Warrior queens, child kings, royal bastards, scheming uncles, feuding families, shifting allegiances, usurpation, decapitation, incest, toxic masculinity, toxic monarchy, a sprawling cast of characters, genealogical charts, ardent fans, a global literary event—take Shakespeare, add dragons, zombies, naked people, and corporate interests, take away the verse, and you get Game of Thrones.

The hit HBO series Game of Thrones, adapted from George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, drew its central storyline from historical source material in the Wars of the Roses, a bloody fifteenth-century civil war among feuding noble families in England. The Wars of the Roses involved the House of Lancaster (whose emblem was the red rose) and the House of York (the white) battling for the English crown amidst competing claims to the proper line of hereditary succession. Yorks unseated Lancasters, then were unseated by the upstart House of Tudor, inaugurating a period of peace and prosperity in England that included the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughter, Elizabeth I. The central parallel in A Song of Ice and Fire involves the Starks as the Yorks, the Lannisters as the Lancasters, and the Targaryens as the Tudors, as detailed in books and websites recounting “the history behind Game of Thrones.” Even the cadence of Martin’s title, A Song of Ice and Fire, recalls the Wars of the Roses, the ice pointing to the white rose, the fire to the red. In the author’s own words from 1998: “The Wars of the Roses have always fascinated me, and certainly did influence A Song of Ice and Fire, but there’s really no one-for-one character-for-character correspondence. I like to use history to flavor my fantasy, to add texture and verisimilitude, but simply rewriting history with the names changed has no appeal for me. I prefer to reimagine it all, and take it in new and unexpected directions.”

400 years before Martin gave the Tudors dragons, another famous writer told the story of the Wars of the Roses in a very different way. Written in collaboration with other authors in the early 1590s, William Shakespeare’s dramatization of the Wars of the Roses comprises his “first tetralogy”—his first set of four plays that tell a single story (Shakespeare’s “second tetralogy” was composed later in the 1590s as a prequel of sorts, depicting the English history that led up to the Wars of the Roses). Martin clearly knew the Wars of the Roses, but was he also familiar with and influenced by Shakespeare’s plays about them?

This book asks what someone who knows Shakespeare’s first tetralogy (as opposed to the history of the Wars of the Roses more generally) understands about A Song of Ice and Fire (the books) and Game of Thrones (the show) that someone unfamiliar with the Shakespearean texts might miss. In keeping with the expansive and episodic nature of the texts under consideration, there is not a single story told in this book but, rather, a series of interweaving observations. My hope is that, taken together, these vignettes reveal Martin’s debt to the literary strategies and achievements in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy as distinct from Martin’s use of the history of the Wars of the Roses as source material. These comparisons also illuminate how Shakespeare and Martin worked as authors and the conditions of literary production during the different eras in which they wrote. I include interviews with some Game of Thrones actors, and some reflections on how Game of Thrones fits into the history of Shakespearean adaptation. And in the end, I suggest the comparison with Shakespeare helps us understand how Martin changed the ending of Game of Thrones, and why fans love these texts so much.

Because its narrative is long and complex, Game of Thrones starts with a title sequence mapping out the locations of the narrative. I’ll follow suit here with a map of the disciplinary locations of the book that follows. After Section 1 surveys the relevant historical background, Section 2 delivers the book’s main argument, laying out a case for Shakespeare’s powerful yet indirect presence in Game of Thrones, drawing upon the discourse on Martin’s medievalism led by scholars such as Shiloh Carroll and Kavita Mudan Finn. Section 3 invokes Adaptation Studies to analyze Game of Thrones as what Kevin Witmore and Adam Hansen call a “Shakespearean echo,” viewing George R.R. Martin as what Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes call a “Shakespeare user.” Authorship Studies inform Section 4 (about collaboration). In the first half of the book, Sections 4-9 are comparative, examining parallels and divergences, invoking disciplines such as Film and Television Studies (Sections 3, 4, 6, and 8), Genre Studies (Section 5 and 6), Performance Studies (Section 9), and Audience Studies (Section 10). The second half of the book shifts from a comparative to a historicist methodology, Sections 11-19 asking how Martin used Shakespeare as a source, and how their different time periods influenced their shared tropes, motifs, devices, characters, and plots. These readings are interdisciplinary: Political Science informs Sections 12 and 17; Sociology appears in Sections 13, 14, and 19; and Gender Studies arise in Sections 14 and 15. Theory from these disciplines is used to explicate our literary texts, but Section 12 offers an example of “Shakespeare for Theory” where literature is not the recipient of theory in the service of exegesis but the origin of new theory then offered to other disciplines. The final third of the book also spotlights questions of reception. Section 15 looks at criticism on race and gender in Shakespeare and Martin’s texts, building on conversations begun by Carroll, Finn, Helen Young, and Mat Hardy, among others. Section 18 shows Martin cycling the various possible endings of A Song of Ice and Fire through Shakespeare. And Section 19 concludes the book from the vantage of Fan Studies.