William Shakespeare had it about right: don’t write about kings and queens until they are long dead, otherwise the backlash might have been uncomfortably sharp – an axe rather than a quill, in those pre-Twitter days. Could Henry V speak French? Of course he could. Was Richard III a villain straight out of melodrama? No. But safely dead, they could be celebrated or pilloried at will.
Peter Morgan (no Shakespeare he, alas) has no such excuse. But how could The Crown pass up the events of the early 1990s without dramatising them? The spectacular break-up of the royal marriages, the Windsor Castle fire, the annus horribilis. It’s just a bit of a shame that they have all been endlessly picked over for real. How can drama compete, except by making stuff up?
