So question not what you can’t understand!
The final extract, again offered with no explanation, would seem to close the play as the diary entry then ends, and the next concerns a very different occasion – an apparent account of Death itself visiting a village that fell victim to the Black Death.
MISS WRIGHT
Has he gone mad?
SUSAN
Not mad, but almost home
For he, at heart, is a creature of time
And loves to wander where so e’er he please,
To learn the things no other being knows,
To see the sights no other being sees,
To live the days no other thing can live,
To travel in the TARDIS every way,
To take in all the gifts that she can give.
PHYSICIAN
The dust on antique time would lie unswept
’til whirling TARDIS time rotors it blow
To let us see those sights as yet unseen,
Where none can go before, we boldly go.
APPENDIX
THE LAST WILL
While it does not seem to fit into the general tone and structure of this volume, the following short story is included as an Appendix. It has no known provenance, but had been reproduced in various periodicals, journals and anthologies without explanation or attribution. Since it concerns both William Shakespeare and a mysterious ‘doctor’, it may indeed have some relevance to the preceding material.
I William Shackspeare of Stratford upon Avon in the countrie of Warr’ gent in perfect health and memorie god by praysed doe make and Ordayne this my last will and testament . . .
Item: I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.
‘You’re kidding.’ Donna Noble accused the Doctor of kidding a dozen times a day. The thing is, he never was. Well, hardly ever.
‘Nope.’ The Doctor gave Donna a tiny push and she fell backwards. Onto the bed. Onto William Shakespeare’s bed.
He’d been taking her on a tour of the TARDIS. Well, actually, she’d gone to grapple with the old-fashioned tea urn (emblazoned with a ‘Votes for Women’ sticker). After ten minutes she’d emerged without any tea to find the corridor around her had changed completely. She was utterly lost.
The Doctor had come for her. Eventually. He was wearing a different suit to the one she’d last seen him in. And he was holding a cup of tea.
She took the tea from him and asked about the straw in his hair.
‘Oh, I’ve been having problems with a bed.’ Sometimes the Doctor seemed to delight in coming up with sentences that had never troubled the English language before.
‘A bed?’ Donna’s tactic on these occasions was to make a question out of the last two words.
‘Yup.’
The Doctor had shown her the room. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected the Doctor’s bedroom to be like. But of course this was it. There was a child’s wallpaper of rocket ships and little glow-in-the-dark stars were stuck to the ceiling. On top of a tottering pile of yellow Beanos was a stuffed toy owl. The most remarkable thing about the room was the bed.
‘That’s quite boxy.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the Doctor.
There was a lot to take in about the bed. For a start, it was the kind of bed you got in a posh mini-break hotel. It had the four posters. It had the curtains. It had the mountain of pillows and cushions. It had the elaborately embroidered sheets and the carved wooden sides. Somewhere, Donna surmised, was a honeymoon suite with a hole in it.
‘Is this your bed?’
‘Sort of.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘Well, I inherited it. It’s actually William Shakespeare’s bed.’
‘Shakespeare’s bed?’
The Doctor had nodded and suggested she try it. Then he’d pushed her onto it.
Donna Noble didn’t bounce. She landed on the bed with a thump.
‘It’s got a straw mattress,’ the Doctor explained. ‘Don’t worry – I’ve had it fumigated. No bugs. Zilch.’
Itching suddenly, Donna got off the bed. It wasn’t just the imaginary fleas. She wasn’t sure what was weirder – that William Shakespeare had slept on the bed, or that the Doctor did. She’d never really thought about him sleeping.
‘Oh, I’ve never used it,’ the Doctor said. He’d been looking at her curiously for a moment. As though waiting for something to happen. ‘I’m just looking after it. For a friend.’
‘The friend being Shakespeare? This being Shakespeare’s bed?’
‘Shakespeare’s best bed,’ corrected the Doctor. ‘He left his wife the second best one.’
‘Charming.’ Donna rolled her eyes. ‘I’m sure she was very grateful.’
‘Well, she was actually.’ The Doctor was being defensive. Clearly Shakespeare had been a good friend. Donna paused. Yep, there was another new sentence for the English language. ‘The best bed went in the spare room. It was for guests, to show off.’ The Doctor patted the elaborately carved sides of the bed. Nestling among the laurels were two masks, one smiling and one sad. Gambolling among the smiling mask were fauns and fairies, and a man with an ass’s head. On a grassy mound a fat man sat laughing with a large woman holding a tankard and a platter of bread rolls. Clustered around the sad mask was a lonely young man holding a skull, a wild old man carrying a child, and a sour-faced king with a dagger. Standing on top of the masks were a boy and girl, reaching out to each other, but unable to touch. Yes, thought Donna, the whole bed was showing off.
Distracted by the carvings, she’d missed that the Doctor was busy talking. ‘The second best bed, now that was Mr and Mrs Shakespeare’s own. The one they slept in every night. Well, I say that, but Anne was a terrible duvet hog.’
‘But I thought duvets weren’t invented until—’
‘Wedding present,’ coughed the Doctor. ‘So, William often sneaked off over the landing to sleep in the guest bed. Especially if he wanted to stay up late working on something. He’d sit up, scratching away and dreaming, looking out at the stars. Which is where the problem is. The problem of the bed. Why I have it.’
Donna’s tea had gone cold. Mind you, if all of time and space were your car boot sale, of course the Doctor would have Shakespeare’s bed in his room. What would she choose? Cleopatra’s? She smiled at that, imagining some amazing gilded bed – not in her room in the TARDIS, but back at home, her mum boggling at it nestling in among the Ikea lamps and the Argos table. Donna would like that. Should she ever leave the Doctor. Just something to remind her every morning of how amazing her life had once been.
Lost in her reverie, she’d missed most of what the Doctor had been talking about. ‘. . . The problem was, you see, having sneaked in through his dreams in earlier life, they’d left a massive gaping psychic hole. It was fine when he shared a bed with Anne. Her dreams and worries (laundry lists, servant gossip, wondering what Will got up to in London) counteracted all of his. But when he slept in this bed, his brain never stopped churning out ideas, and that psychic hole in his dreams never ceased, pouring things out of his head . . .’ The Doctor gestured at the bed, which suddenly looked ominous.
‘You mean . . . ?’ Donna stared at the bed.
‘Lethal queens, devious sprites, alien battle fleets—’
‘Alien battle fleets?’
The Doctor waved a hand. ‘Yeah well, one of us had had a bit too much sack that night. I’d just been thwarting the Cunning Trees of The xlloxlttoxtl . . . and he’d just started Macbeth. Suddenly—’
‘Oh!’ said Donna. ‘The bit where Burnham Wood walks to Dunsinane Castle?’
‘Yup,’ said the Doctor, patting the bed a little nervously. ‘And as he slept, perchance to dream, a whole fleet of killer alien trees got stored in the bed.’
Donna stared at the bed. And now it seemed as though the bed stared back at her.
‘All of his dreams are stored in that bed,’ said the Doctor. ‘So many potent thoughts. It’s only because I fiddled with the mattress that the world wasn’t overrun by fai
ries.’
‘You fiddled with the mattress?’
‘Well, you’ve heard of memory foam?’ the Doctor said, pushing down on the mattress. The fibres inside rustled. ‘This is memory hay. Kind of. Bulrushes of Lethe. Psychically absorbent and naturally hypoallergenic. Sweet dreams guaranteed.’
‘There’s a “but”, isn’t there?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Very absorbent. All of Shakespeare’s dreams are stored in there. Problem is it’s full. Crammed fuller than an iPod. And the next person to take forty winks on that . . .’
‘And in that little sleep of death, what dreams may come?’ Donna quoted.
The Doctor nodded. ‘Which is why it’s in my bedroom. After all, I never sleep in here—’
‘I knew it!’
‘I doze in armchairs.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘One life I’m going to wake up with terrible back pain.’
Donna ignored this. She’d spotted a problem. No Noble ignored a problem. ‘But there’s hay in your hair. And you said you’d been having trouble with the bed . . . and, back up the truck a minute, this is the most dangerous bed in existence, and you made me lie on it!’
The Doctor looked sheepish. ‘Just testing,’ he muttered.
‘Testing what? That I didn’t grow a donkey’s head or go all Lady Macbeth?’
‘Yurp,’ said the Doctor eventually.
Donna gave him the stare she’d learned from Paddington Bear. It had made at least three different employers phone the temping agency to ask if someone else could come next week.
The Doctor jammed his hands in his jacket pocket, and then in his trouser pocket. ‘I’d just been wandering by, looking for you. And spotted the door all open, and the bed all inviting, and there was a copy of the Beano and I was wondering how Minnie the Minx was getting on. I travelled with her once, you know. You see, Bash Street was being attacked by—’
Donna hated it when the Doctor fibbed. Or babbled. Now he was babbling and fibbing. ‘You saw the bed, you fancied a nap and you nearly ended the universe?’
The Doctor blinked. For a moment she wondered if he was going to claim he and Dennis the Menace had fought the Cybermen. Instead, he said very quietly, ‘Well, I don’t think it would have been the end of the universe.’
‘Course it would have been, you prawn.’ Donna punched him softly on the shoulder. ‘Cos you wouldn’t have been around to sort it all out. While your alien trees and witches and nasty fairies would have been pouring out of the bed giving it all eye of newt, you’d have been asleep.’
‘Ah.’
Donna punched him on the arm again.
‘Stop that.’
‘I never had an older brother,’ said Donna. ‘I’m making up for lost time. So come on, how did you save the world from Shakespeare’s Bed?’
‘Quite easy actually.’ the Doctor took Donna’s teacup from her and drained it. ‘I turned the mattress over. Side B is empty.’
‘And that’s why you . . . you put me on the bed?’
‘Yup.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘Testing.’
‘And am I Queen Titania?’
The Doctor looked Donna up and down slowly. ‘Not quite,’ he said eventually.
‘Pity.’
‘Come on, fair Kate,’ the Doctor said.
The two of them shut the door on the Doctor’s bedroom and wandered away, leaving Shakespeare’s bed behind them. And, as they walked up the winding corridors of the TARDIS, if either of them noticed the gentle patter of tiny feet and the ghostly, musical laughter that followed them, then neither of them said anything.
* * *
For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the fall of Arcadia.
* * *
* * *
The rest is . . . Silents!
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
JAMES GOSS has written the books Doctor Who: Dead of Winter and Summer Falls, as well as several Torchwood books and radio plays. His favourite play is Pericles, oddly.
JONATHAN MORRIS is one of the most prolific authors of Doctor Who novels, audio plays and comic strips and a regular contributor to Doctor Who Magazine. He first read the complete works of Shakespeare as a precocious 15-year-old but 25 years later still struggles with iambic pentameter.
JULIAN RICHARDS is an English and Theatre Studies student at the University of Warwick. He is a Third Dan Karate Instructor, keen amateur writer and lifelong fan of both Shakespeare and Doctor Who, making this almost his ideal book (lacking only Karate).
JUSTIN RICHARDS has written for stage and screen, audio, children’s novels, the science fiction series The Never War, and all sorts of other things. In his spare time he acts as Creative Consultant to BBC Books for all their Doctor Who titles – including this one. He has a degree in English and Theatre Studies, and once kidnapped someone by accident.
MATTHEW SWEET is a writer and broadcaster with a doctorate in Wilkie Collins. He presents Free Thinking and Sound of Cinema on BBC Radio 3 and The Philosopher’s Arms on BBC Radio 4. His books and TV documentaries include The West End Front, Shepperton Babylon, The Rules of Film Noir and Me, You and Doctor Who. A million years ago he played Iachimo to Eve Best’s Imogen, but Hollywood never called.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
CREDITS
Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
Cover design by Two Associates
COPYRIGHT
The authors have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production for BBC One.
Executive producers: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin
BBC, DOCTOR WHO and TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.
DOCTOR WHO: THE SHAKESPEARE NOTEBOOKS. Text by James Goss, Jonathan Morris, Julian Richards, Justin Richards, William Shakespeare and Matthew Sweet, with additional thanks to Becca Dunn, Jenni Street and Helen Cornes © 2014. Illustrations by Mike Collins © Woodlands Books Ltd, 2014. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in 2014 by:
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Cover design: Two Associates © Woodlands Books Ltd 2014
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1Well, I have to say this is rather better than your first attempt: ‘To be or not, aye there’s the rub . . .’
2And what question is that, exactly?
3I still think ‘the songs and harrows’ would be better. Still, it’s your play. I suppose.
4Mixed metaphor – I’ve warned you about these before, you know.
5I keep reading this as ‘hair’ but that’s my handwriting I suppose.
6Now you’re just cheating to make it fit the meter – worst example is “th’ unworthy” later on.
7If you just asked, I could tell you a thing or two about that, you know.
8If you only knew how this phase will be used and abused. Even parrots shuffle off, apparently.
9Long life? You don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, you’ll be dead before you’re 60. Sorry, probably a bit tactless to mention that.
10Do you honestly think anyone is going to understand this? Do you??
11They may grunt and sweat a bit, as you say, but the Fardels of Astrogothicus Minor are actually very friendly and refined. Great chefs, the Fardels. They’re especially good at open sandwiches, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms (which it is).
12To coin a phrase. Several phrases in fact.
13It might puzzle you, Will, but it seems pretty straightforward to me.
14That’s just what I keep saying – but people will fly to me with their problems at the drop of a metaphorical hat. And scarf.
The Shakespeare Notebooks Page 14
