JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL REMARCH Journal for Cultural Research ROUTLEDGE Routled Taylor & Francis ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcuv20 The dialectics of honour and shame in Middleton's The Changeling and contemporary Palestine Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra To cite this article: Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra (2020): The dialectics of honour and shame in Middleton's The Changeling and contemporary Palestine, Journal for Cultural Research To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2020.1782152 Published online: 19 Jun 2020. Submit your article to this journal Q View related articles View Crossmark data C Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcuv20
JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2020.1782152 ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Check for updates The dialectics of honour and shame in Middleton's The Changeling and contemporary Palestine Bilal Tawfiq Hamamra Department of English Language and Literature, An-Najah National University, Nablus ABSTRACT This article follows the critical lines of new historicism, feminism, psychoanalysis and presentism so as to scrutinise the destructive practices of enforced marriage and turning a deaf ear to the female voice in Middleton's The Changeling and contemporary Palestine. The eclectic range of critics I am employing opens up gender-based read- ings in the teaching context of the Department of English Language and Literature at An-Najah University where I teach Renaissance Drama. In both the fictional world of The Changeling and in contem- porary Palestine, tragedy ensues because male figures refuse to listen to female figures' voices and such aural closure to the female voice is a symptom of masculinity in crisis. I contend that female figures are active agents who can strengthen or weaken male figures' honour which is represented as a matter of public performance rather than an inherent signifier. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 April 2020 Accepted 2 June 2020 KEYWORDS Silence; speech; gender; honour; shame; Israeli occupation; subversive complicity Middleton's and Rowley's The Changeling (1622) is a tragicomedy that reveals the inadequacy of the paradigm that associates woman's speech with sexuality and silence with chastity. While the main plot suggests that silence produces excessive transgression on the part of woman, the sub-plot reveals that the excessive speech of madness ultimately serves to contain female sexuality. The fact that Beatrice-Joanna is silenced at the end of the play as she articulates her sexual desires and achieves them by means of adultery and murder may reveal that Middleton sanctions the stereotypical association between female speech and lasciviousness. Many twentieth-century critics have perceived Beatrice-Joanna's character as that of a 'dangerous tigress,' like Shakespeare's Tamora (Barker & Nicol, 2004, para. 23). However, Beatrice-Joanna's murderous and sexual transgression is a comment on the mascu- line practice of enforced marriage and of male figures' refusal to listen to female figures' voices. As a result of her father's absolute authority and his refusal to listen to her voice, Beatrice-Joanna chooses to murder Alonzo rather than appear disobedient. I contend that the speech and silence of Middleton's heroines suggest a relational form of self-fashioning, at least on the surface. However, their silent and vocal forms of