Troilus and Cressida
Troilus and Cressida was a play by William Shakespeare, featuring the two titular characters of Troilus and Cressida.
The play had a good reputation among Shakespeare's works. The Eighth Doctor, though he had not read it, knew it was "supposed to be one of the better ones". (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"]) It was set during the Trojan War, (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"], Troilus and Cressida [+]Loading...["Troilus and Cressida (short story)"]) towards the end of the conflict. The Prologue at the play's start set up the current state of affairs and explained the reason for the war, saying that sixty-nine rulers were on their way to ransack the city of Troy, in which Helen, Menelaus' queen, slept with Paris. (PROSE: Troilus and Cressida [+]Loading...["Troilus and Cressida (short story)"]) Shakespeare's play mostly followed the story established by Geoffrey Chaucer (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"]) in Troilus and Criseyde; (PROSE: Troilus and Cressida [+]Loading...["Troilus and Cressida (short story)"]) an eight-year-old Shakespeare referred to Cressida's tale as "part of tradition". (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"])
A variant version of the play which was contained within the Shakespeare Notebooks featured a Prologue who was based upon the First Doctor and also ""seem[ed] to have some trouble keeping to his place in the drama". This Prologue claimed to be responsible for the successful Greek plan involving the Trojan Horse and also made several anachronistic references, including to television and film star Maxwell Reed. Some scholars pointed to this as further evidence that the Notebooks were fakes. (PROSE: Troilus and Cressida [+]Loading...["Troilus and Cressida (short story)"])
By the time of the First Doctor's visit to Troy in the company of Vicki Pallister and Steven Taylor, the Doctor had not read Troilus and Cressida and had very limited knowledge of the play. One of his later incarnations recalled in their memoir Not Necessarily the Way I Do It! that the only reason he let Vicki go away with Troilus at the fall of Troy was he had assumed the romance was predestined once he heard she was calling herself Cressida. This assumption was incorrect as Cressida ended up with Diomede in the play, not Troilus.
In 1183 BC, the Eighth Doctor encountered Troilus and Cressida while travelling with Charlotte Pollard and a young William Shakespeare. The Doctor realised Shakespeare was due to write Troilus and Cressida in a few years and feared the creation of a temporal paradox unless he was careful. He resolved to prevent the boy from learning about Troilus and Cressida's background, ideally in such a way that he forgot as much of their present as possible too, and to this end he instructed Charley to get him so drunk he would not be able to remember his behaviour the next morning. The Doctor later explained his actions to everyone, causing Shakespeare to reveal that he already knew of the tale of Troilus and Cressida's failed love from the works of Chaucer while Charley added that Shakespeare's play was set during the Trojan War not after it, with Cressida ending up with Diomede not Troilus. The Doctor was then forced to admit that he had never actually read the play, and so was being over-cautious without reasonable cause. He attempted to excuse himself by claiming to have been busy, noting he had still not managed to tune the Time-Space Visualiser to catch all of The Golden Girls which he had been trying to do for decades. (PROSE: Apocrypha Bipedium [+]Loading...["Apocrypha Bipedium (short story)"])
