B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

by Parkin, Lance

[453] The Stones of Venice

  [454] SJA: The Curse of Clyde Langer. Date unknown, but at a rough guess, it’s probably some centuries prior to the Mojave surrendering to United States forces in 1859. Mojave culture stretches back that far, but very little is known about it.

  [455] Recorded Time and Other Stories: “Recorded Time”. Prince Arthur died on 2nd April, 1502.

  [456] The Time Meddler, City of Death.

  [457] Kingdom of Silver

  [458] City of Death. The Doctor’s note to Leonardo ends “see you earlier”. In The Two Doctors, the Doctor has Leonardo’s business card.

  [459] SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge. It seems reasonable to presume that all seven Mona Lisas were created using paint made from the alien rock, as the original painting is destroyed in 1979 (City of Death). In both City of Death and Mona Lisa’s Revenge, various characters attribute Leonardo as having painted the Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1519, in accordance with the painting’s real-world history. City of Death, however, specifies that the original Mona Lisa, at least, was completed by 1505.

  [460] Doctor Who - The Movie

  [461] Relative Dimensions

  [462] Happy Endings

  [463] Dating City of Death (17.2) - Tancredi asks what the Doctor is doing in “1505”.

  [464] The Nowhere Place

  [465] SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge. The number of years that elapse between Guieseppe painting The Abomination and his death in 1518 isn’t specified.

  [466] Vincent and the Doctor. The Sistine Chapel was painted from 1508-1512.

  [467] “Changes”. Peri is surprised to find the picture in a store room, so she wasn’t with the Doctor at the time.

  [468] The Stone Rose

  [469] The Resurrection of Mars

  [470] “Centuries” before The Rising Night. As the Baobhan Sith are enemies of the Time Lords of old, it’s odd that they were, historically speaking, allowed to create an Empire. Then again, the fall of their Empire here might well owe to Gallifrey’s intervention.

  [471] “Eight years” before “Dragon’s Claw”.

  [472] SJA: Mona Lisa’s Revenge.

  [473] Hornets’ Nest: The Stuff of Nightmares. The expression is first cited in a 1520 poem by Conrad Goclenius.

  [474] Susan says in The Aztecs that this happened in 1520; as The Left-Handed Hummingbird correctly identifies, it was actually 1519.

  [475] Point of Entry. The Spanish invasion of the Aztecs happened 1519-1521.

  [476] Point of Entry. Agrippa lived 1486-1535.

  [477] Dating “Dragon’s Claw” (DWW #39-43, DWM #44-45) - “It is 1522... the summer of death!” according to the opening captions.

  [478] Benny: The Lost Museum

  [479] The Sensorites. Henry VIII reigned from 1509-1547. In Tragedy Day, the seventh Doctor says he has “never met” Henry VIII (p74); but the sixth Doctor says he has in The Marian Conspiracy, and is seen doing so in Recorded Time and Other Stories: “Recorded Time”.

  [480] “The Gift”

  [481] Iris: The Panda Invasion

  [482] Iris: Enter Wildthyme. This happens “four hundred years” before the destination they flee to, a Shirley Bassey concert (so, likely the twentieth century, but possibly the twenty first).

  [483] Terror Firma. It’s unclear if this refers to the same occasion mentioned in The Sensorites.

  [484] The Stones of Blood. The dissolution of the monasteries took place in the fifteen-thirties.

  [485] Black Orchid

  [486] The Burning

  [487] Dating SJA: Lost in Time (SJA 4.5) - The date is given.

  [488] Dating Recorded Time and Other Stories: “Recorded Time” (BF #150a) - King Henry VIII states the exact day. Anne Boleyn was killed about two weeks later, on 19th May. That Anne is still at liberty - and arguing with Henry in the court about his affairs - is a bit ahistorical; in real life, she was arrested on 2nd May and imprisoned in the Tower of London.

  [489] Deadly Reunion, unrelated to the sixth Doctor meeting Boleyn in Recorded Time and Other Stories: “Recorded Time” .

  [490] Tooth and Claw (TV)

  [491] Benny: The Vampire Curse: “Possum Kingdom”. The Tigra, a.k.a. the Tiwa, are first mentioned in 1541 by the conquistador Francisco Coronado, although Nepesht’s sojourn with them could predate that.

  [492] Dating The Jade Pyramid (BBC DW audiobook #10) - The Doctor and the blurb vaguely identify the period as “medieval Japan”. A much earlier version of this story was set in Korea and dated between 1592 and 1598. Foreigners from across the seas are mentioned, possibly denoting the Portuguese, who arrived in 1543. Firearms are cited in such a way that they don’t appear to be common. Ultimately, while author Martin Day didn’t have a year in mind for the final version of The Jade Pyramid, he was inclined to think that it was during the early years of Ashikaga Yoshiteru’s shogunate, which lasted 1546-1564. But even Day concedes that this was more of a generalisation on his part than a hard and fast rule.

  [493] “Ten years” before The Room with No Doors.

  [494] Hexagora

  [495] The King of Terror

  [496] The Ark in Space. Nostradamus lived from 1503-1566, and published his prophecies in 1556.

  [497] Dating The Marian Conspiracy (BF #6) - It is one month after the Wyatt Uprising, at the end of 1554.

  [498] The Curse of Peladon, although the Doctor admits he might be confusing it with the Coronation of Queen Victoria. Elizabeth was Queen from 1558, but the Coronation wasn’t until the following year.

  [499] Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark. There wasn’t an Earl of Essex at the time of Elizabeth’s Coronation.

  [500] Terror Firma. Elizabeth ruled 1558-1603.

  [501] Dating The Room with No Doors (NA #59) - It is “probably March 1560”, and “early spring”.

  [502] Verdigris. Mary Queen of Scots ruled 1542-1567.

  [503] Tragedy Day

  [504] The Taint. The Beast arrive on Earth in 1944, according to Autumn Mist.

  [505] Sometime Never

  [506] “Centuries” before The Perpetual Bond.

  [507] Thin Ice. Ivan ruled 1533 to 1584.

  [508] Dating The Massacre (3.5) - The first three episodes take place over a single day each, the last picks up nearly twenty-four hours after the end of the third late on the evening of the 23rd and runs into the 24th. The Admiral Gaspar de Coligny was shot on the 22nd. This story is sometimes referred to as The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve, based on some production documents, but this is historically erroneous. The event is more accurately named “the massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day”.

  [509] The Time of the Daleks, which implies that Shakespeare used some of the names of individuals he met in the future for characters in plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest.

  [510] Dating The Vampires of Venice (X5.6) - The opening caption says “Venice 1580”. This is another story affected by the Cracks in Time, so it’s possible - given that the Saturnynians would never have come to Venice but for benefit of one - that this story was removed from history when the cracks were sealed (see the Cracks in Time sidebar, however, for why this probably isn’t the case). The Doctor references this story’s “sexy fish vampires” in A Good Man Goes to War, giving no indication that they’re now the stuff of alternate history.

  The aliens are called “Saturnynians” on the BBC website, “Saturnynes” in Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia. The story ends with the canals of Venice still containing ten thousand Saturnynian males, and it’s the subject of fan-conjecture that, somehow, they become the progenitors of the fish-people seen in The Stones of Venice.

  [511] Timewyrm: Revelation

  [512] The Stones of Blood

  [513] Dating TimeH: Child of Time (TimeH #11) - The year is given (p68). It’s possible that these events occur in an alternate timeline; see the 2586 entry of this story.

  [514] The Seeds of Doom

  [515] The Empire of Glass, which consistently renders "Roanoke" as "Roanoake
".

  [516] EarthWorld. This was in 1587.

  [517] Four to Doomsday. The Spanish Armada attacked in 1588.

  [518] The Marian Conspiracy

  [519] Birthright

  [520] Only Human

  [521] Sometime Never

  [522] The Doctor’s claim in The End of Time (TV) is backed up by Liz X in The Beast Below and the Dream Lord in Amy’s Choice. We don’t know the year, but we can presume that it was before The Shakespeare Code, and explains her anger with him in that story.

  [523] The Wedding of River Song

  [524] “A Fairytale Life”

  [525] The Empire of Glass

  [526] Loups-Garoux

  [527] Dating Point of Entry (BF LS #1.6) - The Doctor judges that they’ve arrived “1590 local time, or thereabouts. The Elizabethan Age.” A slightly later dating, however, is indicated in the Doctor telling Peri that while “Shakespeare’s hardly started yet”, they can potentially see Henry VI, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. The real-life evidence suggests that at the very earliest, those three plays were written in 1591, and first performed no later than September 1592. Whatever the case, it’s after Marlowe’s Tamburlaine - the first part of which was first performed in late 1587 - has been performed for Queen Elizabeth I.

  Certainly, Point of Entry happens before Marlowe’s real-life death on 30th May, 1593 - although The Empire of Glass details how he faked his demise. That story and Point of Entry are reasonably compatible as far as Marlowe’s life is concerned, although the sixth Doctor curiously tells Peri that Marlowe - as history claims, and as the Doctor should know better from The Empire of Glass - will die young in a bar fight.

  It’s twice said to be summer.

  [528] The Empire of Glass. History tells us Marlowe died on 30th May, 1593.

  [529] “Three centuries” before The Bodysnatchers. This is a different ship from the one seen in Terror of the Zygons.

  [530]

  Shakespeare

  Going on just the information in the television series, the Doctor has met Shakespeare at least three times. Taking all the other media into account, we can infer that the Doctor has met Shakespeare a bare minimum of eight separate occasions, in at least six incarnations.

  We actually see five of these meetings. In chronological order of Shakespeare’s life, these are The Time of the Daleks (when Shakespeare is a child), “A Groatsworth of Wit” (set in 1592), The Kingmaker (set in 1597, and in which Shakespeare is replaced by Richard III), The Shakespeare Code (set in 1599) and The Empire of Glass (set in 1609, but with an epilogue that shows Shakespeare’s death in 1616). Additionally, The Chase has the first Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki using the Time-Space Visualizer to observe Shakespeare in the court of Elizabeth I, presumably at some point between The Shakespeare Code (as Hamlet has still not been written) and Hamlet’s real-life registry in 1602 (years before The Empire of Glass, then).

  In one regard, this is all far less contradictory than it might seem. None of the stories (save for The Chase and The Shakespeare Code, in which Shakespeare twice receives inspiration to write Hamlet) bear different accounts of the same event. Indeed, none of the adventures even occur in the same year - the closest pairing (The Kingmaker and The Shakespeare Code) are set two years apart. Taking the general events in the five stories that directly involve Shakespeare, then, at face value is not very difficult.

  Two impediments remain, however. One is that Shakespeare does not remotely look or act the same in some of his appearances. All things being equal, it’s hard to believe that Shakespeare as voiced by Michael Fenton-Stevens in The Kingmaker, as played by Dean Lennox Kelly in The Shakespeare Code, and as played by Hugh Walters in The Chase are all the same person. (Note that this problem isn’t limited to the different Doctor Who media, but occurs even in Shakespeare’s two appearances on television.) Shakespeare’s personality varies wildly between stories, even allowing that we’re witnessing different points of his life.

  The other problem is that Shakespeare in his later appearances never acknowledges having met a stranger named “the Doctor” before. He is admittedly never seen to meet the same incarnation twice, but it’s implausible to think that he never makes a connection between the various men who keep appearing during turbulent and strange events, all of them named “Doctor”. The Kingmaker actually helps a little in this regard - the Doctor and Shakespeare are on very chummy terms, but Shakespeare dies on Bosworth Field, eliminating the need for Richard III to acknowledge having met the Doctor in The Time of the Daleks and “A Groatsworth of Wit”. Obviously, this doesn’t explain why Richard himself doesn’t acknowledge the Doctor in the next story in the line - The Shakespeare Code - or thereafter.

  The Kingmaker is a particular sticking point, as it has Richard III living out Shakespeare’s life from 1597 onward. This would mean that the “Shakespeare” that the tenth Doctor and Martha meet in The Shakespeare Code is actually a disguised Richard III installed by the fifth Doctor… but who is somehow driven to great depression by the death of the original Shakespeare’s son, who has acquired two perfectly functional arms and who doesn’t limp. It might be best to assume events in The Kingmaker happened, then the Time War or some other intervention (allowing for Shakespeare’s importance to history) reversed them. This would carry the double benefit of not having to rationalise the conflicting fates of Richard III’s nephews/nieces in The Kingmaker and Sometime Never.

  [531] City of Death. This unseen encounter would have to be before 1590, when we know Shakespeare was writing, and must have involved one of the Doctor’s first four incarnations.

  [532] TW: Trace Memory. Shakespeare and Fletcher are credited as writing the lost play Cardenio in a 1653 Stationers’ Register that otherwise makes false use of Shakespeare’s name. In the Doctor Who universe, it appears he and Fletcher did author the work.

  [533] Dating “A Groatsworth of Wit” (DWM #363-364) - Greene’s death on 3rd September, 1592, is historical record. Greene is famous for dismissing Shakespeare both for plagiarism and because he was mainly - at that time - an actor, not a writer. When Rose asks if the Doctor knows Shakespeare, he says he’s “known him for ages. Just not yet”. This would suggest that the meeting mentioned in Planet of Evil didn’t involve too much familiarity.

  [534] Dating The Kingmaker (BF #81) - The date is given. It’s believed that Richard III was written in 1592-93, and it was entered into the Register of the Stationers Company on 20th October, 1597 by bookseller Andrew Wise. The Doctor and Shakespeare go drinking at The White Rabbit - a London establishment mentioned in Big Finish projects such as The Reaping.

  [535] The Shakespeare Code. Hamnet Shakespeare was buried on 11th August, 1596.

  [536] Dating The Shakespeare Code (X3.2) - The date is given in a caption at the start, and confirmed by the Doctor. In real life, it’s thought that Love’s Labour’s Lost was performed in 1597; Love’s Labour’s Won is on a list of Shakespeare’s plays dating from 1598. Historically, the Globe Theatre opened in the autumn.

  The tenth Doctor claims that he “hasn’t met” Queen Elizabeth I yet, but Birthright establishes that she’s been familiar with the seventh Doctor since at least 1588. It’s possible that the tenth Doctor means that he hasn’t yet met Elizabeth in his current incarnation (and is therefore surprised because she recognises him on sight), and that Elizabeth doesn’t realise that the different Doctors are the same being.

  [537] The implication is that (among other things) the Doctor inspires Shakespeare to use the name Sycorax - not just the aliens from The Christmas Invasion, but also the name of Caliban’s mother in Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest. (A moon of Uranus is named after the same character.)

  [538] The Chase. Literary scholars disagree when Hamlet was written, but we know it was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1602. It was almost certainly written and performed around 1600.

  [539] Endgame (EDA)

  [540] The Ultimate Treasure. The Merry Wives of Windsor was written around 1597, but
could have been a little later, so this is just possibly the same visit as the one where the Doctor helped with Hamlet.

  [541] City of Death. Historically, Shakespeare was known as an actor by 1592, and tradition has it that he continued to act even when he was better known as a writer. This reference seems to contradict the one in Planet of Evil, and clearly represents a different, subsequent visit (or visits). We can therefore infer that it’s the fourth Doctor who helped with Hamlet, after Planet of Evil. The encounter is mentioned again in Asylum. One problem is that it’s also mentioned by the first Doctor in Byzantium! - if that needs explaining away, it’s possible the first Doctor has seen the manuscript, recognised his handwriting (we know from The Trial of a Time Lord that the Valeyard and sixth Doctor have the same handwriting, so presumably all the Doctors do) and so inferred a future meeting.

  [542] City of Death

  [543] The Gallifrey Chronicles. Presumably on the same visit he helped write it, although the amnesiac eighth Doctor should have no memory of that.

  [544] The Time Meddler, although there’s no evidence of any contact between the Monk and Shakespeare.

  [545] The Cabinet of Light. King Lear appeared in the Stationers’ Register for November 1607, so this is another meeting. Island of Death implies it has to involve one of the Doctor’s first three incarnations.

  [546] Island of Death

  [547] “Changes”. This play, unlike the ones Braxiatel acquires in The Empire of Glass, is completely unknown to Shakespearean scholarship.

  [548] The Suns of Caresh

  [549] Pier Pressure

  [550] Dead London

  [551] Grand Theft Cosmos

  [552] The Banquo Legacy. In the real world, the Necronomicon was a fictional book of magic invented by H.P. Lovecraft.

  [553] Spare Parts

  [554] The Mind of Evil. Raleigh lived 1552-1618, and was imprisoned 1603-1616.

  [555] “Centuries” before The Way Through the Woods.

  [556] Dating “The Devil of the Deep” (DWM #61) - It’s “the early seventeenth century” when Diego is rescued according to a caption. The Sea Devil revived “ten years” before rescuing Diego, who is rescued “twenty years” after being marooned.