In King Lear, confronted with the figure of his cruelly blinded father, Edgar wonders whether matters are as bad as they imaginably could be. He concludes, however, that “the worst is not/So long as we can say “This is the worst.”’ The very fact that he has language, and the capacity for judgment, is itself proof that he has more to lose. Edgar’s words, in this most archaic of Shakespeare’s plays, feel horribly prophetic of the slaughter bench of modern history, as if the events of the 20th century were designed to test them. Is this the worst of which...