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,