Seattle Arts and Lecture Series
A Conversation with Maggie O’Farrell:
In-Person & Online
Tuesday, October 11, 2022 7:30 pm PST
https://lectures.org/event/maggie-ofarrell/
Biography
O'Farrell worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday in London.
She also taught creative writing at the University of Warwick in Coventry and Goldsmiths College in London.
She has lived in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Hong Kong, and Italy, now living in Edinburgh. Hers husband is William Sutcliffe, acclaimed British novelist, whom she met while they were students at Cambridge; they didn't become a couple, however, until ten years or so after they graduated. She has said of Sutcliffe: "Will's always been my first reader, even before we were a couple, so he's a huge influence. He's brutal but you need that."
They have 3 children.
Biography
O'Farrell has stated that well into the 1990s, being Irish in Britain could be fraught: "We used to get endless Irish jokes, even from teachers. If I had to spell my name at school, teachers would say things like, 'Oh, are your family in the IRA?’ Teachers would say this to a 12-year-old kid in front of the whole class.... They thought it was hilarious to say, 'Ha , your dad's a terrorist'. It wasn't funny at all.... I wish I could say that it's [less common today] because people are less racist, but I think it's just that there are new immigrants who are getting it now."
Nevertheless, not until 2013's Instructions for a Heatwave did Irish subjects become part of her work.
Publications
After You'd Gone (2000) is the groundbreaking debut novel about a distraught young woman who boards a train at King’s Cross to return to her family in Scotland. Six hours later, she catches sight in a mirror at Waverley Station of something so terrible that she gets on the next train back to London. This novel won the Betty Trask Award
My Lover's Lover (2002) is an intense, unnerving and passionate story of betrayal, loss and love, with all the frisson and psychological intensity of Rebecca.
The Distance Between Us (2004) is described as a gripping, insightful and deft novel, the haunting story of the way our families shape our lives. It won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Publications
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2007). Set in Edinburgh in the 1930s, Esme, youngest daughter of the Lennox family, is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Years later, a young woman receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit. Her grandmother seems unable to answer questions. How is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?
The Hand That First Held Mine (2010) is a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood. It won the Costa Novel Award and was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Publications
Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) is a novel set during the legendary summer of 1976. It was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Novel Award.
This Must Be the Place (2016), a top-ten bestseller, crosses time zones and continents to reveal an extraordinary portrait of a marriage. A reclusive ex-film star living in the wilds of Ireland, Claudette Wells is a woman whose first instinct, when a stranger approaches her home, is to reach for her shotgun. Why is she so fiercely protective of her family, and what made her walk out of her cinematic career when she had the whole world at her feet?
it was shortlisted for the Costa novel award, for the Saltire Society fiction book of the year, and for the BGE Irish book awards novel of the year.
Publications
I AM, I AM, I AM: Seventeen Brushes with Death is a memoir of her near-death experiences, and those of her children, that was Book of the Year in The Sunday Times, The Times, Guardian, Irish Times, Observer, Red and The Telegraph. It was shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography 2018.
Hamnet (2020) is the
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
Winner of the Women’s Prize For Fiction 2020
Fiction Book of the Year – British Book Awards
New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller
Publications
In 2022, she published The Marriage Portrait, a novel based on the short life of Lucrezia de' Medici, who may or may not have been poisoned by her husband, Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara. O'Farrell has said that she got the idea for the novel after seeing Lucrezia's portrait, attributed to Agnolo Bronzino, and from reading Robert Browning's poem, "My Last Duchess," in which Lucrezia makes a brief, silent and unnamed appearance.
She has also written two pictures books for children, Where Snow Angels Go and The Boy Who Lost His Spark.
Cast of characters
The Latin tutor and his wife Agnes (Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway)
Daughter Susanna
Twins Hamnet and Judith
John and Mary Shakespeare, he's a glove maker
William is the first child to survive, two sisters died previously
Edmund
Eliza (husband is the milliner)
Anne (deceased)
Richard
Gilbert
Cast of characters
Family of Agnes Hathaway
Bartholomew is her brother
Rowan is mother to Agnes and Bartholomew, deceased; father remarries
Stepmother Joan, with daughters Caterina, Joanie, Margaret and sons James, Thomas
From History (British publication)
What originally inspired you to write Hamnet?
When I was studying ‘Hamlet’ at school, my teacher mentioned in passing that Shakespeare had a son called Hamnet, who died several years before the play was written. I was immediately struck by the sad confluence of these names. What did it mean for a father to call a play after his dead son? And how might Hamnet’s mother have felt about it? I remember looking down at the cover of the play and covering the ‘L’ of the title with a finger. How easy it was to make ‘Hamlet’ read ‘Hamnet’.
From History (British publication)
What originally inspired you to write Hamnet?
This is a novel I’ve been wanting to write for over thirty years. I’ve always felt Hamnet’s story has been eclipsed, his short life relegated to a literary footnote. He gets very little mention in any of his father’s biographies; his mother has too often been inexplicably maligned and misrepresented.
With this book, I wanted to give voice to Hamnet and his mother and sisters, to imagine what life had been like in the glover’s house in Henley Street, and how the tragic events of August 1596 might have played out.
Questions for discussion
Like Horse, Hamnet is an unusual novel. For one thing, it isn't a straightforward, chronological narrative. The book begins with an important view of Hamnet who has just discovered that his sister Judith is seriously ill. He searches for, calls for, his mother, grandmother, older sister, a maid, his absent father, even his indisposed grandfather. Ultimately he goes to the local physician's house.
His mother Agnes is at Hewlands tending to her bees
His father is of course in London
His sister and grandmother are delivering gloves
His grandfather has been socializing with prominent townsmen, now drinking ale in the parlour, drunk.
Book opening:
A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.
The passage is narrow and twists back on itself. He takes each step slowly, sliding himself along the wall, his boots meeting each tread with a thud.
Near the bottom, he pauses for a moment, looking back the way he has come. Then, suddenly resolute, he leaps the final three stairs, as is his habit. He stumbles as he lands, falling to his knees on the flagstone floor.
It is a close, windless day in late summer, and the downstairs room is slashed by long strips of light. The sun glowers at him from outside, the windows latticed slabs of yellow, set into the plaster.
Book opening:
The room is empty, the fire ruminating in its grate, orange embers below soft, spiralling smoke. His injured kneecaps throb in time with his heartbeat. He stands with one hand resting on the latch of the door to the stairs, the scuffed leather tip of his boot raised, poised for motion, for flight. His hair, light-coloured, almost gold, rises up from his brow in tufts.
There is no one here. . . .
This house whisteles with draughts and eddies of air, with the tapping and hammering of his grandfather’s workshop, with the raps and calls of customers at the window, with the noise and welter of the courtyard out the back, with the sound of his uncles coming and going.
But not today.
Book opening:
. . . He calls out, a cry of greeting, a questioning sound. Once, twice, he makes this noise. Then he cocks his head, listening for a response.
Nothing. . . .
But where, he would like to know, are his mother, his older sister, his grandmother, his uncles? Where is the maid? Where is his grandfather, who tends not to leave the house by day, who is usually to be found in the workshop, harrying his apprentice or reckoning his takings in a ledger? Where is everyone? How can both houses be empty?
Book opening:
Hamnet’s mind is quick: he has no trouble understanding the schoolmasters’ lessons. He can grasp the logic and sense of what he is being told, and he can memorise readily. Recalling verbs and grammar and tenses and rhetoric and numbers and calculations comes to him with an ease that can, on occasion, attract the envy of other boys. But his is a mind also easily distracted. A cart going past in the street during a Greek lesson will draw his attention away from his slate to wonderings as to where the cart might be going and what it could be carrying and how about that time his uncle gave him and his sisters a ride on a haycart, how wonderful that was, the scent and prick of new-cut hay, the wheels tugged along to the rhythm of the tired mare’s hoofs.
Book opening:
He has a tendency to slip the bounds of the real, tangible world around him and enter another place. He will sit in a room in body, but in his head he is somewhere else, someone else, in a place known only to him.
He is utterly confounded to be so alone. Someone ought to be here; someone always is here. Where can they be? What must he do? How can they all be out? How can his mother and grandmother not be in the house, as they usually are, heaving open the doors of the oven, stirring a pot over the fire? He stands in the yard, looking about himself, at the door to the passageway, at the door to the brewhouse, at the door to their apartment. Where should he go? Whom should he call on for help? And where is everyone?
Questions for discussion
That section ends and the next begins with the following:
Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. Him standing here, at the back of the house, calling for the people who had fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow on broth before he ate it, to take care crossing the street, to let sleeping dogs lie, to swill out a cup before drinking, to stay away from deep water. . . .
It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.
So, what's the meaning of this book's opening?
Questions for discussion
One of the book's reviewers said that it is about "meetings," about chance encounters that can have a profound effect on someone's life.
One chance encounter is of course William and Agnes.
Another is the about the plague--presumably the purpose of that 12-page description (ca. p. 140) about the origins of the plague in Venice—the Murano glassmaker who accidentally burns himself, the man on the docks in Alexandria with a monkey wearing a little red jacket and cap, the cabin boy from the Isle of Man on whom the monkey climbs, the seamstress in Stratford waiting for Venetian beads for a fashionable dress, and Judith, helping her, who opens the box containing the beads and their infected packing material.
So, is the book about chance encounters, or episodes in life that are definitive?
Questions for discussion
Who is Agnes? What kind of a person is she? What does she represents?
Questions for discussion
About Agnes, from The Literary Review:
Rather than presenting us with the umpteenth Shakespearean biography, she offers us “something other” – a phrase which appears twice in the text to describe the enigmatic maternal figure.
In her latest novel, O’Farrell seeks to retrieve the “absent mother” Agnes Shakespeare from the obfuscating sexism of historiography.
Questions for discussion
About Agnes, from The Literary Review:
In a wonderfully playful scene in the novel, Shakespeare mishears her name as “Anne” when they first meet.
The slipperiness of her name in the book registers the mysterious nature of her identity.
Prior to their fateful encounter, the eighteen-year-old Shakespeare has already “heard many . . . fanciful tales” about this enchanting woman eight years his senior:
Questions for discussion
About Agnes, from The Literary Review:
She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad . . . collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone . . . She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite.
O’Farrell reimagines Agnes as a powerful woman with exceptional gifts, and this visionary healer captivates the local glover’s wayward son, who will one day become the world’s greatest dramatist.
Questions for discussion
About Agnes, from The Literary Review:
In the author’s note she emphasizes, “it is not known why Hamnet Shakespeare died,” nor is the Black Death even “mentioned once by Shakespeare” in “any” of his writings. Therefore naming, or the refusal to name, something or someone is a significant theme in the book. When Hamnet hears a neighbor mention the plague, he thinks, “That – he will not name it, he will not allow the word to form, even inside his head – hasn’t been known in this town for years.”
Questions for discussion
From The Literary Review:
The novel is an astonishingly intimate portrayal of a family living in the shadow of pestilence during a strange, stifling summer. . . . in Hamnet she [O'Farrell] writes of Agnes’s dying patients,
“How frail, to Agnes, is the veil between their world and hers. For her, the worlds are indistinct from each other, rubbing up against each other, allowing passage between them.”
The structure of the novel follows suit, and the result is deeply atmospheric prose that transports the reader to another world, which is at once Elizabethan England and a dreamlike space where anything can happen.
Questions for discussion
The narrative is split in two parts: before Hamnet’s death, and after.
The first part, which occupies two-thirds of the book, alternates between Will and Agnes’s earlier years – youth, courtship, pregnancy, shotgun wedding – and the “present day” of the book, late-16th century England.
The second part occurs after Hamnet's death as Agnes is preparing him for burial. O'Farrell writes:
How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?
Questions for discussion
And the second part also includes Agnes's trip to London when she discovers her husband's play Hamlet.
The epigraph that opens part 2 is Hamlet's speech, as he's dying, to Horatio:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
He then asks Horatio to "remember me."
What does Agnes hear in this final scene?
Questions for discussion
From a review in The Guardian:
. . . the title is slightly misleading. Though the novel opens with Hamnet, its central character and beating heart is the boy’s mother, whom O’Farrell calls Agnes. Names are significant in this book; when Agnes eventually sees the version of her son’s name on a London playbill, she feels he has been stolen from her a second time. Meanwhile, the most famous character in the novel goes unnamed; he is variously “her husband”, “the father”, “the Latin tutor”. He is allowed very little direct speech. This deliberate omission frees the narrative of all the freight of association that his name carries; even Stratford is rarely mentioned explicitly, with the author instead naming individual streets and houses to root her story in its location.
Questions for discussion
From a review in The Guardian:
[The novel focuses] on the everyday, domestic life of this family, who could be any family. Indeed, in their small local sphere it is Agnes who is the celebrity, known in the town for being unconventional, free-spirited, a gifted herbalist who trails rumours of other, stranger gifts. O’Farrell’s Agnes is a woman whose origins merge into a particularly English kind of folklore
– “There used to be a story in these parts about a girl who lived at the edge of a forest” –
Questions for discussion
From a review in The Guardian:
"There were creatures in there who resembled humans – wood-dwellers, they were called – who walked and talked, but had never set foot outside the forest, had lived all their lives in its leafish light, its encircling branches, its wet and tangled interior.”
Agnes herself is, in the eyes of her neighbours, a creature descended from myth; they regard her with a mixture of awe and wariness.
Questions for discussion
From a review in The Guardian:
There is an elliptical, dreamlike quality to her [O'Farrell's] prose in Hamnet that is essential to creating a world that feels at once wholly tangible and somehow otherworldly, as if the membrane between the natural and supernatural was more porous then.
Anyone who has visited Shakespeare’s birthplace will recognise her descriptions of his former home, but O’Farrell plunges the reader into the vivid life of the house, with its smells of a glover’s workshop, the heat and bustle of a cookhouse, the physical effort of planting a garden or twisting out newly washed sheets.
Breakout room question
So, what has stayed with you from this book? What is it's meaning, its value? What will you remember about it?
Questions for discussion
From The Literary Review:
The timeline of the text shifts back and forth between 1596, the year Hamnet dies aged eleven, and the 1580s, tracing the courtship and marriage of Agnes and William, and family life with their three children. It is an exquisitely rendered meditation on motherhood in all its love, joy, and grief, and the miraculous power of art to heal a wounded heart.
British website about Shakespeare
For more information, see the website maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/
What Manner of Man was Shakespeare?
The first in a four-part lecture series; 'What Was Shakespeare Really Like' by
Prof Sir Stanley Wells, University of Birmingham Shakespeare Institute, at
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in Henley Street, next to the Birthplace itself.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
He worked too as a theatre administrator, helping for two decades to manage a single theatre company, which suggests a high degree of business acumen, of stability of character, and of conscientiousness.
Above all he worked as a playwright, producing an average of around two plays a year over two decades or more, but ceasing it would seem around 1613, three years before he died.
And, as I shall discuss later, much serious reading lies behind his writings. He was a hard-working man for most of his life.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can see that he went on reading assiduously and widely throughout his working life, and we may make deductions from this about his sociability – aided perhaps by Aubrey’s remark that he ‘was not a company keeper; lived in Shoreditch; wouldn’t be debauched, and, if invited to writ he was in pain.’ He needed time to himself.
Study of the structure of his plays can help us to identify qualities of mind that made him successful as a plotter, as someone who could construct a complex dramatic structure, who had a practical knowledge of the theatrical conditions of his time, of the limitations imposed by the fact that only male actors would appear in his plays, that he needed to lay out his plot so that an individual actor might be required to take more than one role.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can see him as an observer of the life around him, as someone who knew, whether from direct experience or through his reading, about domestic life, about the law, and music, and philosophy, about plants and gardens, and about hunting and wild life.
We can think about his sense of individual character, both by observing how he makes characters in his plays speak and behave and also by observing what he makes them say about other characters in their plays, their moral attitudes, their foibles and sensitivities.
We can look at his portrayal of human idiosyncrasy, observing his sympathetic amusement at the ramblings of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and of Justice Shallow, at the immature illusions of the lords in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the affected language of Osric in Hamlet, the social pretensions of the Old Shepherd and his son in The Winter’s Tale.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can try to assess his sensibility by examining how in his plays he imagines himself into his characters’ attitudes to the life around them. We can observe, for example, that he was capable of empathizing with the suffering of animals . . .
We can think about the absences in the literary as well as the biographical record; about for instance the fact that in spite of his massive literary talent he wrote almost entirely for the theatre, that he appears not to have written masques for the court, or pageants for the City, or what we may call ‘public’ poems such as commendatory verses for other writers’ work, or comments on national events, or tributes on the death of members of the royal family such as Queen Elizabeth in 1603 or Prince Henry in 1612 – both of which elicited extensive comment from fellow writers.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can think about the implications for Shakespeare’s personality of his choice of subject matter for his plays, of the fact that almost all of them are set in the past and (except of course for the English history plays) in foreign lands.
And in relation to this we can consider how his choice of subject matter compares with that of his contemporaries – of his fondness for Italian sources, of the comparative absence from his plays of clear topical reference, of his general avoidance of direct contemporary satire.
He was a Romantic, and his work always had a touch of the old-fashioned about it, even whilst bristling with dazzling new words, freshly-minted from his hyper-articulating imagination.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can, I think, deduce something about Shakespeare’s personal opinions from the plays. He seems to me to have distrusted people, like Iago in Othello, and Goneril, Regan, and above all Edmund, in King Lear, who express a severely rationalistic view of life and of morality, and to have sympathized more easily with the sceptical irrationality of Gloucester and indeed of Hamlet: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio …’
There is a speech by Lafeu in All’s Well that Ends Well, unnecessary to the action, in which I think that for once we can hear Shakespeare speaking: ‘They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things [that are] supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.’ (2.3.1-6)
Lecture by Stanley Wells
He is suggesting that ‘clever’, excessively rational people, try to reduce to a commonplace level matters that are beyond human understanding, reducing the mysteries of the universe to a series of scientific formulae, making ‘trifles of terrors’ instead of opening their imaginations to the fullness of experience – or, as he puts it, submitting themselves ‘to an unknown fear’- that is, to the uncertainties of the unknown and unknowable.
It is an exact description of the error that Lady Macbeth makes in thinking that she can ignore the promptings of imagination. Essentially, it seems to me, this identifies Shakespeare as someone who acknowledges the mystery of human life but is not bound by any dogma.
Lecture by Stanley Wells
We can learn about Shakespeare too by thinking about his financial affairs, his purchases and his investments – how extensive they were, where they were, and when and to what end he made them. It is surely significant that he appears to have lived relatively modestly in more than one neighbourhood in London and to have poured most of his financial resources into property and land in his home town.
From the age of 33 – only three years after the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – he owned New Place, the largest house in the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon.
Five years after this, in 1602, he paid £320 for the Welcombe estate, a property of some 107 acres – almost as big at the whole of the Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon (109 acres).
Lecture by Stanley Wells
And only three years later, in 1605, he paid £440 for a share in the Stratford tithes. His last known investment, and his only known purchase of property in London, came in March 1613 when he along with three associates agreed to pay £140 for the lease of the Blackfriars Gatehouse, which was close to the Blackfriars playhouse.
In so doing, we should bear in mind that wills were as they always have been – starkly legal documents. The phrase ‘second-best bed’, so often interpreted as personally inflected, was matter-of-fact and ensured that his widow, Anne, had residential rights in New Place.
British website about Shakespeare
Conclusion of Stanley Wells' first lecture:
In brief, it seems to me that Shakespeare led a life of external respectability and that he achieved personal popularity and worldly success, but the amazing degree of imaginative fecundity and emotional ferment to which his works bear abundant witness surely reflects a life of inner turmoil. His life is a tale of two cities (or one town and one city). In Stratford he is the prosperous and outwardly respectable family man. But he leads a double life, disappearing at frequent intervals to the metropolis. There he is the successful poet, actor, and playwright, leading member of the most successful theatre company of the age, a frequenter of the royal court and also of the Inns of Court.
British website about Shakespeare
Conclusion of Stanley Wells' first lecture:
I see him as a man whose inner tensions were contained with stern self-discipline in an external appearance of harmony, but who found release in the creative energy that informs his plays and especially, I believe, in his Sonnets. In some of them, I believe, he delved deeply into his innermost self, discovering for himself what manner of man he was by giving voice to his most intimate being.
I plan to talk about the Sonnets in the third of my lectures, but next week I shall remain with his professional life and discuss how he wrote his plays.
From The Guardian
About Hamnet:
And what distinguishes it from O’Farrell’s earlier work is that while it shares the page-turning verve of its predecessors, it pulls off what younger writers (she is now 47) seldom achieve: the power of letting a story appear to tell itself. It reads like a fairytale rooted in heartbreaking reality – there is no magic with which to save a child.
Hamnet is believed to have died of the plague, aged 11. His brief and precious life was, O’Farrell thinks, more significant than literary historians suppose. In Shakespeare’s time, Hamlet and Hamnet were, according to the critic Steven Greenblatt in the New York Review of Books, the same name.
But no one has, until now, imaginatively investigated the connection between Hamnet and Hamlet
Sonnet 33 (Hamnet is subject matter)
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow,
But, out alack, he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born in 1585, probably before Shakespeare had written and published any of his plays. We don’t know a lot about the twins, but we do know that Hamnet died very young— he was only eleven years old when he caught what was probably the bubonic plague. He died just a couple of years after the premiere of The Comedy of Errors. So it’s possible that Shakespeare wrote about twins because he was the father of twins.
There are differences between the twins in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In the former, there are two sets of fraternal twins. This is played more for farce than for any sort of emotional impact or resolution; in fact, even though the twinhood is celebrated in this play, it’s also the problem. The play is only resolved when the other characters are able to separate and make distinctions between all four twins. Twelfth Night, on the other hand, plays the whole twin idea more seriously. Don’t get me wrong; it’s still a comedy. But it’s a comedy with some sad undertones.
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born in 1585, probably before Shakespeare had written and published any of his plays. . . . [Hamnet died at 11 when] he caught what was probably the bubonic plague . . . just a couple of years after the premiere of The Comedy of Errors. So it’s possible that Shakespeare wrote about twins because he was the father of twins.
There are differences between the twins in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night. In the former, there are two sets of fraternal twins. This is played more for farce than for any sort of emotional impact or resolution; . . . Twelfth Night, on the other hand, plays the whole twin idea more seriously.
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
The play starts with a shipwrecked and distraught Viola learning of her twin brother Sebastian’s supposed death. In fact, she believes that Sebastian is dead throughout most of the play, and only finds out that he is still alive at the very end.
This theme of separated and dead twins was probably close to Shakespeare’s heart; he wrote the play only around five years after his son’s death, so it’s no surprise that a dead twin is a prominent part of the plot. The twins in Twelfth Night are fraternal, just like his own children.
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
In Twelfth Night, it’s only through the “twinhood” of these characters that there’s any resolution at all. If Viola and Sebastian were not twins, then Olivia would end the play alone and with unresolved romantic feelings for Viola. Instead, she pairs off ultimately with someone very similar in appearance and personality, and Viola has her own love and her own life. If Sebastian was not Viola’s twin, the plot would not resolve nearly as happily or as tidily. The Comedy of Errors is all about the problems with being twins, while in Twelfth Night the twins are what make a happy ending possible.
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
[In both plays], twins are treated like heroes. They are the protagonists, they are normal people, and they all seem relatively happy. This was wildly different from what other writers did at the time. If twins featured in any literature at all in Shakespeare’s day, it was usually something tragic or something unnatural. Contemporary scientific thought held that twins were unnatural and deviant, born out of unnatural desires in the mother.
From Utah Shakespeare Festival--twins
It seems that Shakespeare was a lot more forward thinking when it came to twins than his colleagues and contemporaries. Shakespeare’s twins are not unnatural, they are not deviant, they are not weird. Instead, his twins are individuals with their own strengths and faults, and their twinhood is secondary to their own personal characters. This might be because he understood better, as the father of twins. Or it could be that he was just better educated on the subject. Or maybe, Shakespeare just knew the human condition and understood individual characters in a unique and deep way..