Re-reading Rape in The Changeling

Abstract

In Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622), Beatrice-Joanna's father insists that she marry Alonzo di Piracquo. Her servant De Flores demands her virginity in payment eliminating Piracquo so that she may instead marry Alsemero, predicting, loathsomely but correctly, that Thou'lt love anon / What thou so fears't and faint'st to venture (3.4.173-74).1 Alsemero, despite his apparent lack of sexual experience, travels prepared with test to ensure that his wife, should he happen to acquire one his journey, is virgin. When Beatrice-Joanna is discovered to have had sex with De Flores and to have colluded in Piracquo's murder, her father, husband, and lover all turn her. Alsemero even locks her into closet with De Flores, commanding repeat performance of her adultery: I'll be your pander now; rehearse again / Your scene of lust, that you may be perfect (5.3.114-15).In response to this trafficking in Beatrice-Joanna, The Changeling has sometimes been read as about rape. In provocative and influential essay challenging long tradition of demonizing Beatrice-Joanna, Deborah Burks argues that the not only presents De Flores's defloration of Beatrice-Joanna as but also, in accord with obsolete but not superceded statute definitions of rape, as crime targeted at propertied men, through piece of their property, women. The violation of the woman in this is shown clearly and horribly to be an assault man, by whom she means first Piracquo but then Beatrice- Joanna's husband, Alsemero, and her father, Vermandero (762-63). (As this string of possible stakeholders suggests, one of the interesting things about the is that it is hard to determine in 3.4 precisely who owns Beatrice-Joanna and is thus the victim of this theft.)2 Christina Malcolmson calls what happens between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores a form of (156); Molly Smith describes their relationship as rooted in (112, 90). Building the assumption that what happens between De Flores and Beatrice-Joanna is rape, Judith Haber reads the as insisting on the coincidence of fear and desire, of virgin and whore, of marriage and (80). Although Kim Solga points out that Beatrice-Joanna's status as victim of sexual violence (indeed, of any violence at all) is wholly uncertain (146), and therefore up to the audience to determine, she also consistently assumes that De Flores rapes Beatrice-Joanna, who might best be described, therefore, as victim. Finally, Karen Bamford labels The Changeling late Jacobean play (151).This essay argues that The Changeling depicts coercion and consent in socially and morally complex ways that describing it as rape play flattens. I am particularly interested in the ways in which Beatrice-Joanna is herself sometimes coercive or at least strategic in her schemes to have her will. Yet I also want to challenge division in criticism of The Changeling between those critics who argue that the depicts and those who simply ignore the possibility and the criticism that posits it. Although questioning the usefulness of as verdict is riskier strategy than ignoring it, keeping the possibility of active allows us to scrutinize the interplay of coercion and consent, of victimization and strategy, not only in the but also more broadly in theoretical and historical discussions of rape. I propose to re-read the in light of both Janet Halley's critique of carrying brief for the feminine, or in this case, female character, and recent work the available ways of describing and assessing sexual coercion in seventeenth-century England. Is it possible to re-read the negotiations between Beatrice-Joanna and De Flores in The Changeling as something other than rape, as statutes defined it, while still suggesting that the participates in history of debating rape's meaning? Is it possible to take break from either defending or prosecuting Beatrice-Joanna? …