1. Introduction
[1.1] Fandom (encompassing many manifestations such as memes, YouTube videos, and fan fiction) is often theorized as a vital praxis that expands agency across the permeable borderland between creatives and consumers, making consumers into creatives and critics who transform and complicate notions of an originary and authoritative textual source such as William Shakespeare's canon. Indeed, Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall describe fan fiction as "the beginning of a new kind of criticism" (2016, 29), one that puts pressure on "the notion of Shakespeare as author-god—a notion that still follows Shakespearean texts like a creeping shadow" (33). For the generators of fan fiction, the playwright's text becomes "a refracted urtext at the core of the fan's creation, in which the idea of an 'original' exists with the same autonomy as its adaptive counterparts" (Fazel and Geddes 2016, 276). This leveled authority—in which the Shakespearean text, its performance history, editorial interventions, adaptations, and appropriations sit side by side with user reimaginations—opens vistas of opportunity to puncture the enduring status of Shakespeare's canon as exclusively "white property" (Little 2016, 88). Johnathan Pope anticipates, however, the uneasiness such freely redistributed literary authority soon provokes, describing a debate over the right kind of fandom: "While we are all theoretically permitted equal access to Shakespeare and can do with him as we please, to also conceive of him as something that can be exploited, stolen from, or even misinterpreted is to expose some of the tensions at work in the assertion of accessibility and collective ownership" (2020, 70). The sheer expansiveness of fan access to the revered cultural capital of Shakespeare inevitably produces a backlash. In light of anxiety over the radical potential of extreme accessibility, antifandom operates as a gatekeeper, one that polices, among other factors, the whiteness of Shakespeare. Masquerading as defenders of Shakespeare or pro-Shakespeare, this form of antifandom discourages unvetted fans who might be tempted freely to extemporize, improvise, and work changes upon the canonical texts.
[1.2] One such example, citational performance in heritage film and serialized television drama, functions subtly to curtail the possibilities of fan-driven recirculation, protecting the so-called sanctity of Shakespeare through an unashamed alignment of the playwright with British colonial-imperial history and authority. By interleaving references to Shakespeare in their narratives of the British monarchy, heritage films and television serials instantiate a fandom that rapidly becomes antifan, a narrative intertextuality thwarting the shared agency and infinite iterations typical of, for example, fan fiction. Three episodes of the Netflix heritage drama The Crown (2016–2023) typify the antifandom that sutures Shakespearean authority to the British monarchy by means of citational performance. In each case, reenactments of scenes from Shakespeare appear at moments of crisis regarding the ruler and the nation—contestations over the former British empire and debates over the home nations constituting Great Britain (note 1). These citational performances of Shakespeare appear at first as a form of Shakespeare fandom—enthusiastically lifting and repurposing Shakespeare's drama. However, in each case, the gesture to Shakespeare transmutes into antifan, actively undermining multicultural British identities and reinscribing the white bodies of a post-imperial crown as a permanently fixed hermetic institution.
2. Policing the radical potential of fandom
[2.1] Building habitations within, around, and alongside canonical works, the fan often opens horizons of alternative meaning and world orientations disruptive of the hegemonic forces which typically draw sustenance from the soft power and cultural capital of acclaimed literary works. Generators of alternate universes, online communities, and fan fiction, fans appropriate the original artwork and the creative process, employing destabilizing tactics that "are frequently framed as resistant and subversive" (Pande 2018, 2). When fans take agential control over a Shakespearean text, such appropriations prompt at least two crucial questions: "[W]ho owns Shakespeare? Who determines the acceptable parameters for engagement with this playwright?" (Pope 2020, 11). Critical consensus agrees that fandom answers these questions with a provocative democracy of access and adaptation, unseating the Shakespearean urtext from a position of unassailable authority. As Fazel and Geddes assess the dynamic, "Shakespeare becomes not a parent text to be appropriated/adapted, but a boundless user-driven archive of material to be repurposed and refashioned to suit the tastes of its users in today's technologically engaged culture" (2016, 275). Crucially, Mudan Finn and McCall point out that "fandom is a community overwhelmingly driven by marginalized readers: women, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and readers of colour who are actively agitating against white patriarchal epistemologies that have historically defined which texts have cultural value and how those texts should be interpreted" (2016, 32). According to Rukmini Pande, what has lagged behind is a critical engagement with whiteness, which "has remained the unexamined structuring force within discussions of the workings of media fandom communities up to the present moment" (2018, 12). Indeed, Benjamin Woo adds, "whiteness has been baked into the way that fans and fan scholars conceptualize the field" (2018, 249), prompting Mel Stanfill's call for "fan studies to name whiteness as it functions in fandom and interrogate its workings" (2018, 305). By habitually citing and performing Shakespeare within its bleached landscape, British heritage drama stages a fandom that reinforces the ubiquitous invisibility of whiteness (Dyer 2017) and insists on whites as the proper owners and lawful wielders of the playwright's words, constituting a distinct antifan power move.
[2.2] As often theorized, antifandom manifests as antipathy targeting an object of enthusiasm valued by other fan communities. Familiar examples include hate-watching or snark-viewing or online comments and trolling. Jonathan Gray delineates a taxonomy of antifandom that more precisely characterizes a range of stances including "competitive anti-fandom" in which, "dislike...is directed at a perceived rival of one's beloved fan object" (2019, 26). However, I want to explore another possibility—that antifandom can take the form of indirect proscription determining who may and may not appropriate the canonical texts. Indeed, Gray spotlights a category he describes as "anti fans anti-fandom," which "is directed towards fans" rather than at the fan object per se (2019, 32). Antifan gatekeepers of taste monitor access to the Bard's canon and seek to prevent recirculation by the "undisciplined and unrepentant, rogue readers" of fandom (Jenkins 2012, 18). Fazel and Geddes have theorized this fannish position under the term "antefandom," which they define as a range of practices "designed to keep out anything that might contaminate the fan object and, by extension, the attached fan" (2022, 173). They explain that "Antefandom, therefore, is loaded with defensive strategies that embrace classist, sexist, or racist strategies to prohibit the intrusion of external voices" (2022, 175). By means of quotation and citational performance of Shakespeare, The Crown enacts this mode of antifan antifandom (the gatekeeping of Fazel and Geddes's "antefan"), staging a uniquely controlled iteration of fandom that claims Shakespeare as exclusively white property. The Shakespearean presence in The Crown manifests a dynamic described by Vanessa I. Corredera: "Shakespeare as white property delimits who performs Shakespeare and how staging 'authentic' Shakespearean performance becomes defined" (2024, 18). As represented by The Crown, fans, always-already white, find in Shakespeare a second language by which to articulate identity and aspirations, make decisions, broker influence, foster alliances, and reinforce social networks. These fan communities within The Crown constitute a form of antifan or antefan representation closing off the broader multiracial and multicultural contestations over ownership unfurling within fan universes.
3. Postcolonial Britain, monarchy, and The Crown
[3.1] Released on November 4, 2016, season 1 of The Crown was written, filmed, and edited at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis and in the midst of the volatile European Union membership referendum campaign leading to the Brexit vote on June 23, 2016. The former empire's waning influence abroad and a crumbling national infrastructure at home following the 2008 financial collapse and austerity measures informed a level of unrest that was aggravated by fears of largescale refugee displacement. The fabrication of a racially pure past and uncontested white British supremacy joined forces with a willful amnesia about the empire's crimes to fuel a distinct form of postcolonial melancholy in third-millennium Britain during the Brexit moment when The Crown was released. Characterized both by an unacknowledged and thus unresolved guilt over colonial atrocities and a simultaneous craving for an imagined imperial splendor, postcolonial melancholy lives on a nostalgia enhanced by forgetfulness: "Once the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten" (Gilroy 2005, 90).
[3.2] British heritage film and serialized television drama have long provided a welcoming artistic and expressive home for this imperial nostalgia that mutes the empire's blood-guiltiness. Indeed, Sivamohan Valluvan argues that "the rehabilitation of monarchy through recurring spectacles of weddings and reproduction" and "the revival of Edwardian and interwar period drama" operate as effective outlets for the wishful thinking of post-imperial dreaming (2017). Finding solace in the materials and textures that conjure a "memory" of times past, heritage drama offers the illusion of authenticity, displayed through the period-specific details of "costumes, hairstyles, buildings, landscapes, furnishings, modes of travel, behaviour and speech" (Cardwell 2002, 114). The deliberately crafted and particularized mise-en-scène provides the additional varnish of veracity to the post-imperial fantasy: "Heritage cinema plays a crucial role in this process of imagining English nationhood, by telling symbolic stories of class, gender, ethnicity, and identity, and staging them in the most picturesque landscapes and houses of the Old Country" (Higson 2003, 50). In the space of much heritage drama, that so-called authentic past is depicted as one peopled by whites only. As I have argued elsewhere, whiteness "has been encoded in the practices of heritage film" (Pittman 2022, 176). The product of a distinctive third-millennial nostalgia and postcolonial amnesia, The Crown opens on the years immediately following the Allied Forces' triumph over the Third Reich, deliberately situating itself within the fog of memory that revels in the moral verities of the battle against fascism and an empire undaunted. Following quickly on from the accession of Elizabeth II in 1952, The Crown proceeds to chronicle the decades of the twentieth century that witnessed the gradual decolonizing of the British empire, moving across time analeptically to fill out its narrative of the Windsor royal family. In the process of telling that story, The Crown wavers ideologically between a critical awareness of empire's self-affirming brutality and an irresponsible complicity with those forms and ceremonies that enforced British military, economic, and cultural ascendency across the globe.
[3.3] In the case of The Crown, it proves far easier simply to expose the idiosyncrasies of a powerful and dysfunctional family than examine in a candid and sustained manner colonial trauma, the very history, Gilroy insists, that must be confronted to enable a thriving multicultural present (2005, 94). Though never shying away from depicting the Windsors as a distinctly unloving and unlovable dynasty, the series fails to spotlight for sustained critical remembrance the histories of colonial rule and equally complicated processes of decolonization that moved Great Britain from an empire to a networked commonwealth. Countless examples of The Crown's cringeworthy colonial amnesia and nostalgia abound. For example, on a trip to then-Rhodesia, Princess Margaret delivers unqualified praise of the deeply troubling Cecil Rhodes for his civilizing impact on the subject African peoples (1.6 "Gelignite"). Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, voices racist and derisive comments repeatedly when on tour to Africa and the South Pacific (1.2 "Hyde Park Corner"; 2.3 "Lisbon"). Though the series holds up for condemnation Margaret Thatcher's blatant white supremacist disregard for the members of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth's stewardship of that so-called family, an unremarked white-savior maternalism that bears scrutiny, never receives the same level of critical engagement (4.8 "48:1"). In fact, the episode commends the monarch for promoting anti-apartheid sanctions, presenting her as a forward-thinking advocate for social justice and racial equality in contrast with the prime minister. Indeed, over the course of its seasons, The Crown depicts this queen of a former empire as a devoted servant of what she believes to be her Commonwealth family and disables an interrogative consideration of how the economics of empire enhanced royal privilege.
[3.4] Several postcolonial authors have described the painful experience of watching The Crown for this very reason. Writing for Quartz, Manavi Kapur asserts, "No amount of rousing music could block out Netflix's whitewash over Britain and the royal family's gruesome colonialism and racism," noting "the valorisation of Lord Mountbatten and the absolute silence over the violent legacy he has left behind in the Indian subcontinent" (2020). Throughout The Crown, colonial history arises as incidental to the narrative of the royal family and its interpersonal conflicts. The series never centers people of color; their stories instead serve merely as backdrop to the drama of white entitled identities. Sohel Sarkar elaborates: "Throughout the series, references to British colonialism abound but are incidental to its plot, serving as props that stitch together the Queen's public and private traumas. They dart in and out with little context and a blatant disregard for any point of view that is not British, reaffirming a whitewashed history shorn of the brutalities that the formerly colonized know only too well" (2020). Just as the colonial inheritance casually appears, so too the crises of the home nations operate without fail to reveal character attributes of royal leads or to illuminate the ambitions of the political elite—not to acknowledge national trauma in a thoughtful way. In The Crown, the combined elegance of filming, music, and mise-en-scène stunt the growth of any genuine critical self-examination and strain to gatekeep a wider fan access to Shakespeare's coded language of power. By staging fan performances populated by whites only, The Crown reinforces the playwright's oeuvre as white property to be protected from a broader, rogue, and potentially multicultural fan community.
4. Fans and citational performance of Shakespeare in The Crown
[4.1] As in other examples of heritage drama, Shakespeare as citational performance or passing reference appears regularly throughout the seasons of The Crown, offering characters a repository of in-group shorthand and unimpeachable aphorisms that confirm identity, social class status, and access to power. A brief catalogue demonstrates the playwright's ubiquity. In 2.1 "Misadventure," Shakespeare helps justify an illegal invasion of Egypt, which will be discussed later; in 2.10 "Mystery Man," the royal photographer, Cecil Beaton, intones John of Gaunt's "this England" elegy from Richard II. In 3.1 "Olding," an art historian and Soviet spy declares, "Truth will out," while in 3.5 "Coup," Daily Mirror editor and influencer Cecil King reasons, "there is special providence in such a fall," continuing with only lightly edited lines from Hamlet to justify a fledgling coup against the government. As will be discussed below, 3.6 "Tywysog Cymru" features a performance of Richard II. Also in season three, Shakespeare acting veteran Derek Jacobi plays the dying Duke of Windsor and former monarch Edward VIII, who declares, "Reputation is an idle" from Othello in 3.8 "Dangling Man." In 4.1 "Gold Stick," there are references to A Midsummer Night's Dream in an early encounter between Lady Diana and Prince Charles—to be discussed below—and 4.5 "Fagan" invokes Lear's Fool. In 4.9 "Avalanche," Princess Anne references Romeo and Juliet when discussing Charles's thwarted desire for Camilla Parker Bowles. In 4.10 "War" Prince Philip describes the ouster of Margaret Thatcher as the Ides of March. Three of these references constitute extended examples of citational performance—a reference to Shakespeare that is more than passing. These three instances of citational performance share some of the following elements: a performance of Shakespeare with other in-the-know listeners; exchanged lines of poetry as dialogue; a conversation including costuming and deliberate, extended reference to the content of a play; or a fully staged representation of a play. Not only do these scenes stage Shakespeare, they also depict fan interaction with the poet's language and plotting in ways that underscore that the right fan is a white fan, one qualified to cite, adapt, and manipulate the canon within acceptable boundaries. No person of color ever participates in these Shakespearean moments; the citations are performed exclusively by white members of the social elite or royal family network. Thus, persons of color remain visibly outside the gates that guard the Shakespeare fan community dramatized by the series. Collectively, the Shakespeare citations in The Crown do the racialized antifan work of gatekeeping access to and hoarding the power associated with a national and cultural icon.
5. 2.1 "Misadventure"
[5.1] The Shakespeare reference found in 2.1 "Misadventure" typifies the gatekeeping role that citational performance of Shakespeare fulfills in The Crown, a deployment that defines and reinforces the "right" kind of fan identity and behavior. In "Misadventure," the citational performance of Shakespeare operates as an unacknowledged but always accessible shorthand between white elites, thus implying that the correct, entitled fan is the white, native, privileged public-school educated male. As depicted, such a fan quotes the words of the Bard with an easeful sprezzatura designed to foster mutual understanding between members of the ruling class. The episode's unfolding details demonstrate, however, that even within this coded language some fans prove more astute and able manipulators of the discourse than others. Furthermore, as in other episodes of The Crown, the performance of Shakespeare manifests at moments of perceived geopolitical conflict ostensibly in order to bolster British colonial-imperial authority. In the case of "Misadventure," the effort by the Egyptian people to assume control of the Suez Canal constitutes the sustained threat to British superiority and rule. With far too little irony, "Misadventure" traffics in well-known Orientalist stereotypes and weds those to Shakespeare and the British monarchy, even as it appears to lament the prime minister's arrogant, deceptive mishandling of the crisis.
[5.2] Throughout the episode, a filmic discourse operating on juxtaposition telegraphs a view of the empire from the center that labels a legitimate bid for national independence as disruptive rebellion against right, white British authority. Any effort to defend The Crown's narrative as knowingly anti-imperial falters under the weight of evidence found in its filmic stylings, which habitually smooth over postcolonial resistance by means of shot framing, fluid camera movement, and portentous musical scoring. Early in the episode, "Misadventure" juxtaposes scenes of Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy) and Prince Philip (Matt Smith) hosting an official function for the diplomatic corps at Buckingham Palace with a cut to the Suez Canal Company offices in Port Said, Egypt. The light-filled elegance of a palace ballroom contrasts with the muted hues of the office building, where we first see a custodian mopping the floors before abandoning his task to join the office workers listening to the voice of Gamal Abdel Nasser (Amir Boutrous) over the radio. The reduced light levels and the predominance of brown earth tones immediately signal to the viewer tropes too old to countenance of darkness, mystery, and obscurity characterizing the world of Northern Africa (Nochlin 1989, 35). Furthermore, one can't help but suspect the casual use of an unspoken stereotype of non-Westerners as indolent in the custodian who so quickly stops working—leaving his mop and bucket to litter the hallway (Said 1978, 38–39). In addition to the light/dark binary established by these scenes, The Crown adds a detail of set dressing to indicate a difference in cultures. The open-plan arrangement of the Suez Canal Company offices in which men sit and work with a union jack flag just visible on the right side of the frame includes a live monkey randomly perched on one of the work desks. In contrast, the workspaces of Whitehall and Buckingham Palace in The Crown feature long corridors, neatly arranged antique furnishings, and an orderly behavioral protocol, a mise-en-scène and tone in which the only so-called wild animals to be found are the Queen's domesticated corgis. This visually divides a supposedly civilized West from an uncivilized East to inform the remaining events presented by the episode.
[5.3] Crosscutting the company offices with Nasser's rally, the episode proceeds to negatively mark Egyptian independence as chaotic, violent, and fascistic. The camera captures Nasser in full rhetorical flow, utilizing angles and shot frames that replay footage of Hitler or Mussolini addressing massive audiences. This well-recognized filmic vocabulary involves high angle shots over the speaker's shoulder and low-angle shots viewing the would-be tyrant from a subordinate position, depersonalizing the figure's supporters by creating a mass of wildly enthusiastic adherents. The filmic discourse thus reinforces without qualification the Western view of Nasser as tending dangerously towards fascism. The Crown intercuts such shots from Nasser's rally with those of his soldiers breaking into and occupying the Suez Canal Company offices, an invasion met with a feebly ineffective and fluting British bureaucrat who demands, "Excuse me. What the devil do you think you're doing?" The intercut sequence of celebrating Egyptians and the office in disarray concludes with a slow dolly-in shot of the Queen's portrait stoically observing the regime change in another of her empire's strategic holdings. Fluttering office papers drop like confetti as the majestic underscoring of the soundtrack heightens the epochal nature of the moment. Egregiously replicating British colonial attitudes in its depiction of Nasser's fight for Egypt's autonomy, the episode presents his takeover of the Suez Canal offices as an invasion of chaos into an orderly and efficient bureaucracy. What remains particularly concerning about the episode is its replication of Orientalist stereotypes without adequate complication. While it might be argued that the episode pokes fun at a certain type of British ruling class smugness, too many details borrow from that racist vocabulary without convincing irony; the smoothly homogenizing discourse of heritage-style televisual and cinematic technique thwarts such evaluation.
[5.4] The extent of British self-satisfaction certainly becomes clear in Prime Minister Anthony Eden's visit to Eton, which celebrates in-group elitism—a fan community under another name—and introduces the concept of the fan's shared vocabulary—a lexicon to be supplied by Shakespeare's plays. Without apology, Prime Minister Eden (Jeremy Northam) insists that the individuals produced by Eton are best trusted with the task of leading the nation: "If Britain's leaders aren't coming from Eton, then where should they be coming from? You see before you the sixteenth Etonian Prime Minister" (note 2). In an effort to counter accusations regarding the closed nature of such circles, Eden continues: "Well, yes, you might well argue that as a social pool, it is a bit narrow. But narrowness at the top is not necessarily a bad thing. For as any serviceman will tell you, in battle, when the heat is on, one needs a shorthand, a shared language and understanding. A clarity. Eton has, for generations now, provided Britain with that clarity. That code. That shared language." As imagined by The Crown, that code relies upon and enmeshes Shakespeare directly in the project of British imperialism.
[5.5] A strategic repurposing of Shakespeare's language ensues when the buffeted Eden consults with Chancellor Harold Macmillan (Anton Lesser), a citational performance by what are presented as licensed fans claiming the poet's language as the property of the white political elite. The fannish performance takes place as Eden and Macmillan debate privately the merits of military action in response to the Suez Canal Crisis. The scene begins with Eden remembering his Hamlet and uttering, "I'm afraid that when sorrows come, they come not single spies," which Macmillan finishes with, "but in battalions." Here, much as Eden has just described the benefits of an Etonian insular education, Shakespeare functions as a shorthand between the two politicians—a language they share that asserts their fitness to govern and the cultural superiority of their nation. Moments later in the conversation, Macmillan deploys Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida as international policy, goading Eden into a foolhardy military response that he reinforces with Shakespeare: "Take but degree away, untune that string." This time, Eden completes the thought with "and hark what discord follows." Filming, which alternates between the two men, stresses that Shakespeare becomes the code Eden has referred to earlier that justifies British colonialism and establishes alliances between members of the ruling class. In this sequence, the fannish iteration makes decontextualizing assumptions about the political import of the original passage. Here Nasser constitutes the "untuning" of the imperial string, a fact the men do not have to elaborate upon because Shakespeare has made that point for them. For the two men, Ulysses's doctrine of degree perfectly fits the moment of colonial unrest and upended imperial authority. Their fannish performance here takes no time to interrogate the dislocated lines, to consider that, in context, Ulysses's words confront internal Greek discord. Repurposed as an elite shorthand, the lines gesture toward an internally riven community of the Greeks in the play text, one in which Achilles steadfastly refuses to fight on behalf of Agamemnon and his gathered forces. Though such infighting suits the use to which Macmillan puts the lines (pushing the prime minister into politically harmful hawkishness), Eden ignores the textual surround of the passage to brandish Shakespeare's aphorism as a weapon to castigate the colonial subject's resistance (note 3).
[5.6] Read in the wider context of the episode's civilizational binary, the citational performance reinforces Shakespeare as the property of British whiteness and the shared language spoken by the elite. But fissures in that fan group appear in the use to which Macmillan puts his Shakespeare. His own political ambitions run as an undercurrent in the episode and prompt him to encourage Eden's reckless retaliation against Nasser. In a subsequent cabinet meeting, the degree of Macmillan's own quiet treachery emerges when he disavows himself of Eden's unsuccessful military offensive. Eden has assumed that he and Macmillan speak the fan's code of Shakespeare to mutually beneficial ends; however, in this Shakes-off, Macmillan does it better, using the words of the playwright to corner Eden into a politically and internationally unwise position. Though this code between elites exists to be deployed by white males in power, that discourse still bears the potential to misfire and to distinguish more or less able fan practitioners.
[5.7] Eden's vexed Shakespeare citation might just signal a rueful and ironic critique of British unilateral colonial enforcement and aggression. Indeed, the episode includes a sequence of shots scored to a mournful orchestral melody that records the destructive force of the British attack. As the descending arpeggios, brass interval reaches, and ominous thudding timpani drums play, shots cut between bombs targeting an airfield, British paratroopers preparing to drop into Egypt, and Egyptians fleeing down a dirt avenue just as a British tank rolls by. However, no amount of vigorous scoring, choreographed violence, or images of the ailing Eden hunched over his pharmacopeia of drugs can counterbalance the residual Orientalism of this sequence. For, as with the monkey poised atop the work desk at Port Said, this sequence is marred by visual details that inscribe British prejudices: a closeup of ants crawling over a dish of dates and pastry, the bare, brown legs of fleeing citizens, and the random presence in a city street of two roosters. These details fit too easily within the racist playbook contrasting white superiority with an "uncivilized" world of decay, dirt, and disease. Finding their way into the camera's lens, they reinforce a British-centered perspective despite the ostensible intentions of the attack montage. Certainly, the montage offers an opportunity for determined soul-searching about the inbred social network that rules Britain and makes international policy based on poisonous Orientalist prejudices. But by catering too easily to stereotypic representation, the series truncates such critique. In this episode, Shakespeare provides white male fans with the code to jockey for power without confronting their imperial prejudices or counting the costs of their political striving.
6. 3.6 "Tywysog Cymru"
[6.1] Each Shakespearean citational performance in The Crown represents the correct fan as white and identifies Shakespeare not just as a shared language for political influence and power-brokering but also as a vital means by which white men find their voice and self-actualize. The lengthiest citational performance of Shakespeare in The Crown, in 3.6 "Tywysog Cymru," positions Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor) as the right kind of fan, one who locates in the poet's idiom a natural language of self-definition, much as, according to Little Jr., whites "have used Shakespeare to define and bolster their white cultural racial identity, solidarity, and authority" (2023, 1). Written by James Graham and Peter Morgan, "Tywysog Cymru" weaves the identity struggles of Charles on the brink of his 1969 investiture into the ceremonial title Prince of Wales with those of the Welsh people whose lost sovereignty helped create Great Britain. As imagined by the episode, Prince Charles also desires autonomy and self-governance, straining against his repressive family and royal destiny. Framed by a stage performance of Richard II, the episode underscores Shakespeare's utility and inherent suitability for the privileged white male fan.
[6.2] Camera movement, position, and framing combine to establish Charles's desire for escape and authentic self-expression—an outlet he will discover as a fan of Shakespeare. Shots repeatedly frame Charles within rigidly symmetrical spaces and capture him against a variety of backgrounds that trivialize him. When Charles learns he must leave Cambridge for a term to study Welsh prior to his investiture, the episode positions him centrally, alone on a sofa dwarfed by a largescale aristocratic family portrait. Arrayed opposite Charles in carefully balanced and height-dependent order, his assembled family confronts him with this news stressing the young prince's disempowerment and enmeshment within a dynastic structure that denies him personal freedom. A longshot of the palace chamber taken from a slightly higher angle places Charles in the center of the frame subject to the gaze of his family and the viewing audience. Thus, the episode establishes the vulnerability and neutered agency of this most privileged of young men through the mechanics of its elegant, heritage-style filming. In this context, Prince Charles seeks an affinity to assuage his feelings of alienation, finding that temporarily in the unlikely location of Wales.
[6.3] Though the episode ostensibly interrogates a stifling British hegemony victimizing the Welsh people, this concern remains subordinate to the coming-of-age narrative centered on the diffident young white man, positioning Welsh devolution as a mirror for Charles's own desire to escape the British monarchy. Moved both by his tutor and the history of Wales he begins to learn, Charles crafts an addition to his investiture speech celebrating the unique and independent identity of the Welsh people. Charles's revised investiture speech articulates the right of Welsh people to a distinct identity, but in its call for self-determination, Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) perceives coded critique of the constraints her son likewise experiences. When he returns to receive his mother's praise for his effective speech, he is minimized by the symmetrical staircases of the palace before proceeding to his mother's rooms, a reminder of how little he rates within the royal institution. As the queen chastises her son for voicing an individualized perspective, the camera captures the reduced and alienated Prince Charles through the open woodwork of a boudoir chair, the bend of the queen's arm, and lastly, the reflection from her dressing table mirror. Confined thus, Charles must turn to the more reliable outlet for selfhood provided by Shakespeare fandom.
[6.4] Fandom offers refuge for the prince, whose voiceover of the hollow crown soliloquy covers a continuity edit that returns him to Cambridge and the episode's bookended citational performance of Richard II. Editing and shot selection combine to underscore the natural suitability of the Shakespeare canon to the white male fan of privilege. In the edit whisking Charles from London to Cambridge, the camera records him driving, while the voiceover plays, stressing that these words written by Shakespeare perfectly mirror the prince's plight. A closeup shows the pensive Charles at the wheel while we hear him recite as voiceover words that could simply replicate his own despairing psyche:
[6.5] for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks. (3.2.160–65)
[6.6] The wretched young man looks down at the wheel, and next, the camera reveals him in the greenroom gazing into the makeup mirror now in heavy white stage makeup and wearing an ermine cloak, the prop crown just to his right. When the camera cuts to the stage and the monologue proceeds diegetically, closeups of the prince's face reinforce that Shakespeare's King Richard speaks for Charles—capturing the intractable contradictions of rule. To underscore that fact, a cut reveals Princess Anne (Erin Doherty) seated in the audience watching with rapt attention, her knowing gaze suggesting the similitude she observes between the words and her brother's condition. A second shot of the princess shows her lean forward in her seat when Charles recites, "I live with bread like you, feel want, / Taste grief, need friends" (3.2.175–76). Her reactions, combined with multiple shots of a pensive Charles throughout the sequence, assert that Shakespeare's words perfectly ventriloquize the white heir-apparent's dilemma. By virtue of its aptness, Charles's performative fandom (as imagined by The Crown) inscribes Shakespeare as the inherently suitable terrain for white men to examine the seeming burdens of their role, accomplishing the work of antifandom by firmly identifying the best fan as white.
[6.7] However, like so much of The Crown, more expansive interpretive possibilities lurk only to be shut down by the conventions of heritage film. Literally wearing heavy stage whiteface, Charles radically displays the whiteness of Shakespeare—a constructed performance of whiteness and Shakespeare that could threaten normative whiteness. By rendering whiteness extremely visible and a result of applied makeup, Charles's Richard II could well telegraph the crucial fact of arbitrary racial construction and thus undermine the doctrines of white supremacy fundamental to British royal authority. Unfortunately, an immersive representational style using Shakespeare's words in racially essentialist ways to match the prince's psychology instantiates a troubling antifandom—insisting that privileged white men can best be trusted to enact and guard the treasured legacy of the national poet.
7. 4.1 "Gold Stick"
[7.1] In season four, episode one ("Gold Stick"), another crucial citational performance takes place, again interweaving Prince Charles's plight with postimperial crisis: the status of Northern Ireland and, by means of metonymy, that of the Indian subcontinent. Recounting the death of Charles's father figure, Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance), in County Sligo, Ireland, the episode juxtaposes that loss with the prince's awakening interest in Lady Diana Spencer (Emma Corrin). Diana makes her fateful first appearance in the series costumed for a school performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like the Eden and Macmillan exchange in "Misadventure," the citational performance of Shakespeare that follows suggests like-mindedness and affinity. In "Gold Stick," Charles posits sympathy with Lady Diana and assumes her intriguing suitability in part because he discovers they share the same Shakespearean fan code, a language that underscores likeness of rank and race. Once again, Shakespeare functions as the language accessible exclusively to white persons of social standing, firmly shutting the gate to other would-be fans not matching the class and racial profile of those represented by the series.
[7.2] Speaking in characteristic double-talk, this opening episode of season four appears designed to undermine imperial splendor with a dose of its realities—the riven home nations and violent aftermath of colonial brutalities. Thus, as it begins with a staging of the 1979 Trooping the Colour in honor of the Queen's birthday, a dissident Irish voiceover offers bellicose interrogation of British authority: "Why are the English still with us? Why after everything we've thrown at them does the British presence in Ireland still endure? So many sacrifices have been made...The time has come to escalate our efforts, redouble our militancy, spill more blood, so that the Crown retreats and leaves Ireland forever." Toggling between preparations for Trooping the Colour and found news footage of The Troubles, season four commences with a gesture of provocation, signaling ostensibly a more overt questioning of British rule. However, as seen throughout the series and in the examples discussed thus far, these crises habitually fold inward toward the personal drama of the British political elite, the royal family, and the identity crises of white men. Such is the case in 4.1 "Gold Stick."
[7.3] Though it opens with an effort at self-critique whereby the imperial splendor of Trooping the Colour contrasts with the IRA voiceover, the costs of centuries-long colonization in Ireland soon fade in significance as the episode interweaves scenes depicting the budding Charles and Diana relationship. So obviously aware of the emotional portent for viewers who know this relationship's tragic end, "Gold Stick" builds toward a visual reveal of the young Lady Diana. In doing so, the episode reimagines the first encounter between this couple as a meeting of two Shakespeare fans with the Bard serving as an initial litmus test of compatibility. Their chance meeting takes place on a visit by Charles to see Diana's elder sister, Sarah, at the family seat of Althorp. Diana who has been strictly instructed not to intrude on the visitor, violates the rules and creeps across the vast hall in which Charles waits for his date. Concealing herself between conveniently placed plinths and urns, Diana laments, "Sorry. I'm not here," though she immediately steps out and curtsies, addressing Charles as "your royal highness." Diana tiptoes ever closer to Charles just as the camera position draws nearer to her though not yet revealing her. Diana's identity becomes the known mystery of the scene, her face obscured by a performance mask, and her body concealed in green leotard and strategically placed twigs. Playing with audience anticipation, the scene steadily creates the effect of these two fated individuals being drawn inexorably toward each other. As she becomes more visible to Charles, they banter about her costume: "It's quite a costume." She replies with famously recognizable insecurity, "Is it complete disaster? We're doing A Midsummer Night's Dream at school." This magical statement unlocks the prince's eager fan response, "I love Midsummer Night's Dream," with Diana confirming pluckily, "So do I." That this affinity has sparked further curiosity in Charles is signaled by his movement to a pedestal closer in proximity to Diana, noting: "All the characters have such wonderful names. Flute, Snout, Goodfellow..." a list he finishes with, "Snug, Quince, [chuckles and looks down] Bottom!" She laughs and repeats, "Yes, Bottom." Their citational performance of the play's names functions as a thread between them, pulling them toward each other as their movements are mirrored, until they peer out from either side of the same pillar and urn. At last a close-up shows her masked face: "I'm Sarah's younger sister, by the way. Please don't tell her you saw me. I'll get into terrible trouble. She wanted everything to be just perfect. She wouldn't want me to scare you off." When he asks, "How would you do that?" she explains, "Well, you know...by being a mad tree." Here Diana's costume and coy concealment invite Charles to a form of fan cosplay that unlocks connection with a potential spouse and royal consort. Her plea to maintain a conspiratorial silence about her appearance likewise disarms the prince so accustomed to the cold withholding of his own family.
[7.4] Though the overt reference in the scene is to A Midsummer Night's Dream, the choreographed ever-closer movement of the two would-be lovers replicates the stage movement so often associated with performances of Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet ball, an allusion heightened by Lady Diana's mask. Indeed, the scene appears to borrow from the idiom of Baz Luhrmann's iconic treatment in his 1996 adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, in which Juliet (Claire Danes) and Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) gaze through a fish tank at each other as the ball's chaos subsides into a romantic ballad. The Crown thus makes its own fannish reference to the Shakespearean universe of adaptations and appropriations, utilizing his dramatic canon as initial point of contact between two fans, Charles and Diana. The Romeo and Juliet allusion also involves the viewing audience in fandom discourse by telegraphing the tragic outcome of this royal misalliance, a marriage union rooted in Charles's need for a wife and heir, not in any understanding of Diana herself. In the imagination of The Crown, the discourse of Shakespeare initiates this important next step in Charles's long wait for sovereignty.
[7.5] As in the other examples, citational performance of Shakespeare here operates to grant white men voice and decision-making clarity and does so against the backdrop of threats to British imperial sway. In the family crisis that follows on the death of Lord Mountbatten, the entire history of his colonial service and the bloody catastrophe of his tenure as Viceroy of India are painted over with the loss experienced by his Windsor kin. Indeed, Lord Mountbatten's death off the coast from his deceased wife's estate in Ireland, Classiebawn Castle (itself a seventeenth-century confiscation following anti-English rebellion), might slyly invoke centuries of large-scale land expropriation by the English in Ireland. However, Mountbatten's presence in Ireland, holiday-making with family, seems almost incidental and in no way explicitly situated within a larger pattern of English colonial oppression in that country. Though references to Bloody Sunday and other English atrocities in Northern Ireland do bookend the episode through the IRA voiceover, the inclination of the episode's representational style lands firmly on the side of family pathos. Charles's choice of Diana appears motivated by a misplaced devotion to his Uncle Dickie who had long been admonishing Charles to do his duty by choosing a suitable wife. Having delayed choosing a partner for too long (according to his family), Charles relies on the affinity established through the fan's language of Shakespeare to accomplish another crucial milestone in his long wait for the throne. Of course, in the little world of The Crown's royal family drama, their marriage becomes the bomb more potent than any British provocation or IRA response, once again overshadowing the postcolonial global stressors gratuitously referenced but inadequately investigated by the series.
8. Coda: The fandom of a king
[8.1] By repeatedly placing the words of Shakespeare in the mouths of their overwhelmingly white cast members, heritage film and television habitually reinscribe Shakespeare as white property, denying persons of color the right to appropriate and imaginatively remake his canon. This technique operates in ways akin to Fazel and Geddes's antefandom, which "manifests in an impossible bardolatry that both puts Shakespeare out of reach of the 'undeserving' fan and under the control of the antefan" (2022, 172). The ubiquity of Shakespeare's words and their often-casual use by entitled white men in heritage film and television serve to police with quiet efficiency the identity of those free to wield the agential and creative power of the fan. This mode of antifan antifandom never directly declares exclusive rights to Shakespeare's canon, nor does it need to, since repeatedly Shakespeare proves the tool that helps white men speak.
[8.2] One final example demonstrates this persistent enmeshment of Shakespeare fandom, whiteness, and the British monarchy. On September 8, 2022, Charles III acceded the throne upon the death of his long-reigning mother, Elizabeth II. In his first publicly televised statement as mourning son and monarch, King Charles concluded his words with a citational performance of Shakespeare, bidding a fond farewell with, "May 'flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'" Borrowing from Horatio's valediction to the deceased Prince Hamlet, King Charles tapped into his own well-known Shakespeare fandom, what Richard Wilson characterizes as the king's "lifelong infatuation with Shakespearean theatre" (2017, 76). Now a monarch himself, Charles III lives and reigns, no longer in the shadow of his mother and about to embark on a precarious new era of the British nation and its fraying commonwealth alliances. How will Shakespeare function in this brave new world? The years ahead will reveal whether or not this royal Shakespeare fan will cite and perform the Bard's language to expand access for all of Britain's multicultural citizens to the fan communities circulating around and transforming the nation's playwright.
9. Acknowledgments
[9.1] I extend warm thanks to my friends and colleagues, Vanessa I. Corredera, Kristin N. Denslow, and Kylene Cave for their clarifying questions and feedback, and to the editors, Mel Stanfill, Kavita Mudan Finn, and Johnathan H. Pope for their review.