The Changeling: A Critical Reader

Mark Hutchings

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350197572
• eBook ISBN: 9781350011397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This volume offers an accessible and thought-provoking guide to this major Renaissance tragedy, surveying its key themes and evolving critical responses over the course of nearly four centuries. Providing a uniquely detailed and up-to-date account of the play's rich stage history, it demonstrates how useful Performance Studies is to our understanding of early modern drama, and looks closely at major recent productions on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the 2014 production of the 'Jacobean' indoor space, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London. In a series of critical essays, the guide offers fresh perspectives on the characters' mechanical psychology, the influence of Spanish Golden Age literature on Middelton and Rowley, and how the play has been treated on the modern stage and screen. Featuring a guide to digital resources and an annotated bibliography, this collection is a definitive guide to The Changeling.

1

The Critical Backstory

Sara D. Luttfring

Following the first publication of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling in 1653, one of the earliest and most explicit print references to the play occurs in The Marrow of Complements (1655). The title page of this book advertises it as ‘A most Methodicall and accurate forme of Instructions for all Variety of Love-Letters, Amorous Discourses, and Complementall Entertainements’. The book contains three unattributed excerpts from The Changeling: Jasperino’s flirtation with Diaphanta from 1.1.132–45, entitled ‘Jasperino, a merry fellow, at first sight thus boards the Joviall Diaphanta’; Alibius’s conversation with Lollio from 1.2.1–34, entitled ‘A Dialogue betwixt an old jealous Doctor, and his man’; and Antonio’s attempt to woo Isabella from 3.2.113–35, entitled ‘A Gentleman to obtain the love of his Lady, faignes himself Mad, and thus courts her in his keepers absence’.¹ The play, which most modern readers, audiences and critics think of as centring on the doomed love triangle composed of Beatrice-Joanna, De Flores and Alsemero, seems an incongruous source for romantic bon mots, and indeed, the excerpts singled out for inclusion focus on supporting/subplot characters rather than the main plot’s leads. In fact, if all we knew of The Changeling was derived from The Marrow of Complements, we might assume that this play of merry fellows, jovial maids, old jealous husbands and disguised wooers would bear more resemblance to one of Middleton’s city comedies than to a tragedy.

As many of The Changeling’s modern editors have noted, the play’s popularity in the seventeenth century seems to have been due primarily to the subplot and its titular changeling, Antonio.² The focus in The Marrow of Complements on the play’s more comic characters and moments appears to reflect this trend in its early reception. When the first critical commentary on the play appeared in the early nineteenth century, however, we find this trend reversed. As we will see, early critics bemoaned, derided and/or outright ignored the play’s subplot even as they praised the main plot’s dark power. Similarly, they celebrated the play’s main plot as evidence of Middleton’s skill as a writer while lamenting his association with Rowley, to whom they attributed the inferior subplot. Whereas many of the play’s earliest audiences seem to have focused on the play’s comic elements, nineteenth-century critics insisted that its only merits were to be found in its tragedy. The play’s provocative, and at times almost perverse, blend of tones and genre markers would continue to be a source of fascination and frustration throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Aside from some seventeenth-century references to the play in performance and an unpopular eighteenth-century rewriting of the play, William Hayley’s Marcella (1785),³ the next specific mention of The Changeling in print occurred in Walter Scott’s edition of the thirteenth-century Middle English verse romance Sir Tristrem, first published in 1804. In this version of the Tristan and Iseult legend, Tristrem and Ysonde fall in love and have sex despite the fact that they are en route to England so that Ysonde can marry King Mark. Upon arrival in England, Ysonde marries King Mark as planned. According to Scott’s plot summary: ‘[T]o conceal her guilty intercourse with Sir Tristrem, [Ysonde] substitutes her attendant, Brengwain, in her place, on the first night of her nuptials.’ Ysonde then ‘becomes fearful lest Brengwain should betray the important secret with which she was entrusted; to prevent which, she hires two ruffians to dispatch her faithful attendant’.⁴ Ultimately, Brengwain’s life is spared after she proves her loyalty to her mistress. In his notes on this part of the poem, Scott writes, ‘The barbarous ingratitude of the queen of Cornwall [i.e. Ysonde] resembles that of the heroine in Middleton’s Changeling, an old play, which contains some passages horrible striking.’⁵ Scott seems clearly to be referencing the bed-trick episode in The Changeling, in which Diaphanta takes her mistress’s place on her wedding night in order to conceal Beatrice-Joanna’s loss of virginity; unlike Brengwain, however, the less fortunate Diaphanta is murdered for her perceived disloyalty. Two things seem of note here. First is the decisively unsympathetic characterization of Beatrice-Joanna as, like Ysonde, ‘barbarous’. Second is the characterization of the play itself as both ‘horrible’ and ‘striking’. As we will see, such characterizations of Beatrice-Joanna were commonplace in much early criticism of The Changeling. Scott’s characterization of the play itself is similarly prescient, as many nineteenth-century critics found the play to be ‘horrible’ both in its ability to provoke horror and in what they perceived to be the low quality of some of its scenes. Despite the disgust and exasperation with which early commentators viewed the subplot and certain elements of the main plot, however, they also found much in the play that was ‘striking’ and worthy of serious thought and discussion.

Following the first printing in 1653 and a reissue in 1668, the play did not appear again in print until 1815, when C.W. Dilke included it in his Old English Plays. In his prefatory remarks on the play, Dilke (rather astonishingly) compares it unfavourably with Hayley’s Marcella, noting that while Hayley’s heroine is made sympathetic, ‘Beatrice can only be regarded with detestation and abhorrence.’ Dilke also remarks approvingly on Hayley’s omission from the narrative of ‘the disgusting scene which passes in Alsemero’s closet in the beginning of Act IV’. ⁶ Presumably he is referencing Beatrice-Joanna’s discovery of Alsemero’s virginity test, an incident which, along with the bed-trick that Scott apparently found memorable, was a source of frequent critical consternation. The play’s next editor, Alexander Dyce, found more to praise in The Changeling, arguing that the play showcases ‘Middleton’s tragic powers’. He is also the first commentator to directly address the question of the play’s co-authorship: ‘According to the title-page, William Rowley, who was frequently [Middleton’s] literary associate, had a share in the composition; but I feel convinced that the terribly impressive passages of this tragedy … are beyond the ability of Rowley.’⁷ Dyce’s seeming reluctance to give Rowley equal billing with Middleton is notable and characteristic of much nineteenth-century criticism. Dyce refers to Rowley as Middleton’s ‘associate’, not his co-author or collaborator, and he admits only that Rowley had ‘a share’ in the play. Clearly this ‘share’ did not include the play’s strongest parts, and Dyce declines to speculate as to what Rowley’s contributions were. As we will see, later critics would be more specific about Middleton and Rowley’s division of labour, but not necessarily to Rowley’s benefit.

In 1843, James Russell Lowell effectively ignored both Rowley and the subplot in his analysis of The Changeling. He begins his reading with a brief plot summary, at the end of which he notes: ‘The tragedy takes its name from the chief character in an underplot, which, as is usually the case in the old drama, has nothing whatever to do with the action of the piece.’⁸ This is Lowell’s only reference to the subplot, and Rowley’s name is never mentioned. Instead, Lowell focuses on the brilliance of Middleton’s characterization of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores. Despite the fact that Beatrice-Joanna takes the initiative in hiring De Flores to kill Alonzo, Lowell depicts her as a passive victim, comparing her to ‘a child talking aloud in the dark to relieve its terrors’ and contrasting her ‘shrinking dread’ with De Flores’s ‘contemptuous coolness’.⁹ Two years later, Leigh Hunt was similarly struck by the forceful characterization of De Flores: ‘there is one character of [Middleton’s] (De Flores in the “Changeling”) which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life’.¹⁰ Whereas Scott and Dilke appear to cast Beatrice-Joanna as the arch villain of the play, Lowell and Hunt depict De Flores as the play’s most forceful character, thus presenting the murderous couple in more conventionally gendered ways.

In his 1885 edition of Middleton’s works, A.H. Bullen follows Lowell in excluding the subplot entirely from his summary of The Changeling. He does, however, acknowledge Rowley’s specific contribution to the play, although not favourably: ‘The wild extravagance of the madhouse scenes is quite in [Rowley’s] manner.’ In addition to crediting Rowley with the inferior subplot, Bullen also attributes to him the play’s final scene, noting that the ‘violence of the language’, ‘ill-timed comic touches’ and ‘metrical roughness’ differentiate this scene from the rest of the main plot.¹¹ By contrast, Bullen praises Middleton’s work in the main plot, particularly the confrontation between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna in 3.3.¹² Bullen nervously sidesteps what were widely held as the main plot’s most glaring flaws – the virginity test and bed-trick: ‘I must be excused for passing over the device by which [Beatrice-Joanna] conceals the loss of her virginity from Alsemero.’¹³ Despite this squeamishness, however, Bullen is the first commentator to note the virginity test’s possible historical links to Frances Howard and the Essex divorce trial, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Introduction
• Notes on Contributors
• Timeline
• Introduction
• 1 The Critical Backstory
• 2 A Performance History
• 3 State of the Art
• 4 New Directions: Embodied Theatre in The Changeling
• 5 New Directions: Doubles and Falsehoods: The Changeling’s Spanish Undertexts
• 6 New Directions: Performing The Changeling: 2006–2015
• 7 New Directions: Loving and Loathing: Horror in The Changeling from Text to Screen
• 8 Resources
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright