ABSTRACT
Shakespeare and his collaborators presented the woman warrior as supernatural because a domestic life for women was thought to be natural, Joan coordinating her military prowess with her rejection of traditional femininity. From Shakespeare’s three main female characters—Joan, Margaret, and Eleanor—we can distill three main character types that inform the two central female characters in Game of Thrones: the woman warrior, the momma bear, and the Machiavellian lady. Coding political women as witches was an expression of male anxiety about the increased power and prominence of women in the Elizabethan age. Four hundred years later, the motif of the burning girl would become central to Game of Thrones, not only in Daenerys Targaryen’s self-immolation, which radically revises the trope, but also in the sacrifice of Shireen, which devastatingly retains it. Daenerys is a Margaret who becomes a Joan, while Cersei is a mixture of Margaret (queen mother) and Eleanor (Machiavellian lady).
