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Here is Shakespeare's biggest bummer in a long career of bummers. Remember that catch phrase kids thought was clever in like 7th grade as they were discovering the joys of nihilism: "Life sucks, then you die"? That's the actual and entire message of King Lear. "Nothing will come of nothing," rages the doddering King, and there is nothing, and nothing comes of it.

And along the way, don't forget, we get maybe Shakespeare's most disturbing scene, the outing of the vile jelly, Marlovian in its gruesomeness.

Shakespeare liked the word "nothing", only partly because it's vaginas. He has some dark fun with it in Lear - check him out as he offers the disinherited Cordelia to Burgundy in marriage:

If aught within that little seeming substance,
Or all of it, with our displeasure pieced,
And nothing more, may fitly like your grace,
She's there, and she is yours.

Burgundy's like nah, I'm good. But this play is about something less pleasant than vaginas: it's about the real nothing, entropy, death.

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World points out that Shakespeare has this weird tendency to excise the motive from his plots, which is part of what makes them so endlessly interesting and open to interpretation. Shakespeare's has Iago acting out of jealousy, because he has a crush on Desdemona. But Shakespeare more or less chops that out; Iago's motives are left murky. "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know," he says as he leaves the stage, and there's that word again.

And Shakespeare mucks with his source again in Lear. His (this is an oft-told tale) has Lear staging the whole "Who loves me?" thing so as to get Cordelia to marry who he wants. (It sortof makes sense in context.) Shakespeare once again trims it out; in his version, the game seems like no more than an old asshole who likes to be flattered. He changes the ending, too, which is happy in most of the sources. His Lear starts and ends in chaos and meaningless tragedy: nothing from nothing.

Lear isn't perfect. That fake suicide scene has never worked for me, and the mock trial doesn't really either, and frankly there's less in the way of glorious wordplay than there is in Hamlet or Tempest, and the parallel plots work together but also make it seem less focused than Macbeth or Othello. But it's a storm of nihilism, a dark night of literature, a virtuoso depiction of despair without glimmer. As an exploration of the emptiest corners of the world, the bleak and barren heath of your soul...nothing beats it.