The Madness of King Charles III: Shakespeare and the Modern Monarchy

Prince Charles’s Stratford rendition of ‘To be or not to be’ on Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary, together with his TV recital of Cranmer’s eulogy of Elizabeth I, as a 90th birthday present to his mother, crowned the old alliance between the Bard and British monarchy. For whereas critics read the plays as rehearsals for the execution of Charles I, the Prince’s theatre mania harks back to the royal restoration staged in comedies like All’s Well That Ends Well. And an entire genre of recent romances, such as Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, confirms how, so long as Will ‘is by performance served’, Shakespeare remains the therapy to cure the king’s speech. But the success of Mike Barlett’s King Charles III also presents the Prince with Marx’s interpretation: ‘Sovereignty of the monarch or of the people: that is the question’.