The Authors
The Changeling (1622) was written jointly by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) and William Rowley (?1585-1626).
Middleton, the son of a wealthy bricklayer, attended Oxford University but left without obtaining a degree. By 1601 he was in London ‘daily accompanying the players’ and became one of Philip Henslowe’s stable of playwrights collaborating with Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday on various plays that have not survived. He wrote plays with Dekker for the companies of boys performing at Blackfriars and Paul’s, for Prince Charles’s company, for Lady Elizabeth’s Men and after 1615 for the King’s Men. He also wrote civic and Lord Mayor’s pageants, becoming Chronologer to the City of London in 1620. His 1624 play A Game at Chess achieved the longest run of any Jacobean play (nine days), but ran foul of the authorities for its topical satire against Spain. His plays include the comedies A Mad World, My Masters (1604?), The Roaring Girl (with Dekker, 1610?) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) and the tragedy Women Beware Women (1621). He is now also widely regarded as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) traditionally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur.
Rowley was a leading comic actor with the Duke of York’s Men (which became Prince Charles’s company) and then the King’s Men. His parts included the clown in his own All’s Lost by Lust (1622) and the fat bishop in A Game at Chess. As a dramatist he collaborated with Thomas Heywood, Dekker, Ford, Fletcher, and Webster as well as with Middleton, with whom he wrote both A Fair Quarrel (1615?) and The Changeling. It is generally agreed that Rowley wrote the subplot and the opening and closing scenes of The Changeling, which suggests that the authors’ relationship was a genuine collaboration, rather than, as has sometimes been suggested, a master/servant relationship, with Middleton as the senior partner taking responsibility for the tragic parts while leaving his junior to get on with comic relief.
What Happens in the Play
Beatrice-Joanna, the daughter of Vermandero, is betrothed to Alonzo De Piraquo.
1.1 Alsemero has fallen in love with Beatrice-Joanna, not knowing she is engaged. Beatrice-Joanna reciprocates his feelings. Vermandero’s servant De Flores (who is infatuated with her) informs Beatrice-Joanna of her father’s arrival but she treats him with scorn. Vermandero welcomes Alsemero and tells him of the forthcoming marriage. Alsemero decides to leave when he finds out that Beatrice-Joanna is engaged, but Vermandero persuades him to stay.
1.2 Alibius, who runs a madhouse, and his servant Lollio discuss arrangements for protecting Alibius’s young wife Isabella from sexual temptation. They welcome a new patient, Antonio, who is actually a nobleman disguised as a fool in order to attempt to seduce Isabella.
2.1 Beatrice-Joanna is trying to find a way to marry Alsemero rather than Alonzo. She and De Flores quarrel again. Alonzo’s brother Tomazo suspects that Beatrice-Joanna’s affections for Alonzo have cooled.
2. 2 Unknown to Alsemero, Beatrice-Joanna decides to use De Flores to kill Alonzo. De Flores, delighted by Beatrice-Joanna’s changed attitude towards him, arranges to show Alonzo the castle, in order to murder him.
3.1–2 De Flores kills Alonzo and decides to give Beatrice-Joanna Alonzo’s ring. He has to cut off Alonzo’s finger because he cannot get his ring off by itself.
3.3 Lollio introduces Isabella to the madman Franciscus, a new inmate who is actually another nobleman and would-be seducer. Antonio, overheard by Lollio, tells Isabella that he is actually her would-be lover, not a fool.
3.4 De Flores tells Beatrice-Joanna that Alonzo is dead and shows her the finger. As she begins to realise the full horror of what she has done, he tells her that she, not money, will be his reward.
4.1 In a dumb show, Vermandero puzzles over Alonzo’s apparent flight but permits Alsemero to become betrothed to Beatrice-Joanna. Beatrice-Joanna discovers that Alsemero has a virginity testing kit. Worried that he will discover that she has lost her virginity (to De Flores), she tests Diaphanta, her confidante, before allowing her to take her own place in the bridal bed.
4.2 Vermandero discovers that Franciscus and Antonio are absent and quarrels with Tomazo, Alonzo’s brother, who is accusing him of having a part in Alonzo’s death. Jasperino, Alsemero’s friend, has overheard a compromising encounter between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna. This leads Alsemero to test Beatrice-Joanna with his virginity potion. She, having already tested it on Diaphanta, is able to fake the necessary reactions, thus convincing Alsemero of her chastity.
4.3 Isabella tells Lollio that she has two disguised suitors. She then pretends to be a madwoman in order to test Antonio, who finds her repulsive in disguise. Lollio confronts Franciscus.
5.1 Beatrice-Joanna is worried because Diaphanta is still in the bridal bed. De Flores sets fire to Diaphanta’s bedroom in order to rouse the house. In the confusion, he shoots her to ensure her silence.
5.2 Vermandero tells Tomazo that Alibius and Isabella have confirmed his suspicions of Franciscus and Antonio.
5.3 Alsemero and Jasperino are now convinced that Beatrice-Joanna is guilty of adultery with De Flores. She explains her conduct, admitting her role in Alonzo’s death, and Alsemero locks her and De Flores together in a closet. When Vermandero comes to explain his version of Alonzo’s death, Alsemero tells him the truth and reveals De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna, both now fatally wounded at De Flores’ hand.
The earliest known performance of The Changeling took place at Court in 1624 and it was licensed to the Phoenix, an indoor playhouse. Its early performances would, then, have taken place indoors, in an environment lit by artificial lighting, rather than in one of the familiar open-air amphitheatres, such as the Globe. Although the indoor playhouses were smaller than the amphitheatres, the audience still largely shared the same space as the actors and the claustrophobic atmosphere of The Changeling may well have been enhanced by the relative intimacy of the theatre and the artificial lighting. The play poses no major staging challenges and the various effects and properties were well within the normal range of a theatre company of the period. Trained young male actors would have played the female parts.
Although The Changeling is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of Jacobean drama, it appears not to have been performed between the end of the seventeenth century and the 1950s. This theatrical eclipse partly stemmed from the play’s subject matter, since plays that involved sexual partners being substituted for others were considered too immoral for polite society. Critics such as T. S. Eliot and M. C. Bradbrook paved the way for a critical reassessment of the play that led in due course to a series of revivals since 1950 that have re-established the play in the theatrical canon.
In The Changeling the authors created a dramatic structure that gives memorable dynamic form to the moral and psychological issues it raises. In particular they use a number of dramatic, theatrical, thematic and linguistic strategies to bind the actions and the characters of the play together almost subliminally. Although the visual, almost emblematic moments (particularly the dropped handkerchief, the ring and the finger, and the dumbshow) play a major part in this process, the relationship between the plot and the subplot, the concepts associated with changelings and the linked ideas of change and exchange are crucial factors in the play’s structure.
A changeling is either a child left by the fairies in exchange for one they take away or the child they take away itself. Characteristically, the child left behind in the mortal world is physically or mentally abnormal. Presumably the idea originated in a desire to explain the otherwise apparently random appearance of such children. Inevitably the term came to be extended to apply to various categories of those with mental or physical disabilities. It is in this sense that it is applicable to Antonio in the subplot, who pretends to be an idiot and is, strictly, the changeling of the title.
Plot and Subplot
Middleton and Rowley wrote The Changeling jointly. There is still some critical suspicion of multi-authored works because the post-Romantic critical tradition still values the author’s supposed ‘individual voice’ and ‘originality’ far more highly than the Jacobean dramatists did as they struggled to earn their livings in a precarious theatrical business. Despite the influential criticism of Roland Barthes and more recent approaches attacking the idea of the authority of the author, there is still a powerful tendency to see collaborative works in terms of who wrote which bits, who was the originator, who gave the instructions. However, it is grossly misleading to see the play as two disparate stories by two authors, linked only in the revelations of the last act. In fact, although there is very little narrative interdependence between the two plots, they are related thematically and structurally in ways that are crucial to the play’s overall effectiveness. It is possible to stage the Beatrice-Joanna/De Flores plot without the Isabella story (as the various television versions demonstrate) but what the play may seem to gain as a concentrated study of an isolated individual, it loses by not offering the wider perspectives provided by the values of the world outside Vermandero’s household. This other world, the world of the madhouse, provides a corrective commentary on Beatrice-Joanna’s behaviour by showing a positive model of how to behave. It is a kind of ironic reversal of the Shakespearian flight from court to a more natural world seen in plays such As You Like It.
Beatrice-Joanna’s dealings with her various suitors (Alonzo de Piraquo, De Flores, Alsemero) provide the main impetus of the main plot. The subplot is constructed to give an alternative perspective by treating a similar situation in a radically different way. The emphasis is, broadly, comic, since no real harm comes to the characters in the subplot, and the relationship between Alibius and Isabella is re-established on a basis of mutual trust rather than jealousy. The central characters of the subplot are not as important socially as the characters in the main plot but their moral behaviour is better, particularly if we compare Isabella with Beatrice-Joanna.
The subplot is not comic relief but a working out of the moral issues from a different perspective. In the more overt world of the subplot potential lovers adopt physical disguises in their efforts to gain their beloved. Isabella’s physical world is dominated by the two wards of madmen and fools: it is a world where those who do not conform to society’s codes are incarcerated, yet it is also a world where those codes are more strictly observed than they are in the fashionable world of Beatrice-Joanna. In traditional comic terms, Isabella has every reason to cuckold her husband: he is old, jealous without cause and treats her badly. Yet in the face of the two would-be lovers’ advances she remains constant and is eventually rewarded by her husband’s confidence in her when she reveals the plot to him. There is a striking theatrical enactment of this in Act 4 Scene 3, when she adopts the physical disguise of a madwoman and Antonio fails to see through it. Isabella can change into a new shape, the outward appearance of a madwoman, but is able to return to her original one, unlike her counterpart, Beatrice-Joanna, who is trapped in a series of metamorphoses and cannot return.
The relationship between the Beatrice-Joanna and Isabella plots is not simply one of parallels, because the range of choices available to each of them differs and their reactions to them are dissimilar. It is also important that although the action of the subplot takes place in a madhouse, the main characters of that plot are sane, merely adopting disguises in order to get closer to Isabella. On the other hand, in the ostensibly sane world of the main plot, the characters behave in ways that can be considered mad. Middleton and Rowley take great care to provide alternative perspectives on each plot. Thus, Isabella stays loyal to her husband whereas Beatrice-Joanna abandons her loyalty to her fiancé and her father. De Flores and Lollio both demand sexual favours for keeping quiet, but whereas De Flores is successful, Isabella threatens Lollio with death at Antonio’s hands in an ironic counterpart to De Flores’ murder of Alonzo. The structure of the play is important here, since, by placing Lollio’s demands on Isabella after Alonzo’s murder but before De Flores asks for his reward, the authors bring two possible modes of behaviour in similar situations into a very close juxtaposition.
Finally the connection between the two plots is made very explicit at the end of the play when Alsemero sums up the action of the main plot, beginning with the moon, that perennial symbol of change:
What an opacous body had that moon
That last chang’d on us! Here’s beauty chang’d
To ugly whoredom; here, servant obedience
To a master sin, imperious murder;
I, a supposed husband, chang’d embraces
With wantonness, but that was paid before;
Your change is come too, from an ignorant wrath
To knowing friendship. Are there any more on’s?
(5.3.197-204)
And the false fool, the false madman, the tempted wife and the jealous husband all admit their membership of the club, each, inevitably, using the word change. So, between the two plots we are presented with an image of a whole society affected in various ways by the influence of ‘love’s tame madness’, which is what Tomazo calls Alonzo’s love in Act 2 Scene 1 when he sees that Beatrice-Joanna is no longer as affectionate as she was. In some cases, the madness leads to death; in others it comes close, as society changes from an apparently ordered situation to one where its hidden desires and fantasies are given full expression for a while, with catastrophic results.
Changelings, Changes, Exchanges
As the play’s title suggests, the ideas of change and exchange associated with changelings provide one of its most important organising principles. The importance of the subplot is most obvious in the fact that the notions associated with changelings are to be found there. Some of the ideas of change and exchange are more significant than others and almost any play will, inevitably, show the characters changing in some ways. In The Changeling, however, the changes are actually related causally and thematically so that they are dependent on one another and also related to the theme of the deceptiveness of outward appearance until the situation changes and the concealed truth emerges. The key element in this complex of ideas is that someone is changed or exchanged, and this allows the concept to be applied almost universally throughout the play.
For Antonio and Franciscus the change is simple: by adopting the roles of the fool and the madman, both pretend to be something different from what they actually are. In the case of Alibius the idea works in two ways: his name is formed from alibi, the Latin word which means he is somewhere else while something is going on, but he is also changed from being an unjustly jealous husband to one who has confidence in his wife; he will ‘change now/into a better’. Just as Franciscus and Antonio adopt disguises, so does Isabella who is not recognised by her putative lover when she disguises herself as a madwoman.
Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores initiate many of the changes that occur to other members of the cast. De Flores is apparently physically ugly – at least Beatrice-Joanna tells us that he is, though no one else seems worried by his appearance – and this physical ugliness could be characteristic of a changeling. He is also the instrument of change since he actually does all the dirty work: he kills Alonzo, the most fundamental change of all, thus allowing Beatrice-Joanna to change from being engaged to him to being engaged to Alsemero. He changes Beatrice-Joanna from a virgin to a whore; he kills Diaphanta after she has exchanged her virginity for experience. He also changes in Beatrice-Joanna’s judgment of him, from an ugly to a beloved man and, in other people’s judgment, from ‘honest’ De Flores to ‘horrid villain’ when the truth is finally revealed.
The changes in Beatrice-Joanna are equally significant and relate not only to the original meaning of ‘changeling;’ but also to one of its extended connotations, that of ‘a woman whose affections were not constant’. After all, she starts the play engaged to Alonzo but changes her affections to Alsemero and ultimately to De Flores. The successive changes chart her decline morally, spiritually and socially. This is particularly evident in the great exchange between her and De Flores in Act 3, Scene 4, where Beatrice-Joanna tries to evade the consequences of her desires and De Flores replies:
Though thou writ’st maid, thou whore in thy affection!
’Twas chang’d from thy first love, and that’s a kind
Of whoredom in thy heart; and he’s chang’d now,
To bring thy second on, thy Alsemero,
Whom (by all the sweets that ever darkness tasted)
If I enjoy thee not, thou ne’er enjoy’st.
(3.4.143-8)
Beatrice-Joanna is also a changeling in her dissimilarity to her father. Vermandero is a decent man, a careful father trying to do his best for his daughter, whereas Beatrice-Joanna has no compunction about telling lies, organising murders, and cheating her husband. Finally she says as much to her father: ‘O come not near me, sir, I shall defile you:/ I am that of your blood was taken from you/For your better health; look no more upon’t, / But cast it to the ground regardlessly’ (5.3.149-52).
Visual Elements
The visual elements of the play have an important function in presenting the transformations and excesses associated with the outbreak of changing emotions.
For example, the dropping of Beatrice-Joanna’s glove in the first scene is a highly visual way of showing the alterations that occur in people’s plans. She drops it as a love token for Alsemero but De Flores picks it up. This highly conventional lover’s gesture is meant as a signal of Beatrice-Joanna’s changed affections but actually operates as a prophetic anticipation of what is really going to happen in the play. Beatrice-Joanna’s glove dropping is a visual presentation of her willing change from Alonzo and her initially unwilling change to De Flores, showing her impetuousness, since she miscalculates the relative physical (and mental) positions of her father, De Flores and Alsemero. She wants to give Alsemero a love token, but she doesn’t see the situation properly.
Beatrice-Joanna’s blindness to the possible consequences of her actions also appears in her reaction to the physical evidence of Alonzo’s death. When De Flores presents her with Alonzo’s finger it gives her a sense of the reality of what she has become involved in and it colours our attitude to her during the crucial scene with De Flores after the murder (3.4). The fact that the ring would not come off the finger is important symbolically: the ring was given to Alonzo by Beatrice-Joanna as a love token, De Flores brings it back, like a cat bringing a present to its owner, as a token of his love. She tells him to keep it, thus symbolically giving it and herself to him. The ring is one of many sexual symbols in the play and its symbolism is partly carried over from the business with the glove where De Flores talked about thrusting his fingers into Beatrice-Joanna’s sockets. In both incidents the visual is reinforced verbally, but a considerable amount of meaning is derived from the physical action.
The Changeling in the Modern World
In many ways the Beatrice-Joanna story is a domestic tragedy. Although it is set in the citadel at Alicante, there are no important political issues at stake, no empires crumble, no states totter. A verse form that is very flexible and colloquial, bound together by repeated use of words, matches the inherently domestic setting. However, the authors also use image clusters such as allusions to the Fall of Man, concepts of change and perception, allusions to hell, and words like ‘blood’, ‘will’, ‘act’, ‘service’ and ‘deed’ (which are particularly associated with De Flores, usually in a sexual context) to link the characters, indicating, almost subliminally, that they are trapped in the same linguistic and dramatic framework. However domestic and colloquial the play may be, it is not naturalistic in approach: the dumb show, the virginity test and the substitute bed-mate trick are all powerful reminders of the play’s theatrical and intellectual contexts.
In his essay on Middleton, T. S. Eliot suggested that The Changeling is ‘the tragedy of the not naturally bad but irresponsible nature caught in the consequences of its own action’. He was referring to Beatrice-Joanna and her relationship with De Flores, though his comment could apply equally well to the two noblemen who disguise themselves for the love of Isabella and nearly get executed because of their apparent guilt for Alonzo’s death. Eliot’s remark goes close to the heart of the whole play, to its presentation of people who don’t stop to think, whose moral vision is limited, who see only the desired object at the end of their actions and ignore possible ramifications and potential consequences. Beatrice-Joanna is clearly the classic example here, as her desire to marry one man rather than another leads to catastrophe after catastrophe. A major part of the impact of the tragedy and a significant factor in its modern appeal, lies precisely in the way that the authors show us characters who are unable to see that the methods they adopt to achieve ends which may, in themselves, be honourable and legitimate disqualify them from successfully achieving the desired result. The compelling horror of the play lies in its convincing presentation of just how easy it is to step over the line that divides proper from improper behaviour, from the banal to the tragic, and just how destructive the unrestrained acting out of subconscious desires can be.
Trevor R Griffiths
The text of this edition is based on the 1653 quarto, with lightly modernised spelling and punctuation. Square brackets indicate words added to the quarto text.