The historian G. M. Trevelyan observed that ‘the reign of Richard II has interested people more, perhaps, than any other equally brief period of English medieval history’, because (he explains) in the ‘long-drawn-out process’ whereby the so-called Middle Ages came to an end, the events of Richard's reign hold ‘a peculiarly important place’. From Shakespeare's depiction of the final year of that unhappy reign, seen in the context of the historical sequence of plays his Richard II initiates, one may surmise that he held a similar view—indeed, suspect that Shakespeare's portrayal has substantially contributed to the peculiar interest Trevelyan notes.

Doubtless much of that interest, whatever its source, derives from an awareness that the deposing of Richard precipitated a century of civil strife in England, leading to the Wars of the Roses, which in turn resulted in the termination of some three and a half centuries of unbroken Norman-Plantagenet rule and the ascension of the House of Tudor (whose early years continued to be troubled by disturbances in favour of rival claimants). By the time Shakespeare wrote his dramatic accounts of English history, the de facto basis of royal authority in England, of its ‘legitimacy’, had been radically transformed. For though lip service continued to be paid to its de jure basis of ‘divine right’, that principle was increasingly viewed as moribund even as it was first being declaimed as absolute.