Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?”

This article considers one area of what Scott McMillin has described as Othello's "textual mystery" by looking at the theatrical work that text performs. Thinking about the striking differences between Q and F of Othello (printed only a year apart), it asks whether performance can offer answers to textual problems, and further, whether performance can be captured for an archive that might be useful to editors, actors, students, and directors. Taking 4.3 - the unpinning, or 'willow' scene - as a test case, the essay records practical performance experiments conducted on the stages of Shakespeare's (reconstructed) Globe with actors wearing (reconstructed) early modern dress, presenting the record of this experimental work in an online archive (see