UW THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE
Appetite, Excess, and Antithesis
"Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting
The appetite may sicken and so die"
Ethan Hultin Warren
The world of Twelfth Night, or What You Will oscillates quickly between antithetical excesses of grief and joy, loss and abundance. When we dramaturgs started our work researching Twelfth Night, or What You Will, we asked a question to ourselves: what is an excess of mine?
Contextually, the play figures a relationship between the abundance of life, and the presence of grief and loss. The “Twelfth Night” of the title alludes to the twelfth night of the Christmastide season, the night before the celebration of Epiphany. Alastair Fowler, analysing the play as an “Epiphany play”, describes it as having a “melancholy atmosphere of transience”. This is an important context for Twelfth Night, or What You Will, occurring at the end of a period of festivities. It is a time of both exuberance, abundance, and melancholy, as everyone is aware that the party is about to end.
Our reinterpretation of Twelfth Night, or What You Will brings the script into the roaring twenties, a time of wealth and abundance, and yet one haunted by the First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic that preceded it; ahead lies the Great Depression and the Second World War. Our production therefore exists in an oasis: the memory of loss haunts a vibrant and abundant present, all the while the threat of future hardship looms. All of these multiple truths exist simultaneously in a crystallised moment of time. The characters of Twelfth Night, or What You Will sit and drink at the waters of the oasis as a reprieve from what is before, and prepare themselves for what is to come.
Textually, this tension between abundance and loss is familiar. Many of the characters of Twelfth Night, or What You Will are haunted by personal losses: Olivia mourns both her father and brother; Toby his uncle and cousin; both Viola and Sebastian have lost their father and believe their sibling dead. All these characters begin the play in mourning, and end in celebration of not just one, but two weddings. In all these cases, the character only arrives at their joy through grief. The two sensations are tied together.
Orsino sets the stage for the play in his first monologue:
“If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.” (Shakespeare, 1.1.1-3)
These lines invite us to consider themes of music, appetite, excess, sickness, and death. All of these threads will be pulled on throughout the play, forming a complex tapestry for the characters to live within. Interestingly, excess is framed as both antithesis and cause for death. Orsino asks for “excess” so that having satiated his desire, “the appetite may sicken, and so die”. His excessive desire for Olivia causes his exorbitant suffering. He will only be cured of this melancholy that haunts him when he finally falls in (an extremely sudden) love for Viola. Viola reveals that she mirrors this suffering caused by desire when she describes to Orsino that her ‘sister’ (an innuendo for herself) “sat like Patience on a monument / Smiling at grief”, because “She never told her love” (Shakespeare, 2.4.122). Both these characters collapse into grief and melancholy as a result of their desire for another person.
Olivia, on the other hand, begins the play in the midst of her great grief, and is pulled out of her excessive mourning by an equally excessive love (or perhaps more aptly lust) for Cesario (Viola in disguise). Her ‘appetite’ emerges as a mechanism to deal with the grief of losing her family - she admits to Cesario that “’tis time to smile again” during her courtship (3.1.133). Sebastian’s appetite is figured even in his language to describe his curiosity as a tourist - “let us satisfy our eyes / With the memorials and the things of fame” (3.3.23-24). He breaks out of coping with the (believed) loss of his sister by seeking the beauty of the world. These characters swing from one extreme of feeling to the opposite side of that sensation: moving from grief to arousal, arousal to grief. I understand all of these reactions as coping responses: An extreme contraction into oneself leads to an equally extreme expansion into the world.
This interplay is explored by the concept of pendulation, a term that comes out of Somatic Experiencing therapy. Pendulation is “the shifting of body sensations or emotions between those of expansion and those of contraction” (Ross). Pendulation understands that human beings exist in constant pendulum-like oscillations between periods of expansion and contraction: physiologically, psychologically, and emotionally. Implied in this concept is that extreme motion towards one side of the spectrum necessitates an equally extreme return in the other direction, as the body maintains dynamic equilibrium.
As we have seen above, the characters of Twelfth Night, or What You Will move between these heightened appetites. This is true outside of the main grief/lust pendulums of the four lovers. Sir Toby Belch embodies pendulation in his drinking, going from being the life of the party, to the depression of being hungover. Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Lady Andrea Aguecheek in our production), similarly moves between joviality and gloom. Malvolio tries to assert control over others, and then desires to be dominated.
The play finishes on a sombre note (take a look at our exploration of that too), with Feste singing:
“When that I was a little tiny
boy, With hey, ho, the wind and
the rain, A foolish thing was but
a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came, alas, to wife,
With hey, ho, the wind and the
rain, By swaggering could I
never thrive, For the rain it
raineth every day.
A great while ago the world
begun, With hey, ho, the wind
and the rain, But that’s all one,
our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.” (Shakespeare, 5.1.412-431)
It is a strange thing to end a comedic play with a surprisingly melancholic song about the inevitability of rain, rather than a double wedding. In these last few lines, the repetition of “the rain it raineth every day” is broken in the last line “we’ll strive to please you every day”. This last line, like this last song, positions “striv[ing] to please” through the creation of art as antithesis to the entropic passage of time. Counterbalancing the passage towards death, then, is the creation of life. To create art is an inherently excessive thing to do: it does not fulfill any inherent need. I believe that we value art, because creation balances out the inevitable destruction of time, and so to quote Sir Toby: “Let us therefore eat and drink”... and make theatre (Shakespeare, 2.3.13-14).
Fowler, Alastair, 'Twelfth Night and Epiphany’ Remembered Words: Essays on Genre,
Realism, and Emblems” Oxford, 2021; online edition, Oxford Academic, 22 July 2021,https://doiorg.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/10.1093/oso/9780198856979.003.0009, accessed 7 Oct. 2026.
Ross, Sarah. "Resourcing, Pendulation and Titration: Practices from Somatic
Experiencing®." Psychotherapy for Women, Families, and Children in Berkeley, CA, 30 Aug. 2020, https://sarahrossphd.com/resourcing-pendulation-titration-practices-somatic-experiencing/.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night from The Folger Shakespeare. Edited by Barbara
Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, Folger
Shakespeare Library, 7 Oct. 2026, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/twelfth-night/.