[In the following essay, Friedman compares Othello with Desdemona, Paula Vogel's revision of Shakespeare's play, examining in particular the way in which Vogel dramatized the threat posed by female desire and questioned conventional categories associated with virginity and faithfulness.]

In his introduction to Othello, Alvin Kernan asserts that Shakespeare's vision of human nature dramatizes ‘ancient terrors and primal drives—fear of the unknown, pride, greed, lust, underlying smooth, civilized surfaces’, and that there is a marked ‘contrast between surface manner and inner nature. … In Desdemona alone do the heart and the hand go together: she is what she seems to be.’¹

This characterization is reversed in Paula Vogel's revision of Othello as Desdemona.² In this play, we have a Desdemona who is not what she seems, ‘of spirit so still and quiet’. Rather, she is Othello's worst nightmare, the transformation of Iago's pretence into reality. Though still naive, Desdemona is no longer the innocent—unselfish in her love, forgiving of all transgressions against her. She is sexually adventurous as she works for Cassio's harlot Bianca in her brothel, seemingly voracious in her appetites, manipulative of anyone who can feed them, and anything but loyal in her relationships with women or men.

Questions abound. Why has Paula Vogel created a Desdemona who, though ostensibly inside out, still seems like Othello's projection? Could a lascivious Desdemona represent a feminist reclamation of the powers of desire and, at long last, ownership of the gaze? What, in this revision, constitutes change, subversion, or the revelation of patriarchal ideology concerning women's sexuality encoded in Othello?

To be sure, Vogel joins a throng of critics, writers, directors, and actors who have challenged Shakespeare's plays with their new readings, literary applications, film adaptations, and inventive theatrical productions, often from a feminist perspective.³ In her call for ‘more new readings’ of Shakespeare in the 1990s, the scholar Jean Howard argues against the traditional approach to criticism that sees meaning ‘already in the text’, there to be discovered by the ‘alert reader’. Rather, Howard argues that a Shakespeare play is an occasion for a ‘complex, contemporary interaction with a classic text’ and ‘an occasion for creation by which the critic acknowledges his own place in history’.⁴

Peter Erickson, in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves, locates the writer as well as the critic in history. Emphasizing the ‘interactions between past and present that we construct and negotiate’, he is seeking representations of Shakespeare which go beyond contemporary theatrical performance and pedagogy to the ‘different cultural sites of contemporary literature’, which he perceives as ripe for ‘imaginative free play and for the development of an independent perspective’.⁵

Erickson's prime example is the poet Adrienne Rich's re-visioning of the father-daughter motif and women's forgiveness in both King Lear and The Winter's Tale. Given Shakespeare's iconic status, the danger is that the image can become ‘fixed in our minds as an inviolable element of father-daughter relations’, despite the ideological tensions in ‘values and expectations’, which are subject to dramatic pressure within the text. ‘Whether or not Shakespeare is seen as critical of Lear, Shakespeare cannot give us Cordelia's point of view.’⁶

This critical distance from Shakespeare in twentieth-century rewritings of his works is also noted by Marianne Novy, whose collection of articles documents women's readings of Shakespeare over the past three hundred years. Carol Neely, in an epilogue to this book, observes categories of revisions. Some writers foreground female friendship and express a connection to women characters who demonstrate assertiveness, exploit the uses of disguise to transcend confinement, and display wit as well as passion (e.g., Rosalind, Beatrice, Helena, Cleopatra). Other writers who adapt Shakespeare for their texts seem more detached as they ‘balance sympathy and judgement. … Patriarchal structures and the constrictions suffered by women are exposed and, sometimes, corrected through revision.’ Neely notes that several often seemingly conflicting responses alternate—

between anger and empowerment, between critique of patriarchal culture and the creation of alternatives to it. … Analysis of patriarchy moves beyond characters, beyond the playwright himself, to a probing analysis of his culture as well as the writer's, with Shakespeare's plays enabling the critique.⁷

These revisions eventually lead to ‘transformational’ readings which, in alliance with Shakespeare, ‘transform his scripts into their own’.

A SHIFT IN THE FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE

Paula Vogel's raucous Desdemona draws on many of these conventions of feminist revisioning. She foregrounds the women in the play; explores female friendship; and refocuses plot to reveal the ‘high cost of patriarchal values’ that several critics see embedded in Shakespeare's tragedies. As the editors of The Woman's Part assert, ‘the men who uphold [these values] atrophy, and the women, whether resistant [Emilia] or acquiescent [Desdemona], die’.⁸

However, departing from her re-visionary and transformational predecessors, Paula Vogel does not attempt to celebrate the purportedly ‘womanly’ virtues—the ‘flexibility, compassion, realism’ attributed to Shakespearean heroines.⁹ She does not perceive in the women's intimacy a ‘mutual affection and a kind of female subculture apart from the man's world’.¹⁰ Nor does she correct and revise the restrictions that so obviously oppress the women and inform the men's destructive fantasies of betrayal.

Rather, Vogel's play marks an important shift in the feminist critical perspective, specifically in drama, as characterized by Lynda Hart in her collection of essays on contemporary women's theatre: ‘the shift … from discovering and creating positive images of women in the content of the drama to analyzing and disrupting the ideological codes embedded in the inherited structures of dramatic representation’.¹¹

Whether one takes the interpretive stance that Shakespeare questions and explodes patriarchal attitudes toward women or that he reinscribes profound fears of female sexuality and desperate attempts to control it, the terms by which women are defined (e.g., the virgin or the whore) and the spheres to which they are relegated—backroom, bedroom, balconies—remain in place. A revisionary theatre perceives genre, language, stage space, and the body as the ‘loci’ for the playwright to ‘dramatically challenge’ the terms, categories, and beliefs by which women are defined and determined in the discourse of dramatic and cultural texts.¹²

In any revision, the original work hovers over its present incarnation. In fact, the programme notes to Desdemona include a brief synopsis of Othello, followed by a letter from Vogel to her audience in which she reveals her implicit dialogue with the Bard. She begins by sharing her memories of earlier readings, when she had wept for the Moor, who ‘goaded to desperation by the innuendos of cuckoldry that [his ensign] Iago manufactured, [and] believing his virginal bride to be the harlot coupling with his lieutenant Cassio, gives in to homicide’, strangling ‘pure, blameless Desdemona’ in her bed.

At the same time, however, and despite Vogel's admiration for Shakespeare's ‘fantastic verse’, she began to question the critical assessment of Desdemona as a ‘fully dimensional heroine’. The woman that she reads is an abstraction played by ‘gawky male adolescents’. Furthermore, Vogel raises two provocative questions regarding conduct in a text which, though naturalized through the ages, in her mind bears questioning:

Had Desdemona been sleeping with the Russian Navy [that is, the Venetian garrison], would Othello have been justified in his self-pitying act of murder? [And] why did Emilia steal the handkerchief Othello had given his wife, if she was such a devoted servant to Desdemona?

(‘A Letter from the Playwright’)

In this self-reflexive reading of Othello, the playwright/critic also becomes a feminist spectator who, as Randi Koppen defines such a viewer, resists, revises, and produces meanings ‘in response to the text's own promptings’.¹³ In a deconstructive parody, Vogel dislodges the convention of the intimate scene between women in Shakespeare's theatre and expands it into an entire play. Now decentering the tragic hero, she foregrounds and enacts the threat of female transgression—the construction of female desire—that incites the tragic action of the play.¹⁴

Using bodily presence and ribald language in place of whispering asides, delicately expressed confidences, and plaintive ballads (e.g., Desdemona's song in the willow scene), these familiar female characters, central to our most cherished narratives and cultural paradigms, speak in a forbidden language, and disrupt the categories of their representation—the twin images of the virgin/whore dichotomy and the faithful handmaiden—linked to their gender and class status. Vogel produces multiple and shifting identities as she dramatizes, among various postures, a whoring Desdemona, a spiritually monogamous Bianca, and a sassy Emilia, who does not invariably understand and support the lady she serves. As in women's performance art, ‘the position of the female subject talking back throws that position into process, into doubt’.¹⁵

FEMALE CHARACTERS AND PUBLIC ACTION

In Renaissance drama, particularly tragedy, centre stage is the site of public action and oratory more often reserved for male characters, reflecting the ‘relationship between the male-defined polis and the politics of stage space’.¹⁶ Several critics have lauded Shakespeare for creating a counter-universe in scenes where women share intimate conversations that reveal both their ‘freedoms and constraints’. Carole McKewin observes that although this enclosed space is often ‘shaped by the larger world of the play’, in scenes where women talk to each other apart from men, they engage in freer expression of their ‘perceptions and identities, comment on masculine society, gather strength, and engage in reconnaissance to act in it’.¹⁷

McKewin illustrates this assertion with her view that Desdemona and Emilia's ‘feminine friendship … is affectionate and frank, generous and nurturing’. In the willow-song scene in Othello, Desdemona laments the plight of her mother's maidservant forsaken by her lover, and initiates a dialogue with Emilia about women's attitudes toward adultery and honour. According to McKewin, this dialogue between women ‘reflects both the increased oppression of the outside world and the effect, however limited, the counter-universe can have on its opposite’. McKewin admires Emilia's loyalty to Desdemona and her ‘egalitarian view of man and woman in marriage’. Indeed, with more than a hint of cultural feminism, the critic perceives their friendship as what ultimately emerges from this counter-universe to ‘reveal what woman is, and to reshape the chimeras of slander’ that result in the ‘debacle of Othello’.¹⁸

Vogel, focusing her lens onto the background of the play, brings Bianca from the streets into the palace, juxtaposes her with Desdemona and Emilia, and complicates this intimate conversation with material concerns. Her women engage in frank discussion and behaviour that undermines their valourization and camaraderie, and so frustrates any attempt at a unified construction of ‘what woman is’. Her counter-universe is fraught with differences among the women and contradictions within each character. Their world is presented as inextricably intertwined with all that surrounds it, to reveal the hierarchy and intersection of gender and class relationships that might explain Emilia's careless but fatal betrayal as well as the harsh Renaissance code governing a woman's adultery.

PROBING THE IDEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

To establish the links between the ostensibly dual universe of feminine and masculine, Vogel probes the ‘unconscious’ of the text—that which is not directly spoken or presented but ‘operate[s] contrapuntally’ in the ‘absence’, ‘silence’, or ‘reverse side’ of what is written.¹⁹ Although Othello is not a tragedy of a woman's infidelity, but rather of the tragic consequences of Iago's plot inflaming Othello's fantasy of betrayal, the subject of Desdemona's sexuality and, most notably, the men's construction of it, is always there, ‘latent’, bubbling to the surface in speech and action. Indeed, the hint of Desdemona's alleged indiscretion with Cassio is instantaneously translated by Othello into her whorish behaviour with his men of every rank and file, ‘pioneers and all’ (III, iii, 343). As Jyotsna Singh succinctly states:

To label Othello a ‘tragedy of jealousy’ has almost become a critical commonplace. What has less frequently been specified is a crucial aspect of his male jealousy—namely, the fear that wives can turn into whores or, put another way, that wives and whores are indistinguishable.²⁰

It is precisely this binary construction that Vogel dramatizes and, in the process, deconstructs as she probes the ideological discourse that informs the play's lofty themes of marital love, honour, and loyalty.

What lurks behind the Renaissance ideal of pure and passive femininity, guardian of masculine sexuality, if not the anxiety that all women are descendants of Eve, responsible for ‘both mortality and the “sin” of human sexuality’?²¹ Female sexuality is contained in the social practice of marriage to a virginal bride. That which is not contained ‘emerges as whoredom’. Singh observes that the terms ‘harlot’, ‘whore’, ‘strumpet’, and ‘courtesan’ recur ‘frequently in various Renaissance discourses such as court records, sermons, moral treatises, and literary texts’ in the service of moral prescriptions.

Singh also notes that prostitution, as a social and economic institution that expanded in the early modern period, is ‘elided’ in narratives which demonize women's unbridled sexuality and associate it with the prostitute.²² The idea of woman's desire (as opposed to woman as the object of desire) was seen as a threat to the moral and social order dependent on strict gender opposition and hierarchy.²³

Within Othello, this polarization between the sexes is generated by the men and leads to the destruction of all the major characters. What one remembers of this conflict is the male preoccupation with honour that Othello speaks of as dependent upon a woman's faithfulness—‘I had rather be a toad / And live upon the vapour of a dungeon / Than keep a corner in the thing I love / For others' uses’ (III, iii, 269-72). And even after the discovery of his error, he calls himself an ‘honourable murderer’ (V, ii, 290).

Several critics have identified the root of this concern in the struggle for a secure masculine identity which gives rise to images of threatening females. Thus, in Man's Estate Coppelia Kahn argues that, although ‘in its outward forms, patriarchy granted near-absolute legal and political powers to the father … in unacknowledged ways it conceded to women, who were essential to its continuance, the power to validate men's identities through their obedience and fidelity as wives and daughters’.²⁴

Shakespeare's Desdemona is continually called upon to defend her honour in a display of her faithfulness and obedience to her husband. She speaks her desire only in her wish to consecrate her marriage (‘the rites for which I love him’, I, iii, 252) by following Othello to Cyprus. Othello, however, speaks of it in fear and loathing:

O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites!

(III, iii, 267-9)

And when he believes her guilty of sexual impropriety with one man, he declares her a threat to all men that he must eliminate (‘Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men’, V, ii, 6).

Iago's plot is consistently underscored by his numerous references to wives as whores. Taunting Desdemona and Emilia in repartee, he claims that though ‘pictures out of door’, you are ‘wildcats in your kitchens … players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds’ (II, i, 108-11). And in his plot to dupe Othello, he substitutes talk of Bianca for incriminating remarks about Desdemona. In the staged conversation with Cassio which he intends to be inaccurately overheard by Othello, Bianca the whore serves as the ‘embodiment’ of Desdemona's transgression.²⁵

REPLACING THE ‘ABSENT FEMALE’

By ‘making the silences speak’,²⁶ Paula Vogel engages us in a production that replaces the ‘absent female’, represented by the boy players of the Elizabethan theatre, with real women whose sexual desires and psychic needs are no longer cursed, camouflaged, mimicked, or encoded in stylized gestures, at least by the men.²⁷ As Sue Ellen Case argues:

Without the public appearance of the female body, cultural representations of sexuality could not be physical ones. Rather, sexuality became located within the symbolic system that was the property of the spiritual domain, for instance language. … In theatre, the sexual danger inherent in the female gender was alleviated by the male assimilation of female roles. …²⁸

In Vogel's production, the women, not the men, comprise an almost exclusive community. Their formidable presence momentarily evokes the spectre of women's emasculating power and duplicitous nature that had only been treated symbolically in Othello.

In her Comic Women, Tragic Men, Linda Bamber argues that the ‘feminine in Shakespeare … is always something unlike and external to the Self, who is male. … The Feminine … is that which exists on the other side of … the barrier of sexual differentiation.’²⁹ With ironic references to the men's suspicions in Othello, Vogel brings her audience across the great divide only to find that the women's quest for fulfilment seems to mirror the men's, as they yearn for sexual adventure, power and position, and, of course, true love.

Even sexual betrayal is in the air. Desdemona unwittingly cuckolds Emilia during her night at the brothel, and Bianca is almost driven to violence when she discovers that the handkerchief given to her by Cassio belongs to Desdemona. The playwright heeds Emilia's words in Othello: ‘Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour …’ (IV, iii, 96-8). Women's desire, though boldly advocated by Shakespeare's Emilia, is articulated in terms of men's sensibilities. It is this version of sexuality that Vogel puts on display.

Making no attempt to capture the lost voices of Renaissance noblewomen, handmaidens or prostitutes, Paula Vogel stages the threat of female desire in a patriarchal culture and the conditions that might structure women's fantasies about themselves and each other. In dramatic texts, perhaps the most salient feature of what Sue Ellen Case calls the ‘Fictional Woman’ is her representation as an ‘object of exchange between men’.³⁰ As maiden or prostitute, her ‘sexual allure can never escape the thrall of commodification’.³¹ Paula Vogel's women, exercising a kind of agency, are acutely aware of the value of their charms.

MANIPULATING THE SEXUAL EXCHANGE

In Desdemona, the three women spring to life as they appropriate the language of sexuality and manipulate the exchange. In coarsely mocking banter, they talk to each other about their experience of sex; objectify the male organ (as Desdemona fondles a hoof-pick, she stretches out and says ‘Oh me, oh my—if I could find a man with just such a hoofpick—he could pluck out my stone’); name the various forms of couplation (as does Bianca when she informs and instructs the eager Desdemona in the tricks of her trade); and acknowledge the barter of their sexuality in exchange for money, gifts (‘a brooch for a breast’) and, in Emilia's case, her place in the world as the ensign's wife.

In Othello, the handkerchief functions as a powerful metaphor for the proprietary attitude toward women's sexuality. Whoever possesses the handkerchief possesses the woman. Thus, the handkerchief confiscated by Emilia and placed by Iago in Cassio's possession—only to end up in the hands of his strumpet Bianca—duly becomes proof of Desdemona's alleged betrayal.³²

The handkerchief in Vogel's play—visible in a lit corner of the stage as the play opens—retains its power to convict Desdemona (Vogel's subtitle is ‘A Play about a Handkerchief’). However, we see it as a mere contrivance—a ‘snot rag’, in Desdemona's contemptuous language, which stands for nothing. The women become the ‘ocular proof’ that Shakespeare's Othello yearns for to justify his accusation and revenge.

Still, this Desdemona is far more complex than Othello imagines her to be. Vogel relies on dramatic irony as she reaches back through Othello to Shakespeare in order to fashion a Desdemona out of his subversive cues—for example, Brabantio, Desdemona's father, warning Othello that his daughter may betray him as she has betrayed her father in marrying without his consent. She has defied the patriarchal code in placing her will above her father's judgement—even the judgement of the Venetian Senate, in her refusal to postpone the consecration of her marriage. She professes not to have fallen prey to mysterious potions and charms, but to have responded to her heart's ‘preferences’. Furthermore, Othello tells us that she had been aroused by listening to his dangerous exploits:

She'd come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse. …
She wished she had not heard it;
Yet she wished that heaven had made her such a man.

(I, iii, 148-9, 161-2)

Vogel transposes this ‘greedy ear’, this desire to be a male warrior, into a greed for conquest and sexual adventure that Desdemona associates with male freedom.³³ She explains to the scornful Emilia her desire to break out of her ‘narrow world’ and to see the ‘other worlds’ that married women never get to see, ‘bridled with linen, blinded with lace’ (19). Seeking to assuage her disappointment with the ‘strange dark man’, whom she mistakenly believed would offer her escape, she proclaims her ‘desire to know the world’:

I lie in the blackness of the room at … [Bianca's] establishment … on sheets that are stained and torn by countless nights, and the men come into that pitch-black room—men of different sizes and smells and shapes, with smooth skin—rough skin, with scarred skin. And they spill their seed into me, Emilia—seed from a thousand lands, passed down through generations of ancestors, with genealogies that cover the surface of the globe. And I simply lie still there in the darkness, taking them all into me; I close my eyes and in the dark of my mind—oh how I travel!

(20)

Desdemona reveals at once her desire to know and the limits on her desire as she seeks only carnal knowledge and imagines herself a passive learner. She becomes whatever they are. She knows whatever they know. Furthermore, Vogel associates Desdemona's desire for the ‘strange, dark man’ with the desire for a different and, using Coleridge's word, ‘monstrous’ union. The critic Karen Newman has linked Othello and his tales of ‘slavery and redemption’, ‘of Cannibals, that each other eat’, and ‘men whose heads Grew beneath their shoulders’, to the play's ‘other marginality, femininity’. Both thus represent the fear and power of the Other, which ‘threatens the while male sexual norm here represented by Iago’.³⁴

Vogel's Desdemona openly expresses her attraction for the feared Other, acts out her propensity for a union which is alluded to by Shakespeare's male characters as unnatural and bestial. Concomitantly, she expresses disappointment in the divided self that marks Othello. As the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes, Othello's own identity

depends upon a constant performance … of his story, the loss of his own origins, an embrace and perpetual reiteration of the norms of another culture. … He is both representative and upholder of a rigorous sexual code which prohibits desire, and yet is a sign of a different, unbridled sexuality.³⁵

Vogel's Desdemona, less discreetly than Shakespeare's, aligns herself with the latter Othello as she quests for global encounters that will replicate if not surpass his mythical journeys.³⁶

In Othello, it is Emilia who punctures the ideal of women's purity and of unwavering faithfulness to husbands. When Desdemona asks her, ‘Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?’ Emilia replies: ‘The world's a huge thing; it is a great price for a small vice’ (IV, iii, 70). In Shakespeare's dialogue, Emilia imagines fashioning a world that would make her wrong a right. However, it is a world in which her cuckoldry would make her husband a ‘monarch’.

In Desdemona, Vogel switches the women's respective stances. Her Emilia is unwilling to take chances, intimating that her position in the social order is vulnerable enough. It is Desdemona, with the haughtiness of the desirable noblewoman, who tries to remake the world—not for her husband's gain, but for her own power, responding, ‘The world's a huge thing for so small a vice’ (19).

With these inverted representations of the women, Vogel offers us a dual response. She reads against the text in order to reveal the material concerns and the discursive representations that haunt the women in Shakespeare's Othello. So, in Vogel's invention, the women are situated in the back room of the citadel, the private sphere of the servant Emilia where her work is no longer invisible. Among the artifacts of her daily life—tools, baskets, leather bits—she peels potatoes and washes blood-stained sheets and nightgowns (actually the chicken's blood used to feign Desdemona's virginity on her wedding night). The sense of containment in the back room and the association of sex and the spilling of blood seem to reflect a more vulnerable, certainly less lofty, image of women's lives.

The latter half of Vogel's play introduces Bianca. As the owner of a brothel, she is depicted as a more aggressive prostitute than the courtesan who in Shakespeare's play follows Cassio around, pining for his love and waits on his attention. Vogel's Desdemona, true to her class, ignores the destitute conditions underlying Bianca's plight. She sees her as the sexually and financially independent new woman of the Renaissance, that which the men of her station might perceive as the threat of organized lechery.³⁷ Here, the women speak openly of sex, but like their Shakespearean counterparts are defined by the attachment to the men in their lives, and are frequently subject to physical abuse. And though they share these intimacies, they are separated by class divisions that evoke condescension, misunderstanding, and distrust among them.

Bianca, though on the surface free, is still subject to violence from her customers, and will never have her dream of romance and security with Cassio. In the end, she shatters Desdemona's misguided fantasy about her when she says: ‘Inside every born one of us want smugs an’ babies, smugs wot are man enowt t' keep us in our place’ (38).

Emilia will continue to be ignored or mistreated by Iago, and, whatever fraught allegiance she has to Desdemona, cannot look to her for salvation as her lady's maid in exchange for keeping Desdemona's confidences. She has taken the handkerchief to advance the career of her husband on whom she is forever dependent. Despite the contempt for Iago that she openly expresses to Desdemona, she explains that

for us in the bottom ranks, when man and wife hate each other, what is left in a lifetime of marriage but to save and scrimp, plot and plan? … I says to him each night—I long for the day you make me a lieutenant's widow.

(13)

And finally, amidst all of her daring and bravado, Desdemona's fate is sealed in the cultural code reflected in the punishment of death for betrayal that she is to receive from Othello, even in Vogel's revision.

JUDGEMENT BETWEEN THE ACTS

As spectators, producing meaning in our interaction with Shakespeare's text and with Vogel's production simultaneously, we might resist her disturbing representation as we long for a Desdemona free of Othello's conception of her, pure or vile, and revisioned as more tragically heroic. Yet we feel Othello's conception more powerfully in his absence, sensing from the tension within the female enclave that the male world is ‘everywhere around’, and that the female world of love and desire is ‘entirely constituted by the gaze of man’.³⁸ And when this Desdemona addresses the audience directly, without the mediation of the male protagonist, spectators might, in Brechtian terms, become ‘alienated’ from their ‘habitual perceptions’ of a character made strange by this shift in viewpoint.³⁹

Clearly Vogel makes use of Brechtian techniques—the alienation effect, epic (episodic) structure, and the social gest—to disrupt the spectator's expectations of Othello, to ‘surprise the spectator into thought’. As Janelle Reinelt describes it, Brechtian technique

provides the means to … foreground and examine ideologically determined beliefs and unconscious habitual perceptions, and to make visible those signs inscribed on the body which distinguish social behaviour in relation to class, gender, and history … to see what is missing, or what new insights emerge if hidden aspects are thrown into relief.⁴⁰

In thirty short scenes, or ‘takes’, punctuated with flashes of light and percussive music, Paula Vogel creates an episodic structure that invites the spectators to interpose their judgement between the acts. By contrast with a seamless narrative or plot structure in which the characters move to what feels like an inevitable end, the division between scenes allows the spectator greater freedom here to imagine alternatives to the course of these events, or to reflect on their determinants.

At the same time, the playwright explicitly frames the angles from which we view each character in a series of what one critic called ‘character-freezing tableaux’, that at once eliminate a single viewpoint while drawing attention to the framing of characters on stage. Freeing (or ‘alienating’) these characters from the audience's familiar or conditioned responses, the actors posture to the audience employing the device of the ‘social gest’.

Consisting of a singular gesture or a ‘realm of attitudes’⁴¹ expressed in words and movement, the gest demonstrates the character's identification with social attitudes and relationships. Emilia, the confidante in servitude, bends over her crate of potatoes or her pile of washing; Bianca, the sexually aggressive prostitute, stands with legs apart, hands on hips which are thrust forward; and Desdemona, with unladylike abandon, leans back upon a table, and dangles her head arched upside down, suggesting both privilege and vulnerability.

The final four frames constitute a tragic recognition shared by two women, though they have no authority to act on it. Once again, Vogel dislodges a generic convention associated with tragedy—the moment of recognition that signals self-knowledge for the protagonist. In their dialogic relationship, Desdemona and Emilia together discover that Othello's gathering up of the wedding sheets from her bed, ‘like a body’, breathing it in ‘like a bouquet’, isn't love (45). Indeed, it has been surveillance.

The final gest, which spans three ‘takes’ (scenes), conveys resignation as Emilia prepares Desdemona for her impending death in the marriage bed, brushing her hair the requisite hundred strokes. Desdemona, ‘listening to the off-stage palace’, leans back, this time to accept her fate. The audience, presumably grappling with their various responses to the revisions of the original text, might also become aware of what does not change. The female world, though presented more subjectively, is still performing under a watchful, scrutinizing eye, awaiting judgement. For all of Desdemona's fidgetings, she is forever confined within Othello's gaze. But the spectator, perhaps for the first time, might stand outside it, recognize it, and resist its compelling vision.

Notes

1. Alvin Kernan, ‘Introduction’, Othello, by William Shakespeare (New York: Penguin Books, 1986) p. xxiii-iv. All subsequent references to this edition of Othello are in parentheses.

2. Desdemona was first produced in association with Circle Repertory Company by the Bay Street Theatre Festival, Sag Harbor, New York, in July 1993, then by the Circle Repertory Company, New York in Fall 1993, and was published by Dramatists Play Service, 1994. All subsequent references to Desdemona appear as page numbers in parentheses.

   For a discussion of the ‘multiple implications’ of the phrase ‘the woman's part’, see the ‘Introduction’ to Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds., The Woman's Part (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 12. The reference to ‘part’ in the title plays upon five different senses in which the term may be understood. It assumes (1) that women play a ‘distinct, gender-determined part’ in the world of the plays as well as outside them; (2) the bawdy meaning of ‘part’, as used by Shakespeare to indicate women's sexuality; (3) that the parts women play are social as well as sexual, and in the plays may be false—‘roles adopted to deceive or inflicted by the dominant patriarchal culture’—and constitute only part ‘of a whole’: that is, the complex identity of any character and of the men and women in relation to each other; (4) that feminine and masculine characteristics are changing cultural constructs and thus not restricted to females or males; and (5) that feminist criticism, in confronting these limiting constructs within texts, is ‘avowedly partisan’, and so taking the ‘woman's part’.

3. For example, Peter Erickson's readings of the representations of Shakespeare by twentieth-century women writers (Maya Angelou, Gloria Naylor, Adrienne Rich) in Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991); the numerous films of recent years such as Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet, Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night, Al Pacino's Looking for Richard; or Kristin Linklater's all-woman cast in the Company of Women's production of Henry V at Smith College, in September, 1994.

4. Jean Howard, ‘Scholarship, Theory, and More New Readings: Shakespeare for the 1990s’, in Shakespeare Study Today, ed. Georgianna Ziegler (New York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 129, 138.

5. Erickson, p. 2, 7.

6. Erickson, p. 163-4.

7. Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Epilogue: Remembering Shakespeare, Revising Ourselves’, in Women's Revisions of Shakespeare, 1664-1988, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 243-4.

8. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 6.

9. Neely, ‘Epilogue’, p. 243.

10. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 5.

11. Lynda Hart, ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), p. 4.

12. Hart, p. 13.

13. Randi S. Koppen, ‘“The Furtive Event”: Theorizing Feminist Spectatorship’, Modern Drama, XXXV, No. 3 (September 1992), p. 379.

14. See Dympna Callaghan, Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1989), p. 56-9, where she argues for ‘deconstructing certain crucial terms of canonical criticism’ in order to examine women's status in tragic drama and its reproduction in traditional criticism by ‘juxtaposing the concept of tragic transcendence with that of female transgression’.

15. Jeanie Forte, ‘Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 254.

16. Nancy Reinhardt, cited by Hart, p. 8. Reinhardt notes that the ‘sides, background, niches, and balconies function as the inner domestic space where women are usually kept’. Lorraine Helms, in ‘Acts of Resistance: the Feminist Player’, in The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, eds. Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms, and Jyotsna Singh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 111, examines the effects of theatrical production in relation to performance choices for those who play ‘the woman's part’ in contemporary performance. She claims that ‘with some exceptions, Shakespeare's female characters play their roles in the illusionistic scenes of the locus. They enjoy few opportunities to express the interiority of the reflexive soliloquy and even fewer to address the audience from the interactive platea.’

17. Carole McKewin, ‘“Counsels of Gall and Grace”: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays’, in The Woman's Part, eds. Lenz, Greene, and Neely, p. 118-19. McKewin cites Juliet Dusinberre's observation that Shakespeare's theatre offers a ‘consistent probing of the reactions of women to isolation in a society which has never allowed them independence from men either physically or spiritually’ (p. 117).

18. McKewin, p. 128-9.

19. Callaghan, p. 75, 65.

20. Jyotsna Singh, ‘The Interventions of History: Narratives of Sexuality’, in The Weyward Sisters, eds. Callaghan, Helms, and Singh, p. 46.

21. Callaghan, p. 53, 63-4.

22. Singh, p. 12.

23. See Dympna Callaghan's survey of the relationship between family, church, state and cosmos, and the significance of the category ‘woman’ in political and theological discourse (p. 14-27).

24. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981), p. 12. According to Madeline Gohlke Sprengnether, male fantasies of betrayal stem from fears of being weak or ‘feminine’ in relation to a powerful woman. ‘The feminine posture for a male character is that of the betrayed, and it is the man in this position who portrays women as whores’. See ‘“I Wooed Thee with My Sword”: Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms’, in Othello, ed. Alvin Kernan, p. 250.

25. Singh, p. 48.

26. Singh (p. 7) draws on a phrase employed by Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn in their reading of Isak Dinesen's story ‘The Blank Page’ as a ‘paradigm for a feminist historiography’. See ‘Feminist Scholarship and the Social Construction of Woman’, in Making a Difference, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 13.

27. Lorraine Helms (p. 106-7) cites varying critical responses to women playing female roles originally written by men for male performers. For example, Elaine Showalter argues positively that ‘when Shakespeare's heroines began to be played by women instead of boys, the presence of the female body and the female voice, quite apart from interpretation, created new meanings and subversive tensions in these roles’. On the other hand, Sue Ellen Case argues that these roles are ‘caricatures’, and that they should again be played by men to underscore that classic roles are ‘classic drag’. Helms argues for a ‘partial, problematic, and paradoxical’ freedom at the same time that one acknowledges these constraints.

28. Sue Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988), p. 21.

29. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1982), p. 4.

30. Case, p. 26.

31. Singh, p. 20.

32. According to Carol Thomas Neely, the handkerchief also functions symbolically to represent ‘sexuality controlled by chastity’. Passed from female sibyl to female charmer to Othello's mother to Desdemona, its purpose has been to make women ‘amiable’, and prevent men from hunting ‘after new fancies’. (See her extended discussion in ‘Women and Men in Othello’, in The Woman's Part, eds. Lenz, Greene and Nealy, p. 228-30.) Karen Newman discusses the handkerchief's historical as well as psychological significance: in her view, it ‘figures not simply [the mother's] missing penis’ but the ‘lack around which the play's dramatic action is structured, a desiring femininity … an aberrant and monstrous sexuality’. “‘And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’, Shakespeare Reproduced, eds. Jean E. Howard and Marion O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 156.

33. Karen Newman observes that Desdemona's responses to Othello's tales are ‘perceived as voracious … conflating the oral and aural’. Othello's language ‘betrays a masculine fear of a cultural femininity … envisioned as a greedy mouth never satisfied, always seeking increase, a point of view which Desdemona's response to their reunion at Cyprus reinforces. … Othello fears Desdemona's desire because it invokes his monstrous difference from the sex/race code he has adopted, or alternatively allies her imagined monstrous sexual appetite with his own’ (p. 152).

34. Newman (p. 157) further argues that although Shakespeare was subject to racist, sexist, and colonial discourses of his time, by making Othello a hero and Desdemona's love for him sympathetic, the play stands in a contestatory relationship to the hegemonic ideologies of race and gender in early modern England.

35. Greenblatt, quoted in Newman, p. 150.

36. Desdemona is, after all, willing to accompany Othello to Cyprus, which Alvin Kernan sees as a society ‘less secure’ than the idealized city represented by Venice—the image of government, ‘of reason, of law, and of social concord’. The island of Cyprus is more exposed to the Turks, emblematic of the forces of barbarism, the ‘geographical form of an action that occurs on the social and psychological levels as well’ (xxvi-vii).

37. See Jyotsna Singh's discourse on such facts as unemployment and population displacements that led to the prosperity of brothels in early modern England (p. 28-33).

38. Roland Barthes, quoted in Greene and Kahn, p. 4.

39. See Bertolt Brecht on the alienation effect in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Methuen, 1964), p. 192.

40. Janelle Reinhelt, ‘Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama’, in Feminist Theatre and Theory, ed. Helene Keyssar (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 35-6, 42.

41. Brecht, p. 198.