help reveal such ideological clashes between the godly and the good fellow as less directly oppositional than fraternal or sororal, two intimately connected, if fractious, impulses. Further, it is precisely in the vexed responses to drunkenness that we see addiction’s range and pliability. Both devotional and compulsive at once, drunkenness provoked the variety of cultural responses that are at stake in early modern addiction and then are buried in later centuries. For even as conversations on excessive habitual drinking increasingly insist on drunkenness as a disease and pathology, they nevertheless retain the notion of addiction as a laudable pastime, a form of good fellowship that proves constant amid cultural changes.
Project Outline
Each of this project’s chapters wrestles with addiction in relation to devotion, compulsion, agency, and authority. To do so each chapter offers a discussion of addiction in a different arena, moving from theology and lexicography to medical writings and puritan polemic to legal tracts and national politics. In the process, rather than concentrate solely on those texts that repeatedly deploy the word “addiction,” I instead select texts that pose the broader philosophical issues at stake in invocations of addiction, drawing particularly on the imaginative richness afforded in the study of literary texts.107 “While other discourses may be compromised by ambiguity, literature,” Roland Greene writes, “is drawn to it—and can fashion it into something new, granting the premium of fresh perspective to old problems.”108 Sermons attempt to convert readers; literature, by contrast, serves to “entertain,” both in the sense of offering a pleasurable pastime and in the sense of considering new ways of thinking about familiar issues. Through concentration on a literary text in concert with cultural and political writings, each chapter illuminates an aspect of addiction’s rich possibilities.
When The English Faust Book describes Faustus as “addicted” to study, and when Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts necromantic study as “ravishing,” these texts draw on classical and Renaissance notions of addiction as a beneficial and laudable form of commitment. Tracing the invocations of addiction in classical and theological writings ranging from Cicero and Seneca to Calvin and Perkins, Chapter 1 overturns modern, pathological conceptions of addiction by exposing the concept’s classical and Renaissance meanings. More specifically, the chapter establishes how the influence of Calvin and Calvinist-minded Cambridge divines appears in Doctor Faustus, not just in the drama of election—as has long been argued—but also in the play’s preoccupation with the challenge of commitment. Dedication, the play reveals, paradoxically requires both effort and surrender. If early modern theologians encourage such release, Marlowe illuminates addiction as a process of both wonder and terror.
This project’s second chapter moves from theology to lexicography, and specifically to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, examining addiction through the figure of the devoted lover. In relinquishing self-sovereignty in favor of another, the lover transforms into an addict, an achievement unavailable to other, more self-serving characters. For an embrace of devotional addiction is an embrace of the magic and serendipity of love, a process uncontrolled by human will. Furthermore, this foregoing of control requires dedicated commitment; it is a sustained process of giving oneself repeatedly through time. This mode of loving contrasts with what might appear, to modern readers, to be the more obviously addictive practice in the play: drunkenness. Yet this chapter delineates the difference between addiction and drunkenness precisely through a comparative study of Olivia, Viola, and Toby: Toby is too much himself to allow addictive transformation.
Henry IV stages the complex and contradictory invocation of addiction as both the laudable attachment chronicled in Chapters 1 and 2, and a compulsion, anticipating the modern era. Chapter 3 studies Falstaff as an admirable addict, dedicating himself to Hal. The play’s markedly self-possessed rulers throw his mode of attachment into sharp relief: Hal, like his father before him, rises through the addictive energies of dedicated men only to abandon them. With his addictive relation forestalled and his devotional pursuit failing, Falstaff turns from Hal to the material conditions of their friendship, namely drunken good fellowship. As a result of this shift, the lauded ability to release oneself as an addict appears less dedicated than compelled, resonant with contemporary attacks on drunkenness as disease, examined in this chapter. The very language that designated loyal commitment comes to signify a form of bondage and is used to chronicle the compromised will of the drinker.
The project’s fourth chapter turns from reflexive addictions—those actively chosen and embraced—to imperative addiction, studying Othello’s staging of incapacity through legal debates on responsibility. While Othello’s love for Desdemona represents a form of laudable addiction as he dedicates himself to another, Iago’s polluting attachment results in a transformation of addiction, from Othello’s primary devotion to his new wife to his secondary addiction to his villainous ensign. Prompted to murder by love and loyalty, Othello proves both compelled and free to act. His criminal action, mitigated by incapacity, is anticipated in a much more minor key by Cassio earlier in the play. Read through early modern legal debates on drunken incapacity, Cassio’s actions—like Othello’s—should receive the full force of the law. Shakespeare, however, challenges such strict legal responsibility by staging addiction’s double bind: how can one be both strictly responsible and non compos mentis, or incapacitated? The legal insistence on responsibility even at moments of madness contrasts with Shakespeare’s more nuanced interrogation of addictive possession, in which the addictive propensities of both Cassio and Othello stand as a form of heroism: they open themselves to others and allow themselves to become possessed, in stark contrast to the excessive exercise of the will showcased in Iago.
This project’s fifth and final chapter, rather than analyzing addiction through one exemplary play, instead turns to a single addictive practice: health drinking. This binge-drinking ritual helped to bolster beleaguered communities, as drinkers pledged themselves through expressions of loyalty and faith. Studying this addictive practice through a generic and historical range—surveying drama and poetry over an eighty-year period, from the 1580s through 1660—reveals both the longevity of addiction as devotion and the variability of attitudes toward one addictive practice. Health drinking was initially condemned in the 1580s and 1590s as a deplorable and foreign practice, but by the 1630s it was celebrated for its loyalist potential in uniting politically isolated royalists. Health drinking exposes, then, not simply the range of attitudes toward addiction as a mode of attachment, but divergent responses to one addictive practice that appears at once compulsive and dedicated. The book thus ends with a chapter that, despite its methodological distinction from the rest of the book, condenses many of the paradoxes evident throughout: early modern addiction represents choice and tyranny, devotion and disease.
Each of the project’s chapters takes up, as suggested above, a different arena of addiction discourse. Showing the range of addiction’s reach, each chapter save the last is also rooted in a popular play that deploys addiction discourse in an especially rich and nuanced staging. Most specifically, the plays under discussion dramatize the addict-actor relationship, which is explored in this book’s preface, by simultaneously reinforcing and challenging their connection: Mephastophilis’s power over Faustus, Viola’s over Olivia, Iago’s over Othello, and to a complex and different degree, Hal’s over Falstaff’s. Each of these relations expose the intimate connection—and opposition—of acting to addiction. Through a counterfeiting character who uses theater to his or her own ends—through a character who can claim, with Viola and Iago, “I am not what I am”—the play’s hero transforms. Willing away his or her will, the hero shapes him or herself into an addict, one bound, tied, and obligated to the play’s counterfeiting actor. In devotional relation, this heroic addict proves both sincere and dependent, in contrast to the potentially duplicitous freedom exercised by the counterfeiting actor. Yet this counterfeiter, who deploys deceit over sincerity, is of course played by an actor who is himself—in
