The Changeling, by Middleton & Rowley (1622)

What struck me about the English plays of the Renaissance (written between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries) is the coarse language and general lewdness - in this respect, Shakespeare is a literary giant who really towers above his contemporaries. The Renaissance comedies are very rough and ready, like some Zaju plays of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty, and the tragedies are stuffed to the brim with gore, blood, and ugly murder. In other words, many of them are gothic camp. I wondered if there was anything worth reading, and came across The Changeling, interesting because it's so bizarre (and not at all politically correct, I'm afraid), about a woman who is in love with a man who is unfortunately not her fiancé. So she hires her ugly servant, who is in love with her, to kill her betrothed for the price of her own virgin flesh. The play also has a subplot involving madmen and fools in a private asylum run by a physically abusive profiteer, but unlike in the 17th century, we don't find mentally disturbed patients funny anymore. However, the chaos in the asylum is perhaps a fitting backdrop for the story of reversals, deceptions, and descent into madness.

[Thomas Middleton]

The word "changeling" in European folklore refers to a deformed or mentally retarded child believed to be the offspring of fairies, secretly substituted by them for a "normal" human child they had stolen. The original child could be made to return by torturing the changeling (in the hope that the fairies would come to rescue it) - a silly superstition which led to countless cases of child abuse. More generally, the term could also be used to describe a fickle person, someone pretending to be someone else, or an idiot.

The tragicomedy about the changeling also switches authors, as it was written by the duo of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. The play has two plots: a tragic main plot and a comic subplot. Scholars believe that Middleton wrote most of the main plot, while Rowley wrote mostly the comedic subplot.

The female protagonist of the play, Beatrice-Joanna, is a privileged Spanish lady, the daughter of the castle owner Vermandero. Vain and selfish, she is about to marry a gentleman named Alonso de Piracquo, a suitor supported by her father, but falls head over heels in love with Alsemero, a visitor to town whom she has just met by chance in church.

More interestingly, she is also possessed of an abiding hatred for a frightening, repulsive man, De Flores, her father's servant, who is madly and hopelessly obsessed with her beauty and continually follows her around offering his services. She constantly bullies him, clearly showing how much she hates his ugliness. When her father demands that she marry Alonso de Piracquo in a few days, she suddenly realizes that the hated De Flores might be useful to her after all - he is so blinded by love that he will do anything she asks of him.

De Flores is an interesting accomplice to his powerful but shortsighted mistress. He carries out Beatrice's crime out of a self-loathing devotion to her beauty and prestige. After he kills her fiancé and brings her the victim's finger with her ring on it, she thinks he will be satisfied with money and leave the country - instead he demands her virginity and blackmails her into a night with him. When she replaces her maid in her bed, she sets off a bloodbath and everything spirals out of control. Evil begets evil, and soon she must abandon all pretense of being the beautiful, innocent, and respectable gentlewoman she once pretended to be.

Although Beatrice detests De Flores, it is clear that she is also powerfully attracted to him, a sexually charged bond based on both repulsion and fascination. De Flores's ultimate triumph over Beatrice is both deeply horrifying and strangely satisfying - the manipulator manipulated. When the guilt of both is revealed, he stabs her to death and then commits suicide.

This is the terrible main plot of The Changeling. By comparison, the subplot, in which a man enters an asylum as a patient so that he can be near the doctor's beautiful young wife and declare his love for her (which is rejected because the woman is honest and sticks with her husband), is rather commonplace - nothing more than background noise.


I have read this play in the Penguin Classics edition of "Three Revenge Tragedies." The text of the play can also be found at archive.org.

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