The king in bare bones

Regal Bones

I got introduced to Richard III (till date that remains my sole interface with the medieval English king, descending from the house of the Plantaganets), through Shakespeare's Richard III.

I loved the play, though, the king himself was portrayed as evil incarnate. I had the rare experience of reading a Shakespearian play where the protagonist is also the antagonist.

But, in a way, I kind of liked Richard III as well as prayed for his demise. He sounded heroically humble when in that fatal battle of Bosworth, having tumbled off his horse, he had shrieked out the famous lines: "A horse, a horse, a kingdom for a horse." This willingness to barter on such humble terms, indicated a flexibility of spirit that the king, when he was alive and ruling, never showed. 

Throughout the play, Richard was inveterate in his evilness where getting and keeping the "kingdom" was concerned.

So, I liked Richard at the moment of his death, is what I mean to say. I'm thus delighted to know that his skeleton (the skeleton of the real king, that is) has been found under a parking lot in Leicestershire. The ignominy of a legendary king's remains being found under a 21st century parking lot is great, but the discovery of the remains, in and of itself, is testament to the fact that these figures had once lived.

Personally, for me, the bones humanize a fictional hunchbacked king who menaced subjects, enemies and women in Shakespeare's play.

A bit of a biographical detail is in order: Richard wasn't all that evil at all. In fact, the historical Richard was the victim of decades of systematic denigration by his Tudor successors on the throne. He was a reformist king, who introduced kinder laws for the poor and the incarcerated, and most importantly, he eased bans on printing and selling of books. In short, he was a progressive king of his time. My guess is that Shakespeare couldn't have shown the real Richard the way he was because his play was produced during the time of the Tudors.