William Shakespeare's Richard III

Though Richard III was one of William Shakespeare's historical plays, he managed to inflict some of his own opinion in it, which was that Richard was as evil as his enemies of the House of Lancaster made him out to be. As was the case between the English and the Scottish in the early 1300s, different groups of people had different, biased opinions about different groups of people. The Lancastrians, later the Tudors, thought of Richard III as a wicked man who would -- and did -- kills his friends and relatives to help ensure that he would obtain the crown. Shakespeare was greatly influenced by these views and the writings of Sir Thomas More, who learned much of his information from people who did not like Richard III. One of the biggest evidences of this bias style in which Shakespeare wrote was the fact that, in his play, he portrayed Richard III as being deformed, with a hunchback, like the Tudors, whereas the people of the House of York saw him as being without any flaws. Though many things in Shakespeare's play and the writings of this time period were based on fact, they were also largely based on opinion, and it is for that reason that it is unlikely that the historians of today will ever know the full truth on some matters concerning Richard III.