My response to an excerpt from the pamphlet "The Witches of Edmonton" was resigned dismay "ÃÂ resigned because I have researched the subject before, and dismayed with a culture that could, out of fevered imaginations and fear create an epidemic of killing. Of course, witch-hunts were not unheard of in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare made use of the witchcraft culture in many plays, Macbeth most notably.
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Transformations of Shakespeare Transformations utilize the text of an exisiting play to make an imaginative literary "leap". Many characters in Shakespearean drama are never given the chance to fully explain their motives or feelings. By carefully studying the lines of pivotal -- but enigmatic -- characters, the following transformations have been created to give a clearer insight into the characters and plays. Each represents a soliloquy that the character might have given at a key point in the action to allow the audience to understand their motives.
Othello and Desdemona in Venice, 1850, oil on wood...
Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona in Orson Welles' 195...
Desdemona First Baptist Church, Desdemona, Texas H...Desdemona's Soliloquy Desdemona is in a tiny roof-top crevice, one of many little nooks in her father's house.
Soil has collected here over the years, and small, stunted trees, weeds, and woody herbs are pushing through the brick and stone-work of many ages. Desdemona knows this house like the back of her hand. The light is beginning to fade from the sky, it is the advent of the night that will hold the most pivotal event in her life. Desdemona must make a crucial decision "ÃÂ will she marry Othello, and forsake her father's house, or will she stay and be an obedient daughter? She is reading, or trying to, and she is obviously agitated.
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Desdemona Cemetery, Desdemona, Texas Historical Ma...
"A Bedchamber, Desdemona in Bed asleep", from Othe...
Desdemona by Frederic Leighton, ca. 1888