The Cross-Dressed Narcissus

Abstract

Directed by Peter Gill, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Twelfth Night of 1974 deserves much credit for popularising our widespread contemporary sense that the seaside dukedom of Illyria is ‘a land where human beings are all mirrors to each other, casting back reflections – whether identical, reversed, or absurdly distorted – that most fail to recognize as images of themselves’. William Dudley's minimalistic set design for this production strikingly featured ‘a stage with slatted walls, constructed in isolable blocks’, with ‘the central block of the back wall, which slid forward to create two upstage entrances’ portraying a larger-than-life ‘pale portrait of Narcissus’. Looming behind and between the onstage Shakespearean characters, this symbolically suggestive scenery seems to have inspired divisive audience reactions. Though it was despairingly described by Shakespeare Quarterly 's unenthusiastic reviewer Robert Speaight as ‘the only pictorial element in the bleakest decor that can ever have been devised for this highly decorative play’, Irving Wardle's review in London's Times instead argued that this Narcissus portrait visually elucidated ‘the main intention of … Gill's production’: that is, to present Twelfth Night as a play whose characters ‘are intoxicated with their own reflections’ and must navigate ‘through an Ovidian obstacle course’ before ‘they learn to turn away from the mirror’. In the wake of Gill's mythologically energised Twelfth Night , a body of scholarship began to emerge in the late 1970s exploring the specific relations between Ovid's tale of Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3 and this Shakespearean comedy . The first of these seems to have been A.B. Taylor's 1977 ‘Shakespeare and Golding: Viola's Interview with Olivia and Echo and Narcissus’, which was followed by D.J. Palmer's 1979 ‘ Twelfth Night and the Myth of Echo and Narcissus’. Taylor would return to this issue repeatedly over the next decades, and the connections between Narcissus and Twelfth Night have been elsewhere treated in Jonathan Bate's Shakespeare and Ovid , William C. Carroll's The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy , and Rene Girard's A Theatre of Envy , amongst other works.