In modern terminology, it is generally accepted that monozygotic fertilization is always same sex (in fact, recent research has shown that in certain rare cases of genetic abnormality it is possible to have boy-girl monozygotic twins). But Riche’s original premise reveals the absurdity of this criticism of the plot: siblings don’t even have to be twins to look remarkably alike.

One of the greatest challenges for a writer is to imagine what it would be like to be a member of the opposite sex. The particular demand faced by Shakespeare and the boy actors who played his women’s parts was to get beyond the age’s conventions of proper female behavior, which commended silence and submissiveness. “Cesario” is partly a device to give Viola an active voice, to enable her to break the shackles of passivity. But the lovely combination of quick-witted facility, wonder, and vulnerability with which she slots into her impersonation is something more than a reaction to social convention or codes of propriety. In terms of the play’s imaginary world, Viola plays Cesario so effectively because of her prior knowledge and love of Sebastian—this is what allows the otherwise implausible conceit of Olivia’s marrying Sebastian in the belief that he is Cesario. In terms of the play’s creative origin, it is tempting to speculate that the germ was sown by Shakespeare’s observation of the intuitive understanding between his twins as they learned to speak and to play together.

Shakespearean comedy often imagines a journey from the secure womb of the family to a world of shipwreck and isolation, and thence to the bond of marriage. The characters lose themselves to find themselves. Broken families are restored in the same instant that new families are anticipated through the pronouncement of love vows. The climax of Twelfth Night is one of the great reunion scenes, as the parted twins are joined:

ORSINO    One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,

A natural perspective, that is and is not!

…

ANTONIO    How have you made division of yourself?

An apple cleft in two is not more twin

Than these two creatures.…

The language is richly suggestive of one made two and two made one, of the cleft apple from the Symposium’s myth of origins, and of the workings of nature combined with the trick of art (a “perspective” was a distorting glass that created the optical illusion of one picture appearing as two). In a single action, brother and sister find both each other and their object of desire.

And yet. The peculiar poignancy of Twelfth Night comes from the sense that there are many losses even in this moment of wonder. Antonio, who has been like a brother and even a lover to Sebastian, is left alone. Malvolio has been humiliated just a little too far. The union of Sir Toby and Maria leaves Sir Andrew isolated—he was adored once, too, but we cannot imagine that he will be again. And Feste is there to sing another sad song of time and change. Above all, Cesario is no more: Orsino closes the dialogue by addressing Viola by her boy-name one final time before she assumes her female garb and becomes his “fancy’s queen.” But “fancy’s queen” is the very language of that shallow courtly love with which Orsino had tried to woo Olivia: the language that Cesario cast off when he/she began speaking in his/her own voice. In the closing moments of the play, Viola does seem to revert to the silence and passivity of orthodox female behavior.

What is going through her imaginary heart at this moment? Even as Sebastian and Orsino are found, Cesario is lost. Could Viola be saying goodbye to the feigned twin into which she has made herself?

The name “Cesario” suggests untimely birth—as in “Cesarean section,” a baby “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”—but the character undergoes an untimely death. A few months before starting the comedy of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare completed his deeply meditated tragedy of Hamlet. There are unfathomable crosscurrents at work here: in creating and destroying Cesario, perhaps Shakespeare too is saying a goodbye. To his own Hamnet. Viola is diminished when bereaved of her invented second self. Was this Shakespeare’s delayed response to poor Judith’s desolation on the loss of her twin?

In preparing to direct the play for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2009, Gregory Doran, himself a twin, noticed a coincidence neglected by nearly all the legion of Shakespeare’s biographers and critics. Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were baptized on 2 February, the feast of Candlemas (which celebrates the presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple in Jerusalem—a fitting moment for the baptism of a treasured first son). And it was on that very same festival day seventeen years later, 2 February, Candlemas, that Twelfth Night was performed (the earliest performance of which we have a record) before the law students of the Middle Temple in 1602. Malvolio describes Cesario/Viola as “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy. As a squash is before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple: ’tis with him in standing water, between boy and man.” On 2 February 1602, Judith was in standing water between girl and woman. By turning Viola into Cesario and allowing Sebastian to return from the devouring sea of death, Shakespeare allowed himself the consoling fantasy of a seventeenth birthday reunion for his own separated twins.

THE FOUNTAIN OF SELF-LOVE

A more immediate occasion for the play’s meditations on love and identity seems to have been Shakespeare’s friendly rivalry with Ben Jonson. Shakespeare had been writing courtship comedies for many years when Jonson came onto the theatrical scene at the end of the 1590s with a more hard-edged satirical vein of drama that tapped into the psychology of “humours”—the idea that aberrant behavior (which is readily comic and worthy of satire) could be attributed to an excess of a particular passion or obsession or to temperamental imbalance (too much choler or melancholy).