John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO A STORY BY DAVID PRIESTLAND IN THE
GUARDIAN
Well, the reference to "hunchbacked" shows
something important of the writer's understanding.
We now know definitively from his bones that Richard was not
a hunchback, that legend undoubtedly having been created by apologists for the
Tudors, apologists like the brilliant but biased Shakespeare.
I love Shakespeare’s Richard III, one of his greatest
histories, but it is riddled with exaggeration and inaccurate information.
The historical Richard actually appears to have been a
rather brave and admirable king, at least according to some serious recent biographers.
As far as his re-burial's negative effect on the city owing
to his bad reputation, I am sure it will in fact prove the opposite, to be
beneficial in economic terms. Like it or not, tourists do go to see the places
associated with villains. We actually had people going to the place O. J.
Simpson’s wife and another person were literally butchered like livestock to
take smiling snapshots of themselves.
