1In Elizabethan drama, representations of kingship or individual kings are on the whole no laughing matter. Shakespeare, when he turned to dramatising the chronicles, and looked at the somewhat ramshackle attempts of other playwrights, developed a distinct dramatic kind, the History Play, dialectical in conception, generically hybrid, with no shyness about anachronism. Perhaps we should call them Political Plays since their chief concern is with power and its workings, presented in terms of personalities distanced in the historical past to permit freer analysis and reduce trouble with the censor. English history offered three tests of the monarchy by usurpation, King Henry VI, King John, King Richard II. Shakespeare, it may be noticed, deals with all three. The verdict of Andrew Gurr, after considering Elizabethan censorship of Shakespeare's King Richard II and that play's contemporary political allusiveness, is that on the Elizabethan stage an “astonishing amount of political comment or display seems to have been acceptable”1.

2If the History Plays were renamed Political Plays there would be the added advantage of signalling how much is owed by our modem critical and stage interpretations of these plays to the modem masters of political theatre, Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht — and not only is much owed by our critics and theatre directors, much is owed by our writers, our playwrights, as for instance Alan Bennett and his recent play The Madness of George III (1991). Bennett wryly comments that critics of this play describe his staging as “Brechtian”, a term which he notes to be nowadays “as two-edged a compliment as ‘Shavian’”2.I think he is right to object to such modish disparagement. It is complacent. In fact it took decades for the English theatre to catch up with Brecht in seeing that Bernard Shaw's intelligence about politics was a dramatic strength. Brecht had made parodic use of Richard III in satirising Hitler in Arturo Ui in 1941 (he knew Jessner's great 1920 Berlin production), but in England the dominant stage interpretation of King Richard III continued undisturbed in its traditional stress on the individual villainy of Richard. It is a reflection on the tenacity of the tradition-bound culture of British Theatre generally and its Great Actor cult in particular, that in World War II, according to Laurence Olivier, in 1944 Richard III “was at this time a stale cup of tea”3 and therefore a suitable choice as a vehicle for his individual star performance of sheer acting, whereas in the same year Olivier's choice of a play to make into a popular film, as his contribution to the war effort, was of course King Henry V, traditionally presented in doublet and hose but with a brief patriotic dedication tacked on. Olivier's star performance as Richard III, first seen on stage in 1944, was reinforced by the film version released in 1955, prolonging its influence. Intervening productions in New York4 had suggested superficial analogies to recent tyrannical regimes in Germany and the USSR but English audiences had to wait until 1963 for a coherent staging of King Richard III with modem political implications — this was the Peter Hall-John Barton production, which formed the concluding part of the first tetralogy collectively titled “The Wars of the Roses”. Peter Hall records that he was reading a proof copy of Jan Kott's book Shakespeare Our Contemporary as he travelled to the first rehearsal. The next year a production by Peter Brook of a play by Peter Weiss, The Marat/Sade, which presents the world as an asylum full of murderous lunatics, against a background of the French Revolution, powerfully alluded to the phenomenon of political terror in modem regimes. The impact of these two famous productions of the early 1960's is apparent in subsequent staging of Shakespeare’s History Plays and certain tragedies in particular; indeed the very recent film version of King Richard III by Ian McKellen and Richard Loncraine (based on the National Theatre production of 1990) is distinctive not for its much-advertised Nazi period setting and the visual resemblance of the film's Richard to Hitler, but rather because it ignores the issue of Richard's madness, thereby reverting to an older Brechtian-style interpretation of the play as a political warning against totalitarian tendencies in contemporary society.

3Alan Bennett's play The Madness of George III focuses on the English monarchy at a point mid-way on its long downhill from Queen Elizabeth I to King Charles III — at a point, that is, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century where the monarchy's autocratic power had already declined very far but where, as an institution, its prestige was still sustained by the traditions of privilege, primogeniture, paternalism, and property — not to mention the fear of bloody revolution à la française.

4 The Madness of King George could be broadly characterised, Polonius-wise, as Tragical-Comical-Historical in mode. It shows awareness of today's allusive fashion for modemising Shakespeare on stage and screen, and there is reason to suspect it is conscious of an earlier tradition of adapting Shakespeare which flourished in the Hanoverian period. Although modernised Shakespeare is currently something of a vogue in the cinema and virtually de rigueur in the theatre, when Bennett was beginning his career the staging of Shakespeare in modernised terms was still in the process of becoming the dominant mode in British theatre; following the Hall-Barton “Wars of the Roses” in 1963, two landmarks of its progress were Peter Brook's King Lear in 1964 and Stoppard’s Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead of 1967.

5Alan Bennett began as a writer of parody, participating in Beyond the Fringe (1960) and its admirable spoof of the mindless well-spoken actor style of performing Shakespeare History Plays in the pre-Peter Hall era: the parody climaxed with Jonathan Miller's extravagant imitation of Olivier's long-drawnout death-agonies as Richard III. Jonathan Miller has since pursued a career directing opera and classic plays and his book Subsequent Performances has an excellent discussion of the whole issue of modernising and adapting Shakespeare. He has been a friend of Alan Bennett since Beyond the Fringe and they live across the road from each other in the same Street in Camden. According to Bennett, the idea of George III as a possible subject for a play was suggested to him by Miller.

6Bennett's first independent play Forty Years On was historical in subject and somewhat Brechtian in mode, and Bennett's preoccupation with history (in which he was trained at Oxford) is also clear in an early television film A Day Out, which has World War I in the background. His recent work for the theatre includes a representation of the reigning monarch Elizabeth II (in A Question of Attribution) which is striking, by comparison with Shakespearean monarchs, for its detailed humorous depiction of human particulars. At the same time we should note that the author's preface to the published playscript discusses patriotism and national decline. The Madness of George III takes further Bennett the historian's interest in the broad issue of the current British monarchy already touched on in A Question of Attribution, this time using the filter of Hanoverian culture. This play about King George III can properly be described as a modem History Play since it is concemed to reflect on contemporary political culture and is eclectic in its stylistic elements, owing most perhaps to modem British staged Shakespeare (a remarkably rich field of fresh creativity for directors and designers as well as actors) and to the diffused influence of Shaw and Brecht. What particularly concems me here is the connection with Shakespeare: I hope that Bennett may prove a useful perspective on Shakespeare's presentation of kings, and vice-versa.

7The eighteenth century in the English theatre is well-known for its bold adaptations of Shakespeare; the two most famous being Tate's King Lear and Cibber's King Richard III. As it happens, the historical Hanoverian politicians and cartoonists themselves displayed a remarkable interest in adapting Shakespeare, in the form of allusive quotation for satiric and ironic commentary on contemporary politics5: so much so indeed that when the King suffered a relapse into madness the London theatres were prohibited from putting on performances of King Lear for nine years, from 1811 to 1820. Bennett's King George III says (p. 80) of King Lear “It's my story”, exactly echoing what Elizabeth I said of Shakespeare's King Richard II: “Know you not that I am Richard II?”. In Shakespeare’s own time censorship ensured that the deposition scene was omitted from the published quarto, and in the eighteenth century it was again the deposition scene that upset the censors who banned even an adapted version of King Richard II by Nahum Tate from stage performance6.

8In George III's lifetime the Tate version of King Lear held the stage, although strictly for a reading text informed taste turned back from Tate to Shakespeare; and Cibber's version of Richard III, for all its vulgarity, appealed to audiences and its stage life lasted until the recent past; it has also influenced the way modem productions of Shakespeare's play adapt the text — somelimes retaining a favourite line or two of Cibber. It is highly significant that Bennett alludes to Cibber's version right at the end of The Madness of George III: the play's last line (p. 93) being George's assertion “The King is himself again”. We may care to recall it in its original context, where it gains additional ironic point:

9As Richard's vaunt here is destined all too soon to prove in vain, so history tells that George III is destined to succumb once more to the “babbling madness” (and in Bennett's play a twentieth-century doctor, MacAlpine, has just corne on to give the scientific diagnosis, porphyria).

10Bennett’s play about George III already seems the natural and obvious subject for the end of the 1980's, dramatising the dilemmas of today's House of Windsor (Prince of Wales included), and their continuity with those of the Georgian House of Hanover; indeed given this author's long-established devotion to parody, it is tempting to sum up the ironic point of The Madness of George III by varying Miss Prism's immortal definition: the good end happily and the bad unhappily: that is what history means. Yet Bennett's Hanoverian King is more likely to compare himself to some fictional, some Shakespearean monarch than to one of his own actual historical predecessors; and what is so striking is that the Shakespearean monarchs he alludes to have such troubling implications — Richard II, Richard III, and Lear — and that they were among the favourite sources for allusions to the monarchy and politics during George III's reign.

11Bennett uses the historical setting to make allusion forward to the present as well as back to a more remote past. A primary pattern consists of parallels in persons and events, a secondary pattern consists of allusions, mainly quotations of language or incident from dramatic and literary works; the point of writing in this mode of allusion is that once a general structural analogy has been signalled between two main plots, and two historical moments, direction will be given for the decoding of the implications.

12Just as Shakespeare in his Histories gave his own contemporaries a defamiliarised version of themselves, so in Georgian England his plays were recognised as furnishing contemporary parallels. Today Shakespeare continues to be applied in this way — Hamlet having been the favourite text in the Eastern Bloc countries between 1946 and 1990 for making oblique comment on politics, as suggested in Stoppard's Dogg's Hamlet and Cahoot's Macbeth. Stoppard has recorded that he was inspired by a report of a Czech dissident's persecution by political censors. Bennett has remarked (p. xviii) of The Madness of George III, “Any account of politics whatever the period must throw up contemporary parallels. I think if I had deliberately made more of these it would have satisfied or pandered to some critics who felt that was what the play should have been more about. But it is about the madness of George III”. Well yes, it is understandable, it is right, that the author should in the first place want recognition for the new thing his imagination has created; but after all in this play Bennett contrives that the madness of George III should acquire all manner of configurations; the king himself insists (p. 41) he is mad only nor-nor-west:

'Not mad, though, me. Not mad-mad-mad-mad. Madjesty majesty. Majust just nerves nerves nerves sss

13His doctor, Willis, coldly comments “The State of monarchy and the State of lunacy share a frontier. [...] Who is to say what is normal in a king?” (p. 47). The Prince of Wales, on the point of declaring himself Regent, forcibly refuses his mother access to the King, and alludes to his father's tendencies, in madness, to lechery, when he tells his mother (p. 32): “in his current frame of mind His Majesty does not seem to care for you”. He then uses the words of Shakespeare's Claudius, commenting on Hamlet's behaviour in the Nunnery Scene: “His affections do not that way tend”. Now presumably the Prince of Wales is consciously quoting, knowing that his German mother will not recognise the ironic allusion; and certainly Bennett the playwright is quoting in the expectation that at least a proportion of the audience will get the allusion. For those who do recognise the allusion, there is much food for thought. In Hamlet it is the son not the father who seems mad. In Bennett's play it is the reverse. In Hamlet it is the mother's taking a second husband that causes the son great suffering, whereas Bennett's Prince of Wales is cynical about his father's adultery and callous towards his mother, who remains faithful. But three parallels between the two plays remain obvious — a politically corrupt court, a frustrated heir to the throne, and the issue of royal madness. Bennett's play provokes thought about Shakespeare's depiction not only in Hamlet but also in Prince Hal of the psychological and political frustration of being heir apparent, which as the play says is not so much a position as a predicament. Today's audiences are likely to appreciate an immediately contemporary allusion, to Prince Charles, but one should remember that his recent predecessors include Edward VIII, the abdicator, and Queen Victoria's eldest son, who as Edward Prince of Wales had to endure his mother's regal disapproval for so long, his only consolations being horseracing, mistresses and an ever-expanding girth. Bennett admits in his Introduction (p. xi) that strict historical truth was a casualty in his portrait of the Prince of Wales, explaining that “the play works only if the antipathy betwen father and son, never far below the surface with all Hanoverian kings, is sharpened”. Certainly the Shakespearean allusions work because Bennett makes the antipathy between father and son sharp, and this permits some close parallels to be made: in King Henry TV, the King on his deathbed rebukes the Prince of Wales for taking his crown away:

I stay too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair'

14Bennett's King George is angry in the same way, using the same turn of phrase:

15The fact that George's outburst interrupts a concert in the presence of the whole Court signais a cross-reference to Hamlet, where in the play-scene the heir apparent provokes the king to disrupt the performance. King George at the very end of the play (p. 93) makes another allusion to King Henry IV when, restored politically and personally, he rejects his doctor, using exactly Prince Hal's words, when Falstaff interrupts his coronation procession and Hal rejects him: “Presume not that I am the thing I was”. This parallel is, again, not so straightforward in its implications. Even the veteran opportunist Falstaff miscalculates the sheer tough impersonality, the difference, that royalty involves, learns the hard way that monarchy is proof against sentiment; and whatever sheer hard-hearted greed the episode may expose in Falstaff, it evenhandedly exposes a sheer sourness in the Prince also. The scene has wider implications than the persons themselves, it is interested in the laws of power, showing that the crown is pitiless in diminishing humanity, whoever wears it.

16There may be an especial irony residing in the fact that the present Prince of Wales is so stout a defender of Shakespeare for his language: is it significant that he is not heard to say, as Ben Jonson said of Edmund Spenser, “I would have him read for his matter?” Certainly Bennett's George III is quite clear that it is Shakespeare’s matter that counts: that is why he keeps quoting him. The complication in such a deliberate use of allusion as Bennett deploys in this play is that there can be no delimiting its implications: the nature of irony, its strength and its risk as a rhetorical mode, is its open indefinition.

17 The Madness of George III begins the way Shakespeare's Measure for Measure ends, with a royal procession interrupted by a woman petitioner. Bennett wrote the final draughts of his playscript, so he informs us, in collaboration with the play’s National Theatre director, Nicholas Hymer; I suspect it to be significant that Hytner had not long before directed a moderndress Measure for Measure for The Royal Shakespeare Company, a production which visually suggested the present day and the 1930's and in which Shakespeare's Duke was comparatively young and resembled King Edward VIII at the time of his abdication.

18At the beginning of The Madness of George III the woman (a Mrs Nicholson) who petitions George III — and who recalls Shakespeare's Isabella in Act 5 of Measure for Measure — first submits her paper crying “I have a property due to me from the Crown of England” — “Give me my property or the country will be drenched in blood” — then suddenly takes out a knife and strikes the King. George III's reaction is phlegmatic: “Well, not with this, madam. It’s a dessert knife. Wouldn't cut a cabbage” (p. 1). Evidently this is not the world of Shakespeare, and to stress the point that this is 1786, Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks is playing. Furthermore, coming on top of the assassination attempt, the woman's prophecy is made to seem melodramatic, altogether un-British, quite foreign, in point of fact actually mad. Shakespeare in another play, Julius Caesar, had dramatised an assassination in which the killers conceal their intent by submitting petitions, and there the outcome is bloody enough to warm the heart of a Charlotte Corday; in Measure for Measure, however, Isabella is as ineffectual as the Mrs Nicholson who attacks George III, and, also like that Mrs Nicholson, Isabella is dismissed as merely mad.

19Mrs Nicholson was a historical person; her attempt on the king's life was made in 1786, not long before the storming of the Bastille: it was already by that date a different world from Sterne's Sentimental Journey of 1768, with its memorable beginning: “They order this matter better in France”: subsequent history lends the phrase retrospective irony. In Bennett's play King George says of his would-be assassin (p. 3): “She is fortunate to live in this kingdom, hey? It is not long since a madman tried to stab the King of France. The wretch was subjected to the most fiendish torments—his limbs burned with fire, the flesh lacerated with red-hot pincers, until in a merciful conclusion, he was stretched between four horses and torn asunder. We have at least outgrown such barbarities”. Presumably George III has in mind his predecessor King James I, who decreed very similar punishment for the Gunpowder Plotters, ending in dismemberment without the use of horses (a detailed description may be found conveniently in Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World). What neither the audience nor King George anticipate at this point is that he himself will soon be subject to torture, as sanctioned by the Royal College of Physicians, and that then the King will invoke the past, an Age of Faith, in a vain attempt to stave off being tortured in the name of Science. King George III's Court may indeed be as dull and stuffy as that of the House of Windsor, yet it soon becomes clear that like every institution it generates oppression: it is not for nothing that Bennett has studied Kafka, for in this play he exploits Kafka's vision of bureaucratic menace.

20The play's presentation of Georgian Britain invites recognition of parallels with the present; a secondary set of parallels is invoked — by means of allusions in situation and in language — to Shakespeare, so that one perspective extends back to Shakespeare's kings, another forward from the play's eighteenth century to our time. The play's action, though itself very confined to the King’s confinement for madness, is placed precisely between off-stage events which make their presence felt, being of epic scale and historic importance — the American and French Revolutions. If this reminds us of the Marat/Sade, can it be a coincidence? Whether subconscious or conscious, the parallel is close and associates the institutionalisation of madness with State bureaucratisation, and the development of State terrorism as an instrument of state policy — something featured in the 1963 Peter Hall production of King Richard III. Hall, as already noted, was strongly influenced by Jan Kott, and it is striking that Kott’s leading idea in Shakespeare Our Contemporary seems highly applicable to Bennett: “We began our considérations with a metaphor of the grand staircase of history. It was on such a staircase that Léopold Jessner set Richard III. [...] That metaphor has philosophical consequences and is also dramatically fruitful. There are no good and bad kings; there are only kings on different steps of the same stairs. The names of the kings may change, but it is always a Henry who pushes a Richard down, or the other way round. Shakespeare's Histories are dramatis personae of the Grand Mechanism [...] which forces people to violence, cruelty and treason”8. Now Bennett says in his Introduction to The Madness of George III (p. xxi): “When I was writing the play I had no notion of how it could be put on except that I knew there was a flight of stairs at the rear of the stage” and that the play should begin and end with the King and Court descending these stairs. The designer of The National Theatre production devised a flight of steps running the full width of the stage at the rear. Is it not tempting to think Bennett was subconsciously, if not consciously, influenced by Kott's reference here to the staircase of history?

21In any case Jessner's staging of Richard III at the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1920 to which Kott refers is well worth pausing on. Jessner said his aim was not to offer historical realism but to place vivid symbols on the stage. The actor of Richard was instructed not to impress the audience with his personal magnetism but to perform as merely one element in the political allegory. The set had a high stone wall stretched across the entire stage, pierced at the centre by a small portai. Slightly behind the first wall another higher wall rose, forming a terrace for Richard's ultimate entrance to the citizens and Lord Mayor. Above the second wall, outlining it at the top of sight lines, was a narrow framework of sky — lit in a foreboding crimson. Action in the first half was all on the horizontal plane in front of the wall; only in the second half was there vertical action, enhanced by a flight of red steps rising to the throne; an eye-witness recorded how all the heightened movement there produced a memorable contrast when Richard slowly descended the red staircase at the end in utter lassitude9. Peter Hall's 1963 production designed by John Bury likewise featured dominating grey walls; it was described as catching the “true grand Nazi horror of the play, with its imbricated black metallic wall and throne emerging from the shadows and receding again”10. Significantly Richard III himself, played by Ian Holm, avoided extravagant mannerism and gave an interpretation deliberately understating what Olivier had stressed, while at the same time bringing a new emphasis: Richard was clearly mad. He was progressively afflicted by sudden blinkings and twitches, credibly developing megalomania. A reviewer11 wrote that Holm's Richard was “not so much a villain as an insane manipulator of events” and considered this detracted from the suggested parallel with Hitler: “the anachronistic jackboots, far from striking a note of fear, are somehow out of place, an irritant”. The issue of madness dominated RSC productions in 1970 and 1975. The 1975 Richard III directed by Barry Kyle recalled the Marat/Sade in being set in an asylum with some characters costumed to suggest mental patients or concentration camp prisoners, and the conflation of Richard the madman with Richard the modem tyrant has been influential in many subsequent productions including the schizopherénie Richards of Al Pacino, 1973, Michael Moriarty, 1974, and Brian Bedford, 1977. Nevertheless Kott's concern with power politics, playing down the interest in the clinical-psychological idea of Richard, is still influential, as one sees from the very recent film derived from the National Theatre's Ian McKellen blackshirt Richard III of 1990; and moreover that production recalls significant aspects of Michael Bogdanov's at the Young Vic in 1978 in which the men wore lounge suits, dinner jackets or battledress, the women black cocktail dresses; Richard himself was “a fatly smiling boardroom type wearing slovenly worsted like a professional assetstripper looking for companies to liquidate”12. Stanley telephoned nervously from a public phone box. Richard did not make his famous offer of a kingdom for a horse, being hemmed in by machine-guns at the time.

*

22Bennett's layered allusions to Shakespeare, mainly to Richard III and Richard II, Prince Hal, Hamlet and Lear, suggest that The Madness of George III is in part a meditation on Shakespearean kings and that the particular verbal allusions gain significance when related to their original Shakespearean contexts. There is a pattern of visual allusion as well, the words also having a context of stage action. In Bennett's play at the point where the King's new doctor, Willis, begins his treatment he breaks Court decorum by daring to look at the King directly (which Court etiquette forbade), then speak to him directly (which was also forbidden), then he takes physical hold of the King's shoulder (which was absolutely unthinkable). The King first freezes rigid with anger, then goes for Willis but falls. He just stays sitting on the ground:

23There are allusions here to two key episodes in Richard II, from 3.2. and 4.1. In fact these allusions are prepared for by an allusion to Richard II much earlier but which it is easy to overlook, because not tagged by a verbal quotation. This is when King George refuses to sign urgent State papers handed to him by his Ministers: he is having difficulty with his sight as well as his mind, and cannot read properly; he insists, “I do not sign anything I do not read. I might be signing my own deposition”. The idea of deposition, coinciding with the stage business with the paper he is urged to accept, recalls 4.1. of Richard II. There the King is given a list of crimes he must confess and retorts — “Must I do so? And must I ravel out/My weav'd-up follies?”. However this allusion is half-obscured because King George is immediately distracted from deposition by the random triggering of another idée fixe, America. To recall his American colonies’ rebellion is torture to George III:

All ours. Mine. Gone. A paradise lost. The trumpet of sedition has sounded.
We have lost America. Soon we shall lose India, the Indies, Ireland... (p. 25)

24The King foresees in the loss of one colony the falling away of the entire British Empire; his Ministers have until now considered this a minor obsession; but now, when the King's illness seems to be intensifying, the outburst about America suddenly looks as if it could be a symptom of real madness. To the theatre audience, of course, it is clear that the King is not exaggerating (except about the pace at which the empire will dissolve), though it is impossible to gauge whether the King's insight is shrewd intuition or paranoid fantasy induced by his disease. But to go forward to the episode already quoted where King George is sitting upon the ground: in 2.3. of Richard II the king laments the falling away of his supporters which he sees will lead to the loss of his crown to the rebel Bolingbroke. He indulges in sweeping emotional rhetoric — “For God's sake let us sit upon the ground” — rather than act decisively in such a moment of crisis, so giving his supporters an impression of self-pitying defeatism and bad judgement; and yet from a longer perspective, that of Shakespeare's audience, or of George III, Richard’s sense of incalculable loss (though he cannot give rational justification for it) is not disproportionate to the true scale of the process as Shakespeare presents it: there is, definitely, much more in this rebellion than the deposition of a single king. But if Bennett suggests the parallel between George III and King Richard II, he also connects George III to Shakespeare's Gaunt in the same play. Gaunt is also a sick man, and as George III laments America Gaunt laments England, prophetically seen as betrayed by the corrupt king, “England, that was wont to conquer others,” “This other Eden, demi-Paradise”. Gaunt in his sickness plays nicely with words, whereas George III is suffering from uncontrollable punning and verbal diarrhoea. Gaunt speaks metaphorically when he warns Richard of impending disaster, but he might almost be referring to Bennett's King George:

And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Commit'st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee.

25In Shakespeare's Richard II the figure of Gaunt, mortally sick — “Gaunt am I for the grave” — is an image of the sick body politic and also a mirror in which the king's fate is foretold, though Richard cannot himself yet recognise it. Clouded vision also affects King George — it is one of the actual symptoms of his sickness — Bennett leaves the metaphoric significance implicit — but whereas George like Richard prays for death to release him from his sufferings, Bennett's play ends not in tragedy but with the King's restoration to health and rule, although as everyone knows (and as Bennett makes explicit in a deliberate anachronism, bringing on a twentieth-century doctor to tell), the historical George III later relapsed into irrecoverable madness.

26This brings us to the next main pattern of Shakespeare allusions, those to King Lear. Near the end of his play Bennett makes explicit allusion to King Lear when King George (p. 80) reads the scene in Shakespeare where Lear awakes and is restored to his daughter Cordelia. This is the way the eighteenth century English theatre preferred King Lear to end — as it does in Nahum Tate’s adaptation, where Lear is restored to sanity and to his throne. In fact Tate restored the ending from the historical sources which Shakespeare had deliberately changed in order to add incalculable force and darkness to the tragedy. Bennett, too, departs significantly from his historical sources, choosing to end his play well before George III's reign is over, and before the King's relapse. Notice that Bennett does to the historical record of George III the opposite of what Shakespeare did to the historical record of Lear, but in so doing Bennett fits eighteenth century history to eighteenth century theatrical taste, creating a Nahum Tate version of King George III. The audiences of today in the National theatre seem, ironically, to prefer to enjoy The Madness of George III as a Tate-style drama with a mock-eighteenth century happy ending, something which the playwright had not expected and which he disapproves as a misreading and over-simplification of the play: “I had not anticipated”, Bennett writes, “that the audience would be so whole-heartedly on the king's side” and wryly goes on to record that in performance the line “The King is himself again” was taken by audiences to mean that they could once more “take pleasure in his eccentricities, enjoy the discomfiture of his doctors” and receive the conclusion as a “nice, sentimental” one (p. ix). This makes clear that Bennett by no means thinks of the play as a comedy or a tragicomedy; in my view it confirms that he aimed at the hybrid form of a History Play, but with a special modification: Bennett seems to be alluding not directly to Shakespeare only but also to the eighteenth-century Shakespeare, and to plays which were then considered scandalous in the parallels they offered to contemporary Hanoverian times, as with the very line “The king is himself again” in which Cibber's King Richard overcomes the terrors of his “babbling dreams”. Bennett alludes to a variety of Shakespeare plays, indicating the hybrid nature of his own History Play, recalling the partcomic political plays Measure for Measure and King Henry TV. George III performs an actual fragment of Shakespeare’s King Lear — recognising as he does so its ironic application to himself — and thereby prompts us to recognise allusions in earlier scenes concerning the King's madness and his subjection. What, for instance, of those images of the King strapped in Dr Willis'chair, scenes which at first sight probably seem redolent of a Foucault version of the Age of Enlightenment (or, less loosely, may for some spectators bring memories of the Theatre of Cruelty and Peter Brook's Marat/Sade)? Yet if we do ask where a chair is required in Shakespeare’s King Lear the answer may be surprising, for the episode George actually reads aloud, when Lear is brought on unconscious in a chair, to awake and be restored to Cordelia, is preceded in the play by two grimly different instances: first the chair of State, which is needed for 1.2. when Lear fatefully divides his kingdom, and second, the chair required for Gloucester's blinding — “Bind fast his corky arms. [...] To this chair bind him” as Cornwall orders, and Gloucester's eyes are gouged out — and with his own son Edmund's acquiescence. The complete subjection and humiliation of the king is marked by physical suffering in both plays: Bennett makes a visual parallel between George III and Lear by showing George progressively reduced to filthy rags, as his mental disorder reaches a peak; but in Bennett's play the King is not physically tortured in a chair — the chair is associated with psychological torture — the physical torture is applied to the king by doctors (in King Lear the doctor gives Lear comfort) and it is atrociously painful, causing the king to scream, but it is done in a different position — the King is held face down as the candies burn for his flesh to be blistered. It seems probable that here Bennett is alluding to the twin of Richard II, Marlowe's Edward II, memorably revived in the theatre in recent years, and which features perhaps the most terrible torture in all Elizabethan drama, as the king is held face down, to die screaming in agony as Lightborn thrusts a red-hot poker into his rectum.

27The entire plot of The Madness of George III is devoted to insisting that to be an English king is to be subject to systematic deformation, only the difference in Bennett's play, compared to Shakespeare, is that the level of normal domestic existence is more clearly invoked while at the same time shown to be inaccessible to the monarchy, and this is achieved by a much greater use of humour. In the play George III calls his queen affectionately Mrs King, and her concern for him is strongly, even sometimes movingly expressed; but the royal pair are also shown in a contrary light, blankly indifferent even to their immediate household once the crisis is over and normal service is resumed. Bennett makes emphatic the repercussions on the royal servants, particularly those who make the mistake of responding with sincere humanity, such as Papandiek and at the higher rank, Greville (there is a complex parallel to be drawn with the servants in King Lear). Shakespeare does not show monarchs experiencing domestic intimate normality: not even in Antony and Cleopatra, where privacy is somehow always made public and intimacy always precarious. King George III may aspire to be a normal farmer George but the play shows the deformation of monarchy is inherent in the institution: the King at one point is put into an actual straitjacket, but metaphorically he is always wearing one; this is ironically underlined by Bennett's stagecraft, juxtaposing the King's straitjacketing to the sight of the tubby Prince of Wales being laced tightly into a corset, a slave to fashionable tailoring (p. 59). As a somewhat heavy Brechtian gestus, this seems unnecessarily explicit; the play shows continuously that the doser an outsider comes to the life of the Court, the greater is the deformation suffered.

28At the same time an audience today, used to current modernising of Shakespeare and the practice of allusion, will also be aware that another perspective altogether is being invoked: for modem history, particularly in totalitarian States, offers notorious instances of the medical profession allowing imprisonment and torture to be carried out in the name of medical science — and there is Kafka, for instance his story “In a Penal Seulement”, with its scientifically precise machine which inscribes a description of the crime in the flesh of the prisoner strapped down for the punishment. The King's disease, which modem medicine has identified, is not in the play the object of singleminded medical curative intent. The king's own doctors have other priorities, as do his Ministers. The king's sickness is a means to prestige and power. Each doctor's diagnosis is an assertion of his status and also an expression of his power against his rivals. Furthermore each treatment is powerful in relation to the prestige of the patient; the more the patient is reduced to subjection, the more the doctor's power increases, and the best sign of the doctor's power is the greatness of suffering imposed on the King—power increases in proportion to the violence of the torture. Willis, whose method of treating the king is terror rather than physical torture, is perfectly clear that however incompetent and destructive he may consider the treatments his rivals prescribe, he must acquiesce in them to maintain the prestige of medecine as an institution, without which his own power could vanish. He exactly appreciates the cultural politics which makes medical science challenge monarchy, and instinctively senses that in the long run history is on his side. More close to home, the doctors' violence towards their royal patient is an abuse of their power as scientists and is parallel to, is a figure of, the imminent degeneration of reason into terror on a national scale in revolutionary France, to which Bennett gives explicit emphasis at the close of the play;

29There is a memorable etching in which Goya illustrates the maxim “The sleep of reason breeds monsters”. In All's Well 2.3. Shakespeare endows old Lafeu with eloquence on the subject: “They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons to make modem and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence it is that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear”. In Bennett's play about King George III, England may pride itself on its age of reason, on having outgrown barbarism, but when the king experiences subjection to those other Enlightenment watchwords, surveiller et punir, and suffers torture by his doctors, he will cry out “I am the Lord's anointed”, thereby invoking the ghosts of his Shakespearean predecessors such as Richard II;

Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king

30Modem history also furnishes complicated perspectives on the supposed diminution or disappearance of the sacred aspect of the monarch in Western culture: how is the public reception of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas to be interpreted? At the time it was experienced as a kind of tragedy, yet it is striking what a hit-and-miss affair the sacralisation of a ruler seems to be: consider the failed attempt by gunmen to shoot President Reagan getting into his limousine, or the escape of Prince Charles when shot at from close range in Australia: the Prince was mercifully unharmed and reacted with admirable sang-froid; but is the point, also implicit in George III's survival, that sacredness is conferred if at all then only retrospectively, posthumously, if the assassination attempt succeeds—as seems disconcertingly to be the suggestion in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar?

31 The Madness of George III is designed to demonstrate the precarious practicability of the (post-Glorious Revolution) Georgian formula, that the monarch must conform to a public idea of being royal and of being a good fellow. It is a recipe for survival, but it does require the constant promotion of the idea of royal family — that is to say as long as it appears satisfactory nobody cares about the reality — which is a very different thing from the old conception of royal secrecy, the mystery of rule. In the movie version of the play Bennett gives the King new dialogue. He is seen standing on the steps of St Paul's — the location which for modem television viewers, if not theatre audiences, is irresistibly associated with the royal wedding of Charles and Diana — and it is there that the King marshals his large family and tells them: “Let the people see we're happy. That is why we are here”.

32I the King is to be king it is a matter of being seen to be so; near the end of the play (pp. 81-2) Thurlow tells him “Your Majesty seems more yourself” and the King replies “Do I? Yes, I do. I have always been myself even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. That's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem. What, what?”. If we recognise the allusion to Cibber's King Richard III (Catesby's “Be more your self, my Lord”) we will recognise the implied irony — the King indeed can only seem himself, his illness is not cured, this is only a remission. On the other hand if we do not attend to the allusion and take the exchange at face value, so to speak, another allusion presents itself — for to seem royal, to seem every inch a king is thereby resoundingly to deny the credo of Hamlet, for whom as Shakespearean heir to the Danish throne, kingship is integrity or it is nothing:

Seems? Nay is. I know not seems.

33Would Bennett have his audience reconsider the issue, in a modem context of mass-media influence on the reputation of the monarchy, and consider whether such a belief as Hamlet's “I know not seems”, in any royal person, must constitute a tragic flaw? And could that be the point of Measure for Measure, as well as Henry V? One ruler, the Duke, has to learn to seem, the other, Henry, never has a need, alas, to learn it, is perfect in his part from the beginning (“I know you all” observes the supposedly engaging youth) and needs no stringent lacing-up to fit the role. Henry V never had any excess of humanity to discipline and punish in the first place. Bennett sympathises with his King George's humanity, but shows with strict consistency that the humanity is only uppermost when the king is deranged. Bennett plainly did not write a sentimental melodrama nor a play with one star part, whatever his first audiences and his actors might think. He wrote a History Play, and that is what the allusions to Shakespeare tell us.

34Bennett does not allow his George III to forget that he is separated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 from British monarchs of Shakespeare's time: not for George III is there the illusion of choice open to the perverse reigning monarch of Shakespeare's time, James I, who is alluded to by Shakespeare when he makes his Duke in Measure for Measure say “I love the people, / But do not like to stage me to their eyes” — but notice that Shakespeare's Duke, whatever he might say there, does just the opposite, and takes good care to absolutely act his socks off before his people in a fantastic Act V.