Richard III of England has been depicted in literature and popular culture many times. In the Tudor period he was invariably portrayed as a villain, most famously in Shakespeare's play Richard III, but also in other literature of the period. Richard's life was not much depicted again until the 20th century when the "Ricardian" movement sought to restore his reputation. Much of more recent creative literature has portrayed him in a positive light.According to R. Gordon Kelly "Popular culture remains overwhelmingly pro-Ricardian". R. Gordon Kelly, "Josephine Tey and Others: The Case of Richard III", in Ray B. Browne, Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr, et al (eds) The Detective As Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, Volume 1, Popular Press, 2000, p.134. However his reputation as a hunchbacked villain has remained a familiar historical cliché within popular culture.

Literature

Tudor period

The foremost work of literature featuring Richard III is William Shakespeare's Richard III, which is believed to have been written in 1591, a century after the King's death. It was the final part of a tetralogy of plays about the Wars of the Roses. Richard also appears in the two plays preceding it, Henry VI, Part 2 and Henry VI, Part 3. Shakespeare depicts Richard as a deformed and malevolent individual who takes out his bitterness over his own twisted body on the world, serving only his own ambition. His self-serving amorality is the culmination of the social and moral chaos caused by power struggles between the great magnates of the era. In Henry VI part 3 (Act III, Scene 2, lines 1645–50) Richard describes himself as follows:

Why, love forswore me in my mother's womb: And, for I should not deal in her soft laws, She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe, To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub; To make an envious mountain on my back, Where sits deformity to mock my body; To shape my legs of an unequal size.

Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (1579) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England.Churchill, George B., Richard the third up to Shakespeare, Alan Sutton, Rowman & Littlefield, 1976 The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c.1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority." Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.

In 1602, in the last days of Tudor England, Ben Jonson wrote a play about Richard entitled Richard Crookback. His portrayal of the king is unknown, as it was never published.McEvoy, Sean, Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p.4. However, it is unlikely to have departed from the negative portrayal of Richard, and probably followed the same pattern as Jonson's only other tragedies, written at the same period, Catiline His Conspiracy and Sejanus His Fall, both of which are about ruthless usurpers who finally receive just retribution.

Several ballads about the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) also survive from this period, some of which may date back to the immediate aftermath of the battle.

18th century

Richard is one of the central characters in Nicholas Rowe's 1714 play The Tragedy of Jane Shore; he is portrayed as a tyrant, similar to Shakespeare's Richard. Richard Plantagenet a legendary tale, a poem by Thomas Hull was published in 1774. It is written in the first person, spoken by Richard Plantagenet, the king's illegitimate son. The boy grows up in ignorance of his parentage. He meets his father just before the Battle of Bosworth. His father proposes to acknowledge him and raise him to royalty after the battle, but he tells him to keep his parentage secret if the battle is lost. With the king's defeat, Richard spends the rest of his life as a lowly workman.

19th century In Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Last of the Barons (1843) Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, features prominently. In Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses the young Richard of Gloucester is a significant secondary character, as "Richard Crookback". In Mark Twain's A (Burlesque) Autobiography he writes: "I was born without teeth — and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him."

20th century

Dickon is a 1929 novel by Marjorie Bowen about King Richard III of England, giving a sympathetic portrayal of Richard.Brown, Morton A. “Two-and-a-Half Secrets about Richard the Third.” The Georgia Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 1973, (pp. 367–392). Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) puts Clements Markham's theories regarding the Princes in the Tower, from his Richard III: his life and character (1906), into the form of a modern detective novel. While in hospital, an injured police detective devotes his spare time to an investigation of the murder of the Princes, supposedly committed or commissioned by Richard III. He concludes that Richard was innocent and that the most likely culprit was Henry VII. Writing as Gordon Daviot, she also wrote a play, Dickon (produced 1955), based more closely on the historical Richard, and again sympathetic in its treatment. Counterfactual treatments of what would have happened had Richard III won the Battle of Bosworth and killed Richmond instead are rare within the alternate history subgenre of science fiction. One rare exception is Andre Norton's The Crossroads of Time (1956/1962), in which Ferdinand and Isabella also fail to subdue Granada. Thus, John Cabot discovers America (or Cabotland, as it is called here), amidst other historical alterations. While Richard III plays a minor role, Norton's sympathies seem Ricardian in this context. Rosemary Hawley Jarman's novel We Speak No Treason (1971) is another account from the Ricardian viewpoint, told through three courtiers. John Crowley's novel The Deep features a fictionalized version of Richard named Sennred, who is portrayed as a hero. Elizabeth Peters's novel The Murders of Richard III (1974) is set in a modern country house filled with Ricardians re-enacting the events of 1483–5. A series of pranks escalating to crimes occur during the re-enactments. Rhoda Edwards wrote two historical novels examining Richard's youth up to his betrothal to Anne Neville, Fortune's Wheel (1979), and his reign as king up to his death, Some Touch of Pity (1977) (published in the US as The Broken Sword). Dickon by Jack Pulman (1979) is a play premiered by the John Lewis Partnership Dramatic Society, directed by Michael Deacon, and starring Alan Patient as Richard III. Richard III features as a character in The Founding (1980), Volume 1 of The Morland Dynasty, a series of historical novels by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. This volume is set against the background of the Wars of the Roses. Sharon Kay Penman's historical novel The Sunne in Splendour (1982) gives a comprehensive account of the Wars of the Roses. However, the author has made additions and minor adjustments to enrich the story. John M. Ford wrote a counterfactual fantasy treatment of Richard III's rise to power, The Dragon Waiting (1986), albeit one set in an alternate universe where Julian the Apostate reigned as Roman Emperor for longer than in our history and was successful in reinstating Roman polytheism as a consequence. Magic also works in this alternate universe. At its end, Richard III wins the Battle of Bosworth and kills Richmond. In the Jonny Quest comic, #10, March 1987: "Winters of Discontent", Jonny and Hadji are accidentally sucked back in time and meet Richard III, only to find the princes are not locked in the tower (they adore their uncle), that Richard, not deformed, is loved by the people, and that there is a plot by Henry to usurp Richard and launch a smear campaign to legitimize his own claim to the throne. The theme is that history is written by the winners and that the truth will out. Kate Sedley's "Roger the Chapman" series (1991 - 2013) features a pedlar who solves murders and is often employed by Richard III.

21st century

Reay Tannahill's The Seventh Son (2001) is a sympathetic but unromanticized treatment of Richard III. Sandra Worth's trilogy "The Rose of York" includes three titles: Love and War (2003), Crown of Destiny (2006) and Fall from Grace (2007). Anne Easter Smith's A Rose for the Crown (2006) is a romantic novel centred upon Katherine Haute, who has been suggested as the mother of at least one of Richard's illegitimate children. In Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, the Shakespeare play is treated in the same way as The Rocky Horror Show, with regular audiences dressing up as characters from the play, stepping in to take part in it, and regular, evolutionary audience participation. Posie Graeme-Evans's trilogy about the later Plantagenet kings features a young Richard III. In Margaret Peterson Haddix's 2009 young-adult novel Sent, volume two of her The Missing novel series about a time-traveling illegal adoption ring involving abducted young historical figures, two of the main characters, Chip and Alex, turn out to be Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, respectively. They dodge an assassination attempt by Richard III, who believed that it was necessary for them to die for the good of England, and nevertheless was wracked by guilt about it throughout his reign. Philippa Gregory's novel The White Queen (2009) never fully acquits Richard of the young princes' murder/disappearance, but implies that Henry Tudor's mother, Margaret Beaufort, is involved, with the intention of incriminating Richard; however, Prince Richard is saved by being secretly sent abroad. Her novels The Red Queen and The White Princess confirm the suggestions made in the earlier book. Moonyeen Blakey's novel The Assassin's Wife implicates Richard in the murder of the princes. In Requiem of the Rose King, a manga series begun in 2013 by Aya Kanno and loosely based on Shakespeare's plays, Richard is portrayed as being intersex rather than hunchbacked. Jason Charles's The Claws of Time (2017) is a historical fantasy novel which depicts the relationship between Richard III and his fictional mistress Dimiza/River.

Screen adaptations Perhaps the best-known film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Sir Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Sir Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. In the 1960 BBC series based on Shakespeare's history plays, An Age of Kings, Paul Daneman played Richard.Quoted in Smith, Emma (2007). "Shakespeare Serialized: An Age of Kings". In Shaughnessy, Robert. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 140. Ron Cook played Richard III in the 1983 BBC Shakespeare production of the play. Away from the Shakespearean tradition, Aneurin Barnard played Richard in the 2013 BBC-Starz joint production TV series The White Queenhttp://www.starz.com/originals/thewhitequeen last accessed 25 November 2014 based on Philippa Gregory’s novels, and in September 2014 BBC started filming a new TV version of the Shakespearean play for the second part of The Hollow Crown with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role.