The many versions of Richard III: from Shakespeare to Game of Thrones

Figuratively speaking, writers have been digging up Richard III and setting what they make of him before the public for more than four centuries. While some were inspired by the play Shakespeare wrote 100 years after Richard’s death, others have been drawn to the historical figure, who was reburied in Leicester this morning.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo

Hugo revered Shakespeare, so it was not by chance that a medieval setting and a hunchback protagonist came together in this early novel, just as they do in Richard III. But the French author breaks away from the play in making his hunchback, Quasimodo, socially lowly and heroic – the opposite of a beguiling aristocratic villain; when he commits murder, he does so because the evil Frollo has handed over Esmeralda to be executed.

Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville

Several Shakespearean heroes contribute to tragic Ahab, soliloquising hunter of the titular white whale, but the captain’s prosthetic leg aligns him most closely with Richard. Both characters belong to an unpleasant tradition of equating moral and physical deformity or disability, continued in the 20th century by, for example, Ian Fleming’s scarred Bond villains and Peter Sellers’s wheelchair-bound eponymous scientist in Dr Strangelove.

Rigoletto
by Giuseppe Verdi

Another Hugo hero, another hunchback (Verdi’s opera is based on his play Le Roi s’Amuse), but this time one who, when marginalised and mocked because of his appearance, converts his resentment like Shakespeare’s character into a determination to be avenged. Like Richard, Rigoletto is the cause of the death of a child under his protection, although in his case the murder is a horrible instance of mistaken identity.

The Black Arrow
by Robert Louis Stevenson

A medieval adventure (whose name and setting suggest it influenced The Black Adder) in which the hero, who belongs to a band of outlaws, fights alongside “Richard Crouchback” and is knighted by him. Though he scoffed at the Bard’s take on Richard as crude apprentice-work, Stevenson copied him by barmily depicting the future king as leading armies in battles of the 1450s, when he would have been under 10 years old.

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

In this offbeat detective novel, armchair sleuthing by a recuperating policeman establishes a powerful revisionist case: the real villain was the usurper Henry VII, and Richard – a willing right-hand man who didn’t murder the princes in the Tower or covet his brother’s crown – was traduced by Tudor toadies Thomas More and Shakespeare.

The Winter of Our Discontent
by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck’s last novel centres on a small-town Richard who schemes his way to local power and benefits from an apparent murder committed by someone else. Reviewers saw it as the work of a burnt-out writer, but he was awarded the Nobel prize the following year.

The Cousins’ War
by Philippa Gregory

Gregory’s series, which radically reimagines the Wars of the Roses using female narrators, neither convicts nor acquits Richard of killing the princes (Anne, his wife, may have given a hitman the go-ahead without meaning to), but generally presents him as far from a monster. He is, though, like Shakespeare’s king in being a transgressive seducer, conducting a secret affair with his niece Elizabeth – who happens to be the wife-to-be of his nemesis-to-be, the future Henry VII.

The Black Adder
by Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis

Not only does Richard III (played by Peter Cook) appear briefly in this alt-history medieval sitcom – set in the 1480s in the counterfactual reign of Richard IV, father of its eponymous anti-hero – but Atkinson’s Prince Edmund is also clearly partly based on the cynical, frustrated, unprepossessing Richard who resents being a mere duke in the Henry VI plays and at the start of Richard III.

House of Cards
by Michael Dobbs

Dobbs’s chief whip, Francis Urquhart, is Richard-like only in being an ambitious, disregarded figure willing to do anything to climb the greasy pole. It was Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation that significantly advanced the parallel with the play’s confiding Machiavel by using a Shakespearean device that was also adopted in the current US version starring Kevin Spacey: the politician directly addressing the audience.

A Song of Ice and Fire
by George RR Martin

The website History in Game of Thrones argues the historical Richard is the model for the northern ruler and trustworthy brother Ned Stark – David Cameron’s favourite character in the TV version. It’s also been suggested that Martin drew on the last Plantagenet king when creating Tyrion Lannister and Stannis Baratheon in his refashioning of 15th-century English history.