The Wars of the Roses (adaptation) IV", Hall wrote, "underlying these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes a bad king, ungoverned, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare, his deposition is a wound on the body politic, which festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by blood-letting. The bloody totalitarianism of "Richard III" is the expiation of England." John Jowett argues the production very much reinforced the teleological assumptions upon which the Tudor myth is based; "it generated an
Richard III of England it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel "Dickon" set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was "The Daughter of Time" (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel "Crown of Roses" (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel "The Sunne in Splendour", attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham.