Middleton’s concern with the dangerous absurdities to which an obsession about female chastity leads is one of the many points of contact between The Witch and his later play (with Rowley) The Changeling.23 Like Francisca, Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling is prepared to murder to conceal the loss of her virginity, and this results in an uneasy mix of tragedy and farce. Francisca’s plot to disgrace and discredit her sister-in-law evolves into a murder plot characterised by a confused sequence of entrances and exits that begins to resemble a bedroom farce. Beatrice-Joanna is subjected to a virginity-test where the symptoms of true virginity (sneezing, laughing and yawning) are absurd. This quality is reinforced by the fact that the ridiculous symptoms are performed twice, first by Diaphanta, and then by Beatrice-Joanna. The test is utterly worthless because it can be so easily faked, but as a symptom of patriarchal neurosis it is extremely significant. Beatrice-Joanna has learned from her patriarchal culture that to lose her reputation for chastity would be so appalling that murder is preferable. Consequently, like the duchess in The Witch (V.iii.101–2), Beatrice-Joanna is more willing to confess publicly to murder than to unchastity. This distorted morality is particularly emphasised in The Witch as there is so much hullabaloo over which woman precisely Alma-childes has penetrated: first it seems that it may be Amoretta, then that it may be the duchess and finally it turns out that it was a common prostitute. A bitter comedy emerges, focussed around the grotesque comic device of the bed trick, where one woman is substituted for another without the man concerned noticing the difference. Middleton also uses bed tricks in A Game at Chess and The Changeling. In a play where the focus on female chastity and sex is so strong (this is true also of Shakespeare’s bed tricks in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well), the bed trick points uncomfortably to the utter reification of women in the act of sex, as each woman becomes an anonymous body to be penetrated, not an individual with distinguishing marks.24

The Witch also connects with The Changeling in several plot devices. Both plays show a woman (Amoretta, Beatrice-Joanna) manipulating a man who lusts after her (Almachildes, De Flores). Both plays counterpoint the main action with a sub-plot concerning a society that seems alien but turns out to be in fact very much in tune with the protagonists (the witches’ coven, the madhouse). Both plays show women (the duchess, Beatrice-Joanna) attempting to be Machiavellian but failing rather pathetically. Both plays show passion as deadly – a bewitching or a madness; both also deal in sensational stage properties (the skull, the finger) as well as referring to the same court scandal, the Essex divorce and the murder of Overbury.