[Between 2006 and 2016 I wrote a number of short articles for the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Around the Globe; I’ve been depositing them on this blog under the category ‘Globe Essays’. This is the eighth, from Spring 2015.]
The strangest thing about The Changeling is the certainty of its volatile heroine, Beatrice-Joanna, that she is consistent: that her values remain unchanged from the start of the play to its final act. In the intervening scenes she has exchanged one lover for another and then a third; arranged for the assassination of an unwanted fiancé (Alonzo) and an inconvenient waiting-woman (Diaphanta); and replaced a bitter loathing for one of her father’s servants (De Flores) with a passionate desire for him, consummated in a string of liaisons which she construes as appropriate payment for his work as her private assassin. Yet after all these transformations she can still tell her new fiancé Alsemero: ‘Remember I am true unto your bed’. She even seems convinced that what she says is true, and that if he never knows she has slept with De Flores she will be innocent of adultery.
More astonishingly still, in the final scene she is prepared to confess that she had Alonzo killed, while lying repeatedly about her sexual exploits in a desperate bid to preserve Alsemero’s belief in her unblemished chastity. It would seem that Beatrice-Joanna has lost all sense of proportion, all moral judgment: that she’s effectively insane. The fact is, however, that she judges herself by the standards of her culture; a culture that treats women as commodities, and whose valuation of people and goods is always changing. She is a native of Alicante in Valencia; but Middleton (who wrote most of the sections of the play in which she appears) seems to have felt that England shared both her double standards and her changefulness.
Two recent English scandals might well have ensured that the play’s first audiences agreed with him. The first is evoked by The Changeling’s Spanish setting. In 1621, parliament tried to persuade King James I to abandon the projected marriage of his son Charles to the Spanish Infanta and go to war with Spain instead. James responded by dissolving parliament and suppressing all public debate about his policies. The second scandal was the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury by the Earl of Somerset – James’s favourite – and his wife Lady Frances Howard, in revenge for Overbury’s vocal opposition to their marriage. The pair were acquitted of murder, despite all the evidence against them, and released from prison in 1622, the year of The Changeling’s first performance. Commentators have identified a number of references in the play to the Overbury murder. What links these two national scandals, however, is the double standards they indicate. At this time in history, Spain could be said to have been both friend and enemy of England, while Somerset and Howard could be said to have been both innocent and guilty, depending on which aspect of their trial you chose to emphasize: the evidence or the verdict. What you held to be ‘true’ in each case was as much a matter of taste as of judgment; and taste interferes with judgment throughout The Changeling.
Moreover, tastes in the play are always changing; and the speed with which they change is always linked to violence. In the first scene, Alsemero changes his mind about setting sail on a commercial voyage when he catches sight of Beatrice-Joanna; and whereas the day before he was in a ‘violent’ rush to catch the tide, his sudden obsession with the governor’s daughter makes him equally eager to seek out her company. Alsemero’s friend Jasperino describes this new obsession as a ‘venture’, with Beatrice-Joanna and her waiting woman as ‘vessels’ from which both men expect to profit. The women’s status as commercial objects is later confirmed when Alsemero tests Beatrice’s virginity with a drug he has, to ensure he is really getting what he wants. Meanwhile, the ‘violent’ speed with which Beatrice’s father plans to marry her to Alonzo, whom she no longer loves, is what incites her to plot Alonzo’s assassination. Later still, Diaphanta’s sluggishness in executing another plot, this time to deceive Alsemero into thinking Beatrice a virgin, results in her violent death at the hands of De Flores: killing her is the speediest way to keep her under control. After Alonzo’s assassination, his brother Tomazo is so eager to avenge him that he very nearly executes two innocent men. ‘Time’s too precious / To run in waste now,’ he raves when the men are arrested on suspicion of murder; ‘I thirst for’ em, / Like subtle lightning will I wind about ’em, / And melt their marrow in ’em’. His fusion here of the languages of gluttony, commerce, lust and violence is characteristic of the fiercely competitive world in which Beatrice finds herself, where no one is prepared to let anything get in the way of what they wish for.
The central motif of The Changeling is a well-known proverb: one man’s meat is another’s poison. Beatrice’s initial disgust for the servant De Flores has no firmer basis than her spontaneous attraction to Alsemero, or her sudden revulsion for her fiancé Alonzo. As she admits, her hatred for De Flores is
my infirmity,
Nor can I other reason render you,
Than his or hers, of some particular thing
They must abandon as a deadly poison,
Which to a thousand other tastes were wholesome.
Such arbitrary judgments, based on the senses – the superficial glance of an eye, the touch of a tongue – can of course be altered with as little ‘reason’ as they were first arrived at. So Vermandero, Beatrice’s father, can substitute Alsemero for the dead Alonzo as his prospective son in law at a moment’s notice; and Alsemero can expunge Beatrice from his memory at the end with shocking speed when he learns what she has done. If one man’s meat is another’s poison, there is no stable basis for valuation in the world of the play, and it’s scarcely surprising if Beatrice-Joanna bases her sense of her own value on how she appears to the men who judge her, rather than on the intrinsic morality of her actions.
In the seventeenth century, however, Beatrice-Joanna was not the star attraction of The Changeling. The play was better known for its subplot, mostly written by Rowley, in which a young man called Antonio disguises himself as a madman to court Isabella, who is married to the keeper of the local madhouse. Changeling could mean lunatic in the period, so Antonio is one of those referred to in the title; and he assumes that Isabella too is a kind of changeling, in another sense: that she will promptly switch her affections from her husband to her would-be lover when he presses his suit. Isabella’s refusal to be seduced puts her radically at odds with every assumption made about women by the other characters. Her constancy to her jealous husband marks her out as insane by the measures or tastes of the men who court her, and it’s striking that part of her strategy for putting them off is to act like a lunatic herself.
The last scene of the play brings both of its plots together. Isabella’s husband is invited to stage a dance performed by his lunatics at Alsemero’s wedding to Beatrice-Joanna. As it happens, the wedding is called off and the dance never happens; instead Antonio is wrongly arrested for Alonzo’s murder. But Isabella’s description of the inmates of the madhouse neatly summarizes all the cast, with the exception of the speaker. They
act their fantasies in any shapes
Suiting their present thoughts; if sad, they cry;
If mirth be their conceit, they laugh again […]
As their wild fancies prompt ’em.
This is recognizably also a description of Jacobean England, where relations with Spain or the guilt of murderers could be viewed in different ways depending on the ‘wild fancies’ of the powerful. The Changeling’s representation of this situation was once seen by critics as tasteless; but for a long time now its shocking satire has appealed to the tastes of modern audiences, for whom it mirrors the uncertain values, wavering tastes and unstable judgments of the current century.
