Desdemona: a Tale about a Handkerchief by Paula Vogel is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello. First performed in 1993 as part of the Bay Street Theatre Festival in New York, in this play the male characters are seen only from the perspective of the all-female cast of three.
The Back Room
Vogel has the action happen solely in the palace where the general Othello and his bride Desdemona are staying in Cyprus, in the days after the Duke of Venice has sent Othello there to defend this Venetian colony from the Turks. But rather than being in the central rooms, as in the original play, the action unfolds in a back room – in the traditionally unseen quarters where the womenfolk carry on with the hard, menial labour of preparing the food and doing the laundry while the men strut around on the main stage of life. Here, Desdemona, her maidservant Emilia and the prostitute Bianca laugh, chat, work and bicker.
The Play’s Time and Space Dimension
The play is set in an indeterminate time and space dimension, described in the staging instructions as ‘ages ago’ and Cyprus, but the character of Bianca speaks with a cockney accent, Emilia with an Irish accent, the money is pounds and pence and upper-class Desdemona speaks with a modern idiom, for example when searching for the precious handkerchief that Othello gave her, ‘Oh, where is that crappy little snot rag!’
The Draw of the Exotic
A bored, spoilt princess, looking for kicks, Desdemona talks of how she wants to be ‘free’ and make her ‘own living in the world’, a view that Emilia dismisses as ‘this new woman hogwash’. In her need for new experiences, Desdemona was once enthralled by the apparent exoticism of her black husband, just as Othello was in the thrall of her high-born whiteness: ‘I thought,’ Desdemona tells Emilia, ‘if I marry this strange dark man, I can leave this narrow little Venice with its whispering piazzas behind – I can escape and see other worlds. (Pause.) But under the exotic facade was a porcelain white Venetian’. Bitterly disappointed by this discovery, she resorts to taking Bianca's place and having sex with sailors, as the only access she can have to their male world of adventure.
A Modern Character Trapped in a Past Morality
The transplanting of the modern character of Vogel’s Desdemona into such a prison, where she is under the control of her bombastic husband, has the effect of highlighting the inhumanity and absurdity of one gender being able lawfully to impose their will on the other. In Shakespeare’s play, the female characters belong to that alien world. We enter into it and to a certain extent take on its values in judging the action. We accept that the tragedy is not that Othello murdered his wife but that he murdered her by mistake, because he erroneously believed her to be unfaithful. The clear subtext is that if she had been unfaithful, there would be no tragedy.
This is the starting point for Vogel, who describes in the programme notes how her younger self ‘wept for the Moor’, her identification with his pain blinding her to the issue she is now raising with her play: ‘Had Desdemona been sleeping with half the Russian Navy, would Othello have been justified in his self-pitying act of murder?’ By deconstructing Othello from a feminist position, Vogel resists the dichotomy of saint/whore on which the original play is built, and instead creates in Desdemona simply a flawed human being: snobby, mean, sexually incontinent, but also funny, sharp, and hungry for life – a life she is soon to lose.
Desdemona’s Mask of Passivity
Vogel’s ingeniousness is that rather than replace the Desdemona character created by Shakespeare, her play suggests that this character was a mask, a performance forced upon Desdemona in order to survive. Whenever Vogel’s character is about to meet her lord and husband, she puts on an appropriate passivity as she walks off-stage to him, and so becomes the familiar original Desdemona. However, in the back room she allows this docile, sweet mask to drop and a new, hungry Desdemona to reveal itself.
Desdemona: a Play about a Handkerchief by Paula Vogel, Dramatist Play Service Inc. (1994).
