Shame and Pleasure inThe Changeling

‘Of counsel with [m]y mistress’: The mistress–servant alliance in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622)

“…The alliance between Beatrice-Joanna and Diaphanta is forged over their shared experience of having a female body whose uncertainty constituted a source of anxiety to men and whose inscrutability, in Jennifer Panek's words, the play is much concerned with. 50 It is a critical commonplace that, in The Changeling, 'women's bodies, with their ability to change shape and hide secrets, represent a threatening nature which the taxonomies and structures of patriarchally conceived culture must at all costs control.' 51 However, the fact that it takes collaboration between two women for that threat to materialise has not been commented on.…”

Bad Blood, Black Desires: On the Fragility of Whiteness in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling

“…For Panek, Beatrice-Joanna's 'decision to have Alonzo murdered is itself at least partly rooted in maintaining the persona of desireless virgin purity by which she defines herself'. 77 What I think Neill's, Dolan's, and Panek's readings miss is that Beatrice-Joanna's power and agency are dependent on her retaining her privileges as a white woman. Retaining her reputation as chaste is what the theologian and critical race theorist Thandeka would call the 'pound of flesh' that Beatrice-Joanna must pay to maintain her unearned privileges.…”