Book Review: The Changeling
She that in life and love refuses me,
In death and shame my partner she shall be
Boy, this was not what I expected. See, when you say ‘the changeling’, you somewhat imagine fairies coming in the night and snatching human babies away to their kingdom, replacing them with a strange and unearthly child of their own… but that’s not what happens here. Far from it, in fact. I don’t think you could get much further, to be honest with you.
It’s a bit like Othello, tragic, fuelled by love, lust and badly executed plans. All in all – A bit like watching a train crash in slow motion. But that’s what you get with a Jacobean tragedy. They do love, murder and lust and ghosts and men taking the moral high ground. Which I find a little annoying, to be honest – the men taking the moral high ground part. It’s just so… predictable it’s almost boring! Thankfully in this play by Thomas Middleton, it’s not a priest. I would have thrown the play out the window if it was a priest. So, I may have read this with a 2023 eye. And boy it gave me some serious stink eye.
So essentially you have Beatrice-Joanna, and she is betrothed to Alonzo. But, she wants to marry Alsemero (quick question: what is it with Jacobean names?). She employs the despised De Flores (who is in love with her) to murder Alonzo so she can marry Alsemero and once he has, he does not demand money, but Beatrice Joanna, herself, as his prize. You can somewhat see that it all goes downhill from there.
Naturally, in this day and age, you can marry whoever the heck you want – but back in the Jacobean era, not so much. Marriages were arranged and it was rare that a love match would happen. So can you really blame Beatrice Joanna for wanting to have some agency and marry Alsemero. True, murder is murder, and I don’t condone her actions and I’m willing to bet that if she dared to speak of it to her father he would’ve said no, then made her marry Alonzo right then and there. We might have an even messier play if that were to happen. In effect, it all comes down to Power. She wants it – she uses De Flores infatuation against him to do her bidding only to backfire when he inverts the power and rapes her. Power is interesting, De Flores is a servant – so he doesn’t have any. But a man’s word is still stronger and more believable than a woman’s. He is also aware that Beatrice Joanna spends much of her time either avoiding his horrendous face or degrading him – emasculating him. So, the subversion of power is his way of saying – both figuratively and literally – fuck you.
Although the murderous plot is revealed in the end. Fair. Murder is bad. So is the rape and yet Beatrice Joanna, in all Jacobean predictability, is called the whore. Being a murderess is one thing, but being a whore is very different. Effectively, Beatrice Joanna is doomed to fail and that’s not taking into account that god-awful-bullshit virginity test. It’s what you get in a world dominated by the damned patriarchy.