Anyone who knows me even a little knows of my appetite for history and historical novels. Since I’m always reading about one ruling dynasty or another, my husband has stopped keeping track of when I’m talking about true accounts or fictional ones, or whether I’m talking about emperors, tsars, or kings. As a result, my husband has condensed all my books—and films, for that matter—of this nature to the generalized category “lords and ladies”. This isn’t even a little bit accurate. Worse, he’ll occasionally rent a “lords and ladies” movie that turns out not to have any lords OR ladies in it, but the gentlemen wear suits and the women have ostrich-feather fans and everybody has some sort of foreign accent and that, to him, is close enough.
While I love all those stories, I have recently noticed some major, repeated problems with them.
1. I don’t ever really know what anyone’s name is. In any of these stories. Okay, because one week I’ll have a book about a real woman named Elizabeth Woodville, and the next week I’m reading a fake story about Emma Woodhouse and THOSE ARE REMARKABLY SIMILAR. Now, please let me interject here that I am not a stupid person. I wouldn’t say I’m smart, but I’m not entirely dumb, either, and it seems like you shouldn’t have to have advanced degrees to sort out the forty Lady Annes and eighteen different “Edwards” in one single book. Furthermore, a book may even have more than one royal Edward, so “Prince” gets added on and you then have to keep track of 12 different “Prince” Edwards, too. (Seems like if there are really that many princes running around all the time I wouldn’t have married some commoner dude and have to live in a regular house and do my own errands, but whatever.)
This is why my visualizations of fifteenth century England are chock-full of men in suits of armor with “Hello, my name is” stickers on the breast. And every name has a different initial after it, just like the first day of school in any grade, ever, when there are thirteen boys named Zack but it’s all “Zack C.” and “Zack M.” and “Zak B.” and “Zachary J.”
Some sort of Edward.
However, even initials wouldn’t be enough to sort out all the various princes and nobles because of another major naming issue: titles. Titles are the reason I got halfway through The White Queen, thoroughly hating this dude Warwick, before I finally went “wait, Warwick IS Richard Neville? How did I miss that?” But you see, Richard Neville was the Earl of Warwick, (which everybody knows, right?) And as though two very fancy sounding names weren’t enough, he also had a nickname. The Kingmaker. Which sounds awesome as nicknames go. It’s almost as cool as T-Bone would have been, if George Costanza had gotten that as a nickname instead of “Coco”.
Edward DEADWARD, am I right?
Aside from the redundancy of names of people, there’s also the redundancy of. . . just. . . names of any noun in general. So I spent a whole book reading about the Lancaster family line, but then there are battles in LancaSHIRE and I’m supposed to be keeping all this straight when I’m still identifying “Hello, my name is” badges on soldiers in a battle happening in my brain?!? And it’s then that I go into a downward spiral contemplating Places in England and feel majorly ripped off that I spent my entire life learning to pronounce “Worcestershire” (as in the sauce. Obviously.) only to find out that the real Englishers pronounce it “Worstershire”. THAT’S A WHOLE SYLLABLE I DIDN’T NEED TO LEARN.
Edward the Alabaster, Duke of Emo. His hair refused to be tamed by any mortal hat.
Clearly, I do not have the proper certification to read anything remotely historical. I might do better to rely on sci-fi (or syfy? Do we spell it “syfy” now?), in which the all the names are supposed to be alien, but not to the point of being Brothers-Karamazov-alien. In sci-fi the characters have names that read like the author didn’t want to try that hard so he/she just took regular names and messed with the spelling. So you get “Jenha” and “Ki-el” and nobody worries about identity confusion. In those cases, readers only have to puzzle out stuff like “ice-9” and “ansibles”, which are CLEARLY easier to comprehend than which Henry fought at Agincourt and which Henry, you know, killed all his wives.*
One of those wives. She thought she could distract him with her triangle hat, but alas, he noticed the no eyebrows.
*It was Henry V at Agincourt, and Henry VIII who killed all the wives. Just like Bluebeard!
Canny Gal 