In a news cycle where the separation of fact and fiction grows increasingly impossible and “you couldn’t make it up” is the standard reaction to every new headline, Dame Judi Dench scored a small victory for truth last week by obliging the streaming giant Netflix to acknowledge that, actually, sometimes you can and do make it up. In a letter to the Times, Dench accused Netflix of misleading viewers of its royal drama The Crown by failing to warn that it’s not “wholly true”. A disclaimer was subsequently added to the new season trailer, stating that the show is a “fictional dramatisation”, “inspired by real events”.
Dench’s objection was that the series, created by Peter Morgan, “seems willing to blur the lines between historical accuracy and crude sensationalism”. Someone, not unreasonably, pointed out on Twitter that this was the same Judi Dench who’d won an Oscar for her portrayal of another Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, a film that imagined the greatest dramatist ever to grace the English language capering around like a Terry Jones-style female impersonator while struggling to finish a play called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter.
Not the same thing, you may say. The film is obviously comedy, while Shakespeare is dead and so is his immediate family, therefore we’re at liberty to dress him up however we like, put words in his mouth and impute any motives, emotions or behaviours to him with no harm done. After all, it’s no more than he did to a long line of historical figures with lasting effect, most notably Richard III, whose personal brand has been tarnished for four centuries as a result of Shakespeare’s penchant for sensationalism.
But it’s those four centuries that make all the difference when it comes to the ethics of whether inventing – and potentially misrepresenting – the thoughts and feelings of real people is legitimate or “cruelly unjust”, as Dench put it. The Crown may have started out as historical drama but, by season 5, it has shifted closer to verbatim theatre; we’ve only just watched the conclusion to its main character’s narrative arc in real time. At the heart of Dench’s complaint, and the responses to it, are questions about rights and responsibilities: does an author have the right to invent the inner life of real people, particularly those still living or recently deceased, and does historical fiction or drama have a responsibility to educate its audience accurately or merely to entertain?
These are questions that every writer of historical novels is asked in every interview and book festival Q&A. No one has wrestled with them more comprehensively or thoughtfully than another beloved dame, the late Hilary Mantel, whose 2017 Reith lectures focused on the novelist’s role in interpreting the past. “If you can locate the area of doubt,” she said, “that’s where you go to work.”
With figures such as Shakespeare or Thomas Cromwell, that’s less problematic. While much is known about their lives, there are gaps in the record where a writer of fiction can speculate, working back from the facts. But the same might also be argued of the current royal family; the historian Philip Murphy wrote in response to Dench’s letter, pointing out that Buckingham Palace had obtained an absolute exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, effectively blocking historians from access to official records on the monarch. If scholars are denied this material, he says, “the field will be left to dramatists and those with a vested interest in leaking information”. In other words, if they’d let us look behind the curtain, we wouldn’t need to make it up.
The bigger question is: does it matter? Does a dramatist have a duty of care to a public figure and to the audience for whom this imagined version might be their first or only contact with the historical material? Mantel thought it did: “You can select, elide, highlight, omit. Just don’t cheat,” she advised. I tend to agree – up to a point. When I started writing historical crime novels featuring the 16th-century Italian philosopher and heretic Giordano Bruno, I was conscious that, for many English readers, these stories might be their introduction to Bruno’s life and work, and I wanted to do justice to a man who was – as I see it – charismatic, flawed but ultimately courageous in his defence of free thought. Genre fiction arguably gives greater room for artistic embellishment, but it has always mattered to me to stay true to the spirit of who Bruno was, even if that’s only my interpretation. The idea that he was involved in foiling conspiracies against Elizabeth I while working as a spy in London was not my invention, but inspired by a theory put forward by the late historian John Bossy. Prof Bossy took the trouble to write to me after the first two books were published to tell me he thought they were silly, which I suppose is better than cruelly unjust, although he objected less to my imaginative licence and more to the fact that he thought I hadn’t given his book proper credit in a footnote. (It might be noted that his theory was itself regarded as fanciful by a number of fellow academic historians; in the end, we are all telling stories, building interpretation upon interpretation.)
Season 5 of The Crown approaches the final years of Princess Diana’s life and there is a case for saying it’s unethical to make what is essentially a glossy soap opera out of the lives of people, many still living, who were daily turned into a drama by the tabloids, with fatal consequences. But that would be tantamount to saying that some stories are off limits. People will always be fascinated by the gaps in the record; dramatists will always want to feel their way into those unknowable conversations in private rooms that went on to shape events in the public sphere. We don’t turn to historical fiction or drama for literal reconstruction, but for understanding and – if the writer has done a good enough job – empathy. But as Mantel reminds us, we should be always asking: “Who is telling me this and why does he want me to believe it?”
• Stephanie Merritt’s latest novel is Storm
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
