What could be more Shakespearean than a ghost?

In the final series of the Netflix programme The Crown, Princess Diana will appear as a ghost. We are told that her apparitions will be ‘thoughtful and sensitive’ – which is rather disappointing for anyone hoping for her to have a recurring role, like Marty Hopkirk in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), perhaps wearing that white dress she wore to the British Fashion Awards. Yet this has not stopped the ‘friends of the King’ from saying that the programme has lost all the credibility it had in its earlier years. It is true that, in the first series, The Crown was more like Shakespeare than soap opera, with actors trained at the RSC delivering grand speeches about the nature of monarchy. But what could be more Shakespearean than a ghost?

It depends, of course, on what the poor ghost shall unfold. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, it was generally understood that ghosts appeared ‘for the instructing and terrifying of the lyving’ – as Ludwig Lavater put it in his 1569 treatise De Spectris. According to Lavater, it is also ‘an horrible and heynous offence, if a man give no succoure to such as seeke it at his hands, especially if it be the soule of his parents, brethren or sisters’.

And this is what Shakespeare’s ghosts do: they seek the succoure of revenge for foul and most unnatural murder. In The Lion King – a far more Shakespearean epic than The Crown could ever be – Mufasa’s spirit tells Simba to take up his destiny (which is just Disney for avenge his foul and unnatural murder).

But this is not, apparently, what Princess Diana’s ghost will do. She is, says Netflix’s advance publicity, going to tell her husband that he looked handsome in the hospital, and Her Majesty the Queen to be more comfortable with her emotions.