play, Hamlet’s ‘madness’ had been tactical and fake, a ruse to buy time and foster the appearance of harm lessness. But in Shakespeare’s version, his suicidal madness is actually real and, writes Greenblatt, ‘nothing to do with the ghost’ that informed him of his father’s murder. Shakespeare continued his experiment with ‘radical excision’ of such character information in the thrilling sequence of plays written between 1603 and 1606, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Why did Othello’s Iago so desperately want to kill his general? Shakespeare obscured and hinted at Iago’s motivations, which were
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