Why did shakespeare make Richard III look bad?

Answer 1

I am no expert on Shakespeare but I do know that there were still many people at the time that were still loyal to the House of York and Richard III. At the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 Richard was defeated by Henry VII, of the House of Tudor (Henry VIII's Father) who had no legitimate claim to the throne and only won the crown on the battlefield, as the House of Tudor is of Welsh extraction and not of the Plantagenet line except through an illegitimate son and a marriage to Richard's niece. Richard III wasn't always king either; he first was appointed Lord Protector for his nephews who were both princes and only 14 and 11 years old, one of which, Edward, was the next successor to the throne. After their mysterious deaths in the tower of London (You may know it as the Princes in the tower), many questions were raised as to what happened to them. Many surmise that Richard killed them so he could claim the throne, as a couple of months afterward he actually became king (The truth is no one knows what really happened). After Richard became king, Henry VII (Who was at the time in exile in France) prepared to face Richard in a battle for the crown. After Richard was killed at the battle of Bosworth, Henry VII secured the crown and most crucially for him the Tudor Dynasty which still has its impact to this day.

I'm only guessing from here on in but I think Shakespeare was employed by the Tudors to portray Richard as a creepy, evil, power hungry hunchbacked man who would do anything for the crown including killing his own nephews. This Propaganda was used to reinforce that the Tudor Dynasty was the right noble family to rule England even though they had no legitimate claim to the throne. This propaganda was key as they were still people claiming to be descendants of the House of York trying to claim the throne for themselves, although Henry VII had in fact neatly bumped off almost all of them.

Actually, Shakespeare drew his story of Richard's reign from Holinshed's Chronicles which in turn used a history of Richard III written by Sir Thomas More, politician in the court of Henry VIII (son of the man who killed Richard III), and who without doubt was on the payroll of the Tudors. By Shakespeare's day the threat of a Yorkist rebellion was well in the past and Queen Elizabeth's biggest threat came from another Tudor (her cousin Mary Queen of Scots). However, it still would have been insulting to the Queen to suggest that her grandfather was an unscrupulous self-seeking parvenu, rather than the heroic deposer of a deformed psychopath as Thomas More made him out to be.