To a post-Freudian world alarmed by the consequences of unrestrained individualism, Ovid's myth of Narcissus has seemed eerily prescient of the modern self-absorbed subject. Appropriately, as Eric Langley shows, Ovid's most popular tale also played an important role in early modern thought about identity. As Langley argues, the narcissist and his double the suicide were the “negative exemplars of excessive self-subjection and self-involvement, as advocates of gratuitously isolationist self-sufficiency” (2) through which debates over the early modern self took place. In one sense, perhaps, Narcissus made us who we are today.

Langley begins by examining Ovid's story of Narcissus and its English adaptations in a period fascinated by the paradoxes of selfhood. He is especially good both at describing Ovid's construction of rhetorical figures of repetition and doubling which verbally mirror the boy's own self-mirroring, and also at showing how English writers were challenged to reproduce such structures in English. The master of Ovidian rhetoric is Shakespeare, whose catchy “Narcissus so himself himself forsook” (Venus and Adonis, 161) expresses perfectly the paradox of a figure who is both subject and object of his own affections. The second chapter studies the epyllion in relation to a transition from an extromissive to intromissive, Platonic to scientific, model of sight. The two theories of vision are exemplifed in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, whose “war of looks” reveals antithetical modes of perception and ultimately selfhood: “the extromissive reciprocating couple and the intromissive, introspective individual” (70). According to Langley, moreover, the two types of selfhood appear as competing forms of narcissism that dominate the discussions of the period: in Venus, a narcissism that is inherent in the Platonic love relation that idealizes the oneness of lovers; in Adonis, the narcissism of modern autonomy that emphasizes the singularity of the self. For Langley, both poem and history trace the triumph of Adonis.

The rest of the book charts this victory in greater detail. The third chapter on Romeo and Juliet serves as a bridge between the two central topics, treating the relation between narcissism and suicide in the play. As Langley moves into other discussions of suicide, he differentiates between romantic suicide, in which death enables union with another, and stoic suicide, in which it is the path to autonomy. The conflict between these two models appears in the fourth and fifth chapters on Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Langley argues that in Antony and Cleopatra the death of the lovers offers an alternative to the kind of suicide imagined in Julius Caesar: where Romans kill themselves to assert individuality, the lovers seek what he describes as an Egyptian “mutual loving suicidal self, where duplication and doubling simply speak of coupled reciprocation and renounces the paucity of solitude” (187). The last chapter provides a more general survey of Renaissance ideals of self-slaughter, focusing especially on Donne's Biathanatos and the controversy it generated. Analyzing the rhetoric of these treatises, Langley suggests that it mirrors the self-consuming logic of narcissism and suicide. (In this, however, it seems difficult to distinguish from other polemics of the period, which generally turn their opponents’ arguments against themselves.) In the conclusion he returns to Shakespeare and to Othello, reading the death of the lovers as a suicide provoked by the self-destructive individual Iago.

The book thus retells the familiar story of the emergence of the early modern subject through figures that show how the assertion of the self can be self-negating. There are thoughtful treatments of the ways in which both Socratic self-knowledge and Protestant self-scrutiny are both counters to and causes of Narcissism and suicide, and a succinct review of debates on the question of classical subjectivity, and especially classical views of suicide. I am less convinced by the readings of Venus and Cleopatra especially as representing an ideal mutuality that Shakespeare longs for but that modern narcissism will destroy. At times, moreover, the weaving together of material can be confusing. The attention to details is admirable and leads to some exciting discoveries, but means it can be difficult to follow the argument as a whole. When discussing one work, Langley will compare it briefly to another and then cite, mostly without introduction, another text. The reader is left to try to figure out the relations between the different sources. A certain amount of critical self-consciousness seems especially appropriate for this topic, but some of the reflections become involuted and repetitive. But as a whole the book is a fruitful coupling of two figures of self-destruction who played a paradoxically generative role in early modern thought.