By Emmeline Burdett
The 2022 film ‘The Lost King’ tells the story of how the remains of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III (1452-1485) were rediscovered in a car park in Leicester, in 2012. (The Plantagenet dynasty ruled England from 1154 until 1485 and was succeeded by the Tudors). The rediscovery was spearheaded by an amateur historian, Philippa Langley. The film emphasizes that Langley feels a strong kinship with Richard because she sees parallels between the way in which he was portrayed as disabled as a way of discrediting him, and the way in which she has been looked down upon as a person with ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis). It is not uncommon for people with both ME, and other hidden impairments, to spend years, if not decades, attempting to get a diagnosis from a largely unsympathetic medical profession. Indeed, several times during the film ‘The Lost King’, Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) insists ‘It [ME] is a real illness!’. She does so with all the fervour of a person who has been repeatedly made aware that ‘real illnesses’ are ones which can be readily seen and identified by others – not ones which can be felt only by the people who have them.
Historical Background
Richard III was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. He was the last English king to be slain in battle. Because he was the last Plantagenet king of England, and because his death led to the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, it has been argued that the Tudors wanted to blacken his name, and that they did this in two ways – by portraying him as disabled, and by portraying him as deciding that, because he was disabled, he (in the words of William Shakespeare’s play about him) ‘could not prove a lover’, and would therefore hurtle enthusiastically down the path of least resistance and ‘prove a villain’(Langley, 2013, pp.30-52 provides an overview of this long-running debate). These ideas were given their most eloquent and enduring expression in the playwright William Shakespeare’s play Richard III, written c.1592-1594, the full title of which gives an account of Richard III’s supposed crimes, namely “his treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pitiful murther [murder] of his innocent nephews: his tyrannical vaurpation [usurpation]: with the whole course of his detested life and most deserved death”. The play itself was based partly upon Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III, published in 1513. Sir Thomas More’s text focused on Richard’s appearance, describing him as
Little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than his right, hard-favoured in appearance…’ (Sir Thomas More, quoted in Langley, 2022).
‘He was close and secret, a deep dissembler, lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly friendly where he inwardly hated, not omitting to kiss where he thought to kill, pitiless and cruel…’
A Painting by an Unknown Artist
In the film ‘The Lost King’, Philippa Langley shows her husband (played by Steve Coogan) a photograph of a portrait of Richard III which has been overpainted to change his features so that they correspond more exactly to More’s description of his physical appearance. The portrait in question was first recorded in the inventory of the Tudor king Henry VIII, and analysis of its wooden panel suggests that it was painted between 1504 and 1520, probably from an earlier painting created during its subject’s lifetime. Though there is no indication of who painted the portrait, the British Library website speculates that the artist was either Flemish or British, and working at the English court. (British Library) The painting has been subject to various striking alterations – for example, the line of Richard’s coat has been altered to suggest that his right shoulder was much higher than his left, his eyes have been overpainted a steely grey and the corners of his mouth have been turned down to give him a more malevolent appearance. One alteration to which Langley draws attention in ‘The Lost King’ is that Richard’s fingers have been elongated to make them appear more like talons. These changes can be seen with the naked eye as the overpainting has aged differently from the rest of the painting. (British Library)
 |
| Figure 1 - A version of the painting in question. Credit: This Portrait by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA. |
In their book The Lost King: The Search for Richard III, Langley and her co-author Michael Jones observe that, although it is now more widely accepted in academic circles that this view of Richard is deeply flawed, the image of Shakespeare’s hunchbacked, limping villain has been difficult to shake from the public imagination.(Langley, 2022, 49) Though they report that few members of the public regard Shakespeare’s portrayal as historically accurate, the fact of its existence tells us some things about fifteenth and sixteenth century English beliefs about disability. Chief amongst these was a belief in astrology, and this was of great importance to one of Richard III’s earliest detractors - the Warwickshire priest and antiquarian John Rous. In his history of the English kings, which was written during the reign of King Henry VII (1485-1509), Rous moved Richard’s date of birth from 2nd October (under the sign of Libra) forward three weeks to enable him to write ‘At his nativity Scorpio was in the ascendant … and like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail’.(Langley, 2022, 39). This was considered important because it tallied with the widespread belief in the power of astrology and its ability to manipulate events. (Vincent-Connolly, 2021,52).
That Richard III had a long history of being considered disabled – either because he was, or as a way of discrediting him, or both – makes a claim made in the British online journal Disability Arts Online seem rather bizarre. In an article published in October 2022, Jeffrey R. Wilson claimed that ‘Richard only really became disabled in the 1980s’. (Wilson, 2). Wilson was, though, making the point that, up until then, the possibility of Richard’s disability had not been seen as an important part of either his identity or of that of the actor who played him. This started to change with the late Antony Sher, who in 1984 drew on his memories of using elbow crutches when he broke his leg to accentuate Shakespeare’s description of Richard III as a ‘bottled spider’. Sher’s research for the role included ‘watching interviews with psychopaths’ and ‘reading about mass-murderers’, which would suggest that he was not challenging Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III as someone who had reached the top by killing anyone who got in his way. Sher also watched Stephen Dwoskin’s autobiographical film Outside In, about his experience of polio. Sher seems to have found in Dwoskin’s film a confirmation of what he already thought disability was – a purely physical experience:
Very useful for Richard. He [Dwoskin] has severe polio in both legs and has to wear complete callipers, so the legs can’t bend at all. He walks with crutches and even then, has enormous difficulty throwing each leg forward. I must use this – the hip throw. (Sher, 150)
Another sequence of him [Dwoskin] limping slowly out of the darkness into a square of light. A way of starting the play? … You hear ‘Now is the winter’ coming from the darkness, then he starts to limp into the light… (Ibid)
 |
| Figure 2 - Anthony Sher as Richard III 1984. Credit: This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA. |
All of this suggests that Sher believed that if his Richard III looked right, that was all that mattered. With such a visual portrayal, this was of course not irrelevant, but neither was it the only thing of any importance, particularly as the idea that he had a disability had played such a significant part in attempts to discredit him. Indeed, this seems not to have been understood, as someone with whom Sher discussed his preparation for the role suggested that Richard III’s physical disability should be a visual marker of his inner moral deformity:
Sher reports that the actor Richard Wilson asks him why the crutches that are so important to him are not mentioned in the text of the play Richard III, which Sher counters by saying that other characters keep referring to him as various four-legged creatures. Richard Wilson then asks, ‘Why should it [Richard’s physical disability] be such a hang-up otherwise?’[unless it was severe] (Quoted in Sher, 1985,139).
Why would someone be ‘hung-up’ on relentless unnecessary mentions by those around them of a characteristic which was incessantly used as a stick to beat them with? Possibly because the person in question is not made of stone? In Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Jane describes the ‘reproach of my dependence’ as being ‘very painful and crushing’, and whilst the descriptions of Richard III were intimately connected with the play’s depiction of him as evil, rather than, as in Jane Eyre, with the dreadful crime of having been sent, as a baby, to live with rich relations who did not want her and never missed an opportunity to tell her so, it seems that he was subjected, sniper-like, to frequent uses of his disability as a way of criticising him, whether or not such criticism was actually valid. Antony Sher’s book talks about how other characters in the play ‘keep’ referring to Richard III as various four-legged creatures, and gives the specific example of his wife, Lady Anne, referring to him as “a lump of foul deformity”. (Sher, 1985,139) Continuous reminders that one does not belong to the ‘tribe’ in which one happens to find oneself (and that, by extension, those who do belong to it, are not merely reaping the benefits of something that had nothing to do with them at all and thus for which they cannot legitimately claim any credit – well done, Lady Anne – congratulations on your colossal personal achievement!) constitute a process known as Othering, and Sher’s comment that other characters ‘keep’ referring to Richard III as various kinds of four-legged creature suggests that this happens more than once. Looking at the play itself reveals that various characters refer to Richard III as ‘a toad’, ‘a hedgehog’, ‘a bottled spider’, and so on. This takes us back to Sir Thomas More’s description of Richard III as being ‘close and secret’ and ‘outwardly friendly where he inwardly hated’, as one reaction to being Othered might be the development of a character where no-one really gets to know you. This sounds a very modern insight for a play written in about 1592-4, but a lot has been written about how acute Shakespeare’s understanding of psychology was, and of, for example, how Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex was developed thanks to Freud’s reading of Hamlet. This could be another example of Shakespeare being well ahead of his contemporaries, particularly as one does not have to be disabled to be Othered; one must merely possess a characteristic which sets one apart from others, and which they feel entitled to use against one. This insight may have been lost on Elizabethan theatregoers who simply wanted to boo a villain and enjoy Shakespeare’s rather colourful insults, but that does not mean that it did not exist. It may subsequently have been lost as an insight into the behaviour of a disabled character for several reasons: non-disabled people’s behaviour towards disabled people often goes unquestioned and unnoticed; a perception that there is nothing to say about disability, and so on. The play opens with Richard III bemoaning his own fate, and this is certainly a more comforting idea for most people – that disability discrimination is somehow less wrong because the disabled person is suffering primarily from the torment of differing from the norm anyway. The modern idea of the social model of disability challenges this, by saying that people are disabled by society’s failure to accommodate them – for example by being sent a letter in an inaccessible format when one is visually impaired, or being unable to get into a station – or the part of a station which one needs – because one is a wheelchair user and the platform can only be reached via a flight of steps. It is ignorant to assume that the social model existed in an era which ended with the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, when it was in fact not suggested until the 1970s.
In his article in Disability Arts Online, Jeff Wilson gives the example of various non-disabled actors who have played Richard III, and argues that they tend to be extremely athletic, which does not suggest that they really had mobility impairments. (Wilson, 2022,2) On the other hand, the impairment that Richard III is thought to have had – a type of spinal curvature called scoliosis – would apparently not have prevented success on the battlefield and would not have been visible once he was wearing armour. (Vincent-Connolly, 2021,145).
This leaves two questions unanswered. Firstly, was Richard III actually disabled, or was that just a claim made to discredit him? Secondly, what significance does the question have today?
In answer to the first question, when the skeleton was excavated from its resting-place in the car park in Leicester in September 2012, it was shown that it did indeed have a spinal curvature. It was pronounced, but as it was well-balanced, would probably have resulted in little physical disfigurement, and the fact that the bones of both legs were well-developed suggests that Richard III would probably not have walked with a limp. (Appleby et al, 2014, 1944). Not quite the person described by William Shakespeare and Thomas More.
In answer to the second question, there has been a persistent perception that Richard III’s reputation needed rehabilitating, but this has not always related to a feeling of fellowship with him due to a real or imputed disability. For example, the Gothic novelist Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third was published in 1768 and seems to have been much more preoccupied with the idea that Richard III’s bad reputation was based on the continued failure robustly to interrogate sources which, like Sir Thomas More’s biography of Richard III, were themselves deeply flawed. On the other hand, Philippa Langley seems only to have started looking for Richard III’s remains after she discovered that she felt that they had both been looked down upon because of a perceived disability. In addition, The Lost King relates Langley’s unhappiness with a scoliosis specialist’s tendency to describe Richard III as a ‘hunchback’ – a word which Langley does not explain her dislike of, except to call it “that awful word” which she thought “had been discarded”. (Langley, 2022, 170). She gives the impression of somebody who takes the description of someone else far too personally, but one might suggest that it is bound up with her feelings of kinship towards Richard III, and also with her experiences of feeling judged and improperly understood by the medical profession in particular. In addition, she says that she thought that the word ‘hunchback’ had been discarded. This could be a reference to the controversy surrounding the 1996 Disney film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel Notre Dame of Paris. Disney’s decision to use the word ‘hunchback’ to describe the famous character of Quasimodo was among the aspects of the film which were criticized; some disability activists claimed that using the word was pejorative and that it raised various problems which it made little attempt to solve – chiefly that small children were (allegedly) afraid of the Quasimodo character, something which Disney’s attempts to make him less frightening had not solved, as his character might still cause small children to recoil, and refer to disabled people in general as ‘hunchbacks’. In addition, the film gave the impression that all disabled people were physically unattractive. (Knight-Ridder, 1996) One of Disney’s executives, Peter Schneider, said that they ‘had’ to use the word, but it is unclear why he thought that Disney was so powerless that it could not have avoided using a contentious word, particularly as the film’s advertisement posters made no mention of Victor Hugo (something which angered Hugo’s descendants), and the book is often known as Notre Dame of Paris anyway. (Strauss, 1996)
‘Nobody tweaks the Bard’
I came across this claim a few months ago, made in a television drama by a character directing a Shakespeare play, and I thought it was ridiculous. Everyone tweaks the Bard. Well, not everyone, obviously. A significant number of people have, though, whether in terms of changing the era or the location of one of Shakespeare’s plays to make a point, and Shakespeare is often known as ‘The Bard of Avon’ to reflect this. As far as disability is concerned, the most recent ‘tweak’ is the 2024 production of Richard III which starred Michelle Terry in the title role and had a cast that was exclusively female or non-binary. Despite its commitment to other kinds of modern concerns (in addition to its casting, the play explored ideas of toxic masculinity), it seemed clear from a Q & A session with two cast members (Helen Schlesinger and Katie Erich) that I went to as part of a Richard III study day at the Globe Theatre in London in August 2024 that the cast rather felt that the controversy surrounding Terry’s decision to erase Richard III’s disability had rained on their parade. As one cast member, Katie Erich, used British Sign Language, and brought a British Sign Language interpreter along to the Q & A, it was surprising that, unlike Philippa Langley, she seemed to feel no solidarity with Richard. It may have been that Erich viewed herself as a member of a linguistic minority rather than as a disabled person, and she may simply have seen British Sign Language as something which enabled her to do her job without the necessity of having to lip-read her colleagues as well. It seems that one thing to consider is that seeing disability as a purely individual phenomenon helps to encourage the idea that no ethical questions arise from it.
Dr Emmeline Burdett is an independent researcher.
_____________________
References:
Appleby et al. ‘The scoliosis of Richard III, last Plantagenet King of England, diagnosis and clinical significance’, The Lancet, 2014 (vol.383), p. 1944.
British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/richard-iii-portrait-with-overpaint-c-1504-20
Langley, P. and Jones, M. (2022) The Lost King: The Search for Richard III. John Murray.
Sher, A. (1985). Year of the King. Nick Hern Books.
Shakespeare, W. (2000). The Tragedy of King Richard III. Oxford World’s Classics.
Strauss, Bob. ‘Courting controversy? Disney’s Newest Animated Feature, ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, Takes On Sensitive Adult Issues’, (1996), Sunday, June 23rd.
Vincent-Connolly, P. (2021). Disability and the Tudors: All the King’s Fools. Pen and Sword Books.
Wilson, J. ‘Cripping Richard III’. Disability Arts Online, (2022), October 3rd.
Wolfe Knight-Ridder, Kathi, ‘Another Burden for the Disabled’, The Spokesman Review, (1996), Wednesday, July 3rd.
Recommended citation: Emmeline Burdett (2025): "Thou lump of foul deformity". Richard III, William Shakespeare, and The Lost King. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 3.
