‘Shakespeare’s Villains’

Shakespeare's comic characters are one thing; his villains quite another. A mark of the bard's genius is that the same imagination that gave us Puck and Bottom also created the most ominous characters in stage history. So profound was Shakespeare's perception of our dark side that his "best" villains are lasting personifications of wickedness in human form. Who are foremost among them, and what makes them especially infamous? In this class we will consider three Shakespearean plays--King Lear, Richard III, and The Merchant of Venice--within the context of Western understandings of evil, from medieval notions that it is the absence of good to Hannah Arendt's modern formulation of its banality.