these plays is the curse on the House of Lancaster. Bolingbroke deposed Richard II to become Henry IV. Richard II was a weak and sometimes a bad king, ungoverned, unbalanced; he could not order the body politic. Yet for Shakespeare, his deposition is a wound on the body politic, which festers through reign after reign, a sin which can only be expiated by blood-letting. The bloody totalitarianism of Richard III is the expiation of England." John Jowett argues the production very much reinforced the teleological assumptions upon which the Tudor myth is based; "it generated an epic sense of history as a horrific process. Richard's deeds, far from appearing as gratuitous crimes, were the final retributive throes of a sequence of events starting far back in the murder of Richard II." Randall Martin similarly writes "Barton created a compelling dynastic saga about the houses of Lancaster and York, as one falls and the other triumphs - or appears to do so. This emphasis on family history over any single personal story was reinforced by the plays' relationship to the wider cycle, which affiliated individual episodes to an epic structure and teleological interpretation of history." Likewise, Nicholas Grene explains that "as Tillyard saw the history plays, they were the grandly consistent embodiment of the orthodox political and social morality of the Elizabethan period, preaching order and hierarchy, condemning factious power-seeking and the anarchy of civil war to which it led, commending the divinely sanctioned centralised monarchy of the Tudors. Barton and Hall worked to homogenise, to accentuate and underline the orthodoxy postulated by Tillyard." Production However, although the political sphere was very much to the fore in the thematic foundations of the production, unlike many other politically minded productions of the tetralogy (such as, for example, Michael Bogdanov's production of both historical tetralogies for the English Shakespeare Company in 1987), modern parallels were not brought out in the actual performance. Barton and Hall were insistent there be no direct references to contemporary events in the production itself; "instead, contemporary issues were used to help the company explore the political and psychological meanings of the plays." The plays were approached as a collective analysis of power, with the behaviour of unscrupulous politicians contrasted with the political innocence and religious idealism of Henry. As Hall argued, "in theory, he should be a good king. He applies Christian ethics to government. But he is