On the surface, The Changeling isn’t all that different from some of the other plays that we’ve read in that by the end, justice (in some fashion) has been meted out to those deserving of it. Bodies strew the stage, dramatic final words are spoken (“‘Tis time to die when ’tis a shame to live.”), and things seem somewhat right by the close of the final curtain (perhaps because the two principal villainous characters are dead). Yet this play is far from just another Renaissance tragedy.
When compared with some other of our readings, the play’s conclusion seems rather tame; the deaths are numbered, and De Flores and Beatrice depart seemingly on their own volition. Yet by the time Joanna breathes her final breaths, she has already lost something perhaps more valuable than her life, her reputation. And what’s more the loss of this intangible is not merely the result of a one time occurrence, but rather a repeated and consistent set of choices that she makes throughout the play’s five acts. In many ways, The Changeling signifies the vast difference in female characterization that we’ve encountered since the start of our readings this semester. From the start of the play, Joanna is neither the passive nor genteel character we might’ve expected out of a female character. Her degrading treatment of De Flores from the onset foreshadows in many respects the downward moral spiral that her character will undergo.
As a character whose status is of less than noble standing, Joanna is able to hold herself on her virginal purity and (dare I say) innocence. She sullies both of these beyond repair. So to return to the question that Alsemero originally posed to De Flores in the final scene, What price goes murder? The answer for Joanna is not merely her life, but her reputation, honor and purity, and by 5.3, she pays up.
This is well observed, Peter; pointing out how badly behaved Beatrice is from the start helps to explain the swiftness of her total disintegration. The way she degrades De Flores even while she flirts with Alsemero invites the audience to wonder about her capacity for cruelty. It’s ironic that De Flores’s ingenuity in dispatching Diaphanta leads her to make a valuable discovery about the danger of judging people superficially–“His faces loathes one, / But look upon his care, who would not love him” (5.1.72-73). Normally we would think of such a realization as a demonstration of growing maturity; here it’s just one more proof of her capacity for depravity even while it shows her continuing naivete, something like that innocence that Shazia describes above.