Who invented Shakespeare?: Or, was the Globe Theatre a TARDIS?

The 50th anniversary of Doctor Who was celebrated in November 2013, a few months before the 350th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Although the two iconic figures might seem to belong to completely different cultural spheres, Shakespeare wrote his plays for the popular theatre and exploited the possibilities of that relatively new medium, just as Doctor Who did those of television in the 1960s. Shakespeare did not appear in the television series until ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (2007), but allusions to the Bard and his works abound in Doctor Who texts in a number of different media. This essay argues that Shakespeare in Doctor Who functions as a utopian representation of the ‘human’ in opposition to the alien monstrosity of the Daleks.