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Chapter 2

Addicted Love in Twelfth Night

Love is that of which we are not masters.

—Jean-Luc Nancy

Chapter 1 analyzed addiction to God and to study in Calvin and Marlowe. This chapter continues to explore the challenge of addiction by turning to another form of devotion: secular love. The drama of addiction in Doctor Faustus—moving through incantations, willful service, and contractual donation of the self—finds surprising parallels in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play in which frustrated love yields to service and devotion.¹ Shakespeare offers a broader range of potential addicts than Marlowe, as multiple characters strive to give themselves over to the spirit, in this case of love or drink. Nevertheless, the challenge of relinquishing control proves as challenging in comic Illyria as in tragic Wittenberg.

Twelfth Night stages, in order to embrace, the loyalty and fidelity of firm addictions: the devoted lover is the play’s most powerful force, and it demands relinquishing sovereignty of oneself to risk loving another. Fostering this addiction—this willingness to forego self-rule in favor of a stronger force or attachment—is an achievement. It is an attachment requiring both commitment and devotion expressed not temporarily, but over and through time. Addiction as a mode of loving shifts attention from a momentary experience—I fell in love, I feel love—to an extended connection. As David Schalkwyk argues, “Love is not an emotion, even though it does involve emotions. Love is a form of behavior or disposition over time; it involves … ‘commitment and attachment.’ But such dispositions are not given; they are navigated, negotiated, even discovered in the course of what we think of as their ‘expression.’”² Thus love is not a bodily condition, such as a humor; it is not a complexion but an inclination that has turned to what the early moderns would deem an addiction. Twelfth Night, as Schalkwyk goes on to write, “embodies love through dedicated behavior and action, rather than the causal interiority of bodily heat or humor.”³ This form of loving is a sustained inclination that transforms: through addicted loving, characters go through the process of becoming themselves, offering a range of loving expressions that are at once, as N. R. Helms argues, surprising and what he calls “expectable.” In Twelfth Night a character can, he writes, “change before our eyes, while remaining the same character.”⁴

Such addicted loving stands in opposition to another practice more obviously associated with addiction for modern audiences: drunkenness. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew prove incapable of surrendering their own material desires—for money, status, and pleasure—even as they surrender consciousness and physical capability when drinking. Theirs is not addiction, at least not in early modern terms, but instead appetite, a craving at odds with the vulnerability and release of devotion. Twelfth Night interrogates and ultimately exposes the limitations of what we might call the humoral or appetitive inclinations, including those practiced by Toby, Andrew, and Malvolio. The humoral predispositions of these characters amplify their preexisting states, so that the more they indulge their inclinations, the more they become the bodies and affects that define them. Indeed, the humoral fixity of these characters is such that, as Jason Scott-Warren argues, they appear animalistic rather than entirely human.⁵ Toby and Andrew are most themselves when drunk. Their festive antics reinforce familiar ideological fault lines and stock characterizations. These characters become themselves, to follow the analysis of Helms, only in the sense that they perpetually reinforce or agree with their own past actions, in contrast to the play’s addicted characters, who experience transformation, becoming a new iteration of themselves.⁶

Twelfth Night thus offers, for this project, a productive study of the distinction between addiction and habitual drunkenness: as the play reveals, addiction celebrates—or in Roman terms, requires—the release rather than the exercise of self. Olivia, Orsino, and Viola experience an initial fixity of character, as the addicted melancholic, the Petrarchan lover, and the shipwrecked sister. But they come to release themselves into love and experience what it means to be overcome by devotion at the expense of one’s desires, former attachments, and identity itself.

The Melancholy Addict and the Comedy of Humors

The countess Olivia suffers from an addiction to melancholy. Conjuring an image of the ill-suited Malvolio before his mistress, Maria suggests that his smiles will be “unsuitable to her disposition, being addicted to a melancholy as she is” (2.5.195–96).⁷ And Olivia is not the play’s only melancholic. Orsino most obviously exhibits the features of melancholic love in his preoccupation with Olivia. As Feste tells the duke, “Now the melancholic god protect thee” (2.4.73). Viola, too, begins the play in a state of melancholic grief and describes her condition of “green and yellow melancholy” (2.4.113) to Orsino. Indeed, as Keir Elam puts it in his Arden edition of the play, “the comedy offers a veritable anatomy of the most fashionable of humours, melancholy.”⁸ In its fascination with the melancholy body, the play joins in the diagnostic interest and philosophical speculation surrounding this humoral state, what Drew Daniel calls the melancholy assemblage. This social network includes, he writes, those “who spectate and speculate upon the interiority of an allegedly melancholic body.”⁹ Twelfth Night participates in and invites such spectatorship and speculation on melancholic states. It does so not only because it offers anatomy of the melancholy humor, but also, more surprisingly, because it comes to celebrate change and alteration away from this state, precisely what a melancholy addiction seems to foreclose. After all, how can one prove both “addicted to melancholy” and open to change?

We might begin to investigate this question by turning to Shakespeare’s contemporaries, many of whom yoke—as Maria does—melancholy and addiction. The surgeon John Banister prescribes “a decoction for such as are weake and addicted to melancholie,” while Thomas Dekker cautions against those who are “hard fauour’d, dogged, addicted to melancholly, to diseases, to hate mankind.”¹⁰ For Banister and Dekker, melancholy addiction signals a disease, a permanent state that might only be overcome with management or medical intervention. Yet in Amadis de Gaule, we learn of a character who exercises a degree of choice: she suffers from “the extreame melancholie, whereto (over-much) shee addicteth her selfe.” As a result of “being so continually sad,” she threatens to “fall into some dangerous disease.”¹¹ While each of these examples yokes melancholy, addiction and disease, the agency behind addiction is tangled, since the melancholic “addicteth herself,” and proves willfully “addicted to melancholy, to diseases,” even as an addict might also “fall” into such illness and prove “weake.”

Part of the challenge in understanding addiction to melancholy comes in determining its condition as a fixed or chosen state. For some writers, both humors and addictions are predetermined. When Gervase Markham speculates on humoral predispositions, for example, he writes of “the predominance or regencie of that Element” in which the body “dooth moste entyrelye participate, so for the moste parte are his humours, addictions, and inclinations; for if he have most of the earth, then is hee melancholie, dull, cowardlye, and subject to much faintnesse.”¹² Markham offers a medical narration of sorts, accounting for the fixity of melancholic addiction: a creature has a “complexion”—based in a natural element—that is evident on his body in the form of “colours” that betray his “nature.” Such a “humour” or complexion is described as an addiction. Melancholics, he goes onto explain, are “kyteglew’d, blacke, both sortes of dunnes, Iron-gray, or pyed with anie of these colours,” for they are connected to “the earth.” Thus despite the word “inclination” seeming to indicate preference rather than determination, Markham’s description suggests an inevitability to the humor or addiction—it is a condition determined by one’s physical state, it influences our tastes and character, and it can be regulated but not overcome.

Michel de Montaigne also views a humoral state such as melancholy as a fixed addiction, and directly cautions readers against its entrapping power. Montaigne writes: “We must not cleave so fast unto our humours and dispositions…. It is not to bee the friend (lesse the master) but the slave of ones selfe to follow uncessantly, and bee so addicted to his inclinations, as hee cannot stray from them, nor wrest them.”¹³ Montaigne, like Markham, links addiction to inclination, humour, and disposition, arguing even more vehemently that such fixity is a form of slavery. If we are addicted to our own inclinations, we “cleave” to our humor, we become a “slave” and “follow uncessantly,” we “cannot stray from them, nor wrest them.” This humoral addiction is limiting; it designates a particular character, one that is fixed and rigid. It is worth noting Montaigne’s language of bondage: to be “addicted to … inclinations” is to “be tied,” to be “the slave of oneself.” With this enslavement comes compulsion, “necessity,” and “incessant” bondage, a form of the ethico-spiritual slavery that attests to the “weakness or self-indulgence of the paradigmatically ‘free’ agent,” to invoke Nyquist’s formulation rehearsed in the introduction.¹⁴

In the above examples, melancholy threatens to overwhelm the individual, who becomes defined through a humoral disease. Such is the case with Robert Burton, who famously takes a thousand pages to catalogue melancholy’s contours. A predisposition becomes enslaving without proper management. This view of humoral addiction as a form of tyranny recalls the Roman understanding of addiction, noted in the Preface. The contracted “addict,” bound to service, is enslaved and compelled. It might seem, then, that addiction and melancholy function as synonyms, both accounting for a tyrannical, entrapped state: addiction is the state of being enslaved, and melancholy is the enslaving condition or power. Montaigne’s French, and Florio’s translation of it, reinforces this link. When Montaigne cautions against clinging to humors, what Florio translates as “addicted to his inclinations” appears in the original as “être prisonnier de ses propres inclinations.”¹⁵ To be imprisoned is to be addicted. Taken this way, Maria’s use of the term “addicted” helps illuminate Olivia’s condition: she is in a state of incarceration, overcome by a humor. The yoking of addiction to disease and melancholy in the citations above further bolsters this reading. Addiction, in anticipation of its modern applications, appears as pathological or enslaving compulsion.

Yet Florio’s use of “addicted” in his own dictionary suggests a slightly different signification to the term, and challenges the linkage of addiction and humor. In his A Worlde of Wordes: or, Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English, Florio uses the word “addicted” not as a synonym for imprisoned but instead in connection with words like dedication and affection. He defines Dédito as “given, addicted, dedicated, enclined,” while Affettionato appears as “affected, affectionated, addicted.”¹⁶ To be addicted, here, seems to be attached or dedicated. Similarly he designates Dedicare as “to dedicate, to consecrate, to addict” and Dicare as “to vowe, to dedicate, to addict, to promise.”¹⁷ Notably, the word “addicted” never designates a state of confinement. It does, however, help define the more dramatic terms Revólto and Volgiuto, volto, appearing in their definitions as “turned, overturned, tossed, tumbled, transformed … addicted, converted.”¹⁸

To be addicted, at least in Florio’s lexigraphical glosses, is to experience a converting, transforming devotion. And this resonance of “addict” with devotion and dedication can be further elucidated through other early modern dual-language dictionaries, where addiction suggests less compulsion than devotion, a form of fixity and determination but one with a positive valiance. As in the case of Calvin’s writings, explored in Chapter 1, “addiction” often appears as a translation for adonner. Randle Cotgrave in his Dictionary of the French and English Tongues uses addict to define s’adonner, writing “s’Addonner à. To give, bend, addict, affect, apply, devote, incline, render, yeeld himselfe unto.”¹⁹ Guy Miège, in his New Dictionary French and English, with another English and French (1677) defines s’adonner similarly: “to give (addict, or apply) himself to something,” as in “s’addonner à la virtue, to give himself to virtue.”²⁰ Drawing on these framings of addiction not as compulsion but as devotion helps illuminate the danger, as well as the promise, of melancholy addiction. The individual suffers from the humoral disease of melancholy. But the propensity for addiction, namely devotional attachment, presages the ability to give or apply oneself fully. Addiction at once signals agency and excess, giving oneself over to a condition voluntarily and entirely. Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s imprisonment as “addicted” arguably reveals this, shifting from a permanent state to one that is chosen through devotion.

Turning to English language dictionaries further exposes the common understanding of addiction as, initially, a form of choice. Indeed, it is English language lexicographers who illuminate precisely the devotional and transformative potential of the addict in terms that resonate with Shakespeare’s stagings. In dictionaries, “addiction” is defined largely as a laudable preoccupation; far from signaling a form of slavery or tyranny, addiction signals the deepest form of chosen attachment. In Thomas Cooper’s thesaurus, he defines “addiction” (namely “Addico, addîcis, pen. prod. addixi, addictum, addícere”) as a form of giving over or bequeathing: it is “to say: to avow: to deliver: to sell” or “to alienate from him selfe or an other, and permit, graunt, and appoint the same to some other person.”²¹ In his examples of such addiction, Cooper turns to Latin invocations of the term from Cicero, Quintilian, and Caesar: “Addicere se alicui homini, siue cuipiam rei. Cicer. To addict or give him selfe: to bequeath. Addicere se sectæ alicuius. Quintil. To addict or give himselfe to ones sect or opinion. Seruituti se addicere. Cæsar. To bequeath him selfe.” The Latin addīcere becomes “approve,” “allow,” “give,” or “bequeath” in English. Furthermore, the English and French terms “devote” in turn draw on the English word “addict.” Cooper defines “to devote Deuoueo, déuoues, deuôtum. pe. pro. Denouêre)” as “to vowe: addict or give: solemnly to promise: to bequeath.”²²

Each of these definitions grants agency to the addict. Addiction is an active process of giving oneself over, or delivering oneself, precisely as Calvin counsels in the writings examined in Chapter 1. The addict consents to be overtaken. These definitions also frame such consent in terms of promising, bequeathing, allowing, and giving—transactions that are relational and potentially generous. Cooper describes, in accordance with the term’s original usage in Roman law, addiction to service: “Addicere quempiam pro debito dicitur Prætor. Cic. To deliver a debtour to his creditors to be vsed at their pleasure. Addicere in seruitutem. Liu. To judge one to be bonde: to deliver as a bondman.”²³ It is only in this last definition that any sense of bondage or compulsion appears, although even such apparently servile enslavement can signify, as in the case of Faustus, a desire for metaphysical merger. More frequently than bondage, addiction resonates with notions of faithful devotion, a kind of bequeathing that evokes friendship and marriage. Thus John Baret defines “addicte” as a form of devoted giving: “to addicte & geue him selfe to ones friend ship for ever.”²⁴ Thomas Thomas, too, defines devotion as a form of addiction or giving: “Dēvoveo, es, ōvi, ōtum, ére. To vow, to addict or give, solemnlie to promise.”²⁵ Most specifically, this addiction evokes notions of love. Cotgrave employs the term “addict” to help define giving, attaching, and affecting, both in the example of s’Addonner à rehearsed above, and with Affectionner, which signifies “to affectionate, beget a liking, breed an affection; excite, incite, or animate, unto. s’Affectionner à. To affect, or love; to addict, or devote himselfe; to give his mind, unto.”²⁶

If Cooper and Cotgrave define addiction in terms of bequeathing and giving, Thomas amplifies it with a sense of delivering over or confiscating; in other words, for Thomas, addiction can designate both voluntary and compelled forms of service:

Addico: To deliver up unto him that offereth moste: to put to saile: to confiscate: to deliver some worke upon a price: to addict, bequeath or give himselfe to something: to saie: to avow: to alienate from himselfe to another, and permit, graunt, & apponit the same to another person: to condemne: to approoue or alow a thing to be done, to deliver, depute or destinate to; to judge, to constraine, to pronounce and declare.²⁷

Thomas’s definition at once presents addiction as a kind of constraint and as a gift. This complexity of something that is and is not voluntary, something initially free but ultimately constraining, appears to Montaigne as a condition to be avoided, a form of slavery. But viewed through the vantage point of devotion to God or to a beloved, this language of devotional constraint encapsulates the rights and responsibilities, the volition and compulsion, at stake in deep, extended intimacies.

Recognizing how the term “addicted” might not amplify melancholy (Olivia is excessively attached to it) but instead temper it (she has chosen to be attached) offers a new perspective on Shakespeare’s famously multi-perspectival play. In addition to viewing the play as an anatomy of melancholy, we might also see how it toys with or stages the issue of addiction as willful release. The play’s title, in pairing the Epiphany of Twelfth Night with the “will” of Or What You Will, embeds this paradox, for it insists upon the interplay of choice and release, willfulness and devotion. This interplay structures the love relations of the play to a degree that “what you will” stands both in opposition to Twelfth Night’s celebration of Epiphany and in connection to it. “The very word epiphany,” as Bruce R. Smith writes, “means an appearance or a revelation and suggests that on that special day celebrants could expect something visionary, a miracle, a manifestation of divinity.”²⁸ Such emphasis on the divine and magical might conventionally oppose the will, but Shakespeare announces their intimate connection in his play’s very title and, in doing so, anticipates the link of will and release at stake in the addictions he stages.

In the lexicons above, addiction appears as a form of designating, giving, bequeathing, serving, or devoting akin to marriage or religious faith. Thomas indicates the ways in which such devotion might not be entirely voluntary: one might be given over to service. But most frequently addiction appears as a commitment to something; a dedication to an activity, person, or relationship; a devotion “to” or “unto.” Thus addiction is and is not an act of will; it represents, as the lexicographical definitions suggest, a radical form of giving oneself, what Tim Dean, following Levinas, calls “unlimited intimacy,” and what Leo Bersani calls “self-shattering.”²⁹ As Dean writes of such unlimited intimacy, “Not only the envelope of selfhood but the very distinction between self and other is undone.”³⁰ For even as lexicographers yoke giving and bequeathing within addiction to devotion, their definitions also hint, as Thomas reveals, at a condition of release and donation of the self. One is delivered over to someone or something, one is constrained even as one also consents to this gift giving.³¹

Yet how might one consent when one no longer signifies or exists? How do consensual relations emerge out of forms of vulnerability and servile devotion?³² How might sharing intimacy with a stranger represent the deepest, most radical, and spiritual form of loving available? These questions resonate strongly with Twelfth Night, a play in which Olivia excitedly marries the wrong man, Sebastian weds a woman he does not know, Orsino agrees to marry a woman he’s never seen, and Viola finds love through a form of anonymous service. The early modern concept of addiction—which equally insists on the link of devotion, service, gift-giving, and love—helps account for the play’s famously serendipitous depiction of loving: love in Twelfth Night offers a radical challenge to identity and character, dissolving the boundaries of self in relation to another. Addiction—to love or melancholy—takes characters out of themselves; addiction challenges the self, if not in the specifically physical terms signified by Bersani’s “self-shattering,” then in equally conversionary terms, as love transforms identity and character. Addiction, the play reveals, is not a governing humor requiring, at best, skillful management.³³ Instead, it is an ability to foster deep attachment, presaging exactly the propensity to love needed in Illyria.

Devoted Attachment and Eager Appetite

Twelfth Night begins with gluttony. Orsino is overcome by love, and he seeks to surfeit on it:

If music be the food of love, play on,

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting

The appetite may sicken, and so die.

(1.1.1–3)

The language of binging and purging here evokes the compulsive ingestion of material substances, from food to liquor to drugs. The desire to indulge so heavily that cravings will finally end might even be called an addictive fantasy. But appetite is precisely not addiction. Compulsive ingestion, the play reveals, is merely habitual and customary consumption, rejected even as it is embraced: “Enough, no more, / ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before” (1.1.7–8). Orsino glosses his own rejection of love, his sense of “enough, no more,” by turning to the image of the sea. Yet his image of the “spirit of love” as the sea is not, despite his rhetorical attempts, parallel to his own process of loving. For if he hopes to purge himself of his amorous appetite, his watery image attests to love’s limitless capacity:

O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou

That, notwithstanding thy capacity

Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there

Of what validity and pitch soe’er

But falls into abatement and low price

Even in a minute.

(1.1.9–14)

Love, he postulates, has no limits. It overpowers any object or being that enters into its domain. Orsino’s images are contradictory: he hopes to purge himself of love through binging, yet he also believes that love overpowers all, being a sea of infinite capacity. Perhaps most obviously this image of the devouring sea resonates with Petrarchan rhetoric of the initially idealized and subsequently abject love. As the idealized beloved falls to “low price,” so the “quick and fresh” spirit of love survives as a force more powerful than any individuated object, as a poetic expression—in the Petrarchan sequence itself—more lasting than the beloved’s body.³⁴ What simultaneously distinguishes and reconciles these images, even if Orsino himself does not seem to recognize it, are the opposite approaches to the lover’s agency. Orsino initially attempts to overpower love, casting himself as an appetitive lover who can control how much he ingests: “give me” “enough.” He manages his desire through imperatives. By contrast, the sea of love overpowers the object (both lover and beloved), redefining them entirely.

The challenge for Orsino at this early point in the play comes in sorting through his opposing yet related views of love. Although he celebrates love’s “quick and fresh” spirit—namely, love’s metaphysical capacity to transform all devotees by drowning and reforming them—he does not acknowledge his own potential transformation, his own “fall” into the spirit. Instead he attempts to govern the power of love through forceful wooing. His arguably uncommitted, gluttonous, and fickle feeling rejects rather than embraces love’s vulnerability. Furthermore, when Orsino rehearses his attraction to Olivia, he betrays his fantasy of domination, not release:

O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame

To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

How will she love when the rich golden shaft

Hath killed the flock of all affections else

That live in her – when liver, brain and heart,

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and filled

Her sweet perfections with one self king!

(1.1.32–38)