As has been now well established, Shakespeare's generation viewed history as a mirror in which could be read lessons important to ruler and subject alike. Particularly because throughout the sixteenth century England had reason to fear civil strife as well as foreign invasion, Elizabethans continued to manifest a keen interest in the historical events of the preceding century. On the throne of England when the dramatist wrote sat the granddaughter of Richmond, the first of the Tudors, who, it was firmly believed, was the godly savior of an England long torn by dissension and civil war. That war, a prolonged, intermittent conflict between the two noble houses of Lancaster and York which began in 1455, was closer to Shakespeare and his generation than are the Napoleonic wars to the present generation. Shakespeare's Richard III covers events in the latter years of the Wars of the Roses - that is, from the attainder and execution of George, Duke of Clarence, in 1478, to the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.
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