‘Of counsel with [m]y mistress’: The mistress–servant alliance in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622)

Analyses of service in The Changeling have focused on De Flores as an embodiment of contemporary fears about servants, neglecting his mistress's agency and the play's engagement with anxieties about women's authority, especially their power over servants. They also ignore two other servants, Diaphanta and Lollio, whose relationships with their mistresses are equally revealing of those anxieties. This article argues that The Changeling stages alliances between mistresses and servants as threatening to patriarchal authority. It revises the dominant critical reading of the play, showing that while the castle plot dissolves the mistress–servant alliance, the hospital plot is less straightforward.

Bad Blood, Black Desires: On the Fragility of Whiteness in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling

This essay reads Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling (ca 1622) as a meditation on the fragility of white privilege. The anxieties about blood in the play are situated by how the English viewed Spain as the least white nation within Europe. The trope of blackness impacts the way others read Beatrice-Joanna’s sexual transgressions, ultimately questioning her chastity and challenging her privileges as a white woman. Rather than seeing whiteness as a stable identity category, I argue that the privileges of whiteness were particularly unstable for white women in the early modern period.

Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama

This book examines ‘queer style’ or forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body in early modern English city comedies. Queer style destabilizes distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and nonhuman, and the past and the present—distinctions that have structured normative ways of thinking about sexuality. Glimpsing the worldmaking potential of queer style, plays by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While the characters associated with queer style are situated in a hostile generic and historical context, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts so as to access the utopian possibilities of early modern queer style. These theoretical frameworks also help bring into relief how the attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance can estrange us from the epistemologies of sexuality that narrow current thinking about sexuality and its relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

“Our eyes are sentinels unto our judgments”: Embodied Perception in The Changeling

This essay argues that Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) draws on debates about sense perception in the period to interrogate the effects of dramatic representation. After a brief overview of early modern perceptual theory, this essay demonstrates that the play's villain, De Flores, manipulates other characters’ perception through language. In fact, De Flores uses theatrical language to manipulate how other characters perceive their environment, indicating the theater's ability to manipulate audiences. By affecting how characters perceive, De Flores affects other characters’ ability to process and react to their environment, which impedes their judgment. The essay argues that much of The Changeling's dramatic action unfolds through a conflict between two models of perception—presentational and representational—that undergird much of the play's dramatic conflict. In the play, pervasive anxiety about judgment, particularly how perception affects judgment, is structured around the distinction between these two models of perception. Considering the play alongside representational and presentational models indicates how early modern dramatists engage with intellectual theories to consider how representation works and how spaces are experienced. In this way, the theater refracts and dramatizes theories about perception.

Performing Conversion

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

Paul’s Nave

This chapter provides an overview of the architectural features, uses, and users of the nave, with discussion of its physical condition. It also discusses the occupations of the nave—the various church-related and secular practices and professions that were carried out in the interior, and emphasizes the commercial activities, including those of labourers, lawyers, clergy, serving men, and criminals. The chapter looks at the newsmongers and walkers of Paul’s, including John Chamberlain, and attempts to reframe the rituals of their ‘walk’ as purposeful rather than idle. Several literary texts, including those by Thomas Middleton, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, are discussed. Further, consideration is given to how the nave’s architecture and material features, principally the tombs and monuments influenced the practices by both restricting and affording human agency, all the while affirming the importance of the dead to the living in Paul’s.

'Such Violent Hands'

For many, ‘Titus Andronicus’ exemplifies the extreme visual horror which characterises the subgenre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Long recognised as a collaboration between William Shakespeare and George Peele, the play’s notorious denouement – in which a Gothic queen is tricked into eating her slaughtered sons – has often been interpreted as a satire upon the revenge genre itself. Yet the nature of the play has recently been complicated by the claim that an additional banquet scene, only present in the 1623 Folio, may be a later addition written by a third dramatist, probably Thomas Middleton, and incorporated into the play sometime after 1616. This article will consider the implications of this probability further. It will explore how the author was not simply adding new material to ‘Titus Andronicus’ in order to provide a new selling point for a later revival of the work, but was constructing a new sequence designed to mirror and complement the already infamous cannibalistic conclusion of the original text. Understanding this scene as a later addition, we can now better understand how this additional scene serves as an integral turning point in the drama’s narrative, and is far less ‘disposable’ than previous critics have been equipped to realise.