Twins in Early Modern English Drama and Shakespeare by Daisy Murray (review)

Daisy Murray's new book on twins and twinning in early modern English drama begins by situating dramatic representations of twins within the larger early modern culture of thought around the unnaturalness of twins in popular culture and scientific literature. In doing this crucial contextual work, Murray sets out to refresh our thinking on what it meant to be a twin or be related to a twin in early modern England and to lay the foundation for her readers to understand the possibilities for monstrosity and surprise that twins presented in early modern drama. She drives home the variety of interpretations open to early modern people when encountering twins, most often through literature of some kind, but aims to recast twins not as the 'objects of horror' of many early modern representations but as 'objects of wonder' (182). Her use of both medical literature and cheap print such as broadsides and ballads gives evidence of the representation of twins in early modern England as 'prodigious figures' who appeared alongside 'moralizing messages' and gave rise to reams of medical literature blaming women for 'imperfections' in the children they bore (3, 9). Murray's thorough survey of medical manuals feeds productively into the discussion of William Davenant's The Cruel Brother (1627) in chapter one and Richard Brome's The Lovesick Court (1638) in chapter two. Here, she focuses her thinking on the alignment of the female character with the space of the womb, drawing on early modern scientific discussion of the womb as 'the site of generative activity' (8). In sum, Murray's formative contextual work on non-dramatic literature surrounding twins and twinship is the base on which she rests her assertion that these cultural markers contributed to and influence both modern and early modern readings of the twin relationships in the plays she discusses.

The bulk of Murray's text is devoted to working through dramatic representations of twins in tragedies (John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and William Davenant's The Cruel Brother), tragicomedies (Webster's The Devil's Law Case, William Ryder's The Twins, and Richard Brome's The Lovesick Court), comedies (James Shirley's Changes: or, Love in a Maze; Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside; Patient Grissil by Thomas Dekker, Henry Chettle, and William Haughton), and two of Shakespeare's comedies (The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night). By organizing her book in this way, she shows both the ways in which representations of twins are bound by genre and how the non-dramatic literature surrounding twins manifests itself in dramatic representations of twins. In the tragedies, for example, Murray argues that the unnatural nature of twin births (as propounded by the period's medical literature) carries forward into the unnatural behavior of the twin characters. Both sets of male/female twins in the two plays she discusses in this section 'create binaries of their twin characters' and in so doing, set the brothers in opposition to their sisters (58). Each brother destroys his sister, but as they are indissolubly linked to each other, so each brother is the author of his own destruction. As Murray maps twins through the remaining plays in her book, she notes the shift from negative depictions of twins in the tragedies to more (but not wholly) positive depictions in the comedies. The tragicomedies are the unsurprising middle ground of twin representation, removing or changing the twin relationship in such a way as to allow for a comic ending free of the negative effects of twinship apparent in the tragedies.

A particular strength of the book is Murray's juxtaposition of twins in academic comedies, mainstream non-Shakespearean comedies, and Shakespearean comedies. In the three professional plays she discusses in her comedy chapter she notes 'while the negative associations with twinship are overridden, they are not necessarily directly addressed and, accordingly, the horrific possibilities still linger over these plays' (137). When compared with the...