Warlike Doctor (A Prologue)

The Warlike Doctor was a character in a variant version of William Shakespeare's play Henry V.

Unlike the finished play, which depicted events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt between the English and the French in 1415, this alternative draft focused on a war "even further beyond the possibility of representation with a small cast and modest set of props", featuring combatants such as the Daleks, the Nightmare Child and the Time Lords. The Chorus was the first character to appear in the play and it was his role to explain to the audience "that the lifelike depiction of such a conflict is beyond the means of a little group of actors in a wooden theatre". In its opening, he claimed that if a whole planet was available to use as a stage, then the Warlike Doctor would. as he did in real life, "assume the port of Mars".

The character of the Warlike Doctor resembled and was clearly based upon the War Doctor, the incarnation of the Doctor who fought in the Last Great Time War. It was because of the Doctor's involvement in the play that a fragment of the earlier draft formed part of the Shakespeare Notebooks. (PROSE: A Prologue)