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Macbeth is only one pregnant example of Spiró’s hypothesis that Shakespeare based his system of doubling on certain pairs of opposites—the living and the dead; good and evil; gentlemen and commonfolk; Englishmen and Frenchmen; Montagues and Capulets. Such pairs of opposites represent extremes in human qualities, treating Man as a collective idea rather than as an individual. The doubling of roles taken as a basic principle of the Shakespearean method leads to exciting conclusions in his essay. On occasion, however, one play or another escapes the net of the doubling theory and will not lend itself for such an interpretation. Of the best-known plays, King Lear is a case in point, even if traditionally the roles of Cordelia and the Fool are frequently put forward as an obvious doubling. As we know, the Fool vanishes from the plot without a trace, while Lear speaks about the dead Cordelia as "my poor fool". Spiró, however, does not consider this particular doubling probable. "We may, of course, substantiate it, in a very twisted way; however, the Fool who is wise and Cordelia whose heart is wise but is a fool in real life, do not belong together—more precisely, they do not make a pair of opposites. […] This type of doubling is untypical of the mature Shakespeare." According to Spiró, several roles may be contracted in Lear, and the whole play may be performed by a company of twelve actors and a couple of apprentice actors, but "no doubling in it offers anything of artistic significance".

Then he arrives at a strange conclusion: "Though doubts as to Shakespeare’s authorship have never been raised, it may nevertheless be more than just coincidence that, as regards doubling possibilities and dramatic significance, Lear is out of line, and the most talented detractors of Shakespeare, such as Leo Tolstoy and the Hungarian novelist Zsigmond Móricz, singled out for criticism the forced solutions in Lear and projected this onto other plays as well. The secondary plots, when examined, show that the Edmund and Edgar line as set against the Lear line is conspicuously dilettantish. The former is psychologically flat, a poorer version of the Richard III story, hinting of re-echoing, while Lear’s outbursts—his soliloquies—appear as though floating in loneliness over the whole play. The motifs of the secondary plot were much admired and imitated in the Romantic Age, not entirely by accident, perhaps, in view of the fact that the Romantics’ insight into character was inferior to that of the Elizabethan Age. Shakespeare either kept nodding off when writing Lear or else contributed only the great soliloquies, and left the makeshift structure the way it had been supplied."

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Bolder still is his conjecture on Henry IV. He thinks it is conspicuous that the King and Falstaff meet only four times throughout the play, and even then Falstaff utters no more than one sentence. "Lesser dramatists than Shakespeare would not pass up confronting the two characters, and at least once would engage them in a major polemic. Yet Shakespeare did pass up such a tempting opportunity. And I think this author is one of the greatest sensationalists, who would never willingly or unwillingly give up an effect, except for an even greater one. The question that arises is: Was it not the same actor that played King Henry and Falstaff? When they do encounter one another, any actor could have substituted for Falstaff, in his costume, and he had only to produce a single sentence in Falstaff’s voice. Even a hired actor could have done that." And the aim could have been nothing other than to mock the King as performed by Falstaff—more complex than a simple parody: the actor playing Falstaff parodies himself, the way he plays King Henry’s role.

Spiró admits that the probability of certain doublings he suggests—Henry/ Falstaff is one—may be strongly debated. Yet he maintains that "possible doublings are at the same time probable as well: a dramatic structure that harbours so many occasions for doubling can only be built up by design." And this leads to one es-sential conclusion of his work: "In Shakespeare’s dramatic oeuvre, the rich choice of possible and probable versions of doubling lead us to believe that, for him, writing each particular play involved a series of choices and decisions, and because he was free to do without doubling, he was also free to opt for doubled roles; he was also free to experiment with widely different versions of the doubling structures. Literary critics and historians are wont to treat certain literary works as though having been written by an automaton, a robot licensed to write plays, which was expected to ‘give voice to’ or ‘reflect the age’, the ‘spirit of the age’, or ‘class struggle or ‘the Renaissance vision’ and who knows what else, supporting, as it were, the views later analysts hold on the philosophy of art—as though a work can only exist in the very form it has been left to us and could not be any different, as though some divine or historical predestination was at work when the writer chose that particular form and nothing but that form; as though he could not have picked, had he wished, any other form or any other figure except that one he did. Those who have no personal experience of the creative process usually exclude from the work precisely what is most important—the element of creation."

The author’s working hypothesis certainly leads to a series of other questions. For example, Spiró asks, whether the actor who plays in double roles within one performance did make it clear in one of his roles that he, the actor, played an- other role as well; and if so, did the audience appreciate this or not; if not, did they appreciate that the actor played both roles with genuine and deep identification, not stepping out of either, and it is only the audience member who knows that these roles are akin through the person of the actor. Was the aim perhaps that the identity of the actor in various roles must not be revealed? Did the "Brechtian" or rather the "Stanislavsky" method work in the Elizabethan Age? And later, did this "doubling principle" operate, if only in a changed form, in other centuries and in the work of other playwrights, such as Ben Jonson, Webster, Goethe, Kleist, Schiller, Pushkin, Büchner, Wyspianski, Shaw and Chekhov?

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