#and then the way it will contain profoundly devastating psychological truths

[itspileofgoodthings]

tortured poets is so close ….

[princess-of-france]

Top 5 saddest Shakespeare moments?

You are a monster and I’m so broken by this. But also: catharsis.

(And I’m going to do a countdown because I’m a Dramatic Bitch.)

5. “I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.” (King Henry V, 2 Henry IV)

In a canon of plays that contain some of the most stomach-churningly visceral violence in all of English drama, this moment in 2H4 is devastating proof that words really are the cruelest weapon we humans are capable of wielding against each other. As far as I’m concerned, two characters die in this moment: Hal is Hal no longer and Falstaff is strapped onto the conveyer belt that will bring him to his offstage demise in H5. Absolutely brutal.

4. “Nobody; I myself. Farewell.” (Desdemona, Othello)

Honestly, this entire scene in Othello is like a crash course in Human Suffering, but I chose this specific moment because I don’t think there is anything more profoundly sad than the fact that Desdemona—the woman murdered for her unfaithfulness—refuses to indict her husband in her final ~10 seconds of life, even though her husband is literally the person who murdered her and this could be the only opportunity for the truth ever to come out. Desdemona’s loyalty to Othello, whom she chose with her eyes and heart wide open, is the only force in this play more powerful than Othello’s jealousy. He cannot strangle that love out of her. It is pure and nuclear and unstoppable. And heartbreaking.

3. “Thy lips are warm.” (Juliet, Romeo and Juliet)

Again, this whole scene is pretty much agony, but the sheer simplicity of this sentence guts me every single time I read or see it. Juliet—this firecracker of a girl whose love and passion blaze brighter than the stars that first threw her and Romeo together—kisses the mouth of her two-day husband and realizes from that kiss that Romeo must have killed himself only moments ago. She was too late to save the love of her life by just a few minutes. Tellingly, Juliet can’t even express the depth of her grief upon realizing this. There’s no poetry here, no eloquence; it’s nothing like Romeo’s gorgeous death speech, nothing like all of her speeches that have come before. All Juliet can do is tremble and choke out these four words that encapsulate her tragedy. The phenomenology of this moment onstage is inherently powerful for an audience—it’s part of what has made the ending of this play so iconic.

2. “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” (Angelo, Measure for Measure)

#MeToo. I don’t think Shakespeare meant this moment to be “tragic,” in the classical sense, but it’s been four hundred fucking years. It is a tragedy. 

1. “I might have saved her.” (Lear, King Lear)

I mean, this whole play is basically a three-hour-long Sad Shakespearean Moment, and virtually any mutilation/dissolution/betrayal/death in the narrative could easily merit a #1 place on this list, but I would argue that there is nothing worse than Cordelia’s death. Nothing, that is, except the fact that the audience is then forced to watch literally every character left alive/onstage register her death in real time. And no one’s grief is worse than Lear’s, in large part because he flickers in and out of even believing that she is dead, like a badly wired institutional lightbulb. This particular line slays me more than any other because it marks the culmination of Lear’s full circle as a character. It’s the moment of supreme anagnorisis, the moment when Lear finally recognizes that this entire tragedy is one of his own making. He finally catches up, psychologically, to where the audience was five whole bloody acts ago and recognizes the awful truth that he consigned Cordelia to her death the moment he banished her from England, because it was always going to end this way. Goneril and Regan were always going to feed him to the dogs and Cordelia was always going to take that as her cue to march into battle for his sake and he was always going to lose everything from his crown to his marbles and the Fool was always going to disappear and Edmund was always going to play his last, spiteful ace and no, Lear, no, Cordelia is not still alive. She is dead. You might have saved her. You did not.