their production; In Shakespeare's histories, the Grand Mechanism is manifested nowhere more clearly than in the rise and fall of Richard III. Kott argued that "Richard is impersonal like history itself. He is the consciousness and mastermind of the Grand Mechanism. He puts in motion the roller of history, and later is crushed by it. Psychology does not apply to him. He is just history, one of its ever-repeating characters. He has no face." This concept of Richard as a faceless personification of the process of a cyclical history became extremely important in Ian Holm's performance. Whilst some critics felt that Holm was physically too slight to play such a 'large' character, this was precisely the point. Holm's Richard is not the dominating larger-than-life presence of the third play as he appears on the page, but is instead a small figure, nurtured by, trapped within and ultimately destroyed by the times that have produced him. Holm himself has stated "I played Richard very much as a cog in the historical wheel, and not as an individual character. We tried very hard to get away from the Olivier/Irving image of the great Machiavellian villain." Both directors were also supporters of E.M.W. Tillyard's 1944 book Shakespeare's History Plays, which was still a hugely influential text in Shakespearean scholarship, especially in terms of its argument that the tetralogy advanced the Tudor myth or "Elizabethan World Picture"; the theory that Henry VII was a divinely appointed redeemer, sent to rescue England from a century of bloodshed and chaos initiated upon the usurpation and murder of the divinely ordained Richard II, a century which reached its debased and cruel apotheosis in Richard III. According to Hall, "all Shakespeare's thinking, whether religious, political or moral, is based upon a complete acceptance of this concept of order. There is a just proportion in all things: man is above beast, king is above man, and God above king [...] Revolution, whether in the individual's temperament, in the family, or in the state or the heavens, destroys the order and leads to destructive anarchy." Indeed, the program notes for Henry VI included an article entitled "The Cycle of a Curse," which states that "as Orestes was haunted in Greek drama, so Englishmen fight each other to expunge the curse pronounced upon Bolingbroke's usurpation of the tragically weak Richard II." Similarly, in the notes for Edward IV, Hall wrote, "underlying