The Costs of Evil

• Evil is incontrovertibly destructive in the play, taking a loving family of five and reducing it to one young survivor

• It is also however deeply destructive to those who perpetrate it, and not just their victims

• Not only do the three pillars of evil in the play - The Cardinal, Ferdinand and Bosola - all die by the end of the fight act, but they also each pay a special penance that elucidates just how terrible evil can be tho those who employ it

• Ferdinand is the most obvious example

• throughout the play, his anger is so intense that he seems almost deranged, but he does not truly lose his mind until the murder if his twin sister

• The change comes so suddenly after her death- he leaves the stage to go hunt badger - that it is clearly a result of the evil he has done.

• In addition the form of lunacy takes - digging up corpses and believing himself to be a wolf- is also intricately connected to his guilt, as he says that ‘The wolf shall find her grave, and scrape it up’ to discover/The horrid murder’

• For the Cardinal, the costs are more subtle

• He plays with his life, of course, but he also gives up what he values most throughout the play - his reputation.

• Whereas the cause of Ferdinand’s anger towards his sister is not entirely clear, the Cardinal’s resentment is clearly based around the family’s reputation- ‘ Shall our blood/The royal blood of Aragon and Castile/Be thus tainted?’

• When he dies, the state of their family is in such shambles that he wants to be blotted out completely - ‘I pray, let me/ Be laid by and never thought of’, and Delio makes it clear that he will get his wish, since the evil brothers have left nothing to be remembered

• the price Bosola pays is more complicated, in the same way that his participation in the evil is more complicated

• By the end, he wants to redeem himself at least partially for all he has done

• Instead he accidentally kills Antonio destroying his last chance to perpetrate good

• He does succeed in killing Ferdinand and the Cardinal, but arguably only because Ferdinand gets involved and wounds the Cardinal himself

• Bosola has a small amount of peace in knowing that he loses his life in ending theirs, but because of the evil he has perpetrated, he finds no true peace, evidenced Babis final speech, in which he reflects on the darkness he helped create in the world

• Thus the characters who employ evil in the play ultimately pay for it with more than simply their lives