While Penman’s use of the fully-omniscient voice is well done, and while a book that covers an entire lifetime must necessarily have some exposition to condense or skip over events, there are limits. The quote above also illustrates my last complaint: too much exposition. Thus, every character sounds like everybody else, and everyone sounds like the narrator. This sentence structure appears on every page, usually multiple times. Here’s another:Īnne had expressed confidence that Edward would relent, had promised that Richard would keep on urging Edward on her behalf. It’s a structure that states a basic fact, adds another after a comma. In addition, Penman has a peculiar syntactical tic that she uses everywhere. The author throws in other archaisms, too, albeit with less frequency, but overall they comprise an irksome feature to her dialogue. As example, the word “be” replaces “is” in many places throughout, as in “You be well aware that…”, “It be only that I would not see you hurt,” and “It be sweet of you to worry about me,” three quotes pulled from the same scene.

Dates are obtrusively plunked into the narrative, and Penman’s attempt to make the dialogue sound archaic quickly becomes tiresome. From the use of now-obsolete or obscure terms such as “garderobe” and “oyer and terminer” to descriptive bits about daily medieval life, the book is detailed in its descriptions. Unfortunately, Penman sometimes takes this a bit too far. The novel is steeped in scholarship, and Penman’s painstaking research is obvious on every page. Now that I have, I’m glad I did, but the book is not without flaws. My friend Barb, who knew of my curiosity on the topic, recommended I read Sharon Kay Penman’s historical opus, The Sunne in Splendour, a historical novel about Richard III. Shakespeare, generally quite good at character motivation and development, has shoehorned this relationship into his play, telling us “Just roll with it.” I’ve read analyses of the play, pored through the variorum of the play, all to no avail. The complete implausibility of this scene has always puzzled me. Afterward, astonished, Richard asks us:Īnswer: No. It’s the scene where Richard accosts Lady Anne during a funeral procession and, in the course of a few hundred lines, steers her from unmitigated loathing all the way ’round the bend to a point where she warms to his affection, accepts his ring, and considers his suit for her hand in marriage. A long-standing obsession of mine has been act 1, scene 2, from Shakespeare’s Richard III.

The sunne in splendour review