ABSTRACT
Narcissus was born from the rape of one body of water, a river nymph named Liriope, by another, the river Cephesis. Ovid's story had undergone radical re-reading and survived alongside concurrent versions long before the time that Narcissus was taken up by the early modern period. Narcissus, it seems, has become a figure of the losses of the future, and the very word, "new", which is explicitly "nova dogmata" in the Latin of the Aldus edition is so sensitive in the context of sixteenth-century France that, in the translation into French of the Rouille and Mac Bonhomme editions in 1549, the new doctrine is written over as "autre voye". At the heart of the most difficult language problem of the theater of modernity, then, is the proper understanding of this problem as failed Narcissus, the monstrous face, political havoc. The great "Narcissus" in the Galleria Corsini, Rome, is of uncertain attribution and insecure date.
