What did it mean to be addicted in early modern England? As Rebecca Lemon observes in this beautiful and illuminating book, the period's theater teems with intoxicating substances and consuming attachments. Characters find themselves ravished by the gravitational pull of wine, love, friendship, and religion, and they willingly relinquish self-sovereignty in order to revel in submitting to these forces. Modern theories of addiction explain their capitulation as a form of pathology, but early modern writers suggest a very different understanding of the affective and ethical stakes of surrendering one's will to an outside force. In tracing an unfamiliar prehistory of addiction, Lemon uncovers the term's complex and surprisingly positive meanings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The word addiction has etymological roots in legal sentences. Sixteenth-century English dictionaries habitually glossed it as “devotion” and “dedication,” and writers used it to refer to loyalty, attachment, and selflessness. Protestant theologians including Calvin, Perkins, and Foxe exhorted believers to addict themselves wholly to Christ, while warning that not everyone could achieve this state of absolute commitment. Even those who condemned addictions typically criticized them for misdirection rather than their essential premise. Addiction to idols was bad, that is, because it supplanted addiction to God, not because it overrode personal volition. By the same token, troublesome addictions could not be easily distinguished from their virtuous counterparts. Although moralists attacked drunkenness as a vice, many writers praised devotion to alcohol as a commitment to sociability and fellowship.
After tracing accounts of addiction in dictionaries, religious texts, medical treatises, and conduct manuals, Lemon brings their meanings to bear on plays, where they produce satisfyingly counterintuitive insights. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, long understood as dramatizing the dangers of unfettered excess, instead turns out to tell a story of incomplete addiction. Despite his desire to be ravished, the restlessly flitting Faustus ultimately fails to achieve the self-surrender that he craves. Far from a bad bargain that he accepts blindly, his contract with Mephastophilis reflects his desire to be irrevocably bound, but it falls short of ensuring his unequivocal devotion. We find more triumphant forms of addiction in the enraptured lovers of comedy. Among the drunken revels of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Olivia forsakes her addiction to melancholy in order to embrace an all-consuming romantic passion. Her choices might appear misplaced—after falling into unrequited love for Viola/Cesario, she accidentally marries Sebastian, an utter stranger—but Lemon suggests that the resulting union becomes an epitome of erotic self-abandon, all the more powerful because of its leap of faith.
Olivia succeeds where Faustus fails, at fully relinquishing herself to devotion. Not all characters who follow her lead, however, find themselves rewarded. All-consuming love becomes catastrophic in Othello, which joins Twelfth Night in juxtaposing erotic passion with uncontrollable drinking. As Lemon shows, however, Shakespeare identifies Othello's error not in his overwhelming love for his wife, but in letting himself be persuaded to retreat from this devotion, which he fatally redirects toward Iago. Unlike Faustus, he achieves a full capitulation, but he fails to sustain it. Yet even complete surrender is not always enough. In both parts of Henry IV, Falstaff's affection for drinking masks a deeper devotion to Hal, the cornerstone of their shared tavern conviviality. Falstaff's loyalty remains constant, but Hal fails to reciprocate it, and eventually betrays his friend utterly. Falstaff's downfall may be less terrifying than Othello's, but its pathos similarly reflects the error of his misdirected commitment.
Lemon's final chapter expands the book's generic and chronological boundaries to consider depictions of drinking rituals in lyric poems stretching into the Restoration. As she shows, writers offered sharply varying responses to health toasting, the obligatory ritual of drinking to the health of friends, mistresses, and monarchs. As in the previous century, some condemned socially pressured drinking, but others saw surrendering self-control in honor of drunken oblivion as a praiseworthy sign of devotion to community. For these writers, generosity and participation represent higher values than order, control, and productivity. These priorities might seem at odds with the Calvinist, protocapitalist early modern world we think we know. Lemon movingly shows the unexpected contours of a moral landscape in which dissolving the self is a higher achievement than fortifying it.
