MOVED from MAIN - "sequels" to the classics

[Carol]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "a_svirn" <a_svirn at ...> wrote:
>
> > Carol, who still has grave reservations about fanfic and none
> > whatsoever about *good* historical novels
> 
> a_svirn:
> By "good" you mean those with a right bias? Because you have to
limit that Shakespeare's history plays are pretty good – as works of
art, that is. Richard III is certainly a masterpiece.
>
Carol responds:

By "good," I mean well-written and well-researched. I do, of course,
prefer historical fiction with a Ricardian (pro-Richard) or a Yorkist
bias, but I'm not confusing my own preferences with good writing. (I
edit for a living, remember, and I know bad writing and bad editing
and inadequate research when I encounter it.)

As for Shakespeare's "Richard III," I think Paul Murray Kendall summed
it up beautifully: "The forceful moral pattern of [the Tudor historian
Polydore] Vergil, the vividness of [Sir Thomas] More, the fervor of
[Edward] Hall, and the dramatic exuberance of Shakespeare have endowed
the tudor myth with a vitality that is one of the wonders of the
world. What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for
history" (Paul Murray Kendall, "Richard the Third," New York and
London: Norton, 1956, p. 514).

So the problem is that, as a work of art, Shakespeare's "Richard III"
is *too* good, too memorable, so that many people prefer his
hunchbacked serial murderer with a withered arm to the quiet, pious,
reforming, and undeformed young king who had the misfortune to die
childless (his "natural" son and daughter didn't count in the
succession) and have his name dragged through the mud by a successor
whose claim to the throne of England was neglible. Yes, he made
mistakes, but he was a good man who tried to be a good king, and he
was eloquently mourned by the people of York, who knew him best: "King
Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was . . . . piteously slain
and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City" (quoted Kendall,
444 and many other places).

Carol, wondering what the history of England would have been like had
Richard not died before his thirty-third birthday