Columbia Professor James Shapiro Determines How Shakespearean Is KING CHARLES III

Playwright Mike Bartlett has Broadway audiences absolutely gobsmacked at the Shakespearean style of his futuristic history play, KING CHARLES III.

Royal Shakespeare Company vet Tim Piggott-Smith, plays the current Prince of Wales who, after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, ascends to the throne. The play is written in blank verse, contains soliloquies and even has a ghost.

But Rebecca Mead of The New Yorker wanted to put it to the test, so she invited James Shapiro, Professor of English, at Columbia University and the author of "The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606," to offer his expert opinion.

"My first impression was to consider what's Shakespearean about it, and I started reading it the wrong way," Shapiro remarked before the performance.

"I was scanning the lines to see whether they follow the same metrical rules as Shakespeare-the ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. And that is not what this script is about. Yeah, it's iambic pentameter-but it turned out to be Shakespearean in much more unexpected and hard-to-capture ways."

He calls it "a great succession play," and explains that, "From the beginning of his career, up until HAMLET, Shakespeare made a living writing succession plays. It's tougher to do than you think. Especially with a play like RICHARD III, where everybody knows how it ends, there have to be twists. With this play, you kind of know which way it is heading, but you can't figure out how it's going to get there."

During intermission, the professor observed, "There is always one speech about what England is-'this sceptr'd isle,' in RICHARD II-where Shakespeare stops and tells you what this nation is about. I am seeing how deep the anxiety is, not just about the monarchy but about England, in this play. All the institutions are threatening to unravel."

"The other thing is that Charles is going to be a terrible king. He reminds me a lot of King James, who followed the first Queen Elizabeth: really smart, waited forever to get the English Crown, and then was wrong-footed almost immediately."

"Have you ever played RICHARD II? You just did," Shapiro told Piggott-Smith post-performance.

Though the actor explains that though Prince Charles has not seen the play, he strongly believes that someone saw it on his behalf during its West End run.

"We received a note at the Almeida to the effect that Charles doesn't wear his wedding ring."

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The Queen is dead. After a lifetime of waiting, Prince Charles ascends the throne. A future of power lies before him...but how to rule? Winner of the 2015 Olivier Award for Best New Play, King Charles IIIis the "bracingly provocative and outrageously entertaining" (The Independent) drama of political intrigue by Mike Bartlett that comes to Broadway following a sensational West End run. Directed byRupert Goold and deemed "the most insightful and engrossing new history play in decades" by Ben Brantley of The New York Times, this "bold and brilliant" (The Times of London) production explores the people underneath the crowns, the unwritten rules of Britain's democracy and the conscience of its most famous family.