Monthly Archives: May 2013

The subplot plays a significant role in dramas, particularly Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas.  The subplot reinforces the theme/main idea of the play by presenting characters that are in situations parallel to those of the main characters, yet have contrasting personalities.  For example, Isabella and Beatrice are both young women with prospective men in their lives.  Three men are vying for Isabella’s attention and affection (Francisco, Antonia, and Lollio) and three men are also interested in Beatrice (Alonso, Alsemero, and De Flores).  Isabella’s placed in a situation that limits her freedom and makes her an object of her husband’s authority, while Beatrice also initially lacks the freedom to choose whom she wants to marry.

These characters dramatically differ, however, in that Isabella remains virtuous and chaste, and does not succumb to the pursuits of the men attempting to win her over.  In fact, she ironically beats them at their own game and wittily exposes their true intentions. Beatrice, on the other hand, takes a very different approach and loses her innocence in every way possible.  The consequence of her actions is a serious one–death.  Although she temporarily gets what she wants, the ends certainly do not justify the means.

Isabella and Beatrice are foils of each other, and the inclusion of Isabella in the plot of the play makes the audience see even more clearly how the selfish, immoral acts of a woman lead to a snowball effect of destruction.

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.