SOURCE: Novy, Marianne. “Saving Desdemona and/or Ourselves: Plays by Ann-Marie MacDonald and Paula Vogel.” In Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance, edited by Marianne Novy, pp. 67-85. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Novy contrasts the portrayal of the Desdemona character in Vogel's Desdemona and Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona.

Two very different recent plays take a new and transforming look at Shakespeare's Desdemona, in ways influenced by different feminist ideas. The transformation in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) can easily be connected to a feminist impulse to show female strength and authority, though the play shows limitations in its woman warrior.¹ By contrast, Paula Vogel's Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief contains no character anything like a role model for women. But, in its critical analysis of male power, the ideologies and structures that maintain it, and the exploitative...