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
The Troublesome Reign of King John Peter Ackroyd have defended the Shakespearean attribution. Candidates put forward for the author of "The Troublesome Reign" include Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and George Peele, among others, alone or in various collaborative combinations; no scholarly consensus has been achieved. The main historical sources for "The Troublesome Reign" are thought to be the "Chronicles" of Raphael Holinshed and "Foxe's Book of Martyrs", and perhaps Richard Grafton's "Chronicle at Large", which recapitulates much of the material in John Foxe's book. The Troublesome Reign of King John The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, commonly called The Troublesome Reign of