Introduction:

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Canadian actress who starred in several movies and TV shows before switching to the stage. She wrote many novels and plays, of which the two most famous are Fall on Your Knees, and this one. This particular play caught my attention in 2014 because of its cover. I read it on three consecutive nights in early April, and it is one of the most fascinating plays I’ve read.

              Banuta Rubess introduces the play with the work’s inception, as a joke. The title (which is very clever and appropriate) was the spark that initiated the play. The two used to work as director and writer, but in this work, MacDonald wrote the play and Rubess directed it. And it is always a curious thing when an actor on the stage writes the play, as was the case with Shakespeare, since actors have an intimate knowledge of how plays function from the inside. This gives a special character to this play, and makes it a very enjoyable and funny one. (It is really funny!)

              Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is a modern comedy that reflects the modern man’s anxieties, especially that special problem we all face: The sense, and belief, of being inefficient, wasteful, unhelpful, and always, an imposter. There are very few modern works that deliver these messages as great as how this book does, and in the plays of Shakespeare, we may see the contrast that helps us put ourselves in the big historical picture to see that we don’t really have to be who we think we have to be, and just not being as tragic and overly dramatic as the characters that might be seen here, or as heinously villainous and/or as naturally chaotic and destructive is, for historic man, a civil achievement of grand and universal scope.

Plot:

The story revolves around Constance Ledbelly, a Ph.D. student in literature who’s appointed as an assistant professor and a teacher’s assistant at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Canada. The author grows increasingly frustrated at not being able to add much to her field, seeing as to how — as she deems it — everything has been extensively covered in the field. Her thesis is about the two Shakespearian tragedies, Othello and Romeo & Juliet. More specifically, her task was to break a code in the writings, in the folios and quartos which we have inherited the texts from [1]. However, when the Professor she was assisting and editing his works gained a scholarship with his young student, she was left alone here. Frustrated and depressed, and feeling unappreciated and unhelpful, she decided to quit. She tore her manuscript and threw them in the trashbin, only to be magically absorbed into the bin.

              The second act opens with Constance being transported into the world of Othello in Cypress. Being more of a fretting and nervous girl than a scholar of Shakespeare, she immediately confronts Othello trying to convince him not to fall prey to his blinding rage, which saves Desdemona from her death in the classic. She keeps interfering with history in a manner similar to what can be seen in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The main difference here is that just as soon as she interferes, she realizes that she has ruined a timeless classic of English literature. Still stuck in this world, she tries to repair her damages, but soon discovers that the characters here exhibit the same fervor and fury in the plays, and cannot be so easily talked out of their actions.

Constance faints at the sight of a beheaded man, and is transported in the third act to Romeo and Juliet’s Verona. In this final act, she becomes more careful about ruining another Mona Lisa, but eventually alters the events of the play so dramatically, and unintentionally enters a love triangle from which she cannot escape.

Style and themes:

The play jumps between verse and prose in a very elegant matter, Shakespearian at times, and always fresh and modern. It is one of the most interesting plays of the 20^th century, and it is funny when it needs to be, and dramatic and mature at just the right moments.

This comedy is tragically anachronistic in the funniest manner, and it keeps playing with every word, every term, every event in a fashion reminiscent of Shakespeare’s works. I couldn’t stop laughing at how the characters kept misinterpreting her every word either due to the terms used by Constance being modern and therefore unfamiliar, or because of old habits of thought that are hostile to valid reasoning. (Much of this style of comedy reminds one of Mark Twain’s hilarious King Arthur novel.)

I have been interested in Shakespeare ever since I read his Romeo and Juliet in 2014. I thought that I would find him impossibly hard, what with his indecipherable English. It turns out that Shakespeare was really not so hard to read if one gets used to the language, and learns some of the terms that we consider today archaic, or whose meanings have changed. This play took me back to those days, and to the days when I sat next to my grandmother while she was sleeping or reading the Qur’an in the hot Summers of Kuwait. I still remember those days, and I kept remembering her, knowing I would really miss her [2].

I truly admire the works that go the extra distance. In this play, we see that Shakespearean style adopted to the modern stage and we also see those Shakespearean themes modernized and refreshed. I have felt throughout a mastery of the Shakespeare pen, and that was something I truly admired.

Criticism and Conclusion:

The characters here are so memorable and each with his distinct and to a large degree looney personality. Each serves one great function in the grand scheme of the play. In my analysis of the text, my thoughts instead of being self-absorbed and self-focused, took on a universal look at the whole of the world and of history. We really are self-absorbed people, and we forget the progress we have taken as a species. In going to Verona or to Cyprus, we saw how simplistic and violent we were. We are still as simplistic and as violent as we always were, but satisfying that Freudian suppression, we have learned how to handle and conduct ourselves.

              Constance would do well to understand how she can be creative and useful. Her shy persona is very attractive, and she is a humble woman — though quite depressive and gloomy. In her, we see that Steinbeck who has cheered on Ed Ricketts, and tried to lighten up his melancholy sphere. The world is not so sad when we see ourselves in the grand scheme of things, and I believe that I have benefitted from reading this play by being reminded of this most important lesson.

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[1] Every modern edition (Penguin’s, Oxford University Press’, Yale University Press’, Wordsworth’s, etc.) consists of selections from the quartos and the folios which contained the original scripts, some adjustments by the author after watching the play being acted, and after several adjustments from the actors themselves or future directors. The Shakespearean plays, in this regard, can be considered collective work, though the inspiration and originality may be singularly attributed to the main author himself, without suffering injustices on any party.
[2] My grandmother recently passed away while I was abroad. May she rest in peace. I will truly miss her. (My poem, A Night Eternal, is dedicated to her.)

Rochester, New York,
May, 2022.