Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies

Introduction

Alessandra Marzola — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Evil and the Forms of Shakespeare’s Endings

Claire McEachern — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay argues that those of Shakespeare’s plays in which perpetrators of wrongdoing are initially unknown to fellow characters and then conclusively exposed – which is to say plays in which evils are spectacularly made known not only to an audience but to the characters within a play – would have provided a cathartic release for Reformation audiences newly confronted with the dismayingly two-steps forward one-step back nature of soteriological inquiry and identity. The increased prominence and Calvinist torque of theories of predestination and original sin, along with the corresponding prevalence of the notion of reprobacy, and in combination with the waning of pre-Reformation protocols of mitigating sin (e.g., “works”), rendered the naming of sin a peculiarly satisfying experience. In a culture in which one’s salvation or damnation was a secret ultimately known only to the deity, the revelation to characters of information known to an audience in advance of said characters would have made its theatrical dénouement a particularly charged dramatic moment.

Shakespeare and the Conscience of Aaron

Maria Del Sapio Garbero — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s first Roman play, stages the story of a city which quickly and relentlessly slips from a victorious and Roman ‘pious’ scenario into one of revengeful horror. Evil, however, emerges as a question, as the play is heading to its closure: when the butchery of a total war seems to have exhausted the possibilities of horror and a disgraced humanity − like Walter Benjamin’s angel − is violently propelled into the future with its “face turned to the wreckage it leaves behind” (Benjamin 1999, 249). This is epitomized by the displacing space of a ruined monastery, the place where the surviving heir of the Andronici’s (the general Lucius) and the Moor following the Goths (Aaron) are strategically summoned by Shakespeare as if to an endgame: a challenging dispute on evil and conscience. This essay foregrounds the tangle of issues (religious, theological, philosophical, cultural, racial) triggered by Act 5 and the provocative role this scene assumes within the framework of the play as well as in Shakespeare’s tragic canon.

Shakespeare and the Boundaries of Human Kindness

Silvia Bigliazzi — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, ideas of predetermination and divine election constitute, especially in the gradual establishment of Puritan culture, the main frame of reference of the theology and ethics of evil, which, on principle, removes from the self any potential source of pleasure or seduction by excluding free will and, therefore, individual choice. Yet the experience of evildoing does not end in this closure of the subject within a fideistic perspective. Contemporary theatrical culture problematises the question by exploring in tragic play and participation in theatrical gameplay the limits and potential of freedom as an act of will recognisable in the assumption of guilt-as-doing as the foundation of one’s being. Shakespeare explores a whole range of possibilities of doing evil as cases of conscience as well as in relation to the reactions to evil done (or being done), from fear to terror and horror. It has been noted that the experience of horror threatens not just individual human lives, but the very essence of what it means to be human – rooted in the singular vulnerability of each embodied person. This encompasses the full range of violence, from overt atrocities like massacres and torture to more subtle, insidious forms of harm. In this sense, violence on the body has been interpreted as a violation of the human condition. This article explores how Shakespeare probes the boundaries of the human condition through the experiences of horror in Macbeth – distinct from fear and terror – focusing on the psychological, ethical, and symbolic dimensions at the outer limits of tragic catharsis.

“Nothing is but what is not”: the Creative Evil of Macbeth

Nicholas Luke — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Macbeth comes to life by being summoned by the forces of evil. The weird sisters are given the dramatic force to convulse the cyclical feudal violence of Duncan’s realm and to conjure Macbeth’s imaginative consciousness. On the road to Forres, Macbeth is confronted by a radical intrusion from beyond his world, and, like a dark Saint Paul, he is irrevocably transformed by its call. I suggest that Macbeth exists at the crossroads of poetic creation, rapturous inspiration, and demonic negation of extant being. Macbeth voyages into “what is not” (I.iii.141) and that voyage brings him both to a heightened imaginative life and to deadness and closure. Blurring the boundaries between good and evil, the play opens unexpected connections between poetry, early modern theology, and more contemporary philosophy. All these modes – theology, poetry, and philosophy – take us beyond the immediate through a negation of what is. Macbeth suggests that there is something at once animating and potentially evil in the process of negating the world-that-is in favour of a vision of what is not. By giving dramatic life to Macbeth and withholding it from the ‘good’ characters, Shakespeare raises uncomfortable questions about the relationship between poetic creation and evil.

Negative Empathy in Shakespeare’s and Verdi’s Macbeth

Stefano Ercolino, Massimo Fusillo — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the concept of negative empathy in literature, with a focus on William Shakespeare’s theater and Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth. Negative empathy arises when readers or spectators engage emotionally with morally troubling characters, oscillating between identification and ethical distancing. The analysis begins with a theoretical discussion of the idea of negative empathy and then shifts to literature and Shakespeare’s Othello and Richard III, highlighting how characters like Iago and Richard fail to evoke genuine negative empathy due to their (almost complete) lack of inner torment. In contrast, Macbeth – both in Shakespeare’s play and Verdi’s opera – provides a compelling case study. The protagonist’s psychological depth, inner conflicts, and mad descent into tyranny generate an aesthetic experience where the audience simultaneously empathizes with and recoils from his plight. Through an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach that combines aesthetic and literary theory with textual and musical analysis, the essay shows how Shakespearean theater creates a space where negative empathy emerges as a powerful, unsettling aesthetic experience.

The Mind’s Eye: Seeing Things in Shakespeare

Roger Holdsworth — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay discusses Shakespeare’s fascination with delusion, particularly the kind of stubborn self-delusion which results from the habit, famously described by Bacon, of ‘submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind’. Treated initially as a subject for comedy, the rearrangements and distortions of reality this tendency precipitates, and the sense of self-entrapment it brings with them, took on darker and less tractable forms in the plays Shakespeare wrote from the late 1590s onwards, and made inevitable his switch to tragedy as the genre where this subject matter could be more searchingly treated. A late attempt, in The Winter’s Tale, to include a self-deluded protagonist whose paranoia equals that of Othello or Macbeth, and yet to rescue him for comedy in the play’s finale, is only partially successful.

Touched by Evil: Performing Theodicy in Orson Welles’s Shakespeare Adaptations

Anthony R. Guneratne — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In translating a pot-boiler roman policier, Badge of Evil, into a cinematic meditation of the corrupting wages of power, Welles substituted “touch” for “badge” in his title. Fluent in a number of European languages, Welles understood “touch” in a multiplicity of ways: a dexterous riposte, as in the French touché; a quantity barely to be perceived; a tactile, sensory path to knowledge as the empiricists and rationalists of the Seventeenth Century postulated. The present study intends to demonstrate that throughout performing career – as a voice actor in radio and audio recordings, as a stage actor, and as the protagonist of his own films and those of other directors – Welles accepted the existence of evil and strove to illustrate its omnipresence in human affairs. He even demanded that his fellow directors allow him to play characters in his own idiosyncratic manner, and he radically revised plays and novels in order to make his protagonists more morally culpable than they are in his sources. In so doing Welles amplified the ethical conflicts deployed by his favourite authors: Conrad, Dinesen, Cervantes, Kafka, and above all, Shakespeare. Welles’s tyrants and supermen owed little to Nietzsche, being more akin to those celebrated by Machiavelli and decried by Vives, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Alive to the philosophical discourses permeating Shakespeare’s plays well before their elucidation by today’s scholarship, and yet deeply concerned with conveying them to a wide public, Welles paid the price of having many of his Shakespearean projects unrealized. Traces of the latter exist in archives in Torino, München, Michigan and Indiana, and the present work “touches” on these as well as his extant oeuvre to illustrate the full extent of his theodicy. Jan Kott, Welles’s contemporary, outlived him; but it was Welles who first re- established Shakespeare as “our contemporary.”

“Some Women Are Odd Feeders”: Male Fantasies of Perverse Female Desire in 17th-Century English Tragedy

Joel Elliot Slotkin — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of taking a ‘frightful pleasure’ in things we are not supposed to like is a common feature of early modern literature but a challenge for early modern theories of literature, which typically privileged normative beauty and virtue. Concerns about the appeal of the ugly or evil become even more acute for early modern writers considering the possibility of women desiring people or qualities that run contrary to what men want them to want. Male characters in early modern drama often seek to engender disgust for female desires in order to police their potential disruption of the patriarchal order. Hamlet, Othello, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Changeling demonstrate how some early modern playwrights navigated the tension between allowing audiences to take a certain kind of pleasure from disgusting descriptions while reckoning with the use of disgust as a tool of patriarchal control. In these plays, male characters’ pervasive descriptions of diseased female desire are almost invariably shown to be fantasies in which the men project their own demonized appetites onto the women and then blame them for it.

“This it is when men are ruled by women”. The Evil of Queenship in Shakespeare

Elizabeth Bronfen — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In fairy tales the wicked stepmother ultimately finds a terrible death to punish her for her evil deeds. The Queen in Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline fits the bill. But something similar happens to Tamara in Titus Andronicus, who takes revenge on her martyred son. Indeed, queens in these plays are targeted as monstrous whenever they insist on following their political ambitions. In the history plays Queen Margaret is slandered by the Yorkists, because she will not cede to them the throne that she believes is rightfully her son’s. Lady Macbeth, in turn, is called a “fiend-like queen” by Duncan’s son Malcolm, after he has reclaimed the throne. In all cases – as my article will demonstrate – the notion of evil is used as a weapon to harness, manage and contain feminine power.

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

Davide Del Bello — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Melville’s Shakespearean Masquerade of Evil: The Confidence-Man

Paolo Simonetti — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the influence of Shakespeare on Melville’s conception of evil, from the oscillation between innocence and corruption in Typee, through the tragic grandeur of Moby-Dick, to the satirical skepticism of The Confidence-Man. Melville’s lifelong engagement with Shakespeare, evident in his marginalia and in the ongoing dialogue with the playwright, sets his work in a tradition that both ridicules and admires villainy while exposing its paradoxical ties to truth. The Confidence-Man, the most overtly Shakespearean of Melville’s novels, stages a “masquerade of evil” through its shapeshifting, devil-like protagonist, who recalls Shylock and Autolycus yet unsettles the role of villain by pretending to reject Timon’s misanthropy. Timon of Athens thus emerges as a key intertext, alongside The Winter’s Tale, whose shifts from tragedy to comedy offer a striking contrast: where Shakespeare turns tragedy into redemption, Melville drives his masquerade toward indeterminacy and overarching obscurity.

Metamorphoses of Evil in Contemporary Adaptations of The Tempest

Michela Compagnoni — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As the supreme master over his heterotopic microcosm, Prospero embodies the ethical ambivalence of power at the heart of early modern debates on sovereignty, master-slave relations, and proto-colonial dynamics. His regime, built on total surveillance and absolute dominion, is a fantasy of omnipotence that challenges early seventeenth-century conceptions of divine authority. Caliban, long seen as the embodiment of savage monstrosity, disrupts and complicates Prospero’s dominion, whose evil evokes early modern anxieties about scientific progress, divine foreknowledge, predestination, and the crisis of subjectivity also spurred by new geographical discoveries. This article explores how Prospero’s tyranny and theatre of revenge have been reimagined as metaphors for omnipresent control systems in three contemporary adaptations of The Tempest: Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s HBO series Westworld (2016- 2022), and Jeanette Winterson’s short story “Ghost in the Machine” (2023). By casting Prospero as the primary evil-doer and probing the ethical implications of his art, these works confront pressing issues such as the rise of artificial intelligence, the debate on free will and determinism, shifting definitions of humanity, the reinforcement of privilege, and emerging systems of control. As we shall see, these reinterpretations testify to the enduring potential of Shakespeare’s play, in which the embryonic forms of today’s ethical debates can be glimpsed.

“Hell’s black intelligencer”: Hannah Arendt, Auschwitz, and Richard Gloucester

Carlo Pagetti — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The theatre of Shakespeare, the artist of the “invention of the human” (Bloom 1999), stands at the opposite side of the dehumanizing practices pursued by the Nazi perpetrators. In an often-quoted statement Arendt portrays Eichmann, one of the main criminal minds behind the ‘Final Solution’ as a petty bureaucrat, far from the devilish grandeur of Shakespere’s Richard Gloucester, king Richard III. All the more so, since, unlike Richard, Eichmann was doubly subordinate to Himmler, and to Hitler. And yet, I argue, Shakespeare’s dramatic experiments in English history can still contribute to our understanding of the radical extremity of the Shoah and of the Nazi leader. By developing the character of Richard Gloucester play after play, Shakespeare explores the experience of the evil king both as “hell’s black intelligencer” and as a hystrionic orator, who artfully seduces his audience. The tragedy of the Shoah has retrospectively shed a new sinister light on Richard’s perverting journey to the throne, witnessing to the shifting mutability of Shakespeare’s theatre and to its enduring capacity to resonate with the evil of history.

Selected Publications in Shakespeare Studies

Editorial Staff — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shakespeare and Social Crime: Legality and the People’s Justice

Paola Pugliatti — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The idea of “social crime” was first developed by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who defined as “social” those crimes which “have a distinct element of protest in them”, and are therefore supported by the community’s consensus as crimes of necessity. Though potentially fertile, however, the notion of “social crime” was quenched by the partial disagreement of another Marxist historian, E. P. Thompson, who objected that such definition would imply a distinction between “good” and “bad” criminals, overlooking the fact that all criminals occupied the same disadvantaged social group. The present article examines three Shakespearean texts where the idea of social crime is differently represented: Coriolanus, the Hand D pages of Sir Thomas More and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The citizens’ revolt in the first scene of Coriolanus is probably the most relevant theatrical representation of a social crime in Shakespeare’s plays. Not only are the Roman Citizens represented in it as performing a conscious action of protest dictated by need; but, as has been noted, the play has an apparent topical feature, for it was written a year after the Midlands Rising (1607), a protest against enclosures which Shakespeare re-reads, in Coriolanus, as a food riot. The “Ill May day scenes” in Sir Thomas More, instead, are presented as the instance of an irrational protest against foreign labourers which, being dictated by mere xenophobia, cannot be justified as “social” crime. Even less can the “disparagement” Falstaff performs in Merry Wives by poaching in the lands of JP Shallow. Falstaff and his gang of friends are indeed “bad” criminals who profit from their vicinity to the nouveaux riches to perform an offense that should have been prosecuted at the highest degree, that of the Star Chamber, but is instead celebrated with a venison dinner.

On the Rigorous Writing of Evil in Beckett and Sade

Davide Crosara — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to trace the echo of Sade in Beckett’s dealing with evil in Watt and The Unnamable. Mediated by translation and editorial projects, Beckett’s longstanding interest in Sade peaked in the postwar years, nurtured by his interest in the Sadean readings of Bataille and Blanchot, where the shade of the Holocaust looms large. The rigorous, almost implacable shape of Beckett’s novels and novellas found in Sade’s inquiry into evil a catalyst for the reconfiguration of language as vagrancy (the novellas), paralysis (Watt) or disintegration (The Unnamable). Confronted with Sade’s ruthless and numbing narratives, Beckett’s writing of evil will find in the voice a new organizing principle, profoundly indebted to his first experiments with the new media.