This essay traces Shakespeare’s evocation of Echo in Twelfth Night (c.1600-1). Echo features in Viola’s lines where she imagines a lover’s song resounded by "the babbling gossip of the air" (1.5.227). This phrase, closely imitating Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus from Metamorphoses, comes to identify Viola with Echo, suggesting imitation and repetition as key factors in depicting the relationship between the master and his page boy. In his later comedy, Shakespeare revises and expands on the motif of the transvestite page boy’s mediating role and explores more fully Viola’s enactment of the multiple roles that she must play for Orsino: the reader, mediator, and actor of his courtship text. Recognizing the literary value of Shakespeare’s classical debts, I argue that Echo, derived especially from Ovid’s version and placed in the contemporary context of female-voiced complaint, offers an implicit but crucial model for Viola’s service as a messenger. Although Echo is only obliquely invoked in the play, the figure’s characteristic imitation suggests a version of collaborative authorship which is not attributable to a single individual speaker or writer and calls for an extensively femininized space for the articulation of desire.

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