Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) Quotes

Three vignettes played simultaneously.
1. Desdemona’s bedchamber; OTHELLO murders DESDEMONA in her bed, by smothering her with a pillow.
2. A crypt; ROMEO dead, JULIET unconscious on a slab. JULIET awakens, sees ROMEO, and kills herself with his rapier.
3. Constance Ledbelly’s office at Queen’s University;

CONSTANCE finishes a telephone conversation. She is upset. She hangs up the phone, takes her green plumed fountain pen from behind her ear, and pitches it into the wastebasket. She then picks up a long and narrow, ancient leather-bound manuscript, pitches it in after the pen, and exits.

CHORUS: What’s alchemy? The hoax of charlatans?
Or mystic quest for stuff of life itself:
eternal search for the Philosopher’s Stone,
where mingling and unmingling opposites,
transforms base metal into precious gold.
Hence, scientific metaphor of self:
divide the mind’s opposing archetypes –
if you possess the courage for the task –
invite them from the shadows to the light;
unite these lurking shards of broken glass
into a mirror that reflects one soul.
And in this merging of unconscious selves,
there lies the mystic “marriage of true minds.”

CONSTANCE: “Romeo and Juliet and Othello: The Seeds of Corruption and Comedy.” Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, Othello and Romeo and Juliet produce the most ambivalent and least Aristotelean responses. In neither play do the supposedly fate-ordained deaths of the flawed heroes and heroines, seem quite inevitable. Indeed, it is only because the deaths do occur that they can be called inevitable in hindsight, thus allowing the plays to squeak by under the designation, “tragedy.” In both plays, the tragic characters, particularly Romeo and Othello, have abundant opportunity to save themselves. The fact that they do not save themselves, tends to characterize them as the unwitting victims of a disastrous practical joke. Insofar as these plays may be said to be fatalistic at all, any grains of authentic tragedy must be seen to reside in the heroines, Desdemona and Juliet.

CONSTANCE: What if a Fool were to enter the worlds of both Othello and Romeo and Juliet? Would he be akin to the Wise Fool in King Lear?: a Fool who can comfort and comment, but who cannot alter the fate of the tragic hero. Or would our Fool defuse the tragedies by assuming centre stage as comic hero? Indeed, in Othello and Romeo and Juliet the Fool is conspicuous by his very absence, for these two tragedies turn on flimsy mistakes – a lost hanky, a delayed wedding announcement – mistakes too easily concocted and corrected by a Wise Fool. I will go further: are these mistakes, in fact, the footprints of a missing Fool?; a Wise Fool whom Shakespeare eliminated from two earlier comedies by an unknown author?!

PROFESSOR: Still harping on the Gustav Manuscript are you? I hate to see you turning into a laughing stock Connie. You know you’ll never get your doctorate at this rate.

CONSTANCE: I know … I guess I just have a thing for lost causes.

PROFESSOR: You’re an incurable romantic Connie.

CONSTANCE: Just a failed existentialist.

PROFESSOR: Traipsing after the Holy Grail, or the Golden Fleece or some such figment.

CONSTANCE: “You who possess the eyes to see
this strange and wondrous alchemy,
where words transform to vision’ry,
where one plus two makes one, not three;
open this book if you agree
to be illusion’s refugee,
and of return no guarantee –
unless you and your true identity.
And discover who the Author be.”

DESDEMONA: Thou dost not know thyself?

CONSTANCE: Apparently not.

DESDEMONA: Do none in Academe know who thou art?

CONSTANCE: Maybe. They call me Connie to my face, and something else behind my back.

DESDEMONA: What’s that?

CONSTANCE: “The Mouse.”

DESDEMONA: “The Mouse”?

CONSTANCE: I saw it carved into a lecture stand.

CONSTANCE: I merely must determine authorship.
But have I permanently changed the text? –
You’re floundering in the waters of a flood;
the Mona Lisa and a babe float by.
Which one of these two treasures do you save?
I’ve saved the baby, and let the Mona drown –
Or did the Author know that I’d be coming here,
and leave a part for me to play? How am I cast?
As cast-away to start, but what’s my role?

CONSTANCE: I used to work for him.
For ten years I … assisted him, by writing.
Some articles he would have writ himself,
had he the time, but he’s a busy man.
Now he’s got tenure and an Oxford post
I hoped was meant for me.

DESDEMONA: Ten years of ghostly writing for a thief?
Thy mind hath proved a cornucopia
to slake the glutton, sloth, and he hath cooked
his stolen feast on thy Promethean heat.

CONSTANCE: Boy, Shakespeare really watered her down, eh? …
I wish I were more like Desdemona.
Next to her I’m just a little wimp.
A rodent. Road-kill.

CONSTANCE: Where’s the Fool? Where’s the damn Fool?! How come I end up doing all his work? I should have waited in the wings for him to leap on stage and stop the fight, and then I could have pinned him down and forced him to reveal the Author’s name! The Author – who must know my true identity.

JULIET: I die of tedium!

NURSE: Oh.

JULIET: O Hymen, god of marriage, pray undo thy holy work:
Make me a maid again! To plunge once more in
love’s first firey pit, to hover there ’twixt longing and
content, condemned to everlasting Limbo, O!
Penance me with new love’s burning tongs; spit and
sear me slow o’er heaven’s flames; grant me an
eternity to play with fire!

CONSTANCE: You’re the essence of first love – of beauty that will
never fade, of passion that will never die. Are you
afraid of growing old?

JULIET: No one may remain forever young. We change our
swaddling clothes for funeral
shrouds,
and in between is one brief shining space, where love
may strike by chance, but only death is sure.

CONSTANCE: What happens though, if love itself should die?

JULIET: When love goes to its grave before we do, then find
another love for whom to die, and swear to end life
first when next we love.

JULIET: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” Romeo, for with each
new lust, thou creepeth close unto the agèd day when
soft moist lip and dewy eye convert to senile rheum.

ROMEO: Thinkst thou to leave a lovely corpse my dear, when even
now the crows have footed it in merry measure all
about thine eyes?

JULIET: Oh! I shall tell my father of this insult!

[They are both on the verge of passionate tears]

JULIET: [Below] But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the East, and Constantine the sun!

CONSTANCE: Uh oh.

JULIET: He speaks.

CONSTANCE: Romeo? Is that you?

JULIET: I know not how to tell thee who I am. My sex, dear boy, is
hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee;
therefore I wear tonight, this boyish hose.

CONSTANCE: Juliet? What are you doing down there? How on earth
did you get into the orchard?

JULIET: With love’s light wings did I o’erperch –

CONSTANCE: I don’t believe in love-at-first-sight.

JULIET: Say then that thou dost not believe in air! Or in the solid
ground on which we tread! Nay, love’s a force of
nature, can’t be stopped; the lightning waiteth not
upon my thought to thus endow it bright; it doth but
light!

CONSTANCE: Nay, love’s a bond of servitude; a trap that sly
deceptors lay for fools – fools they use then throw
away, or trade in like a lib’ry book they’ve read, then
lost, then found beneath the bed all coffee-stained
and dust-bunnied, all dog-eared, thumbed and
overdue.

CONSTANCE: Do you know something of the Manuscript?! Do you know who the Author is?

GHOST: A lass.

CONSTANCE: I know, “alas, alas poor Yorick”, so?! Who wrote this thing?

GHOST: A beardless bard.

CONSTANCE: A boy?

GHOST: A lass!

CONSTANCE: Oh here we go again, “alas”! Who is the Author?

GHOST: A Fool, a Fool.

CONSTANCE: The Fool and the Author are one in the same?

GHOST: Ha, ha, ha, ha.

CONSTANCE: What’s his name?!

CONSTANCE: Desdemona, I thought you were different; I thought you
were my friend, I worshipped you. But you’re just like
Othello – gullible and violent. Juliet, if you really loved
me, you wouldn’t want me to die. But you were more in
love with death, ’cause death is easier to love. Never
mind. I must have been a monumental fool to think that
I could save you from yourselves … Fool …

[When the warp is over, CONSTANCE is alone in her office at Queen’s. Both she and the office are precisely as they were at the onset of the first warp at the end of Act I: the phone receiver dangles by its cord, and CONSTANCE is leaning over with just her – hatless – head in the wastebasket. She straightens up and looks about her, a little disoriented. She tentatively touches herself as if to confirm her reality, bringing one hand up to her head. She feels her pen behind her ear, removes it, and looks at it. It has turned to solid gold, feather and all]

CHORUS: The alchemy of ancient hieroglyphs has permeated the
unconscious mind of Constance L. and manifested
form, where there was once subconscious dreamy
thought. The best of friends and foes exist within,
where archetypal shadows come to light and doff
their monster masks when we say “boo”. Where
mingling and unmingling opposites performs a
wondrous feat of alchemy, and spins grey matter,
into precious gold.