Shakespeare Was Wrong: Richard III Wasn't a Club-Footed Hunchback

I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not.

Until his bones were discovered under a parking lot in Leicester, all of my knowledge about the English King Richard III came through the lens of William Shakespeare's play. He had club feet, a hunch, and a will-to-power-at-all-costs attitude. While the bones don't tell us much about his demeanor, researchers from the University of Leicester have found that Shakespeare's play, wherein Richard III is called “deform’d” and “unfinish’d,” overplayed the king's physical deformities.

The bones have confirmed a few things about Richard III—eight battlewounds around his head confirm that he died in battle, and he did in fact have scoliosis—just not to the extent that he would've been a hunchback.

“Although the scoliosis looks dramatic, it probably did not cause a major physical deformity,” said Jo Appleby, an osteoarchaeologist (the first I've ever heard of) at University of Leicester’s School of Archaeology and Ancient History. “This is because he had a well-balanced curve. The condition would have meant that his trunk was short in comparison to the length of his limbs, and his right shoulder would have been slightly higher than the left, but this could have been disguised by custom-made armor and by having a good tailor.”

The researchers used pretty much the raddest tools available to analyze and reconstruct one of history's most famous deformities. They scanned the spine using computed tomography, and used a 3D printer to create polymer replicas of each vertebra. They then reconstructed the spine using the polymer pieces to look as it did when it was in a king.

Then, not content to keep all the fun to themselves, they photographed the polymer reconstruction from 19 different points, and stitched the pictures together digitally to create this interactive 3D model, allowing us all the privilege of spine spinning, just like the real osteoarchaeologists presumably do.

They discovered that the king had a “well-balanced curve,” meaning that his head and neck were straight and not tilted to one side, so all that talk in the bard's play about how freakish he looked were overstatements, made up well after the fact. While the feet are missing from the skeleton, Richard III's legs seemed normal too, another strike against Shakespeare.

“If you took Richard’s clothes off, you could see that his spine had a big curve in it, but if he was clothed, scoliosis is much less obvious,” Piers Mitchell, a paleopathologist at Cambridge, told Bloomberg. “Shakespeare wrote his play over a century after Richard III died. Clearly, he was writing the play based on what he had heard, without seeing the evidence himself.”

It's not really Shakespeare's fault, I guess; it's not like there were photographs or even photographs of paintings to look at. Richard was the last Plantagenet king before the Tudors took over and history is written by the winners, and repeated by the playwrights.

It is interesting to note that that Shakespeare was able to figure out that Richard might well have said something like: “And thus I clothe my naked villainy / With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,” except with “naked villainy” replaced with “unusually curved spine,” and “odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ” with “well-tailored clothing.” But then, he was writing in verse, so, you gotta cut him some slack.