Abstract
Traditionally read as a tragedy about the erotics of vision, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622) more compellingly foregrounds the affective force of the sense of touch. Attention to three scenes that foreground female touch – Beatrice's dropping of her gloves in Act 1, her touching of DeFlores’ face in Act 2 and her offering of a ‘scientific’ potion to her waiting woman in Act 4 – reveals how obsessively the play ponders the materiality of human skin. Reading these scenes, I depart from the traditional account of the play as a moralistic drama about the dangers of female sexuality. As it stages artisanal, medical and scientific modes of encounter with skin, I argue, The Changeling dispenses with conventional ideas of individual agency and offers instead a narrative of unwilled proximities, ‘hands-on’ practices and queer circuits of desire.
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Notes
For a compelling account of the sense of touch as a crucial part of the early modern reception of drama, see Mazzio (2003).
On the early modern understanding of vision, see Smith (2010).
Bosman (2009, 228) notes that leather is ‘the middle layer of a mammal's skin once it has been cleaned, worked, and preserved’ (emphasis added).
For an incisive reading of this image, see Crawford (2005).
On the erotics of perfume as early modern stage property, see Dugan (2008).
On this point, see Burks (2001), who equates Beatrice's ‘giddy turning’ with her ‘sexual awakening.’
On the play's representation of desire and aversion as affects that have little to do with will, see Bovilsky (2008).
On the canine association, see Crooke's (1615, 754) discussion of the ‘muscles [that] doe moue the skinne of the face.’ He also notes that unskilled surgeons occasionally disfigure faces so that ‘the cheekes haue flowne upward from the skin vnderneath them’ (Crooke, 1615, 754).
On the Paracelsian medical theories underlying this moment, see Bovilsky (2008) and Harris (1998, 54).
On the face as an especially important index of health, see Lindemann (2010, 274).
On the significance of color for Galenic theory, see Harvey (2007) and Paster (2009). See also Batman's (1582) popular compendium of ancient and medieval lore.
As Weisser (2009, 321) details, the examination enabled the practitioner to determine the proper treatment at a moment when a great many distinctive skin ailments were recognized, among them ‘abscesses, wens, impostumes, boils, pustules, tumours, pushes, carbuncles, furuncles, botches, blains, buboes, tokens, pimples and wheals.’
For a compelling argument that scholars have neglected the existence of an early modern discourse of skin porosity as sublimity, see Shirilan (2008).
On this cultural shift, see, for example, Shapin (1998, 65–117).
Note the name of the play's virginity test, ‘A merry sleight, but true experiment,’ also emphasizes ‘hands-on’ expertise by evoking a trick dependent on manual dexterity.
On glass as a euphemism for the hymen, see the entry for ‘glass’ in Williams (1997).
On its association with glass, see, for example, Ben Jonson's ([1607] 1875, 478) Entertainment of King James and Queen Anne at Theobalds, which refers to ‘divers diaphanal glasses, filled with several waters, that shewed like so many stones of orient and transparent hues.’
The conventional Renaissance bed trick, as Traub (2009, 177) has pointed out, ‘dramatizes male ignorance about particular female bodies while asserting female knowingness over the duped male.’
See Kalas (2007, 174), who describes the glass production process as follows: ‘a mixture of sand and ash is heated until the batch is fluid; and the character of this state molten is retained even after the glass is blown or molded and allowed to harden. The result is that in its final brittle state glass retains the liquid qualities of its fashioning.’
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Cahill, P. The play of skin in The Changeling. Postmedieval 3, 391–406 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.26