A. Who are these people?
B. Why on Earth is Lady Anne even slightly tempted by this Sleemo?
Evidently Jennifer shared my second question, and it's been discussed on her blog and was brought up in class yesterday.
To answer my first question I turned to Wikipedia. I spent the next several hours examining the succession of kings, genealogies, and personal histories of the people who appear in the play. The women and the princes interested me the most. Evidently Elizabeth, Edward IV’s wife, was not born into a noble family and they had a secret marriage, despite his betrothal to a French princess. Sounds like the plot of a Romance Novel, but it’s history which makes it all the more fascinating as you don’t have to suspend disbelief, and even if you do have disbelief you can banish or suppress it permanently without being thought crazy. Then there are all the people who rose in society because they were related to her, two of whom show up in Richard III and get beheaded, including John of Norfolk who got his title, lands, and money by marrying a rich noble widow more than three times his age, and this is also interesting. I got very excited reading about so many stories, including the references to Historical Fiction based on them. It was like reading the descriptions of a dozen or more different interesting sounding fanfictions of life and history; and so I was reminded that I do actually like History, and that that is one of the main reasons I like reading Lord of the Rings, its appendices, and the Silmarillion and why I read the extended Universe Star Wars books… I like History, and the depth and breadth of the countless stories and versions of countless people and incidents throughout time.
Anyways, it was nice to feel a bit more familiar with who the people were and how they are remembered by history with all their interactions with eachother before I got into the play's account of the intrigues, relationships, deaths, and so forth. History, now, isn’t so sure that Richard III was nearly as guilty as his successors claimed (Lianna went into this with her recent blog post on him), and so it may be, for example, that his romance with the Lady Anne (whom he probably knew as a child) is not so very dreadful. Also, Clarence is portrayed as near saint-like in the play, but Wikipedia shows him more as someone looking to see which king he gains more advantage by following, more wishy-washy and ambitious seeming than noble. I wondered when Margaret started cursing people that she complimented Buckingham, as he had seemed in the article I read on him to be as likely to be a contriving villain as any of them, but then he did show that more villainous side by helping Richard out later in the play, so I guess Margaret just didn't know or didn't care about his machinations.
