Body of evidence

摘要

Headline writers and bloggers dusted off their copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare this week to gleefully report the identification of the skeleton of King Richard Ⅲ, found beneath a car park in the English midlands. The fascination with Richard, the last king of the Plantagenet line and the last English monarch to fall in battle, goes beyond the known facts of the historical record; Richard is known as much as the misshapen villain of Shakespeare's play as the man who ruled until his violent death in 1485.