63 IAN WARD "It isn't what I hoped:" Shakespeare and the Performance of Kingship in Bartlett's King Charles III Mike Bartlett's King Charles III was first performed at the Almeida Theatre in Lon- don in April 2014, after which it transferred to the Wyndham before going on tour across the UK throughout 2015 and into 2016 (cf. Bartlett 2014a). It was immediately acclaimed: a "snowball success" according to the Evening Standard (Curtis 2014). According to Time Out Bartlett's play was "brilliantly audacious," in sum "theatrical dynamite"1 (McGinn 2015). "Bold, brilliant and unstoppably entertaining, an intelli- gent, empathetic, moving look at the power and limitations of the modern monarchy," the reviewer in The Times gushed, "theatre doesn't get much better than this" (Max- well 2014). The Daily Telegraph was just as impressed: "Outstanding and provoca- tive," its reviewer concluded, "the most spectacular, gripping and wickedly entertain- ing piece of lèse-majesté that British theatre has ever seen" (Spencer 2014). King Charles III tells the story of what might happen in the weeks which follow the death of Queen Elizabeth II. More particularly it anticipates what might happen within the respective walls of Westminster and Buckingham Palace if her eldest son decides to pursue a slightly different way of ruling. There are other locations, and different envi- ronments. There is a comic sub-plot located in London club-land. But King Charles III is principally about the highest of high-politics; for which reason critics have tend- ed to place it, understandably, within the genre of "state of the nation plays," of the kind familiar in the work of an earlier generation of radical playwrights such as David Hare, Howard Brenton and Caryl Churchill (cf. Curtis 2014; McGinn 2015). Such plays like to ask large questions. In the case of King Charles III it is about "the mon- archy's future role in a country without a defined constitution" (Billington 2014). Prospective though it might be, King Charles III is a history play of a kind. It is commonly assumed, and quite understandably, that history looks backward. But the fact that it lies in the past does not preclude its presence or indeed its place in the future. Indeed, it might be said that history acquires its greatest urgency when we contemplate its prophecy. It lends a sense of certainty to a necessarily uncertain pro- spect; even if it is a certainty which we create for ourselves, and which is just as much the product of our own narrative prejudices. King Charles III is such a history by virtue of its subject-matter and its medium. It is a "virtual" history in the immediate sense that it is prospective. But it is also virtual in the sense that it is presented in dramatic form. The consequence is a peculiarly poetic kind of virtuality. Bartlett was keen that his play should be serious, "defiantly unironic," neither a "parody [n]or a pastiche," and it would not be stuffed with "fairytale characters" (Bartlett 2014b). And above all it would be "Shakespearean," in its writing and in its reception (Bartlett 2014b). It may, Bartlett observed with necessary modesty, never "be as good as 1 As well as being, on "one massively enjoyable level," also "gloriously, victoriously vulgar" (McGinn 2015). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 28.2 (September 2017): 63-76. Anglistik, Jahrgang 28 (2017), Ausgabe 2 © 2017 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 64 IAN WARD Shakespeare," but his King Charles III would look and sound as Shakespearean as he could make it (Obeng 2015). It was a daunting challenge.2 But it seemed to work.3 Hauntings But if Bartlett's play is short of fairytale characters it is not short of ghosts; many of which, as we shall see, assume a distinctly Shakespearean form. King Charles III is a haunted play. Some of the ghosts assume a dramatic presence. The recently dead Queen makes a "floating" appearance early in the play, whilst the ghost of Princess Diana flits in and out at various moments, a "Beshrouded lady, walking through the walls," chiding her troubled husband for rejecting her, and then riddling him with the idea that he might prove to be the "greatest King we ever had," before her spectre "drifts away, like mist at dawn" (Bartlett 2014a, 32). A little later she appears to Wil- liam, and makes the same prophesy, with one crucial difference. Having tempted Charles to make his critical mistake, she can now be sure that her son will "be the greatest King we ever had" (71). We will speculate on the ghostly Diana's theatrical origins shortly. Other spectres lurk in the historical imagination. There are most obviously all the kings who, down the ages, found themselves despatched. Some departed quietly. Edward VIII managed to slip off to a life of genteel retirement and petty controversy. For most, however, the end was more grisly. And prospectively entertaining, for there Winter Journals is nothing which theatre-goers down the ages have seemed to relish more than a spot of murderous regicide. Elizabethan theatre-goers were no exception. The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II was the subject of Christopher Marlowe's more renowned history play, whilst the Tragedy of King Richard II likewisePowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) attracted Shakespeare's critical eye. We will revisit Shakespeare's Richard in due course. And when Bartlett's Charles harangues his Parliament for its "juvenile and selfish squall" it for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution is impossible not to recall the first King Charles breaching the same etiquette when he entered the Commons in January 1642 in a vain attempt to arrest five Members (Bart- lett 2014a, 76); or the words of his nemesis Oliver Cromwell who brought the Rump Parliament to an abrupt close eleven years later.4 It can only be wondered what Shakespeare might have done with the "Tragedy of King Charles I," if the course of history had flowed at a different pace.5 A more subtle historical spectre is raised by Bartlett's leader of the opposition, Mr Stevens, who reminds Charles, as he agonises over whether to sign a contentious press regulation bill, that William IV "resolved a not/ Entirely different situation" in regard to the 1832 Reform Act. William's solution was to dismiss an administration and, when that strategy failed, to sign the Act in absentia.6 There is special resonance 2 As Bartlett admitted, his play would "need five acts, quite possibly a comic subplot, but most worry- ingly the majority of it would have to be in verse" (Bartlett 2014b). More precisely it is written in iam- bic pentameter. 3 According to Sarah Lyall, at least, writing in the New York Times. Bartlett thus ensured that his charac- ters, rather than being "cardboard figures of ridicule" were "full of tragedy and pathos" (Lyall 2015). 4 "Some of you are whoremasters, some drunkards, and some corrupt and unjust men and scandalous to the profession of the Gospel," Cromwell berated the remaining Members as his troops bundled them roughly out of the House (cf. Royle 2005, 637-8). 5 Interestingly, Howard Brenton has tried to imagine the same in his acclaimed 55 Days. 6 William dismissed Lord Grey's Whig administration in 1831 and asked Wellington to see if he could form an alternative Tory government. He could not and Grey returned a few months later. Charles later reflects to himself that he knows "well the precedent" (Bartlett 2014a, 62). But it gives him little com- fort. Anglistik, Jahrgang 28 (2017), Ausgabe 2 © 2017 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) SHAKESPEARE AND THE PERFORMANCE OF KINGSHIP IN BARTLETT'S KING CHARLES III 65 here; for it was the threat of a second Reform Act which so troubled the great Victori- an commentator Walter Bagehot thirty years later. Bagehot's spectre assumes a con- siderable presence in King Charles III. It is to Bagehot's English Constitution that Charles turns for succour, as the crisis regarding the bill grows about him: […] And so. Here's Walter Bagehot, eighteen sixty-seven, Explaining changes to balance of The Crown and State. I read it as a child. One line stands out: Bagehot explains that now The monarch's mostly ceremonial And only can expect, from hereon in: The right to be consulted (which I've not) The right to encourage (which is all I do), And most importantly the right to warn. (Bartlett 2014a, 103) "It's a thing of quiet beauty" he tells his son William. William is not sure. Too much "history" dulls the senses (Bartlett 2014a, 106-7). It certainly seems to have dulled his father's. In his Constitution Bagehot identified two particular aspects of modern monarchy. First, he stressed how fine is both the practice and the performance. Second, he de- scribed what, in the matter of government, a monarch could and could not do; or more precisely what they could appear to do or not do. Bagehot's insights were of course coloured by context, by the debates which moved around the 1867 Reform Act, and by Queen Victoria's "retirement" from public view following the death of her beloved Prince Albert in 1861. Bagehot, ever more the old-fashioned Whig than the new- fashioned Liberal, did not much like the idea of reform, as the introduction to the second 1872 edition of the Constitution confirmed. And he was very troubled by his Queen. In an ill-advised letter to the Times in 1865, Victoria had acknowledged "the desire of her subjects to see her," but confirmed that there "are other and higher duties than those of mere representation which are now thrown upon the Queen, alone and unassisted" (Strachey 1971, 184).