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In 1925, Albert, Duke of York, began seeing a speech therapist to correct his pronounced speech impediment. Eleven years later, he reluctantly ascended to the British throne as King George VI, after his older brother Edward VIII abdicated to marry the American Wallis Simpson.
As the king, George VI was expected to frequently address his nation, both in person and on the radio. During these public speaking engagements, he continued to rely heavily on his speech therapist, Australian Lionel Logue, to make sure he didn't stammer.
King George VI's relationship with Logue is at the heart of director Tom Hooper's historical drama, The King's Speech. The film stars Colin Firth as King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Logue, who developed his somewhat unorthodox way of treating speech impediments while treating shell-shocked soldiers in the years following World War I.
\"What I learned about stammering was that, when as a young child you lose the confidence of anyone who wants to listen to you, you lose confidence in your voice and the right to speech,\" says Hooper. \"And a lot of the therapy was saying, 'You have a right to be heard.' \"
Follow Us On Twitter googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1537475330107-0'); }); The King's Speech at Chicago Shakespeare Theater The King's Speech Chicago Shakespeare Theater 800 East Grand Avenue Chicago Paralyzed by his stammer and unable to speak to a nation in crisis, King George VI ascends the throne as England stands on the brink of war once again with Germany. Enter Lionel Logue, an Australian migrant with a career path as unexpected as the king's. The remarkable true story of this unlikely bond between a reluctant king and a charismatic subject that inspired the Academy Award-winning film is now brought to the stage, where writer David Seidler first imagined it.
In order to explore the intersections of class, technology, and disability manifest within The King's Speech, it is first necessary to contextualize the work's culturally determined representation of stuttering in modern history. Over the past thirty years writers such as Benson Bobrick and Marc Shell have offered useful overviews of how stuttering and speech pathology have figured in the historical imagination as evidence either of moral deviance or medical abnormality. 7 However, their work, while essential to an understanding of cultural attitudes towards non-normative speech, engages only tangentially with the vibrant and diverse field we now call Critical Disability Studies. More recently, there have been vigorous calls to consider speech production specifically within the framework of disability theory across humanistic disciplines including history, rhetoric, film and media, literary criticism, and art history. 8 Joshua St. Pierre has noted that although \"disabled speech\" has begun to \"gain some much-needed attention within disability studies, the lived experience of the disabled speaker remains underdeveloped and obscured.\" 9 His own rigorous analysis of \"disabled speech\" has been crucial in this regard, and his call to gather \"stuttering from the fringes of disability theory\" situates his work at the forefront of what some have called \"Dysfluency Studies.\" 10
This essay engages work already underway not just by bringing more attention to the role of speech impediments in cinema or by arguing for the consideration of disfluency within disability theory more broadly, but also by interrogating the impact that those representations have had upon the stuttering community at large. I would suggest that even the global popularity, critical acclaim, and financial success of The King's Speech cannot mitigate the manner through which it does, at times, troublingly perpetuate misleading theories surrounding the genesis of vocal disfluency. For while the story at the heart of the film has appealed to millions of film-goers worldwide, The King's Speech nonetheless obfuscates modern scientific and critical understanding of communication disorders by rendering stuttering as a moral failure rather than by attempting to understand it as a socially-constructed condition contingent upon established societal and temporal norms.
To begin delineating these various critical strains I focus on the ways in which Hooper (as director) and Seidler (as screenwriter) construct the film's protagonist as simultaneously vocally disabled and royally entitled in a modern world clinging desperately to archaic cultural traditions even as it is being fundamentally changed by emergent media technologies. Hooper's attention to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and its wireless radio as national mechanisms for war and empire figure prominently in the human drama swirling around the personal struggle of one man reluctant to embrace his compulsory role in the established rituals of British royalty. By reading Hooper's strategic deployment of the wireless radio alongside Seidler's troubled representation of class and his fraught invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet as the film's governing tropes, we may better understand current attitudes towards disability within the context of royalty, patriarchy, and national identity (the film's other major concerns). The King's Speech is a film whose image of modern kingship grounds itself upon a notion of imperial authority as technologically constructed but ultimately disabled (and I use that term deliberately) by a national fantasy of historical wholeness in the fabricated kinship between a monarch and his people.
One of the achievements of The King's Speech is the way in which the film manages to capture the anxiety and terror many stutterers experience when confronted with the prospect of public speaking. 11 Hooper uses a range of cinematic techniques in the opening sequence of the film to dramatize socially imperative verbal performance by rendering emotional tension through the media technology that emblematized Britain's modern imperial structure. Even before we meet Prince Albert, Duke of York, (the future King George VI who is known in the film as \"Bertie\"), the title sequence treats us to a nearly empty room with a single microphone (see figure 2). The camera then cuts to close-up shots of the mic from different angles. No human figures appear within the frame for several minutes, just shots of the wireless mic from various positions. When Hooper cuts away from the microphone, he focuses upon Bertie dressed in formalwear, a conspicuous paper (the king's speech!) in hand. A tight shot of the speech follows, and then Hooper cuts in close to focus upon Bertie's mouth before cutting to a BBC broadcaster preparing to introduce the Duke's first official radio broadcast. Miriam Burstein notes how in this sequence the \"BBC announcer gargles, sprays, warms up his vocal chords, and calculates his distance from the microphone before launching into his introduction,\" concluding that such imagery demonstrates \"that there is nothing natural about public speaking on the wireless.\" 12 Burstein is right to highlight the manner in which the film portrays (at least in these early scenes) human speech and public oratory in particular as profoundly unnatural. Though she does not connect the inorganic nature of speaking on the radio to Bertie's own vocal disability, one can see in the preparations of the BBC announcer that speech in modern imperial Britain has become a professional exercise. Ironically, the creation of \"perfect\" human speech, the product made possible through the technological innovation of wireless radio, masks the artifice it demands.
Being unable to control their speech in such a way that conforms to institutionally and culturally enforced temporal modalities, stutterers are, to put it simply, disempowered by a system that demands fluent speech. Hence the advent of medicalized speech-language pathology in the modern era and its dominant therapeutic programs, which seek to shape disfluent speech into the kinds of acceptable temporal embodiments Freeman describes. The explicit goal of speech therapist Lionel Logue (portrayed in the film by Geoffrey Rush) is to (en)force Bertie's speech into culturally accepted (and culturally determined) rhythms that appear \"normal\" according to established British social ritual. What Freeman calls \"chrononormativity\" seems a useful concept here, which she identifies as \"the use of time to organize individual human bodies in the service of maximum productivity.\" 17 Within the context of The King's Speech, the definition of productivity for royal figures with regard to speech imagines verbal performance as a perfunctory display of monarchical authority. Fluent speech, the film reiterates, is a necessary component of royal performance.
Even beyond its specific desire for chononormativity, The King's Speech is a film obsessed with temporality in general. In its opening scene, for example, a BBC agent tells Bertie before his first public speech, \"Just take your time.\" As the phrase normative speakers most commonly hurl at stutterers, \"Just take your time\" is also uttered to Bertie in the film's second scene by a royal physician who has been tasked with \"curing\" him. The phrase is voiced yet again in a crucial flashback wherein Bertie's father, King George V (Michael Gambon) exhorts him to \"take [his] time\" even while displaying clear impatience over his son's hesitated speech. Continually required to regulate his body in relation to others' temporal expectations, Bertie cannot help but be reminded of his inability to do so. As he later responds to Logue's humorous query about whether he knows any jokes, Bertie replies, \"Timing isn't my strong suit.\" Bertie's ironic quip, while offering a bit of comic relief in an awkward moment between patient and therapist, nonetheless acknowledges the central role that temporality plays with regard to communication disorders (and disability more broadly). Indeed, time is precisely the stutterer's problem. 18
By presenting Bertie's speechlessness not just as a crisis of personal tragedy but one of class failure, The King's Speech thus situates compulsory fluency as an essential component of modern kingship. The Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter) tells Logue in their first meeting that, \"My husband is required to speak publicly.\" (emphasis mine) Lionel replies wittily: \"Perhaps he should change jobs,\" to which she replies, \"He can't.\" Note the passive construction of the Duchess's claim here, that Bertie \"is required to speak,\" a syntactic formation that reflects external coercion. What the exchange demonstrates is the way in which much of Bertie's compulsion to speak emanates from his class position, and more specifically from his role as a member of the royal family and the directives of his father the king. 59ce067264