Shakespeare and the Healing Power of Deceit

Summary

The mark of the Shakespearian villain is deceit, rather than cruelty, ruthlessness, greed, or ambition (though he may be cruel, ruthless, greedy, ambitious). He is a man who pretends to be working for your good, and he puts on a show of loyalty, affection and honesty, while he is secretly undermining you and plotting your downfall, so that he may get your power or your possessions or your wife, or just so that he may enjoy your ruin. Deceit is the ‘divinity of hell’ which Iago exults in as he plans the ‘honest’ advice which will be the destruction of Othello, Desdemona and Cassio:

When devils will their blackest sins put on,

They do suggest at first with heavenly shows.

(ii, iii, 340–1)

The good cry out in indignation against the bad, and Lear in the storm curses the 'caitiff'

That under covert and convenient seeming

Has practised on man's life.

(iii, ii, 56-7)

The outrage of deceit is often betokened by the smiling or impassive face:

there's no art

To find the mind's construction in the face.

(Macbeth, i, iv, 11-12)

But in Sonnet 94 ('They that have power to hurt and will do none'), it seems to be argued that those whose faces give nothing away can be justified; indeed, that some people who 'do not do the thing they most do show', and are the 'lords and owners of their faces', are specially favoured of Heaven. And indeed, when one thinks about it, 'seeming', the false presentation of the self or of events, concealing what you are and pretending to be what you are not, is a widespread activity among Shakespeare's good characters as well as among his villains. Prince Hal lets it be thought that he is an irredeemable roisterer.