Revisiting Shakespeare’s Richard III on Screen:

Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen aims to challenge a long-established boundary imposed by Shakespeare’s Richard III and the historical Richard III, and to absolve Richard III from slanderous depictions that Shakespeare foisted upon him. It raises a question about who the real Richard III was versus the dramatic character that we have known from Shakespeare’s play, and revisits historical inaccuracies framed by the scenes that Shakespeare invented. This paper examines the difference in dealing with historical sources between Shakespeare and Gregory: Shakespeare’s use of them as a means of framing the characterization of Richard III versus Gregory’s unframing historically unmerited notoriety. The discussion is divided into two parts: the first on Shakespeare’s naming of the genre in the original title of Richard III; the second on Gregory’s revisiting of the Shakespearean manipulation of historical events. Shakespeare employed the tragic genre to reify moral applications and judgments, thereby portraying Richard III as a tyrant who was guilty of the usurpation of the throne and the murder of his two nephews. Gregory’s television series attempts to recover the historical Richard III, thereby filling in the gaps between the dramatic action of Shakespeare’s play and much of the historical detail. The recent discovery of the body of Richard III in a Leicester car park lends support to the practicality of her research.