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## The Shakespeare Problem
Any account of Richard III must grapple with the question of what is known, what is inferred, and what was invented — and the invention has had an unusually long shelf life.
William Shakespeare’s play *Richard III*, written around 1592, gave the world its dominant image of the king: a physically deformed, psychologically monstrous schemer who murders his way to the throne and is haunted by the ghosts of his victims at Bosworth. “I am determined to prove a villain,” declares Shakespeare’s Richard in the first act, setting the tone for a play that is theatrically brilliant and historically unreliable in roughly equal measure.
Shakespeare was drawing on earlier Tudor sources, including Thomas More’s *History of King Richard the Third*, written in the early sixteenth century, and Polydore Vergil’s chronicle, commissioned by Henry VII. These sources portrayed Richard in the most unflattering possible terms, which made sense given that they were produced under a dynasty with an obvious interest in justifying its conquest of the throne.
The portrait that emerged — hunchbacked, withered arm, murderous, tyrannical — was effective propaganda. The physical descriptions in particular became famous: the humpback, the one shoulder higher than the other, the limping gait. Later generations of historians have debated how much of this was accurate, how much was exaggerated, and how much was invented.
The 2012 discovery would provide some partial and carefully qualified answers to the physical questions, while leaving the moral and historical questions — the fate of the princes, the nature of Richard’s character — entirely beyond the reach of the bones in the ground.