Day 726: The Shakespeare Code

Watching The Shakespeare Code, by Gareth Roberts, my mind is immediately drawn to another piece by Roberts, The Plotters, a Doctor Who spin-off novel written in the 1990's, where the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki have an adventure with King James I and Guy Fawkes. What makes these stories so similar, beyond their time periods, is the way in which they depict history.

Roberts' attitude to historical stories is to make them feel modern. He doesn't treat the past as some collection of people talking in iambic pentameter and wandering around in robes, instead he writes the characters, and by extension the world, as if they exist today, except with a few dialogue changes here and there. This can be seen, for instance, in the characters of Firking and Hodge in The Plotters. Both are simple cobblers, and their lives feel perfectly normal. They worry about normal things, like what work they want to be doing, making the book breathe with life, instead of just being a collection of words on a page. You can also see this in one of the opening scenes of The Shakespeare Code, where the Doctor guides Martha around Elizabethan England, points out analogues to various modern day concepts including, in what later becomes the story's best joke, global warming. This all helps the world feel alive, and turns the world of Shakespeare's London from an abstract concept that you read about in books to something that you can step into and live in.

It's a fun story, all in all, and acts as an excellent example of a historical adventure done well, where the world feels real, as if the TARDIS has really taken you back in time.