‘The Crown’ blurs the divide between fiction and royalty

LOS ANGELES — When “The Crown” returns on Wednesday after a two-year absence, Charles and Diana’s tumultuous marriage and further concerns for Queen Elizabeth II will take center stage in the drama series’ elegant but intrusive spotlight.

The drama has also been extended beyond the screen for the Netflix series, whose first season portrayed Elizabeth’s marriage in the late 1940s and its fifth season tackles the turbulent 1990s for the British royal family. The queen famously even labeled one year of that decade her own “annus horribilis,” Latin for “horrible year.”

The security of historical distance is erased in the 10 new episodes that take place in the recent memory of many and whose stories have been denounced without being released. Queen Elizabeth II’s death at age 96 in September adds a complicated dimension: We freely speculate on the celebrities before and after they leave, but is anything more owed to the beloved monarch with the longest reign of a country?

One of the prominent critics of the series is Judi Dench, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Elizabeth I in “Shakespeare in Love.” In a letter to The Times of London, the actress slammed elements of the series as “cruelly unfair to individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”

The actress requested that each episode include a notice to classify it as fiction. It’s a demand Netflix has heard before and continues to resist, calling the series a drama inspired by historical events. Series creator Peter Morgan was unavailable for comment, Netflix said.

Dench isn’t surprised by the streaming service’s intransigence.

“The time has come for Netflix to reconsider, for the sake of a family and nation so recently affected by the loss of a loved one, as a mark of respect to a sovereign who served her people so diligently for 70 years,” he wrote. .

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His request came after a rebuttal to the series from former Prime Minister John Major, who appears in the new season being lobbied by Prince Charles — who is now King Charles III — to help maneuver the queen’s abdication. A spokesperson for Major called the scene false and malicious.

Cast members, including Jonathan Pryce, who plays Elizabeth’s faithful husband, Prince Philip, differ from the naysayers.

“The queen is not in danger with ‘The Crown,'” Pryce told The Associated Press. She added that critics are lambasting the new season despite not knowing about it, reminding her of “the Mary Whitehouse effect,” named for British conservative activist Mary Whitehouse.

Whitehouse had “a huge following and was criticizing shows I had never seen,” he said. “I think that many of the protests this time are from people who have not seen the series. They do not know how these matters are dealt with. I have to say that they are treated with a lot of integrity and a lot of sensitivity.”

Imelda Staunton, who is the latest actress to take on the role of Isabel, defended the series, its award-winning creator and its viewers.

“I think it’s underestimating the audience,” Staunton told the AP. “There have been four seasons that people know have been written by Peter Morgan and his writing team.”

Morgan, screenwriter of the film “The Queen” and the play “The Audience,” both starring Oscar and Tony Award-winning actress Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, has played the role of royalty your specialty. Recent criticism might suggest that he faces a winter of more accusations, but Morgan has an easier job than another writer who used British monarchs as his raw material: William Shakespeare, who dramatized the reigns of seven monarchs.

They had all been kings in the past, Shakespeare lightly addressed the monarchs of his time Elizabeth I and James I.

“We all imagined it was sweetness and light, and we’ve all seen ‘Shakespeare in Love’ where everyone is sitting around drinking. It was actually like Stalinist Russia in many ways,” Shakespeare scholar Andrew Dickson said of the tightly controlled society in which the bard worked between 1585 and 1613.

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Plays were approved by the party master, a kind of civil servant with the power to censor, said Dickson, author of the books on Shakespeare’s theater “Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare’s Globe” and “The Globe Guide to Shakespeare.” Perpetrators could and were jailed and faced even more serious penalties for violations, he said.

“The few depictions of royalty recent to their time were quite flattering and even early audiences called them patriotic,” said Harvard professor Jeffrey R. Wilson, author of “Shakespeare and Trump” and “Richard III’s Bodies.” Theater in general was considered illusory and misleading, he said.

“He told that politicized version that was flattering to the powers that be at the time,” Wilson said. It became the “dominant framework for telling British royal history until the 18th and 19th centuries. It is now called ‘the Tudor myth,’” he added, referring to the House of Tudor that ruled for more than a century.

It’s just as problematic if people similarly start telling the Netflix series’ “fictionalized version of history” “as fact,” he added.

Lesley Manville, who plays Princess Margaret, the queen’s sister, this season, said it’s up to those in charge of “The Crown” whether or not to include a notice.

“For my part I can only be very clear that I am making a drama,” Manville said. “We never supported it as if it was anything other than a drama about the royal family, a world-famous family.”

Staunton said she was grateful that the series tackles a period that was “quite tumultuous and therefore creates a very good drama.” The actress blamed the recent protests on the series to the death of the queen.

“There’s no question that if we had launched the series two years ago there wouldn’t be that amount of sensitivity, which is completely understandable,” Staunton said. The actress herself said that she felt quite affected by the death of the queen, which she found out about a day after recording part of the sixth season of the series.

“’Why do I feel so affected?’” she recalled wondering. “But of course, he had been living with her for two and a half years” of preparation and production.

For Pryce, working on the series has given him a better understanding of the royal family.

“They have always been a part of society and it looks like they will be for a while,” he said. “I look forward to Carlos reigning, and to see what he can do to change things.”