Look at this bizarre cover (left). Actually, I was not attracted by it but by the central title: Richard III. Why Shakespeare made him a devil. Yes, this is the question we've wondered about more than once in our Ricardian quest: Why did Shakespeare make him a devil? Why did he choose to depict the last Plantagenet king, dead at Bosworth defending his crown against Richmond (future king Henry VII) in 1485, as the archetype of the tyrannical usurper and the most wicked of his villains?
His Tragedy of Richard III, was first performed on an Elizabethan stage in 1592-93 among religious tensions, fears of civil war and foreign invasion provoked by the unresolved succession to Queen Elizabeth I. The queen was then 60 years old, single, childless and king James VI of Scotland would succeed her on the throne after her death in 1603.
Shakespeare's Tragedy of Richard III was so influential that it characterized and shaped how history would look at those events for the centuries to come. But it's time we know why that happened , if there is a why.