The Changeling Study Guide

Thomas Middleton was born into wealth, the son of a prosperous and reputable bricklayer in London. After beginning his career as a poet, Middleton entered the world of London theater, where he made both friends (namely playwright Thomas Dekker) and enemies (like the prolific writer Ben Jonson). During the bubonic plague pandemic of 1603, Middleton found new focus and motivation and began collaborating with playwright-actor William Rowley. The two men co-authored popular plays including Wit at Several Weapons, A Fair Quarrel and, most famously, The Changeling itself. Since Rowley had made a name for himself as a clown, often playing broadly humorous parts, the Middleton-Rowley collaborations were uniquely seriocomic, blending the high drama popular at the time with Rowley’s sillier sensibility. Middleton continued to write until 1624, when his plays began to draw complaints from the Spanish Embassy; to appease Spain, Britain (likely) banned Middleton from writing for the stage. Today, Middleton is considered one of the most important dramatists of the Jacobean era.

The Changeling is set in Alicante, a city in the Spanish province of Valencia; as Alsemero makes clear, the story begins soon after a temporary cessation in the Spanish-Dutch conflict known as the Eighty Years’ War (which continued, with stops and starts, from 1568 to 1648). But though the Spanish Catholic characters in The Changeling resent the Dutch for their newfound Protestantism, Middleton and Rowley—as English protestants and allies to the Dutch crown—would have likely sympathized with the very “Hollanders” Alsemero criticizes. Indeed, The Changeling focuses on Spanish Catholics as a subtle means of political critique. By (implicitly) aligning Beatrice’s passion and irrationality with Catholicism, Middleton and Rowley were likely aiming to critique Spanish beliefs and practices. This message was especially salient given that, at the time of The Changeling’s first performances, King James of I England was preparing to ally with the Spanish crown; in much of his work, Middleton hoped to discourage such an alliance.

The plot of The Changeling comes directly from The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the crying and execrable Sinne of Murder, a collection of short stories by English writer John Reynolds. Formally, the jarring, tragicomic tone of The Changeling recalls some of William Shakespeare’s later work, like The Tempest and Cymbeline (sometimes considered to be “problem plays” because of their tricky tonal shifts). But the plot of The Changeling has more in common with the so-called “revenge plays” popular during the Jacobean era. Authors like Thomas Kyd (who wrote The Spanish Tragedy) and John Webster (who wrote both The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil) similarly focused on the sometimes horrifying, often bloody ways in which lovers and courtiers could take their revenge.