February 4, 2013
THE HUMILIATION OF RICHARD III
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/the-humiliation-of-richard-iii.html#ixzz2KRc0bWDh
How does one recognize the bones of a king? At a press conference at the University of Leicester on Monday, a team of scientists and archeologists announced that a skeleton found under a parking lot was that of Richard III. From the moment they dug it up, last fall, they’d thought it might be him, because of all the places his body was broken, with multiple blows to the head; a scoliotic curve in his spine; and the way he’d been left near the church but not in any tomb, with his hands tied behind his back—everything un-regal recalled this king. That’s now been confirmed with radio-carbon testing and a match with the maternal DNA of two descendants of Richard’s sister. (One of them is Michael Ibsen, a furniture maker from Canada; the other wanted to remain anonymous.) “Beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed at Greyfriars in September, 2012, is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England,” Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist, said at the press conference.
Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth, in 1485, by the forces of Henry Tudor. He was thirty-two years old, and the last King of England to die in battle. There were different rumors about what happened to his body, which will now be re-buried at Leicester Cathedral. One involved him being thrown in a river, another in the ground near Greyfriars. Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” which portrays Richard as a hunchbacked villain, murdering his brother and nephews and then trying to marry his niece, doesn’t exactly say, though Derby’s lines as he hands Henry his crown (“Lo, here, this long-usurped royalty / From the dead temples of this bloody wretch / Have I pluck’d off, to grace thy brows withal”) are consistent with historical accounts saying that the body was stripped.
So is the damage done to it. Jo Appleby, an osteoarchaeologist who was part of the team, said that there were eight wounds to the skull alone, several with a bladed weapon or “something similar to a halberd,” and that it was “hard to understand how any of these injuries could have been caused if this individual had been wearing a protective helmet.” (She might have watched the Super Bowl last night.) The wounds on Richard’s face looked like they may have been inflicted after death, and represent ” humiliation injuries.”
There were other injuries, too, that could not have been made if his armor was still on: a cut to his ribs; and, most brutally, an injury to the right pelvis, “highly consistent with being a blade wound from a weapon, perhaps a knife or dagger, which came from behind in an upward movement”:
Detailed three-dimensional reconstruction of the pelvis has indicated that this injury was caused by a thrust through the right buttock, not far from the midline of the body.… Historical sources suggest that Richard’s naked body was flung over a horse after the Battle of Bosworth before being carried back to Leicester. Whilst we can never be certain of what happened, if so this would have provided an ideal opportunity for a wound such as this to be inflicted as a symbolic act of humiliation to the body.
If Richard was sodomized with a sword it may have been preferable that the act followed, rather than caused, his death.
What story would we tell if we found, unnamed and unfamiliar, the body of a man with a physical disability who had been bound, his head crushed, his body mutilated? Would it tell us something about warfare and its lack of limits (it does anyway), or about who a society valued and why? Last month, the Times reported on the discovery of a far more ancient set of bones, of a boy who lived four thousand years ago and seems to have survived for a decade after a congenital condition had fused his vertebrae and left him “bent and crippled by disease,” unable to walk. That story was offered as proof of compassion among prehistoric people, who carried the boy with him rather than abandoning him as useless. Would it ever occur to us to think he could have been their king?
At the end of the press conference, a university official summed up their discovery as “thrilling.” It is thrilling because we like stories about lost kings, and also because Shakespeare taught many of us to hate Richard, even as Josephine Tey’s novel, “The Daughter of Time,” which portrayed Richard as noble and framed, taught some readers to hate Shakespeare for Richard’s sake. (It also, perhaps unintentionally, made “Tudor propagandists” sound like thrilling characters.) But Tey was as fascinated as Shakespeare was with Richard’s body, and with the idea that how twisted (or straight) his back was has anything to do with his innocence. As it happens, the conclusion from the excavation is that the curve in his spine was maybe less than Shakespeare implies but more than Tey and Richard’s other fans have invested themselves in thinking it was. (“Appleby: the curve in the spine would have taken a significant amount off his apparent height when standing.”) The most useful part of Tey’s book, with all its historical and apologist’s flaws, is its conveyance of the immediacy of the past, and of questions of war and legitimacy and power—but then, Shakespeare is pretty good at that, too. So is a body found under a parking lot, left there since an earlier century’s war.
Photograph by Dan Kitwood/Getty.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/the-humiliation-of-richard-iii.html#ixzz2KRbqaPPT
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