Ten years ago, in early September 2012, a team of archaeologists and researchers unearthed the 527-year-old remains of Richard III in the lost site of the former Greyfriars church, beneath the staff car park of Leicester city council social services.
Before the results of mitochondrial DNA analysis of a descendant of Anne of York, Richard III’s sister, confirmed that the remains belonged to the fallen king, it was the osteology work of Dr Jo Appleby that led to a probable identification. She determined that the skeleton in the car park belonged to a man between the ages of 30 and 34, whose spine had a pronounced curvature, and whose head showed signs of two lethal injuries consistent with battle trauma.
Even though Shakespeare made Richard III one of literature’s most famous hunchbacks, prior to his exhumation, the extent of his actual deformity was the subject of scholarly debate. On stage he is usually portrayed with crutches, and a hump created through padded shoulders, but we know now that the Bard’s description of an “envious mountain on [his] back” in Henry VI, Part 3 can probably be put down to artistic licence, or prejudice, or both.
It turns out that the real Richard III suffered from scoliosis (which twists to the side) rather than kyphosis (which rounds forward, creating a “hunch”). In an article in the Lancet published two years after the king’s body was found , the degree of his curvature – measured using a Cobb angle – was estimated to be between 70 and 90 degrees. The paper’s authors concluded that despite the curve’s severity, his “physical disfigurement … was probably slight”. Newspaper headlines claimed it as a victory for the maligned monarch: he wasn’t a hunchback after all.
As someone whose spine looked almost identical to Richard’s, measuring 78 degrees before my vertebrae were fused and scaffolded by titanium rods, the Lancet article’s conclusion caused me to raise an eyebrow. Before surgery, the bottom left side of my ribcage ground against the top of my pelvis when I moved, and my right shoulder jutted out like a clipped wing. Even beneath clothing, these distortions were visible. Richard may not have had a hunch, but he was definitely crook-backed.
In the early modern period, physiognomy (the theory that a person’s physical features indicate their character) was influential. A spinal deformity was often read as evidence of inner ugliness – the surface revealing the soul beneath. In the 1613 physiognomic treatise A Pleasant History, Thomas Hill declared that “crookednesse of the backe” betrays a “wickednesse”. Given Richard III’s reputation, dogged by allegations that he took the throne by killing his child nephews, a twisted spine was a gift to those who wished to cast him as crooked. In his opening soliloquy, while still a duke, Richard blames his wicked desires on his bad back. He regards himself as “deformed, unfinish’d” and therefore ready to “prove a villain”.
Literary characters afflicted with hunched and crooked backs have had a tough time of it over the centuries. If they are not evil, they are pitiful. Either way, they are doomed to tragic ends. Take Quasimodo from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, the deaf bellringer in Notre-Dame Cathedral who possesses “an enormous hump” between his shoulders and is rendered half-blind by a giant wart covering one eye. His physique means he is an outcast, feared and maligned by the residents of Paris. But he is trusting, courageous and loving, especially when it comes to the object of his affections, the beautiful Esmeralda. After failing to protect her from being executed by cruel Claude Frollo, archdeacon of the cathedral, Quasimodo dies of heartbreak next to her corpse. The book’s gothic conclusion describes the discovery of two skeletons in a cellar: a woman held in the “tight embrace” of a man whose “spinal column was curved”.
If the lesson of Richard III is that a crooked man must have a crooked heart (to rework the nursery rhyme), Hugo’s story is one of not judging on appearances. Different as their conclusions are, neither will let their protagonist be hunchbacked without good reason. By contrast, Ottessa Moshfegh’s treatment of scoliosis in her latest novel, the medieval gross-fest Lapvona, seems to take this trope in a new direction. Marek, the small boy at the centre of the story is “disfigured by birth, his spine hinged forward so that his little shoulder blades stuck out from his back” (Moshfegh herself suffered from scoliosis as a child, spending three years between the ages of nine and 12 in a brace).
Like his literary forebears, Marek is also shaped by his physique, his “sense of his own future” as “stunted” as his body. But unlike Richard and Quasimodo, whose hunched forms are contrasted with the able-bodied people around them, Marek is not alone in his abnormality. The village at the heart of Lapvona is an unremittingly grotesque place, where adults come to suckle on a lactating old woman and peasants resort to cannibalism. Moshfegh’s treatment of these characters is unsparing and unsentimental. Marek may be reviled and pitiful, but he is also murderous, and his disfigurement is just another form of suffering and strangeness.
The wonderful thing about plays is their capacity for re-interpretation across hundreds of years of staging. The exhumation of Richard’s remains, and the confirmation that he did indeed have scoliosis, offers contemporary productions of Richard III new depth. It was only this year that the Royal Shakespeare Company first cast a disabled actor in the role. Rather than an offensive caricature, this Richard was a bad man with a bad back, using his physical difference to his advantage because he knows that the world thinks he’s crooked.
