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The Apologetics of Evil: The Case of Iago. By Richard Raatzsch. Translated from the German by Ladislaus Löb. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. 124. $27.95 cloth.
Reviewed by Paul A. Kottman
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...