Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona, Good Morning Juliet is a lighthearted little romp that sends up both Shakespeare and the academic ivory tower with a mischievous feminist sense of humor
Our heroine Constance Ledbelly is an undistinguished worker bee in the literature department of an unidentified university, where she has worked ably without recognition for her pompous supervisor Professor Claude Night. Her devotion to him is absolute but irrational, for he's a caricature of self-centered male vanity, interested principally in attractive female undergraduates and in getting his full professorship.
Connie has her own wild thesis about Shakespeare, one that will make or more likely break her already flattened career. She thinks that someone, somewhere, rewrote Romeo and Juliet and Othello to turn them into tragedies. All those deaths could have been avoided, if only there had been a truth-telling Fool to clear up the misunderstandings. She is toting around a copy of an undeciphered 300-year-old manuscript that she hopes will confirm her hypothesis.
That is, until the good Prof. Night dumps her and heads off to a well-paid post at Oxford with one of his bimbos. At that point either Connie has a serious psychotic episode or else she really does travel to the mystical worlds of Othello in Cyprus and then to the Capulets and Montagues in Verona. Plopped down into each intrigue at the crucial moment, Connie promptly clears up the misunderstandings, putting Iago into the doghouse and forestalling the duel in the piazza that triggers tragedy in Verona.
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