss, but it's getting a bit repetitive and maudlin now. Poor Martha. (more of her later ? much more!)

To return to the point, a scene that deserves special praise is the fabulous ending! Queen Elizabeth enters with the immortal line "Doctor! My sworn enemy!" and the Doctor and Martha are forced to make a comedic flying exit for reasons they don't even know. Tennant plays it with an infectious smile on his face, and the whole thing is so marvellously uplifting and somehow typical of Doctor Who, from the Doctor's looking forward to having that adventure in future to the point when arrows begin thudding into the TARDIS, that I was quite delighted! There, I thought to myself, is the Gareth Roberts I know!

Roberts had a lot to live up to, as well, having written several highly perceptive articles about how to write Doctor Who stories and how to use the TARDIS in 'Doctor Who Magazine' ? back in the days when I still read it, before the new series sycophancy became too sickly to endure ? even going so far as to lay down ground rules about it, which I was looking through shortly before the episode. Well, he wasn't obviously following those rules. But it was fine, because what he produced was good anyway. Although a past master of the printed word, and an unparalleled imitator of the Fourth Doctor's era in the spacious confines of the novel, he had no previous form on television that I had seen, so I was quite wary going into this, too. In a way, though, I think this could become one of the most enduring episodes of the new series so far.

As for the plot, I'm not quite sure, looking back, what the pre-credits sequence had to do with anything, and while the resolution to the story was a fabulous concept requiring the genius of Shakespeare, aided by the genius of the Doctor and the more questionable geniuses of Martha and J.K. Rowling, his key speech was rather lost in a welter of special effects and noise. I'll have to go back and watch it again. The little details were where the really winning stuff was ? Martha's own tiny imprint on history, in influencing the behaviour of theatre crowds; the inclusion of Mr Kempe as a speaking part in Shakespeare's company (which I didn't even notice till the ending credits); and of course Martha Jones ending up as the Dark Lady.

It begs the question ? why couldn't we have one more little detail for those in the know: a brief reference to all those times in the past that the Doctor has referred to being well acquainted with the Bard? Take 'City of Death', for instance, where we learn that the Doctor actually wrote the first draft of Hamlet ? taking dictation, obviously. For an ultra-fan like me the story almost seemed to lack something, a certain natural outgrowth, for not acknowledging the Doctor's past meetings with Shakespeare (though this was quite clearly their first meeting chronologically). Roberts also thankfully omitted any reference to his previous Shakespearian romp, the Ninth Doctor comic strip, A Groatsworth of Wit, although the monsters were very similar.

That strip treated Shakespeare rather differently to how he came across here, and rather less well than The Shakespeare Code ? so that was one worry I initially had scotched. Although in both Shakespeare was something of a randy opportunist where love was at stake, and in both the Doctor's companion became the object of his affections, Dean Lennox Kelly, as Shakespeare, conveyed a certain likeability that a drawing could not! Which may sound like a rather backhanded compliment to give an actor, but I assure you it was meant nicely! And in contrast to the Ninth Doctor disrespectfully throwing Mr S. aside like a rag doll once things got heavy in the strip, David Tennant's Tenth Doctor treats him with near-constant hero-worship, only losing his cool briefly when the play goes ahead after he explicitly commanded otherwise. DT shouldn't have played the Doctor's lines during that bit with such vitriol, for my money. In the context of the episode I feel it might've worked better as a bit more wry and fatalistic ? less of the Idiot's Lantern-esque "I'm not listening!" treatment, which is his one deficiency as an actor. He then instantly reverted to enthusiastic appreciation, so the effect is unsatisfying.

Martha. She ought to get the trip of a lifetime here, but from the word go nearly gets a bucket of something unmentionable thrown over her, and then has to put up with the Doctor's almost wilful insensitivity in bringing up Rose again as they lie squashed intimately together on a bed. (We're back to the acceptable face of a 'sexual Doctor' here, by the way ? he's a sex symbol and shares a bed with Martha, but there's no flirting going on and he tells Lilith that sensuality is one way she could never snare him.) The Doctor being totally oblivious to normal human feeling is nothing new of course, but I mean to say ? poor girl! She recovered from it very well, I thought, and it was nice to see her enjoying herself for a while on a trip through time, which is something companions get surprisingly little time to do quite often.

I like Martha more and more, despite her rough edges ? namely, giving Shakespeare inexplicably short shrift over his un-PC epithets at their first meeting. She's in Elizabethan England ('the past is a foreign country ? they do things differently there') so you'd have thought she could've let it go. And all that stuff about how much better the 'land' that she comes from is than the one she finds herself in, where women can't do what they want, is just very slightly preachy.

The Doctor, happily, doesn't really seem to care about what Shakespeare says to her. I never forgave the Ninth Doctor for his cheap crack about the Deep South in The End of the World, and it's nice to see that the Tenth Doctor can sometimes be a little more tolerant of people's human and cultural failings, as seen from his lonely pinnacle. He gets all outraged with the warden at Bedlam, but that's a far more black-and-white situation: although there's no explicit confirmation that the warden enjoys whipping his poor charges, and to be fair to him somebody presumably has to do that job, there's no real compassion on show and the Doctor perhaps perceives something truly nasty about the guy ? he's better at seeing into the soul of a person than most.

Quite a long and rather more ruminative review than usual, but you'd be pretty damn disappointed if a script with William Shakespeare as principal guest wasn't thought-provoking, wouldn't you? I would. But my parents were soliloquising like crazy from the Shakespearian canon soon after the credits rolled, so Mr Gareth Roberts can't be said to have failed on that score!