Uneasy is the head that wears the crown
This Shakespearean truth is not exclusive to kings
I named my company “Heavy Crown Press” because I feel the words from Shakespeare’s tragedy Henry IV as a reflection on responsibility, to ourselves and to each other. It’s about the conflicts that stir up in every human life, in our struggle to balance duty and desire. Life is so hard precisely because we have two incompatible (?) motivations—to belong and to be unique. We want to stand out; we fear to stand out. We want community; we fear to become invisible. The community demands duties. Just as a king needs loyalty, a friend requires reciprocity. Whether the king gets loyalty by benevolence or malevolence, whether a friend gets reciprocity by fairness or trickery, it is undeniable that these are the key components of a successful reign/relationship. It is the question of how we balance these human drives (to be unique and to belong) that fascinates me constantly. If the king could survive without loyalty, his head would never be uneasy. If we could be happy in social exile! Alas!
Henry VIII was an absolute monarch, and yet even he needed to negotiate and compromise. In order to marry Anne Boleyn, he had to create a new church. In order to behead her, he had to manipulate charges against her, for a case had to be made (worse, totally contrived) against her who had many admirers in the Protestant cause—a movement he could not afford to alienate as he built his countermovement against the Catholics. He also could not murder his first wife without causing a war, since she had international, geopolitical connections that ran all the way to the top of the Holy Roman Empire, the emperor being her nephew. Even an absolute monarch must be charismatic and persuasive; and even he runs the risk, all the time, of going too far. Look, for example, at the first King Charles. He pushed Parliament to the brink and they put him on trial. Civil war broke out between supporters of Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, and royalist troops. King Charles I was beheaded. The monarchy was abolished and Cromwell cemented his power as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Cromwell’s death and the succession of his own son, Richard, must have made people scratch their heads and wonder what was it all for? They had beheaded a monarch, forcing his heir into exile abroad, only to now have another system in place entirely based on hereditary rule. The royalist cause got its mojo back with the restoration of the House of Stuart and the enthronement of King Charles II. Yet all of that really just goes to show that nothing is truly absolute. Even dictatorships are precarious and must constantly work for survival. But it’s not just kings I want to talk about here! It’s not just kings who must walk this tightrope! We all have to be absolute monarchs of our own lives; at the same time, we have to work with each other. We have to wear the heavy crown, bear the duties, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Nothing comes from nothing. What got me thinking about this (crowns, duties, desire, and ‘Heavy Crown Press’) was a Masterpiece Theatre production called King Charles III. This was actually an adaptation of a Broadway play by Mike Bartlett, which was nominated for several Tony Awards in 2016 and did win two Critics Circle Theatre Awards in 2015. I was not particularly entertained by the show, but it did get me thinking, and I found it fascinating the way the writer blew through the boundaries of generally perceived reality. If you want to see a show where the actors look like the royals you recognize from the magazines, you will be disappointed. I believe that was intentional. We are led by the media to think we know the royals. They give us particular narratives and we form ideas about the characters based on those narratives. Bartlett’s play overturns all of that. It’s also melodramatic. Reality is blown up, up close and in your face, as we often see in theatre, especially Shakespeare. The characters speak in an elevated way. They voice their thoughts. They address the audience. Charles, William, and Harry are all visited by the Ghost of Diana. Charles sees her first, standing at a distance, wearing all white, like a bride, and looking out of a window. He has this vision after an argument with the prime minister over a bill which his conscience opposes, but which he is being compelled to give Royal Assent because it’s his constitutional duty. The bill itself reminds the audience of Diana, because it’s about the freedom of the press which tormented her entire adult life. Parliament wants to place restrictions on the press, and Charles, ironically, as an anachronistic figurehead, is wrestling with his own bias against the press and his conflicting but democratic conviction that he ought to rise above his bias and defend democratic freedoms. And then he sees Diana standing at the window. He steps toward her, bewildered. She looks at him, turns, and walks out of sight.
Is Diana the conscience, the source of the conflict? Like Anne Boleyn was for Henry, Diana is the one to awaken in Charles all the things that cause inner turmoil. Diana is where he went wrong, so badly wrong. She is where the shame lies. Where did we screw up in life? Where did we forget ourselves? Where did we wrong ourselves even by laying aside our principles? Where did we become lost? Broken?
Camilla is the easy one for Charles. There’s no story there. All the versions agree, he was in love with Camilla at first sight. It was always easy with Camilla. The man wanted Camilla. The prince though, that was another matter. The prince was shoehorned into marrying someone else, and he was not strong enough to buck against all the forces pushing him that way—his parents, his godfather, his grandmother. In Bartlett’s play, we see all the characters—the prime minister, William, Kate—trying to convince him to sign the bill, even if he disagrees. Just sign it, they say. It’s your constitutional duty. You don’t have to agree with it, they say. It’s your duty.
Similar: Just marry her, Charles. You don’t have to love her. It’s your duty.
No spoilers. You’ll have to watch the show to see what Charles does.
There’s a side story that focuses on Harry and his own wrestle with conscience, and that too, bucks reality, but in retrospect, was astonishingly prophetic of the writer! This play was written before Meghan was on the scene. Written in 2014, well before Harry met Meghan, it weaves a story of Harry falling in love with a woman of African descent, and who shares with his actual future wife another trait—she’s a liberal. Her name is Jess and she comes boldly into Harry’s orbit, unafraid to tell him exactly as it is. She’s against the monarchy. She wants a republic. Harry wants to leave the system he was born into and live with her as a man. Although the details are different “in real life,” the outcome is the same: Harry on the outside, Harry and his wife and children rejecting the toxicity of the system.
I doubt it’s a show calculated to please an audience. It’s not a neatly packaged story. It’s an alternative melodrama, and alternative to the reality we know, while simultaneously sharing and reflecting elements of our familiar perceptions. It forces you to suspend your disbelief in many ways. Some of the performances are a little one-note, but none of them are bad. Yet I think if you’re willing to roll with it, it could open up new channels of thinking about things that otherwise might have become static in the collective mind as it views the real-life personalities upon which the characters are loosely based.