Blank Verse

The most important stylistic aspect of Goodnight Desdemona is its attention to the customs and conventions of Elizabethan drama and culture. Particularly in acts 2 and 3, inside the worlds of Romeo and Juliet and Othello, MacDonald emulates and mimics Shakespeare's style. For example, MacDonald uses blank verse, the theatrical writing style made famous by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Blank verse is the name for unrhymed iambic pentameter, or lines that form a meter of five two-syllable units and do not rhyme at the end. Although blank verse is normally spoken without audible line breaks, it sets the work in poetry and adds what many consider a sense of gravity and beauty. MacDonald uses this style with great dexterity, capturing the poetic personality of Shakespeare's characters and setting Constance's lines into blank verse while retaining her personality and even the tone of her late-twentieth-century Canadian accent.

Asides and Monologues