nineweaving is better at this than I am

[angevin2]

Because once again she's where I first saw the Stratfordian link of the day: Wouldn't It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn't Shakespeare?

Besides, no argument could ever possibly sway the Oxfordian crowd. They are the prophets of truthiness. “It couldn’t have been Shakespeare,” they say. “How could a semiliterate country boy have composed works of such

Comments

[melusinehr]

Thomas More sort of worked up the hunchback idea from John Morton, who wrote a nasty bio of Richard. I can't remember all the details (it's been a while and I'm away from my sources at the moment), but there's a fantastic discussion of how it got built up in Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time.

[jsburbidge]

More was a page in Morton's household when he was young and it is a probability that he derived much of his source material from Morton (who was a player on the Woodville/Tudor side during Richard's reign).

[angevin2]

I know that! I'm just saying, I don't think either of them invented the characterization of Richard as a hunchback.

[jsburbidge]

He seems to have had one shoulder slightly higher than the other - the sort of thing that a good tailor can correct easily. It wasn't even all that unusual in a class that trained heavily in arms if you didn't take pains to train ambidextrously.

Putting on my late-fifteenth-century historiography hat here...

[lareinenoire]

Butting in here because this is my research area--beg pardon!

As far as I am aware, the characterization of Richard III as a hunchback began within a year of his death when a Warwickshire cleric named John Rous wrote an illustrated history of English kings.

This characterization was picked up--for obvious political, symbolic, historiographical reasons--by both Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More. What is worth keeping in mind is that they were writing two extremely divergent texts.

Vergil's Anglica Historia was meant to rewrite and recontextualize the history of England in the wake of two major changes: 1) Henry VII taking the throne in 1485; and, 2) the Renaissance.*

* This is, of course, a vast oversimplification, but Vergil was emerging from a new Italian tradition that emphasized causation and human error and that was meant to look forward to the coming of Henry VII and his descendants.Thomas More's text is a very different animal--for one thing, it was never completed; the English text ends quite literally in the middle of a

Re: Putting on my late-fifteenth-century historiography hat here...

[lareinenoire]

EDIT: Vergil was emerging from a new Italian tradition that emphasized causation and human error and his history was meant to look forward to the coming of Henry VII and his descendants.

Apologies for grammar fail.

Re: Putting on my late-fifteenth-century historiography hat here...

[lblanchard]

Also...Rous had a far different opinion of Richard III before Richard's death. One copy of his history of the Neville family, with abundant praise for Richard, survived his efforts to consign them to the shredder.

Re: Putting on my late-fifteenth-century historiography hat here...

[lareinenoire]

Oh, yes! I meant to mention that and forgot. Oh, Rous. You dodgy, dodgy man.

Re: Putting on my late-fifteenth-century historiography hat here...

[lareinenoire]

The Rous Roll (which survives in two versions, BL MS Additional 48976 in English; College of Arms Warwick Roll in Latin) is what lblanchard is referring to--a genealogical roll depicting the earls of Warwick and their descendants. It's one of the few contemporary illustrations we have of Richard III and there's no evidence of a hunchback or uneven shoulders. In the Historia regum angliae of 1485-86, however, Richard's right shoulder is higher than his left (he also spent two years in the womb and emerged with teeth and hair). One can see how that kind of drama may have appealed to Vergil and More...