There have been constant attempts to justify or to implore tragedy to be moral, to have a function. The most notable intervention is perhaps the rewriting of the end of King Lear by Tait, to have a happy ending, to find resolution. This version first appeared on stage in 1681 and is believed to have replaced the original until 1838.

There is historical justification for this change, the play certainly played on tensions which were perhaps to close to those in Britain across that period. But Tragdy should not lecture, it should not be about telling us how we should behave, what is right and wrong, of showing us vice and virtue. It should be more philosophical, merely presenting things as they are, exploring the depth and range of the human condition, good or bad, without judgement. Its job is to present, not to analyse and then present us with dictums by which to live our lives. It is our job to deconstruct.

The notion that virtue is rewarded and vice punished is presenting us with an idealised and unrealistic world view, we are better to learn rather than to be blindly guided. People don’t see a play and think I will act like this or that because this they did in the play and that’s what happened to them.

Stripping King Lear of the death of Cordelia and Lear is an odd and ineffective censorship, suggesting that virtue is rewarded and vice punished. Death is promiscuous in tragedy, as it is in life, it should not have a judgemental moralistic hand. It is indiscriminate. If the good die that should not suggest that being good goes unrewarded. Do natural disasters or weapons of mass destruction discriminate; does a bullet make a judgement? People are destroyed with no regard to justice or if they deserve it or not. Tragedy is a place ruled by disorder and anxiety, not an ordered world of ideal moralistic outcomes. As such it reflects life.