When one looks at items from the Jacobean era—architecture, furniture, clothing—she is struck by an interesting dichotomy/duali

Zarski

Rebecca Zarski

Dramaturgy

Protocol Essay

18 November 2012

Passion, Madness, and Feminine Power in The Changeling

While looking at objects and artwork from the Jacobean era—architecture, furniture, paintings, clothing—one notices a striking dualistic quality: there is a sense of largeness, openness, brightness, and grandeur but also one of confinement and tightness with intricate details where secrets can hide in darkness. In their play The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley show this is also true of the minds and of behaviors of people—these can hold many qualities simultaneously, expose and conceal, be magnificent and defiling. The dramatists toy with opposites but rather than simply portray the struggle between conflicting forces they fuse the forces together as partners in the same design—they are inverses but they are also identical. The play creates a situation that is not only either/or but also both/and. In particular, given its subplot and protagonists, Middleton and Rowley explore the realms of madness and sanity, and feminine power and weakness. These combinations spring from the seed at the core of the play, which is passion; it is lust that gives birth to madness, and a woman’s sexual desire is both her strength and her weakness.

The pluralism of language in The Changeling reflects the multifaceted nature of the characters and the play itself. Beatrice-Joanna’s name, for example, is multilayered: it is two names combined into one; it means “she who makes happy” and “the Lord’s grace” but she is sinful and creates pain (The Changeling Daalder footnote 3); the name brings to mind Dante’s holy Beatrice and the mad Joanna, daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain. Phrases often carry multiple meanings. There is a plethora of sexual innuendo in the use of words like service, reward, blood, will, and fire, and in the multiple mentions of rings and fingers. Then, of course, there is also the word “changeling,” which contains various meanings including a fairy-child, an inconstant person, a substitute, a person with mental insufficiencies, and a woman who has had sexual intercourse (OED, Haber 83). There are also numerous asides, which create the effect of two things occurring at once. In the world of the play, everything must be seen with a sort of double (or triple) vision. Judith Haber, in her essay on erotic logic in The Changeling, refers to a pertinent piece from one of Sigmund Freud’s works on compulsive neuroses and their illogical processes:

“A battle between love and hate was raging in the lover’s breast, and the object of these feelings, was one and the same person….Compulsive acts like this, in two successive stages, of which the second neutralizes the first, are a typical occurrence in obsessional neuroses. The patient’s consciousness naturally misunderstands them—rationalizes them, in short.…What regularly occurs in hysteria is that a compromise is arrived at which enables both the opposing tendencies to find expression simultaneously” (Freud qtd. in Haber 91-2).

According to this definition, Beatrice-Joanna has both obsessional neurosis and hysteria because she both “loves and loathes” De Flores (1.1.124). She at first despises his presence and then she decides he is a “man worth loving” (5.1.76). As well, early on when she expresses her hatred of this “serpent” she simultaneously drops her glove (1.1.223-4), an action that can be construed as “a sexual invitation that she extends unconsciously” (Daalder Introduction to The Changeling xxvi).

The essence of the play itself is somewhat neurotic and hysterical because it juxtaposes and intertwines opposites. The play is both a comedy and a tragedy—the theater world recognizes it today as a tragedy but Rowley described it as a comedy (Daalder Preface to The Changeling vii). Its structure moves between two plots—one set in the supposedly mad world of an insane asylum and the other in the apparently sane world of Vermandero’s castle. They seem disparate and unrelated but they can and must be connected as they form one play. Certain thematic threads, among them madness and feminine power, join the two; the plots are distorted reflections of each other, both placing women between multiple lovers; the lunatics perform at Beatrice’s wedding; and eventually the audience sees that the “madmen” Antonio and Franciscus actually belong to Vermandero’s household. In fact, by the end of the play, it seems as if the world of the madhouse is saner than the outside world.

Another example of the play’s attempt to enable “opposing tendencies to find expression simultaneously” is De Flores’s off-stage murder of Beatrice-Joanna which conflates an act of love with violent stabbing; in the three syllables “O, O, O!” Beatrice-Joanna expresses pleasure and pain—she is “dying” in the sense of having an orgasm while she is literally dying (5.3.139). Freud obviously did not influence Middleton and Rowley but it is still interesting to note that what Freud defined during the birth of modern psychology was already delved into by the playwrights hundreds of years earlier; comparing the two demonstrates how powerfully and clearly the dramatists portrayed the crevices of the human mind—realms which excite as much interest and concern then as now—particularly in the workings of madness.

The inherent madness of the play, its duality, can express itself not only through the language and action of characters but through other aspects of production—set, lighting, music, costumes. The bright and dark qualities of 17^th century art can work their way into lighting, which can toy with openness and the shadows of confinement, the individual and the group, comedy and tragedy, pureness and contamination. The set can mimic the grandeur and secretive crevices of the world of the play, as the Jacobean stage did. This stage had a façade separating the main stage and backstage, with a central opening flanked by two doors; behind the central opening (usually curtained) was the “inner stage,” where, for example, the sounds of the madmen and Beatrice’s murder would occur (Daalder Introduction xxxviii). This stage embodied the “inner weakness,” the “inner world of ‘secrets,’” the relationship between the seen and unseen that the play presents (Bevington qtd. in Daalder xxxviii-xxix). There are many ways to visually demonstrate the paradoxical feeling the play gives of trapped freedom, dark lightness, truth and lies. Part of the play is set in an asylum but besides this element there are various ways to represent a convoluted mind moving between sanity and madness.

In order to discuss the different levels of madness in the play it is useful to look at its definition. Paramount in the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary¹ is the lack of control over the mind and various extreme emotions, both positive and negative; it includes “delusion,” “ecstasy,” and “anger,” all of which are strikingly present in The Changeling, with its focus on (self-) deception, sexual desire, threats, and murder. As Muriel Bradbrook states, “all of the characters…are entirely at the mercy of their feelings, which are instinctive and uncontrollable” (298), although it may be more reasonable to say most of the characters, as a few, such as Isabella, Jasperino, and in the end Alsemero, seem to be guided more by reason.

Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) also notes the inability to control passions. He states that the “the soul receives a tincture from the body,” meaning that the humors can negatively affect the functioning of the soul and the mind, making them susceptible to negative passions that the individual is powerless to resist; as a result, madness causes men to “degenerate into beasts.” He cites a variety of sources for definitions of madness; a general definition is when “some one principal faculty of the mind, as imagination, or reason, is corrupted” by “dotage” and the excess of “black choler” (melancholy), particularly when it is inflamed by “roasting” blood. Burton also mentions that devils are able to “deceive all our senses.” In contrast, he defines understanding as “a power of the soul, by which we perceive, know, remember, and judge…a reflecting action, by which it judgeth of his own doings, and examines them.”

Sexual passion, which drives the madness of most the characters, is caused by heated

blood: Alsemero says his blood “fired” his devotion to Beatrice-Joanna (5.3.74-5) and Beatrice complains that Diaphanta “cannot rule her blood,” causing De Flores to label her a “mad whelp” (5.1.7, 18). Like Diaphanta, other characters are rarely able to control their passions because of their single-minded “dotage” upon their desires—Alibius, determined that Isabella will not cuckold him, goes to extremes to secure her faithfulness; Tomazo’s desire for revenge clouds his vision and gives him no peace; Alsemero suspects his love for Beatrice but its strength makes him easily overcome these suspicions; De Flores’s lust for Beatrice drives him in everything, including his murder of her. Beatrice’s desire for sexual fulfillment (with Alsemero) and desire to maintain her honor, or at least its appearance, corrupt her reasoning and propel her recklessly forward into dangerous territory. As she gains control over her situation by plotting murders, she simultaneously loses control by becoming indebted to De Flores. The physical fire in Act V, Scene 1, exemplifies the unruly nature of madness and the passionate conflagrations within the characters.

Characters are also “beasts;” people repeatedly describe De Flores as a creature, a serpent (1.1.128, 223; 5.3.66) and Beatrice-Joanna eventually degenerates into something deformed (5.3.77). The madmen of Alibius’ asylum visually relate madness to animals when they enter “some as birds, others as beasts” (3.3.191 stage direction). While it was a common practice to have madmen perform on various occasions, the fact that there is an antimasque of madmen at the wedding not only shows the single physical link between the subplot and the main plot but also implies that there is an inherent madness in the wedding and the characters’ relationships.

Madness deceives the senses of all of the characters, particularly their sight, as described in Beatrice-Joanna’s eloquent speech on eyes and passion:

Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments,

And should give certain judgment what they see;

But they are rash sometimes, and tell us wonders

Of common things, which when our judgments find,

They can then check the eyes and call them blind.

(1.1.71-5)

The eyes are “rash” when passion controls them. The corruption of the five senses extends also to reasoning: “Judgment is blinded, so that the characters practice all kinds of deception and self-deception to gain their ends” (Bradbrook 298). Beatrice-Joanna’s passion causes her to be blind to the consequences of her choices; she has no understanding, in Burton’s sense of the word, because she is unable to perceive, reflect on, and judge her actions. She asks De Flores to murder her fiancé Alonzo so she can be free to marry Alsemero but she is shocked when De Flores brings her Alonzo’s finger as proof of the deed; De Flores must tell her that she is as guilty as he of the murder and that she is a “whore in her affections” because she lusted for Alsemero while betrothed to Alonzo (3.4.83-84,142). The production can play with the senses of both the actors on stage and the audience—play with the distortion of reality—channeling the idea of a reflection in a funhouse mirror and the sense of an image reflected over and over so that one does not know where it begins or ends. There could be misshapen furniture, lurid unnatural colors, and strange sounds.

Using Burton’s definition of madness, it is apparent that the institutionalized insane men in the subplot are not the only mad characters in the play; madness reigns everywhere, infused into the workings of many minds. This is, essentially, what Joost Daalder expounds in his essay “Folly and Madness in The Changeling.” He believes, however, that Burton’s piece and similar works have no bearing on madness in the play. Instead, Daalder attempts to construct a definition of madness based solely on the play’s text, looking at the characteristics of madness in the subplot and how they appear in the main plot. A fool is essentially illogical while a madman is “out of touch with reality….acting on his fantasy rather than on reason and observation of evidence,” and “claims, and truly believes, that something is fact, which we know not to exist” (2-3). Daalder notes other components of madness including a person’s suppression of “his deeper sense of the truth” or his sexual passion (8-9), his tendency to “feel and/or do something which he is not conscious of” (11), and his lack of insight and self-understanding (14-15).

He gives many examples, including Alibius’s and Alsemero’s “paranoia” (4), Beatrice-Joanna’s unconscious love of De Flores and her fantasy of being able to happily marry Alsemero (9, 12), and her self-delusion at the end when she states that she was true unto Alsemero’s bed (17). Daalder’s essay is convincing but there are times when it seems that he may carry his argument too far, as when he claims Beatrice-Joanna actually believes what she says about being faithful to Alsemero—one cannot be certain of that. Madness is inherent in the play but it is important to remember that the playwrights portray a world that is both mad and sane.

The aspects of production can make this clear. Lighting and music can obviously set a mood. As well, the settings can have rational, clean, ordered, and “sane” elements with defined straight lines alongside more absurd, twisted, “insane” elements. It could be interesting to see the “sane” settings in the asylum and the “mad” settings in Vermandero’s castle. Color is also extremely useful—it can reveal relationships between characters, show the black, white, and gray areas, and indicate madness through jarring colors. Actors are able to demonstrate a certain amount of logic even in their insanity. The characters are not necessarily wild although passion rules them; their plans are calculated even in their madness. It is essential for actors to know the different components of madness and sanity to adequately represent them—Burton, for example, shows that madness is not only psychological but also something that exists throughout the entire body, meaning the acting is very physical not just mental. The body is important since the play revolves around physical sexual experience. The madhouse and Vermandero’s castle could have the same basic background as a visual link between the two plots and the worlds of sanity and insanity.

One problem with imputing everything to madness is that it can make the madness the controlling force, allowing the characters no agency, causing them to seem like victims rather than composers of their own fate; they are both—they are pawns with power. The overwhelming passion may influence actions but characters still make choices. In order to see the strength of Beatrice-Joanna’s character, for example, it is essential to know that she has a will of her own. The fact that Beatrice may be controlled by madness but still has the power to make key decisions and incite events is part of the relationship between sanity and derangement that Middleton and Rowley explore. It is what makes her character so compelling; it shows her power and her weakness, the combination of which is inherent in her identity as a woman.

Deborah Burks says that in Jacobean England there was a “pervasive fear of women’s desire…women’s vulnerability to seduction or sexual assault was a recurrent, even an obsessive concern” (763). This was due to issues of property, status, and gender—ravishment was a crime because women were property and even a suspicion of sexual impurity compromised a woman’s marriageability, which threatened to destroy socially the woman and her family (Burks 761, 763-5). There was a dual fear of rape itself and active female sexuality, which would cause a woman to consent to or seduce a lover. Particularly disconcerting were the ideas of women’s simplicity and deceitful nature. Society saw a woman as too innocent and simple to act responsibly, making her especially susceptible to rape; paradoxically it also saw her ability to “disguise her intentions and…emotions,” and “easily counterfeit [her] experience of the sexual act” because there was no foolproof way to determine if she was a virgin or if she had enjoyed sex (Burks 767, 773, 777). Women had the power to deceive men, and even the law, but men’s fear of their trickery reduced their power.

It is important to note the difference between the 21^st century definition of rape and the 17^th century definition, which primarily revolves around “the illegal conveyance, marriage, or deflowering” of a woman above the age of ten from the protection of and against the will of her father or husband (Burks 768). Rape was not simply an attack on the woman; ravishment could be both a “violation and a pleasure” by its very definition, as Burks points out by showing the link between rape and rapture (769-71). In the performance, the audience must see that Beatrice is not just a victim. The central scene between Beatrice and De Flores is disturbing but it is a coming together, a twisted marriage, not necessarily a violation. Beatrice is sexually drawn to De Flores even though she may love Alsemero. Body-language, blocking, costumes, as well as acting can show the unavoidable connection between them even before this scene. Setting the play in a different time from this, whether an actual time, a hybrid time period, or a nonexistent time, can also make it clearer that the audience must view the situation from a different lens.

These 17^th century fears clearly relate to Beatrice-Joanna. Her commissioning of De Flores for murder displays both her innocence and sexual power. While she can “consciously blot out of her mind the nature of the temptation she offers De Flores, the way she accosts him indicates clearly that instinctively she knows he hungers for her” (Ornstein 184), as she calls him “my De Flores,” comments that he “looks[s] so amorously,” and even touches him (2.2.75-100). Despite these actions, her “simplicity” still guides her; she is unaware of the magnitude of asking De Flores to kill Alonzo and she assumes payment in gold will be enough to satisfy him (Burks 774-5). She is able to hide for some time her sins of murder and adultery from her husband and father. It is essential in understanding Beatrice-Joanna and her relationship to De Flores that ravishment includes both violation and pleasure—it shows that Beatrice is not simply a victim of sexual assault. Passion entails both negative and positive consequences; it can be both a strength and a weakness.

Daalder states that in Act II, Scene 4, Beatrice’s “sexual enjoyment at the end of this scene is obvious when De Flores comments: ‘’Las, how the turtle pants!’ This is not an emotion produced by bullying, leave alone something like rape, as is so often claimed” (Introduction to The Changling xxviii). Judith Haber rightly quibbles with this view, noting that it is not solely an expression of lust; Beatrice’s fear and hatred are also present (81-2). She agrees, however, that “Beatrice’s loathing is…the guarantor of her desire—as ultimately contemporaneous and indistinguishable from that desire” (82). It is inherent in Beatrice’s character that she is two things at once—mad and sane, desirous and repulsed, strong and weak—which is why she must love and loath De Flores. De Flores demands sex from Beatrice but she still has the choice to deny him; it is not much of a choice as he threatens to expose her in the murder, which would mean her execution, but she could choose death over the “murder” of her virtue (3.4.120). Instead she chooses to succumb to him. Beatrice must unite with De Flores “in order to know herself, for only he can free her from the chains of convention and family duty” (Ornstein 187).

She must succumb because it gives her power even while depriving her of it, it gives her physical pleasure even while causing her psychological pain. Existing in a paradoxical play necessitates Beatrice-Joanna’s participation in a paradoxical action. Her passion allows her to gain Alsemero and, as the consequence of gaining him, causes her to lose him.

Beatrice’s dual nature, in fact the dual nature of all the women in the play, is also physical in the sense that in 17^th century England young men would play the female roles. The play calls attention to this fact when Beatrice says “Would creation had formed me man” (2.2.107-8). She must act out the signs of her virginity (gaping, sneezing, laughing, melancholy); “her deception and the false testimony of her body are the characteristic untruths of actors” (Burks 780). Middleton and Rowley also place each of the three women between two men, or multiple pairs of men, showing her position on the cusp between power and weakness, deceit and honesty, madness and sanity. Isabella is balanced between Lollio/Alibius and Antonio/Franciscus, meaning she exists between honesty, chastity and the (ostensibly) sane, and temptation, incontinence and the (apparently) mad. Diaphanta moves between Jasperino and Alsemero, displaying her weakness as a servant and her power as the lover of a nobleman. Beatrice is poised between her father (his power, legitimacy, judgment) and her lovers (her will, illicitness, passion); Alonzo (honor, legal engagement) and Alsemero (seduction); Alsemero (honor, legal marriage) and De Flores (sin, adultery, psychological and physical marriage). The nature of the three women in the play reflects the nature of all women, their ability to do and be more than one thing at once, their role as changelings.

This balance between two paths, this temptation, corresponds to the play’s representation of the Fall of Eve. When Beatrice wishes creation had made her a man, she calls attention to the fact that if Woman were not created there may have been no Fall because she would never have been tempted. De Flores the serpent tempts Beatrice-Joanna as Eve and leads to her banishment from home. But in another sense, Beatrice is tempted by her passion and De Flores is like Adam who follows her lead when he realizes she has been sexually awakened by tasting the forbidden fruit of desire and murder. When Eve eats the Fruit of Knowledge, it bestows power onto humans because they can judge and choose between good and evil, but it also strips them of power because they are expelled from Paradise and God’s presence. It is probably not a random coincidence that Alsemero catches sight of Beatrice and De Flores in the garden. From yet another perspective, Beatrice can be seen as Satan himself in that she shows “the deforming of a creature in its origin bright and good, by its own willed persistence in acts against its own nature” (Gardner 321).

Helen Gardner, in her essay “The Tragedy of Damnation,” says that Beatrice-Joanna “sins against her nature” when she enlists De Flores’ aid to achieve her will because he is “the thing her nature most loathes” (329). She notes “the absolute contrast at the beginning and the identity at the close of Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores” (329), how they move from being separate and opposing entities (purity and immorality) to being one and the same. Seen in a different light, however, Beatrice does not sin against her nature because fundamental to that nature is the same passion that is in De Flores. As Robert Ornstein says, “She instinctively feared that which was latent in her”—De Flores’s poison (187); “she must read her character in the mirror which he thrusts before her” (185). There is the sense that Beatrice has somehow changed and deformed, as well as the idea that she was the same all along, only hiding her true nature behind a mask; Alsemero states that “There was a visor/O’er that cunning face” but also that her “beauty changed to ugly whoredom” (5.3.46-7, 197-8). Again, Beatrice represents both conflicting qualities at once. Much of Beatrice-Joanna’s power and innocence and her tie to Genesis is language-based and would have to come out through acting but visual details can help, such as having apples as a prop or (as many have done) showing the serpent somehow—it is difficult to show the correlation without getting trite and vapid. Act III Scene iv with Beatrice and De Flores could conceivably take place in a garden but this might be overdoing it. Showing the inherent internal weaknesses of something strong, such as Vermandero’s fortress, is more important because what must comes across is the power and vulnerability of the characters in their sinful acts, not necessarily that they are mythical in their representation of the Fall.

Daalder, in his Introduction to The Changeling, claims that the dramatists “try to prevent us from interpreting things in a simplistic or platitudinous fashion” (xxxii). They do this by displaying a world in which madness and sanity, power and weakness, truth and lies, sin and virtue are one and the same—the viewer must simply chose in which light she wishes to see the situation. Sight is clearly important in the play’s world; it is directly mentioned almost 150 times in the piece. Just as a Jacobean audience would know that beneath the surface of a woman on the stage there exists a male actor, so every audience must realize that conflicting qualities exist simultaneously in the structure, language, characters, and action of the play. The play itself is inherently a changeling.

1 The OED defines “madness” as: 1. Imprudence, delusion, or (wild) foolishness resembling insanity; an instance of this. 2. Insanity; mental illness or impairment, esp. of a severe kind; (later esp.) psychosis; an instance of this. 3. Wild excitement or enthusiasm; ecstasy; exuberance or lack of restraint. 4. Uncontrollable anger, rage, fury.