December 26, 2015-January 24, 2016

The Erotics of Aversion

by Professor Jean E. Howard

Columbia University

Few Renaissance tragedies match The Changeling for sheer audacity. Its female protagonist, Beatrice-Joanna, is a privileged Spanish lady on the brink of a wedding to a gentleman named Alonso de Piracquo and possessed of an abiding hatred for an ugly man, De Flores, servant to her father Vermandero. Though she loathes him, De Flores will not stop following Beatrice-Joanna and offering her his services. By the end of the play, Beatrice-Joanna and DeFlores are not only adulterous lovers, but bound together by a chain of sexualized crimes and intimate encounters more vivid and more engaging than anything else in the play. With breathtaking daring, The Changeling explores the terror, the horror, the passion and the soul-shattering insights that attend lives lived outside social norms.

The Changeling, one of only a handful of Renaissance tragedies set in Spain, has a double plot.  Like many early modern plays, it was written by two playwrights, Thomas Middleton, whom scholars think wrote most of the Beatrice-Joanna story, and Samuel Rowley, who was mainly responsible for a second plot involving a madhouse resembling Bedlam, or Bethlehem Hospital, the famous London institution for the incarceration and “cure” of madmen and fools.  The madhouse, a cacophonous site of babble and cruelty, becomes a symbol for the general loss of moral orientation that attends the events in the main plot and hints at the depravity with which many Englishmen associated Catholic Spain. In the bedlam scenes, the keeper of the hospital has a young wife, Isabella, whom he confines to the hospital under the watchful eye of a servant so that she will not betray him sexually.  Of course, suitors disguised as fool and madman, Antonio and Franciscus, infiltrate the madhouse and proposition Isabella. She remains chaste, her choice underscoring Beatrice-Joanna’s opposite response to sexual temptation.  In moral terms, the two plots set a virtuous woman against an immoral one, but that fact hardly determines the flow of audience sympathy.  Beatrice-Joanna is infinitely more interesting and complex than the virtuous Isabella, and the audience is asked to extend its sympathy in unexpected directions.

It is the subplot, moreover, that gives the play its name.  The word “changeling” had several meanings in the period.  In folktales, it signified an ugly child left in the cradle by fairies when they stole away a typical child; in general use, it had come to mean a stupid or foolish person.  Antonio, the gentleman turned fake madman in the subplot, is the play’s most obvious changeling in the sense of someone who by going in the disguise of a fool, substitutes one identity for another.  However, main plot characters are also changelings in a less literal way. Beatrice-Joanna, for example, does not change outwardly, but is transformed from reputable virgin (in the first scene she is coming from church) into a whore; and De Flores changes from being the ugly object of her loathing to the object of her deepest affection.

The main plot economically and powerfully dramatizes the stunning transformations of virtue and fortune attending its main characters.  Beatrice-Joanna, on the brink of her wedding to Piracquo, meets a gentleman named Alsemero and suddenly and willfully decides she must marry him.  Unable to shake off Piracquo, on impulse she unthinkingly asks De Flores to kill her betrothed.  He does, in a grizzly murder deep in the bowels of Vermandero’s castle, and then demands that Beatrice-Joanna sleep with him.  Shocked and horrified, she must comply or be exposed.  Deflowered by De Flores, Beatrice-Joanna fears being revealed on her wedding night as no virgin.  Ever inventive, she then asks her maid Diaphanta to sleep with her husband in her place (the well-worn Renaissance bed trick). But Diaphanta lingers all night in Alsemero’s bed, and to rouse her before dawn, De Flores sets fire to Diaphanta’s chamber and kills her when she returns there from Alsemero’s quarters, claiming she was burned to death.  Exposed as lovers and co-conspirators by a gentleman who overheard them talking together in a private chamber about all these events, De Flores kills Beatrice-Joanna and himself rather than face separation and the punishment of the state. 

The sudden jerks and turns of Beatrice-Joanna’s desires and the responsiveness of De Flores to her every mood, reveal her undisciplined and naïve impulsiveness and his endless devotion to her service.  Together, these two tread a dangerous labyrinth in which she is made to come face to face with her own depravity and her likeness to and affection for the one man who really knows her.  All the other men in the play treat Beatrice-Joanna with rote reverence.  Focusing on her beauteous outside, until the final revelations they cannot imagine she could be anything but what she seems.  But as the play over and over demonstrates, surfaces are deceptive, and dark secrets (one of the play’s keywords) lurk beneath those surfaces.  De Flores alone does not shrink from confronting Beatrice’s darker desires, nor does he allow her to evade them either.  After she—assuming the privilege rank and beauty have given her-- casually commands the ugly servant to murder her husband-to-be, he returns with a token to show he has done the deed: a finger cut from Piracquo’s hand with the ring she had given him still on it.  The grizzly body part, sign of De Flores castration of a rival suitor, also makes real the horrific consequence of Beatrice-Joanna’s casual command. A man has died; his blood now stains the castle.  But De Flores is not done.  If Beatrice-Joanna still treats him as a servant to be packed off with a monetary reward, he now drives home their moral equivalence: “You are the deed’s creature; by that name/ You lost your first condition, and I challenge you,/ As peace and innocency has turn’d you out,/ And made you one with me” (III.iv.137-40).  Laying out her moral deformity, calling her by the name of whore, denying her immunity by virtue of her birth,  De Flores nonetheless continues to love Beatrice-Joanna with passion and devotion. He becomes her servant in the Petrarchan sense of a lover devoted to his beloved, only Beatrice-Joanna is not the chaste woman on a pedestal of that tradition, but a fallen, passionate and inventive soul mate. When her husband offers her a virginity test before the consummation of her marriage, she reaps the benefits of having pried into his secret medical closet.  She yawns, sneezes, and laughs, just as his book of secrets says a virgin would do.  She and De Flores are devilishly clever, both skilled at hiding sin under the appearance of virtue and making monkeys of the learned and privileged men around them.

Act V pushes Beatrice to ever-deeper recognitions.  After De Flores rushes out to set Diaphanta’s chamber on fire, she exclaims: “How rare is that man’s speed!/How heartily he serve me!  His face loathes one,/ But look upon his care, who could not love him?/ The east is not more beauteous than his service” (V.i;.69-72). But Beatrice-Joanna not only recognizes what is beautiful in De Flores, but what is ugly in herself.  As she dies, she confesses to Vermandero how completely she has defiled her family’s good name, comparing herself to infected blood that should be sluiced down the common sewer.  Yet as she and De Flores die, entangled in one another’s bloody arms, what an audience feels may not be smug satisfaction at seeing sinners brought to bay, but something more akin to wonder at the strange passions and secrets of the human heart. As Alsemero and the other men band together, hugging their virtue, at the play’s end, one can only wonder what dark secrets lurk, unacknowledged, underneath their smooth exteriors.