2990TLN 2990: unpin

Social historians and editors now generally agree that Emilia is called upon to help Desdemona get undressed, though for much of the nineteenth century and in some twentieth-century productions, unpin is played as a reference to the letting down of Desdemona's upswept hair. Hankey notes that Ellen Terry, the famous nineteenth-century Desdemona, wrote "hair" in the margin of her copy at unpin me here (TLN 3005). Carol Chillington Rutter argues that the unpinning of Desdemona is "nothing less than sensational," marking the "dismantling [of] the Senatorʼs daughter, the generalʼs wife, the maid who 'paragons description and wild fame'" ("Unpinning Desdemona (Again)" 115). To view Rutter's fascinating analysis of attempts to recover the force the scene may have had in its earliest performances, see "Unpinning Desdemona - the Movie": http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/capital/teaching_and_learning/projects/unpinning/