More actions
According to William Shakespeare's account of events in his play The Noble Troyan Woman of Troy, when it emerged that the Eighth Doctor's attempts to protect history by preventing the young Shakespeare from remembering meeting Troilus and Cressida had been unnecessary on account of Shakespeare not inventing the tale upon which his future play Troilus and Cressida was based, Charlotte Pollard told the Doctor that he "should have [his] Brodie's Notes on Will". (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
Brodie's Notes were a series of GCSE and A-level textbooks published in the 1990s. It covered works by a range of different authors, including William Shakespeare, though there was never an instalment dedicated to Troilus and Cressida specifically.
Within the context of Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"], it is unclear how accurate to the "real" version of events Charley's mention of Brodie's Notes was. The line comes from one of Shakespeare's portions of the story which were written in strict iambic pentameter composed entirely in rhyming couplets. Furthermore, it is improbable that as a native of 1930 Charley would immediately think to reference a series of 1990s textbooks, with this line and her next few simply communicating that Charley was critical of the Doctor for thinking up a non-existent threat.