Middleton / Rowley The Changeling

Full Text and Introduction (NHB Drama Classics)
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78001-266-7
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 0, 128 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Drama Classi

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Middleton and Rowley's masterpiece, a tale of murder, lust, seduction and blackmail in the seventeenth century. Alsemero has fallen in love with the beautiful Beatrice after a chance meeting in a church - but Beatrice has already been promised to another man. Unable to marry the man she loves, she employs the hated De Flores, her father's servant, to murder the man her father bids her marry. As payment, De Flores demands Beatrice. And then things get worse... Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's play The Changeling was mostly likely first performed in 1622. This edition of the play in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is edited and introduced by Trevor Griffiths. Set Text >>The Changeling is a set text for AQA Drama and Theatre Studies A/AS Level, AQA English Literature A/AS Level, OCR English Literature A/AS Level and WJEC English Literature A/AS Level.

William Rowley (c.1585-1626) was an English Jacobean dramatist and actor, best known for works written in collaboration with other writers.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Middleton, Thomas

Rowley, William

Leseproben

Introduction

The Authors

The Changeling (1622) was written jointly by Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) and William Rowley (?1585-1626).

Middleton, the son of a wealthy bricklayer, attended Oxford University but left without obtaining a degree. By 1601 he was in London ‘daily accompanying the players’ and became one of Philip Henslowe’s stable of playwrights collaborating with Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton and Anthony Munday on various plays that have not survived. He wrote plays with Dekker for the companies of boys performing at Blackfriars and Paul’s, for Prince Charles’s company, for Lady Elizabeth’s Men and after 1615 for the King’s Men. He also wrote civic and Lord Mayor’s pageants, becoming Chronologer to the City of London in 1620. His 1624 play A Game at Chess achieved the longest run of any Jacobean play (nine days), but ran foul of the authorities for its topical satire against Spain. His plays include the comedies A Mad World, My Masters (1604?), The Roaring Girl (with Dekker, 1610?) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) and the tragedy Women Beware Women (1621). He is now also widely regarded as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) traditionally ascribed to Cyril Tourneur.

Rowley was a leading comic actor with the Duke of York’s Men (which became Prince Charles’s company) and then the King’s Men. His parts included the clown in his own All’s Lost by Lust (1622) and the fat bishop in A Game at Chess. As a dramatist he collaborated with Thomas Heywood, Dekker, Ford, Fletcher, and Webster as well as with Middleton, with whom he wrote both A Fair Quarrel (1615?) and The Changeling. It is generally agreed that Rowley wrote the subplot and the opening and closing scenes of The Changeling, which suggests that the authors’ relationship was a genuine collaboration, rather than, as has sometimes been suggested, a master/servant relationship, with Middleton as the senior partner taking responsibility for the tragic parts while leaving his junior to get on with comic relief.

What Happens in the Play

Beatrice-Joanna, the daughter of Vermandero, is betrothed to Alonzo De Piraquo.

1.1 Alsemero has fallen in love with Beatrice-Joanna, not knowing she is engaged. Beatrice-Joanna reciprocates his feelings. Vermandero’s servant De Flores (who is infatuated with her) informs Beatrice-Joanna of her father’s arrival but she treats him with scorn. Vermandero welcomes Alsemero and tells him of the forthcoming marriage. Alsemero decides to leave when he finds out that Beatrice-Joanna is engaged, but Vermandero persuades him to stay.

1.2 Alibius, who runs a madhouse, and his servant Lollio discuss arrangements for protecting Alibius’s young wife Isabella from sexual temptation. They welcome a new patient, Antonio, who is actually a nobleman disguised as a fool in order to attempt to seduce Isabella.

2.1 Beatrice-Joanna is trying to find a way to marry Alsemero rather than Alonzo. She and De Flores quarrel again. Alonzo’s brother Tomazo suspects that Beatrice-Joanna’s affections for Alonzo have cooled.

2. 2 Unknown to Alsemero, Beatrice-Joanna decides to use De Flores to kill Alonzo. De Flores, delighted by Beatrice-Joanna’s changed attitude towards him, arranges to show Alonzo the castle, in order to murder him.

3.1–2 De Flores kills Alonzo and decides to give Beatrice-Joanna Alonzo’s ring. He has to cut off Alonzo’s finger because he cannot get his ring off by itself.

3.3 Lollio introduces Isabella to the madman Franciscus, a new inmate who is actually another nobleman and would-be seducer. Antonio, overheard by Lollio, tells Isabella that he is actually her would-be lover, not a fool.

3.4 De Flores tells Beatrice-Joanna that Alonzo is dead and shows her the finger. As she begins to realise the full horror of what she has done, he tells her that she, not money, will be his reward.

4.1 In a dumb show, Vermandero puzzles over Alonzo’s apparent flight but permits Alsemero to become betrothed to Beatrice-Joanna. Beatrice-Joanna discovers that Alsemero has a virginity testing kit. Worried that he will discover that she has lost her virginity (to De Flores), she tests Diaphanta, her confidante, before allowing her to take her own place in the bridal bed.

4.2 Vermandero discovers that Franciscus and Antonio are absent and quarrels with Tomazo, Alonzo’s brother, who is accusing him of having a part in Alonzo’s death. Jasperino, Alsemero’s friend, has overheard a compromising encounter between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna. This leads Alsemero to test Beatrice-Joanna with his virginity potion. She, having already tested it on Diaphanta, is able to fake the necessary reactions, thus convincing Alsemero of her chastity.

4.3 Isabella tells Lollio that she has two disguised suitors. She then pretends to be a madwoman in order to test Antonio, who finds her repulsive in disguise. Lollio confronts Franciscus.

5.1 Beatrice-Joanna is worried because Diaphanta is still in the bridal bed. De Flores sets fire to Diaphanta’s bedroom in order to rouse the house. In the confusion, he shoots her to ensure her silence.

5.2 Vermandero tells Tomazo that Alibius and Isabella have confirmed his suspicions of Franciscus and Antonio.

5.3 Alsemero and Jasperino are now convinced that Beatrice-Joanna is guilty of adultery with De Flores. She explains her conduct, admitting her role in Alonzo’s death, and Alsemero locks her and De Flores together in a closet. When Vermandero comes to explain his version of Alonzo’s death, Alsemero tells him the truth and reveals De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna, both now fatally wounded at De Flores’ hand.

Contexts

The earliest known performance of The Changeling took place at Court in 1624 and it was licensed to the Phoenix, an indoor playhouse. Its early performances would, then, have taken place indoors, in an environment lit by artificial lighting, rather than in one of the familiar open-air amphitheatres, such as the Globe. Although the indoor playhouses were smaller than the amphitheatres, the audience still largely shared the same space as the actors and the claustrophobic atmosphere of The Changeling may well have been enhanced by the relative intimacy of the theatre and the artificial lighting. The play poses no major staging challenges and the various effects and properties were well within the normal range of a theatre company of the period. Trained young male actors would have played the female parts.

Although The Changeling is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of Jacobean drama, it appears not to have been performed between the end of the seventeenth century and the 1950s. This theatrical eclipse partly stemmed from the play’s subject matter, since plays that involved sexual partners being substituted for others were considered too immoral for polite society. Critics such as T. S. Eliot and M. C. Bradbrook paved the way for a critical reassessment of the play that led in due course to a series of revivals since 1950 that have re-established the play in the theatrical canon.

In The Changeling the authors created a dramatic structure that gives memorable dynamic form to the moral and psychological issues it raises. In particular they use a number of dramatic, theatrical, thematic and linguistic strategies to bind the actions and the characters of the play together almost subliminally. Although the visual, almost emblematic moments (particularly the dropped handkerchief, the ring and the finger, and the dumbshow) play a major part in this process, the relationship between the plot and the subplot, the concepts associated with changelings and the linked ideas of change and exchange are crucial factors in the play’s structure.

A changeling is either a child left by the fairies in exchange for one they take away or the child they take away itself. Characteristically, the child left behind in the mortal world is physically or mentally abnormal. Presumably the idea originated in a desire to explain the otherwise apparently random appearance of such children. Inevitably the term came to be extended to apply to various categories of those with mental or physical disabilities. It is in this sense that it is applicable to Antonio in the subplot, who pretends to be an idiot and is, strictly, the changeling of the title.

Plot and Subplot

Middleton and Rowley wrote The Changeling jointly. There is still some critical suspicion of multi-authored works because the post-Romantic critical tradition still values the author’s supposed ‘individual voice’ and ‘originality’ far more highly than the Jacobean dramatists did as they struggled to earn their livings in a precarious theatrical business. Despite the influential criticism of Roland Barthes and more recent approaches attacking the idea of the authority of the author, there is still a powerful tendency to see collaborative works in terms of who wrote which bits, who was the originator, who gave the instructions. However, it is grossly misleading to see the play as two disparate stories by two authors, linked only in the revelations of the last act. In fact, although there is very little narrative interdependence between the two plots, they are related thematically and structurally in ways that are crucial to the play’s overall effectiveness. It is possible to stage the Beatrice-Joanna/De Flores plot without the Isabella story (as the various television versions demonstrate) but what the play...