I watched Great Performances' "King Lear" on PBS last night. Shakespeare did like to end things rather bloodily, and KL is a satisfactorily dark story. However, I kept wondering what will happen with the line of succession. The king and daughters are all dead, other nobles dead...who's going to run the country now? Can they avert a big civil war, or will they just invite the French in, who were already there, yet beaten, naturally, anyway. It wasn't a tidy ending for me.