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
Exhumation and reburial of Richard III of England research, Langley urged Ashdown-Hill to contact the producers of Channel 4's "Time Team" archaeology series to propose an excavation of the car park, but they declined as the dig would take longer than the standard three-day window for "Time Team" projects. Three years later, writer Annette Carson, in her book "Richard III: The Maligned King" (2008), independently came to the conclusion that his body probably lay under the car park. She joined forces with Langley and Ashdown-Hill to carry out further research, in the course of which she found what she called a "smoking gun"—a medieval map of Leicester showing