Daisy Murray opens her book on twins in early modern drama with The Cholmondeley Ladies (ca. 1600–10), a portrait of two identical women holding identical babies in a shared birthing bed, on view at the Tate Britain in London. I am surely not the only tourist to have texted an image of the mesmerizing portrait to my identical twin (though I am perhaps more unusual in having also sent it to my triplet offspring). Murray's book ends with her own thoughts on growing up as a twin, and her chapter on Shakespeare opens with an account of what we know about Shakespeare as father of twins, Hamnet and Judith. Reading this book, I joined a transhistorical fellowship of multiple births and found myself grateful to Murray for providing the first full-length comprehensive study of twins in early modern English drama.

Drawing on a body of material from medical tracts, ballads, and broadsides, Murray's approach is historicist rather than archetypal, mythopoetic, or intertextual. Conjoined twins dominate the cheap print of the period; these children were treated as monsters born to lascivious mothers. The popular story of the Sooterkin featured a triplet birth that included one live, one dead, and one serpent-like birth. This last creature embodies the evil twin who seeds discord and commits crimes, a theme continued in horror film classics such as Brian de Palma's Sisters and David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. In Shakespeare's age, even the healthy births of fraternal and identical twins were associated with promiscuous mothers who had had sex in succession, possibly with different fathers. (“Heteropaternal superfecundation” is indeed medically possible.) Identical twins were treated with wonder bordering on fear, while fraternal twins were suspected of incestuous leanings. Twins were not, however, as in some cultures, killed or exposed.

The most famous non-Shakespearean twin drama in Murray's book is John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, which features Ferdinand's jealous murder of his twin sister. Ferdinand, Murray argues, is the Sooterkin of the play. In addition, Murray links Ferdinand's incestuous passion to the myth of Narcissus, a welcome 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).