Rowley, William | J. L. Simmons (essay date 1980)
J. L. Simmons (essay date 1980)
SOURCE: Simmons, J. L. “Diabolical Realism in Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling.” Renaissance Drama 11 (1980): 135-70.
[In the following essay, Simmons examines sexual fantasy and demonology in The Changeling.]
Middleton's paradoxical genius was affirmed by T. S. Eliot in 1927 in a way that modern criticism tends to vulgarize into simple contradiction. Middleton was, for Eliot, an “impersonal” artist with “no point of view,” “no message”; he was “merely a great recorder,” his work grounded by “a strain of realism underneath.”1 With those characteristics, however, and perhaps even because of them, he wrote in The Changeling a play of “profound and permanent moral value and horror”; here “Middleton is surpassed by one Elizabethan alone, and that is Shakespeare.” Eliot apparently saw no dichotomy: in The Changeling Middleton objectively...
[The entire page is 13654 words long]
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