Hand in Hand: Shakespeare’s Use of Twinning

Since the beginning of recorded culture, twins have held a social fascination for man. Twins were used in ancient mythology to provide explanations for natural phenomena such as the weather or constellations and the use of twins in literature and the arts predates The Bible. A playwright who had more than just a passing interest in the subject of duplicity as the father of boy/girl fraternal twins Judith and Hamnet, William Shakespeare would time and time again use the concept of twins and doubling in his plays. Whether writing about actual twins in such mistaken identity comedies as The Comedy of Errors (COE) or Twelfth Night (TN), using doublets or other types of duplicate language such as homonyms in his prose or even providing opportunities for his characters to demonstrate onstage twinning such as a sane Hamlet transforming into his evil twin, a mad Hamlet, Shakespeare never lost sight of the literary powers of twinning. Since I too have more than just a casual interest in the subject as an identical twin who is also the dad of identical twins, I believe that Shakespeare was able to use his own experiences as a father within his plays. Shakespeare realized that each pair of twins can represent a paradox as single identities yet as individuals that society views as parts of a collective whole. As the perceived natural halves of a collective dual being, twins or other literary tools used to portray the aspect of twinning can sometimes represent parts of an incomplete identity, a theme that Shakespeare expanded upon continually.

As twins became more and more common in society during the 20th and 21st centuries, the literary world started to see new literary criticism of Shakespeare which placed additional emphasis on his use of twinning. David Kirby in an essay titled Chekhov’s Influence on Shakespeare originally printed in the Virginia Quarterly Review felt that the theme of twins is one of the most important elements in reading the Bard. “The paradox that is most essential to an understanding of Shakespeare is the one I’ll call twinning.” As I mentioned, the natural reaction many people have when seeing two twins is to think of them as one person. For a writer like Shakespeare who was so concerned with his characters abilities to see both themselves and the world with double vision, the irony of one person apparently being in two places at once was probably too hard to avoid using in at least a couple of his comedies. Kirby groups the mistaken identity scenes sprinkled throughout COE as well as the brief interaction between female/male twins Viola and Sebastian in TN along with other non-zygotic twinning examples in Shakespeare such as Bottom portraying an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (MND) or the twin plays within a play in MND and Hamlet, but for the purposes of this paper I will mainly limit my comments to the sets of twins in TN and COE.

Although open to debate, it’s very likely that COE and TN marked Shakespeare’s first and last true comedies. Looking at the development of the relationship between the twins in these two bookend plays, it is evident that Shakespeare had refined his playwright skills in the decade-or-so in which he wrote the plays and it is also quite probable that he had developed new feelings on the interaction between twins during that timeframe, particularly as the latter play was written after the death of one of his twins, his son Hamnet. One major difference between the two plays is that until the very end of COE, there are no characters, including the dual sets of Antipholus and Dromio twins, who realize that the farcical events and lines being uttered could possibly be related to their character being mistaken for a twin. Contrasting this, however, Viola immediately senses that the possible source for the confusion is her newly found twin brother: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true (note the doublet of repeated text), that I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you!” (TN, III, iv, 375-376) One critic looking at Shakespeare’s literary twins, Ronald R. Macdonald, felt that by allowing Viola to quickly grasp the reasons behind the confusion, Shakespeare was showing his more mature writing skills in TN. “The speed with which the potential problem is disposed of suggests that by this time Shakespeare had found subtler and more varied ways of generating a comic plot.”

Make no mistake of it, Shakespeare’s twins are certainly used for comic relief. Drawing upon the basic plot of The Menaechmi by Plautus for COE, Shakespeare expands upon the pure farce of the Plautus play by adding a second set of twins, the Dromio servants, and also giving the main Antipholus twins more ethics and purpose. The audience learns of the twins at the start of the play as the father of the two Antipholus brothers, Egeon, explains how he, his wife Aemilia, their infant twins and twin servants were capsized and divided at sea in a storm. As the storm intensified Egeon was left in charge of one son and his servant and his wife in charge of the others.

Two things capture your attention as the story of the twins separation is shared with the audience; first, we would see the same fate befall Viola and Sebastian in TN, and second, there almost appears to be a narrative error in Egeon’s speech as he exclaims, “My wife, more careful for the latter-born, Had fast’ned him unto a small spare mast, Such as sea-faring men provide for storms. To him one of the other twins was bound, Whilst I had been like heedful of the other. The children thus dispos’d, my wife and I, Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix’d.” (COE, I, i. 78-84) Apparently by that description Egeon is watching the older first-born twin and Aemilia has the responsibility for the younger second-born twin son. Yet later in Egeon’s narrative, he explains to the Duke what happened after the boat split in two, “My youngest boy, and yet my eldest care, At eighteen years became inquisitive After his brother; and importun’d me That his attendant – so his case was like, Reft of his brother, but retain’d his name.” (COE, I, i.124-128) So in other words Egeon does survive with the younger twin--not the older twin after all--and at age 18 explains to his son what happened to his twin brother while giving the younger twin the older brother’s name.

Was this really a mistake in narrative? There are a couple of arguments that can be made that this confusion was intended. Patricia Parker, in her essay Transfigurations: Shakespeare and Rhetoric makes the case that the critical line in the passage is line 84, “Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix’d” implying that the parent was watching the son they were caring for, but doing so possibly from afar on the opposite side of the boat. Another interpretation of this apparent emphasis on birth order compels the reader to contrast the confusion over which twin is in which parent’s care (and thus which is the older twin and which is the younger) to the play’s closing lines as spoken by the Dromio twins as they try to determine how to walk off together into the sunset: Syracuse Dromio: “Not I, sir, you are my elder.” Ephesian Dromio: “That’s a question; how shall we try it?” Syracuse Dromio: “We’ll draw cuts for the senior, till then lead thou first.” Ephesian Dromio: “Nay then thus: We came into the world like brother and brother; And now, let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.”

The literary debate over the birth order of twins and the argument that one twin must be a leader and the other must be a follower can be seen as far back as The Bible with Jacob and Esau and their divisions and battles to determine which is older and younger (coincidentally enough contained within Ephesians 2 in The New Testament). With his closing to COE, it’s almost as if Shakespeare is implying that there is no need to identify a twin as being older or younger.

When Shakespeare next puts twins in a play with Viola and Sebastian in TN, he doesn’t try to define their roles as older or younger. Sebastian’s explanation of his family to Antonio is much briefer than Egeon’s tale in COE: “my name is Sebastian, which I call’d Rodorigo; my father was that Sebastian of Messaline, whom I know you have heard of. He left behind him myself and a sister, both born in an hour.” (TN: II, i., 16-19) Not only does Shakespeare not identify if Viola or Sebastian was born first, he doesn’t even have a character use the word ‘twin’ until very late in the play. After telling Antonio about his sister, Sebastian does hint at the resemblance between he and his sister and also explains that (he believes) she drowned at sea: “A lady, sir, though it was said she much resembled me.” (TN: II, i., 25-26) Obviously there is still the intent to use the theme of mistaken identity for comic relief later in the play with the added twist of one needing to suspend belief to assume that adult male/female twins can be mistaken so easily for one another. The Duke Orsino comments upon first seeing the two characters together, “One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!” (TN: V, i., 216-217) Later in that same scene Antonio remarks on their resemblance to one another: “How have you made division of yourself? An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?” (TN: V, i., 222-224) Note the clever Biblical reference to Adam and Eve, another male/female set who though not twins will also always have their origins be tied together.

Shakespeare indeed uses his twins in his comedies in a classic sense. Juliana de Nooy, who examined hundreds of sets of twins in literature and cinema in her recently published book, Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture, comments on the standard treatment of twins in mistaken identity literature: “In comedies of confusion, twins escape with their lives, but in these genres they have no life together. They are usually separated at birth and, in plays, never appear on stage together until the very last scene.” In addition to the twins in COE and TN, I feel there is one other Shakespearian character worth mentioning who spends her time on stage in search of finding herself and who I believe shows character traits of an individual with a void as if missing part of her complete being. Certainly not a comedic character, the 13-year-old Juliet (coincidentally the same age Viola was when losing her father) to me shows traits that we would nowadays associate with the phenomenon known as a twinless twin, an individual who loses their twin at an early age and then constantly feels an absence in their life. In Romeo and Juliet (R&J), the Nurse character relates the following to Juliet’s mother after the matriarch wonders how old her daughter is: “Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen, Susan and she—God rest all Christian souls!—Were of an age. Well, Susan is with God, She was too good for me. But as I said, On Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen.” (R&J, I, iii., 17-21) Isn’t it interesting that this vignette can draw parallels to both of Shakespeare’s plays with twins? Similar to COE, a care-provider is entrusted with the safekeeping of an infant (and failing in the nurse’s case with Susan) and as in TN a teenage girl is searching for her true identity and not finding it until she finds her true love. I’m not implying that Juliet and Susan were also twins, but we can certainly infer from Shakespeare’s brief inclusion of the doomed Susan that Juliet at least had a companion and friend whose identity would forever be lost to her.

When it comes to Shakespeare’s use of twinning, I believe that he placed twins in his plays or used his other literary tricks involving duplicity as a method of portraying an individual’s search for his or her lost identity. Shakespeare knew that twins represented a curiosity factor in society as I’m guessing that even in Elizabethan times, strangers might come up to twins or their parents and question whether they were identical or which was born first or ask if they think/speak/act alike. He knew that each twin was his or her own person, but that this identity was oftentimes missing, either from the twin’s own perception of his or herself or at least from society’s perception of that individual. Being so concerned with his character’s searches to achieve their true identity, Shakespeare constantly would rely upon the act of twinning in his plays, either through the use of twins in a couple of his plays or with the inclusion of verbal doublets or other forms of duplicity, to allow his audience to meditate on the question of character and identity. This search for identity took on various forms, through love, marriage, family or perhaps just a general acceptance by society. It certainly is not something unique to twins but can go hand in hand with the perception of twins.

Twinstuff 14:24, 16 May 2007 (CDT)

Works Cited or Referenced

De Nooy, Juliana. Twins in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Palgrave MacMillain: Sydney, 2005.

Kirby, David. Chekhov’s Influence on Shakespeare, Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter, 2004.

Macdonald, Ronald R. William Shakespeare: The Comedies, Twayne Publishers: New York, 1992.

Parker, Patricia. Transfigurations: Shakespeare and Rhetoric, reprinted in Shakespeare, An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, edited by Russ McDonald, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2004.

Riverside Shakespeare, The (2nd Edition). Houghton Mifflin Company: Boston, 1997.

Vaughn, Jack A. Shakespeare’s Comedies, Ungar Publishing: New York, 1980.