The essays in Playing Shakespeares Villains trouble our assumptions of whatand whoconstitutes "villainy" in Shakespeares works, through probing and provocative analyses of the murky moral logics at play in the Bards oeuvre. Shakespeare spreads before us a panoply of evil, villainy, and amoralityof characters doing bad things for good reasons, bad things for bad reasons, and bad things for no reason at all. How does Shakespeare handle culpability and consequence? How much does he justify his villains actions? How much do we enjoy watching people get away with murder and mayhem? What are we to make of the moral universe that Shakesperare presents: a universe in which some villains are punished and others seem to be rewarded; where mischief can quickly turn violent; and where an entire world can be brought down by someones willful insistence on having ones way? Questions like these animate the discussions in this lively volume, the second in the Playing Shakespeares Characters series.

Louis Fantasia is the director of the Los Angeles Shakespeare Institute, a joint project of the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles and the UCLA Clark Memorial Library. Formerly President of Deep Springs College, he was awarded the Officers Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his contributions to German culture and theatre.