William Shakespeare, the Wars of the Roses and the Historians

How and why Shakespeare propelled the relatively unimportant Wars of the Roses into the history books. For historians of the Wars of the Roses William Shakespeare is both a curse and a blessing: a curse because he immortalized Tudor spin on fifteenth-century civil wars that helped justify Elizabeth I's occuption of the English throne; a blessing because, without Shakespeare, the Wars would not be known by the public at large.