Goodnight Desdemona was a popular and critically acclaimed play that was vital to launching MacDonald's career. Critics writing for Canadian Literature, Canadian Theatre Review, Maclean, and Back Stage praised MacDonald for producing a witty and successful work. Mark Fortier, for example, writes in Canadian Theatre Review that the original production had its problems but that the play has great potential and that in one performance with “rare energy . . . I was given a wonderful sense of living, indigenous Shakespeare.”

Most critics tend to concentrate their discussion of the play on its value as a work of feminism. Although MacDonald has resisted classifying the play as an exclusively feminist work, she is a self-proclaimed feminist, and critics argue that her analysis of Shakespearean culture and the academic world rests heavily on the feminist tradition. Shannon Hengen, for example, stresses in Canadian Literature that the play is a “feminist...