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
