ABSTRACT
There is a profound sense of claustrophobia in The Changeling, a play that treats space as a metaphor for relations between reality and appearance, truth and deception, sanity and madness. A ‘changeling’ was a child left by fairies as replacement for one they had stolen but, by time of this play, it had become a broad term for those exhibiting mental anxiety or ‘abnormality’: thus most critics regard the sub-plot’s Antonio as the changeling of the title. The Changeling can be seen as part of the tradition of revenge plays that includes Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet yet, by the 1620s, the genre itself had undergone considerable amount of change, so that the frustrated revenger is no longer necessarily the protagonist. In play like The Changeling, cultural institutions which attempted to contain these passions are exposed and severely questioned. Its Catholic Spanish setting might usefully have distanced Thomas Middleton and William Rowley from censure over its religious skepticism.
