SOURCE: Friedman, Sharon. “Revisioning the Woman's Part: Paula Vogel's Desdemona.” New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 58 (May 1999): 131-41.

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...