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
Cultural depictions of Richard I of England Cultural depictions of Richard I of England Richard I of England has been depicted many times in romantic fiction and popular culture. The Scots philosopher and chronicler John Mair was the first to associate Richard with the Robin Hood legends in his "Historia majoris Britannae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae" (1521). In the earliest Robin Hood ballads the only king mentioned is "Edward our comely king", most probably Edward II or Edward III. However, Sir Walter Scott's novel "Ivanhoe" popularised Mair's linking of the Hood legends to Richard's reign, and it was taken up by later novelists and by cinema. Typically