In spite of being in love with the duke herself, Viola/Cesario must woo the duke’s love interest Olivia. Viola washes up on the shore of Illyria and disguises herself as Cesario, a boy servant to Duke Orsino. Twins supply both plot and atmosphere: Viola and Sebastian are fraternal twins who are separated during a shipwreck. It’s deeper, less wacky, and shot through with magic and melancholy. But it’s better than The Comedy of Errors, which features two sets of twins. Twelfth Night isn’t the first of Shakespeare’s plays to use twins and doubles.
These works serve as excellent companions, reminding us we always have something in common with others, whether it is our appearance or our emotions, and that we are not alone. The following eight works of literature suggest that the paths we take in our lives are not inevitable, not fated, not wholly dictated by how we appear as an image from the outside, but more often the sum of the individual choices with which we all struggle and how the world reacts to them. But fiction is powerful because it can reveal what’s inside each twin’s mind, rather than create meaning solely from appearance. You only have to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s dread-infused Vertigo or Krystof Kieslowski’s poetic The Double Life of Veronique or Stanley Kubrick’s frightening The Shining to see the immense power of a doubled image to convey meaning. Observing their constant companionship, their hugging and squabbling and tormenting of each other - all in stark contrast to memories of my own childhood - made me think about all of the literature featuring twins I’ve read over the years.Īs a visual medium, films can be better equipped than novels to make something marvelous out of the mere image of twins - the playfulness, the uncanniness, and the potential dangerousness of doubles. He took great delight in the puzzle of putting his hand on the mirror, and watching his “twin” copy him from the world on the other side. For months during infancy, when one twin looked in the mirror, I am fairly certain he believed it was his twin he was seeing and not a reflection of himself. For the most part, they only use one of their names interchangeably it has taken some doing to convince one twin to recognize that the discarded name actually belongs to him and he should reclaim it.
M y toddler twin sons seem to believe they might be the same person or copies of each other. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
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