h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Changeling

I watched two versions: 1993 starring Elizabeth McGovern, Bob Hoskins, and Hugh Grant. And a 1974 production starring Helen Mirren, Brian Cox, and Stanley Baker.

A dark powerful tragedy regarded as one of the best non Shakespearean tragedies, written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley in 1622. It tells of Beatrice-Joanna, a young woman who, though betrothed to Alonzo, falls in love with Alsemero. The only way she can be married to Alsemero is if Alonzo is ‘disappeared’. Alsemero offers to do this but, as she points out, this would lead to him having to go away to escape retribution.

She asks her servant de Flores to help her and he agrees. He kills Alonzo and disposes of the body. Beatrice’s mistake however is to believe that he does it merely for pecuniary reward. He is in fact in love with Beatrice, and when she offers him money refuses, and lays down his terms for keeping quiet. Which are, essentially, that she becomes his lover.

Meanwhile, with Alonzo out of the way, the marriage to Alsemero can go ahead. Beatrice panics when she realises that Alsemero will know that she isn’t a virgin on the wedding night and so substitutes her maid, who is subsequently murdered by de Flores to protect the secret. Unfortunately Beatrice and de Flores are overheard during one of their ‘encounters’ and the whole plot is unmasked. De Flores stabs Beatrice and then kills himself.

There is also a sub plot involving a young wife and an older husband, two or three would-be lovers, a lunatic asylum and a comic ending. It is often either completely cut or seriously truncated in the two versions I have seen. I must read it one day.

Collaboration in playwriting was very common in this period. Unlike modern theatre with its long rehearsal period followed hopefully, by an even longer run, ElizaJacobean theatre offerings were continually changing. Most of what we know on this subject comes from a notebook called ‘Henslowe’s Diary’ which was a book kept by the theatre owner in which he jotted down everything from play receipts to payments for actors, writers and costumes.

In 1593 for example, the Rose put on one performance each of ‘The Jealous Comedy’, ‘Tamar Cham’, Massacre at Paris’ (Marlowe); two performances of ‘Harry the Sixth’ ‘The Comedy of Cosmo’, ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ and ‘Mulomuloc’; and three each of ‘A Knack to Know a Knave’, ‘Sir John Mandeville’, Titus Andronicus’, ‘Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay’, and Marlowe’s ‘Jew of Malta’.

The two Marlowe plays were the big box office successes. The demand for play scripts was so great that writers would combine together to provide them. I always imagine it like American sitcoms, with a team of writers doing the bits they are best at. Single authorship was the exception rather than the rule at this time. Even Shakespeare at the beginning and end of his career collaborated. Ben Jonson did so at the beginning. Given Ben’s irascible temperament that must have been fun for the junior partner.

This was not fully appreciated until the Henslowe ‘diaries’ were discovered, probably because single authored plays probably are more artistically consistent and therefore tended to make it into print, and therefore survive.

William Rowley was an actor, who played mostly comic roles, usually as a fat man, so it is conjectured that perhaps he was supersized himself. He wrote a number of other plays, always in collaboration with one or more co writers. He worked on a few with Thomas Middleton, often doing the comic sub plots, although for ‘The Changeling’ he is known to have written some of the main tragic plot.

Thomas Middleton is definitely a class above. He is rated with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher as one of the best Jacobean dramatists both for tragedy and comedy. He collaborated with Shakespeare on ‘Timon of Athens’ and revised ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Measure for Measure’ into the versions we have today. He may also have had a hand in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.

His finest work includes ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’ (see the conversation for 13th November below), a comedy ‘A Chaste Maid in Cheapside’, ‘The Changeling’ and ‘Women Beware Women’ which is, “women should be wary of other women”, and not a misogynistic shriek “Women!!!!! Beware……… Women!!!!!” Eeeeeeeek.

His work has become very popular through the twentieth and into the twenty first centuries. Last season the RSC in Stratford put on another of his plays ‘It’s a Mad World My Masters’. They modernised the text ‘in a few places’, that is they replaced the Jacobean bawdy language with more up to date bawdy language, set it in 50’s Soho (the London one, once the sink of iniquity filled with strip clubs, brothels, drug dealers, jazz clubs and other sources of fun) and threw in a Jazz Blues singer to comment musically on the action.

It was frenetic and hilarious, and dem blues was cool, man. Should it turn up anywhere near you, make the effort. Just don’t take anyone under the age of sixteen. Looks at calendar, sees that it is now 2013 and amends that to ‘under eight’.

Deb

[Amy P]