Othello and the Grammar of Evil

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.