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 II of England forfeited earldom of Gloucester.<br> f. Though it had become established tradition for earldoms to descend in the male line, there was no such tradition for royal succession in England. The precedence could indeed be seen to invalidate the English claim to the French throne, based on succession through the female line, over which the Hundred Years' War was being fought. Richard II of England Richard II (6 January 1367 – c. 14 February 1400), also known as Richard of Bordeaux, was King of England from 1377 until he was deposed in 1399. Richard, a son of Edward the Black Prince,