Introduction
Martin clearly knew the Wars of the Roses, but was he also familiar with and influenced by Shakespeare’s plays about them? 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.
1. The Tudor Myth
This briskly telescoped history of medieval English royalty shows how many of the same themes pop up in Game of Thrones: internal civil war and external foreign war, women in politics, church versus state, royal authority versus people’s rights, counsellor infighting, the line of succession, the child king, and monarchy versus meritocracy, among others.
2. Martin’s Shakespeare
While there is ample circumstantial evidence suggesting Martin directly engaged with Shakespeare’s first tetralogy—such as his self-proclaimed love of Shakespeare and his documented direct engagement with Shakespeare’s other plays—it seems likely that Martin’s engagement with Shakespeare’s first tetralogy was, paradoxically, very deep yet indirect. His most extensive source-work was with popular histories and historical fictions that are not Shakespeare’s history plays, yet are informed by them. Martin seems to be more influenced by Shakespearean tropes of characterization and narrative than by Shakespeare’s actual texts themselves.
3. The Shakespearean Slingshot
Game of Thrones is an example of what I call the Shakespearean slingshot. Artists position themselves behind Shakespeare, drafting off his cultural energy, allowing his power and popularity to clear the way for new artistic endeavors, the artists darting out from behind Shakespeare at key moments, taking the lead, going in their own directions, leaving him behind to fade into the distance.
4. Composition History and Co(rporate)-Authorship
Where the Elizabethan theatrical scene of Shakespeare’s London boasted a system of collaborative authorship that identified young talent and fostered the careers of individual artists—allowing for the emergence of the man who would become the most celebrated author in the English language—the twenty-first-century American entertainment industry exhibits a system of corporate authorship that literally takes authors’ narratives away from them for the sake of making money.
5. From True Tragedy to Historical Fantasy
Why was Martin drawn to the Wars of the Roses for source material when writing his fantasy novels? He wasn’t. Instead, he started with the Wars of the Roses, then realized that that story he sought to tell had affinities to the genre of fantasy.
6. Comical-Tragical-Historical-Pastoral: Mixed Genre
While the specifics are vastly different from the mixture of history, tragedy, and comedy in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, A Song of Ice and Fire, like Shakespeare’s earlier text, draws its literary prowess from generic mixture, not only blending fantasy with history, but also spicing it with horror, romance, pastoral, and the novel of manners.
7. Narrative Relief: From Comedy to Nudity
Where Shakespeare and his co-authors offered relief from the seriousness of war and politics in scenes of slapstick comedy, HBO offered relief from the political plot of Game of Thrones through scenes of gratuitous nudity and sex. And this parallel creates an opportunity to theorize the concept of narrative relief as something different from the more common notion of comic relief.
8. Spectacle and Success from the Medieval Church Service to CGI
The popularity of Game of Thrones is often associated with the carnal pleasures provided in its gratuitous sex and violence. Looking more closely, however, the examples of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy and Game of Thrones suggest a theory of literary popularity: literature becomes popular when it exploits the most recent technological advances in spectacle.
9. Game of Thrones as Shakespearean Performance: Interviews with the Actors
During interviews with Julian Glover, Conleth Hill, and Anton Lesser, the idea that struck me most powerfully was that acting Shakespeare, especially Shakespearean tragedy—those lines written in formal verse, delivered in a high style, talking about important matters of state—prepares one to deliver convincingly the text of Game of Thrones. In both cases, the actor must be able to make current and real to a twenty-first-century audience a slice of life as medieval royalty that none of us has experienced, and a world far removed from reality that none of us has ever lived in.
10. External Predictability, Internal Unpredictability
The human brain likes predictability. As history plays, the popularity of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy is configured with its predictability, but the popularity of Game of Thrones is connected to its unpredictability. Paradoxically, the human brain also likes surprises. But predictability works completely differently in these two instances.
11. Eddard as Gloucester: De Casibus Virorum Illustrum
Once the analogy between Lancasters and Lannisters, Yorks and Starks is recognized, the shared fate of Eddard and Richard, Duke of York is not so surprising after all. As represented by Shakespeare, however, Richard, Duke of York doesn’t really resemble Eddard Stark at all. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, that role is played by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.
12. Wars of Roses: A Literary Trope in Social Life
We can theorize outward from the Wars of the Roses, the specific historical event, to a generalizable sociological concept. In other words, by structuring its plot on the Wars of the Roses, but detaching that event from its historical moment, Game of Thrones helps us theorize what a “war of roses” is: the fractious squabbling that occurs among competing leaders within a group, sewing discord and division, weakening solidarity and defenses against outside forces, allowing those foreign powers to overtake the divided group with relative ease as it gnaws away at itself.
13. The Stigmatized Protagonist: The Tragic Model and the Heroic Model
With Richard III, Shakespeare invented the stigmatized protagonist: the central figure whose character and plot are closely bound up with his or her negotiation of negative social attitudes heaped upon him or her in response to some innate aspect of his or her identity (1) that he or she has no control over, but (2) that has come to signify illegitimacy. The stigmatized protagonist was probably the most important literary trope George R.R. Martin inherited from Shakespeare when he wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, but Martin adapted the character in two ways.
14. Girl Power: Mimetic Feminism and Rhetorical Misogyny
Along with the proliferation of the stigmatized protagonist, the representation of strong female characters is the best evidence for the case that George R.R. Martin was influenced by Shakespeare’s first tetralogy as a literary work rather than just the Wars of the Roses as a historical event. But the shared tropes for female characters also point to one of the biggest differences between these two texts: the way each author engaged with the gender politics of his time.
15. Generic Bias: Gender, Race, Criticism
The race and gender problems of Game of Thrones are intrinsic to the narrative’s source material. Game of Thronesinherited the problematic identity politics of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, resulting in parallel critical conversations about racism and sexism in these texts. Operating on the level of narrative structure, these regressive identity politics override progressive moves made by the authors, which are more evident with gender than race, and which come on the lower level of characterization. This dynamic shows how the ethical impulses of individual authors can be stifled by what I term “generic bias,” and how generic bias perpetuates harmful attitudes over time.
16. The Bloody Hand: Intertextual Metatheater
The different versions of The Bloody Hand in Martin’s chapter and the HBO show are variously intertextual, metatheatrical, and intertextually metatheatrical—meaning they (1) allude to Shakespeare, (2) reflect upon their own acts of artistic representation, and (3) allude to Shakespeare’s reflections on art.
17. The Targaryen Myth
While Game of Thrones took from Shakespeare’s first tetralogy the notion of a mythological dynasty bringing peace to a land beset by civil war—the Tudors and the Targaryens—the political ideologies represented by Shakespeare’s Henry Tudor and Martin’s Daenerys Targaryen could not be more different. Where the Tudor myth promoted the idea of a divine-right monarch led by the hand of God to acquire power over a nation, granting that monarch and his descendants absolute authority to rule, the Targaryen myth suggests that political power will seek out, find, and enfranchise those who exercise the most liberal principles, such as freedom, fairness, and equality.
18. How George R.R. Martin Changed the Ending of Game Of Thrones
We know Martin based the structure of his central narrative on the Tudor myth, but was always happy to change things around as needed. My goal here is to show with some specificity how he used character and narrative tropes from Shakespeare’s depiction of the Tudor myth as a frame for thinking about several plot developments and possible permutations of his story and its ending.
19. Fandom as IKEA Effect
Why do fans love these texts so intensely? I suggest that the strong fan bases of both Shakespeare’s history plays and Game of Thrones exhibit something called the IKEA effect. Taking its name from the “assembly required” furniture store, the IKEA effect refers to a psychological phenomenon where people highly value things they have imbued with their own labor.