Battle of Bosworth Field lead character, has been built up in the battles of Shakespeare's earlier play, "Henry VI, Part 3", as a "formidable swordsman and a courageous military leader"—in contrast to the dastardly means by which he becomes king in "Richard III". Although the Battle of Bosworth has only five sentences to direct it, three scenes and more than four hundred lines precede the action, developing the background and motivations for the characters in anticipation of the battle. Shakespeare's account of the battle was mostly based on chroniclers Edward Hall's and Raphael Holinshed's dramatic versions of history, which were sourced from Vergil's chronicle.
Ricardian (Richard III) was originally a small group of interested amateur historians whose aim was to bring about a re-assessment of the reputation of Richard III. The society became moribund during the Second World War. In 1951 Josephine Tey published her detective novel "The Daughter of Time", in which Richard’s guilt is examined and doubted. In 1955, Laurence Olivier released his film of Shakespeare's "Richard III", which at the beginning admitted that the play was based on legend, and a sympathetic, detailed biography of Richard was published by Paul Murray Kendall, all of which went some way towards re-invigorating the society. The Fellowship