Chapter 1 - Dominic Dromgoole’s The Changeling (2015): Social Division and Anamorphic Vision

Summary

When The Changeling was first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Phoenix playhouse in 1622, the building’s history of class-conflict and bloodsports is likely to have played an important role in conditioning the audience’s responses to Middleton and Rowley’s tragedy. This, too, was an almost brand-new playhouse, rebuilt as The Phoenix after its precursor, The Cockpit, was vandalised by apprentices on Shrove Tuesday 1617 to vent their frustration at the move of the Queen’s Men from the popular Red Bull open-air playhouse into the much smaller and forbiddingly pricey repurposed indoor Cockpit. There, an elite audience now watched plays rather than the cock-fights which had also been also a popular form of entertainment for apprentices. Against the backdrop of this history of social exclusion and destructive rage at the elite, De Flores’ frustration at the mismatch between his sense of entitlement as someone who ‘tumbled into th’world a gentleman’ and the poverty that has ‘thrust [him] out to servitude’ brought the grievances of those excluded from the playhouse on to its stage (2.1.48–9). Beatrice-Joanna’s vicious rebuke ‘Think but upon the distance that creation / Set’twixt your blood and mine, and keep thee there’ conflates social superiority with sexual rejection (3.4.130–2), setting her up as the play’s gatekeeper and sexually desirable gateway to the social elite.