Shakespeare's "Sisters": Desdemona, Juliet, and Constance Ledbelly in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)

Shakespeare's "Sisters": Desdemona, Juliet, and Constance LedbeUy in Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) LAURIN R. PORTER In "Feminist Thematics and Shakespearean Tragedy," Richard Levin takes to task that body of feminist critics who take a thematic approach to Shakespeare 's tragedies. All of them, as he sees it, insist in one way or another that "the plays are about the role of gender in the individual and in society.'" While he does not deny that the worlds Shakespeare presents us with are patriarchal in nature (how could they be otherwise?), he resists the feminist tendency to single out this patriarchal aspect as the fundamental cause of the tragic events. "[T]hey are necessary conditions of the action but are not in themselves sufficient to cause it," he argues. "Many of these critics seem to have confused these two different kinds of agency.,,2 Be that as it may, the fact remains that, on the whole, the women in Shakespeare 's tragedies do not fare well. Judith Bamber points out in Comic Women, Tragic Men that in the comedies Shakespeare at least takes the woman's part. "Often the women in the comedies are more brilliant than the men. more aware of themselves and their world, saner, livelier, more gay." The tragedies, she continues, present monstrous females - Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth , for instance - who unnerve us precisely because thejr cruelty is located "on the very site of our expectations of a woman's kindness," giving as an example Lady Macbeth's infamous "I have given suck" speech.3 Judging from her first solo drama, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Canadian playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald4 is acutely aware of the contrast between Shakespeare's tragic and comic heroines. In this play, Constance Ledbelly,a struggling assistant professor at Queen's University, is convinced that the sources for two of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, were actually comedies and that Desdemona and Juliet, misunderstood and unappreciated by contemporary critics, were . originally comic heroines. MacDonald constructs the frame story so that the timid, insecure Constance literally "falls" into the worlds of these plays and Modern Drama, 38 ('995) 362 Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) 363 interacts with the characters, changing the outcome of the tragedies in the process . As a contemporary woman and scholar, she liberates the two heroines from their victim status and "wimp-ish" Renaissance portrayals. The,notion of tampering with Shakespeare is hardly new, of course. Other playwrights have wrinen travesties (I Hale Hamlet) or parodies (such as MacBird , wrinen during Lyndon Johnson's administration), while directors have transposed his plays to other milieux and historical senings. In more serious efforts, playwrights have used Shakespeare as a jumping-off point, borrowing from the text in creative ways to frame contemporary issues. Stoppard's insertion of men with twentieth-century sensibilities into Hamlet's world in Rosencranlz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for example, allows him to examine current questions about ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics. Though it may seem a far cry from Stoppard, MacDonald's rollicking, bawdy, even raucous comedy operates in much the sarne fashion.s On a superficiallevel , Constance's entry into Shakespeare's Cyprus and Verona merely provides the audience with comic entertainment, replete with stock characters Uealous lovers, absent-minded professors, slimy villains, and inflated windbags ) as well as mistaken identities,'romantic triangles, and revenge subplots. The language is also a source of delight; wit, wordplay, and outrageous puns abound. On a deeper level, however, the play raises questions about the ways in which identity is constructed and the impact of gender and societal expectations upon this process. As Constance interacts with first MacDonald's warlike Desdemona and then her erotic Juliet, she discovers aspects of her personality that had hitherto lain dormant. Ultimately, the action takes place not in Constance's office or the fictive worlds of Shakespeare's tragedies but within Constance's psyche. Because it is a new play (first written in 1988; revised in 1990)6 and relatively unknown, a brief synopsis may be necessary. The action begins in the office of Constance Ledbelly, who for years has devoted herself to decoding the famous "Gustav" manuscript, which...