Censorship in the Time of Shakespeare.

Did the bard create an evil Richard the Third to make Queen Elizabeth’s Tudor ancestors seem benign by comparison?

A new play, “The Ballad of Crookback and Shakespeare” explores the problems encountered by writers during a period in which long held religious beliefs were being overturned by the English throne. Henry VIII may have declared himself the head of the Church and repudiated many of the practices of Catholicism; his son, Edward VI, a child king heavily influenced by his uncles, accelerated the persecution of ‘Papists’. The older of Henry’s daughters, a…