Hello, everyone. Thanks for providing this new forum, Weds. I'll contribute to some of the other topics after getting my bearings.
To introduce myself, some of you know me by another name from the Yahoo Richard III Society forum. This new user name comes from a poem that Shelley (the English Romantic poet) addressed to his wife's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, and has nothing to do with Richard III.
I first became interested in Richard through a graduate course in Shakespeare in the early 1980s. After learning that Shakespeare had altered the chronology, making Edmund of Rutland five years younger (and Richard at least ten years older) than he really was, and anachronistically using Margaret of Anjou to taunt Richard when she had in fact died in France in 1482, I wondered what else Shakespeare had exaggerated or altered in what was clearly a caricature rather than a portrait. Imagine my surprise on learning that even historians hostile to Richard exonerated him from at least half the "crimes" attributed to him and dismissed most of the "foul deformities" as inventions! My professor informed me that there was a Richard III Society and advised that I join it. Since then, I've read most of the contemporary and near-contemporary sources (I'll save my views on Mancini, Croyland, and "Saint" Thomas More for another thread), most of the biographies (a new pro-Richard bio is overdue in my opinion), and many Ricardian novels (some excellent, some mediocre or worse). But there's always much to learn and much to discuss about Richard, his associates, and his times, and I look forward to some stimulating conversations in this new forum in the near future.
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