SOURCE: "Double Plots," in Some Versions of Pastoral, 1935. Reprint by New Directions, 1968, pp. 27-86.

Empson was an English critic, poet, and editor who is best known for Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), his seminal contribution to the formalist school of New Criticism. Empson's critical theory is based on the assumption that all great poetic works are ambiguous and that this ambiguity can often be traced to the multiple meanings of words. Empson analyzes a text by enumerating and discussing these various meanings and examining how they fit together to communicate the poem's ideas and emotions. In the following excerpt from a study that was first published in 1935, Empson addresses how the comic subplot of The Changeling relates to and amplifies the main plot, thereby presenting the first modern critical argument that the play is thematically unified

Swinburne said of The Changeling that 'the underplot from which it most absurdly...