THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE
Madness Watch'd
In l6lO, Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV, was spread-eagled upon a great wheel. The royal executioner tore his flesh open with redhot pincers, poured motel lead into the wounds, and splintered his bones with an iron rod. He expired in prolonged, exquisite, and public agony.
The direness of Ravaillac's punishment was an index of how direly his crime was perceived. Not only did an attack upon the ruler classically represent an profane affront to the divinity which he incarnated. The king's corpus also personified the very land he ruled (a metaphor particularly valid to the Elizabethans). Whatever threatened the former -- whether an assassin's blade, accident or illness -- placed the latter in equal peril.
A mental malady afflicting the chief of state poses its own peculiar menace to the health of the realm, and one often more perilous. The ruler with a disturbed psyche can deny his condition with greater vehemence than one with a perturbed soma. It may be cynically suggested that narcissism and paranoia often constitute the native soil for rulership to flourish. When these traits ripen into frank delusion, what Stalin or Mao will label himself unfit towards the general good, quit his dominion, seek paltry treatment? More likely his derangement will compel him to project his malevolent suspiciousness upon those around him, and so become more tyrannical, bloody-minded and cruel.
Determining whether an emotionally troubled ruler is too troubled to rule may constitute an even more daunting task than assessing the degree to which physical illness limits the capacity to govern. Shakespeare's Claudius averred that "Madness in great ones should not unwatch'd go". But Claudius's case is a signal illustration of the ancient warning: quis custodiet ipsos custodios? -- Who watches the watchers? History affords ample evidence of physicians compelled by "watchers" of whatever stripe to perform questionable appraisals of a ruler's physical or psychiatric fitness (a notable modern instance was the supression of Woodrow Wilson's incapacity due to a stroke by his wife, with his doctor's assistance during his second term in office).
Other quondam healers have been motivated by their own beliefs or ambitions to render inappropriate judgements and dubious cures; even act as hired assassins. But the most upright practitioner may still be overswayed by the sheer power of the patient's office, the charisma of the ruler's personality, the siren song of fame and wealth attendant upon successful treatment, or the awful consequences of failure (in not a few kingdoms, the doctor who did not heal the king was liable to be executed by his successor).
The political and personal vicissitudes spun out of the aberrations of the great were invigoratingly interrogated in Alan Bennett's l99l drama, The Madness of George III. The current film version, also directed by Nicholas Hytner, lacks the keen age of Bennett's original, but still features Nigel Hawthorne's astonishing depiction of the manic monarch, and retains enough of the play's other virtues to recommend The Madness of King George (the original title was changed from the dim fear that audiences would think it designated a sequel; the decision would seem to speak volumes to the deficit of producers rather than viewers.).
The action is set in l787, a problematic time for the English monarchy and its conservative Tory regime. The king has been popular, has reigned long and -- for the day -- reasonably well. But now France is frighteningly ablaze with republican sentiment, and an opposition Whig party clamors impatiently for massive reform in Parliament.
A personage of vast, obsessive energy who takes particular delight in knowing the name of his pettiest appointee; a stickler for decorum; an avid balancer of budgets and -- above all -- a passionate agriculturalist, the king imagines himself the nation's Farmer-in-chief. Scorning his court's frantic adulteries, he embodies the family values he enthusiastically recommends to his subjects; dotes upon Charlotte, his frazzled teutonic wife (the estimable Helen Mirren) who has given him nineteen children. The couple happily refer to each other as "Mr. and Mrs. King".
But serpents are astir in George's garden. His fat, foppish oldest son, the dissolute Prince of Wales, (a competent Rupert Everett, burdened with an absurdly mobile artificial paunch) chronically short of cash and grown weary of incessant waiting in the wings for a succession that never succeeds, has thrown his lot in with the Whigs to undermine his father's reign. The American debacle of l776 continues to abraid George's sensibilities. And he lives with the queasy knowledge that on several previous occasions his faculties have inexplicably been thrown into frenetic disorder. Hawthorne's craft reveals that underneath the king's bluff facade hides an inconfident man who harbors the peculiar horror of lunacy that haunted the Enlightenment ("O God, let me not lose my reason!" prayed Dr. Johnson, terrorized by a small stroke). As the story opens, even the mere mention of the new United States is precipitating ever more excessive explosions of choler.
Loss is a well known precursor of both psychic and somatic illness. Bennett acutely intimates the unconscious articulation in the king's mind between the amputation to the body politic and the onset of his physical distemper. Soon George's thoughts are racing hurtfully ahead of his ability to speak them. He's wracked by attacks of violent abdominal pain. Then the behavior of this model of propriety turns erratic, gross, lewd, even as his urine turns blue. As a lunatic, his discourse -- previously stamped with blustering "Hey!, Hey!"s and vapid "Wot!, Wots!" -- also turns remarkably searching, witty (a convention unfortunately more likely to be encountered on the stage than in the clinic).
The watchers of this majestic decline respond with despair or delight according to their lights and loyalties. The queen's solicitude is viciously spurned by her consort: with the lid now thoroughly blown off the royal id, George is exquisitely sensitized to his son's Oedipally tinged competitiveness, elaborating it into a delusional fixation that Charlotte has been bedding the Prince. The dour Tory prime minister, Pitt the Younger -- whose own father went instructively mad -- tries to downplay the depths of the king's lunacy. The Whigs push a bill to have George set aside so that his viper offspring can rule as Regent. With the Prince's help, they conspire to separate him from the queen George yearns for desparately despite his psychotic ire, thus further spurring his deterioration. Meanwhile, the allegiances of assorted toadies and hangers-on in high places shifts uneasily, according to whatever wind blows from the sickroom.
It is a curious fact that the high and mighty who one would have supposed would be given the best medical care often receive the worst -- a situation known in the trade as the "VIP Syndrome". The patient with megaclout is frequently joined by associates in manipulating and intimidating physicians, who themselves are frequently drawn from a cadre of "society" practitioners more notable for an unctuous bedside manner than professional skill.
The king's doctors are as sorry a clutch of sententious bunglers as ever serviced a VIP with substandard treatment. His personal physician, previously so cowed he could only fuss impotently at George's injurious self-medication, seizes upon the occasion to stoke his purse and reputation. Another consultant is a Whig hireling, eager to sneak reports about his patient's relapses to his devious masters. Still another savors every quiddity of the king's stool: this learned boobie disdains examining George's colorful urine, declaring that as a man of science he only values what he can observe -- yet the very signature of acute intermittent porphyria lies, unseen, under his nose.(l) Spouting Galenic mumbo-jumbo at extravagant cross purposes, the triumverate of charlatans heap hellish torments upon their already tormented charge. The babbling king is bled and purged, scourged and blistered to utterly unwholesome effect.
At length, over the quacks' protests, the king's supporters bring in Dr. Willis, a pragmatical Lincolnshire specialist and parson. He scorns the establishment's archaic humoral theories, barbaric remedies, and confinements (and is scorned by the establishment). His sanitarium is a farm where patients -- whatever their station -- are set free to perform simple labor, whilst he instructs them in recovering their wits through diligent exercise of their native powers of reason.
But even Willis' humanism is tempered by a cold severity that comprised the Age of Reason's harsher side (the same icy rigor often informed the relationship between the nobility and their children: George and the Prince provide an eloquent example). Confronted with the king's weak Ego and rampant Id, the doctor opts to align himself with his patient's beleaguered Super-ego. He believes George cannot rule others until he learns to rule himself again. To that end, the king must obey Willis' every command towards rational behavior, or be gagged and strapped into a curious half-throne, half-instrument of the torture chamber.
Observers of the day report that Willis was known for the eery, mesmeric penetration of his glance. "I have you in my eye, sir!" he warns George. Held in that intransigent gaze -- and confined by Willis' horrible chair -- the recalcitrant King relents, gropes his way back to the light. As much as he rages at Willis, one infers that his cure is facilitated by his identification with the feisty little doctor, who much mirrors his patient's bullish strength of will, obsessive concern for appearances -- and agrarian pursuits. (Ian Holm admirably captures Willis' fierce self-confidence and crusty compassion.)
Film scholars have cogently addressed the pitfalls of coverting fiction to film. It's less clear why juicy dramas which one would have thought apt meat for the movies should so resist translation. The Madness of George III is essentially a chamber piece with a minimum of bright, brisk pageantry, propelled by dazzling argument. The play simply does not sustain the weight of being cinematically "opened up". Bennett's exhilirating wordplay is curiously vitiated amidst a surplus of sumptuous decor, impressive exteriors, and a plethora of extras. The lucid potency of Handel's music, sparingly quoted in the original, is diluted by its almost non-stop deployment as sonic wallpaper.
The screenplay (also written by Bennett) considerably elides the play's acid sendup of medical politics and base stupidity. A subtler reflective ending has been discarded. The now merely triumphalist finale dwells instead upon George's return to the public eye, with a rather patronizing recommendation directed at the royals of our day to eschew their scandals, take up their responsibilities to look down upon us with renewed dignity ("Wave to them!" says George to the disgruntled Prince, "Let them see we are happy. That is why we are here!") The viewer of the film will also never have the irony of discovering that George would eventually sicken again to be superceded by his vindictive son -- and spend his later days in demented obscurity.
These objections aside, several moments which were profoundly moving on the stage are even more affecting on screen: In a scene mingling pathos and paradox, Handel's mighty coronation anthem, "Zadock the Priest", swells up as the protesting king is bound for the first time, Christ-like, into Willis' infernal throne. Later, in a sunlit garden, George prompts his chancellor and a lackey through an unexpectedly delicate reading of King Lear's return to reason. At its conclusion, he deems his renewed ability to conceal his inner life an ambiguous evidence of healing: "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."
The film also retains the play's mordant cautionary message to those too intimately regarding majesty in disarray. Upon the king's recovery, the young officer and servants who faithfully nursed him back to health are immediately sent packing, while others friendly to his cause but removed from the brute particularities of his madness -- the raving abuse, the soiled underclothes -- are handsomely rewarded.
Willis himself is dispatched back to his farm with a hefty annuity, and scant thanks (to his credit, he has no illusions about being owed more). A restored king, safe from his demons, now regards his healer with contempt and fear. The doctor's services are no longer required, so he can airily dismiss him with the summary narcissism of the greatly titled and entitled.
NOTES
l. Porphyria is a rare hereditary metabolic disorder caused by the deficiency of an enzyme involved in red blood cell production, characterized by episodes of fulminating abdominal pain, epileptic seizures, and discoloration of the urine (inter alia). Attacks may be precipitated by even small amounts of alcohol (rather horrid to contemplate in view of the court's bibulous nature, unless the king was a teetotaler).
It has been surmised on the
basis of his empurpled urine, periodic gastric distress, irrational outbursts,
so forth, that George III suffered from porphyria. However, ample contemporary
documentation of his behavior and symptomatology leads this medico to suggest
that it is much more likely the king's primary psychiatric diagnosis was
bipolar disorder (the entity formally classified under the rubric of manic-depressive
psychosis). The porphyria (assuming it did indeed exist) would have to
be rated secondary (a co-morbid illness, to use the current fashionable
term). How and to what extent the metabolic condition articulated with
the more fundamental affective illness is a vexed question.