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Shakespeare and Evil by Dr. Michael Platt

[In illustrating evil,] Shakespeare seems to surpass even the Bible. After all, the appearances of Satan in the Bible, in the Garden, in Job, in the Wilderness, are at most cameos, and always with God's permission. The treachery of Judas is against the greatest, but seems trivialized by the pieces of silver. At Bethany, Judas felt acutely the waste of the precious nard oil, worth 300 denarii, that the woman poured on pure Christ's head (John 12). Judas' fear of poverty is an expression of the fundamental doubt, of God and nature, that there be enough of the good to go around, which works weakness in many souls.

Still it is not enough to make a tyrant. Such a small fear, however fundamental, falls short of Richard III, whose tormented hatred of God is monumental. And though Judas' betrayal is of the greatest, he is not evil as Iago is. Is this because Christ had to have first visited the world, been persecuted, crucified, and misunderstood as He was, and only then belatedly understood as good, in a new way, before there could be the evil that senses the fullness of good but chooses against it? If so, then Augustine's account of his youthful theft of the pear, not for its sweetness, may be the first recorded recognition of such evil. But perhaps Judas' suicide had some recognition of that in it, but he would not have committed suicide if he fully recognized that love.

Likewise, Richard III's whole way of life is such a choice of furious evil against the bright background of the love that Christ brought into the world. All his robust and miserable life he experiences the singularity of his birth and deformity as a mark of God's hate, which both destines and justifies his evil deeds. A tyrant, though provoked by Calvinist predestination, Richard can in the end not ignore the ugliness of his life and his own responsibility for it, and the fury of his final battle and of his final cry has something of the suicidal despair of Judas.

Iago's malignancy is purer still. He gives so many mundane motives that none can be fundamental. No, he hates the good itself. That he has a soul, he denies, even as he continues to crush it out. He does not laugh, he does not cry, long ago he decided not to think. Calculate and plan he does a plenty, but not think. Yes, his speeches are highly sententious, especially to Roderigo, but Iago never inquires about anything. True, his speeches to Roderigo and especially to himself, reveal his soul, but they are not thoughtful. The more he speaks of his motives, the more he never asks: why am I doing this? He does not know, though Shakespeare does, and shows why, through Iago's unknowing speeches. Evil in him, primal evil, cannot give a why.

And later, when he may know why he did as he did, he will not speak. More likely, he still does not know. The soul of Richard III was in much better shape when he woke from a harrowing dream the night before Bosworth Field and tried to understand his whole life. Earlier I suggested that Shakespeare always distinguishes the abhorrent evil a man has chosen from the man himself, but when Iago refuses to speak at the end of Othello, we see he has so embraced evil as to become it. Maybe he was always evil. We never knew him when he was not already plotting evil. Iago's refusal to speak is more evil than any speech he might give.

There is no more primal evil than shunning speech. It expresses misology, the hatred of Logos, of the Word and of reason, perfectly. Hate that, refuse that, and you must hate all reasonable creatures, humans like yourself. Hate that and you must hate yourself. Word and person being twins, misology and misanthropy must be allies against both. (In talking on and on, of reasons, conditions, and root causes, all acquiescers to evil, both witting and unwitting, still pay some residual respect to the good.)

Iago's hatred is metaphysical. All the strength of his strong, theoretic soul is exerted to prove that the Good does not exist. That the Good is Love he has heard from Christ. That it is not so, cannot be so, will not be so, he will prove by proving that this most loving couple do not love each other, not enough for one not to kill the other. His proof is exquisite. Virtue in others so offends Iago that he will persuade it to destroy itself. Not the destruction of a human being but the self-destruction of a human soul destroying his own beloved, is Iago's aim, his "soul's dark joy."

After Shakespeare's intelligent evil ones, we have Milton's Satan, Hogg's Wringhim and his devil Gil-Martin, and Dostoevsky's Stavrogin. Before him nothing like. It is not Shakespeare's fault that the novel evil of our times, the Gulag (and the Laogai, the Chinese version) lies in a system, which while it aims like Iago to make every single human being it touches compromise with evil, has no master evil doer to understand and to abhor. Shakespeare left something for Kafka to foresee and for Solzhenitsyn to chronicle.

In his "literary investigation," The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn claims that Shakespeare's evil ones do not come close to the Communists. Certainly not in scope, number of murders, and longevity of their rule, but arm Iago with ideology, let him conceive himself scourge and minister of History, and you will get the death camps. Hatred of the good was not an ideology with Iago, true, but it commanded his whole soul and it has a part in the soul he represents, namely Machiavelli, where it stemmed from hatred of God. Not the number, or the longevity of a regime animated by hatred of God and the good, but its deliberate, systematic, and universal attempt to corrupt the souls of all subjects, both masters and slaves, made Soviet Communism, and now the Chinese extension, novel. But in the soul of Iago, working in private life, we have the same passion and the same design, to make the most virtuous act basely of their own free will, thus "proving" there is no virtue. Or as Marx put in speech and the Gulag put it in power: material conditions dictate consciousness.

Shakespeare's understanding, which unites criticism and understanding so harmoniously, must be the basis of another novel set of characters, his witty lasses, such as Viola, Beatrice, and Rosalind. Can a man ever really understand a woman? --

At the end of my lecture on Sh's Philosophic Art, which included an exposition of the intimate relation of Hamlet and Lear, whose division between dread of something after life and terror that there is nothing, unities the whole, with greater depth than anything else, for examination, Haley asked something about living in an order that in losing the afterlife has lost God, and I adduced the Gulag as the political consequence of militant atheism, and thus to Solzhenitsyn's claim that Shake's evil ones don't measure up to the Gulag, which I contest. However, this still leaves Haley, and me, perhaps others, with the state of the world.