The King's Speech: Shakespeare, Empire and Global Media

The King's Speech: Shakespeare, Empire and Global Media

Peter S. Donaldson

Though the recent Academy Award winning film The King's Speech (2010) maintains an impressively firm grip on the personal side of the story it tells about King George VI and his speech therapist Lionel Logue, it also locates that story in broader historical contexts. The period in which the narrative is set (1925-1939) saw major shifts in the definition of the British Empire and the role of the monarch, and was also the period in which British radio broadcasting became a stable, global medium. These strands of British history were closely linked. The Empire was constitutionally redefined by the Balfour Declaration of 1926 and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 in ways that reduced the political role of the British government in the colonies and dominions but increased the importance of the crown as the symbolic center of the more voluntary and consensual community the new arrangements envisioned. At the same time, Britain was engaged in a strategy for unifying the Empire, advancing trade, and prolonging its hegemony in the world that was based on shifting its international communications network from cable and long wave radio technologies to the new global medium of beamed shortwave. In 1932, these strands came together powerfully: the BBC moved into its new headquarters, Broadcasting House (a lavish and impressive art deco building dominating Portland Square), a high power short wave transmitting station was built at Daventry, the Empire Service was launched on December 19 and King George V made his first broadcast to the Empire on Christmas. The King's Speech reflects these developments, but through shifts of emphasis and some reordering of chronology downplays the pivotal events of 1932 and suggests that the whole of Bertie's struggle with his speech disorder, from his first crushing failure as a radio speaker in 1925 to his first war speech in 1939 took place in the age of global broadcasting. My reading of The King's Men in relation to such details of the histories it draws from and reimagines is partly an exploration of the ways in which the filmmakers -- David Seidler, the screenwriter and originator of the story and Tom Hooper, the director -- work thoughtfully with historical materials, and partly an effort to open the few fault lines the film offers for critique a little more widely in order to suggest that The King's Speech is more centrally concerned with imperial ideology than might at first appear.

In telling its poignant story of a king whose shortcomings as a speaker were so at odds with the ever-increasing importance of the broadcasting skills he struggled to master, the King's Speech also draws on Shakespeare, who enters the narrative largely because he plays so large a role in Lionel Logue's life and view of the world. Logue quotes from Shakespeare beginning with Iago's "poor and content is rich enough" (cf. 3.3.172.)[1] when Bertie first enters his consulting room; he performs Shakespeare speeches for his children and encourages their interest in Shakespeare by having them guess the characters he plays; he auditions for the title role in a Putney amateur production of Richard III; and he makes Shakespeare a collaborator in his therapy, convincing his client, "Bertie" the Duke of York (soon to be King George VI), to recite the "To be or not to be" soliloquy into a voice recorder to convince him of his latent competence. These Shakespearean moments help to give cultural resonance to the king's courage in dealing with his disability despite his doubts and to the ironies and complexities of the Australian-born Logue's position. He is a successful Harley Street professional (though not a medical doctor), an intimate advisor to the king, and an eloquent and highly literate man, but he is also a disppointed actor, a self-taught therapist, and a "colonial" who can be scorned for his origins whenever his British interlocutors find it convenient to do so.

In addition to quotations, direct references and unmistakable allusions to Shakespeare, the film has a more subtle but significant links to Shakespeare's Henry V and to Olivier's 1944 film. The King's Speech echoes several scenes in the play -- especially the campfire scene on the eve of the battle (4.1) and the scene after the battle in which the king and Fluellen meet the common soldier who had challenged the king's pledge not to be ransomed (4.8). The King's Speech also replays aspects of the metaperformative tropes by which Olivier connects the historical Henry V, the actor who played him on the Globe stage, and his own performance in the film, thereby linking live performance to epic cinema.[2] The succession of performance modes and media is different in The King's Speech, celebrating a more modest speaker, but, like Olivier's film, seeks to reposition the monarchy in relation to the contemporary media of global film, television and the cult of celebrity.[3] Of course it cannot do so today without revising Olivier's triumphant, largely unclouded view of royal presence and majesty. The King's Speech does succeed in creating a more persuasive and powerful redefinition of a media-intensive British monarchy for the present day than Olivier's Henry V can any longer be, and does so principally by reimagining the subject matter of Henry V -- the story of a prince who in early life seemed unfit for kingship, who struggles as king with his father's legacy and with his relation to the common people, whose success is in doubt and requires self transformation, who becomes a leader and makes a great speech on the eve of war -- as a Shakespeare-infused disability narrative.

1. Empire of the Air

The Empire Service of the BBC[4] that was launched in December,1932 was the culmination of years of technical development dating from the early 1920s, using the new Marconi system of "focused beam" shortwave transmission and was the center of an entirely refurbished image and identity for the BBC as a whole. George V's inaugural broadcast set the tone for the mix of intimacy and imperial presence that was to be echoed and dilated in later royal broadcasts including the 1939 broadcast by George VI that ends The King's Speech and became a model for broadcasts by heads of state outside the British Empire, including the "fireside chats" of Franklin Roosevelt.

Through one of the marvels of modern Science, I am enabled, this Christmas Day, to speak to all my peoples throughout the Empire. I take it as a good omen that Wireless should have reached its present perfection at a time when the Empire has been linked in closer union. For it offers us immense possibilities to make that union closer still. It may be that our future may lay upon us more than one stern test. Our past will have taught us how to meet it unshaken. For the present, the work to which we are all equally bound is to arrive at a reasoned tranquility within our borders; to regain prosperity without self-seeking; and to carry with us those whom the burden of past years has disheartened or overborne. My life's aim has been to serve as I might, towards those ends. Your loyalty, your confidence in me has been my abundant reward. I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all. To men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them; to those cut off from fuller life by blindness, sickness, or infirmity; and to those who are celebrating this day with their children and grand-children. To all - to each - I wish a Happy Christmas. God Bless You! [5]

This first message by a king of England heard around the globe was closely consonant with the motives that had sparked the period of shortwave development itself, principally, according to Wireless Empire, the most recent and deepest study of the topic, the desire to unify the British Empire politically and economically.[6] As mentioned above, the use of the radio by the monarch was an important part of Britain's strategy for the maintenance of the Empire in a period in which the terms on which countries outside the United Kingdom participated had drastically changed. The Balfour Declaration of 1926, according to which

They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.[7]

and the by the Statute of Westminster of 1931, which confirmed the arrangement by which the nations of the empire could (and did) make independent foreign policy. In such a situation, the king's political authority was minimal but his symbolic role was crucial, and he needed to be persuasive, personable, and above all capable of being heard in remote domains. This is the situation faced by George V in 1932, and by his son the Duke of York in The King's Speech. The risks, if Bertie did not overcome his stammer, were ever greater each year, as the Empire Service became a reality, as the effects of the new order ushered in by the Balfour 1926 declaration took hold, and as war with Germany approached and was declared.

George V's first Christmas speech is a marvel of thoughtful and humane but thoroughly paternalistic imperial rhetoric whose artfulness is due in large part to the fact that it was written for the King by Rudyard Kipling, who also wrote the King's subsequent Christmas messages. Speaking from the "heart" and from the "home," it conveys the presence of a caring and modest king, a servant of his people(s); it acknowledges changes in the Empire and makes opportunities of them. Most importantly in relation to the themes of The King's Speech it is written in the voice of one who understands loss, absence and illness and reaches out compassionately to those who are suffering. As it does this it recapitulates the binary tropes of colonialist discourse -- the opposition of nearness and distance from the imperial center and the parallelism between being "cut off" by distance or by illness from that center and the alignment of the distant colonies with disability and of Britain with health.[8] It offers its "voices out of the air" as technological extensions of the royal voice presented in the vocabulary of magic -- indeed, in words that evoke The Tempest's songs and its voices of ambiguous comfort in the air that take their cue from the island's magician king. George V's pride in and paternalistic connection to his Empire is defined in terms measured by the reach of the mediated voice. At the outer limit of Empire other voices ceases entirely as the King evokes a silence pierced only by the royal voice extended by technology, and at this limit too, distance is aligned with illness and disability, and contrasted with family Christmas celebrations of those "nearer," in all senses, to the imperial center. Heard from the perspective of The King's Speech, in which only a few words of the speech are heard in a crucial scene, to be discussed shortly, the Christmas message also resonates with questions of disability and distance in the royal family itself during this period: with Bertie's speech impediment and his corrective surgeries for knock knees, and especially, for those who now know the story, with the sequestration and "cutting off" of the king's younger son "Johnny," the "Lost Prince," who suffered from epilepsy and strange behavior, was separated from the rest of the family in a far off cottage for much of his life and died an early death at 13.[9] The King's Speech makes Bertie's voicing of his memories of Johnny a crucial point in his therapy, and Bertie himself is presented as having been ostracized and kept at a distance within the family , though to a lesser degree than Johnny, because of his speech defect.

There are other ironies, and more than ironies, in George V's role as benign emperor of the air. His words, though they resonate deeply with his personal experiences, were authored by another: his role, like that of his son, was to read a script. In contrast with the kindly tone of the speech itself, a key scene in The King's Speech has George V complaining bitterly about having to "ingratiate" himself with the public and demean himself by giving it. The starkest irony involving George V and the media is the stunning circumstance, beyond dispute since the release in 1986 of the diaries of his physician, Lord Dawson, that the terminally ill king was euthanized by his own doctor to meet a publication deadline. Dawson, who gave the injection himself when the attending nurse proved unwilling. wrote in his diary that choose the timing because of "the importance of the death receiving its first announcement in the morning papers rather than the less appropriate evening journals," [10] The King's last words, as Dawson recorded them, spoken to the nurse who administered a preliminary sedative were "God damn you."While The King's Speech does not allude to these events, it does use other details first known through Dawson's diaries , such Edward VIII's tearful breakdown after the death and his remark ("I hope that I shall make good as he has made good") in its presentation of the death of George V and reflects in other scenes on contemporary fears of rule by the "radiocracy"[11] and the press. This revised account of the George V's last moments, common knowledge in the UK since 1986, may be meant to hover over the film narrative, at least for British audiences, as an ominous intertext.

It is important for The King's Men, as it was for George V in 1932, that the King's radio broadcasts are heard around the world, that they are global media events, that they reach the far corners of the Empire. This is emphasized, for example, by careful shots of the racked transmitter controls, each marked with the name of a distant dominion or colony, in the radio station from which both Bertie's first great failure, the Wembley speech of 1925 at the beginning of the film and his first war speech as king at the end are broadcast. The film implicitly adjusts the history of broadcasting so that service to the Empire appears to be already in place at the start. Other details support the false impression: having the BBC announcer use the same, distinctively huge "torpedo microphone" [12] in 1925 as King Edward VIII would to announce his abdication in the film; and especially by having the announcer declare that the broadcast is a production of the BBC's "National Programme and Empire Services" in 1925, when the launch of the Empire Service was seven years in the future. These changes set the entire story of George VI's struggle to speak effectively on the radio in the era of global broadcast to the Empire. The new technology in effect plays the role of antagonist or nemesis for most of the film, and the film is resolved when the microphone is reframed, at last, in domestic, dialogic space, with reverse shots of Bertie not only speaking into it but looking through it to his friend, coach and therapist Lionel Logue.

2. "To be or not to be"

A part of George V's "Voices out of the air" speech is incorporated into a crucial series of three scenes in The King's Speech. In the first Bertie recites "To be or not to be" into a voice recorder while his own hearing of what he is speaking is blocked by headphones connected to a gramophone playing the Overture from the Marriage of Figaro. During this first meeting with the Duke, Logue is trying to convince him that he can speak clearly and that recording his voice while being unable to hear it will provide evidence of that. He will record Bertie's voice using the "latest thing from America", a Silvertone Home Voice Recorder. A close shot of Lionel's fingers setting the turntable in motion and then an even closer one (the closest shot in the entire film) of the placement of the stylus share with the audience a very familiar sight, but one that evokes the outdated (even vinyl discs are "retro" now), the repurposed (the postmodern double tables of the Hip Hop DJ) and the return of a now almost completely forgotten technology in which recording and replaying were combined as equipment for home use at an earlier date than most of us now realize. The experiment seems to succeed -- though actually we the audience can't be sure, because we hear the Mozart increasing in volume on soundtrack, but can only hear the first word or two of the Hamlet speech; then it is quickly drowned out by the music. We hear, that is, roughly what we would from Bertie's aural point of view, from inside his headphones, while seeing him from a third party perspective from which, if we were present in fact, we would hear him speak and not hear the music, since it is being played through the headphones only he is wearing. We're thus left slightly uncertain about whether Bertie stammers into the microphone or not. He, however, is absolutely certain the experiment has failed, walks out, and is only barely persuaded to take the record home "as a souvenir."