at the Duchess of Cambridge character displaying a fundamental ignorance that Charles was king immediately upon the death of Elizabeth. She says that he won't be king until the coronation. Sigh. I had to stop watching, because what I was seeing was so far removed from reality.

The Duchess of Cambridge is portrayed as an ambitious, Machiavellian schemer. I'm sure the real Kate wasn't flattered. But since it was fiction, and the rest of the play was so astounding, I let it go...

from this era I'd have found it fascinating. But there's always a huge problem with fiction about current living people, and as far as I'm concerned it's rarely done well. For me it would have worked better had it been as an entirely fictional group of people, sort of an alternate universe kind of thing.

Oh well. To each his own.

Shakespeare portrayed him as an ugly, hunchbacked monster, and that's how most people think of the real Richard.

The real Richard was a brave soldier, a talented general, a gifted administrator, and he looked like this:

But at least Shakespeare was writing more than a century after Richard died, so the sense of getting it wrong wouldn't have been quite so strong as it is with "Charles III".