“Bloody thou art, bloody will be thy end.” English playwright and national poet William Shakespeare is believed to have written King Richard III between 1592 and 1594. It was published in 1597 in a quarto edition and in the First Folio of 1623. King Richard III is the last in a sequence of four history plays collectively called The First Tetralogy. The other three in the sequence are King Henry VI, Part 1, King Henry VI, Part 2, and King Henry VI, Part 3. All four plays focus on the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. In King Richard III, Richard targets every person who stands between him and the throne of England. He marries Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law he has murdered, and goes on to get rid of her. He plots the deaths of Queen Elizabeth’s sons and her brother. He also orders the execution of the courtier, Lord Hastings. Richard’s reign of terror ends when Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, challenges his claim to the throne. Richard is killed in the Battle of Bosworth and the Earl of Richmond becomes King Henry VII.