{"id":876,"date":"2016-09-16T16:52:41","date_gmt":"2016-09-16T20:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/?p=876"},"modified":"2019-03-14T10:19:50","modified_gmt":"2019-03-14T14:19:50","slug":"carparkking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/carparkking\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard III, King of the Car Park | AFTLS Tour Blog III"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may not know this (forgive me if you do) but the real King Richard III<\/a> who ruled England from 1483-1485 was the last English king to die on the battlefield: at Bosworth Field near Leicester.<\/p>\n

He is also one of England\u2019s greatest “villains,” mostly because he was deemed responsible for the disappearance of his two young nephews, Edward, Prince of Wales and Richard, Duke of York who went into the Tower of London<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>in the summer of 1483 and\u00a0<\/span>were never seen again. They had been proved illegitimate\u00a0<\/span>and, though young Edward was due to be crowned,\u00a0it was his uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who became king.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a>

Richard III by Andrew Jamieson (courtesy of the Richard III Society)<\/p><\/div>\n

I put “villain” in inverted commas because many people feel even now that he was maligned especially by Shakespeare who concentrated on the wicked and comedic aspects\u00a0<\/span>of the man. Indeed, Shakespeare has Richard\u00a0<\/span>tell us in his very\u00a0<\/span>first speech\u00a0that he is “determined to prove a villain.”\u00a0<\/span>Of course, dramatically, it makes Richard III<\/a><\/em> an even more powerful and classy psychological thriller. It is argued that it was mostly the Tudors that\u00a0<\/span>wished to dishonour him.<\/p>\n

In 1924, a group of very vehement supporters of Richard III formed a society\u00a0in his name\u00a0 <\/span>to uphold and defend him as an excellent king who passed many good laws (true: a fairer criminal justice system and granting of bail was due to him) and they have members all over the world. The Richard III Society<\/a> think that Shakespeare vilely slandered Richard, that he had nothing to do with the young princes’ disappearance,\u00a0and that he certainly did NOT have a curvature of the spine and physical challenges.<\/p>\n

In Shakespeare\u2019s play Richard is called “a bunchback\u2019d\u00a0<\/span>toad”\u00a0<\/span>amongst other horrible names. [Click HERE<\/a> for a list of the insults hurled in Richard III<\/em>]<\/p>\n

In 2012, Phillipa Langley<\/a>, a member of the still flourishing Richard III Society, after much research and poring over ancient maps, managed with\u00a0<\/span>an historian, John Ashdown-Hill<\/a>, to persuade Leicester University\u2019s archeological department and Leicester City Council to dig up the council\u2019s car park (parking lot in your parlance) as\u00a0<\/span>they both had strong evidence that Greyfriars Monastery<\/a> was beneath it and that Richard could possibly be buried there. Richard\u2019s body, history told us previously, was taken from the battlefield, stripped naked, thrown\u00a0<\/span>and tied over the back of\u00a0<\/span>a horse, and ridden around the city of Leicester to prove he was dead. Philippa believed otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a>There was money enough to dig two trenches and a film crew shot a documentary about this adventure. One of the first shots is of the rather beautiful and slightly nervy and terribly British\u00a0<\/span>Phillipa\u00a0<\/span>standing on a seemingly randomly painted letter ‘R’ (some old designated spacing I imagine) saying tremulously: \u201cI don\u2019t know why but I have the most extraordinary feeling that he\u2019s right under here”…and HE WAS! In the very first hours of the very first day of the dig, they found first some legs and then a skull which they assumed (because of its awkward position) was another body on top ,only to discover that it was someone with a severely curved spine.\u00a0<\/span>It is worth watching\u00a0<\/span>The King in the Car Park<\/a><\/em> solely for Philippa\u2019s reaction as she looks down to the skeleton. You can watch she and the Society\u2019s belief in Richard\u2019s normal physicality\u00a0shatter on screen. Matt, the lead archeologist of the dig, said that if they had chosen to dig 50 centimetres to the right,\u00a0they would never have discovered\u00a0<\/span>his skeleton. The Home Office had\u00a0<\/span>to be called as human bones had been found,\u00a0but\u00a0<\/span>the dig continued. It was later discovered that a descendant of Richard III\u2019s sister, a Canadian cabinet maker living in London called Michael Ibsen, had\u00a0 <\/span>exactly\u00a0the\u00a0<\/span>same DNA as the skeleton. They truly had found a “King in a car park,”\u00a0<\/span>527 years after his death.<\/p>\n

\"Richard's<\/a>Phillipa\u00a0<\/span>is a fantastic woman\u00a0<\/span>who doggedly pursued\u00a0<\/span>her instincts and who honoured this man,\u00a0whatever his misdemeanours. She keeps saying all the way through, often weeping, “I just keep thinking about the man, the human being he was.” Two and a half years later he was\u00a0<\/span>interred at Leicester cathedral in an absolutely beautiful coffin made by his descendant, Michael Ibsen. Gosh, it’s nearly as thrilling as our play.<\/p>\n

\"Richard-iii-remains\"<\/a>One more wonderful thing, bearing in mind our gender blind casting and me — a woman — playing Richard, is\u00a0<\/span>that\u00a0<\/span>when the osteologist was first examining the bones she (for a goodly while) thought it was the skeleton of a woman because the hip bones were slightly larger\u00a0<\/span>than a male and the forearms very delicate and \u201cgracile”\u2026just like mine. Hurrah!<\/p>\n

— Liz Crowther<\/p>\n

BREAKING NEWS — Another King found in a car park just this week! The UK’s Telegraph newspaper has the whole story:\u00a0<\/span>Another car park, another King: ‘Henry I’s remains’ found beneath tarmac at Reading Gaol<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may not know this (forgive me if you do) but the real King Richard III who ruled England from 1483-1485 was the last English king to die on the battlefield: at Bosworth Field near Leicester. He is also one … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1086,"featured_media":878,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47489,361298],"tags":[67547,47640,84421,84417,84423,84420,84428,84424,67548,84422],"class_list":["post-876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actors-from-the-london-stage","category-richard-iii-fall-2016","tag-actors-from-the-london-stage","tag-aftls","tag-john-ashdown-hill","tag-liz-crowther","tag-michael-ibsen","tag-phillipa-langley","tag-richard-iii","tag-richard-iii-society","tag-shakespeare-at-notre-dame","tag-the-king-in-the-car-park"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1401,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876\/revisions\/1401"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/shakespeare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}