What is the truth behind Shakespeare’s Richard II and Richard III….?

Elizabeth watching Shakespeare play, from North Wind Picture Archives

Here’s an interesting take on Shakespeare‘s Richard II. Please note, NOT Richard III. There is a myth that this play was written to flatter the Tudor queen Elizabeth, and yet one scene came so close to the bone, so to speak, that she had it excised from every performance! Amused she was not.

The scene in question was when childless Richard is forced to abdicate. He had always refused to name an heir, and so his cousin Bolingbroke imprisoned him, forced him to hand over the crown….and then had him murdered in Pontefract Castle. Thus England was lumbered with the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV.

The Virgin Queen was by this time too old for childbearing, and she too had declined to name an heir. Was the Bard sending her a warning? Was he pointing out that what had happened to Richard II could as easily happen to her? If so he was playing with fire. The Tudors weren’t renowned for their easy-going tolerance.

From here in the 21st century it’s difficult to imagine how a 16^th century audience might react to such a scene. As  this article Acts of sedition – Perspective Magazine says: “….It is impossible for us to recover the cataclysmic shock experienced by the audience as they watched the enactment of a king humiliated, uncrowned, arrested, thrown in the Tower of London, and butchered before their eyes. Military might had seized the sacred crown and usurped God’s divinely-ordained deputy on earth. But most dangerously of all, Shakespeare had shown the audience how easily it could be done….”

Death of Richard II from Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

Elizabeth was definitely not pleased and saw to it that every published version of the play had the offending scene removed. One of the nicknames she acquired was “Richard-the-Second” and anyone referred to as a “King-Richard-II’s-man” was a fawning, lying, double-dealing creep.

The Bard’s “historical” plays are mostly very political, but Richard II especially so. Toward the end of Elizabeth’s reign she too was a childless monarch hurtling toward disaster because of not having or naming an heir. 

So it seems the Bard didn’t always please the Tudors, except perhaps when he carved Richard III into little pieces? Or was that what he did to the third King Richard? The writer of the above article posits that both the Bard’s Richard plays might not have been what they seem on the surface.

Shakepeare’s Richard III, from Media Storehouse

The back-story of Richard II is described above, but might there also be a back-story for Richard III?  I don’t confess to knowing any more about this, and the only point I can think the Bard might be making is that no matter how good and great the monarch, it’s only too possible to twist their reputation and honour beyond all recognition? Was he saying that Richard had been a good king who would have been great? Was he—shock, horror—pointing out that the Tudors hadn’t told the truth about the monarch who fell at Bosworth? Was he hinting to Elizabeth that her own reputation might suffer in the same way?

No doubt there are many of you are more acquainted with this subject and will put me right. I hope you do, because I would like to know more too.

PS: Of course, there is another theory about Shakespeare’s Richard III. As we said here you’ll see that it might be satire directed at Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s first minister, Robert Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley who suffered from kyphosis.