More’s account has historically posed a particular interpretive challenge because More was a serious man — a scholar, a lawyer, a martyr — whose work was not the casual propaganda of a court flatterer. Yet he was also writing within a political context where criticism of the Tudor dynasty’s opponents was not merely acceptable but advantageous. He had gathered oral history from individuals who had lived through the period, including John Morton, Bishop of Ely, who had been Richard’s opponent and Henry VII’s chancellor. His sources had reasons to remember Richard badly.
The Shakespeare play, written roughly eight decades after Richard’s death, drew on More and Vergil while transforming them into something richer and stranger: a self-declared villain who is also the most compelling presence in every scene he inhabits, a figure so charismatic in his malevolence that audiences have sometimes struggled to sort out why they find themselves invested in his perspective. The theatrical Richard has a freedom to articulate his own villainy that no actual fifteenth-century usurper would have had, and the result is a character who exists in a different register than historical analysis.
The bones found in Leicester could not adjudicate the moral questions. They could address the physical ones, at least partially, and in doing so they complicated the simple equation between physical deformity and moral depravity that the Tudor sources had established.
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## The Body Before Shakespeare
Contemporary accounts of Richard III’s appearance survive from individuals who saw him in life, and they are more varied and less uniformly derisive than the Tudor chronicle tradition suggests.