Goodnight Desdemona
| Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| Characters |
Desdemona Othello Juliet Romeo Constance Ledbelly Chorus Student Iago Ramona Tybalt Mercutio Professor Claude Night A soldier of Cyprus Juliet's Nurse Servant Ghost |
| Place premiered | Toronto |
| Original language | English |
| Setting | Constance's Office Othello's citadel at Cyprus Verona, a public place |
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is a 1988 comedic play by Ann-Marie MacDonald in which Constance Ledbelly, a young English literature professor from Queen's University, goes on a subconscious journey of self-discovery.
Constance theorizes that Shakespeare's tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, were originally comedies, and believes the ideas for the plays originate from the indecipherable Gustav Manuscript. She believes this because, if a wise fool archetype were reinstated into the plays, they could not remain tragedies. However, she is too timid to show her skeptical boss, professor Claude Night, that she is right. In a moment of despair, Constance is thrown into both her subconscious mind and the two Shakespearian tragedies to discover the truth about herself, and to find the lost fool with the help of Desdemona and Juliet.
MacDonald received the Governor General's Award, the Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the Canadian Authors Association Award for the play.
Goodnight Desdemona begins with a "dumb show", or a scene with no sound, in which three situations occur simultaneously. Othello murders Desdemona, Juliet and Romeo kill themselves, and Constance Ledbelly throws a pen and a manuscript into a wastebasket.
In scene 1, Constance works on her doctoral dissertation, which claims that Romeo and Juliet and Othello were originally comedies written by an unknown author and that this can be proved by decoding a manuscript written by an alchemist named Gustav. Her longtime crush, Professor Claude Night, comes in, criticizes her dissertation topic, and tells her that he is taking a job at Oxford University that she had hoped to secure. Constance laments her fate and begins throwing her possessions into the wastebasket until she herself is sucked into the wastebasket.
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