Peri Brown (As You Like It)
Perpugilliam Brown, also known as Peri Brown, was a character in an early 17th century staging of William Shakespeare's play As You Like It. The Shakespeare Notebooks speculated that, as her inclusion was a diversion from all other known sources of the text, she only appeared in a single performance and was "perhaps" an extreme example of improvisation by the actors involved.
Peri travelled through time and space with a clown in the TARDIS, the "star-crossed ship of time" which acted as their home. She was once a Varosian parrot, an experience she could "hardly remember". Additionally, the clown claimed in a verse that "she look[ed] alluring in a gown" and that "leotards love[d]" her, as well as the fact that she would often "run, scream, and then fall down". After the course co-ordinates of the TARDIS "slipped and sent her to a place that [they knew] not", Peri and the clown became stranded in the Forest of Arden. After a scene in which they conversed for a time, the clown operated a device which "filter[ed] feedback on the sub-etheric band" and sent "a signal soaring through the spheres". This resulted in the TARDIS appearing off-stage with "a great wheezing and groaning" thus ending the scene as Peri and the clown departed.
The two characters were clearly based upon the Sixth Doctor and his companion Peri Brown, with this representation of the Doctor earning the transcript of the performance a place in the Shakespeare Notebooks. (PROSE: As You Like It)
