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Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. 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 production channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.” (In response to the former president’s indictment 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 treated Lear as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. The news followed Al Pacino’s announcement that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. Late last month, having cited Lear’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh shared his plans to stage it in London and New York. Succession is not alone in finding resonance in that concession. Lear treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. 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. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show.

Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation.

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. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. Their addresses-honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points-were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air.

His grief overcame him trying to speak, he sobbed. 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.īut Roman failed. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. 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. This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.