ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the way the myth of Echo and Narcissus influenced English Petrarchism in the late sixteenth century, and specifically in the 1590s when amatory sonnet sequences were in vogue. After considering how and why this incongruous cross-fertilisation of Ovidian myth and Petrarchan sonnets occurred, the various effects of it are examined. In sonnet sequences, poets sometimes identified with Echo, and at other times with Narcissus, making it a complex and at times ambiguous effect. In the case of the sequence published by Barnabe Barnes in 1593, the myth was used to shocking effect, when the unrequited lover turns to rapist, prompted by his narcissistic sense of entitlement. The final section explores a different kind of transgression associated with the myth in poetry about homosexual attraction. Poetry on the margins of or even subversive of Petrarchism, such as Richard Banrfield’s sonnets to a young shepherd, or Shakespeare’s to a beautiful youth, draw on the sexual ambiguity of the Narcissus character, as also do the long poems Venus and Adonis and Michael Drayton’s Piers Gaveston, both published in 1593.
