The mighty, exotic general Othello and his diabolical flunky Iago have been stripped of their singularity, whether of greatness of spirit or capacity for evil.
For a drama that desperately wants to be a British version of The Wire, Line of Duty appears to lack an understanding of what makes an interesting criminal overlord: where The Wire's Marlo, for example, was fascinating because of his calm capacity for evil and ability to stay unruffled, Line of Duty's psychotic Scottish crime lord is all bluster and over-reaction.
There is a dark undertow to many of these stories, reminding us of the human capacity for evil and appetite for revenge.
Cronin wrote his college thesis on that novel, tracing the origins and development of Orwell's increasingly gloomy certainty of man's capacity for evil.
In both books the severed head is the ultimate symbol of the essential capacity for evil that sits within us all.
His explication of religion's capacity for evil is far subtler than the simplistic atheist line that "religions cause wars," but he doesn't seem to know it.
They recall, instead, the soliloquies of Iago, in "Othello," and of Edmund, in "King Lear" — the moments when an evil man speaks out loud of his own capacity for evil, and then assures us that there's nothing really shocking there.
That is why the Psalms, and the entire Bible, though well aware of the human capacity for evil, also proclaim the evil that will not have the last word.
LONDON — An inky darkness suffuses the stage at the start of the thunderous new Glyndebourne Festival Opera production of "Billy Budd," and, even when the stage eventually brightens, a shuddering awareness of man's capacity for evil hovers in the mist.
We feel the heat of humanity's capacity for evil against itself, and we feel for our burly and brutalized young charge.
