It is a cliché that the English get their history from Shakespeare and their theology from Milton. As a result of Shakespeare’s rewriting of history for the purposes of drama, Henry V is a national hero and Richard III a national villain. The influence of the history plays on subsequent perceptions of pre-Elizabethan history is widely recognized; their influence on later English history is less well documented. In this article I shall show how certain public, polemical, and parodic perceptions of the future George IV, up to and during the Regency years, were mediated through Shakespeare.

The most socially and politically influential art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was caricature. In the 1790s James Gillray developed a reputation as one of the foremost artists of his age; his works 'were bought up with unparalleled eagerness, and circulated not only throughout England, but all over Europe'. Nathaniel Wraxall wrote of the famous ' Carlo Khan' prints in which James Sayers attacked C. J. Fox, 'It is difficult to conceive the moral operation and wide diffusion of these caricatures through every part of the country.'