The Changeling

As much as I have enjoyed Jacobean playwrights, it's still hard to read anything from this period without reflexively overlaying Shakespeare, without continually comparing phrasing and content. I find myself always surprised that it isn't Shakespeare, that his individual authorial voice does not completely define a generation.

And what a generation it was. For my money, this is without doubt the high-water mark of the theatre. It's a time when live theater met linguistic explosion, where high art met true popular culture, where the theatre was a breathing, vital part of the collective experience. Modern comparisons can be so glib, but Elizabethan and particularly Jacobean theater was the HBO or FX of the day, producing content that electrified as much as Big Love or Breaking Bad or The Sopranos does today. And it did it in the same way: mixing intelligent insight with crowd-pleasing sex and violence.

It's hard not to instinctively think of Richard and Iago when reading DeFlores, to not see a young Lady Macbeth in Beatrice. But The Changeling by Middleton and Rowley (etext here) is a different beast than Shakespeare. It's much more frank, for a start. There's a bed-switch here, a la Measure For Measure, but crueler and discussed in very plain terms. This is not a play safe for outdoor festivals and their tourist base. The other comparison, of course, is the verse ... which simply is a halting beast compared to Shakespeare. Perhaps it's familiarity, but it's Shakespeare and Marlowe that read easily for me and as much as I enjoy other Jacobeans, I admit their verse doesn't hit the ark of beautiful simplicity quite as often. And, of course, there's the violence that's the hallmark of the period. Shakespeare only really approached it in Titus Andronicus, but even that pales to some of what the Jacobeans inflict on their characters and audience.

I was actually somewhat disappointed as I raced to the climax of The Changeling. As the dominoes were put in place and the tension was slowly racheted up, I was expecting a true explosion of blood and chaos. This Grand Guignol fireworks is what Jacobean theater does best, so this quiet offstage climax is completely unsettling ... like a summer blockbuster where nothing explodes. It's very intentional: this tragedy is quiet, dark, and mean. This is not operatic, but petty and ugly.

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The scenes between DeFlores and Beatrice are stunning in their focus and power, and deserving of attention. It's often hard to find good verse work for classes that lies outside the well-trod 37-or-so, but there's a treasure trove of scene and monologue work here ... especially for women. There's no reason that a "Shakespeare" monologue or scene needs to be from Shakespeare, and this is a really good play I need to keep in mind in the future.