A confession: I have gotten caught up in the hype around Spare, Prince Harry’s ghostwritten memoir that sold more than 3.2 million copies in its first week.

Spare feeds us “bombshell” revelations and lurid accusations – exclusive content that has promoted Harry to royalty status on the interview circuit. Widespread media attention has been devoted to what should probably have been kept between the prince and his therapist.

It’s hypocrisy – why shout your story to the masses while claiming you crave a private life, away from the evil, omnipresent media’s scrutiny?

But that’s not the only mixed message – Harry condemns the monarchy yet refuses to renounce his title. He tells Anderson Cooper, when asked about it point blank, “What would be the point?”

Hmmm, Harry, wouldn’t it actually justify most, if not all, of your points?

In Spare, we learn about the relationship between Harry and his brother, as well as Harry and his father. We hear one-sided accounts of neglect, shame, blame and mistreatment.

It’s a modern-era Shakespearean tragedy that mimics the classics: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth … and now the reign of King Charles III. Shakespeare knew that tales of tortured royals would entertain the masses in his day – but could even the Bard have predicted how fascinated the world would still be by today’s royal drama?

Despite Harry’s efforts to make Charles III one of the bad guys, interesting similarities between the father-son duo are unveiled.

Both men have committed themselves, albeit with significant sacrifice and jeopardy to their positions, to women. And divorced women, at that, which has historically set off crises within the monarchy.

This has played out in the past: Britons endured King Edward VIII’s abdication to be with divorced American socialite Wallace Simpson. Going way back, there’s Henry VIII’s infamous six marriages, the schism with the papacy and the advent of the Church of England.

Charles and Harry seem searching for something maternal that’s missing from their lives. There has been reputable documentation and even more speculation that the relationship between Charles and his mother was distant and detached, at times even cold, particularly during his youth.

A generation later, the world watched a young Harry tragically lose his mother. The devastating loss of Princess Diana had a profound effect on the boy, with repercussions reverberating throughout his adolescence and early adulthood.

In the motherly voids, Freudian allusions emerge for father and son. In 1989, Charles told Camilla that he wished to be in her “trousers,” even as her “tampon.” About 22 years later, Harry suffered frostbite in a most vulnerable place, ultimately treating the injury by rubbing his mother’s favorite lip balm on his chapped penis.

Pretty cringy TMI from our British friends.

And, as if William Shakespeare was penning the saga himself, it’s riddled with irony:

Harry, in taking a defiant public stance against his father, has revealed just how similar they are.

Harry, still wanting to be part of the monarchy that has done him so much wrong.

Harry, now eagerly embracing the very media who he claims has caused him so much grief.

And that’s our final lesson from classic literature – how the temptation of fortune so often leads us down paths we would normally not travel.

I can’t speak to Harry’s true motives for giving the world Spare – I wish that he had kept his personal healing journey to himself, his therapist, and his family.

But that option would not have been as financially rewarding or generated as much worldwide fanfare.

Perhaps we’ll see Spare one day performed on stage like the Shakespearean tragedy it is.

 

Jennifer Sharpe is deputy editor of The Journal Record, a publication of BridgeTower Media.