Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’ Taught Me About Being a Twin

For me and my twin, the surprise was not our matching tumors, but that hers was malignant and mine was benign.

My twin sister and I are not carbon copies; we’re more like mirror images, our dominant hands on opposite sides. I used to imagine the moment of our birth: our mother on the surgical table and our father beside her, the incision made, and my sister pulled into the world. Before I was born, she spent nearly a full minute crying into the bright room without me. But I have never known this life without her.

When we were little, before the infection in my sister’s left cornea was diagnosed, I had dreams for weeks that I couldn’t open my right eye. When my sister injured her left knee, I fell to the ground on a soccer field fifty miles away; for no reason anyone could discern, my right kneecap felt shattered. On prom night, I felt so raw I couldn’t bear to be touched, but my sister was the one nursing a third-degree sunburn, blisters in the outline of a soccer jersey above her terrific neon dress. When my twin experienced pain, my body seemed to know.

After our shared girlhoods in central Florida and Georgia, my sister and I attended the same college in the Midwest. Then I moved to New York City, she moved to Nicaragua, and we lived in separate places for the first time in our lives. We weren’t in contact much, but I was convinced that didn’t matter. As girls, we’d stand side by side at the bathroom sink brushing our teeth at night, and my sister would begin to hum the very song stuck in my head. I felt that we shared a special intimacy, a connection that eclipsed distance, time, space, death. My sister scoffed at the idea. She didn’t appreciate that I assumed closeness simply because we’d shared a womb. Still, I felt there was a bond. I felt I knew things about her without having to be told.

Then when we were twenty-four, my sister got cancer, and I felt nothing in my body.

Shortly after her diagnosis, a friend sent an email with an audition notice for a play. “You’d be great for this part,” she wrote, “but maybe it’s too soon? It’s about separated twins.”

That afternoon, I requested an audition slot for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The play begins with a shipwreck, one twin fearing the other lost. “What country, friends, is this?” Viola asks after washing up on a strange shore. She does not recognize the land in which she finds herself, the person who entered the world alongside her suddenly absent.

I reached out to my sister. We had a few stilted conversations. I put together an uninspired care package, unsure of what to include, and sent a faltering note that could not convey the things I felt. I didn’t know what to say to my sister about her illness, but I was sure she knew I was thinking of her constantly. The thought of floundering with insufficient words felt terrifying, a plummet. And so I chose instead to rely largely on our silent understanding, and I carried a copy of Twelfth Night with me everywhere, preparing to audition for the role of Viola, emerging from the sea and looking for her twin.

The audition was scheduled to take place two days before my sister would undergo a double mastectomy. On the subway, I pulled the play from my bag and placed it on my lap, but I couldn’t read. The train rocked me back and forth, and I could only think of an afternoon four years earlier when my sister and I were students at the same midwestern college, me studying theater, her studying political science. I was in one of the campus’s student art galleries, standing alone before a massive painting, an abstract nude. I’d been drawn to the picture’s colors, the thick brushstrokes in blue and green. Stepping back from the canvas, I took in the image as a whole.

Those are my breasts, I thought. They looked just like mine—their size, the curve of them. After a moment, I looked at the exhibit label. The title of the painting, in bold, dark letters, was my sister’s name.

I called my mother’s home in Georgia, where my sister was awaiting treatment and where she would recover after surgery with her partner there to care for her. “She’s sleeping,” my mom said. “And, Lindsey. You ought to see a doctor. Get checked just in case. She’s so young. And she’s your twin.” I made an appointment, all the while thinking of the years my sister and I spent dressed alike, our matching bed linens, trick-or-treating as famous pairs.

I saw the doctor on a morning in late spring. The gray sky had given way to rain, and the downpour was torrential by the time I got off the train in midtown Manhattan. I sat down in the waiting room, dripping wet, and took Twelfth Night from my bag to read Viola’s opening scene, her reaction upon washing ashore in Illyria.

“And what should I do in Illyria? My brother, he is in Elysium. Perchance he is not drown’d.—What think you, sailors?”

“You’d be great for this part,” she wrote, “but maybe it’s too soon? It’s about separated twins.”

It is an agonizing entrance, beginning the play presuming her brother is dead. I thought of the raucous physical humor in The Comedy of Errors. Both plays feature parted twins. Both plays are categorized as comedies. Twelfth Night is a story of mistaken identities, trickery, and music, with plenty of gender fun. Why, then, did Twelfth Night feel so much sadder than Shakespeare’s other twin play?

After a quick internet search, I learned what caused the shift in tone: Shakespeare was the father of a set of fraternal twins born in 1585, Hamnet and Judith. He wrote The Comedy of Errors in 1593, when the twins were eight years old. Some scholars speculate that the play’s farcical nature was meant to alleviate the stigma twins faced in early modern England, a time when twins were often associated with tragedies.

Then, in 1596, Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died when he was eleven years old, leaving his twin sister Judith behind. Five years later, in 1601, Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night. In it, he gives us the scene of a girl emerging from a tempest-tossed sea, grieving the loss of her twin. The rain outside beat against the windows, and my wet dress clung to my skin.

“Lindsey?” Someone was calling my name. I stood and followed a nurse to an examination room. The physician was a young woman with light brown hair tucked behind her ears.

“What brings you in?” she said. Then she offered me her hand while I cried. Not long after the exam began, she paused and prodded the side of my right breast.

“Give me your hand,” she said, and she placed my fingers over my skin and pressed down. “Do you feel that?”

I did. A moment later, the doctor wheeled in an ultrasound machine. The mass on the screen was immediately visible to us both.

Three days later, I laid in a cold, bright room at NYU while another doctor drew a small circle in black marker on my breast before slipping a large needle beneath my skin. I held my breath and looked away, shivering on the table.

“You’re awfully young,” he said. “But it’s good you came.”

I told him why I was there: There was a tumor in my twin sister’s left breast. The doctor confirmed I had a tumor, too, in my right breast. I thought of how my sister and I had been once, seated side by side in a small classroom learning to write letters in cursive, her pencil in her left hand, mine in my right.

Twins reflecting one another in this way—the surprise was not our matching tumors, but that hers was malignant and mine was benign. I thought of the third act of Twelfth Night, one character’s proclamation: “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

On the afternoon of my audition for Twelfth Night, I wore black. I pulled my hair back, trying to put on the body of a woman wearing her twin brother’s clothes, hair hidden and breasts bound, layers upon layers of disguise. Waiting for my name to be called, I closed my eyes and tried to reach out for my sister in the secret space I once believed twins to inhabit.

But I could not find her. I had no sense of her at all, and I understood all at once that our separation was not a product of physical distance. It had begun as soon as I started relying on a cosmic closeness, some mysterious twin connection, to replace the work of sisterhood—the accompanying and comforting and discovering that real relationships require.

The circumstances of our birth did not afford me any special knowledge of her. My understanding of her was not accurate, nor was it earned. Performing twinhood—dressing alike as children and posing together for photographs on our shared birthday—was not enough to stand in for a meaningful relationship.

When it was my turn to audition, my face hot and throat tight, I found my legs would not move. Performing a monologue rife with comedic opportunity, I delivered the speech angrily at the men seated behind the folding table, missing the mark entirely and not caring at all. “O time! thou must untangle this, not I; It is too hard a knot for me to untie!” I didn’t get the part.

I closed my eyes and tried to reach out for my sister in the secret space I once believed twins to inhabit. But I could not find her.

On the day of her double mastectomy, I thought of the painting of my sister’s body. I thought of her on her back, counting backward, slipping out of consciousness, further away than sleep, a fathomless ocean of distance between us. “Prove true, imagination, O, prove true,” Viola exclaims at the possibility that her brother is alive and well. And he is. He lives. They are reunited at the end of Shakespeare’s play. My sister lived, as well, recovering fully.

Later that year, I traveled to central Florida to spend Christmas with my family. My sister’s face was softer than I remembered and her shape unfamiliar. After dinner, I stood at the window and watched her walk into the yard behind the house. I saw an image of us as children so clearly beside her adult figure—a pair of small girls arguing and playing in navy blue school-uniform shorts and white collared shirts, outrunning the cold spray of a rotary lawn sprinkler.

But the person standing in the gloaming was new to me. She passed a hand through her short blonde hair and knelt beside her sweet yellow lab, patting her gently, reassuringly.

To suppose you know everything there is to know about someone is a terrible risk. To love someone deeply, there must be a willingness to encounter them again and again. Assume too much familiarity, even out of love, and it becomes difficult to stay curious and open to surprise, to develop a bond that is rich and evolving. Twelfth Night is a play full of looking, but it takes the siblings’ seemingly miraculous reunion for either of them to be fully seen.

The pair are forced to ask questions of their ties:

I had a sister,

Whom the blind waves and surges have devour’d.

Of charity, what kin are you to me?

What countryman? what name? what parentage?

The twins must encounter one another anew. They must dissolve the disguises they’ve worn for the confusion to be undone, for the flood of fortune to be upon them.

I watched my sister from the window and thought of a line from the final act of The Comedy of Errors: “O, grief hath changed me since you saw me last.” Grabbing a six-pack of beer from the fridge, I walked outside, my feet bare in the damp grass.

“Wanna go to the lake?” I handed one of the cold cans to my sister.

“Sure,” she said.

We walked together to the dock to watch the sun set over the water, to meet each other again.