The King's Speech Language and Communication Quotes

Bertie tends to smoke when he gets nervous about speaking because his physicians have told him that it relaxes his throat. This was actually a common medical opinion in the 30s, but Lionel Logue has no trouble seeing that the physicians are idiots.

When he first meets Logue, Bertie is understandably short-tempered. After all, he is the most powerful man in the world and he can barely say a word to this mere common man.

Logue's first order of business is to convince Bertie that his stuttering is a psychological problem and not a physiological one. He makes this first point by reminding Bertie that there's no stuttering when Bertie thinks or mutters to himself. That means there's something wrong with his ability to speak to other people.

Logue puts earphones over Bertie's head and asks him to read a speech from Hamlet. As the experiment shows, Bertie doesn't stutter at all when he can't hear himself speaking. So now it's a matter of figuring out why stress and self-consciousness keeps Bertie from speaking clearly.

For his next experiment, Logue asks Bertie to sing something for him to see if he stutters. But Bertie already knows that he doesn't stutter when he sings. Again, Logue proves to him that it's only in certain situations that he stutters.

Bertie's wife Elizabeth cheers Bertie up by telling him that his stutter was the reason she agreed to marry him. She didn't want to live in the public eye, but she figured that the press and public would leave her family alone if her husband couldn't speak.

When he finds out Logue has no credentials for speech therapy, Bertie accuses Logue of treason. He figures that Logue has made up all of his expertise just so he can trap the King of England into being his client. And worse yet, he's done this at a time when England needs a king to speak well.

Logue doesn't want Bertie thinking he should be listened to just because he's a king. Bertie deserves to be listened to because he's a man and he has a voice. And at this moment, Bertie accepts his own humanity and Logue supports him totally. Bertie deserves what all of us deserve, which is to be heard.

Logue needs to push Bertie pretty hard before Bertie realizes that he doesn't have some special privilege that no one else has. He's a man just like everyone else, and for that reason he deserves to be heard.

Logue's final demonstration that Bertie's stutter is psychological comes when he gets Bertie to go off on a swearing tirade. Of course Bertie doesn't stutter when he swears, because he doesn't even have time to think about what he's saying.