[In the following essay, Palmer examines Shakespeare's adaptation of Ovid's Echo and Narcissus myth in Twelfth Night.]

Orsino's attitude to love, particularly in the play's opening speech, has often provoked charges of self-indulgence and self-deception, and one critic is even driven to declare him ‘a narcissistic fool’.¹ However, the association with Narcissus can be more precisely defined, since Orsino's luxuriant musing on the appetite that craves to die in its own too much, the music that cloys the sense so that it seems no longer sweet and the capacious spirit of love in which anything of value ‘falls into abatement and low price’ (I, i, 13)² plays upon the motif ‘inopem me copia fecit’, the complaint of Ovid's Narcissus translated by Golding as ‘my plentie makes me poore’ (l. 587).³ In its original context, ‘inopem me copia fecit’ expresses the paradoxical realisation of Narcissus that he himself is the unattainable object of his insatiable desire, but the Elizabethan poets appropriated the tag as a paradigm of unrequited love.⁴ Spenser, for instance, constructs the thirty-fifth sonnet of Amoretti around it:

My hungry eyes through greedy covetize,
          still to behold the object of their paine,
          with no contentment can themselves suffize:
          but having pine and having not complaine.
For lacking it they cannot lyfe sustayne,
          and having it they gaze on it the more:
          in their amazement lyke Narcissus vaine
          whose eyes him starv'd: so plenty makes me poore.
Yet are mine eyes so filled with the store
          of that faire sight, that nothing else they brooke,
          but loth the things which they did like before,
          and can no more endure on them to looke.
All this world's glory seemeth vayne to me,
          and all their showes but shadowes, saving she.(5)

Orsino's opening speech is not only full of similar languishing, but it also expresses the restlessness of the affections that come to ‘loth the things which they did like before’. In the poems written early in his career Shakespeare himself plays some less neo-Platonised variations on the motif of ‘inopem me copia fecit’. At the beginning of Venus and Adonis, for instance, Venus promises the reluctant youth that her kisses will ‘not cloy thy lips with loath'd satiety, / But rather famish them amid thy plenty’, (ll. 19-20) although later in the poem, when she tries to embrace Adonis by force, it is her own lips that ‘surfeit, yet complain on drouth. / He with her plenty press'd, she faint with dearth’(ll. 544-5). Similarly, in The Rape of Lucrece, Tarquin's lust is apparent in his ‘still-gazing eyes’,

Which, having all, all could not satisfy;
But, poorly rich, so wanteth in his store
That cloy'd with much he pineth still for more.

(ll. 96-8)

When Orsino calls for music as ‘the food of love’,

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die,

(I, i, 2-3)

Shakespeare is adapting Barnabe Riche's reflection on the foolish lover, ‘onely led by the apetite of his owne affections’,⁶ to a conventional and perhaps slightly old-fashioned literary trope. Orsino loves by the book; at a further remove from his beloved than Spenser's tormented lover or the predatory Venus, Orsino's passion is fed neither by eyes nor by kisses, but by imagination:

                                                  So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

(I, i, 14-15)

Orsino recalls, not only the Narcissus of ‘inopem me copia fecit’, mediated through the tradition of Elizabethan love poetry, but also the Narcissus whose plight is somewhat unfeelingly described by Golding:

He feedes a hope without cause why. For like a foolishe noddie
He thinkes the shadow that he sees, to be a lively boddie.

(ll. 521-2)

Orsino too pursues an illusion; the fact that during the course of the play he does not encounter Olivia until the final scene reinforces this sense of an infatuation with an image rather than love for a real person. His attitude can indeed be described as ‘narcissistic’, though it is defined in relation to other allusions to Ovid's fable and its later recensions in the pattern of the play as a whole.

Malvolio, for instance, is also initially identified with Narcissus when Olivia rebukes him on his first appearance for being ‘sick of self-love’ (I, v, 85). This Narcissus is the allegorised figure of Philautia, a diagnosis later confirmed by Maria's description of the self-conceit that she will exploit in her plot against him: ‘the best persuaded of himself, so cramm'd, as he thinks, with excellencies that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him’ (II, iii, 140-2). Malvolio, like Orsino, is self-deceived, but to an opposite effect. The Duke plays the long-suffering unrequited lover of poetic tradition, while the steward, ‘practising behaviour to his own shadow’ (II, v, 14-15), a very narcissistic pastime, imagines that his lady dotes on him.

Olivia herself is the subject of another sequence of allusions to Narcissus in Viola's criticism of her refusal of love. Again, some of these are mediated through poetic tradition, while some more directly recall the Ovidian tale. Viola's tribute to Olivia's beauty, for instance, is often compared to the opening theme of Shakespeare's own Sonnets:

Lady, you are the cruell'st she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.

(I, v, 225-7)

The youth addressed in the Sonnets is reproached in several references to the beauty, vanity and eventual fate of Narcissus, including the following quatrain from the first sonnet, with its adroit play upon ‘inopem me copia fecit’ in the third line:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

(ll.5-8)

The vanity of the mythical youth who scorned all his suitors is also paralleled by Viola's accusation that Olivia is ‘too proud’ (I, v, 234), while Viola's imprecation on this ‘fair cruelty’,

Love make his heart of flint that you shall love;
And let your fervour, like my master's, be
Plac'd in contempt!

(I, v, 270-2)

corresponds to the prayer of the rejected suitor in Ovid (Golding's version is cited again):

I pray to God he may once feele fierce Cupids fire,
As I doe now, and yet not joy the things he doth desire.

(ll. 505-6)

The wish is fulfilled upon Olivia no less ironically than it is in the myth: ‘poor lady, she were better love a dream’ (II, ii, 24).

More incidental to the dramatic design, but indicative of the associations at work in Shakespeare's mind, is Malvolio's description of Viola, ‘yond young fellow’ demanding admission at Olivia's gate, as ‘in standing water, between boy and man’ (I, v, 150). The New Arden edition of the play notes that the line is reminiscent of Golding's account of the adolescent Narcissus:

For when yeares three times five and one he fully lyved had,
So that he seemde to stande betweene the state of man and Lad,
The hearts of divers trim yong men his beautie gan to move,
And many a Ladie fresh and fair was taken in his love.

(ll. 437-40)

The verbal recollection brings with it the context of sexual ambivalence, appropriate to Viola's disguise and to the ironic outcome of the following interview with Olivia, while Shakespeare's improvement upon the neutral expression ‘stande betweene’ in the metaphoric phrase ‘in standing water’ is also fitting for this lady from the sea.

Viola's role, however, has more in common with Echo, the nymph deprived of her own speech by Juno and compelled to express her feelings in borrowed terms. Ovid's Echo falls in love with Narcissus, but is spurned by him and hides away until she fades into a disembodied voice. It is tempting to believe that the poignancy of Viola's secret love for Orsino is indebted to Echo's plight, particularly in the device by which Viola preserves her secrecy yet reveals to Orsino ‘what love women to men may owe’ in the fiction of a sister who ‘never told her love’ (II, iv, 109). This tale of melancholy concealment and pining love certainly corresponds in feeling to Ovid's description of Echo (here given in the words of a literal modern translation in preference to Golding):

Thus spurned, she lurks in the woods, hides her shamed face among the foliage, and lives from that time on in lonely caves. But still, though spurned, her love remains and grows on grief; her sleepless cares waste away her wretched form; she becomes gaunt and wrinkled and all moisture fades from her body into the air. Only her voice and her bones remain: then, only voice; for they say that her bones were turned to stone. She hides in woods and is seen no more upon the mountain-sides; but all may hear her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her.⁷

Viola's skill in attuning her speech to the occasion is an important feature of her use of disguise. In resolving to serve Orsino she refers to her ability to speak ‘in many sorts of music’ (I, ii, 58), and this claim is first tested when Orsino sends her to court Olivia on his behalf, assuring her that ‘It shall become thee well to act my woes’ (I, iv, 25). In her encounter with Olivia, she proves herself versatile in adopting different voices, playing in turn the impertinent youth (Orsino has instructed her to ‘Be clamorous and leap all civil bounds’, I, iv, 20), the flattering courtier (‘Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable beauty’, I, v, 160), the candid moralist (‘What is yours to bestow is not yours to reserve’, I, v, 177) and, at the climactic point of the interview, the ardent lover who would, ‘If I did love you in my master's flame’,

Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia’. O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

(I, v, 256-60)

Golding describes Echo as ‘a babling Nymph’, but Viola is no gossip, although she voices Orsino's suit: ‘what I am and what I would are as secret as maidenhead’ (I, v, 203).

The matching response which Viola's impersonated passion so inadvertently elicits from Olivia suggests another variation on the Echo theme, as fable fades into metaphor. Echo is that reciprocation of feeling so eloquently expressed by Viola as she and Orsino listen to music:

Duke.                                         How
dost thou like this tune?
Viola.
          It gives a very echo to the seat
          Where Love is thron'd.
Duke.                                         Thou dost
speak masterly.

(II, iv, 19-21)

Orsino's praise of her response also acknowledges that her ‘masterly’ reply echoes and articulates his own feeling. It is a moment of true emotional consonance, and as Orsino recognises by Viola's answer that his page knows what it is to be in love, the two are drawn closer together. The irony and pathos of Viola's secret plight lend emotional conviction to her repetition of his poetic cliché:

Duke.
                    For women are as roses, whose fair flower
                    Being once display'd doth fall that very hour.
Viola.
                    And so they are; alas, that they are so!
                    To die, even when they to perfection grow!

(II, iv, 37-40)

Viola, like Feste, is a realist, and she tries to make Orsino see the truth of his fruitless pursuit of Olivia:

Viola.
                    But if she cannot love you, sir?
Duke.
                    I cannot so be answer'd.
Viola.                                                   Sooth,
but you must.

(II, iv, 86-7)

That is the crux of the matter: love that lacks a responding echo is in vain.

Concealment and reciprocation, which I have associated with the Echo motif of the love plot, are concerns that extend into other areas of the play. ‘Is it a world to hide virtues in?’ asks Sir Toby (I, iii, 123), and certainly Viola's enforced secrecy and self-restraint contrast with the generally unrestrained and uninhibited temper of life in Illyria. Orsino's ready trust in his new servant, ‘I have unclasp'd / To thee the book even of my secret soul’ (I, iv, 12-13), is paralleled by Sebastian's unfolding to Antonio:

But I perceive in you so excellent a touch of modesty that you will not extort from me what I am willing to keep in; therefore it charges me in manners the rather to express myself.

(II, i, 10-12)

Viola persuades Olivia to unveil and withhold herself no longer, but she must in turn ungraciously refuse Olivia's offer of love (and money), while in a later scene Sebastian accepts Antonio's unsolicited gift of love (and money):

                                                  My kind Antonio,
I can no other answer make but thanks,
And thanks, and ever thanks; and oft good turns
Are shuffl'd off with such uncurrent pay.

(III, iii, 13-16)

Requiting what is freely given is the essence of civility and proper relationship throughout the play, epitomised in Feste's thanks for the sixpence sent by Sir Andrew: ‘I did impeticos thy gratillity’ (II, iii, 25).

A less civil form of requital is the revenge upon Malvolio, and the great gulling scene also turns on concealment and exposure. Before he finds Maria's letter, Malvolio unwittingly betrays his secret fantasies to his enemies concealed behind the box-hedge, and then, with tantalising obtuseness, Malvolio discovers, opens and eventually deciphers the letter with its hidden message: ‘daylight and champain discovers not more. This is open’ (II, v, 141-2). Hilarity is tinged with a more ominous hint when Sir Toby says to Maria at the end of the scene: ‘Why, thou hast put him in such a dream that when the image of it leaves him he must run mad’ (ll. 173-4).

Malvolio's painful awakening from fantasy suggests how much happiness seems to depend on deception and illusion in this play. As Sebastian says, when Olivia, a perfect stranger to him, invites him inside her house,

Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep,
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

(IV, i, 60-2)

Perhaps this is why the final clarifications, which depend on the recognitions of Viola and Sebastian, are deferred for as long as possible. Viola has no cause to wish for delay in resolving the various predicaments she is in, yet in the final scene, when she has more clues than anyone else to the source of the mounting confusion, she preserves a curious secrecy.

From the beginning of the play Viola has been aware of the possibility of Sebastian's survival: ‘Perchance he is not drown'd’ (I, ii, 5). The audience knows of Sebastian's presence in Illyria from the opening of act II, when he declares his belief that his sister is drowned. We are again reminded of Viola's tentative hope that her brother lives when she says to Orsino, almost giving herself away,

I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too—and yet I know not.

(II, iv, 119-20)

But when Antonio claims his purse from her at his arrest, and actually calls her Sebastian, Viola cautiously speculates on his error without jumping to conclusions:

He nam'd Sebastian. I my brother know
Yet living in my glass; even such and so
In favour was my brother; and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate. O, if it prove,
Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love!

(III, iv, 363-8)

In the final scene, as Antonio is brought before Orsino for fighting in the streets, Viola testifies on his behalf, but surely pretends to less understanding than she has:

He did me kindness, sir; drew on my side;
But in conclusion put strange speech on me.
I know not what 'twas but distraction.

(V, i, 60-2)

Antonio's account to Orsino of all that he has done for ‘that most ingrateful boy there by your side’ (l. 71) merely draws from Viola the blank incomprehension of ‘How can this be?’ (l. 86). Before Antonio's grievance can be settled, Olivia appears and immediately reproaches Viola with breaking the vow which we know was sworn by Sebastian. Again Viola's response is evasive: ‘my lord would speak; my duty hushes me’ (l. 101). Her declaration that she loves Orsino ‘More, by all mores, than e'er I shall love wife’ (l. 130) provokes Olivia to protest that she is beguiled, but still Viola is seemingly as perplexed as the others: ‘Who does beguile you? Who does do you wrong?’ (l. 134). When Olivia directly claims Viola as ‘husband: can he that deny?’ (l. 138), the denial, ‘No, my lord, not I’ (l. 140), might be construed as arch rather than bewildered, and similarly her feigned ignorance is wearing thin when Sir Andrew enters to accuse her of wounding himself and Sir Toby: ‘Why do you speak to me? I never hurt you’ (l. 179).

All this is comically effective in arousing the audience's anticipation of Sebastian's own climactic entrance, and it teases us in its disingenuous use of the stock device of mistaken identity. But Viola is not obtuse, and she is in a better position than the other characters to realise that Sebastian must be the key to these apparent contradictions. Secrecy and patience are hers to the end, in contrast to Olivia's o'erhasty marriage and her summoning of the priest,

Here to unfold—though lately we intended
To keep in darkness what occasion now
Reveals before 'tis ripe—what thou dost know.

(ll. 146-8)

With Sebastian's eventual entrance, the twins are together on stage for the first time, but for twenty-four lines Viola remains silent, while her brother, not noticing her, greets his bride and then his friend Antonio. At last it is Antonio's astonishment that draws Sebastian's attention to his other self. The moment of recognition that will disperse error and confusion is now at hand, but still tantalisingly delayed, as brother and sister speak the antiphonal exchanges that bring them with unhurried and almost ritual solemnity to the point of mutual identification.

Even at this point, however, Viola's reticence permits only a provisional declaration of herself, drawing back from the embrace that would finally reunite her with her brother:

Viola.
If nothing lets to make us happy both
But this my masculine usurp'd attire,
Do not embrace me till each circumstance
Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump
That I am Viola.

(ll. 241-5)

This protracted and deferred reunion can be explained as Viola's distrust of appearances in the uncertain and unstable world of Illyria, where, as Feste says, ‘nothing that is so is so’ (IV, i, 8). But from the moment of Sebastian's amazed ‘Do I stand there?’ (l. 218), it is Viola's identity that has to be proved. Moreover, her first reaction to Sebastian's presence as that of a spirit ‘come to fright us’ (l. 228), while referring to his supposed death, also has something in common with that aura of the uncanny and unearthly associated with the confusion and eventual coming together of the twins in The Comedy of Errors. As the Duke of Ephesus exclaims in the recognition scene of that play, ‘Which is the natural man / And which the spirit?’ (V, i, 332-3). In this early comedy, the identical twins pose a threat to each other's sense of self and separate identity; to find his brother, Antipholus of Syracuse must ‘lose myself’ (I, ii, 40). In Twelfth Night, ‘drowned Viola’ (recalling the plea of Narcissus to his own image in the water: ‘It is a trifle in respect that lettes us of our love’, l. 568) will not embrace Sebastian in her ‘masculine usurp'd attire’: according to several Elizabethan versions of the myth, Narcissus drowned endeavouring to embrace his own reflection.⁸ In both plays, however, the true union of two-in-one is achieved in marriage, and the motif of the lost twin embodies that quest for the other self.

Notes

1. Herschel Baker, Introduction to Twelfth Night, The Signet Classic Shakespeare (1965), p. xxviii.

2. Quotations of Shakespeare's plays and poems are from The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951).

3. Quotations of Arthur Golding's translation of Metamorphoses (1567) are from Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (1961). All line references are to The Third Booke.

4. L. Rick, ‘Shakespeare und Ovid’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, lv (1919), 50-1.

5. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (1912), p. 568.

6. Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581) as cited in the New Arden edition of Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (1975), Appendix 1, p. 158.

7. Ovid: Metamorphoses. With an English Translation by Frank Justus Miller. The Loeb Classical Library. 2 vols. (1916), 1, 153.

8. T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespere's Poems & Sonnets (Urbana, 1950), pp. 18-21.