Abstract
Shakespeare’s influence on English-speaking fantasy writers has been the subject of much recent scholarship, notably studies by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (A Short History of Fantasy. Middlesex University Press, London, 2009), Kevin Pask (The Fairy Way of Writing: Shakespeare to Tolkien. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2013) or Cyril Camus (French Journal of English Studies 52: 109–24, 2014).
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Notes
- 1.
See notably Jeffrey R. Wilson. Shakespeare and Game of Thrones. New York: Routledge, 2021.
- 2.
‘A figure by which a word, or a particular form or inflection of a word, is made to refer to two or more other words in the same sentence, while properly applying to or agreeing with only one of them (e.g. a masculine adjective qualifying two nouns, masculine and feminine; a singular verb serving as predicate to two subjects, singular and plural), or applying to them in different senses (e.g. literal and metaphorical)’ (OED 1). About the importance of the sylleptic structure ‘winter is coming’, see Martins (2020, 203–15).
- 3.
In the Prologue of the first book of the saga, A Game of Thrones (1996), three rangers from the Night’s Watch go beyond the wall to track a group of Wildlings but end up stumbling upon ‘the Others’ (the other name given to the White Walkers).
- 4.
‘The map there. Know that we have divided / In three our kingdom […]’ (1.1.31–2).
- 5.
My translation. See Weber (2017, 47): ‘Le meurtre de la Main du Roi, Jon Arryn, le meurtre de Robert Baratheon lui-même, la défenestration de Bran et les horreurs de la guerre civile […] tout s’origine dans l’inceste’.
- 6.
‘Dark fantasy’ is a subgenre of fantasy literature characterized by elements of horror, often displaying an excess of violence, death, blood and sex.
- 7.
Such as Jared Diamond, Pablo Servigne or Raphaël Stevens.
- 8.
For instance, see Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter saga, or even Aemon Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire.
- 9.
See Chapelle et al. (2018).
- 10.
To such an extent that in Nahum Tate’s The History of King Lear, a Restoration rewriting of the play, Lear recovers his crown and gives it to Cordelia, who led the revolt of the British army against the tyrannical reign of her two sisters. Tate offers the play a happy ending, thus preventing the final collapse.
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Martins, V. (2023). Comparative Collapsology: From Shakespeare to George R. R. Martin. In: Patel, S., Chiari, S. (eds) The Writing of Natural Disaster in Europe, 1500–1826. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12120-3_10
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