ARTHUR BURNS: Some of these ideas
came to us when we worked as a team with the Nottingham
Theater Playhouse where they were
doing a production of The Madness of George
III in the autumn of 2018.
We worked there with Mark Gatiss, who
was playing George III, and Adam Penford, the director,
and set up an interesting discussion after the production
between the two of them and two historians
of 18th-century medicine and mental illness
and a contemporary psychiatrist to try and explore
what themes came out and struck us as interesting
and of relevance in the materials.
And in this of course preparing for those meetings
and in the course of the discussions,
we came up with a series of points which we think
are worth further investigation, which
we hope this process of transcription
will enable us to write something and bring together
some new thoughts on this much-studied subject.
We're already adopting three key perspectives here.
One is to just explore more completely
than has ever been done before how the discussion of George's
illness developed over the course of the 200 years
after his death.
And that's a really fascinating story
involving some of the most important figures
in historiography in the transatlantic
world in the course of the discussion.
A second thing we hope to do is explored a bit more carefully
than has been done before the impact of the illness
on the King's family and, in particular,
his relations with his female members, the Queen
and his daughters.
There is at least some indication that some of this
has been treated rather perfunctorily in the past,
not least because poor Queen Charlotte has
been the victim of the most misogynistic historiographies
I think that any historical figure has been subjected to.
Some quite extraordinary writings
from the mid-20th century which she's dismissed as so ugly as
to explain why the King went mad in effect.
And I think we can do better than that.
And there's quite a lot to be said,
I think about the impact of this extraordinarily awful illness
on the King and his family.
And this is a question of reading between the lines
sometimes, but there's an awful lot in there,
and we first got to establish what the lines themselves say.
And then the third thing I think we
hope to do is to reflect on how that conversation has developed
between historians and others and how we can then
use the King's illness.