SOURCE: “Richard III: Tonypandy in the Twentieth Century,” in Literature/Film Quarterly 25, No. 2, 1997, pp. 133-45.

In the following essay, Mitchell discusses the ways in which Ian McKellen's 1996 cinematic performance of Richard III powerfully reinforces the Tudor myth that presents Richard as an immoral monster.

In her 1951 detective novel, Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey proffers the theory that Richard III, last of the Plantagenet kings, was a victim of Tudor character assassination. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, House of York, brother of Edward IV, had long been accused and by many convicted of a long list of heinous crimes, not the least of which was usurping the throne and murdering his nephews in the Tower. We know him today as Shakespeare's “bottled spider,” “foul devil,” “fouler toad.” We also know today that Shakespeare based his portrait on the works of Polydore Vergil, Sir Thomas More, Edward Hall, and Raphael Holinshed...