ABSTRACT
This essay uses as its starting point a striking correspondence between two literary works coming from very dissimilar cultural backgrounds and written for completely different audiences. The first is a short children’s poem by a twentieth-century Polish poet Yulian Tuvim (1894-1953) and the second is a late-seventeenth-century comedy Amphitryon; or the Two Sosias, John Dryden’s adaptation (1690) of the ancient Greek legend of the conception of Hercules, made previously famous by such luminaries of the stage as Plautus and Molière. Incommensurable as these texts appear to be, both contain the same curious incident – indeed, Tuvim’s poem contains nothing else – in which a character is persuaded that if somebody looks exactly like him, or even just wears his clothing, it must be him. Both persuasion scenes are quite amusing, and it is only afterwards, when one tries to figure out what is really going on in these quirky variations on the “twin” theme, that they may appear a bit unnerving. In what follows, I speculate on the possible cognitive-psychological underpinnings of both such amusement and such uneasiness. My ultimate goal is to consider this ambivalent emotional reaction when prompted by the actual theatrical performance as opposed to the same reaction arising in response to reading about the adventures of twins. If the workings of certain deep-seated cognitive proclivities inform our thinking about personal identity, how does the physical presence of the strikingly similar bodies on stage engage and experiment with such proclivities?
