Does Shakespeare tell us how Succession will end?

The award-winning Succession is many things. Now in its fourth series, it has been compared with a Renaissance painting, a Greek tragedy, a Jane Austen novel, and a psychoanalytical allegory of trauma responses (Kendall – fight; Connor – flight; Shiv – fawn; Roman – freeze).

Ultimately, however, it is a Shakespearean series. The writers may have swapped the battlefield for the boardroom and armies for anxious shareholders, but the show’s character studies and themes – power, family, politics, betrayal, revenge – are Shakespearean in their complexity and circularity. Only instead of soliloquies, we have a lot more raised eyebrows, death-stares and ‘uh-huhs’. There’s even a playwright called Willa.

Like Shakespeare himself, the writers have taken from a variety of sources. There are numerous allusions to Hamlet: Logan describes hearing bad news over the phone as ‘dripping poison in [his] ear’. His existential pondering in season four, episode one (‘I mean what are people? What are people?’) riffs off Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is man!’ speech.