Just in case folks need a reminder, here’s Humpty Dumpty’s four lines from Poetry Foundation: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall / All the king’s horses and all the king’s men / Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” That version comes from 1902’s “Denslow’s Mother Goose,” complete with a memorable picture of an egg man on a wall. The original had a different third line, per Vintage News: “Four-score men and four-score more.” That original version first appeared in print in 1797’s “Juvenile Amusement” songbook by Samuel Arnold.
Vintage News follows the reasoning if we take Humpty Dumpty to be King Richard III. Back in 1485, Richard III was killed in combat at the Battle of Bosworth, which ended England’s 30-year-long War of the Roses between competing families seeking the English throne. Richard fell off his horse, broken-bodied, and couldn’t be put back together again — simple as that. One hundred years later, Shakespeare ripped him a poetic new one in “Richard III” and excoriated him as a power-grubbing lunatic and child-and-wife killing tyrant. Two hundred years after that we get Humpty Dumpty.
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In the centuries since, Richard has continued to come up in cultural and academic circles, often painted as an underdog unfairly bullied by the bard, as stories on NPR and History Skills depict. At minimum, he’s a prominent enough fit when wondering about any secret Humpty Dumpty messaging.
