'The Changeling,' or how Bacon’s closet becomes the cabinet of curiosities

Abstract

First licensed by the Master of the Revels in 1622, The Changeling opened to London playgoers who were in some measure familiar with Bacon's praise of inductive reasoning in Novum Organum (1620). It is therefore of note to find that the protagonist of Middleton and Rowley's play, Beatrice-Joanna, consistently undermines what Michael Neill describes as "the ... correspondence of outward appearance and inward reality” (xx); induction cannot reveal moral worth. The closet of experimentation that contains this incongruously unchaste virgin thus transforms into a cabinet of curiosities whose contents resist accepted logic and simple assumptions. Keywords: The Changeling (Middleton, Thomas and Rowley, William); Novum Organum (Bacon, Francis); metaphysics; empirical (Baconian) method (rejection of); cabinet of curiosities; literary interpretation