‘Of counsel with [m]y mistress’: The mistress–servant alliance in Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1622)

Abstract

Analyses of service in The Changeling have focused on De Flores as an embodiment of contemporary fears about servants, neglecting his mistress's agency and the play's engagement with anxieties about women's authority, especially their power over servants. They also ignore two other servants, Diaphanta and Lollio, whose relationships with their mistresses are equally revealing of those anxieties. This article argues that The Changeling stages alliances between mistresses and servants as threatening to patriarchal authority. It revises the dominant critical reading of the play, showing that while the castle plot dissolves the mistress–servant alliance, the hospital plot is less straightforward.