Shakespeare lived in an age when royal genealogy mattered. It became increasingly clear during his adolescent years that Queen Elizabeth would never marry and would have no direct heir. A new sovereign would have to be found on a lateral branch of the royal family tree. Breaks in the royal chain could lead to violence and social upheaval, as those in Shakespeare's time knew well. When he sat down to write his first plays, the Wars of the Roses had ended a little over one hundred years before, a bloody catastrophe which remained embedded in the national memory. One witness to this lingering concern is the playwright's activity during the last decade of Elizabeth's rule, when eight of his dramas dealt with the conflict and its causes; from the deposition of Richard II by his Lancastrian cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, to the overthrow of the Yorkist Richard III by Henry Tudor. Elizabeth was the last of the Tudors, and the joined red and white roses in their coat of arms was meant to remind their subjects of the relative peace which the dynasty had brought to England and Wales.

In the Wars of the Roses, genealogy was claimed as an important issue in the struggles of Yorkist and Lancastrian pretenders to the throne. Henry VI was the great-grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the fourth son of Edward III. This royal ancestry was said to be insufficient by partisans of the Yorkist cause, who observed that Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, besides being the grandson of Edward III's fifth son, Edmund of York, through his paternal line, was also the great-great-grandson of Edward's third son, Lionel of Clarence, through his maternal line. This gave him a claim to the English crown, one which would then be asserted in civil war in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, leading to the deaths of both Richard and Henry, and the accession to the throne of Richard's sons, Edward IV and Richard III.