"He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly..."

It has become something of a ritual. During the summer, I try to go back to Shakespeare. Like everything you are introduced to in school, there is always the temptation to consign his works to the bad fire as an adult, unread and unseen. You recall the clunky BBC adaptations. The emotionally-empty and unrelatable Gielgud-style performances. The stilted readings as your fellow students stumbled over the verse. Schooling wrecks drama - and poetry, for that manner - for too many people.

We had one teacher who insisted on reading out the whole of Hamlet himself in the same flat, perfunctory tone. Every Act, every scene, every character. We empathised more, I think, with the Prince of Denmark's "to be or not to be" speech than might otherwise have been the case, as we watched the rain wash from the concrete, slowly staining the classroom windows white. But the fun, the spice, the messy humanity, the psychological and emotional dimensions -- too often they died upon the page.

I came to see things differently when I lived down south, and found myself cast in one of Shakespeare's trickiest comedic plays during an Oxford summer - Taming of the Shrew. I was Hortensio - a quivering, sexually inept monkfish of a man, who gets cracked over the noggin with a lute and ends up in a loveless marriage with a dragon lady, the elusive but brattish Bianca having slipped from his faltering, amorous grasp. Bloody type casting. The experience was enlightening and enjoyable in any number of respects, but performing the work freed it from the lifeless worthiness of the schooltext into something else. It became easier to read it on recognisably human terms rather than the epic, joyless, sexless high poetry it seemed like in school.  These aren't prim Victorian morality plays.

But even then, sitting in your garden, trying to conjure the plays into imaginative life can be work, hard work. Until I read Othello this summer. The play had remained high on the shelf, neglected, for years. Rarely, if ever, has the rendering of a character on the page struck my imagination more forcefully or more troublingly than Iago. When you read John Byrne's scripts, for example, it's the Glasgow patter on acid. A vivid distillation of character, mood and time, the scenes conjure themselves in your mind's eye. Othello - quite unexpectedly - had the same quality for me. Psychologically, it sang.

We have a soft spot for beguiling villains, whose schemes play out against a grand tapestry of ambition, statecraft and high politics. Richard of Gloucester. Darth Vader. Francis Urquhart. As a child, steeped in the Disney films of the 1990s, the scoundrels of the piece always seemed to me more charismatic than the heroes rendered in pastel shades. I'd take Maleficent and Scar over Prince Charming and Mufasa any day.

But there is something about the smallness of Iago's schemes, their pointlessness, their family scale -- which makes him both despicable and profoundly disturbing. The intimacy of the setting intensifies his hatefulness. And is this, perhaps, what sets Iago apart from Richard III? Our world is full of Iagos and their wreak their cruelties in small places, close to home. I suppose every family knows at least one person, who embodies his bleak and motiveless malice. 

Iago has a haunting line, explaining why he wants to visit ruin on the blameless Michael Cassio: "He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly." It is chilling and precise expression of an all too familiar bitterness - that small, vampiric sensibility which can't see happiness without leeching at it. Badness, and rottenness. In literature, the devil often has all the best tunes. But in reality, wickedness has no dark glamour. Evil is, classically, banal. And if loving is to will the good of the other, in Iago, we find its complete abnegation.

Othello is a late entry, and an unanticipated one, but by some stretch my most memorable book of 2015.