The Shakespearean Forest. Anne Barton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xviii + 186 pp. $99.99.
mythopoetic supplement to the study’s largely medical context, and she suggests that the historical figures for the story may indeed have been twins. Tragicomedies often shifted poor behavior from the twins to their wives and mothers. In Webster’s The Devil’s Law Case, two siblings, Romelio and Jolenta, pretend that Jolenta is pregnant with twins in order to disguise the gravidas of Romelio’s girlfriend, the nun Angiolella. William Ryder’s The Twins explores the passion that Charmia feels for her husband’s twin brother. The scenario is resolved by a bed trick in which the husband poses as his own twin, a clever rendition of an old conceit. In comedy, twins trigger misrecognitions that produce funny situations, and they are perceived as blessings rather than curses to their parents, as in William Haughton’s Patient Grissil. Shakespeare’s twin plays go even further in defusing the fear of twins. Both Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night draw on the Plautine conceit of mistaken identity, but the earlier comedy doubles the trouble, while the later work features fraternal twins who become more like identical twins through cross-dressing. Viola and Sebastian, born from a violent cesarean section on the shores of Illyria, embody the twin mysteries of birth as division, separation, and trauma, and of gender as both riven and merged. Although she notes literary sources, Murray’s reliance on medical literature and broadsides occurs at the expense of detailed inquiry into myth, folklore, and anthropology. Where are Castor and Pollux, Romulus and Remus, and Jacob and Esau? Nonetheless, Murray has assembled a remarkable collection of texts unified around a single theme, and she has produced a thoughtful and coherent account of them as responses to the medical knowledge of the day. Meanwhile, my sister and I resemble Hermia and Helena’s “double cherry—seeming parted / But yet an union in partition” (Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.211–13), and I am blessed to share something with Cymbeline: “O what am I? / A mother to the birth of three? Ne’er mother / Rejoiced deliverance more” (5.6.369–71).