Source of Shakespeare's inaccurate Richard III portrayal explored

While Shakespeare's mastery of language and stagecraft is universally recognised, the historical accuracy of many of his plays is open to question and the recent discovery of Richard III's remains has reminded us of this. A new book edited by Oxford University academics has gone further than ever before in explaining why this is by studying The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland published in the later C16 under the name of Raphael Holinshed. These ground-breaking chronicles gave rise to more Renaissance plays than any other source, including Shakespeare's histories, King Lear, Macbeth , and Cymbeline . Ian Archer of Oxford University's Faculty of History said: 'Our research has found that such inaccuracies are caused by the complexity of Holinshed's Chronicles, which stems from multiple authorship, religious tensions among the contributors, and fraught circumstances when it was published. The authors and revisers came from diverse backgrounds and they used an extraordinary variety of conflicting sources. Richard III, whose reign has been made supremely timely by the dramatic discovery of his skeleton under the Leicester car park, is a very good example of how Holinshed's Chronicles shaped Shakespeare's engagement with history, according to Paulina Kewes of Oxford University's Faculty of English Language and Literature. 'Shakespeare's Richard is a physically misshapen, tyrannical usurper whose defeat at Bosworth is portrayed as providential,' she said.