Shakespeare villains

character from Shakespeare's play

Shylock ( ; spelled Shylocke in the First Folio) is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice ( 1600). A Venetian Jewish moneylender, Shylock is the play's principal villain. His defeat and forced conversion to Christianity form the climax of the story.

Iago () is a fictional character in Shakespeare's Othello (c. 1601–1604). Iago is the play's main antagonist and Othello's standard-bearer. He is the husband of Emilia who is in turn the attendant of Othello's wife Desdemona. Iago hates Othello and devises a pernicious scheme to destroy him by making him believe that Desdemona is having an affair with his lieutenant, Michael Cassio. With 1,097 lines, Iago has more lines in the play than Othello himself.

Caliban ( ), the subhuman son of the sea witch Sycorax, is an important character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest.

character from Shakespeare's play

character in Shakespeare's Hamlet

Tybalt ( ; ) is a fictional character and the principal antagonist in William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. The son of Lady Capulet's brother, he is Juliet's short-tempered first cousin, and Romeo's rival. Tybalt shares the same name as the character Tibert / Tybalt "the prince of cats" in the popular story Reynard the Fox, a point of mockery in the play. Mercutio repeatedly calls Tybalt "prince of cats", in reference to his sleek, yet violent manner.

Sycorax is an unseen character in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1611). She is a vicious and powerful witch and the mother of Caliban, one of the few native inhabitants of the island on which Prospero, the hero of the play, is stranded.

characters in Macbeth

Goneril is a character in William Shakespeare's tragic play King Lear (1605). She is the eldest of King Lear's three daughters. Along with her sister Regan, Goneril is considered a villain, obsessed with power and overthrowing her elderly father as ruler of the kingdom of Britain.