The Unchanging Changeling: Jacobean Resonance in Contemporary Discourses on Sexual Assault
by Rosemary Ewing
Content Warning: This article contains discussions of sensitive and potentially disturbing topics, including murder and sexual assault. Reader discretion is advised.
On March 3rd of 2021 around 9 pm, Sarah Everard left her friend’s house in high-visibility clothing, a turquoise jacket, and reflective shoes.
At 21:34, off-duty police officer Wayne Couzens stopped Sarah Everard on her walk home, telling her he was arresting her for violating the lockdown orders in place in London at the time to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Couzens drove Sarah out to Dover, where he raped her and used his police belt to strangle her to death.
On March 5th, CCTV cameras recorded Couzens filling a container of petrol in Whitfield. On March 7th, Couzens disposed of Everard’s burnt remains in a pond.
On March 10th, the police found Sarah’s body. Couzens was charged with the murder on March 12th. Country-wide vigils took place the weekend of the 13th.
I was studying in London when they found Sarah Everard. Six days later, my Shakespeare professor taught Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, also informally known as the “Jacobean Rape Play.” The resonances were coincidental. We were following the syllabus — the study and discussion of this play were not in response to the news. Perhaps this is why the professor did not feel the need to issue a content warning.
At 3 pm, sitting cross-legged in my 150-square-foot Bloomsbury living room, I pulled my computer onto my lap and entered the weekly Zoom call. It was March 2021, and my masters’ courses had been pushed online. My professor’s camera was already on, the low angle of his computer emphasizing the slick wooden paneling of his home office. Peering at the screen over the rim of his teacup he began, “Alright, so, The Changeling.”
The class, composed of eight students assigned female at birth (AFAB) and one cisgender man, began to discuss the plot.
In The Changeling, a high-born woman, Beatrice-Joanna, falls in love with Alsemero, a well-suited match from Valentia. However, De Flores, an older man with a severe skin condition, would much prefer to enjoy the attention of Beatrice himself. A third suitor later enters the mix: Alonzo, to whom Beatrice’s father promises her hand in marriage. Beatrice attempts to trick De Flores into murdering Alonzo so that she can be with Alsemero. But after he kills Alonzo in Act III, De Flores tells Beatrice that she must submit to his will or risk him exposing her murderous order, telling her, “Why are not you as guilty, in I’me sure / As deep as I?…There will be no rescue for you” (III.iv.1239–1243, my emphasis).
De Flores is aware that Beatrice-Joanna has no interest in him. In fact, he is aware that she despises him, yet he resolves to pursue and even force himself on her. Early in the play, De Flores’s musings on sexually coercing Beatrice are saturated with the language of violation:
I know she had rather wear my pelt tan’d
In a pair of dancing pumps, then I should thrust my fingers
Into her sockets here I know she hates me,
Yet cannot chuse but love her:
No matter, if but to vex her, I’le haunt her still,
Though I get nothing else, Il’e have my will.
(The Changeling, I.i.259–264)
The stage directions tell us that De Flores is handling a glove Beatrice-Joanna has discarded. The “thrusting” of his fingers “into her sockets” is embedded in the text referencing De Flores forcing Beatrice’s glove onto his own hand. However, it also references a sexual assault.
Back in Act III, De Flores wheedles with Beatrice-Joanna, explaining that she is a “whore in [her] affection” and that he “will confess all” if she does not sleep with him (III.iv.1302; 1309). As Beatrice-Joanna begins to panic, De Flores pulls her into his arms, crystalizing the extent to which he’s immobilized her, rid her of choice. He assures her that she will soon love what she “so fear’st” (1333).
Beatrice-Joanna begins to hyperventilate, which inspires the extortionist to observe, “‘Lasse, how the Turtle pants!” (1332). Reading this alone in my pocket-sized flat, I couldn’t help but think about the summer of 2006 when a swallow got into our house, its delicate head thumping into the windows and its small, brown wings beating the air as it tried and tried and tried to find an exit. Reading these lines years later, my own breath felt sharp in my throat. I swallowed.
Weeping, Beatrice-Joanna begs mercy, “let me go poor unto my bed with honor” (1319). Nevertheless, De Flores takes what he wants, blackmailing his way to her body.
Our professor, a highly-respected British scholar in his fifties asked the class to consider whether this encounter between De Flores and Beatrice was a rape or a seduction. After a long pause, the only student in the class who identified as a cisgender man spoke up. “It’s not rape, exactly,” he remarked in an accent groomed by Cambridge education, “it’s more like coercion.” The professor’s mouth took on a sardonic curl. “Well, I think the me-too-ers would have something to say about that,” he chuckled, separating himself from the movement.
My messenger app chimed in a new window. My friends and I didn’t usually text in class, but this time my friend couldn’t help herself. She was so angry and uncomfortable with the professor, the privilege he exuded, and the lack of acknowledgment of the distinctly related details of Sarah Everard’s case overwhelming the news cycle. I typed back that because the class was primarily made up of students assigned female at birth, statistically there had to be survivors in the room. I wanted nothing more than a pint.
I spent that week thinking about women’s bodies and our possession over them, our ability to move through space. I felt like I was wading through a rotting swamp, my mobility hindered by fear of sexually-motivated violence.
Beatrice-Joanna is not the only woman in The Changeling to be molested as a form of payment. Another character, Isabella, has an affair and when another man, Lollio, discovers her transgression, he croons, “Come sweet rogue, kiss me my little Lacedemonian / Let me feel how thy pulses beat; Thou has a thing / About thee would doe a man pleasure, I’le lay my hand on’t” (III.iii.1093). The predator reduces and degrades Isabella’s genitals to a “thing” from which a man might derive “pleasure.” This aggression is not only demeaning, but violent. The text tells us he “lays” (or at least attempts to lay) his hand on her, only arrested from further assault by the entrance of Isabella’s husband.
My PTSD had come back. Or gotten worse, I don’t know. Beatrice-Joanna, Isabella, and Sarah Everard’s bodies felt nested in my own, their trauma overlaying with mine like a stack of Post-it notes, all the same size, the same shape. I’d woken up in cold sweats most nights since the news about Sarah broke.
Sitting in the blue light of my computer, I watched two men debate whether Beatrice-Joanna had been seduced, while my wounds sat packed with salt.
Besmirching and discrediting survivors is central to the patriarchal cycle of violence. As accusations against Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK, and dozens of other high-profile men hit the media during the rise of the #MeToo movement, so too did personal sexual information about their survivors. Sex workers were written off immediately, as were any survivors whose narrative deviated from the idealized conception of the snowdrop of feminine victimhood, the Desdemonas, Lavinias, and Ophelias of our world. Women in high-profile cases took permanent hits to their reputations: Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and more.
“No one will believe you.”
400 years ago, male perpetrators of such violence were playing the same song. De Flores calls Beatrice-Joanna a “whore” and hisses “Push, you forget your selfe, a woman dipt in blood, and talk of modesty” (III. iv. 1284). To De Flores, because Beatrice-Joanna has conspired to spill Alonzo’s “blood,” she has no claim to her own virginity.
We learned in that class that Jacobean theater was marked by excesses of gore and lust. The use of prosthetic limbs, the shadowy staging, and the too-frequent sexualization of corpses transition the genre from macabre into kitsch. The violence in The Changeling follows the style of its time–it is self-awarely theatrical, marked with grotesque artifice…and yet here I was with news articles before me that materialized this imagined violence, these imagined women.
And as with all cycles, it came back around. The following September, Sabina Nessa was killed in a park in southeast London, while on a five-minute walk to meet a friend at a neighborhood pub. Sabina Nessa was a 28-year-old teacher from Bedfordshire and had just obtained her teaching certificate the previous year.
However, in the first week after her death, there were half as many Facebook posts as what had gone up for Sarah Everard and 50% fewer reactions with these posts. Sabina Nessa was a woman of color and her story didn’t garner the kind of sympathy and attention missing white woman syndrome holds for stories such as Sarah Everard’s.
Continuously in the United States and Canada, Indigenous women go missing and are murdered at alarming–and alarmingly undocumented–rates.
This pattern of oppressive brutalization, of women disappearing, of being attacked, of not being able to walk to the shops alone is not really a “women” problem though, is it? Unchecked white patriarchal power is continuously violently erupting across the globe, endangering and murdering anyone who challenges its absolute dominion. The state funds modern-day slave patrols and calls it police; the former president endorses sexual assault and calls it “locker room talk.” De Flores coerces Beatrice-Joanna and calls it love.
Women have an intimate knowing of the menace of patriarchal control and the gendered violence it proffers and excuses. We don’t share our locations with our friends, wear reflective clothing, and pay for rideshares after a night out because it’s fun. I wasn’t excited to discuss The Changeling because it’s fun, but because I’d hoped to bring up how I’d read De Flores’ assault of the glove, because I’d hoped to discuss how women don’t have to do anything “wrong” to fall prey to someone like De Flores or Couzens. Instead, I was spoken over and spoken for in a manner so sharply ironic that it took me three years and a flight home to finally articulate my experience.
Today I’m still swallowing–there’s a grain of sand in my throat and I’m beating breaking wings against glass. We are living the rough drama of the Jacobean play every day. Violent extremism is spilling over the bounds of the 400-year-old page. It is on my doorstep, it is in my blood. Because Beatrice-Joanna too, Isabella too, Sarah too, Sabina too, me too.
Rosemary Ewing, M.A., M.Ed. is a second-year student in the English Literature PhD program at Arizona State University. Ewing specializes in premodern critical race feminism with inflections in queer and fat studies. She has also been a teacher for nearly 10 years and is originally from the Washington, D.C. area.
