Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon

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)