The Changeling: The State of Play

Ann Thompson, Lena Cowen Orlin, Gordon McMullan, Kelly Stage

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350174399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection of original essays on Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's unsettling revenge tragedy The Changeling represents key new directions in criticism and research. The 13 chapters fall into six groups focusing on questions of space, theology, collaboration, disability both mental and physical, and performance both early modern and contemporary. The Changeling 's critical and theatrical history, and a selected bibliography for the volume helps readers easily find the most frequently cited materials in the volume as a whole, while individual essays detail the full expanse of critical sources to pursue for further analysis. With contributors ranging from highly regarded critics to emerging scholars drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Switzerland, the collection equips readers to engage with a variety of critical approaches to the play, moving a long way beyond the last century's tendency to treat Middleton as 'the early modern Ibsen', to ignore Rowley, and to focus almost wholly on a single aspect of the play's plot. Key themes and topics include:
· Performance
· Space and affect
· Authorial collaboration
· Gender and representation
· Violence
· Disability

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Part One Spaces and Places
• 1 Space, Gender and the Rules of Movement in The Changeling
• 2 Chang(el)ing Spaces: Dramatic Forms of Worlding in Late Jacobean England
• Part Two Collaboration and the Hospital Plot
• 3 A Secret Within the Castle: William Rowley and The Changeling
• 4 Isabella
• Part Three States of Mind
• 5 ‘The Pleasure of Your Bedlam’: Mismanaging Insanity in The Changeling
• 6 Passions, Affections and Instinct in The Changeling
• Part Four Disabilities
• 7 The Changeling’s Phantom Limbs
• 8 Disability Representation and Theatrical Form in The Changeling and The Nice Valour
• Part Five Actor and Audience in Jacobean Performance
• 9 The Changeling, The Boy Actor and Female Subjectivity
• 10 Witnessing at the Phoenix: Early Modern Audiences at The Changeling
• Part Six Rape and the Female Body in Contemporary Performance
• 11 ‘What Would a Foreign Woman Be?’ Sexual Borderlands, Hospitality, and ‘Forgetting Parentage’ in The Changeling on Film
• 12 Feminist Staging in Brave Spirits’ Changeling
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright