SOURCE: Pentzell, Raymond J. “The Changeling: Notes on Mannerism in Dramatic Form.” Comparative Drama 9, no. 1 (spring 1975): 3-28.

In the following essay, Pentzell focuses on the formal aspects of The Changeling as a means of coming to a fuller understanding of the play.

In the first act of The Changeling Beatrice-Joanna enters the stage a light-comic ingenue, as transparent and inconsequential as a spoiled Molière fille, and just as self-centered. Near the end of the fifth act she dies, guilty of murder and betrayal, her amour-propre having grown to fruition as a selfishness which grotesquely perverts her zeal for her own honor. She lies next to the catalyst of her ripening, the hideous De Flores, her lover and her murderer, now a suicide. Her death brings her as close as she ever comes to an anagnorisis; self-satisfaction ebbs from her enough that, finally, she can beg pathetically of...