News from Plymouth and The Changeling

Abstract

WHEN the public performance of drama in England resumed following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two dramatists were granted the privilege and authority to put on plays: Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant. One of the first plays to be staged by the Duke of York’s Company under Davenant at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, licensed some forty years previously and in revival appearing for the first time in twenty years, at least according to Samuel Pepys, who records of his visit on 28 February 1661 that ‘it takes exceedingly’.1 Pepys was wrong about the play’s absence from the stage, if John Downes’s claim that in 1659 it had been staged at the Phoenix with Thomas Sheppey as Antonio and Thomas Betterton in the role of Dr Flores is correct, but his judgement was prescient.2 It would appear that Middleton and Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy was popular for at least the rest of the decade, and probably beyond: that would help explain the figure of ‘the Changeling’ on the illustrated title-page of Francis Kirkman’s The Wits (1672). It was printed (for a second time) in 1668, the same year it was staged at court.3 Scholars have not delved into the matter beyond these bare facts, but Davenant’s association with the play was a long one, and must have been a factor in his decision to revive it in 1661.