Mini: Shakespeare's Changeling Children
In today's episode, we'll be diving into the fascinating topic of changeling children in Shakespeare.
Changeling children were believed to be babies that were swapped by fairies with their own offspring, leaving behind an imposter. This myth was prevalent in Shakespeare's time and appears in many of his plays.
We'll explore the historical and cultural context behind the changeling myth, including its origins in folklore and its significance in Shakespeare's time. We'll discuss how the myth reflects the anxieties and beliefs of Shakespeare's society.
Content warning: today's episode contains material related to ableism and child deaths that may not be appropriate for all listeners. Please listen with care.
Kourtney Smith (KS): Welcome to a Shakespeare Anyone mini-episode! In these mini-episodes, we’ll be exploring topics that are related to Shakespeare but aren’t necessarily connected to whatever play we’ve been discussing.
Elyse Sharp (ES): And they’re mini, because well, they’re shorter than our other episodes. They’re like quartos if the regular episodes are folio editions.
KS: In today’s episode, we’ll be discussing the myth of changeling children.
ES: Now, before we dive in, we want to warn listeners that our discussion today will cover topics that may not be suitable for all listeners–specifically, we will be covering some ableist beliefs from the Early Modern period, sexual assault, and acts that involve the abuse and death of children. Please listen with care.
KS: We also want to start off this episode by highlighting some disabled creators who are educators and advocates for accessibility, inclusion, and rights for disabled people. We highly recommend following Imani Barbarin at crutchesandspice.com or @crutches_and_spice on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter, and Catarina Rivera at catarinarivera.com or @blindishlatina on Instagram.
ES: The myth of changeling children is a belief found in many cultures throughout history, but as this is a Shakespeare podcast, we are going to mostly focus on its appearance in English fairy folklore. Scholars believe that English fairy folklore (and similar folklore in other cultures) comes from a need in early civilizations to explain what was then otherwise unexplainable. The changeling myth was used to explain a wide variety of mysteries surrounding pregnancy and childbirth, most notably disabilities or differences that are apparent at birth or in early childhood.
KS: Narratives that described fairies who stole mortal babies and substituted changelings in their place were recorded for the first time in England during the sixteenth century. According to Mary Ellen Lamb’s Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, these narratives were able to explain “various physical changes in infants or even their mysterious deaths…capable of covering a wide range of very different circumstances, from natural death to culpable accident to intentional murder.”
ES: Lamb notes that changelings may also have been used to excuse or cover up other “mysterious” circumstances surrounding the birth of children, such as those conceived out of wedlock. Just as the Old Shepherd in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale represents Perdita as a changeling child left by fairies, changelings may also have existed as an unspoken cross-cultural, cross-class agreement to willfully ignore or obfuscate the truth of the circumstances involved in the conception of a child.
KS: Lamb suggests that such changeling myths could also have been used to cover up the result of consensual cross-class relationships and not expose or scandalize a higher class individual for a consensual relationship with an individual from a lower class. However, changelings could also explain non-consensual conceptions, such as pregnancy caused by sexual assault committed by a higher class individual against a lower class individual.
ES: In the case of Perdita in Winter’s Tale, the Old Shepherd's claim that Perdita is a changeling may serve to provide Perdita with a socially acceptable narrative for her illegitimacy while sparing her lifelong shaming associated with being born to an anonymous woman out of wedlock. It also spares further questioning of the identity of her unknown mother and allows the Old Shepherd to assert himself as Perdita’s father or father figure. The fairy gold he describes is likely payment that was offered by Perdita’s biological mother and/or father to any kind stranger who would take the infant and promise to care for her.
KS: The Old Shepherd’s “white lie” depends on the solidarity and agreement of the community to accept this explanation of Perdita’s origins, and we can see these sort of white lies depicted in other early modern works outside of Shakespeare. In The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, an anonymous work published in 1600, a servant named Haunce reveals that the “fairy gold” found in the shoes of servants was not just a mythical reward for good housekeeping, but was also understood as a system of bribery used to insure Haunce’s silence about the clandestine, late-night visits of his mistress’s wealthy lover. According to Lamb, “the passage raises the possibility that the euphemism ‘going to see the fairies’ to indicate illicit sexual activities may have been widespread enough to be readily understood by a contemporary audience.” And like in The Winter’s Tale, this mutual understanding involves a cross-class collaboration in order to succeed in evading the societal taboo against consensual premarital sex.
ES: The 1628 anonymous prose pamphlet, Robin Good--Fellow, His Mad Prankes, and Merry Jests, also uses fairies to cover-up pre-marital sex, although the consensuality is far more debatable. Robin’s mother is described as having been visited multiple times by a fairy at night who “forced her to dance with him, leaving her silver and jewels at his departure. When she became pregnant, his visits ceased.” While in this story, the father is determined to indeed be a fairy, this experience evokes a predatory, non-consensual experience that was common “at a time when serving girls were often perceived as fair sexual game by their masters.”
KS: As such, ascribing non-consensual sexual acts to a fairy can be seen as a community agreeing to protect the victim of sexual assault from further trauma. Lamb notes that “it is not difficult to understand why a traumatized victim of sexual assault might be unable to identify the assailant; it is even less difficult to understand why victims might fear the repercussions of identifying an aggressor who, if named, might do them further harm.”
ES: As the changeling myth provided protection to victims in these situations, it can also be read as part of a grieving process for parents who experienced infant loss or the death of a child in early childhood due to then unexplainable reasons. Unfortunately, fairy tales where scholars can easily determine a specific congenital disorder as the cause for the changeling myth are rare, however, both Lamb and Susan Schoon Eberly’s Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids, and the Solitary Fairy describe how traits associated with metabolic conditions such as phenylketonuria (fen-ul-key-toe-NU-ree-uh) or PKU do seem to match the descriptions of changelings.
KS: PKU is an inherited metabolic condition that results in a decreased ability to metabolize the amino acid, phenylalanine (fe-nil-AL-a-neen) or Phe. Phe is found in all proteins, most foods, and in artificial sweeteners. An inability to metabolize this building block of protein causes Phe to build up in the bloodstream and reach toxic levels. According to the National PKU Alliance, “the damage caused by toxic levels of Phe in the first few years of life is irreversible…Newborns affected by PKU usually do not show any signs of the disease at birth. But within the first few weeks of life they begin to show neurologic disturbances such as epilepsy…if left untreated, the child is likely to experience behavior problems, developmental delays and severe intellectual disabilities may occur.”
ES: It is also worth noting that individuals with PKU often present with light skin, light hair, and blue eyes even when their parents do not carry these traits, and if the condition progresses, their voice will be “characteristically whine-y.” Eberly prompts us to consider that in fairy lore, there is a repeated preference of some fairies for blonde babies. Quoting Sir John Rhys’s 1901 work Celctic Folk-Lore, Welsh and Manx, “the fairies steal nice, blond babies, they usually place in their stead their own aged-looking brats with short legs, sallow skins, and squeaky voices.”
KS: From an early modern experience, a parent would give birth to an apparently healthy child and within weeks to months see unexplained vomiting, seizures, and other symptoms. Today, newborn testing allows doctors and parents to identify individuals with PKU and start treatment early. With early treatment and avoiding foods high in Phe, individuals with PKU can expect normal development and lifespan.
ES: In the early modern era, PKU and other metabolic disorders could lead to failure to thrive, starvation, and death of the infant if their condition affected their ability to receive adequate nutrition. In these instances, it is very easy to read changeling narratives as the first stage of grief–denial: the idea that the child who died was not their real child and instead, their child was stolen and a fairy child was left in the child’s place. Their real child is alive, somewhere.
KS: This reading is very compassionate towards parents who lose a wanted child, however some changeling myths also point to more sinister behavior by parents who believed their “real child” had been “taken by fairies.” Like PKU, there are a multitude of disorders that do not necessarily present at birth but start to become apparent weeks, months, or years after birth. These include:
Progeria
Autism Spectrum Disorder
Cerebral Palsy
Spina Bifida
Homocystinuria
Mucopolysaccharidosis syndromes such as Hunter’s and Hurler’s syndromes
ES: Eberly notes many tales from Britain and Ireland describe changelings as creatures who must be tricked into revealing their true nature, often by force. Tales describe parents attempting to make the changeling child cry in order to recover their human child, and to try to accomplish this, parents would physically harm the child or abandon them. Stories describe parents dumping children believed to be changelings into newly dug graves, seating them on heated shovels or throwing them into hot coals, or bathing the child in “a potentially lethal solution of steeped foxglove leaves.” Other stories describe children being left out to die, such as leaving the child on the beach below the high-water mark at low tide or on a dung-heap or under a stone.
KS: In these tales, according to Lamb, blaming the fairies offered the parents a “socially acceptable form of infanticide as a means of managing a situation that seemed, or perhaps actually was, impossible.” Robert Willis, who was an age and socioeconomic peer of Shakespeare, wrote in 1639 that there was an anecdote surrounding his birth and near death in infancy where a few days after his birth, he was taken from his mother’s side and stuck in-between the head of the bed and the wall, which caused him to suddenly and fiercely cry out. He notes that if he had not cried out, the women attending his mother during and after childbirth “had a conceit that I had been quite carried away by the Fairies they know not whither, and some elfe or changeling (as they call it) laid in my room.”
ES: Willis’s narrative shows that the myth circulated among the middle classes, though perhaps his mother’s midwife was of a lower class. Lamb notes that “his use of the word ‘conceit’ indicates his perception that the women…attending his mother…were well aware that his near death had nothing at all to do with fairies. If Willis had died, the fairy narrative would have deflected blame from the mother and her attendants.” This sort of blame-deflecting narrative appears in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, in which the nurse presents a fairy story as an excuse for her temporary loss of Dido’s son Ascanius. However, Dido does not accept the nurse’s explanation for the missing child.
KS: This depiction serves to prove Lamb’s notion that for all versions of changeling myth, the community must come together and agree to the “changeling” explanation for it to “work.” As late as the 1800s, we have records of individuals attempting to use a changeling myth as explanation and the community refusing to support the assertion. In the instances where changelings were accepted as explanation, it was due to the community agreeing that fairies were the best explanation.
ES: Whether they are choosing to actually believe fairies as the actual reason for a child born to an unmarried parent or for the abandonment or death of a child, or they are coming together to ignore evidence of socially unacceptable premarital sex or to refuse to assign blame for harm done to an infant or young child. With this context in mind, how can we as modern readers or performers or audiences understand the changeling child in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the description of Perdita as a changeling in The Winter’s Tale?
KS: The changeling child is described as a child of both a votaress of Titania’s order and of an Indian King–is it possible to consider the child is a result of a sexual assault, and how does that drive Titania’s desire to keep and protect it?
ES: What changes in The Winter’s Tale when we consider Perdita to be a disabled person?
KS: We think these sorts of questions are worth sitting with.
ES: Thank you for listening.
Quote of the Episode:
ES: From Love’s Labour's Lost, act five, scene two, said by Princess, “I understand you not: my griefs are double.”
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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Works referenced:
Eberly, Susan Schoon. “Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids and the Solitary Fairy.” Folklore, vol. 99, no. 1, 1988, pp. 58–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259568. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 3, 2000, pp. 277–312. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902152. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Leask, J. “Evidence for Autism in Folklore?” Archives of Disease in Childhood, vol. 90, no. 3, 2005, pp. 271–271., https://doi.org/10.1136/adc.2003.044958.
National PKU Alliance. “About PKU.” NPKUA, National PKU Alliance, 2023, https://www.npkua.org/What-is-PKU/About-PKU.
Progeria Research Foundation. “Quick Facts.” The Progeria Research Foundation, Progeria Research Foundation, 24 Jan. 2023, https://www.progeriaresearch.org/quick-facts/.
