National Public Radio recently featured a story on the discovery of the skeleton of Richard III, the English king that Shakespeare fans love to hate. What does the unearthing of the king’s 15th century remains have to tell the 21st century?
The woman who found him, Philippa Langley, is decribed by NPR as “an amateur historian with a passion for Richard III. And one day, a good decade ago, her research took her into Leicester, and she had a kind of bizarre experience in a car park in Leicester, where she suddenly thought, for no particular reason at all, that she was standing on Richard’s grave. And at that moment, she just said to herself, ‘I just want to excavate Richard.'”
It was as if Richard III was sending a message.
“It happened in stages. The remarkable thing was that they actually found it on the first day of the dig. They were just preparing the ground and [archaeologist Jo Appleby] found a small bit of leg, a leg bone. So she carries on digging, and gradually she uncovers this complete curved spine, and it connects up with the neck, and she sits back and she looks at it, and she says to herself, ‘This is Richard III.’
“The statistical likelihood of them hitting the skeleton is zero — there were so many coincidences and chances that made this happen. …
“The radiocarbon dating showed the man had died at the right time to be somebody who had died at the Battle of Bosworth. The anatomy of the man matched very precisely the phyiscal descriptions we have of Richard. For example, he’s described quite clearly as being quite a frail man, and that is exactly how the skeleton is.”
Richard’s defenders have always said that Shakespeare may have written an amazing play, but he gave Richard a bad rap. Since I have a tendency to believe the truth of fiction more than the facts of history, I better stay out of the argument and let you read the rest of the story for yourself. More here.
Art: Richard III (Reuters)
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