dagblog - Comments for "Skeleton in British Parking Lot Hailed as King Richard III"

"Appease your enemies, don't

artappraiser — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 04:37:08 +0000

In reply to Skeleton in British Parking Lot Hailed as King Richard III

"Appease your enemies, don't piss off the French, and other lessons from Richard III"

What Richard III Can Teach Us Today
The world is grown so bad that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch. Can Shakespeare’s fallen tyrant help us set it to rights?
by John Watkins @ ForeignPolicy.com, Feb. 6, 2013

[John Watkins is distinguished McKnight university professor of English and affiliate faculty in history at the University of Minnesota.]

On how Thomas More &

artappraiser — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 09:04:38 +0000

In reply to Skeleton in British Parking Lot Hailed as King Richard III

On how Thomas More & Shakespeare helped paint Richard III as evil for centuries to follow:

The Shape of a Life: Richard III's Twisted Bones
By Stephen Greenblatt, newyorker.com, Feb. 5, 2013

[....] The new King, who had a lineal claim to the throne far weaker than the man he had just murdered, did what rulers in that situation always did: he encouraged his principal allies, such as his Archbishop of Canterbury and his Lord Chancellor, John Morton, to besmirch the reputation of the vanquished man. Henry got a particularly impressive version of what he sought in “The History of King Richard III,” written by an ambitious young man who had served as a page in Morton’s household. “The History” weaves together every dark rumor about Richard’s brief life (he died at thirty-two) into a brilliant narrative, which paints a portrait of a bold, gifted, and ineradicably evil man whose evil was marked in his very body: “Little of stature, ill fetured of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage.” Even his birth had been a difficult one, and it was reported—though here the author of “The History” voices some reservation—that the newborn had teeth. In any case, he was, we are told, a particularly nasty piece of work: “Hee was close and secrete, a deepe dissimuler, lowlye, of counteynaunce, arrogant of heart, outwardly coumpinable”—i.e., friendly—“where he inwardely hated, not letting”—i.e., hesitating—“to kisse whome hee thoughte to kyll.”

The author of this splendid hatchet job was Thomas More, who would go on to write “Utopia,” and to lose his head at the hands of the second Tudor monarch, Henry VIII. More’s “The History of Richard III” was incorporated into the major sixteenth-century chronicle histories and thus, in effect, became the authorized representation of the loser of the Battle of Bosworth Field [....]

Richard III: king's face

artappraiser — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:15:44 +0000

In reply to Skeleton in British Parking Lot Hailed as King Richard III

Richard III: king's face recreated from skull discovered under car park
Facial reconstruction using skeleton unearthed in Leicester shows what the last Plantagenet king may have looked like

By Maev Kennedy, guardian.co.uk, 5 Feb. 2013

Richard III's face was reconstructed from scans of a skull, newly confirmed as that of the last Plantagenet king. Photograph: Andrew Winning/Reuters

[......]

Richard III's bones confirm

artappraiser — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 23:05:07 +0000

In reply to Skeleton in British Parking Lot Hailed as King Richard III

Richard III's bones confirm Shakespeare and others, more from Burns' article:

Photo credit: University of Leicester via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images @ nytimes.com

....the remains showed an array of injuries consistent with historical accounts of the fatal blows Richard III suffered on the battlefield, and other blows he was likely to have sustained after death from vengeful soldiers of the army of Henry Tudor, the Bosworth victor, who succeeded Richard as King Henry VII.

The fatal wound, researchers said, was almost certainly a large skull fracture behind the left ear that was consistent with a crushing blow from a halberd, a medieval weapon with an axlike head on a long pole — the kind of blow that was described by some who witnessed Richard’s death. The team also identified nine other wounds, including what appeared to be dagger blows to the cheek, jaw and lower back, possibly inflicted after death.

But perhaps the most conclusive evidence from the skeletal remains was the deep curvature of the upper spine that the research team said showed the remains to be those of a sufferer of a form of scoliosis, a disease that causes the hunchback appearance, with a raised right shoulder, that was represented in Shakespeare’s play as Richard III’s most pronounced and unappealing feature....