This bi-polar work is by turns insightful and infuriating. The insights are entirely located in the first half of the book with its careful and entirely persuasive exegesis of notoriously difficult works by Camus (Caligula) and Becket (Waiting for Godot). This exegesis is so captivating that it is hard to credit the hysterical attempt to uncover “evil” at the heart of Machiavelli's Mandragola and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, as being the work of the same author.

Corey's fundamental flaw is his appropriation of Wyschogrod's “death event” as a definition of “evil” (xv). As a mnemonic for our horror at the rational and systematic extermination of human life on the altars of efficiency, purity or racial superiority, its modern application is entirely appropriate. However, this definition fails miserably when transferred to a Renaissance context of sexual scheming, where such anxieties are entirely absent. Following Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa's Shakespeare's Politics (1964) Corey privileges the “authentic intellectual tradition” in which a Renaissance text was written while exposing a binary relationship that can provide the attentive reader with the hidden meaning of the entire play. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that, unlike the moderns, the “authentic intellectual tradition” of Renaissance drama involved actively resisting morally deterministic outcomes such as the ones he imposes, especially in the realm of sexual mores. The “bed trick” that he finds so offensive was a common literary device intended to correct the vagaries of marriage conventions by getting the right people to cleave to the right partner for the good of all concerned (231). Corey unaccountably neglects to acknowledge that this trick goes back at least as far as Plato's Republic, where the citizens are tricked into sleeping with their genetic equivalents by the Guardians. Perhaps the absence of evil intent assigned to Plato by the Straussians, who comprise the bulk of Corey's secondary literature, confused him but whether the lying is noble or not, it involves considerable effort to match the unqualified horror of mass extermination with the deceitful management of sexually mismatched citizens.

Love and deception are quintessentially human characteristics and their combination within the institution of marriage is as far removed from the metaphysics of evil as it is possible for human concerns to be. It makes sense in the modern plays since both are notably sexless; even the rapes in Caligula are enacted in order to prove a “higher truth,” rather than to celebrate or condemn an aspect of the human condition. However, in order to make the Renaissance tales fit his procrustean bed of evil intent Corey dilutes Wyschogrod's death event with several more opaque definitions, including Baudrillard's “Evil is when Evil comes out of Good or Good out of Evil. That is when things are all wrong” (257). This all-encompassing and circular definition is analytically impotent, to say nothing of the fact that is it is extremely hard to recognize good and evil acts when they occur. A divorce might seem catastrophic until we recognize it as a healthy change that allowed a more mature love to later flourish. Corey also appropriates Levinas' definition that “in evil's malignancy, it is excess … evil is excess in its very quiddity” (261). Notwithstanding, the only malignant excess on display is Corey's “expansive” rhetoric for malevolence, such as when he states that “Ligurio uses the wickedness of those around him to realize his own purposes and create a common happiness” (p. 257). Wickedness implies evil intent, whereas the characters Ligurio willingly dupes exhibit character flaws, not moral bankruptcy, and for good outcomes to be synonymous with evil calls into question the value of the term for a human-based political theory. Levinas is unwittingly decrying the very excess that assigns all forms of life on earth their enduring qualities: millions of seeds are continuously hurled into oblivion in order to promote the antithesis to the “death event” that has stained the world of the sexually anodyne moderns.

Corey is quite right to describe the death-event anxiety of the industrially co-opted moderns as a nascent evil, but is entirely mistaken when he tries to impose it onto the plethoric and life-affirming writers of the Renaissance. Had he remained true to the tenets espoused (if not actually practised) by Bloom and Jaffa, he would have recognized how jarring and disjointed his monological obsessions would have appeared in the playhouses of Renaissance Florence and London.