More On Richard III

The current issue (February 8, 2013--available in digital version only) of Newsweek has several articles on the identification of Richard III's bones and the meaning of the find. Simon Schama weighs in with a discussion of whether the simple discovery of the king's skeleton means anything at all about his character or legacy. Harold Booth discusses Shakespeare's version of Richard, and how it necessarily differs from reality. Dan Jones explains some of the science involved in identifying the bones and linking them to Richard's living relatives. And the impact of the discovery? One controversy has popped up: where to rebury the last Plantagenet king of England. Apparently the present Queen has nixed the idea of interring him in Westminster Abbey with other English monarchs. Should he be reburied where he has laid for centuries? That's presently a parking lot. Should he, nevertheless, stay in Leicester, the city where he died? Or be moved to York, where he spent much of his short life (he died at 33)? What are the burial rights of a king who had no direct heirs, died in battle, and lost his kingdom? After all, the victors tend to write history.

More speculation here on Richard's actual face and voice, reproduced via a commission by the Richard III Society.

Richard III Identified

From CNN: Scientists working on the bones found in a parking lot ("car park" in British parlance), the site of an archaelogical excavation, have announced that they are now certain that the bones are those of Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England. The investigators obtained mitochrondrial DNA from a descendant of Anne Plantagenet, one of Richard's sisters, and matched it to DNA obtained from the bones. Once the scientists are finished with their research, Richard will be reburied at Leicester Cathedral. More here from the Guardian.

Here Lies Richard III?

The BBC and other media report that Richard III's bones seem to have been discovered, six centuries after he died after the battle at Bosworth Field that cost him his throne and brought Henry Tudor to power in England. According to scientists at Leicester University, DNA studies are being run on the bones and on descendants of Richard's sister Anne to determine if the bones might indeed be those of the last Plantagenet king of England. The appropriately named Dr. Turi King explains that DNA from females is important to use in such tests because, "after death, the usual mechanisms which keep our DNA molecules long and healthy when we’re alive are no longer working and our DNA begins to break down. While there is only one copy of our genomic DNA in each of our cells, there are many, many copies of our mitochondrial DNA; so if anything is going to be left, it will be mtDNA....The other reason that mitochondrial DNA is so useful in this case is that it’s passed down the female line, from mothers to children (but only daughters pass it on)[.]”

Because he died on the battlefield and his body was lost, Richard was never buried honorably in a king's grave. Many literary works, including Sir Thomas More's History of King Richard III, which influenced Shakespeare in writing his Richard III, vilified him, because during the King's reign his young nephews Edward and Richard, the sons of Edward IV, disappeared. For a different view of Richard, see Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951), in which the detective Alan Grant attempts to reconstruct the mystery of the princes' disappearance and determines that Richard is innocent. See also attorney Bertram Fields's Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery of the Princes (Harper/Collins, 1998); Paul Murray Kendall's Richard the Third, (W. W. Norton, 1956); A. J. Pollard's Richard III and the Princes in the Tower, (St. Martin's Press, 1991), Charles Ross's Richard III, (Methuen, 1981), and Desmond Seward's Richard III: England's Black Legend (Penguin Books, 1997).   Of the filmed interpretations of Shakespeare's play, I particularly like Ian McKellan's 1995 version, with Annette Bening as Elizabeth Woodville, Kristin Scott Thomas as Anne Neville, Maggie Thomas as the Queen Mother, and Robert Downey, Jr. as Lord Rivers.

Law and Tyranny

Timothy Sandefur, Pacific Legal Foundation, has published Love and Solipsism: Law and Arbitrary Rule in Classical Drama. Here is the abstract.

What distinguishes the rule of law from the lawless, arbitrary rule of brute force — which can almost interchangeably be described as tyranny or as anarchy — is that in a lawful rule the government’s coercive power operates according to principles of generality, regularity, fairness, rationality and public-orientation, whereas the arbitrary or lawless ruler wields power in the service of his (or their) own self-interest, or by mere ipse dixit. Law is to arbitrariness as reason is to mere will. In this paper, I explore the dichotomy between lawful and arbitrary rule as it has been represented in literature. I examine first the primal foundation of lawful rule, as depicted in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which law is generated by domesticating the use of force, through persuasion and willing union. Athena creates lawful order, not by fiat, but by marrying the Furies to “Persuasion”: the ambient coercive powers of the people — morally justified, yet dangerously personal urges for vengeance — will now be rationalized in accordance with public, logical, and articulable principles. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, we witness the subversion and near-destruction of lawful order by a man who will tear apart the newly framed lawful order and make the state serve his own private ends. The contrast of these two dramas reveals that the tyrant is essentially a solipsist: his ultimate goal is to make the real world obey his say-so. And if law is like love, the tyrant is like the rapist: the forced surrender of intimacy is the best facsimile of love the solipsist can create; but it can never actually be love, because the two are separated by the same invisible and impenetrable boundary that separates truth from falsehood, or genuine loyalty from the rule of terror. I conclude with a look at the dissenter living in a lawless order, as depicted in two variations on the story of Antigone — the first by Sophocles and the second by Jean Anouilh. In both, the lawless, arbitrary rule is challenged in the name of law, and in each, the ruler nearly succeeds in substituting his private realm of mere words for the public realm of actual things. What emerges from this study is that the basic premise of all lawful order — the root of all secure liberty — is that there is a gap between the will of the ruler and the genuine law. Whenever such a gap exists — whenever it is meaningful to deliberate over whether the ruler’s commands are, in fact, law — the society will, to that extent, become one of lawful order and of (at least some) freedom. The link between tyranny and solipsism is that where the ruler’s will is accounted the law, there can be no genuine law, and thus no freedom. The paradox whereby tyranny is lawless is explained by the fact that tyranny is an attempt to impose by convention what does not originate in nature — and in the end, neither physical nature nor the nature of human relationships can be subjected to such commands. The ultimate demand of the lawless ruler(s) is to substitute his (or their) word for the world — to compel the subject to love him (or them). And because that can never be accomplished, arbitrary rule is doomed to eventual collapse.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.