Introduction

Widely known for the naked people and magic dragons, 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. Turning from texts to receptions, Dan Venning argues that the Shakespearean ancestry of Game of Thrones helps the show, like Shakespeare’s plays and their afterlives, bridge highbrow and lowbrow culture–professional literary critics and pop-culture fans. Fans have written Shakespeare and Game of Thrones mash-ups, one in 2016 imagining how showrunners Benioff and Weiss would butcher Much Ado about Nothing. Martin–who taught English and Journalism for three years at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa in the late 1970s5–is certainly familiar with Shakespeare in general. Because its narrative is long and complex, Game of Thrones starts with a title sequence mapping out the locations of the narrative.