The Changeling: The State of Play

Gordon McMullan, Kelly Stage, Ann Thompson, Lena Cowen Orlin, Gordon McMullan, Kelly Stage

• Editorial: The Arden Shakespeare
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350174399
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism

This collection of original essays on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's unsettling revenge tragedy The Changeling represents key new directions in criticism and research. The 13 chapters fall into six groups focusing on questions of space, theology, collaboration, disability both mental and physical, and performance both early modern and contemporary. The Changeling 's critical and theatrical history, and a selected bibliography for the volume helps readers easily find the most frequently cited materials in the volume as a whole, while individual essays detail the full expanse of critical sources to pursue for further analysis. With contributors ranging from highly regarded critics to emerging scholars drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Switzerland, the collection equips readers to engage with a variety of critical approaches to the play, moving a long way beyond the last century's tendency to treat Middleton as 'the early modern Ibsen', to ignore Rowley, and to focus almost wholly on a single aspect of the play's plot. Key themes and topics include:
· Performance
· Space and affect
· Authorial collaboration
· Gender and representation
· Violence
· Disability

PART ONE

Spaces and Places

1

Space, Gender and the Rules of Movement in The Changeling

Jean E. Howard

The Changeling’s opening scene evokes the sea and ocean voyages. Alsemero, a Valencian, has stopped at Alicante on his way to Malta but his intention is disrupted by the sight of the beautiful Beatrice-Joanna, daughter of Vermandero, the most prominent man in Alicante. Suddenly the onward journey is in doubt, its forward movement suspended. Jasperino, Alsemero’s friend, assumes it will go forward and says: ‘Come, the wind’s fair with you, / You’re like to have a swift and pleasant passage’ (1.1.13–14), but Alsemero resists. While the exact location of the play’s first encounter is not textually indicated, it occurs outside, somewhere between three key locations: the wharves from which the seamen have come to summon Alsemero to his ship, the church where Alsemero has just observed Beatrice-Joanna, and the fortress or citadel where Beatrice-Joanna and her father live. This space of encounter is one of possibility for certain characters. Some who move through it have choices about where they will go next; they could, for example, leave Alicante to pursue their lives as soldiers or merchants on the seas. Sexual attraction, however, draws Alsemero away from the port and toward the citadel, which Vermandero describes thus: ‘Our citadels / Are placed conspicuous to outward view / On promonts’ tops; but within are secrets’ (1.1.167–9).

This looming citadel and the movements of those within it will be the focus of this essay. Critics of the play have often pointed to the slightly menacing nature of Vermandero’s description, which suggests a gap between the easily perceived outward face of the fortress and the unreadable secrets hidden behind its walls.¹ I will argue that Vermandero’s fortress and the house of madmen and fools that dominates the second plot are both presented as conspicuously enclosed spaces that hold other enclosed spaces nestled inside them. Both fortress and asylum stand in marked contrast to the open seas that represent the path not taken by Alsemero and his crew. I will suggest, further, that the sense of enclosure dictated by the play’s emphasis on a rabbit warren of particularized rooms, many secured by locks and keys, is heightened for the audience by the play’s first staging at the Cockpit/Phoenix theatre in Drury Lane, a small house with indoor lighting and a limited stage space. The physical space of this theatre invited spectators to be aware of how their own experience of the material playhouse mirrored the experiences of enclosure imposed on many of the play’s characters. Finally, I will argue that this heightened sense of confinement draws attention to the systematic constraints differentially imposed on characters’ movements within the fictional and actual stage spaces. Women and their incarcerated counterparts, the madmen and fools confined within the asylum, are most subject to bodily surveillance and mobility constraint. Ultimately, I will suggest that Middleton and Rowley’s tragedy employs a radically critical dramaturgy that uses theatre space to expose the circumscriptions that limit how and when bodies move through space; I will also show how such dramaturgy challenges audiences to be critically aware of their paradoxical implication in the dynamics of surveillance, confinement and abjection apparent in the fictional world of Alicante.

Vermandero’s fortress and Alibius’ asylum

As Kim Solga has suggested, Vermandero’s castle ‘sits queerly on the border between older, fortress-like feudal space and newer, elite Tudor structures that featured smaller rooms in “atomized” patterns with quite particular functions’.² On the one hand the castle is described several times as serving a protective function for Alicante, and Vermandero does not want the secrets of this fortification laid open to strangers. It is a sign of Alonzo de Piracquo’s status as a welcome guest that De Flores is permitted to take him on a fatal tour of the ‘full strength of the castle’ (2.2.160). On the other hand, this fortress also resembles an elite house with a remarkable number of named rooms. Staged action occurs in some of these rooms; others are simply referred to in the dialogue. The most famous staged room is undoubtedly Alsemero’s closet where in Act 4 Beatrice-Joanna tries out the virginity test on her waiting woman and where in Act 5 Beatrice-Joanna is imprisoned with De Flores before he kills them both. I will return to this closet repeatedly in what follows.³

Besides the physician’s closet, Diaphanta also conducts Alsemero by a ‘private way’ (2.2.55) to an inner room that Beatrice-Joanna seems to control as her own private space.⁴ Perhaps this is a lady’s closet or cabinet parallel to Alsemero’s closet. Diaphanta says to Alsemero that ‘[t]his place is my charge’ (2.2.1), and she serves as doorkeeper, ushering in and out the love-besotted Alsemero who compares Diaphanta and women in her position as ‘the ladies’ cabinets’ (2.2.6). This word can mean a chest for keeping valuables or secret items. Alsemero implies that Diaphanta keeps Beatrice-Joanna’s sexual secrets. Certainly in this room Beatrice-Joanna attempts to keep secret from her father and husband-to-be the depth of her attraction to the visiting Valencian.⁵ Here she meets Alsemero privately and, in all probability, embraces him.⁶ The room, however, is less impregnable than either Beatrice-Joanna or her maid believes. Alsemero no sooner leaves than De Flores steps forward from behind the stage’s centre curtain or one of the stage doors, or from the back of the upper playing area, to announce to the audience that he has seen all that has gone on and hopes to take advantage of Beatrice-Joanna’s transgressive behaviour. Spying abounds both in the castle and in the asylum, making any notion of private space questionable.

There are other separately demarcated rooms referenced in Vermandero’s castle. Much of 5.1, for example, is given over to speculation about what is happening between Alsemero and Diaphanta in Alsemero’s bedroom. This room is never staged, but it is talked about incessantly as the site where the waiting woman disports herself in her mistress’s place in the bridal bed. As this unseen off-stage scene unfolds, Beatrice-Joanna, in great distress, talks with De Flores in a room that might be either her own bedroom or the private room to which she had had Diaphanta usher Alsemero in 2.2. These two rooms may, in fact, be one and the same. Moreover, Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores hatch a scheme to light a fire in yet a third room, Diaphanta’s ‘chamber’ (5.1.38), to which the waiting woman returns after being roused from sleep by cries of ‘fire’ and where she meets her death at De Flores’ hands. This night-time scene (5.1) creates a sense of darkened, separate rooms, each vulnerable to discovery by prying, intrusive eyes or by the disloyalty of servants.

Finally, there are the more amorphously specified rooms in ‘a back part of the house’ (4.2.92) where Diaphanta and Jasperino held a private conference and from which space Jasperino heard – ‘in the next room to me’ (4.2.995) – the voices of De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna in conversation. Apparently, though the space of the inner castle is divided into many rooms with specific functions, their walls are porous, exposing private matters to public hearing just as De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna are exposed, later, to the prying eyes of Jasperino and Alsemero who see them in an apparently compromising posture in a ‘prospect from the garden’ (5.3.2).

All these locations, belonging as they do to the representation of Vermandero’s castle as an elaborate elite dwelling, differ in purpose from the fortifications depicted in 3.1 when De Flores takes Alonzo on his tour of this ‘most spacious and impregnable fort’ (3.1.4). The pair go down a steep and narrow passage to a spot where they can view a sconce or small fortification within the warren of the castle’s inner defences. It is here, in this claustrophobic secret passage, that De Flores kills Alonzo with a rapier hidden for that very purpose and then shoves the body down a drain or sewer.

Vermandero’s fortress, then, is an imagined space with densely populated and carefully subdivided living spaces nestled within a foreboding set of battlements. The citadel is mirrored, spatially, by the divided spaces of Alibius’ asylum. Characters speak several times of the two locked wards in which madmen and fools, respectively, are housed. In 3.3, Lollio, Alibius’ assistant, suggests that the fools have their ward on the main stage and that the madmen are above, probably on the upper stage (see 3.3.126–8). Somewhere off-stage are Alibius’ living quarters from which his wife, Isabella, emerges to observe and speak with her husband’s charges. In both cases, the carefully delineated stage spaces are largely verbal creations. Characters speak of all the rooms enumerated above, creating a sense of them in greater or lesser detail. And yet these rooms are not evoked solely by verbal means but rely as well on the practical possibilities of the material stage at the Cockpit/Phoenix.

This theatre was, by the standards of the time, small, and this must be addressed in any account of how space was imagined and staged in the play.⁷ When the Cockpit in Drury Lane at least partially burned down, it rose from the ashes as the Phoenix in 1618. ...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Spaces and Places
• 1 Space, Gender and the Rules of Movement in The Changeling
• 2 Chang(el)ing Spaces: Dramatic Forms of Worlding in Late Jacobean England
• Part Two Collaboration and the Hospital Plot
• 3 A Secret Within the Castle: William Rowley and The Changeling
• 4 Isabella
• Part Three States of Mind
• 5 ‘The Pleasure of Your Bedlam’: Mismanaging Insanity in The Changeling
• 6 Passions, Affections and Instinct in The Changeling
• Part Four Disabilities
• 7 The Changeling’s Phantom Limbs
• 8 Disability Representation and Theatrical Form in The Changeling and The Nice Valour
• Part Five Actor and Audience in Jacobean Performance
• 9 The Changeling, The Boy Actor and Female Subjectivity
• 10 Witnessing at the Phoenix: Early Modern Audiences at The Changeling
• Part Six Rape and the Female Body in Contemporary Performance
• 11 ‘What Would a Foreign Woman Be?’ Sexual Borderlands, Hospitality, and ‘Forgetting Parentage’ in The Changeling on Film
• 12 Feminist Staging in Brave Spirits’ Changeling
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright