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.