Game of Thrones, Shakespearean? What fools these mortals be!
The Mad King may bring more dynastic disputes and dotty despots to the RSC – but a ‘mayhap’ or a riddling aphorism does not a Shakespeare play make
As a latecomer to Game of Thrones, I am struck by how many people tell me it is “very Shakespearean”. It is as if they need to justify its heady escapism and heavy reliance on bonking and brutality. But its debt to the Bard – apart from the rivalry between the houses of Lannister and Stark – rests mainly on the casting. Watching the first 11 episodes, I noticed four Lears past and to come (Julian Glover, David Bradley, Oliver Ford-Davies and Roger Allam), a Macbeth (Sean Bean), a Hamlet and Henry V (Iain Glen) and a Cassius (Michelle Fairley) among many others.
Because it is presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company and staged by Dominic Cooke, who memorably directed The Hollow Crown on television, we shall doubtless hear the same arguments about Game of Thrones: The Mad King at Stratford. But, although there are frequent nods to Shakespeare, they totally lack the resonance of the original. Our first sight of Michael Shaeffer’s King Aerys with a white beard, a leafy crown and no shoes almost screams “Lear on the heath”. But where Lear gradually declines into insanity (“O fool I shall go mad”) and comes out the other side, Shaeffer’s Aerys is a dotty despot from start to finish. The use of tournaments to settle dynastic disputes also reminds us of the opening of Richard II – but where that event is aborted and ultimately causes the king’s downfall, here the image of embattled jousters is endlessly repeated.
But there are two other reasons why the use of tropes from the Stratford playwright doesn’t make a play Shakespearean. The most obvious is the language. Where Shakespeare allows even minor characters unforgettable verse (the first murderer’s “the west yet glimmers with some streaks of day” in Macbeth) or plangent prose (the second carrier’s “peas and beans are as dank here as a dog” in Henry IV Part I), Duncan Macmillan’s dialogue rarely glistens. There is a heavy dependence on riddling aphorisms (“Every step we take from our destiny leads us towards it”) and repeated archaisms (such as “mayhap” for “perhaps”) that put me in mind of Max Beerbohm’s magnificent parody of a historical drama, Savonarola Brown, where Lucrezia asks: “How many crows may nest in a grocer’s jerkin?”
The other aspect of Shakespeare’s genius, signally missing here, is the ability to enliven dynastic conflict with social detail and to traverse the nation. Even in an early Marlovian play such as Henry VI Part Two, there is a wonderful scene where the seemingly sightless Simpcox is exposed as a faker. By the time we get to a masterpiece like the two parts of Henry IV, Shakespeare takes us from the council chamber and the battlefield into the Eastcheap taprooms and the Cotswold countryside. But in the nearly four hours of Stratford’s Games of Thrones, we get little sense of the impact of the struggle for power on the commonwealth. This is a story of feuding families and warring tribes with scant acknowledgment of its impact on the people who are simply battle-fodder.
But there is a larger point. While marginalising Shakespeare, the RSC seems fixated on fiction. After this play, inspired by the novels of George RR Martin, the company offers adaptations of George Eliot and Alexandre Dumas. Yet there is a great historical novelist with genuine echoes of Shakespeare hiding in plain sight: Walter Scott. I know he is unfashionable but I have read most of the Waverley novels and been astonished by their narrative vigour and richness of character. Jonathan Bate in The Genius of Shakespeare, while quoting the endorsement of the novelist’s greatness by a Marxist critic, makes the case for Scott’s indebtedness to the man from Stratford far better than I could and I would urge the RSC’s directors to read it.
Of course, they could do something even more radical than ransack the library shelves for work that is supposedly “Shakespearean”. They could stage more of the plays that Shakespeare actually wrote – but that might be a step too far.
• Game of Thrones: The Mad King is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 5 September