Changelings and The Changeling

But another sort of exchange which they had…whereby the sence is quite peruerted and made very absurd: as, he that should say, for tell me troth and lie not, lie me troth and tell not. For come dine with me and stay not, come stay with me and dine not … The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage] the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [vnderchange] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] nothing at all sweruing from his originall … and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called chāgelings, or Elfs: so, if ye mark, doeth our Poet, or maker play with his wordes, vsing a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.

Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie¹

With the phrase 'nothing at all sweruing from his originall', Puttenham characterises hypallage as that rhetorical trick whereby words, or their meanings, steal away from their proper context and create a whole new set of otherwise alien references. Like the fairy children that are substituted for the babies stolen by 'Fayries' and 'Elfs', these gliding verbal expressions have the semblance of the original, yet the meanings of such syntactically flexible constructions can be construed in different ways. As Robert Cummings, writing on changeling epithets and Virgil, comments, 'the grammar pulls them into one relation, but they have a habit of wanting to be elsewhere'.²

To move from figurative changelings to the consciousness of the eponymous changeling in Middleton's play may seem unwarranted. C. S. Lewis, in his striking discussion of hypallage, argues that to understand the phrase 'The waterfall is sublime' as meaning 'I have sublime feelings about this waterfall' is a misinterpretation, because feelings themselves aren't sublime; the waterfall is.³ Lewis notes that, in some of our most everyday expressions, we mix up the subjective and the objective (through hypallage). Such transference of terms, if taken seriously, immediately generates absurdity. Thus, when I say 'You are contemptible', I really mean that 'I have contemptible feelings', or, as Lewis puts it, 'that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible'.⁴ In Middleton – as in Lewis – hypallage finds an echo in perverse human psychology.⁵

This idea is placed squarely before us by the hero-villain of The Changeling, the manservant De Flores. His interest in the way the world works is more in terms of a set of actions than in the development of the inner self. In this he sides with behaviourists who argue that the whole business of behaviour is no longer a tissue of more or less mendacious pretence but straightforwardly constitutes personality. In De Flores's eyes, Beatrice-Joanna, who has planned murder and sealed her pact with him in blood, is reborn – as a part of him. It is this shared identity which, he reminds her, she cannot forget:

Look but into your conscience, read me there; 'Tis a true book; you'll find me there your equal. Push, fly not to your birth, but settle you In what the act has made you; you're no more now. You must forget your parentage to me: You're the deed's creature; by that name You lost your first condition, and I challenge you, As peace and innocency has turned you out, And made you one with me.

(III. iv. 132-40)⁶

With his twice-repeated 'you are's', De Flores confidently asserts that this ontological readjustment ('you're no more now') has immediate social consequences as well: De Flores, the social subordinate, now directs his Lady. The grammatical gymnastics in 'You must forget your parentage to me' (III. iv. 136) emphasises this movement: 'forget', as a transitive verb, may take a direct object but not a dative ('to me'), while the noun 'parent' can easily involve a dative construction: one may be 'parent to three children'. According to ordinary English usage, De...