CHAPTER-IV

THE CHANGELING
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In thel620’s and 30’s, England was in a process of change from a society

based more directly on wealth and property; and this meant a shake-up of social and
moral codes, with an exceptional degree of social mobility One aspect of the
changing social structure was the change in the position of the theatre and the
dramatist Now, it was a secular theatre, not bound by . religion or Church -
controlled popular theatre from which it inherited much of its tone and technique.
Moreover, this Jacobean theatre was a commercial theatre run for profit not
commissioned art. The contemporary dramatist was thus, in a sense, working for
public entertainment Despite insecurity and commercial pressures, this gave him a
degree of freedom that earlier writers did not have.

Like The Spanish Tragedy. Titus Andronicus and The Duchess of Malfi. The
Changeling disturbs the accepted socio-political hierarchy. The shaping metaphor
behind the whole action of Middleton’s and Rowley’s play is one of discovery - the
penetration and display of morbid bodily “secrets”. There is a perplexing mixture of
genres - die main plot alludes to many sub-genre precedents of revenge drama,
tragedy of love and domestic tragedy. Mutilation of Piracquo’s finger in The
Changeling is, therefore, preceded by the confusion and intermingling of genres.
The pretence of order in both the human frame and the generic formula is subverted
and negated, and the text thereby foregrounds the artifice of social and literary
convention.

The changing hierarchy is dramatized at all levels in the play - in Bakhtinian

terms of disruption of the ideologies of aristocratic and grotesque bodies, gender
discrepancies, syntax disorders, changes in speaking positions, displaced psychic
states and most spectacularly, in the dismembered human body. The relation
between the two plots of The Changeling is like an inverted hierarchy of opposites, a
structural image of confusion. Thus, the changing standards of society and politics
find their just image in this particular form.
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The subject of changelings may be seen to have a particular urgency in 1621-

22. Connections have been drawn, notably by Margot Heinemann and J.L.Simmons,
between the behaviour of Beatrice and that of Frances Howard, Countess of Essex
until her divorce in 1613, and Countess of Somerset after her marriage to Robert
Carr, the king’s favourite 2. Heinemann limits herself to pointing out possible
associations, the suggestiveness of the material at particular points in the play.

Yet, while The Changeling clearly asks for politicized local readings, the
connection with Howard also serves - as the figure of Howard herself did - to
localize contemporary fears and fantasies about women, sexuality and marriage. The
play as a whole repeatedly suggests the necessary coincidence of fear and desire, of
“loving and loathing”, and it associates this paradox with the losing of virginity
(m.iii.261-2).

As in The Duchess of Malfi. in The Changeling the opening scene itself hints
at the socio-political tension. In the opening and closing scenes of Middleton’s and
Rowley’s play there are references to the Somerset scandal. In the first scene,
Alsemero’s aside-

“How shall I dare to venture in his castle,

When he discharges murderers at the gate?” (I. i. 229-31)

- might have seemed in 1622 a pointed allusion to the scandal, especially when
Vermandero is identified with James I. Vermandero’s castle is used as an important
image in the first scene and throughout the play. The setting for a ruthless murder is
made highly suggestive, by the above quoted lines, of the Tower of London where
Overbury was murdered and the Somersets were imprisoned.

The aristocratic iconography which appears from the first scene itself has
diverse political messages. On the one hand, it functions as exposition for a wider
audience. On the other hand, such traditional iconography can be seen as an ironical
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advice to a monarch. The most important traditional icon of the play is the castle, as
site of moral struggle, and, as political emblem of the state. Thus, a crucial motif in
the play is that of the locale, a fortified place, whether castle or mad-house. Both the
plot and the subplot, have a narrative of an infiltrated fortification or citadel,
seductive interlopers into a marriage; in both there is an emphasis on the Fall. The
total narrative encompasses, on a political level, a monarch’s relation with foreign
powers and their agents on the one hand, and the Parliament on the Other.

The foreign setting of the play too is significant By placing The Changeling
in Spain, and by selecting as the matter of the main plot a forthcoming marriage, the
authors place the play, with an ostensibly innocuous fortuitousness, in the context of
the vexed area of foreign politics: the Spanish marriage, and thus the whole question
of the prospect of an alliance with England’s traditional enemy.

Above all, The Changeling explores the ambivalence of bodily secrets. Like
Othello, this play is structured around tropes of opening, discovery and hidden
secrets, a psychological anatomy lesson, designed to expose the core of mortal
corruption in the social body - “the hidden malady / Within” of Alsemero’s opening
speech. He further elaborates:

“...our citadels
Are placed conspicuous to outward view
.. .but within are secrets.” (I.i.)

In the context of proclamations and James’s obsession with secrets of state, “within
are secrets” is a topical allusion, a phrase which identifies Vermandero as James I,
particularly as Vermandero swears by ‘Saint James’ a few lines further on. The
political code implicit in these metaphors, reflected in the bizzare and violent nature
of the spectacles that punctuate the play, are preceded by a first scene which
■fAPfc i [tar
carefully established a particularly Jocale.
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I begin my reading of the dismemberment of Alonzo’s finger in The

Changeling with a discussion of Galen’s idea about the function of the fingers in the
human hand. Throughout Galen’s discussion in his On the Usefulness of the Parts of
the Parts of the Body, the hand serves as an analogy and as a model for the analysis
of all other faculties and body parts. Trying to explain the instrumentality of all body
parts, he quotes Hippocrates’s description of the ideal hand:

“...Hippocrates says, “A good shape for the ‘fingers’, a wide space between,
and the thumb opposite the forefinger”, and if you ask again why this is so, the
answer he has written is at hand: ‘Taken as a whole, all the parts in sympathy, but
taken severally, the parts in each part cooperate for its work”3.

Accordingly, Galen goes on to argue that as the fingers are to the hand, so the hands
are to the other parts of the body. Middleton and Rowley explore how the finger
when “taken severally” rather than as part of a whole body becomes an important
representative agency.
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Foucault defines discourse as a form of power that circulates in the social

field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of resistance 4.
DeFlores quite tactfully, inverts the language of gestures and chivalry, of ‘love’,
‘honour’, ‘reward’, and ‘service’ - by dissimulating and subverting their traditional
meanings. ‘Service’ could be sexual as well as social, and Beatrice is trapped by
DeFlores’s tactical use of the ambiguity 5. Again, ‘service’ could as well be
privileged or low-born, chivalric or mercenary, rewarded with love, honour or
money 6. Courtly love, with its concept of ‘service’, was thus a ritualized expression
of anxieties about social class and sexuality1.

In other words, then, DeFlores subtly uses his ‘service’ to revenge his social
and gender dispossession. Even before he is hired, DeFlores detects signs of a
promiscuous career in Beatrice’s sexual wavering, for a woman who strays at once

“Proves in time sutler to an army royal” (II. ii 64).

Beatrice’s double speak about ‘service’ widens the breach in the castle. She
uses speech as a sexual bait, calling DeFlores by name, praising his face while
stroking it DeFlores plays his part of the game, kneeling for ‘the honour of a
service’ from her ‘ladyship’ but rising to speak a bolder tongue once the deal is
struck.

Beatrice’s adroit play on the language of ‘service’, ‘manhood’, ‘blood and danger’,
and ‘reward’ (93, 119, 130) shows how easy it is to overturn these chivalric
concepts. Her failure to read DeFlores’ puns, however, derives from an imperfect
awareness of how language covers ideological seams. She casts her fears upon
DeFlores’s service (140), hoping that once ‘the deed’s done’, he can be pensioned
off ‘to live bravely in another country’ (141-143). When he answers that they will
talk of that ‘hereafter’ (144), she comprehends neither the cynical quibble nor the
tonal change.
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In Women Beware Women, too, we see how words used in the play of
romantic love - ‘business’, ‘use’, ‘service’, ‘expense’ and ‘tender’ - are
contaminated by associations with money 8. Here, the duplicity of such words is
inseparable from the lovers’ migration and their consequent self-betrayal. Florence,
unlike Venice, submits the desires of the lovers to new modes of subjection, and
reflects its more complicated economic and power relations. Shifted to a new
context of coercive exchange, the latent complicities of language erupt to unsettle
the self-understanding of desire. That Bianca should fling back at Leantio “a
doctrine/ Of [his] own teaching” (m.ii.87-8) after the rape is not surprising. If
Leantio had looked upon his conquest of Bianca as “the best price of theft/ that ever
was committed” (I.i.43-4), then the Duke’s capture of Beatrice is merely a more
professional conducting of ‘love’s business’ (ll.ii.365). What is piracy for Leantio is
for the Duke trade legitimized by power.

Thus, I argue that this exceptional emphasis given to physiological,

rhetorical, dramatic and metaphorical details enhance the significance of physical
violence in the murder scene of The Changeling. Selected words, actions, and
properties are given unusual prominence as a result of the end-on arrangement:
castle, keys, passages and swords. DeFlores hides a ‘naked rapier’ in the act-
time; the property must be in the place for the murder, but the stage-
directions’ specification that it is DeFlores that places it there, of necessity in
isolation and in stage silence, suggests that the dramatic requirements of the
play were exploited to create a conspicuous and significant gesture. The effect,
when both DeFlores and Alonzo divest themselves of their swords, at the former’s
instigation, is one of visual emphasis on treachery, a premeditated disarming of
trusting victim who is then subjected to a violent and unsuspected attack. Alonzo’s
disarming is evidently emblematic of James’s passivity.

Moreover, the power of the confrontation scene comes, in particular, from

the manipulation of archetypes. In this respect the focus is on the device of the
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severed finger that Deplores brings back from the corpse, an element which
Middleton did not find in the source. DeFlores presents Beatrice with the ring as a
‘token’ (26), a lover’s gift, and regrets that he ‘could not get the ring without the
finger’ (28). It seems to be the ring which interests him, but this only serves to
facilitate the symbolic importance of the finger. In it, the authors play on two
established paradigms. Like many assassins before him, DeFlores, thereby, produces
a part of the murdered body as evidence that the crime has been committed. The
difference is that in previous cases the grisly proof is a fake, taken from an animal to
cover up the fact that the killer has spared his victim: in The Maid’s Metamorphosis,
for instance it is the goat kid’s heart, not Eurymine’s. In The Changeling, however,
the finger does indeed belong to the corpse, and in that respect it is a truer token
than the ring: DeFlores has not expressed his love by procuring a ring, but by killing
a man.

DeFlores, then, is a tormentor who presents Beatrice with a part of her

former lover’s body, as Bosola presented Antonio’s hand to the Duchess in The
Duchess of Malfi. The Duchess is horrified by the hand because it betokens the
death of her husband, whereas Beatrice no longer loves Piracquo, and is repelled by
the simple gruesomeness of the finger. The juxtaposition of the paradigm with the
facts of this case, then, serves to emphasize the falsity of Beatrice’s pose: she may
see herself as the victim of DeFlores, but in fact she instigated his crime.

In exploiting these two paradigms, the mutilation and the real person behind
it, the authors establish the two functions of the finger. It is a metonymy for the
physical fact of the murder, projecting out of the assassin’s world into Beatrice’s:
’What hast thou done?’(29), she asks when she sees this image of hitherto
unimaginable violence. By bringing Alonzo’s finger DeFlores begins the
remorseless exposure of her moral naivety that is the central concern of the scene:

“Why, are not you as guilty in

As deep as I? ” ( 83-84)
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DeFlores explains to Beatrice that she need not literally be an executioner to be ‘A |

woman dipp’d in blood(126), and that ‘fair murd’ress’(141) is not an oxymoron.
The function of the scene is to correct the moral misapprehensions inherent in the
character which the opening acts established.

In the hiring scene, speech and social gests, like - kissing, touching, kneeling
— had shown the extent to which Beatrice and Deflores were able to fake the
presentation rituals of chivalry. In the second encounter, the phallic digit enables
DeFlores to cross its avoidance limits. He drops ceremonies and addresses Beatrice
as an equal from the moment he shows her Alonzo’s finger. He uses the finger to
remind her of the repugnant conduct of the courtiers:

“A greedy hand thrust in a dish at court,” (31-32).

The ‘greedy hand’ recalls the thrusting finger of the glove-episode, while the court-
dish hints at Beatrice’s sexual status in the elite society.

The ring, too, as in The Duchess of Malfi, has profound significance as the
finger — for it is a reminder of an indissoluble bond between man and wife, Christ
and Church, monarch and nation. In depicting Alonzo’s severed finger twice,
Middleton and Rowley seem to be placing particular emphasis not only on
DeFlores’s callousness and Beatrice’s moral blindness but also on the indissolubility
of the relationship between Alonzo and Beatrice, the truth of Alonzo to his original
vows and the violence with which the relationship has been severed. The importance
of the ring is enhanced emblematically by its being a diamond ring- which
traditionally signifies faith in love, as DeFlores reveals:

“...Oh, ’tis a ‘diamond’

He wears upon his finger...

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‘Not part in death’? I’ll take a speedy course then,

Finger and all shall off [Cuts off finger].” (DI.ii.21-5)

Alonzo’s irremovable ring is a sign of both amorous and religious faith and,
chastity. The reluctance of the ring to part is an omen that the bond between present
and past cannot easily be broken. This bloody token is a grotesque reminder of the
leveling interchangeability of sexual possession - that recurs in Alsemero’s
consummation of his marriage to Beatrice upon Diaphanta’s substituted body. Ring
and finger, are, in other words, the very emblems of the sacramental distinction
which wedding rites confer upon animal desire.

Murder, to Beatrice, hence, is a commodity, which like anything else can be

bought: one pays someone to undergo not only the risk and the unpleasantness, but
the guilt and conscious pangs as well She is certainly terrified- but of exposure and
ultimately it is she, not DeFlores who first decides that Diaphanta must be killed as
an untrustworthy servant (V.i.6). Thus, J^ough such characterization of Beatrice and
Antonio in these two plays the dramatists expose die hypocrisy of the political
standards in contemporary society.

The marriage of Beatrice and Alsemero in Middleton and Rowley’s play is

celebrated within a context of total ignorance on Vermandero’s part of the falsity of
the ceremony and horror it masks. The passing of the bride ‘in great state’ certainly
gives scope for a regal appearance, but more significantly, isolates her for the
purpose of reactive opprobrium. Thus, the story of Beatrice could be read as an
analogue to popular fears of the consequences of James’s foreign policy. The self­
destructive peripeties of the fable of The Changeling are powerfully relevant to the
political peripetia, reversal, inherent in opposition views of a changeling policy of
peace at the potential cost of the integrity of the nation.

In other words, the sin of marriage based on infidelity and murder is also
exposed by the dumb show of the wedding ceremony in the play. The murder of
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Alonzo is suggestive both of casting off of Essex and the murder of Overbury. The
dumb show, particularly, in its being placed after the confrontation with DeFlores
and Beatrice’s sexual yielding to him after the murder, stresses the irregularities
underlying the Somerset marriage. First, the disappearance of the lawful groom is
marvelled at; but as Alsemero enters with gallants, Vermandero- associated from I.i.
with James I- approves of the choice. The dramatist is using here a by-then slightly
outmoded theatrical device as a means of ostentatiously saying nothing and yet
stating all in avoidance of the censor.

Thus, the dumb show of the wedding and the murder of Alonzo, carefully
presented on the stage so that the audience shall not discount the horror of the deed,
are two examples of what Michael Hattaway, using Brecht’s terms, would call
‘gests’, moments in which language and visual action combine to provide a
revelation and summation of the thematic and moral concerns 8. DeFlores’s
presentation of the severed finger to Beatrice hence draws together in its
suggestiveness the past- her vows to Alonzo that cannot be so easily broken, and the
violence of the murder itself, the present- DeFlores’s sexual intent, and the future-
the substitution of DeFlores for Alonzo in his relationship with Beatrice. His abrupt
refusal to play by the rules puts Beatrice ‘in a labyrinth’ (71). DeFlores thus subverts
the language of chivalry by exploiting the anomaly between the ideas of feudalism
and the realities of the sequel.
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From a feminist point of view, women as long as they maintained their

chastity, were the “secrets” within the citadels of the patriarchal society. In a
patrilineal system of descent, the female body constitutes a vulnerable point of entry
into the social body. The penetration of the body, therefore, becomes equivalent to
the looting of its secrets. “Undoing” in Beatrice’s soliloquy, “This fellow has
undone me endlessly...” (TV. iii), stands not merely for betrayal and sexual assault,
but for a radical demystification of identity.

The role of the virgin in patriarchal society was simply that of a bargaining
object in a contractual arrangement. However, early modern English society masks
the virgin’s role with a love narrative in which her primary gift to her beloved is her
bodily integrity. The bride’s well-preserved and extremely fetishized virginity
allows her a valorized position within her society which is ceremonially reinforced
by both her marriage and its consummation 9. As in the case of Lavinia in Titus
Andronicus, Beatrice’s loss of chastity in this play makes important connections
between virginity, the female body and the “ritual” of marriage.

As the title itself points out, the play offers a variety of sexual changelings:
Beatrice, a double changeling who transfers her affections from Alonzo to Alsemero
and then to DeFlores; Alsemero, v/ho changes from celibate traveler in search of
truth to lover, voyager to landsman; Diaphanta, who is both a sexual changeling
substituting Alsemero for Jasperino, and literally a changeling, a substitute for
Beatrice; Antonio and Franciscus, who disguise themselves as idiots to gain sexual
favours and who are idiots for doing so.

Like language, sexuality is neither wholly a source of domination nor of

resistance, it is also neither outside power nor wholly circumscribed by it. Instead, it
is itself an area of struggle. Further, the issue of sex and power coalesce in the sado­
masochistic concerns of The Changeling. By sexualizing class relations, it exposes
idealized loyalties of late feudalism as functions of political strength. Castle, city
and temple are shown in the opening scene to be invaded by disruptive desires.
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From these infected enclosures, Alsemero wished to set out for the lost garden. The
‘hortus conclusus’ was an emblem of the normative body politic in which desire
accorded with power, nature with political rule. The opening scene, then, seems to
imitate the structure of Vermandero’s castle-

“plac’d conspicuous to outward views,

On promont’s tops, but within are ‘secrets’” (Li. 165-166).

Again, the sub-plot of The Changeling shows how the house could be just as much
a prison for wives as it was for daughters since Isabella is literally locked into her
husband’s house. She is kept ‘in a cage’ (IHiii.2-3) at Alibius’s command. The
anonymous Arden of Faversham too takes up many of these ideas in its depiction of
a middle-class household.

In the aristocratic world, therefore, chivalric love and honour define the
outward view while lust and deception lurk within. To see through the facade is to
master its discursive optics. The most unsettling presence in this garden is that of
DeFlores, the ‘serpent’ (Li.225). He sees his garden as a battlefield of phallic wills,
and quickly realizes that the female ‘will’ is the breach through which he may worm
into a position of vantage.

The action, one may say, includes a murderous struggle to control the body
of aristocratic woman. For the malcontent climber, then, the loathing of women
could disguise his awareness of the subservient status he shared with them; like
them his only role is service. The moral solidarity DeFlores claims with his mistress
is a powerful reminder of the shared subservience of the servant and woman.
DeFlores’s ugliness, not present in the source, one that is often rebuked by Beatrice,
makes his motive one of sexual and class revenge.

Interestingly, the destruction of the bonds between women - Beatrice and her
maid Diaphanta - is implicit in the bride-substitution episode. In an equally
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profound way, the theft of the Indian child is a violation of the bonds between
females implicit in Oberon’s capacity to make Titania break her vow in A
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. For at stake in this theft in the Shakespearean play is
a
the destruction of Titania’s promise to the vc .tjess who was the child’s mother
“She, being mortal, of that boy did die”, Titania says,

“And for her sake do I rear up her boy;

And for her sake I will not part with him” (Hi. 135-7).

Such violations of female bonds are part of a chain of sexual violations in

contemporary plays.

Quite contrary to the female bonds, male bonds are represented in The
Changeling as within patriarchy, and making them is acknowledged to one of its
most pervasive practices. Beatrice’s and Annabella’s father in The Changeling and
’Tis Pity, share a special and intimate bond with their suitors - Alonzo and Soranzo,
respectively. At the opening of the former play, Vermandero is proud of his choice
of son-in-law as Alonzo. Beatrice’s preference of Alsemero inevitably causes a
conflict of wills between father and daughter

Vermandero: “I would not change him for a son-in-law...”

Alsemero: “He’s much
Bound to you, Sir”.
Vermandero: “He shall be bound to me,
As fast as this he can hold him...”
Beatrice: “I shall want mine if you do it” (Li-210-215).

We see how strong male bonds are forged as Vermandero confides his plans to
Alsemero, man to man. Alonzo is the constant goal, ‘I would not change him’, while
Beatrice is merely an object of exchange, ‘this’, the tie that will bind him to
Vermanderb.
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Further, the bride-substitution is another revealing example of the rites of

male power ip Alicante. Beatrice’s means of having the ‘will’ denied by her father’s
was to exploit that of her servant She manipulated his lust, yet imagined that he
would keep to the paradoxical discipline which conceived of the subject exclusively
as a ‘body’ but denied its libidinal autonomy. She repeats the pattern with
Diaphanta, her proxy for the first night However, Diaphanta like Isabella and Livia
in Women Beware Women, has none of Beatrice’s illusions about the positions of
female in society. Like Livia, she knows that “Men buy their slaves, women buy
their masters” when they marry (I.ii.176). She enjoys her sexual encounter with the
adulterer - Alsemero, just as Isabella in the other play decides to marry the stupid
Ward to camouflage her adultery. For the native Isabella and the maid Diaphanta,
then, such reasoning and reversal come easily: the moral and generic location of
their world hardly alters. The moral ticket to social privilege was for a woman
reduced to a genital norm. In this scene, Middleton and Rowley express the irony of
an ideology which demanded that female probity should declare it itself in
laboratory reports.

Since murder of a wife taken in adultery was legally condoned, Alsemero’s

laS't
plan to lock Beatrice and DeFlores in the closet and kill them in theAact best
combines his self- appointed roles of judge and revenger. But the play is given a
final twist when DeFlores wields the knife and steals the revenger’s triumph-speech.
Significantly, DeFlores kills himself to consummate the union with the body he has
devoured, making himself and his class enemy literally one. He carries in the
bleeding Beatrice, displaying her as a trophy just as he had shown off Alonzo’s
finger, mocking as ever the chivalric language of his masters.

The rape of Bianca by the Duke in Women Beware Women, just like that of
Beatrice by DeFlores in The Changeling, enables Bianca and Beatrice to
comprehend that they had been constructs of male fantasies and moral
rationalizations. Released from their male sexual offenders, they get a new identity.
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In the former play, Leantio on the one hand, seeks the pleasures of the forbidden in
his wife; the Duke, on the other hand, seeks the sanctioned indulgence of marriage
in his whore. Bianca, who had played romance heroine and contented wife to her
husband in the first act of the play, ‘play(s) the wise wench’ to the Duke in the next
acts (II.ii.382). Like Beatrice, Bianca then, is a hostage of sexualized politics, and
her ‘deterioration’, like the generic slide of these two plays, is really a passage from
one male-forged narrative prison to another. Like the pawn on the chessboard
downstairs in Women Beware Women Bianca, and even Beatrice in The Changeling
(II.ii.300-2), cannot walk back but must advance from one form of captivity to
another. In the latter play, Beatrice’s sexual status and identity is determined not
only by Vermandero and DeFlores, but successively by Alsemero too.

Alsemero’s closet, in the later play then, is a particularly feminine space and
has an important role in the play’s preoccupation with various forms of interiority-
domestic, psychological and sexual. In other words, the closet scene is crucial to the
play’s major theme of the allocation and management of gendered space.

The chastity of the female figure and the extra-textual significance that
chastity assumes in a politicized context is a central motif in the two plots in the
play. A combination of narrative motifs, as in this play, the citadel represents
ravished or seduced chastity, subversion from within, and a site frequently
accompanied by murder. The citadel, hence, constitutes a distinctive symbolic
system in many English Renaissance texts, The Duchess of Malfi. The Spanish
Tragedy. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and Titus Andronicus. Although events in Titus
Andronicus are much more violent and primitive than in The Changeling, they are in
many ways comparable: the opening introduction of interlopers within the
castle/fortified city; rival groups of suitors; vicious murder which removes
opposition to the position of the interloper, despoliation of a virgin. The Satuminus /
Lavinia / Aaron grouping find echoes in that of Alsemero / Beatrice / DeFlores. It is
not the motif of the ‘eternal triangle’ that links the texts. Rather, it is the association
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of the motif with a hidden seducer and destroyer within a setting suggestive of
political crisis, overt or implied, and the suggestive connection of fallen citadel and
the deflowering of initial innocence.

We, therefore, comprehend how the gender hierarchy was an essential and
intelligent strategy of power. Middleton and Rowley adhere to their challenge of
sexual authority by dramatizing Beatrice’s assumption of masculine behaviour as
she regulates her sexual and marital status, initially. She also makes strategies
involving the murder of a male and disobeys her father’s plans for her marriage.
These self-determining and individuated actions of Beatrice disrupt the homosocial
bonds of male order. Contemporary anxieties about transgressing the boundaries of
sex and gender are brilliantly suggested as Beatrice, Alsemero, Diaphanta and
Deplores are provoked to seek alternative political and sexual identities. Beatrice
scheming and manipulating the murder of her male partner transforms her into a
specifically male persona, while Alonzo, with his finger mutilated, transgresses into
a symbolically castrated persona. The Changeling, then, by dramatizing powerful
instances of alternative sexuality disrupts the very basis of the patriarchal power-
paradigm.
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Titus Andronicus, The White Devil. The Duchess of Malfi and The
Changeling, then, use laughter in order to stress the proximity of tragedy and
comedy, to extend tragedy. In other words, actions and situations are dislocated as
dramatists in these plays insist that both tragedy and comedy form essential parts of
their experience. Importantly, I argue that, this clashing of tones and
experimentations with genres, was an attempt on the part of the playwrights, who
attempted to complement a quasi- tragic form with their non-absolutist interpretation
of events - considerably, that of mutilation.

Jacobean tragedies often tried to expand their tone by including comic

anecdotes, incidents or images. The most extreme form of the juxtaposition of tone
occurs in those plays which unite plots of two different kinds, tragic and tragi­
comic, as in Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603), or tragic and
comic, as in Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1632). In Middleton and Rowley’s The
Changeling (1622) a comic subplot of wooing and disguise set in a lunatic asylum
precisely parodies the main plot in order to comment on the ‘changes’ that take
place there. This playing off against each other of tragic and anti-tragic effects is
also crucial to King Lear with its comedy of the grotesque. Lear’s tragic fate and the
Fool’s comments especially in the storm scene in this Shakespearean drama
exemplify Shakespeare’s brilliant use of contradictory effects for a poignant
dramatic situation. In The Revenger’s Tragedy too, Tourneur uses farce to express
violence and terror. Thus, the whole movement of Jacobean tragedy is toward a
mixed genre. The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi also use their anti-tragic
elements of comedy and comic sub-plot, and tragi-comedy, respectively, but with
unusual coherence. Webster’s two tragedies develop the tragicomic web of
repetition and parody through unexpected comparisons made between characters as
well as incidents. In The Duchess of Malfi, the scene in which the Duchess woos
Antonio seems to be basically a comic scene - a Duchess defies convention to marry
the man she loves. However, the comic pattern is disturbed by ominous suggestions
of death and madness, by the discussion of the Duchess’s last will, and by Antonio’s
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fears of his own ambition, the ‘great man’s madness’ (I.i.420). In the disintegrating
world of the play, material which comedy specifically affirms, the independence of
love and laughter, is seen directly leading to a tragic catastrophe.

This use of the reassuring world of comedy to test and challenge tragedy is
also seen in Titus Andronicus. When Titus finally passes over the borderline of
sanity into madness, his laughter is a symptom of his mental state (HI.i.264): his
breakdown is reflected in his discourse. In The Changeling, the parody and critique
of the court is usually accompanied by a comic undertone. After Beatrice has been
‘undone’ by Deplores, the latter watches her wedding procession ‘smilingly’, when
the ghost of the murdered Piracquo ‘appears to Diaphanta in the midst of his smile’,
as the procession passes over the stage ‘in great solemnity’ (IV.i.initial Stage
Direction).

Again, there is an implicit balance and contrast between the two locales of
the play: the castle and the mad-house, fortified structures, one to keep enemies out
and the other to keep uncontrollable lunatics within. The progressive confusion of
palace with pest-house or, to vary the metaphor in the play’s own terms, castle with
mad-house, is precisely what the action of The Changeling explores.

In The Changeling, the impression of the mad-house as prison is created

immediately, not only by the incarceration of Isabella, but also by the harping of the
other inmates on the instruments of punishment, “pillory” (I.ii.195), and, “the rope
about the crag” (I.ii. 197-8). This impression is reinforced in the play by the
omnipresence of Lollio’s whip, which is accorded a type of reiteration both in the
text and in performance by the constant locking up of the inmates after brief
releases. The effort is particularly marked in the scene of Franciscus’s introduction
to Isabella:

“Not too near; you see your danger” (IH.iii.53)

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Franciscus’s mad courtship is presented as one of tension and risk, and the scenic
effect is that of a figure of authority closely watching every word and action, ready
to threaten punishment if certain limits are transgressed. In political terms, Alibius’s
establishment could be viewed as a comic version of a police state.

By understanding the theatrical effect of the madmen on a Jacobean

audience, we can better appreciate Webster’s, as well as, Middleton and Rowley’s
purpose in bringing them onstage in The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling,
respectively. The madmen interrupt a mood of sonify re desperation. To an
Elizabethan, the antics of the madmen furnished comic entertainment10. Therefore,
apart from serving as a relief from the intense tragic mood, the madmen in The
Changeling also provide satiric commentary on socio-political injustices and
cruelties.

In short, madness, in the contemporary period, as is evident from this play,

was a cover for radical opinions. Isabella likewise tries to turn madness from an
occasion of enslavement to one of liberation. Unlike DeFlores she fails. But, in
defeat she reveals that, in their blinkered duplicities, the men who rule her show
more unreason than the caged freaks.

In this play then, the playwrights expose the reality of familial and societal
kinship in the main plot, which is complemented by the subplot The situation of
Alibius’s establishment is not unlike that of England as perceived by active
opponents of James’s foreign policy. The proclamations of 1620 and 1621
threatened imprisonment to all who did not report breaches of the prohibition on
writing about or discussion of affairs of state ‘either at home, or abroad’, and
threatened offenders that ‘the first or forwardest of them’ would be ‘severely
punished, for example to others?’ n. Thus, although there does not seem to be
systematic and sustained critical comment on the Jacobean court in the sub-plot,
Alibius’s restless search for money and clients, the profiteering from idiot wards, the
satiric emphasis on lawyers (l.ii.121-31), the attempted subversion of citizen
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integrity by a ridiculously disguised gentry, are all familiar topics of Jacobean satire.
The recurring controversy over the observation of the Sabbath, and James’s defense
of Sunday games in his Declaration of Sports, had been raised as an issue in the
1621 Parliament, and the cry,

“Catch there, catch the last couple in hell”(HI.iii. 165),

again identifies the madmen with the people of England, probably engaged in
licentious games, if DeFlores’s reference to ‘barley-brake’ .retaken as an indication
of its likely conclusion. The audience would have recognized the hunger of the
people of England as a reaction to the famine in the early 1620’s in the lunatic’s
cries; and presumably, indulgence in Sunday games would be recognized as an
instance of unreasonableness, the folly of sin.

Middleton and Rowley, then, use the binary oppositions inherent in the
structure of the masque for satiric purpose: the symmetry of the plots in the play
points to a divided nation, contrasting court with commons and the mass people,
loyal and imprisoned. On a moral level, the grotesque madmen reflect ‘the bestial
element in man’, present but unacknowledged.

The relation between the two plots of the tragedy, one can say, is like an
inverted hierarchy of opposites, a structural image of confusion. Despite all its
lunacy, folly and deformity, this Bedlam is essentially a well-ordered place where
discretion and propriety prevail. No one is fooled here into taking gentle birth or a
fine exterior cannot guarantee decent conduct. The Changeling is a drama of
spiritual transformation in which the heroine becomes her own opposite. The second
self, however, is a polarity in her own nature, and it is embodied externally in the
hated servant who becomes her lover and master. This duality in the self and in the
relation of heroine and villain has a universal significance which is figured in the
particular relation between Castle and Bedlam. The confusion which results when
identities are lost and opposites change place is expressed continuously in terms of
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decorum, a state of order and property which can be detected in Bedlam but survives
only as a mark for folly and madness at the castle.

The severed ‘finger’ in the main plot serves the same purpose as Lollio’s
phallic whip and Beatrice learns to obey its command just as the lunatics in the
subplot bend to Lollio’s ‘pizzle’. In The Changeling, then, it is the servant who
wrests the phallic key, and it is the mistress who bends. Symbolic possession, or the
possession of symbols, and not any native majesty or servility, marks rulers off from
the ruled. The play, thus, I argue, exposes the subtle nexus between the gender and
class hierarchies in patriarchal Jacobean culture. Maintaining the superficial
distinction between the bodies and the body symbolisms of the different sexes and
ranks, therefore, was such a constant ideological task. The sanity and logistics of the
ruling ideology and government, thereby, becomes more questionable than that of
the labeled lunatics.
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Middleton and Rowley stage the contemporary socio-political conflicts on

the very body of Beatrice, As they elaborately develop the castle-emblem, the house
of Vermandero, the asylum of Alibius, and the stage of the acted play may be
viewed as representing Beatrice herself. In the concluding scene, the forcing of
Beatrice and DeFlores into the closet to rehearse their ‘scene of lust’ for the ‘black
audience’ (115-116) - makes us imagine the discovery space as the tiring house of
hell. Castle and theatre turn to hell, and the spectators its ‘black audience’. We are
betrayed into a helplessness which the routine ‘sententiae’ of the survivors can do
nothing to alleviate. Only the knowledge that the theatre is fiction and actors die in
sport, as said in the Epilogue, reconciles grief to pleasure.

Like the masques in The Spanish Tragedy. Titus Andronicus. The Duchess of
Malfi and The Revenger’s Tragedy, the masque in The Changeling is a grotesque
culmination of the play’s ironies. Vermandero’s castle is, therefore, fashioned in a
way as to mirror its self-deceiving image in theatrical feigning. Moreover, as the
play blends the comic and the tragic, courtliness and domesticity, we comprehend
that the mixture is necessary by Middleton’s understanding of the inseparability of
power and desire, and hence of political culture and civil society.

Importantly, in The Changeling as in other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas,

like The Duchess of Malfi and The Spanish Tragedy, the ‘tool-villain’ seems one of
the less satisfying conventional figures. The motives of Bosola in The Duchess.
Flamineo in The White Devil. Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy, are of peripheral
interest only; in the last resort they kill because they are told to or ordered. It is
DeFlores who throws a hideously clear light on the assumptions underlying this
role- that the gentry can always find some underling to commit their crimes for
them. Beatrice murders Alonzo through the appointed base weakling, and later
grotesquely tries the effect of Alsemero’s virginity-testing medicine on Diaphanta,
so that she may copy the symptoms when she is tested herself. She does not expect
to have to suffer the full punishment for her crimes. Ironically, it is DeFlores, not the
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law, who puts her to death in the end. In other words, then, the play is fixed on
deconstructing the royal prerogative itself. The playwrights thereby, gloss over a
fundamental disunion of early modem English society, its high degree of
stratification, its distinctive and all-pervasive system of social inequality.

Again, the entrances of the characters in this play are very well timed.
Middleton and Rowley’s orchestration of the entries and exits of the characters on
stage reminds us of Shakespeare’s mastery of such staging techniques, as
exemplified in Titus Andronicus. DeFlores’s entry is a logical sequence, in political
terms, to the preceding exchange between Alsemero and Beatrice. It establishes the
central motif of secret passion and ingrained revulsion, profound and hidden sexual
conflict, thereby hinting at the nature of events which are to dominate the rest of the
play. DeFlores is the unperceived enemy within, who is to work his way from
insignificant marginality into the tragic centre of the action. The next entrance of
Vermandero is also superbly timed. The phrase “who discharges murderers at his
gate” is one of those ambiguous allusions which is dispersed throughout the text, the
pun on ‘murderers’ deliberate, a reference to the real guns as well as the release of
the Somersets. It is James as changeling, the James of foreign policy, who was
naively credulous, wavering in purpose that hovers suggestively behind the figure of
Vermandero, keeper of the Castle. Within the context of the play, Vermandero’s
reference to “an host of enemies enter’d my citadel” brings uncomfortably to mind
the opening scene where Vermandero insistently imports into his castle the
irreconcilable elements that have fused into tragedy. Middleton, therefore, subtly
critiqued the inherent corruption in contemporary politics, through the perfect
timings of the stage entrances and exits.

Moreover, the first scene introduces not only the dramatic characters, but
also their primary motives in the play. The political and sexual danger of
transgression that Vermandero is neglecting vividly suggested by the final episode
in I.i., the revelation of the nature and extent of DeFlores’s passion for Beatrice. The
 . 149

thrusting of his hand into her glove is, evidently, an emblem of sexual possession.
As a political emblem, it expresses a desire for physical penetration, a will to
territorial conquest It is interesting to note that, deflowering as an image was used
in opposition literature for Spanish designs of universal monarchy, and especially
against hostile ‘virgin’ territories as Venice and Britain. In this context, then, the
mutilation of Alonzo and Beatrice’s sexual assault by DeFlores, the servant, can
both be viewed as a subversive tactic against the hierarchical power paradigm.

In terms of the traditional allegoric schemes which the play at once

exploits and transforms, Vermandero as the Lord of the Castle, is the head of its
body, enthroned in the seat of patriarchal authority and reason. But his government
is restricted by its implication with the lower, and typically female, domain of
animality and passion. The Changeling introduces us to a world publicly constituted
according to the language of the classical body, “a language governed by the
hierarchy and etiquette of ‘palaces, churches, institutions and private homes’”; but a
world secretly marked by the instabilities of the grotesque body with its dangerously
uncertain boundaries, its treacherous openings and orifices. Considered as a social
edifice, the castle-body exists to encircle and protect the private domain. The
protected secret is at once a source of mysterious power and the cause of deadly
weakness. The play, therefore, critiques the political and oppositional treatment of
somatic topography, through the ambivalence of the bodily secrets. While the body
can legitimize political, lingual, sexual and ideological dominance, it can also
inscribe subversion by being a site of contestation and disagreement
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Finally, in the closing scene of the play, DeFlores announces his defiance in
a language that satirically confounds Alsemero’s rhetoric of infinite punishment:

. .you shall sink to fathoms bottomless.”

He prevents his audiences’ designs with the aid of a penknife. We can, thus, notice
how the author’s twin roles as anatomist and writer are linked by this crucial
penknife or scalpel. Moreover, when DeFlores contrives with the aid of his
penknife, to prevent the tortures that Vermandero has promised to inflict on him, he
imitates one of the most famous episodes in high-Elizabethan drama, Heironimo’s
suicide at the end of The Spanish Tragedy. The context for DeFlores’s equally
*

bloody inscription is less explicit and elaborate; but the killing of Beatrice and his
own suicide are once again identified as a kind of savage writing when the bereaved
father reads in their corpses the scripture of his own disgrace:

“Oh, my name is entered now in that record

Where till this fatal hour ‘twas never read.” (V. iii. 180-4)

This link between writing, blood, and the violence of tragic catastrophe is not
confined to these two texts. We can recall the endings of Chapman’s Bussv
D’Ambois (V.ii.83), and even more strikingly of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
(V.iii.22-39) — where Giovanni’s ‘unripping’ of the letter written in Anabella’s
heart-blood prefigures his subsequent unripping of ho- heart itself. Also, there is the
extraordinary painful scene in Titus Andronicus. where, Lavinia uses her mutilated
mouth and bloody stumps to write the name of her ravishers in the dust, prompting
her father in turn to the violent fantasy of inscription that announces his implacable
revenge-

“I will go get a leaf of brass,

And with a gad of steel will write these words.” (TV.i. 102-3)
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In The Changeling, then, as in The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus. The

Duchess of Malfi, and ’Tis Pity, the human body is focussed upon as the site of
convergence of a whole range of political, cultural and psychological phenomena
and is treated as a privileged historical ‘transcoder’ of these areas of social
existence. Piracquo’s finger like Annabella’s heart, thus, presents no identifying
features that can allow us to recognize individuality. As far as the audience can tell,
Piracquo’s severed finger looks like any other finger tossed about on stage. This
proves that identity is a mere surface artifact

Further, the ‘dead’ Alonzo mocks the ‘living’ Beatrice, by revealing the
transience of distinct identity. Beatrice loses much of her power subsequently in the
play. Her identity, from that of a valourized and chaste aristocratic lady changes to
that of a spoilt or, deflowered female. The issue of sex and power coalesce in the
sado-masochistic concerns of The Changeling. The play suggests, like Women
Beware Women, that ‘government’ in both family and state is the political
entailment of phallic ‘self-will’: only power makes any difference. The sexual
hypocrisy of Alibius’s asylum matches the political hypocrisy of Vermandero’s
r•

castle. The performed area becomes the re-claimed body site seen from different
perspectives, appearing dismembered and unified, destroyed and resurrected all at
once. The stage becomes a body transformed into a sign signifying a thousand
meanings, created by a thousand texts.
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Notes and References:

Ail references to Woman Beware Women are to this edition - ed.

J.R.Mulryne, Revels Plays, London, 1975.

Quotations from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are taken from The Riverside
Shakespeare. G. Blakemore Evans, textual ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.

1. Hienemann elaborately discusses the socio-political condition of the

Jacobean age in his Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and
Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: CUP,1980. See
especially, Chll, “City Tragedy”, 172-99. Also see, The Changeling and the
Years of Crisis: A Heiroglvph of Britain. 1619-1624. ed. A. A. Bromham and
Zara Bruzzi, London and NY: Pinter Pub., 1990, esp. Ch.l, “A
Contemporary Changeling: Frances Howard” and Ch.2, “Political
Iconography and The Spanish Marriage”, 18-58.

2. Heinemann, Ch.ll and J.L. Simmons, ‘Diabolical Realism in The

Changeling’. Renaissance Drama 11.1980,135-70.

3. Galen, On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, (trans.) Margaret

Tallmadge May, Ithaca, New York; Cornell University Press, 1968.

4. I am referring to the term “discourse” in Michel Foucault’s sense that

categories of discourse create our experience(s) and regulate our world. See
Foucault: The Archaelogv of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language.
trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, NY: Pantheon, 1972.

5. Christopher Ricks further explains how Beatrice trapped by DeFlores’

tactical use of ambiguity in, “The Moral and Poetic Structure of The
Changeling”. Essays in Criticism X, 1960, 290-306.
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6. Leo Salingar noted these quibbles about ‘service’ in, “The Changeling and j
the Drama of Domestic Life”, Essays and Studies 33,1979,92-3.

7. I am referring to Maurice Keen’s Chivalry. New Haven: Connecticut,

1984,30.

8. Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plavs in Performance,

London, 1982,3.

9. I am indebted to Lynda E. Boose for this illuminating perspective in, “The

Father and the Bride in Shakespeare”, PMLA 97 (1982): 325-47.

10. For more on this aspect of madness, see Frederick Kiefer, “The Dance of
Madmen in The Duchess of Malfi”. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance
Studies. 17, No.2, Fall 1987,225.

11. F. Larkin and P. Hughes, Stuart Royal Proclamations. 2 vols., Oxford, 1973,
496.