Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus

Summary

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’. 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) 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). 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.