Changeling Legends 

According to Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All, “[a] changeling was a child secretly substituted for another in infancy, particularly one supposedly left (or in this case, taken) by fairies. The word ‘changeling’ could also denote, in a looser sense, a fickle or inconstant person.” According to European folklore and legend, fairies would abduct infants from their parents and replace them with fairy changelings, their deformed offspring that are considered demonic, intending to use the human infants to strengthen the fairy species. Characteristics considered mental or physical abnormalities by parents, including disabilities and crying too much, were attributed to changeling legends. These tales were part of “domestic-moralistic discourse”, designed to “keep housewives, mothers and servants attentive to their duties.” According to Ralph of Coggeshall, English chronicler of the 12th and 13th centuries, fairies were believed to prey upon unbaptized children, specifically. 

Popular European folklore instructed parents both to be watchful of their children as an infant and on how to retrieve their own child after it was swapped with a fairy changelings. These tales often begin with the parents’ (almost exclusively, mothers) momentary distraction from supervising their child; following this, mothers would perceive their child’s increase in upset behavior. To retrieve their children back from the fairies, mothers would hang the changeling over a fire or throw them in a body of water, or otherwise threaten to do so. (These legends, therefore, led to many cases of child abuse, and, at worst, infanticide.) At this point, a fairy would appear to take away their child and leave behind the human infant. 

As beliefs in changelings may range from superstitious to abusive, their implications could be inherently ableist or discriminatory in parents’ belief that their offspring was too unlike themselves in physical or mental ability. 

The Changeling Boy 

Whereas most legends of changelings are from the parents’ perspectives in the stories, as instructions on how to protect or retrieve one’s child or as cautionary tales of what happens when one is less vigilant, A Midsummer Night’s Dream bears a different perspective, that of a changeling boy who is the object of desire—one who is wanted by their fairy in a conflict between the fairy queen and king, Titania and Oberon. Shakespeare counters popular understandings in the minds of his Elizabethan audience through a less volatile origin story of the changeling boy in Dream. As Titania explain how the boy came under her custody to Oberon: 

His mother was a vot’ress of my order,

And in the spicèd Indian air by night

Full often hath she gossiped by my side

And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands (2.1.127-130).

… 

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,

And for her sake do I rear up her boy,

And for her sake I will not part with him (2.1.140-142).

The boy’s Indian origin may be a result of England’s commercial and imperial expansion during the reign of Elizabeth I, in an increasingly mercantile economy. The spice trade brought spices to season the diets of European, previously “bland and monotonous.” Notably, these spices were accessible only to the wealthy, indicating social and economic power. In a similar vein, the boy’s ethnicity may be the result of travel narratives which were popular in written form and travelled orally as well; Shakespeare’s audience would have been familiar with the content of these tales, relating stories from the Indian region. 

(A note on conceptions of the Indian changeling boy: While Dream was written and performed during England’s pre-colonial period, contemporary understandings of the play may see an imperialist hand in depictions of the Indian boy. In productions that have included them onstage, there have been racist or offensive portrayals of the boy as an imperial conquest. In productions that do not include them onstage, the changeling boy instead becomes a symbol, which can empower certain imperial conceptions of the boy, imagining them through the lens of the exoticized India.)