Document (Apocrypha Bipedium)
A document which came to be kept in the Shakespearean Ephemera wing of the Braxiatel Collection was a note found by literary assessor Porlock in the effects of William Shakespeare.
It was not believed to be in Shakespeare's handwriting but scholars did note that it bore "some graphological similarities" to the disputed Scarlioni Hamlet manuscript. Indeed, both were penned by the Doctor, (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"]) the Hamlet manuscript by their fourth incarnation (TV: City of Death [+]Loading...["City of Death (TV story)"], PROSE: The Stranger, The Writer, His Wife and the Mixed Metaphor [+]Loading...["The Stranger, The Writer, His Wife and the Mixed Metaphor (short story)"]) and the note by their eighth incarnation.
The note was given by the Doctor to the young Shakespeare after his brief travels in time had concluded, (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"]) during which time the eight-year-old boy had encountered Daleks (AUDIO: The Time of the Daleks [+]Loading...["The Time of the Daleks (audio story)"]) and met Troilus and Cressida in ancient Troy. It was a list of things Shakespeare was best off not mentioning in his native time. These included: the Daleks, that he and the Doctor had met before when they next encountered each other because he had not mentioned it the last time, that he had already read half of his plays, the idea of cigars until Raleigh returned from abroad, that there would eventually be cigars named after some of his characters, that someone called Raleigh would go abroad, that Troilus and Cressida had a lovely marriage and lived happily ever after in Mousehole despite how the story went in Chaucer, and finally, the places he had gone and the things he'd seen. The fact the Doctor wrote all the good bits in Hamlet was also included in the list, albeit with "good bits" later amended to "rubbush bits" in a different hand.
Historiographic Speculator Anctloddoton reproduced the note in its entirety in his essay A Suggestive Correlation of The Cressida Manuscripts with other Anomalous Texts of the Pre-Animarian Era as proposed for Collective Consideration. (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"])
