The Changeling: : Notes on Mannerism in Dramatic Form

The Changeling: Notes on Mannerism in Dramatic Form Raymond J. Pentzell In the first act of The Changeling Beatrice-Joanna enters the stage a light-comic ingenue, as transparent and inconsequential as a spoiled Molière fille, and just as self-centered. Near the end of the fifth act she dies, guilty of murder and betrayal, her amourpropre having grown to fruition as a selfishness which grotesquely perverts her zeal for her own honor. She lies next to the catalyst of her ripening, the hideous De Flores, her lover and her mur­ derer, now a suicide. Her death brings her as close as she ever comes to an anagnorisis; self-satisfaction ebbs from her enough that, finally, she can beg pathetically of her surviving victims, “Forgive me . . . all forgive.” No one does. Her father bemoans his own disgrace. Her traduced husband is attentive only to him, comforting him with the observation, “Justice hath so right/ The guilty hit, that inno­ cence is quit/ By proclamation, and may joy again.” Suddenly there is set in motion a finale which may be the most insane ever written for a play respected as a tragedy: when Alsemero, the aggrieved husband, begins to retail all the “changes” he has gone through, his catalogue of puns must surely have reminded the playgoers of 1622 no less than ourselves of the kind of drawnout wordplay used in comedy as early as the prologue to Gas­ coigne’s Supposes. Upon finishing his list, he calls, “Are there any more on’s?” And up pops Antonio, a comedian from the sub­ plot, who volunteers his “changes.” He is followed in turn by other contributors out of the comic subplot, Franciscus, Isabella, and Alibius. Each patters out more “changes” until the “tragic” Alsemero regains his turn with a moralizing speech which slips promptly into rhymed couplets as the “epilogue.” Music up. All bow. Exeunt. 3 4 Comparative Drama There are two dead bodies left on stage. No provision has been made to carry them off. They have been lying there all through the punning changes rung on “change.” Now what? Either they lie in place until the whole audience files out chuckl­ ing (a bit of the macabre worthy of Monsieur Verdoux), or else they also get up, bow, and walk off, no doubt reminding us of Leslie at the end of Behan’s The Hostage.1 Either way, our “tragedy” has ended in a double-take of grisly comedy. Nowhere in the canon of tragedy can there be found another example of such an ending.2 This scene, in its preternatural absurdity, em­ bodies none of the thematic ironies of, say, a Euripidean epi­ logue. Its ironies lie almost totally in the sharp clap of suddenly juxtaposed tones—juxtaposed, as it were, for the hell of it. But if the irony of the finale is, strictly speaking, uninter­ pretable, it is neither meaningless nor unprepared-for. Its mean­ ing lies in the fact that it is prepared for, the culmination of a structural pattern which has been at work throughout the play. Many critics have avoided trying to track down an overall struc­ ture in The Changeling, for to do so is to risk bringing discussion to a halt by admitting the play is a botch. Everyone’s first indi­ gestible question is this: What is the subplot, the madhouse farce, doing there? At the outset we must chew on a paradox. The Changeling was written by two men, each writing in a manifestly different set of styles and each (most would say) possessing a different measure of talent. Modem critics typically think of the play as if it were written by Thomas Middleton “with additions by” Wil­ liam Rowley. Though the nucleus of the Beatrice-De Flores plot is Middleton’s most obvious contribution and the farcical subplot Rowley’s, it was Rowley who wrote the longish first scene and all or most of the final scene. However unmistakably different in style they are from Middleton’s scenes, they are of course part of the main plot.3 We can imagine, perhaps, the two writers briefly discussing the subject of the play, outlining its progression only roughly...