ABSTRACT
As history plays, the popularity of Shakespeare’s first tetralogy among its earliest audiences is configured with its predictability, but the popularity of Game of Thrones is connected to its unpredictability. The first tetralogy exhibits an external predictability in which events in the plays are expected because one knows the historical source material upon which they are based. It seems likely that the predictability of the first tetralogy—most especially its teleological movement toward the Tudor dynasty its original audiences were living under—contributed to its massive popularity in the early-modern age. Many of the events in Game of Thrones are predictable when one knows the historical material upon which they are based but, since the vast majority of its audience is unaware of its historical source material—or those analogs are only identifiable retrospectively—the dominant criteria of predictability is internal rather than external.
