“My name is Desdemona. The word, Desdemona, means misery. It means ill fated. It means doomed.”
Well, right from the opening lines, it is clear that this particular incarnation of Othello’s wife is a real “up” person. Seriously, though, just in case it was not clear from the title, the central character is not Desdemona’s husband. This is not Shakespeare’s version of Othello, although anyone familiar with the Bard’s take on the tragic marriage can glean right off the bat that things are heading in the straight direction. After first situating the fact that from birth she was given a name with the worst possible meaning she then skips over allowing the foreshadowing to sink and goes on to wonder if her parents somehow had foreknowledge of “my fortune at the moment of my birth.”
“The endlessness of time and the death of regret equals hell.”
Well, so for much that: Othello is a real “up” person as well. Just in case it isn’t clear, Desdemona is not a pointedly satirical comedic take on the tragedy of the Moor and his interracial marriage. If anything, in fact, this take is even darker and more lacking in in lighthearted moments than the Bard’s. Evil to the core he may be, but one has to admit that Shakespeare’s Iago does bring humor to the tragedy, as black as that comedic sensibility may be. This version is seriously lacking in comedic lightening of the tragedy, but what it loses there it gains in philosophical reflection and, even more so, making the story about Desdemona. One certainly misses the physical of Iago because he is, after all, one of Shakespeare’s top three villains easy, but even the specter of Iago is powerful enough to keep him in mind.
“It is true my earth life held sorrow. Yet none of it, not one moment was ‘misery.’ Difficulty, yes. Confusion, yes. Error in judgement, yes. Murder, yes. But it was my life and, right or wrong, my life was shaped by my own choices and it was mine.”
The decision to move Iago off to the side is integral to the whole point of this reimagining of a familiar tale. The villainous presence of Iago so dominates Shakespeare’s play that he becomes the main character, eclipsing even the titular Othello simple as a result of interest. Iago is not just the most interesting character in Othello, he is one of the most interesting characters in the entire Shakespeare canon. It is a tribute to the vision of the writers that they were willing to gamble on pushing Iago into the shadows because, when all is said and done, Othello without him is kind of like Romeo and Juliet without Mercutio. The story is still there, but, man, what a slog it becomes to get through. By reducing the impact of Iago, the story easily shifts from being about Othello to becoming about Desdemona.
