The 400-Year-Old Tragedy That Captures Our Chaos
This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.
Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.
But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.
treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. is not alone’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh his plans to stage it in London and New York. The news followed Al Pacino’s that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, , , , , , and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.) Maureen Dowd recently as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. She was inspired by the fact that, this spring, “the hottest ticket” in Washington, D.C., was the Shakespeare Theater Company’s take on the tragedy—a channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.”
