ABSTRACT
Several scenes into their tragical history of the Wars of the Roses in 2 Henry VI , Shakespeare and Marlowe swerved to stage a scene of slapstick comedy: the miracle at St. Albans. Shakespeare’s penchant for mixing genres was once seen as a blight on his artistic achievement. 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. At the same time, like Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, Game of Thrones takes much of its literary energy from its intermingling of genres. The prologue of A Game of Thrones starts with horror: action, suspense, and danger out in the wild.
