The play neither hides nor maximizes Richard’s faults, and its apparent impartiality means that neither candidate is idealized. Richard has his favourites, those ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ (2.3.165), but Bushy, Bagot and Green are less effective and less venal than in other narratives of the story. The chronicler Raphael Holinshed, one of Shakespeare’s sources, summarizes Richard’s downfall as the result of his shortcomings as a ruler: ‘by reason he was so given to follow evil counsel, and used such inconvenient ways and means, through insolent misgovernance and youthful outrage’.
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