- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Still addressing the reader in scenario F, the narrator highlights the way in which all stories always end in a fundamentally similar way. While different elements of artifice or deceit may be involved, Atwood urges readers not to be “deluded,” as superficially different endings are “all fake, either deliberately fake […] or just motivated by excessive optimism.” For Atwood this means that even scenario A, the most commonplace of endings, is actually a false ending, because it ends with romance and marriage, rather than the true ending of death.
Any story that fails to include death, by this metric, is…