A r t i c l e

T h e p l ay o f s k i n i n T h e C h a n g e l i n g

Pa t r i c i a C a h i l l

Department of English, Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

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.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2012) 3, 391–406.
doi:10.1057/pmed.2012.26

Traditionally read as a narrative about the erotics of vision, Thomas Middleton
and William Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) in fact offers a wide-ranging
inquiry into sensory apprehension. That sensory experiences other than that of
vision matter greatly to this tragedy of adultery and murder in southern Spain is
readily apparent from what is perhaps its most notorious scene: the moment in
Act 5 when Alsemero imprisons his wife Beatrice and her ‘deflowerer’ DeFlores
in a closet from which Beatrice will emerge with a fatal wound. Concealed from
the sight of the audience, the lovers’ hidden encounter is conveyed only through
what Beatrice’s father describes as ‘horrid sounds’ – namely Beatrice’s five cries

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of ‘O,’ which confusedly mingle the markers of orgasm and death (5.3.139–141).
Just as these unsettling acoustic modalities bespeak a domain of affect that can’t
be confined within Alsemero’s closet, so, too, does the play elsewhere call upon
the non-visual senses – especially the so-called ‘intimate senses’ of touch, smell
and taste – to conjure up a volatile affective realm distinct from that of cogni-
tion or conscious awareness. Many of the scenes featuring DeFlores foreground
the affective charge of these intimate senses. For example, DeFlores offers
a bravura performance of what it means to be in the throes of touch when he
stands alone on stage anticipating the pleasures that await him for having killed
Alonzo (the man to whom Beatrice was betrothed at the start of the play and
whose murder she has solicited): swooning, he sighs that he ‘feel[s]’ Beatrice ‘in
[his] arms already’ and senses as well ‘[h]er wanton fingers combing out [his]
beard’ (2.2.147–148). Later, when he encounters Alonzo’s brother, DeFlores
recoils as he is overpowered by the ‘smell’ of the dead man’s blood and thus by
the capacity of the olfactory to create intimacy where none exists (4.2.41). And,
when he and Beatrice are about to die, DeFlores, once again imagining shared
sensory intimacies, speaks of his boundless desire for Beatrice in shockingly
gustatory terms. Of her virginity, he says, ‘it was so sweet to me/That I have
drunk up all, left none behind/For any man to pledge me’ (5.3.169–171).

Yet, of the three intimate senses, it is the sense of touch that emerges as

irrepressibly powerful in The Changeling, a fact that is hardly surprising given
that touch was often understood to be the ‘root’ of all the other senses (Harvey,
2003, 5).

1

This understanding of touch as at the core of the sensorium is, in

fact, encrypted in the response of Beatrice’s father to her closeted cries, for
tactile effects are key to the Latin root of ‘horrid,’ which means ‘to stand on
end (as hair), to bristle, to be rough; to shake, tremble, shiver, shudder, quake;
to shudder at, dread, loathe,’ (s.v. ‘horre,’ Oxford English Dictionary).
Similarly, in Act 4, when Alsemero reacts with hyperbolic rage to his friend’s
claim that Beatrice has been unfaithful, his ocular imagery relies upon the
tactile: ‘O, were she the sole glory of the earth,/Had eyes that could shoot
fire into kings’ breasts,/And touched, she sleeps not here!’ (4.2.105–107).
Alsemero’s evocation of this Petrarchan lady who can blast flames with her eyes
into the hearts of sovereigns not only instantiates an early modern under-
standing of vision as itself tangible;

2

it also bleeds into an image of Beatrice as

irremediably ‘touched.’ As his moralizing language underscores, she is damned
precisely because, in betraying him, she responds to the illicit pleasures of the
tactile.

What makes The Changeling such a complicated text, however, is that it

refuses fully to endorse Alsemero’s understanding of tactile sensation – one that
assumes that we, like Beatrice, can choose to be (or not to be) touched and thus
that we are, in effect, the owners of our sensations. Alongside Alsemero’s
misogynist narrative about the dire consequences of erotic touch for women is
another narrative in which tactile sensation appears far less knowable. For

1 For a compelling

account of the
sense of touch as a
crucial part of the
early modern
reception of
drama, see Mazzio
(2003).

2 On the early

modern
understanding of
vision, see Smith
(2010).

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many early modern thinkers, the nature of the sense of touch was obscure,
as can be gleaned from their ambivalence about the role of skin, the primary
organ with which tactility was associated. The porosity and color of skin were
widely recognized as valuable registers of one’s physical and emotional life,
as pioneering scholarship on early modern medicine and humoralism has
underscored (Siraisi, 1990; Paster, 1993, 2004, 2009; Schoenfeldt, 1999).
However, skin could also be a source of terrific anxiety insofar as it repre-
sented a permeable boundary between inner and outer domains. Indeed, Pollard
(2010) argues that the early modern period witnessed a shift in conceptualiza-
tions of skin: an older Galenic notion of the skin as providing a salutary
openness to the environment turned into a more ‘defensive’ cutaneous image,
such as that suggested by the anatomist and court physician Helkiah Crooke
in his 1615 medical treatise Mikrocosmographia, wherein skin is likened to
‘the wall of the Castle’ that defends ‘inward parts’ from cold weather (Pollard,
2010, 114). Such a conflation of skin and fortified architecture may stand out
to readers of The Changeling, for the play takes place within a castle and
features in its subplot a physician who may have been modeled on Crooke
(Jackson, 2005, 217). But an allegorical reading is not what I am after here.
Rather, by looking at The Changeling as itself a text about skin, and thus not
altogether unlike Crooke’s Mikrocosmographia, I aim to illuminate how the
play fashions touch as an object of inquiry, and as a sense that is as enigmatic as
it is powerful.

The Changeling stages for its audience a series of affective encounters with

skin – including encounters with the hymen, with which it is clearly obsessed
and whose Greek etymology, we might note, suggests ‘thin skin’ (s.v. ‘hymen,’
Oxford English Dictionary Online). Appearing in an era when Londoners were
increasingly attuned to what Harkness has described as the new ‘sensibility’ of
‘vernacular science,’ including its privileging of the practices of experimentation
and observation (Harkness, 2007, xvii), the play, much like the early modern
Londoners who investigated nature, subjects skin and tactility to scrutiny.
Indeed, insofar as it repeatedly showcases experimentation and observation –
phenomena that are absent from the play’s ‘source’ text, Reynolds’s The
Triumphs of God’s Revenge (1621) – The Changeling might be understood as
participating in, rather than merely thematizing, endeavors associated with
early modern vernacular science. By focusing on three key ‘skin scenes’ rather
than on the anxious, even ‘hysterical,’ narrative of deflowering on which past
criticism has focused (for example, Little, 1993; Garber, 1996; Haber, 2003),
I aim to show both that the play engages the new sensibility of vernacular
science in its artisanal, medical and experimental modes, and that the play’s
affective currents are inescapably queer. Indeed, I argue that rather than offering
a simple tale of adulterous passion, The Changeling discloses the waywardness
of the sense of touch; challenging the notion of individual agency, it shows that
skins have a way of going awry on their own.

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A G l ov e S t o r y

In a much-discussed scene at the end of Act 1, DeFlores picks up a glove that
Beatrice has dropped, perhaps as a way of signaling her interest in Alsemero, who
is present on stage. That this single glove, a common love token in the period,
serves as a kind of stand-in for Beatrice’s body has frequently been noted
(Whigham, 1988, 339; Neill, 1997, 171–172; Stallybrass and Jones, 2001).
Indeed, many have claimed that what the scene dramatizes is Beatrice’s attempt to
re-assert possession of the body her father would dominate through his marriage
negotiations with Alonzo. Stallybrass and Jones, for example, aptly describe the
glove as a ‘stretchable skin’ and a ‘prosthetic body,’ the circulation of which
Beatrice seeks to control. Accordingly, they suggest that when she responds to
DeFlores’ action by discarding her second glove, she ‘animates’ the gloves as a
‘material curse,’ for she hopes aloud that they will enact her loathing of DeFlores
by ‘eating his skin like poison, so that when he takes them off, he will strip off his
own skin’ (Stallybrass and Jones, 2001, 28, 127–128):

BEATRICE
Mischief on your officious forwardness!
Who bade you stoop? They touch my hand no more:
There, for t’other’s sake I part with this –
[Takes off and throws down the other glove]
Take ‘em and draw thine own skin off with ‘em.
[Exeunt]
DEFLORES
Here’s a favour come, with a mischief! Now I know
She had rather wear my pelt tanned in a pair
Of dancing pumps than I should thrust my fingers
Into her sockets here. (1.1.225–232)

What happens next, Stallybrass and Jones suggest, underscores the futility of

Beatrice’s desire for bodily autonomy: as DeFlores thrusts his fingers into the
gloves, he offers a proleptic image both of the enforced sex that is soon to occur
and of his erotic fantasy that ‘his own skin [will be] turned into shoes that [she]
will stretch and wear’ (1.1.128).

Yet, if one looks more closely at the glove in this scene, something more than

patriarchal social structures and a prefiguring of rape is evident. Consider the
play’s foregrounding of the material of the gloves. Although the text is not
explicit on this matter, DeFlores’ reference to the process of turning ‘pelts’ into
shoes suggests that the gloves would likely be made of a prepared skin and,
indeed, perfumed leather gloves were a common feature of early modern
aristocratic apparel. An especially resonant material in early modern culture,
leather, as Bosman (2009, 236–240) has shown, was often imbued with three

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properties: it was ‘laborious’ insofar as it was a manufactured item that was
neither purely natural nor purely artificial; it was ‘dimensional,’ which is to say
that it was stretchable and not flat; and it was ‘synaesthetic,’ its value bound up
with matters tactile, visual, acoustic, and olfactory.

Such ‘leathery’ qualities are a crucial part of The Changeling’s glove scene and

what DeFlores identifies as Beatrice’s wish. Rather than see him wearing her
gloves, he surmises, she would prefer that his body be submitted to the arduous
chemical process known as tanning, which could involve stripping animal skins
of flesh or hair, stretching them, drying them, soaking them, dressing them
and then stretching them again. The image of the manufacture of the dancing
pumps instantiates (among other things) the longing not only to have one’s
skin expertly tended to by another but also, paradoxically, to have it subjected
to punishing labors and to have it rendered most un-skinlike: that is, watertight
and safe from decomposition. In short, this is no ordinary rape fantasy. Instead
of presenting DeFlores as a figure of lust tout court, the play here evokes
through this glove scene a panoply of conflicting desires – including the desire
to, in effect, deaden his skin. Indeed to dismiss this polyvalent imagery of
intimate touch, artisanal labor and insensate pelts as merely the lewd imaginings
of a rapist is to miss the fact that in this fantasy DeFlores hardly seems to be in
charge of the action. When DeFlores anticipates the preservation of his skin,
moreover, he relinquishes the possibility of intimacy, for in early modern
England, the permeability of skin was precisely the source of one’s connection to
others and to the world.

Beatrice’s discarding of the second glove is often interpreted as a defiant but

doomed effort to control the penetration of her prosthetic body – with the
stretchable fabric of the glove’s finger compartments standing in for the vagina
and DeFlores’ thrusting fingers for a kind of phallic excess. Yet, arguably, the
glove more clearly signifies as Beatrice’s skin rather than as her body and hence
as something not easily subject to control. The skin on view is not figured
as a single, thin (and thus easily ruptured) hymeneal membrane. Rather, it is
associated with two leather gloves; and leather, as Bosman reminds us, itself
connotes skin plurality, for it is made from just one of a mammal’s several skins.

3

Early modern writers certainly understood human skin as multi-layered: as
Shirilan (2008, 61) has observed, ‘[w]hile the Greek and Latinate medical terms
(derma and cutae) describe layers of skin, modern English has all but completely
lost its earlier sense of thickness – that there are skins beneath skins and skins
inside the body.’ While the play’s depiction of Beatrice is not as extreme as that
of a 1566 broadside which shows the skin of a newborn ‘Woman Childe’ as a
collection of elaborate ruffs (H.B., 1566), it does conflate her skin and her
gloves, especially after she drops the second one and urges DeFlores to use it to
flay himself.

4

The irony of course is that, even as she utters this curse, she

describes her skin (in the form of the leather glove) making contact with his.
Rather than send him away, the curse brings him into closer proximity.

3 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).

4 For an incisive

reading of this

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The Changeling identifies Beatrice with skin efflorescence not only through

her ownership of the two leather gloves, but also through DeFlores’ reference
to the gloves’ many ‘sockets.’ Because ‘sockets’ suggests what Crooke (1615,
72–73) described as the skin’s natural ‘breaches’ or Foramina – such as the
mouth, the nostrils, the nipples and the ‘lap of the womb’ – the play’s gloves need
not be reduced to a figure of phallic penetration. Rather, insofar as ‘sockets’
evokes multiple orifices in the skin ‘fabric,’ including (but not limited to)
genitalia, it, too, underscores that Beatrice is not reducible to a single, penetrable
surface – that is, to a maidenhead. Instead, the play’s leather gloves represent
Beatrice exterior as marked by eroticized skin hollows or openings and perhaps
also by an enticing scent, if, as is likely, the scene called for perfumed gloves.
Through the gesture of casting off the gloves, the play emphasizes that Beatrice is
constituted by so many heterogeneous skins that she can dispose of two outer
layers without consequence to her bodily integrity. If the gloves Beatrice discards
are perfumed, we might read her act as initiating a richly synaesthetic erotic
experience: one that is outside the frame of heterosexual coupling insofar as the
scent travels promiscuously among all those gathered on the stage.

5

By thus challenging the heterosexual economy that underlies The Changeling’s

courtship/marriage/rape plot, the glove scene pointedly evokes sensory pleasures
that exceed coupling and ‘two-ness.’ Rather than presage male sexual possession
of Beatrice’s body, it stages something more dynamic: an affective force field
marked by the haptic sensation of ‘giddy turning’ that the play, through Beatrice’s
aside just moments earlier, identifies with sexual desire as such (1.1.155).

6

As

gloves change hands, they are imaginatively transformed (backwards, as it were)
into ‘pelts’ or untreated skins; they also veer from culture to nature as they move
from animal to human materiality; from one gendered piece of apparel to another;
from hand to foot. Indeed, the desire conveyed in this scene may inhere in its
category confusions. And, insofar as it conflates the outer skin that is available for
flaying and the skin associated with ‘sockets,’ it also collapses the medieval
physiognomic categories of cutis and pellis, the former of which is associated with
‘outer surfaces’ while the latter is associated with internal membranes that cannot
readily be seen like ‘the skin of the tongue, the palate, the stomach or the vulva’
(Ziegler, 2005, 512).

The giddy turning of the gloves might be said to emblematize the play’s more

pervasive concern with a sensory domain independent of autonomous sensing
bodies. Rather than foreground female agency and what Beatrice can or cannot
do, this scene instead emphasizes the disruptive force of tactility and the
unexpected circuits of desire that encounters with skin decisively set in motion.
One might read this staging of the gloves as anticipating Serres’ (2009, 97)
description of skin as the site or occasion of a ‘mingling’ that has little to do
with what discrete individuals might will. If in The Changeling, Beatrice’s gloves
are beheld as skins, then this scene shows them extravagantly ‘intervening’
in the ‘things of the world’ and effecting their ‘mingling’ (Serres, 2009, 97). Such

image, see
Crawford (2005).

5 On the erotics of

perfume as early
modern stage
property, see
Dugan (2008).

6 On this point, see

Burks (2001), who
equates Beatrice’s
‘giddy turning’
with her ‘sexual
awakening.’

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involvement is writ large in the very language of Beatrice’s ‘material curse’
because her words, ‘Take ‘em and draw thine own skin off with ‘em,’ are
every bit as elastic as leather, suggesting far more than the act of poisonous
flaying to which they are usually taken to refer. Part of what Beatrice evokes
when she tells DeFlores that her second glove should be used to ‘draw’ his skin
off is the pliability for which leather gloves were prized in early modern England
(Bosman, 2009, 238). To ‘draw’ skin could mean to take advantage of its
capacity to be taken in hand and refashioned, for the phrase can suggest ‘[t]o
pull out to a greater length or size; to stretch, distend, extend, elongate’ (s.v.
‘draw,’ Oxford English Dictionary). While Beatrice’s invective may be aimed at
DeFlores, it bounces right back at her. The play might even be said to be
establishing a kinship – a skin likeness – between them: the ‘run’ of her leather
gloves is like the capacity of his skin to respond to the stretch and pull of
another. Beatrice’s curse not only insists that Beatrice and DeFlores are made of
the same stuff; it also captures the shared capability of their skins to respond
without volition to the touch of another.

7

Wi t h Yo u r O w n H a n d s

If the glove scene hints that The Changeling is less about phallic penetration
than it is about the touch of skin, another scene – namely, that moment in Act 2
when Beatrice solicits the murder of Alonzo by repeatedly touching DeFlores’
face – more explicitly acknowledges the play’s inquisitive stance toward the
properties of skin and the affective force of tactile encounters. The play
represents Beatrice’s touching of DeFlores as a kind of experiment. Just before
reaching for him, she asks herself in an aside a question about the possibility of
hiding what she feels: ‘Why, put case I loathed him/As much as youth and
beauty hates a sepulcher,/Must I needs show it?’ (2.2.62–68). While this
question leaves open the possibility that she does not loathe DeFlores, in the
immediately preceding scene, she has expressed disgust with his skin, scornfully
describing him as an ‘ominous, ill-faced fellow,’ and, in an aside within the
scene itself, she also provides him with the mock honorific ‘His dog-face’
(2.1.53; 2.2.146). No one challenges Beatrice’s account, least of all DeFlores,
who, having noted that Beatrice is ‘[t]he cruelest enemy to [his] face in town’
(2.1.34–36), also disparages his countenance, linking himself with ‘foul chops’
(2.1.83, 84), a phrase suggestive of an anomaly in his jaws or cheeks and
possibly of a muscular defect that was said to make its victim’s countenance
resemble that of a grinning dog.

8

Indeed, in one of DeFlores’ many asides in this

scene, the play forcefully conveys the abject status of his skin:

I must confess my face is bad enough,
But I know far worse has better fortune,

7 On the play’s

representation of
desire and aversion
as affects that have
little to do with
will, see Bovilsky
(2008).

8 On the canine

association, see
Crooke’s (1615,
754) discussion of
the ‘muscles [that]

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And not endured alone, but doted on:
And yet such pick-haired faces, chins like witches

0

,

Here and there five hairs, whispering in a corner
As if they grew in fear one of another,
Wrinkles like troughs, where swine-deformity swills
The tears of perjury that lie there like wash
Fallen from the slimy and dishonest eye – (2.1.37–45)

Though DeFlores’ facial flaw remains ambiguous, his attempt to distinguish it

from those that are ‘far worse’ has the effect of suggesting that his face is
grotesquely swinish and extraordinarily porous, for he evokes visages marked
by unevenly spaced chin hairs and eyes that ooze foul fluids like ‘wash’ (the
liquid refuse given to hogs) into deep wrinkles and disfigurements. And
moments later when Beatrice abuses DeFlores as a ‘standing toad-pool’ (2.1.58),
her evocation of fetid water suggests that she sees in him precisely the kind of
face he attributes to others, a fact that may lend a note of pathos to his earlier
fantasies of having his skin expertly transformed into tanned – and thus
watertight – ‘pelts.’

So obsessive is the play’s attention to DeFlores’ vilified facial skin that

Beatrice’s handling of his face in Act 2 arguably rivals the later scene in which
DeFlores imagines she is in his arms and combing his beard as one of the play’s
most affectively charged depictions of the sense of touch. Significantly, the scene
of face-touching occurs not long after Beatrice has identified the act of murder
with a ‘fouler visage’ than that of Alsemero and mobilized the Paracelsian
doctrine that every poison has its use: ‘Why men of art make much of poison,/
Keep one to expel another. Where was my art?’ (2.2.46–47).

9

Staged as a highly

tactile act of medical diagnosis, the scene is premised on an understanding that
the condition of a face provides vital information about its owner’s health.

10

In

medieval physiognomic treatises, the skin of the forehead is one of the most
carefully studied body parts, and assessments of a patient’s complexion are
based on the degree of surface smoothness, wrinkling or hairiness of the face
(Ziegler, 2005). Humoral theories similarly depend on faces for assessment. For
example, because facial skin was understood to be very thin, its color could
signal the overall condition of the body.

11

In early modern London, where many

barber-surgeons devoted themselves to the flourishing art of treating skin
ailments, the face was the site of curative regimens that often involved washing
in herb-suffused or perfumed waters. Above all, as Pelling has documented,
London practitioners managed the facial consequences of venereal disease,
which led to such conditions as ‘falling hair, collapsed nose, ulcerous teeth,
boils, ulcers, scurf and stink (Pelling, 1985, 91).’

Rather than highlighting Beatrice’s putative agency, the scene thus represents

two figures engaged in a mutual endeavor, for as Weisser (2009, 321) has
shown, in early modern England, ‘touching and manipulating the body were

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).

9 On the Paracelsian

medical theories
underlying this
moment, see
Bovilsky (2008)
and Harris (1998,
54).

10 On the face as an

especially
important index
of health, see
Lindemann
(2010, 274).

11 On the

significance of
color for Galenic
theory, see
Harvey (2007)
and Paster (2009).
See also Batman’s
(1582) popular

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often significant aspects of medical diagnosis and practice,’ and both parties
collaborated in the reading of the skin ailments .

12

Evoking the period’s humoral

and physiognomic traditions, Beatrice inquires about the condition of DeFlores’
face, suggesting that she has noted subtle changes in his hair and skin and
inquiring about how he has ‘pruned’ himself (2.2.74). In a sardonic aside,
DeFlores explicitly refers to his face as a ‘physnomy’ and notes that Beatrice has
previously denigrated his skin as ‘scurvy,’ implying that it is encrusted with the
‘scurf’ or scabs of venereal disease (2.2.76–77). As Beatrice tells him that she
will ‘make a water, for [him] shall cleanse this,’ the play clearly focuses on a
future mingling of their skins, a fact that is underscored by Beatrice’s affirmative
response to DeFlores’ query about the skin-on-skin intimacy he anticipates:
‘With your own hands, lady?’ (2.2.83–84).

The tactile erotics of this diagnostic scene are writ large in the interplay

between the noblewoman’s brusque instructions and the servant’s rapturous
asides. Thus Beatrice, conjuring a scene of intimacy on the stage, demands that
DeFlores ‘come hither, nearer, man’ (2.2.78) and in language that, once again,
recalls her own sexualized giddy turning, instructs DeFlores to ‘turn’ and ‘let
[her] see’ him (2.2.79). Witnessing his movements in response to her words and
touching his face, she claims to perceive on his skin ‘the heat of [his] liver,’ the
proverbial seat of the passions (2.2.80). Similarly, when DeFlores exclaims that
he is ‘up to the chin in heaven!’ (2.2.79), the play emphasizes the precise
location of her hands on his face. Moreover, it suggests the synaesthetic qualities
of this encounter as he exclaims in an aside that ‘[h]er fingers touched’ him and
that ‘[s]he smells all amber’ (2.2.81–82) – that is, of ambre gris, derived from
sperm whales and used in perfumes. In subtle ways, then, this moment returns
us to the scene with the (possibly scented) gloves: there DeFlores imagines that
Beatrice’s desire is to subject his skin to the rigors of the tanning process, while
here Beatrice literally takes his skin in her perfumed hands and promises to
assist in the labor of its washing. If in the glove scene the sexual fantasy
DeFlores articulates is to have his skin tanned and rendered impermeable, here
his dream is precisely the opposite: erotic ecstasy is imagined through the
porosity of skin.

13

As this diagnostic encounter returns us to the paradoxical properties of skin –

its capacity both to open one up to the world and to protect one from it – it also
focuses on female sexual desire as anything but straightforward. Rather than
simply stage Beatrice’s duplicity, the scene explores her pleasure in the tactile
encounter. When Beatrice exclaims, ‘oh my DeFlores’ and ‘oh,’ and DeFlores
repeats these utterances while also evoking her ‘sigh[ing]’ and her ‘bosom,’
which is ‘beat[ing]’ with a ‘murmur’ (2.2.96–107), the eroticized repetition of
‘Oh’s’ uncannily anticipates the affect-laden ‘horrid sounds’ of Act 5’s closet
scene. Crucially, in Act 2, the sounds of desire are associated with Beatrice’s
wish to ‘try’ DeFlores by soliciting his services as a murderer (2.2.98). Indeed,
the scene inaugurates a linkage between female sexual pleasure and the act of

compendium of
ancient and
medieval lore.

12 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.’

13 For a compelling

argument that
scholars have
neglected the
existence of an
early modern
discourse of skin
porosity as
sublimity, see
Shirilan (2008).

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testing via a Paracelsian practice, which is present at two other moments:
(i) when Beatrice ‘tries’ the virginal Diaphanta by administering the potion in
Alsemero’s cabinet and witnessing her symptoms, and (ii) when Beatrice, having
tested the veracity of the test on Diaphanta, responds as a maid should respond
to Alsemero’s testing of her. In Act 2’s testing scene, moreover, the sighs and
moans that follow Beatrice’s encounter with DeFlores’ skin cannot be dismissed
as mere simulation, for, as Garber (1996) suggests in her compelling account
of Alsemero’s testing of Beatrice, the play understands female sexuality to be
always a matter of faking it. More precisely, Garber argues that Beatrice, in
feigning the requisite symptoms, simulates the visceral language not of virginity
but rather of sexual ecstasy and its aftermath, thereby pointing to the play’s
insistence on the inherently theatrical nature of female sexuality. In much the
same way, it matters little that Beatrice may be feigning pleasure in her handling
of DeFlores’ face. Rather, this scene veers off from the heterosexual narrative
on which critics tend to focus – the one in which the only touch possible is that
of phallic penetration and the only membrane that matters is the thin skin of the
hymen. Beatrice’s pleasure is aligned with her ‘scientific’ interest in DeFlores’
responsiveness to her touch. Unlikely as it may seem, then, this scene, like the
later scenes of virginity testing to which I will now turn, engages with the sense-
based scientific practices by which early modern knowledge was constituted.

14

Thus what may be most striking in this tactile encounter is not that Beatrice is
feigning nor that DeFlores, as a figure of perversity, finds pleasure in a touch
that he may well know to be fake. It is that the play, in the most protracted and
witty of terms, identifies the affective signs of female erotic delight – the cries,
the sighs, the murmurs and the beating bosom – with the successful carrying out
of a hands-on experiment.

D i a p h a n o u s M a n i p u l a t i o n s

The Changeling moves boldly into the realm of experimentation in Act 4,
which, like the scenes of glove dropping and facial examination, also fore-
grounds the affective matter of skin and the touch of the hands. Through the
play’s rendering of Beatrice’s discovery of Alsemero’s closet and her admini-
stration of the test to herself and the naı¨ve Diaphanta, Act 4 explicitly links
testing and touching with a gendered scientific practice and with the erotics
of female same-sex desire. That Beatrice’s discovery of Alsemero’s closet takes
us into the realms of medicine and science was first pointed out years ago by
Randall (1984), who argues that the play casts Alsemero as a typical early
modern scientific practitioner, a man who, in Beatrice’s words, secretly
‘practice[s] physic for his own use’ (4.1.20, 22). As Randall (1984, 359) notes,
the delineation of methods of testing virginity was common to scientific and
medical discourse throughout the seventeenth century. Significantly, the very

14 On this cultural

shift, see, for
example, Shapin
(1998, 65–117).

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title of the anthology of tests that Beatrice finds, ‘The Book of Experiment,
Call’d Secrets in Nature’ (4.1.22), links Alsemero with early modern natural
philosophers, who privileged direct inspection of nature over consideration
of ancient authorities.

15

Staging the discovery of the secret laboratory ‘[s]et round with vials’ (4.1.21)

the play presents us with skins in abundance. When Beatrice comes upon
Alsemero’s manuscript, she might be looking at actual skins in the form of
parchment or prepared animal skins. The play’s attention to the manuscript’s
capacity to fold in on itself – to have a skin-like ‘leaf tucked down’ (4.1.29) –
may be offered with some irony, given that the treatise implicitly concerns
vaginal folds and the physical signs of female virginity. Female skin also comes
into view through the scene’s water-filled glass ‘vials.’ More specifically, the
glasses are gendered female – each, she says, has ‘her mark’ (4.1.21) – and thus
give literal form to the early modern understanding of women as liquid beings
possessed of ‘leaky bodies’ (Paster, 1993). Beatrice’s discovery of these glasses
resonates evocatively with lines from Middleton and Rowley’s ([1617] 2007)
earlier drama, A Fair Quarrel, in which a rich widower insists that one cannot
be too careful with daughters: averring that daughters, unlike sons, possess a
‘brittle niceness,’ he likens his only daughter to ‘a mere cupboard of glasses,/The
least shake breaks or cracks ’em’ (1.1.8–9). More to the point, Beatrice’s
discovery of the vials usually locked away in Alsemero’s secret study suggests
not only a cupboard of such delicate virgins, but also a display of the most secret
of female skins, the hymen, for glass, as is suggested by lines from Shakespeare’s
([1607–1608] 2002, 4.6.136–137) Pericles – ‘[c]rack the glass of her virginity,
and make the rest malleable’ – frequently functions in early modern culture as a
way of imaging its fragile, thin skin.

16

In staging Beatrice’s discovery of this secret cabinet of female sexuality, The

Changeling attends yet again to the play of skin. Beatrice evokes hymeneal
rupture and female bodily fluids when she bawdily addresses Glass ‘C,’ whose
name may itself suggest a crude term for the vagina, by threatening to ‘break’ it
or transform its water into ‘milk,’ before concluding that she will ‘look to’ it
(4.1.36–38). What does it mean for Beatrice to ‘look to’ the glass vial? While the
phrase leaves open the possibility of contradictory affects – solicitude, wariness,
trust – there is little doubt that Diaphanta will stand in the place of the vial as
the recipient of such affects, for as soon as Beatrice has finished reading out the
symptoms of maidenhood, Diaphanta walks onto the stage. At once, Beatrice
proposes that the waiting woman ‘put [her] honesty/[u]pon an easy trial,’ and
Diaphanta, having agreed, wonders whether Beatrice will ‘search’ her ‘[l]ike the
forewoman of a female jury’ (4.1.96–99), alluding to the notorious 1613
marital annulment trial of Frances Howard, which mandated that Howard be
physically examined to establish that her marriage to the Earl of Essex had not
been consummated and for which a virginal stand-in was allegedly employed
(Amster, 2003). In place of the forewoman’s probing touch of the virginal body,

15 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.

16 On glass as a

euphemism for
the hymen, see the
entry for ‘glass’ in
Williams (1997).

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the play here substitutes Beatrice’s offering of the potion from Glass M (for
‘Maid’) to Diaphanta, which Beatrice in an aside emphasizes is ‘the experiment’
(4.1.103). Lest we miss the ease with which Beatrice’s handling of the glass
vial turns into the handling of the waiting woman, we need only consider that
the waiting woman’s proper name evokes ‘diaphane,’ a word suggesting the
transparency of crystal glass.

17

Assessing Diaphanta, Beatrice thus directly

encounters the matter of her maidenhead.

* * * * *

What does it mean for Beatrice to practice the hands-on science associated

with Alsemero’s closet? Perhaps because Act 4’s ‘scientific’ scenes are set
immediately after the dumb show in which Beatrice and Alsemero marry, critics
have largely directed their interpretive energies to the decipherment of his
experiment with Beatrice and of the ways in which the ostensibly male gaze
seeks to make the female body completely transparent (Garber, 1996; Boehrer,
1997; Bovilsky, 2008). To my knowledge, only Bruster (2003, 142) has sugges-
ted that Beatrice’s administration of the test might evoke something other than
heterosexuality, but even he quickly dismisses the possibility of same-sex
eroticism by concluding that the scene represents a misogynistic spectacle
designed to please a heterosexual male audience. While Beatrice’s testing of
Diaphanta is on the surface about the most heterosexual of matters – whether or
not a vagina has been penetrated by a penis – it is saturated with queer
potentialities, for Beatrice is entranced by Diaphanta’s response to the potion:
incontinently ‘gap[ing],’ then engaging in ‘sudden sneezing’ and ‘violent
laughing,’ before finally settling into a melancholy mood (4.1.48–49). This
scene recalls not only Garber’s (1996, 360) insight that female passion in the
play is bound up with an ‘instrumental insincerity’ that is inherent in all theater
but also the early modern association of hymeneal rupture with female
autoerotism and tribadism (Traub, 2002, 382 n70). While the virginity
testing scenes are about the ‘mechanical details’ of Diaphanta’s performance
(Bruster, 2003, 142), Beatrice’s jubilant response to the somatic agitation
she witness – ‘[j]ust in all things, and in order/[a]s if ‘twere circumscribed’
(4.1.109–110) – inscribes her desire for replicable experiment into a discourse
about the mechanical. As is suggested by the etymology of ‘mechanical,’ this
scene has everything to do with the heady erotics of things done manually.
Moreover, in depicting Beatrice’s acquisition of sexual knowledge, the play does
not suggest that Beatrice has fortuitously obtained what Alsemero already
possesses. On the contrary, it distinguishes Beatrice from Alsemero precisely on
the basis of her superior sensory command, a fact that will be emphasized later
when he is fooled by Diaphanta’s impersonation of Beatrice on his wedding
night.

18

Collapsing female sexual knowledge and sense-based, ‘scientific’

understandings, this scene of female experimentation foregrounds the queer
touch of science.

17 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.’

18 The conventional

Renaissance bed
trick, as Traub

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With this scene in mind, it is hard to conclude, as scholarship on The

Changeling so often suggests, that this drama merely delineates the robust
workings of patriarchal power. On the contrary, the play (at least briefly) imagines
marriage as part of a residual social order, one that might be supplanted by
alliances founded not on gender or social status but rather on ‘scientific’ practice
and other intimate encounters. As is implied by this queer reading of The
Changeling’s scenes of experimentation, the play’s tropes of tactility unravel
the play’s seemingly dominant economy of deflowering and phallic penetra-
tion. Moreover, insofar as the ‘science’ scenes associate female skin with the
diaphanous, they link it with a medium that puts into question the patriarchal
regime of penetrated/not penetrated, for, in the arena of science, glass, as Kalas
(2007, 174) would remind us, figures as a substance that is both liquid and solid.

19

As such, the scenes in which Beatrice discovers Alsemero’s laboratory carries out
an experiment that produces sexual passions in a virgin, and then reproduces the
signs again for her husband, may suggest a new social order exemplified by
scientific practice – one in which female touch and affect are crucial signifiers.

But attention to the fate of Diaphanta – in particular, to the sequence of

actions that begins with DeFlores’ secret murder of the waiting woman with
a phallic gun, a ‘piece high-charged’ (5.1.45), and ends with his assertion that
she accidently burnt to death in her bedchamber – leaves no doubt that the play
is mindful of the transgression that this new disposition represents. More
precisely, it is grimly fitting that the punishment meted out to Diaphanta is to
have her body consumed by fire, for the closet in which those passions were
kindled resembles the early modern alchemical laboratory, which was ‘filled
with instruments of separation and analysis by fire – furnaces, distilling vessels,
and crucibles’ (Smith, 2006, 294). With the help of DeFlores, Diaphanta – the
woman of glass – is quickly reduced to ashes, one of the elements from which
glass is made. Importantly, the play’s source text also concludes with flames.
There, however, it is the fires of the law rather than the fires of science that
matter, for the narrator details how, after the murderous deeds of Beatrice and
DeFlores come to light, the bodies of these adulterous lovers are exhumed and
burned at the ‘common place of execution’ (Reynolds, 1621, 145). We might
provocatively set Diaphanta’s ending against the play’s final evocation of death
by fire – namely, a speech in which Alonzo’s brother Tomazo articulates his
desire to cunningly destroy the men he wrongly believes to have slain his
brother. As Tomazo speaks his murderous desire, he conjures up the ‘melt[ing]’
effects of ‘subtle lightning’ on one’s ‘marrow’ (5.2.85–87), thereby alluding to
the early modern belief that death by lightning could occur without making a
single mark on one’s exterior. Whereas this image of fiery chastisement imagines
male skin as immune to lightning strikes, earlier in Act 5 the play exhibited on
stage the evidence of Diaphanta’s death by fire. Far from a gratuitous display,
the charred skin of the woman so associated with the hymeneal membrane bore
mute witness to the play’s savage attack on female sexuality.

(2009, 177) has
pointed out,
‘dramatizes male
ignorance about
particular female
bodies while
asserting female
knowingness over
the duped male.’

19 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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Concluding shortly after it has consigned Diaphanta to dust, The Changeling

abruptly abandons its investigations into touching and feeling and its questions
about what it means to have a hymen, to touch a face, to live within a tissue of
skins. At play’s end, the play provides evidence and answers, and we are no
longer asked to wonder about the workings of skin in the form of leather gloves,
disfigured faces or glass vials. Even Diaphanta, who was very nearly allegorized
as the much-prized hymen, is depicted as an object devoid of value. In the words
of DeFlores, she is but ‘a thing you all knew once’ (5.1.106). Ultimately, how-
ever, as DeFlores’ words may also hint, the play’s turn away from the obscure
workings of tactile sensation is not as absolute as it seems, for the demand that
we make sense of the gruesome and female ‘thing’ that stands in for Diaphanta’s
corpse effectively returns us to the affect-suffused realm of scientific study.
Asking us to identify the charred remains, the play reminds us of our discom-
fiting status as skin-inhabiting and sensate beings. In short, as it foregrounds the
intensities of feeling aroused by the burnt matter on the stage, The Changeling
can’t help but get under our skin.

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Patricia A. Cahill is Associate Professor of English at Emory University. The
author of Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the
Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2008), she is currently at work on a book
about why and how the sense of touch matters for Renaissance tragedy (E-mail:
[e-mail]).

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