Most early fictional Shakespeares are ghosts, but the desire to have him walk among us again has also led authors to introduce time travel into their stories. Though he cut the scene from the published story, H.G. Wells himself included a seventeenth-century scene in the original manuscript of The Time Machine. Since then, this avenue for encountering the Bard in his own times or in ours has inspired many a literary imagination.
This unique hybrid biography self-consciously combines fiction and historical fact, emphasizing the scarcity of hard evidence about Shakespeare’s life and the speculative nature of other, more official biographies. Holderness suggests biographers of the Bard such as Ackroyd, Bate, Greenblatt, and others end up writing autobiographies in disguise – and without apology does the same himself. Continue reading
Doctor Who, the BBC’s time travelling alien from Gallifrey, has passed through the lives of countless people during his various regenerations. In the recently discovered Notebooks Shakespeare attempted to document the appearances of the “mysterious” Doctor in his life and in his writings. Compiled in 1599 after the events surrounding the loss of Love’s labour’s won, this “book of scraps” includes early drafts of many of his plays (among them an extensive group of unused scenes from Macbeth featuring the second Doctor and his companions Jaime and Zoe), new sonnets, and other material that reveal previously unknown ties between Shakespeare and the Doctor. The Notebooks show Shakespeare as a willing intellectual partner with the Doctor, using his fleeting brushes with the Doctor for ideas and characters (even if they were ultimately excluded). -TH