Things of Darkness: Enduring Evil in Shakespeare’s Late Plays

Abstract

This paper examines the workings of evil in Shakespeare’s late plays – Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – through the dual lens of the theological mysterium iniquitatis and Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil”. Unlike the stark dramatization of wickedness in the tragedies, Shakespeare’s romances present evil as at once pervasive and insubstantial, mysterious yet mundane. It operates both actively – as a persistent, enduring force – and passively – as evil that is endured, destabilizing conventional dichotomies between passivity and activity, suffering and resistance. Close analysis of key characters and narrative developments shows how Shakespeare not only foreruns Arendt’s insight that evil often arises from thoughtlessness rather than malice, but also suggests that rational demystification alone falls short of containing evil’s return. The endurance of evil complicates binary understandings of human responses to iniquity, suggesting that within a redemptive framework, destructive forces may paradoxically catalyze processes of reconciliation and renewal when met with critical thought and moral imagination.