I just had to post this photograph of that time I shared a good laugh with Judi Dench.
Heh-heh.
No, actually, it’s Brendan O’Hea, co-author with Dench of the fascinating book I just finished, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. But oddly, he looks rather like me, doesn’t he? Or like a long-lost cousin?
The photograph, from the back cover flap of the book, has me reflecting on the architype of the double in life and literature. Perhaps it is strangest when it occurs in the real world.
Once, covering a civil trial for the Chicago Tribune, I noticed my doppelgänger in the jury box. He had that look I share with several of my cousins on my dad’s side. We even had the same close-cropped haircut. He noticed me, too. Throughout the trial we kept sneaking glances at each other.
I thought, We could be related. It’s not impossible. Working is an uncommon surname, but a fair number of our clan settled in Illinois and Minnesota, as attested by old Civil War records (my ancestors fought on the Union side). Maybe I should chat with him after the verdict, I thought.
[Check out Russell’s new novel, The Insurrectionist.]
At the first break he stood up. He was about a foot shorter than I. All my cousins on my dad’s side are tall. I thought, Maybe not. Anyway, the jurors left out the back, and I was on deadline, too rushed to talk to him.
‘The Comedy of Errors’
Dench and O’Hea’s book is an oral history of the Shakespeare roles she played over the years. (It’s a wonderful book, by the way. If you love Shakespeare, go buy it.) One chapter deals with “The Comedy of Errors,” which doubles up on the doubles. Two twins named Antipholus were separated as infants during a shipwreck; they have twin servants, both named Dromio. Shakespeare brings them to the same city as adults. Let the madcap mistaken identities begin.
A more somber literary case of doubles appears in Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities. For the love of a woman, Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine in place of his lookalike, Charles Darnay. Dostoevsky wrote an eponymous novel on the theme of the double. Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is the tale of a ship captain who onboards and hides an accused murder who resembles himself. In Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, nine-year-old Edward VI of England swaps places with his double, an indigent Londoner named Tom Canty.
Downtown doppelgänger
A few years back, when I worked at Ragan Communications, a colleague told me she had just seen someone who looked exactly like me on Michigan Avenue.
“He even wore your same style of clothing,” she said.
“I don’t have a style,” I said. “I just wear what my wife buys me.”
“Well, that’s just what he wears.”
I told her I was offended at the notion that Nonna was buying clothes for random Russells wandering Chicago.
Others have noticed doubles in real life. A Canadian photographer named François Brunelle “Finds Look-Alikes That Are Not Actually Related By Blood But Look Incredibly Similar,” Bored Panda screams in amazement. Some of them could almost be identical twins.
Thanks to Dench and my long-lost quasi-double, O’Hea, I am putting “The Comedy of Errors” on my reading list. I haven’t opened the play script since I reviewed an Oregon Shakespeare Festival performance perhaps thirty-five years ago. But I am sure it is worth a second read.
The Elephant Box 