Richard III

Abstract

On an August afternoon in  near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses was won by Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), and Richard III, crowned in July , was slain. The dead king was carried naked on horseback to Leicester and buried in Greyfriars Church. Due to the dissolution of monasteries in the late s and subsequent development of the site, the tomb was lost. In , human remains, showing in situ signs of spinal deformity, were discovered and excavated under a car park where Greyfriars used to stand (see Figure  in the Image Gallery). Mitochondrial DNA proved that the remains were indeed Richard's (King et al. ). Richard's death marked the end of three centuries of Plantagenet rule, a civil war, and the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, a time of peace and prosperity and the English Renaissance (Schwyzer : ).Richard's case is both historically significant and interesting for literary studies because prior to the rediscovery of the remains, both the body and the character of the king were surrounded by myth and political propaganda: Tudor chroniclers sought to discredit Richard as a usurper to reinforce Tudor legitimacy, which lacked strong hereditary grounds. The most well-known depiction of Richard is of course Shakespeare's. Drawing on his contemporary historical sources, Shakespeare portrays Richard as a deformed, limping, villainous hunchback with an arm like a 'blasted sapling withered up' (Richard III, ..).  Richard's posthumous image relied on the Tudors. In their time, the medieval association of deformity with sin and evil still lingered (Comber ). A crooked back was considered, as Elizabethan historian Thomas Hill (: ) writes, to 'innuate the wickednesse of conditions: but an The authors would like to thank the editors of this volume, the editors at Cambridge University Press, and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments.  All the Shakespeare quotations are from Greenblatt et al. ().