Man, if King Lear is your idea of bittersweet, I’m not sure what you would consider a straight up bitter ending. Lear’s last scene with his dead daughter in his is gut-wrenching, and completely rebukes Albany’s lines on the heroes’ wages of virtue and the villains’ cup of their deservings. I’ve always perceived it as the darkest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Maybe Hamlet has a higher casualty rate, but it lacks the feeling of a world passing away (Kurosawa nails it in Ran).