THE CHANGELING

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Character Analysis
Early on in the play, we learn that Titania has been taking care of a "lovely" Indian boy and spends all her time
lavishing him with love and affection (2.1). This has caused a huge rift between Titania and her husband Oberon, who
wants the boy to be his personal "henchman" (errand boy/attendant). Oberon is also bitter about the fact that Titania
keeps the kid to herself while ignoring Oberon. According to Puck, Titania "perforce withholds the loved boy, / Crown
him with flowers, and makes him all her joy" (2.1.26-28). Although the boy doesn't have a speaking role in the play
(and doesn't even appear on stage in some productions), he's a pretty important figure in A Midsummer Night's
Dream.

What We Know About the Changeling

First things first: Who exactly is this little boy and where are his real parents? According to team Oberon, the little boy
is a "changeling" Titania stole from "an Indian king" (2.1.23; 22).
Side note: If you were thinking Shakespeare was referring to the Angelina Jolie movie—we're sorry to
disappoint. Stephen Greenblatt tells us that a "changeling" typically refers to "a child left by fairies in exchange for
one stolen, but here [the term refers] to the stolen child." "Changelings" are an important part of English fairy lore and
Shakespeare often makes references to them in his plays, like The Winter's Tale (3.3) and Henry IV Part 1, where
King Henry says he wishes some fairies had switched his rotten kid for a better son at birth (1.1).
Titania doesn't deny that she's got the kid with her, but she tells a different story about how she came to care for him.
According to Titania, she used to be friends with the kid's human mother back in India but "she, being mortal, of that
boy did die" (2.1.140). Translation: The woman died in childbirth, so Titania is fiercely committed to raising the boy for
her friend.

Why is the Boy from India?

We also want to point out that Shakespeare makes a very big deal out of the fact that the boy is from "the farthest
step of India," which is also the place from which Oberon has travelled to attend the wedding of Theseus and
Hippolyta (2.1). In the play, India is imagined as an exotic, far-off place, where the evening air is "spiced" and where
the sails of merchant ships "grow big-bellied with the wanton wind" (2.1.133). Shakespeare wrote this play in the late
16th century, when England had already been trading with India for a few hundred years, so we're not surprised at
Shakespeare's geographical shout-out.

The Changeling and Domestic Drama

Like we said, the little boy is the object over which the Fairy Queen and King fight, so, in many ways, he's emblematic
of the couple's domestic power struggle. When Oberon succeeds in taking the boy from Titania (by dosing her with
magic love juice and forcing her to fall deliriously in love with Bottom), Oberon basically strips Titania of a mother-
child type relationship that is obviously important to her.
Some critics see Oberon and Titania's fight as a dramatization of what often happened in upper-class houses in
Shakespeare's England, where boys of a certain age were taken out of their mom's care and sent off to school (with
other boys and male teachers). Scholars Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard argue that "The play identifies the
emotional violence of this radical separation of mother and son with Titania and her ferocious refusal to let her
godson go. Oberon parodies and ridicules her maternal attachment and care by putting the monstrous Bottom in the
boy's place."
Brain Snack: In 1862, a British magazine called Punch published a Midsummer Night's Dream-inspired political
cartoon commenting on the US Civil War. The provocative cartoon depicts Oberon as President Lincoln and Titania
as the State of Virginia. The Changeling is depicted as a young slave boy, over whom Lincoln and Virginia are
fighting.

The Changeling Boy

Sheila Brown as the Changeling Boy in Max Reinhardt's 1935 Midsummer.

The Changeling Boy does not always appear onstage; after all, it can be hard to direct children, and he doesn’t have any lines. Even
so, he’s an extraordinarily important character: he serves to further — and ultimately resolve — the conflict between Oberon and
Titania.

When he does appear onstage, he is often played by a six to ten year old. A few more adventurous productions have cast him with
an older actor — “since to an immortal, any mortal of any age is a youth.”
Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”:

The forest episodes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream capture another cultural significance circulatin around fairy lore and the pranks
of Robin Goodfellow, one that played a crucial role in the separation of the middle and upper classes from the common culture. In
the childhood memories of upper-class males such as John Aubrey common culture was transmitted primarily by female caretakers.
Thus while Bottom’s tryst with the fairies literalizes a white lie signifying an illicit sexual encounter, Titania’s relationship with
Bottom also evokes distinctly maternal elements. Bottom literally takes the place of the changeling child in Titania’s affections, and
the implications of this substitution for an infantilized Bottom have been well discussed by critics such as Gail Kern Paster, Louis
Montrose, Meredith Anne Skura, and Allen Dunn.

"The Fairy Flew Away with the Changeling," Arthur Rackham.

William W. E. Slights, “The Changeling in A Dream”:

… we learn that the boy, who started life as an Indian

prince, is “lovely,” “sweet,” and “loved” by Titania. Oberon’s competing and exclusive claim suggests that perhaps, as Puck implies,
no one in fairyland has a rightful claim to him. Anyone who wants the changeling, for whatever purpose, may have to withhold him
“perforce,” that is, forcibly. On the other hand, the line, “she, perforce, withholds the loved boy,” also opens the possibility that
Titania herself is acting under some form of compulsion.

An 1862 political cartoon about the American Civil War, by John Tenniel (the illustrator of the original Alice in Wonderland books).
Lincoln is Oberon; the state of Virginia is Titania, protecting her slave/changeling boy.

… Ruth Nevo remarks wittily that “Oberon might mend his marriage more effectively by getting Titania with child than by trying to
get Titania without child.” Though there is something vaguely absurd in the critic turning marriage counsellor to the Fairy King,
Nevo has rightly seen that parenting emerges as central to Titania’s consciousness. The Fairy Queen places herself in loco parentis
when the Indian queen dies in childbirth. Now she must nurture and protect a child who, to her mind, is more adopted than
kidnapped from the human realm. In Titania’s eyes, the fact that he straddles the border between human and fairy in no way
obviates his need for mothering.
Sanjali Desilva as Changeling Child and Karen Slack as Titania. Photo by Casey A. Cass, University of Colorado Photo Department.

So why is the Changeling Boy from India? Why didn’t Shakespeare write the fairies stealing a child from Athens, wherethe play is set,
or from Britain, which seems more natural for fairies who are so British?

Europeans had been trading with India for a few centuries — when Columbus sailed West from Spain in 1492, he was searching for a
sea passage to India and East Asia — and exploration and colonization were increasing in Shakespeare’s time. A few years
after Midsummer was written in 1600, the East India Company was founded to trade spices between England and the Indies.
India was a fascinating place in the English consciousness: a place of riches, luxurious goods like spices, unexplored and fantastic. It
was also one of the farthest places most people could imagine. By giving Titania and Oberon a foothold in India (not only does
Titania apparently have devotees there, but Oberon has returned to Athens “from the farthest steppes of India” for Theseus and
Hippolyta’s wedding), Shakespeare tells his audience that these are characters of far-reaching influence and high status — and the
changeling boy, an Indian prince, is a worthy addition to their court.

 2.1: We learn from Puck and the Fairy that Oberon and Titania have been fighting over a "lovely" Indian boy.
Puck accuses Titania of having stolen the kid from an "Indian king."

 2.1: We also learn that Oberon wants the boy to be his personal errand boy, but Titania keeps the kid with
her all the time and "crowns him with flowers."

 2.1: Oberon begs Titania to give him the boy and Titania refuses.

 2.1: We hear from Titania that the child's mother died giving birth to the boy, so Titania feels obligated to
raise him.

 4.1: We find out that, when Titania was in her love stupor, she willingly gave up the boy, who was
immediately taken off to Oberon's fairy court.