why Faustus has such a hard time committing. The answer suggested above is that devotion does not come easily. Even as the play illuminates the horrors of following the wrong path, it even more potently stages the challenge of, and fortitude necessary to, surrender to an addiction. Individual desires, combined with the external promptings of community, culture, and law, might still prove inadequate to the task. Faustus’s wavering exposes his incapacity for addiction, evident in his all-too-human propensity for wandering. After so many centuries, what remains admirable about Faustus is precisely his repeated attempts to give himself away to his pursuits in the face of his own fear and hesitation. This sort of addiction is clearly dangerous, but it is also extraordinary and compelling.
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
