Ghostwritten

In Competition No. 2787 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean soliloquy delivered by the ghost of Richard III reflecting on the discovery of his bones in a Leicester car park.

The last Plantagenet king is, it seems, even further from the psychopath conjured up by Shakespeare’s pen than previously thought. Psychologists who have spent 18 months studying historical records from the period spanning the monarch’s life have come up with the rather unglamorous alternative diagnosis of ‘intolerance to uncertainty’ syndrome.

The rollcall of unlucky losers is long: Caroline Gill, Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead, John Renwick, Neil McEwan and Godfrey Ackers narrowly missed the cut. Those printed below earn £25, except Alan Millard who takes £30.

An ‘R’, upon a Council car-park writ,
Condemns my broken bones to Leicester’s light
Where Fox’s Glacier Mints aromas mask
The bloody stench of Bosworth’s battleground;
I am not in a living frame today
Yet framed I am, in dust disturbed by trowels,
The last Plantagenet, once planted deep
In flower-filled gardens, purchased from the friars,
Where warring roses fought the march of time
Till tarmac sealed them in the grave we share.
Now weary, wronged by wrongs I never did
And longing to be laid in holier ground,
I fain would travel to my final rest
But, having neither horse nor strength to walk,
My cry resounds throughout the universe:
A hearse! a hearse! my kingdom for a hearse.
Alan Millard

 
On Bosworth Field was I, though worthy, felled,
My kingdom gone, and I to Kingdom-Come
Despatched. That day I lacked not just a horse —
They would not coffin me, the less to bear,
But bore me bare to Leicester, there to lie
All twisted in the Grey Friars’ narrow grave,
While Shakespeare’s wider lies soon twisted me
Into a crookbacked killer. I was not.
Years passed. I watched the Welsh and then the
Scots,
And even Germans sit upon my throne,
Until the magic cypher D-N-A —
Domine Nos Adiuve
! — proved: I am.