The True and Most Excellent Comedie of Romeo and Juliet (short story)

The True and Most Excellent Comedie of Romeo and Juliet is the eighth story in The Shakespeare Notebooks, featuring representations of the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams.

Summary
It is generally agreed that Shakespeare's play about the doomed love of Romeo and Juliet took as its main inspiration the poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brook. The play, as reproduced in Quarto and Folio, closely follows the narrative of the poem, using the same character names and ending (as it well known) with the death of Romeo (when he discovers Juliet in a state of apparent death after taking a sleeping draught) and the death of Juliet (after she awakes and discovers Romeo had died).

However, it appears that under pressure from James Burbage to "make dark tragedie light" Shakespeare prepared a second version of the play ('the story as it did truly unfold, by misfortune unmarred') with a happy ending, turning the play (which is highly comic for its first three acts) into an out-and-out comedy...

This extract forms one of the longest pieces in the Shakespeare Notebooks.

Characters

 * The Doctor
 * Amy Pond
 * Rory
 * Romeo Montague
 * Juliet Capulet
 * Romeo Montague (clone)
 * Juliet Capulet (Teselecta)
 * The Apothecary
 * Chief Watchman
 * Watchman
 * Friar Laurence
 * Capulet
 * Lady Capulet
 * Juliet's nurse
 * Montague
 * Lady Montague
 * Paris
 * Rosaline
 * Tybalt

Worldbuilding

 * The deceased Romeo is cloned in a Sontaran cloning vat while Juliet is replaced by a Teselecta.
 * The Paris killed by Romeo was a Nestene duplicate. The Tybalt he killed was the human original, but he was secretly replaced with a Zygon, who owed the Doctor a favour after he had previously saved him from being burned as a witch.

Continuity

 * The cloned Romeo is made using Sontaran technology. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky)
 * The Doctor uses a Teselecta to fake someone's death. (TV: The Impossible Astronaut, The Wedding of River Song)