The King and the Bard
Animated by his passion for Shakespeare, Charles led a successful effort to restore the playwright to school curriculums and spent six months compiling his favorite passages for a CD and a book
When King Charles III was sidelined for several months earlier this year during his treatment for cancer, and Queen Camilla gamely stepped in on his behalf, the event he likely missed the most was a celebration of William Shakespeare at Buckingham Palace. The guest list included leading actors such as Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Brian Cox, Gary Oldman, and Tom Courtenay, but the stars of the evening were the twelve actresses—all of them in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, who had been honored as Dames by the Crown. Among them were Joanna Lumley, Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, and Sian Phillips. As it was Valentine’s Day, Dame Judi read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.
“Enormous comfort and encouragement”
Of the King’s many passions, his love of Shakespeare has been the most profound. The celebrated actor Sir Mark Rylance has called Charles “one of the most sincere, devout lovers of Shakespeare I’ve ever met in my life.” The prince himself confessed that “in moments of stress or danger or misery” reciting Shakespearean passages has given him “enormous comfort and encouragement.” On the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, two years ago on September 8th, he found consolation in the words of the Bard.
His fascination with Shakespeare began remarkably early when he was eight years old. At Cheam, Charles’s first boarding school, he was cast in a play about King Richard III. To prepare, he spent hours listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier in Shakespeare’s Richard III. He nearly lost that spark of interest at Gordonstoun, his boarding school in Scotland, where, he recalled, “we ground our way” through Julius Caesar, an experience that “left me largely unmoved.”
“We’ve got better crowns than this at home”
Fortunately, Eric Anderson, an English teacher in his twenties, arrived at the school in 1964, the start of the prince’s third year, and rekindled his appreciation. He cast Charles in Henry V, which would become one of his favorite plays, but in a secondary role as Duke of Exeter. Anderson feared that playing the king would create too much pressure on the sixteen-year-old prince. By November 1965, Charles was ready to star as the lead in Macbeth. When the costumes arrived, Charles cracked, “We’ve got better crowns than this at home.” Anderson described Charles’s interpretation as “a sensitive soul who is behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because of other forces.”
Over the years Charles read his way through the canon. Among his discoveries was “just what fun Shakespeare could be.” He liked to quote Cole Porter’s ditty from the musical Kiss Me Kate: “Brush up your Shakespeare/Start quoting him now/Brush up your Shakespeare/And the women you will wow/Just declaim a few lines from Othella/And they’ll think you’re a helluva fella.”
“Eloquent about Shakespeare’s portray of regal isolation”
An encounter with the actor Kenneth Branagh in 1983 elevated Charles’s interest even further. Branagh wrote to ask for his advice after he was cast by the Royal Shakespeare Company as the lead in Henry V. During a meeting at Kensington Palace, Branagh felt “instant rapport” and concluded that the prince was “eloquent about Shakespeare’s portrayal of regal isolation, the nature of regal responsibility.” When Branagh set up his Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987, Charles became its patron. The following year the actor invited the prince to see the rough cut of Henry V, a film he directed, along with playing the lead. Charles was reported to have “cried openly,” particularly during the scene before the Battle of Agincourt.
He attended the film’s gala premiere in London on October 4, 1989, less than two months after Branagh married the actress Emma Thompson. Notably absent was Charles’s wife, Diana, the Princess of Wales, whose indifference to Shakespeare was one of the many ways she spurned his interests as their marriage collapsed. The following May during a royal tour of Hungary with Charles, Diana gave the cold shoulder to Branagh and Thompson, who were performing King Lear in Budapest. By then the couple had joined Charles’s inner circle of Shakespearean thespians who became his friends. Thompson kept up a lively correspondence that cheered up the prince when he was low: chatty and descriptive letters so informal she called him “Charley Boy.”
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