The Changeling

The Changeling is a Jacobean tragedy written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Widely regarded as being among the best tragedies of the English Renaissance, the play has accumulated a large amount of critical commentary. The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 7 May 1622, and was first published in 1652 by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley. Authorship The title page of the first edition of The Changeling attributes the play to Middleton and Rowley. The division of authorship between the two writers was first delineated by Pauline Wiggin in 1897, and is widely accepted. David Lake, in his survey of authorship problems in the Middleton canon, summarises the standard division of shares this way: Middleton – Act II; Act III, scenes i, ii, and iv; Act IV, scenes i and ii; Act V, scenes i and ii; Rowley – Act I; Act III, scene iii; Act IV, scene iii; Act V, scene iii. Lake differs from previous commentators only in assigning the first seventeen lines of IV,ii to Rowley. The essential point of the dichotomy is that Rowley wrote the subplot and the opening and closing scenes, while Middleton was primarily responsible for the main plot—a division of labour that is unsurprising, given the examples of other Middleton–Rowley collaborations. The main plot itself derives from a 1621 story collection by John Reynolds. Themes and Motifs The theme is the treachery that comes as a consequence of sinful human nature. The play expresses this theme through the reference of "original sin" and its consequential "fall". Subsequently, moral purity is restored after the motives of the main character are revealed. The motif of faulty eyesight is used to express the theme "blindness shuts out the consequences of impulsive acts, and with, what amounts to an idée fixe, the chief characters then seek to impose their wills on an unbending and indifferent world, victimizing those equally as blind".