The pleasure of your Bedlam’: Mismanaging Insanity in The Changeling
Résumé
Together with Dekker’s The Honest Whore, Part 1, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and Fletcher’s The Pilgrim, Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling testifies to the “abnormally extensive use of madness upon the Jacobean stage” (Rentoul Reed) and stands as one of the best and most famous English “madhouse plays”. The first record of its performance at Whitehall dates back to January 1623, but it is likely to have been performed at the Phoenix Theatre as early as 1622. Whatever the precise date, it seems significant that the play was performed after the 1620 “Petition of the Poor Distracted People in the House of Bedlem”, that is, after the appointment of Dr Helkiah Crooke — one of James I’s private court physicians — as keeper of Bedlam in 1618. The timing suggests that Middleton and Rowley may be making topical connections between Dr Crooke and their Dr Alibius. To begin with, a brief diachronic survey of the hospital of Bethlehem from its creation in 1247 to Rowley and Middleton’s days will be helpful in gaining a better understanding of the sorry state the asylum was in and what might have been the Jacobean audience’s shared knowledge and expectations as spectators. Topically resonant allusions in the play to mismanagement will then be traced and analysed — that is, elements exposing the predominance of financial motives over medical competence and concern. These include suggestions of embezzlement, abuse of power, neglect and negation, exploitation, and so forth. Middleton and Rowley’s satirical target will finally emerge as having a broader scope. Our focus will shift from political to religious criticism, from “clinical” to human folly. But these categories may also prove permeable.
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