A theatre's magic, isn't it?

Spoiler Alert - in case you haven't watched 'The Shakespeare Code' yet

And so, the Doctor met Shakespeare, and possibly for the first time met a human with an intellect to match his own. There were some lovely in jokes, but I have to admit the only one that made me laugh out loud was the allusion that Shakespeare was bi-sexual ’57 academics just punched the air’.

I was waiting for the quotes, you see. It was pretty obvious that the Doctor would give Shakespeare some of his best lines, and some of them felt shoehorned in, in an ‘ooh, aren’t we clever’ way. The bits I liked best were the less obvious references; the Doctor saying that a skull he found backstage looked like a Sycorax; a reference to ‘a winter’s tale and a ‘blasted heath’.

As Martha said, you should never meet your heroes, and certainly Dean Lennox Kelly wasn’t my idea of Shakespeare (I prefer the Joseph Fiennes version, in Shakespeare in Love), but then I have to acknowledge that the target audience here isn’t the Shakespeare snob*, but families, including all those kids who perceive Shakespeare as boring. Hence the Harry Potter references (but I did love the comment about Book 7). But why, oh why, with the whole works of the Bard at your disposal, did the final word that rid the world of the carrionites have to come from JK Rowling?

Bits I loved, DT pacing around the Globe Theatre, the bedroom scene, Love’s Labours Won (though, from the snippets we heard, it wasn’t one of his best!!), the theatrical jokes.

Things I wanted – more of Shakespeare’s actual words, DT to stand on that stage and speak them, Martha to actually snog Shakespeare – well, you wouldn’t wouldn’t you, just to say you’d done it?!

*Which I am, I freely admit it