Abstract
At the top of Act Five, scene three of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s notorious revenge tragedy, The Changeling, Alsemero (the duped husband) and his confidant Jasperino exchange brief words. Jasperino suspects Beatrice Joanna (Alsemero’s wife) of adultery. He invokes a ‘proof’: ‘The prospect from the garden’ (5.3.1–2).2 Jasperino and Alsemero — snooping out the window — have caught Beatrice Joanna in the act with her ‘lover’ De Flores; Alsemero, forearmed, will now confront his wife and set in motion the events leading to her murder. And yet, certain though this tense exchange between men may seem, it leaves unanswered a key question: just what, exactly, is this ‘prospect’ of which Jasperino speaks? ‘From the garden’ suggests that the men’s spying eyes were watching at some distance from their subjects, and yet Jasperino has little doubt of what they have seen: Beatrice Joanna’s sexual desire, handmaiden to her sexual betrayal. The possibility that the ‘prospect’ might have captured something else of Beatrice Joanna’s experience — coercion, trauma, shame, rape — does not, indeed cannot, occur to Jasperino.
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Notes
Mike Pearson, Site-Specific Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) 16.
Kim Solga, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance: Invisible Acts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009) 143.
Fiona Wilkie, ‘The Production of “Site”: Site-Specific Theatre’, in Nadine Holdsworth and Mary Luckhurst (eds), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 87–106 (100–1).
Vermandero’s home appears to fit the description of what Christy Anderson calls ‘Albion’ architecture, the sometimes-awkward amalgam of native Elizabethan and imported classical traditions that became the vogue around the turn of the seventeenth century. As Anderson explains: ‘Albion’s architecture is not fixed, either in design or in understanding. The parts may be easily interchangeable, and the understanding changing over time. In contrast, classical architecture respects rules of composition.’ See Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 10.
See Marjorie Garber, ‘The Insincerity of Women’, in Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (eds), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 349–68.
See Bernard Klein, qtd. in D. J. Hopkins, City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London (New York and London: Routledge, 2008) 22.
Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 177.
See Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 96.
Una Chaudhuri, Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) 55.
Elin Diamond, ‘Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama’, in Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins and W. B. Worthen (eds), Modern Drama: Defining the Field (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 3–14 (11).
Mark Wigley, ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) 327–89 (336–7).
See Orlin, Locating Privacy, 110; Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (1995): 76–100 (81); and Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (2009): 4–22 (5).
Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (2009): 4–22 (5).
See Glynne Wickham, Herbert Berry and William Ingram (eds), English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 626–7.
John Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 45.
Michael Neill, Introduction, The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley (London: A. & C. Black, 2006) vii-xlv (xxxiii).
Christy Anderson, ‘Masculine and Unaffected: Inigo Jones and the Classical Ideal’, Art Journal 56.2 (1997): 48–54 (50).
See John Peacock, The Stage Designs of Inigo Jones: The European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 56–8. Anderson sums up Jones’s carefully calibrated performance of self quite elegantly: ‘Inigo Jones worked as hard on the creation of his architectural persona as he did on the design of buildings for the early Stuart court. Through a program of study in continental architectural and art theory, humanist education, and courtly behaviour, Jones redefined the intellectual status of architecture in England and forged a new role for the architect in public life.’ See Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition, 1.
Alina A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 140.
Lisa Hopkins, ‘Beguiling the Master of the Mystery: Form and Power in The Changeling’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 149–61 (149).
Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (2009): 4–22 (5).
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© 2014 Kim Solga
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Solga, K. (2014). Playing The Changeling Architecturally. In: Performing Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320179_4
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