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It’s one of The Tempest’s most famous lines: “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
More than a literal reference to the hellish island on which the play’s characters have been shipwrecked, the line is rich in potential meanings. It is a comment on human nature and the capacity for evil within all people. Hell is not a physical place but a state of being or a condition of the human soul and the devils are not literal demons but humans who embody or enact evil deeds.
The line is also a reflection on the characters’ guilt over the acts they have committed. The devils are their own inner demons or the reckoning they will face for their immoral actions. More broadly still, Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that the world itself is full of corruption and moral decay.
Part of that phrase from The Tempest provides the title for Tony nominee and Grammy winner Patrick Page’s lone-actor performance, which explores “the twisted motivation and hidden humanity at the heart of Shakespeare’s greatest villains.”
Not a play, the Off-Broadway show is a master class, tracing the playwright’s evolution “as a writer of psychologically complex evildoers.” Combining lecture and dramatic readings from over a dozen Shakespearean tragedies, histories and comedies, it is utterly captivating, the Platonic ideal of how to bring canonical texts to life.
It makes me wonder why colleges don’t do more to pair their theater programs with other humanities courses: to have theater students act out scenes in various ways or recite soliloquies or orations, highlighting different approaches, emphasizes and interpretations.
Page’s theme is how Shakespeare, influenced in part by his contemporary Christopher Marlowe, transformed 16th-century morality plays and created the modern villain. As Page demonstrates, much of the bard’s corpus plumbs the motivations of those indelible figures who are driven by malevolence, ambition, a quest for revenge or misguided malice.
The New York Times critic Maya Phillips quite rightly praises the show for melding “the virtuosity of stage performance with the intellectual rigor of a classroom, minus any didacticism” into “a precious night of theater.” Which indeed it is. Page’s “bottomless bass” moves “teary-eyed through the pain of Shylock and the comic pomposity of Malvolio with such swiftness that it’s like watching a chameleon change hues before your eyes: stupefying, effortless.”
Page’s argument is that Shakespeare, especially after the plague temporarily closed London’s theaters in 1593, rendered the psychology of villainy in increasingly complicated ways, with the motives often ambiguous or, as in Othello, inscrutable. The bard’s dramas became more morally complex, challenging simplistic notions of good and evil and right and wrong.
The performance seeks to answer a question asked by a bewildered King Lear: “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?”
“What motivates evil?” Michael Sexton, a past director of the Shakespeare Society, asks. “Does it come from nature or ourselves?”
“These characters, motivated by sexual desire, the thirst for power or hunger for revenge, by simple envy or in some cases a stark will to destruction, are a tricky, deceptive, transformational bunch … So, be careful. We must stay alert as these tyrants and cheats, liars and climbers, murderers, sycophants and showmen do their sly work on us. Watch for the moment when intimacy slides into complicity, when sympathy becomes identification.”
Villains elicit a peculiar fascination. Lurid and gruesome acts, omnipresent in news reports of carjackings, school shootings, domestic violence, sexual assault and home invasions, also pervade our popular culture. It’s not just horror movies that showcase villains, but our crime shows, thrillers and, in some cases, political dramas, which are filled with acts of murder, brutality, corruption, abuses of power and societal injustice.
Villains’ appeal to the popular imagination is not difficult to explain. Villains allow audiences to explore the uglier sides of the human psyche safely. The wicked, the corrupt, the degenerate, the depraved, the iniquitous, the nefarious, the vicious and the vile represent the forbidden, the taboo and the transgressive. They’re intriguing and compelling to explore vicariously.
Also, many villains have complex backstories that explain their motivations. Understanding why a villain acts in a certain way—whether out of past trauma, societal influences or personal losses—can challenge viewers to empathize with them, complicating the traditional hero-villain dichotomy.
Whether attracted by the villains’ charisma, cunning, twisted humor or intelligence or their flaws and vulnerabilities, audiences can indulge in the thrill of the proscribed, the distasteful and the offensive, including the allure of power, the appeal of the demonic, the temptation to violence and the lust for revenge. If, on the one hand, villains can symbolize such deadly sins as greed, lust, temptation, envy and wrath, they also embody the appeal of the outlaw, the rebel and the renegade and defiance of convention.
In addition, dramas involving villains can provide catharsis and emotional release as audiences experience intense emotions of fear, anger and suspense in a controlled and safe environment.
The recent death of Michael Stone, a psychiatrist and scholar who sought to understand evil’s roots “by plumbing the biographies and motivations of hundreds of violent felons who had committed heinous crimes,” has elicited some interesting commentary on the nature and manifestations of human evil.
As The New York Times’ obituary explained, Dr. Stone “ranked the acts on a 22-category scale of his creation … [modeled] on Dante’s nine circles of hell,” culminating in acts “committed by people whose primary motivation was to torture their victims.”
His 2009 volume, The Anatomy of Evil, explained that “for an act to be evil … it must be ‘breathtakingly horrible’ and premeditated, inflict ‘wildly excessive’ suffering and ‘appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.’”
Dr. Stone’s book attributed evil to “two predominant personality traits: narcissism, to the point of having little or no ability to care about their victims; and aggression, in terms of exerting power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering and death.” In a 2019 co-authored work entitled The New Evil, the psychiatrist emphasized that many or most perpetrators of the most horrific crimes “are not ‘sick’ in the psychiatric and legal sense, as much as psychopathic and morally depraved.”
I should, of course, add that much of world’s evil is not the product of individual acts of ill will or malevolence but instead results from collective violence, often a product of fear or justified or rationalized as an act of self-defense or deterrence or legitimate retaliation or as a way of protecting the nation or a form of redress or compensation for some past grievance out of a perception of their victims as less than human or inherently evil.
Then there are the evils that are structural or systemic. These are rooted in institutions like nominally fair legal systems, economic systems and other societal frameworks that nevertheless perpetuate harm or injustice through policies, laws or practices that are inherently flawed or discriminatory. Systemic evil can also be perpetuated through cultural norms, beliefs, attitudes and stereotypes, and values that endorse or tolerate harmful practices and that lead to discrimination, prejudice or violence against certain groups. In addition, social and economic inequalities and power dynamics that privilege certain groups can also contribute to systemic evil.
Few theater, opera or movie goers or their television-watching counterparts can resist a baddie, a rogue or a Machiavellian manipulator of power, a queen of mean, a wicked witch, a femme fatale or an evil stepmother. Some villains fascinated us with their charm, intelligence, sophistication or wit. Others strike us as tragic figures, evoking our sympathy. Then there are the antivillains, whose motivations are relatable and their goals noble or at least understandable, even if their methods are morally questionable or outright wrong.
Shakespeare wasn’t the first to write about villainy in a complex way. In what I consider among the most powerful and moving essays I have ever read, the classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn writes about Aeschylus’s The Persians, the earliest surviving Greek tragedy and “the only classical Greek drama that dramatizes an actual historical event.”
First staged in 472 BCE, The Persians was inspired by “the improbable and glorious defeat, by a relatively tiny force of Greek citizen-soldiers, of the immense expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes to conquer Greece” just eight years earlier.
Yet rather than celebrating the Greek victory at Salamis, “the drama focuses on the grief of the Persian court as it awaits the return of its defeated emperor, Xerxes,” who is himself casually indifferent to the lives of the soldiers dead and wounded. Yet even though the emperor is “dust-covered, despairing, defeated,” the ignominious loss “will not affect him personally; he is, after all, the king.”
The Mendelsohn essay, a review of two feature films about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, reflects upon the difference between history as it was and the stories we tell about that history—events as they are remembered, recalled and retold, an “artfully reconstructed … admixing of reality and invention.” After all, many of our greatest depictions of villainy are not mere entertainment; they represent serious attempts to ponder and reflect upon how and why evil takes place.
The critic ends his 2006 essay by suggesting that one “could write a real tragedy, a Greek tragedy, about September 11 and what it has led to—a story with a true Aristotelian arc, a drama with a beginning that leads organically to a middle that leads organically, reasonably, to its inexorable end.”
As he explains,
“This tragedy could, for instance, be about the seemingly inevitable way in which even the greatest empires can be thrown into confusion by a small number of enemies whose ideological fervor makes them unafraid of death. Or it could be about a specific empire, one whose contemptuous refusal to take its enemies seriously has made it deeply vulnerable. Or it could say something about a foolish and unseasoned autocrat whose desire to outshine his more accomplished father has an unfortunate effect on his policymaking, with the result that he ends up seeming even more foolish and unseasoned in comparison to his father. Or it could be about the seemingly irreducible strangeness of the West to the East and vice versa. Or it could even be a kind of black farce (a genre not strange to Greek tragedy) about the injustices of autocracy—about a ruler so inept that he brings his country to ruin and yet never suffers, personally, for his errors.”
Mendelsohn concludes, “You could write such a tragedy today, and to some people, at least, it might have a larger meaning. But then, someone has already written such a play; it’s called Persians.”
That drama centers “not on the exulting Greeks, but on the sorrowing Persians.” “Which is to say that in the very moment of their greatest victory,” Aeschylus “asked his fellow Athenians to think radically, to imagine something outside of their own experience, to situate the feelings they were having just then—about themselves, about those others—in a vaster frame: one in which they might see that present triumph could induce a complacency that just might bring about future disaster. The sense of these larger, moral themes hovering over the play’s spectacle is, in the end, what gives the play a resonance that transcends the particulars of the history it purports to represent. No wonder the Athenians, for whom tragedy was a form of political dialogue as well as popular entertainment, gave it the prize that year.”
Yes, Xerxes is the play’s villain, but not because he resembles Darth Vader or Freddy Krueger or Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates or Nurse Ratched or Voldemort or the Wicked Witch of the East. Rather, we see the horrible spectacle of the humbled king at the end of The Persians, we know why he has been humbled (his greedy overreaching) and who has humbled him (the gods, the moral order that obtains in the cosmos). Yet he personally faces no consequences. It’s his people, alongside the dead Greek warriors, who suffer.
Shakespeare may not have invented the villain, as Page argues. But Shakespeare does remind us that villainy can take on many guises.
Alongside monstrous, beastly serial killers and reprehensible, remorseless sociopaths or psychopaths motivated by a lust for power, revenge or hatred and demonic tyrants and authoritarians exerting control through fear and brute force, we have much more complex figures, those who commit acts of evil due to external pressures, circumstances or manipulation or out of commitment to an abstract ideology. Then, too, we have tragic figures whose villainous actions are usually the result of past traumas, injustices or significant personal losses.
If there’s anything that the events of the past few months have revealed—not just “the depraved, anti-Semitic terror attacks of Hamas and the devastating IDF campaign in response,” in Andrew Sullivan’s words, but also deliberately provocative speech and acts of vandalism and, in a few instances, of violence that have undercut any sense of campus community, belonging or inclusion, accompanied by the obtuse response by college leaders—it’s that we, at our institutions, need to do much more to grapple with evil and villainy, the various forms these phenomena can take and their underlying cultural, historical, psychological and sociological motivations.
Ariel in The Tempest was right when the spirit repeats the words that Ferdinand had cried out: devils do walk the earth, because the devilish exists within each of us.
