Charles III’s Shakespearean Turn

The Crown’s Josh O’Connor, who played the future King Charles III as a young rake, had trouble finding his character, wondering ‘what’s the get-in? Where’s the juice to him?’ He might have said the same about Shakespeare’s aimless Prince Hal, living under the Crown’s shadow in Henry IV. Hal becomes almost unrecognizable as sovereign in Henry V, a recurrent theme in speculations about Charles III’s reign. He ‘takes up his long-awaited crown,’ The Washington Post remarks, ‘and in exchange sets down his lifelong passions and causes.’ It’s a public imperative not lost on the new monarch. ‘You only have to look at Henry V or Henry IV Parts I and II’ he told the BBC, ‘to see the change that can take place.’ The operative word is ‘change,’ though, not ‘repression.’ Charles III’s habitual recourse to Shakespeare is a mode of negotiating what kingship means as a ‘separate exercise’ from private life when being sovereign also means becoming oneself.

What does it mean to become a sovereign? Much of Britain’s constitutional history traces an evolving settlement between what Winston Churchill called the monarchic ‘ideal of Tudor government’ and an equally powerful ideal of parliamentarian commonwealth. During his Accession at the Tudor-era St. James Palace, Charles’s address to the Accession Council alluded to this. The Council’s proclamation, in turn, described an immediate, complete settlement between Charles Philip Arthur George and the ‘Liege Lord, Charles the Third.’ In Shakespeare’s time, this would have been the idea of the ‘King’s Two Bodies,’ a political metaphor that distinguishes between the king’s ‘Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities,’ and ‘Body politic […] that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government.’ This echoes in the Accession’s insistence that the Crown ‘is come’ to Charles Philip Arthur George. His ‘Body mortal,’ in turn, ‘is now […] become’ a ‘Body politic,’ King Charles III.

It’s not hard to see why Shakespeare was drawn to the dramatic tensions inherent in kingship. In Richard II, for example, Richard’s political crisis is also a psychological one. As Harold Bloom remarks, ‘for him king and Richard are not just two words, but one indissoluble name.’ In Henry V, King Harry might reflect that a sovereign, ‘his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness […] appears but a man,’ but evokes himself in the third person – ‘Harry the king,’ ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’ – during the play’s rousing battle speeches. Most of Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Histories are in fact preoccupied with the consequences of accepting or not accepting Richard’s sense of the ‘King’s Two Bodies.’ Even Hamlet, Shakespeare’s most hesitant prince, reveals something of his sovereign ordination when he refuses to distinguish between his private grief as the king’s son and public performance as mourning heir at Court.

The Shakespearean turn, which has long been part of British political culture, has perhaps taken on new significance as a response to Britain’s continuing decline on the global stage and its unresolved post-Brexit anxieties. In other words, if Britain cannot exert political muscle, Shakespeare suggests that it might yet endure, like the Crown, as a poetical ‘Body politic […] that cannot be seen or handled.’ After Queen Elizabeth’s death, for example, The Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens wrote that Britain’s ‘real constitution’ – Churchill’s ‘ideal of Tudor government’ – is written ‘in the Prayer Book and in Shakespeare and the great poets, not on a website or in some Cabinet Office folder.’ He echoes the sentiments of his late brother, Christopher Hitchens, who claimed that the abandonment of the King James Bible’s Elizabethan English illustrates how ‘the eclipse of a single structure’ leads ‘not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.’

At the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign, the British writer, Thomas Carlyle, wrote that ‘Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakespeare does not go, he lasts forever with us.’ His body of literature was, for Carlyle, Hitchens’s ‘real constitution,’ an essential compact of Englishness. In an era when the future of the Commonwealth seems increasingly uncertain, Shakespearean dramas, like the idea of ‘Commonwealth realms,’ still project the imaginative possibilities of ’global’ Britishness abroad.

It’s worth noting in this regard that Charles’s first speech as king, which concluded with a quote from Hamlet, directly addressed the Commonwealth as much as the United Kingdom. ‘We will come together as a nation, as a Commonwealth, and indeed a global community,’ the King remarked, ‘to lay my beloved mother to rest.’ As ‘Body politic,’ Charles III’s ‘majestic plural’ extends in the address to a rhetorically global ‘us’ – ‘in our sorrow, let us remember’ – and its Shakespearean address to the Queen’s spirit – ‘flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest’ – is spoken on behalf of the Commonwealth realms as well as on a son’s behalf. The ‘Shakespearean sovereign’ mode of speech makes imagined continuities between ‘our family’ and ‘the family of nations,’ at least rhetorically, that a speech by a ministerial department bureaucrat simply could not manage convincingly.

In O’Connor’s terms, though, what’s the personal ‘get-in’ to King Charles III’s use of Shakespeare? Where’s the juice? The notion of a prince finding plays about kings compelling is a prosaic one. Charles, to be sure, seems to have always taken an exceptionally high degree of interest in drama. He played the Duke of Exeter in Henry V and the title role in Macbeth while attending boarding school at Gordonstoun, earning favorable notice in The Sunday Telegraph. At Cambridge, he was active in the Dryden Society, writing and performing his own skits. Later, while Prince of Wales, he served as president of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a role in which he was perhaps best known for his rendition of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy at the 2016 RSC Gala. He edited and introduced The Prince’s Choice, a collection of Shakespearean speeches. He recorded a Shakespearean monologue as a birthday present to Queen Elizabeth in 2016. He advised Kenneth Branagh on his acclaimed film version of Henry V and Branagh, in turn, modeled King Harry’s mannerisms on Charles.

The ’get-in’ is not, then, the expectable fact that Charles III uses Shakespearean quotes to contextualize his speeches as sovereign. It’s that he repeatedly uses them in exactly the opposite context they have in the source plays. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, for example, Archbishop Cranmer prophesies that Henry’s infant daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, will become ‘a pattern to all princes living.’ When Charles quotes the line in reference to Elizabeth II, it’s elegiac. In Hamlet, Horatio utters the line, ‘May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,’ at the death of an idle prince who has been betrayed by, and who has murdered, his estranged mother. When Charles III utters it, it is a king’s tribute to ‘darling mama,’ one in which the repeated byword is ‘devotion.’

As Oxford professor, Emma Smith, remarks, the ‘monarchy has drawn on Shakespeare for its understanding of itself,’ and this poetic inheritance serves as an ‘important aspect’ of how Charles III ‘understands the world.’ If so, then this seems to be Shakespeare on Charles’s terms. Shakespeare’s kings are almost all, at least in a filial sense, broken men. They are heirs without ‘darling mamas.’ They have heirs but not families. One wonders if Charles III’s Shakespearean inversions are those of a man who imagines both his own ‘Body mortal’ and ‘Body politic’ as parts of a man who does.