MOVED from MAIN - "sequels" to the classics

[Carol]

Heidi wrote:
> Which leads to the slightly twisty questions posed by Josephine
Tey's The Daughters of Time, in which a bedridden London detective 
investigates the destruction of the reputation of Richard III by a 
series of Tudor kings and queens, culminating in Shakespeare's play
where Richard was nothing but evil.
> 
> You could say that the Tey novel is fanfic, and it is fanfic-esque,
but it really is meta in narrative form. The author has a theory and
she tells it via a novel.
>
Carol responds:

"Daughter of Time" is loads of fun if you like detective fiction
(though I disagree with some of her conclusions), as is "The Murders
of Richard III" by Elizabeth Peters, which is about members of the
Richard III Society who dress as characters, erm, historical figures
related to Richard's life story, and are mysteriously being murdered
in ways that match the version of their deaths in Shakespeare's
"Richard III."

But if you want a depiction of Richard himself as a character in a
novel set in his own time, you need to look elsewhere. I own a number
of Ricardian novels, including "The Broken Sword" by Rhoda Edwards and
"The White Boar" by Marian Palmer. I thought I owned "We Speak No
Treason" by Rosemary Hawley Jarman. I still think that "The Sunne in
Splendour" by Sharon Kay Penman is the best of the lot if you can get
past "we be" and other attempts to make the dialogue resemble
fifteenth-century English. It's certainly the most detailed and
carefully researched of the books listed, including the much earlier
"Daughter of Time." I also own a number of Richard-related books that
either are or purport to be scholarly, including some that are so
venomously anti-Richard that the very lack of objectivity argues
against their case. I was amazed, when I first started researching the
subject after reading Shakespeare's "Richard III" and the related
history plays, wondering how many of Richard's defects and crimes
Shakespeare had exaggerated and knowing that he had placed Richard as
Duke of Gloucester in a battle that took place when he was eight, to
discover that even most of the anti-Richard authors concede that he
wasn't deformed and didn't murder his own wife or the sixteen-year-old
Edward of Lancaster, who died in battle (Richard, who led the vanguard
in the same battle, was seventeen at the time, almost a year to the
day older than the slain Edward).

Anyway, it's all very interesting (to me) and I may well go back to my
earlier obsession with Richard as a substitute or antidote to the loss
of the WW. (Not that I don't still care about the HP books, but
they're no longer as important to me as they were before DH, whereas
Richard's life, character, and motives are an ongoing mystery about
which there's no JKR to have the last word.)

Carol, who let her membership in the RIII Society expire to cut
expenses but still has boxes of their publications that she can't
bring herself to recycle or throw away