The Apologetics of Evil: The Case of Iago (review)

It has occasionally been observed, and it certainly bears repeating, that Shakespeare’s characters are not dramatically compelling because they are morally justifiable. Shakespeare “seems to write,” as Samuel Johnson put it, “without any moral purpose.”¹ One is tempted by this to conclude that Shakespeare’s characters are dramatically compelling—that is, ethically significant—precisely because their actions are not fully justifiable according to any recognizable moral or legal framework. It is as if Shakespeare knew that our inability to fully justify a protagonist’s actions was in fact crucial to the drama’s ethical claims upon us and as if the dramatic stakes and ethical claims were raised in more or less direct proportion to the extent to which someone’s actions appear morally indefensible.

In his well-argued Apologetics of Evil: The Case of Iago, Richard Raatzsch asks us to consider Iago’s wickedness as a “pathological case of the human” and thus to consider him as someone “whose actions cannot be justified but can be defended” (9, 12). Iago’s naked villainy makes him an excellent case study in this regard. Raatzsch does not invite us to consider the play’s language in any significant detail, nor does he try to present an overall interpretation of Othello; his goal is to explain the claim that “Iago cannot be defended by means of justification” (91).

A number of compelling conclusions, elaborated through succinct argumentation, follow from and surround this claim. Raatzsch accepts Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sense of Iago as the “‘motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity,’” commenting that “the absence of a clear specification of Iago’s motive proves to be an essential point!” (31, 49). But rather than conclude with Coleridge that “clutching at a motive (any motive?) would be [Iago’s] real motive,” Raatzsch maintains that to search for a motive for Iago’s actions “would shift the weight of the examination away from his method toward what drives him, say, for example, the passion of jealousy or hatred” (49). This would be to miss something fundamental, for “Iago’s method of operating itself is the main issue” (49). Shakespeare lays bare Iago’s method of operating—his way of dealing with other people, or what Peter Szondi calls his “absolute negativity” in his relation to Othello—in order to show us what happens when the “method” itself overtakes “the usual human motives [that] play the role they usually play in human life” (49).² According to Raatzsch, it is in this sense—namely, that Iago’s “real motive is his method” (50)—that Iago is a pathological case.

“By contemplating the pathological,” Raatzsch observes, “we learn something about the limits of the normal” (104). Accordingly, Raatzsch wishes us to regard Iago as the embodiment of the “concept of evil” in order to see that he is thereby “removed from the perspective of moral evaluation.” “A model of evil itself cannot be evaluated and therefore cannot be justified” (80). When Raatzsch says that Iago is unjustifiable, he means not simply that Iago acts in a manner that is wicked in the extreme, but that by virtue of its pathological character, his wickedness eludes any evaluative judgment. Iago cannot be judged, Raatzsch avers, nor can any pathological case: “We can only try to understand them” (81). Trying to “understand” Iago does not entail doubting morality or abandoning moral standards of judgment altogether; rather, understanding Iago in his pathological essence, as one who can be neither simply justified nor condemned, “draws our attention to the limits of the moral.” “Iago,” Raatzsch concludes, “teaches us our moral limits by transcending them” (105). In other words, Iago’s transcendence of moral standards validates and renders vivid the ways in which such standards normally operate in our everyday attachments and commitments.

A little more than a century ago, A. C. Bradley explained how our affective response to Shakespeare’s tragedies...