Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III—Future History?

Abstract

The book concludes with a look at the 2017 television adaptation of Mike Bartlett’s play, King Charles III, a modern Shakespearean history play that imagines the nation and the royal family thrown into crisis after the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Bartlett’s play mediates this crisis through race, as Prince Harry’s passion for a young black republican gets caught up in a building political confrontation over freedom of the press. Oddly, however, the interracial nature of the prince’s love affair goes unnoticed; Jess believes that the palace’s resistance to it is due to her working-class background. This indirection—recalling Renaissance usages where African women’s frequently offstage blackness was invoked to throw Englishwomen’s fairness into sharper relief—reduces blackness to background noise, rendering its role in a modern multiracial Britain moot.