Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England by Rebecca Lemon (review)

What if addiction were seen as a good thing? Rebecca Lemon's interesting and original study follows a hidden thread in the history of "addiction." In the early modern period the word was often used in a positive sense, to mean willed devotion, or to indicate an "achievement" (p. 2). This positive understanding of addiction, rooted largely in discourses of religion, worked alongside the more familiar "disease model" (p. 3) of addiction, rooted largely in concerns about the habitual consumption of alcohol, which Lemon, breaking with a dominant trend in the historical study of addiction, convincingly dates much earlier than eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "modernity" (pp. 13–16). Altogether, Lemon invites readers to reconsider the assumptions about the value of autonomy hiding in the framing of addiction as compulsive, unwilled, and socially destructive. Indeed, she suggests that certain understandings of addiction—as willed dedication to something beyond oneself—undergird such phenomena as friendship, love, community, and (as described in a moving epilogue) parenthood (p. 166).

In supporting this provocative thesis, Lemon's book offers, on one hand, an intellectual and cultural history of early models of addiction as they wind through theological (especially Calvinist), political, legal, and natural philosophical sources and, on the other hand, close readings of some key sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary representations of addiction. Although the book's title emphasizes the wider historical context, Lemon seems ultimately most invested in a particular literary tradition: the plays of William Shakespeare (which take up three of the book's five chapters) and his literary relations (Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and the Cavalier poets who claimed Jonson for a model). This is not in itself a limitation; indeed Lemon's book should find an eager reception among Renaissance literary scholars. Her emphasis on the double-edged discourse of addiction sheds light on, to choose two highlights, the characterization of Falstaff (to whom the author, unlike Prince Hal, is unfailingly generous) and the role of legislation concerning drunkenness in Iago's machinations against Cassio. One longs for a consideration of the role of addiction in The Tempest, where Caliban worships the bottle and the clowns who purvey it. This seems like a significant missed opportunity, as that underplot interweaves some central strains of Lemon's discussion: alcohol, religion, colonialism, and some sense of demonic possession.

Lemon's historical discussion of intertwining religious and medical notions of addiction is similarly rife with intriguing observations. The chapter on "health-drinking" and "addictive pledging" (p. 136) is especially excellent. (One can't help but associate this practice with the aggressive camaraderie of shots-taking nowadays.) But the historical dimension of the book is in some ways less satisfying than the literary-critical. Where Lemon wishes to emphasize the devotional potential of addiction, and the intrinsic value of such addicted devotion, the sources don't always cooperate. They sometimes suggest that addiction was less a positive than a neutral notion in early modernity: less a good itself than only good when directed to good objects. Consider, for instance, the book's discussion of idolatry, in which idolatry emerges as a sort of bad addiction to anything but God (see pp. 11, 25, 33, 35). Such neutral usages of the term rob Lemon's thesis of some of its power of surprise. After all, addiction continues to be used in something like this sense; it is quite common to hear people boast of their addictions to exercise, work, and other perceived virtues. These matters of framing aside, Lemon's objection to the simplistic celebration of autonomy in secular understandings of addiction—her insistence on thinking of addiction as a surrender one chooses—is compelling. It stems from a rhetorically muted but steady engagement with important queer theorists: Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, Eve Sedgwick. This dimension of the book emerges explicitly only in the epilogue; one longs to read more about it.

In all, this illuminating book...