The Promised End

The Promised End explores how the endings of Shakespeare's tragedies work - how, in effect, they resist conventional closure. It looks back from the endings of five plays - Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear - to explore how their structures of action, imagery and the interaction of different genres - comedy, tragedy and romance - bring them to conclusions that are both inevitable and yet strangely incongruous, beyond explanation and moral understanding, almost too terrible to bear.