Othello and the Grammar of Evil

There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distill it out. —Henry V, 4.1.4–5 Now I find true That better is by evil still made better[.] —Sonnet 119, ll. 9–101 How do we explain the presence and activity of evil in the world? There are several possible answers to this question in early modern England. In Othello (first performed circa 1604), Shakespeare engages with competing accounts of what evil is, where it comes from, how it works, and why it is permitted.2 Revising a critical commonplace, I suggest that Iago’s evil is neither Manichaean nor an expression of nonbeing. Rather, Iago works in and around the epistemological gray areas found in the privative theology of evil, and between conditional and indicative grammatical moods. He implies causality where none exists, encourages agency where it should not be asserted, and claims a sham...