Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
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with religious worship, it also functioned—as its connection to addiction reveals—independently of a Christian framework. This is because devotion, like addiction, accounts for a position of loyalty to something or someone: one gives oneself up, as a devotee or addict, zealously and exclusively.6 Nonreligious use of the word draws on its Latin root: dēvovēre (to devote), designated an “earnest addiction or application” and a form of “enthusiastic attachment or loyalty.”7 To be devoted is to be “zealously attached or addicted to a person or cause.”8 One exhibits devotion to a king, to a beloved, to an action, or to a pastime. Both addiction and devotion are forms of service: to be devoted is to exhibit “attached service,” to be at someone’s command or disposal. Finally, devotion, like addiction, concerns speech: vowing in the case of devotion, and pledging in the case of addiction.
For if early modern addiction concerns an individual subsumed in relation to another, it also involves a dependence on declarative speech.9 Addiction not only designates a committed relationship of the addict to the substance, spirit, or person to whom he or she is devoted, but also hinges—as noted above—on a verbal contract or pledge. While modern definitions of addiction seem to bear little trace of the term’s etymology and early definition, this project uncovers these historical origins, participating in what Jeffrey Masten has called a “renewed historical philology.”10 In his appeal to consider words and their histories, he writes, “We have not sufficiently attended to etymology—the history of words (the history in words),” urging scholars “to be more carefully attuned to the ways that etymologies, shorn of their associations with ‘origin,’ persist in a word and its surrounding discourse.”11 In the case of the word “addict,” its etymological connection to speaking and pledging, as well as its expression of devotion, might appear entirely buried in modern uses of the term. But this range of meanings persists in early modern usage. Drawing attention to addiction as an utterance uncovers how speaking forth is fundamental to the addictive process. It also reveals such pledging as a challenge to self-sovereignty, as the addict commits to another person or object. Forms of addictive speech—be they pledges, vows, or contracts—track this challenge in their divide between imperative and reflexive articulations: one is attached or compelled by an authority or, alternately and relatedly, one devotes oneself, as with Prynne’s caution to those who “addict themselves” to plays or to acting. If Roman and modern invocations of addiction draw largely on the imperative form, in the sixteenth century the reflexive construction proves dominant: addiction represents an exercise of will even in the relinquishing of it, a form of speaking commitment and devotion out loud or in writing. Definitions of “addict” from the period chronicle this interplay. The addict is defined both as the person conscripted by an external authority into service to someone or something, and as the person who devotes and assigns himself or herself to such service.
The result—the layering of Roman, early modern, and modern uses of the term “addict”—is what Roland Greene deems “a semantic palimpsest,” in which different meanings of a word appear “in different degrees of availability. Palimpsests suggest one fashion of meanings coexisting with one another, with older ones showing through what comes later.”12 With its origin in contract law overwritten by its devotional invocations, which are then also overwritten by medical uses, the word “addict” offers one such semantic palimpsest, what Masten deems the history of and in a word. My emphasis on the semantic meanings of addiction—its definition as offered, for example, in a range of early modern dictionaries, and in Latin, French, and English—is coupled in this project with attention to the word’s conceptual reach. I read, that is, “both the semantic integers that one finds in a dictionary” and “the concepts that shadow them,” as Greene puts it in his study of key words.13
Uncovering addiction both as devotional ravishment and as a form of speech helps account for the question that began this project: why is early modern drama so often preoccupied with addictive states?14 The answer comes, in part, in the parallel between the addict and the early modern actor. Transforming himself in gesture, speech, and dress and adopting the words of another, the actor is bound to his character, to other actors, to the playwright, and to the audience.15 The actor is, in precise accord with the definition of addiction, assigned and obligated. The apparently oppositional definitions of addiction—as devotion versus compulsion, an exercise of the will versus a relinquishment of it—come together onstage in the figure of the dramatic actor speaking to an audience. The actor at once commands his audience, while also being vulnerable before it. In being “abnormally exposed, abnormally dependent upon us,” as Michael Goldman puts it, the actor enters a form of voluntary service that compels him to transform, erase, or shatter himself in relation to another.16 Dramatic performance is, in these terms, addicted relation: “The drama shapes and is shaped by its expressive instrument: the body, mind, and person of the actor,” W. B. Worthen writes of this process.17
This link between the actor and the addict has been anticipated by those scholars theorizing acting’s relationship to inspiration. The actor, breathed into by the author’s script, balances technique with inspiration; she at once releases herself to express passion and trains in her craft. This view of acting was made famous by Konstantin Stanislavsky, who counseled the actor to uncover “inspiration” and “creativity” in order to inhabit the role most fully.18 But the role of the passions and inspiration in acting predates this modern method. Early modern actors were imagined to release and transform themselves, not only through affect and gesture, but also through bodily comportment. In the process, they also transform the audience and the theater space, the scene of connection between the one and the many. The link between the body and spirit, the actor and audience—both inspired by the playwright and each other—results at times in the “unsettling resemblance between inspiration and disease,” as Joseph Roach notes, citing seventeenth-century medical views.19 Transformation as intersubjective connection instead appears, particularly to a viewer like Prynne, as troubling infection. From this vantage point of acting as both inspiration and disease, the links between acting and addiction seem less unexpected than inevitable. Acting presents a “dramatic paradox” for the Renaissance audience, caught between the actor’s creation and his potentially blasphemous deception, or infectious power. The actor, in the creative act, is “both divine and demonic,” Worthen argues, “as a magical extension of human potentiality and as a monstrous deformity of it.”20 The doubleness of the actor, like the doubleness of the addict, moves between devoted and compelled, inspired and diseased.
Ultimately addiction, like acting, offers a challenge to models of self-sovereignty, a through-line in this project’s argument. If self-sovereignty is often posited as requisite for a life of health and well being, such self-possession eludes the addict. Free will, agency, self-care, and autonomy are given over, often by the addict’s active choosing, much as the actor embraces a role or an audience is overtaken by it. Outside of the boundaries of the imagination, such a position of willed compulsion has been largely pathologized by medical experts. It has also been politicized by social theorists: at its extreme, such relinquishment of personal freedom can be taken to justify, as Mary Nyquist illuminates, enslavement on the grounds of the natural servility of some individuals or communities.21 Yet the valorization of individual autonomy and self-possession can also risk upholding isolation at the expense of community or connection. There is, legal theorist Jennifer Nedelsky writes, “something profoundly and I think irreducibly mysterious about the combination of individuality and ‘enmeshedness,’ integrity and integration that constitutes the human being.”22 Early modern models of addiction offer one way of rethinking subjectivity through what has arguably proved the ideological and ethical impasse of self-sovereignty and individuality. Lauren Berlant describes the impasse in these terms: the “sovereignty described as the foundation of individual autonomy” overidentifies self-control with the “fantasy of sovereign performativity and state control over geographical boundaries. It thereby affords a militaristic and melodramatic view of individual agency by casting the human as most fully itself when assuming the spectacular posture of performative action.”23 If, as Berlant suggests, we conceive of human agency in concert with militarized action, celebrating productivity and the exercise of control, then it is no wonder that scenes