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
Edward V of England All hail! when as he meant – all harm." Edward V of England Edward V (2 November 1470) succeeded his father, Edward IV, as King of England and Lord of Ireland upon the latter's death on 9 April 1483. He was never crowned, and his brief reign was dominated by the influence of his uncle and Lord Protector, the Duke of Gloucester, who deposed him to reign as Richard III on 26 June 1483; this was confirmed by the Act entitled Titulus Regius, which denounced any further claims through his father's heirs. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury,