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What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.
Alfred Hitchcock to Francois Truffaut
Plautus, Shakespeare, Hitchcock- a formidable, unlikely threesome, but nevertheless, thematic bedfellows of a sort. In widely spaced times and highly varied environments, each has focused attention on the phenomenon of mistaken identity; all have dabbled in doubles. But though Shakespeare is closer in time and culture to Hitchcock, we instinctivelv link Shakespeare with Plautus because, put simply, "something happened" between Shakespeare's day and our own to change the complexion of the double and throw its shadow darker and larger across our imaginations. That "something" has been identified by Harry Tucker:
Psychology, as we know it today, had its beginnings at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth. The quest into the mind is simultaneously the quest into the individuality and integrity of the self, which can exhibit puzzling contradictions and obscurely understood drives and impulses. It is not surprising, then, that the theme of the double prominently appeared just when introspective German Romanticism was nascent and that it continued to appear along with the development of psychology into an independent discipline. Major wars and other extensive disturbances of society are among those occasions which cause man to ask himself fundamental questions about his identity-an identity which he finds existing on various levels or even in fragmentation.1
It is in fragmentation, subjective doubling by division, as Robert Rogers categorizes it, that the double chiefly reveals itself in literature after 1800. The more overt examples are actual duplicates who are physically identical: the mirror image of Poe's William Wilson, the mischievous shadow in Anderson's fairy tales, the portrait surrogate of Wilde's Dorian Gray. But latent doubles abound more subtly in Dostoevski and Conrad, where the similarities are spiritual rather than physical. As Rogers points out, "the representing doubles in these tales have a more or less autonomous existence on the narrative level . . . and yet are patently fragments of one mind at the psychological level of meaning." 2 This type of double exists as a defense mechanism for the ego, enabling the self to deal with tensions which it could not otherwise handle in primarily moral conflicts. Otto Rank tells us:
the most prominent...