Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
of his potential for salvation, it nevertheless betrays his failed devotion not just to Mephastophilis and Lucifer but to anything: God, necromancy, friendship, or study of any kind. Staging the gap between the desire for addiction and its realization, the play illuminates how a character allegedly predestined for hell, overcome by desire for magic, and contractually bound to necromantic masters still cannot achieve addiction.
Yet in staging Faustus’s failure, Marlowe depicts not the depressing or powerless spectacle of the damned but the monumental difficulties of the addiction Calvin trumpets. Addiction, it turns out, is hard. If, as Rasmussen writes, “the central problem with most orthodox interpretations of Doctor Faustus is that they often verge on lack of sympathy, even open hostility,” viewing Faustus as a failed addict instead illuminates his wavering not as a sign of weakness but as indicative of the challenge of his task.85 Calvin sidesteps the effort necessary to achieve total surrender. Is addiction to faith really as simple as he makes it sound? Indeed, is addiction to sin that easy? Even as Calvin notes the ways in which the elect might stray from their addiction to God, he also describes addiction as effortless; it is simply a question of which addiction one might follow. Calvin’s theory, which is evident in his conversion story and his theory of election, seems to promise that addiction is everywhere—and more potently, that God is everywhere, as seen in all one’s addictive predispositions.86 But, Marlowe reveals, this theory of God’s dominant will falls short. If humans are so passive before this all-powerful God, then where is He? Mephastophilis works throughout the play to secure the soul of a character who is all too eager to give it away; God, by contrast, may or may not speak through the conscience, the Good Angel, or the Old Man.
It is perhaps perverse, then, that despite his inadequacies as a devotee, and despite his wavering, Faustus nevertheless reaches the promised end. He achieves final integration into Lucifer’s kingdom, and he does so not because of his own devotion but because of Mephastophilis’s extraordinary efforts. Again and again Lucifer and Mephastophilis counsel Faustus toward right belief, toward the kind of behavior expected of their “faithful.” Toward the end of the play, as Faustus tries to repent, Marlowe stages a divine figure literally holding the tongue and hands of the devotee, prohibiting him from straying: Faustus cries, “The devil draws in my tears…. O, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold ’em, they hold ’em” (5.2.59–63). This staging of Faustus’s damnation, even as it shocks viewers, also arguably appeals to them.87 The fantasy of God accompanying the faithful through every hour of the day, staying their hands, holding their tongues, and distracting them with spectacles when they think of straying—this God exists only in reverse fantasy, in Marlowe’s play in the form of Lucifer. If even Faustus fails as an addict, despite receiving both direct encouragement from Mephastophilis and tangible material benefits from magic, imagine the challenges facing the godly. Tormented by popish regimes, ridiculed for restrained living, besieged by existential melancholy, and plagued by mortal questions, the godly must endure worldly troubles without a divine Mephastophilis by their side.
Conclusion
Marlowe’s play stages a supernatural universe in which even the unfaithful, weak, and wavering subject might meet his desired end. Understanding how Faustus’s addiction falls short illuminates the treacherous illusion of free will in the play. An attempt to exercise free will in defiance of his contract—indeed, the need to bind himself in a contract in the first place—reveals Faustus’s failure to lose himself in his devotional pursuit. The resulting opposition between free will (as it might allow him to turn from necromancy) and devotion (as it might demonstrate the fidelity of his commitments) is thus a Catch-22. Even as the evocation of free will might seem to dramatize Faustus’s potential to turn from sin, it also—to the degree that he successfully turns—demonstrates his propensity to infidelity and inconstancy, regardless of the devotional field. It is Faustus’s problematic inconstancy that signals his fall, as much as his failed exercise of what one might or might not take to be free will. Indeed, one might argue that Faustus should express even more commitment to Mephastophilis than he does, for only through this full exercise of addiction might he reveal his predisposition for true faith.
Rather than viewing the play as hinging on the tension between faith and free will—a tension that casts Faustus as either predetermined in his damnation or capable of saving himself—the study of addiction in Faustus illuminates instead the drama of his attempted devotion and his failed surrender. His desire to release his will to Mephastophilis indicates a predisposition to precisely the kind of radical faith required of the righteous believer; but his failure to achieve the form of commitment he trumpets indicates his fall. Viewed from this vantage point, the real question in the play is not whether Faustus has free will, but rather why Faustus has such a hard time committing. The answer suggested above is that devotion does not come easily. Even as the play illuminates the horrors of following the wrong path, it even more potently stages the challenge of, and fortitude necessary to, surrender to an addiction. Individual desires, combined with the external promptings of community, culture, and law, might still prove inadequate to the task. Faustus’s wavering exposes his incapacity for addiction, evident in his all-too-human propensity for wandering. After so many centuries, what remains admirable about Faustus is precisely his repeated attempts to give himself away to his pursuits in the face of his own fear and hesitation. This sort of addiction is clearly dangerous, but it is also extraordinary and compelling.
Chapter 2
Addicted Love in Twelfth Night
Love is that of which we are not masters.
—Jean-Luc Nancy
Chapter 1 analyzed addiction to God and to study in Calvin and Marlowe. This chapter continues to explore the challenge of addiction by turning to another form of devotion: secular love. The drama of addiction in Doctor Faustus—moving through incantations, willful service, and contractual donation of the self—finds surprising parallels in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a play in which frustrated love yields to service and devotion.1 Shakespeare offers a broader range of potential addicts than Marlowe, as multiple characters strive to give themselves over to the spirit, in this case of love or drink. Nevertheless, the challenge of relinquishing control proves as challenging in comic Illyria as in tragic Wittenberg.
Twelfth Night stages, in order to embrace, the loyalty and fidelity of firm addictions: the devoted lover is the play’s most powerful force, and it demands relinquishing sovereignty of oneself to risk loving another. Fostering this addiction—this willingness to forego self-rule in favor of a stronger force or attachment—is an achievement. It is an attachment requiring both commitment and devotion expressed not temporarily, but over and through time. Addiction as a mode of loving shifts attention from a momentary experience—I fell in love, I feel love—to an extended connection. As David Schalkwyk argues, “Love is not an emotion, even though it does involve emotions. Love is a form of behavior or disposition over time; it involves … ‘commitment and attachment.’ But such dispositions are not given; they are navigated, negotiated, even discovered in the course of what we think of as their ‘expression.’”2 Thus love is not a bodily condition, such as a humor; it is not a complexion but an inclination that has turned to what the early moderns would deem an addiction. Twelfth Night, as Schalkwyk goes on to write, “embodies love through dedicated behavior and action, rather than the causal interiority of bodily heat or humor.”3 This form of loving is a sustained inclination that transforms: through addicted loving, characters go through the process of becoming themselves, offering a range of loving expressions that are at once, as N. R. Helms argues, surprising and what he calls “expectable.” In Twelfth Night a character can, he writes, “change before our eyes, while remaining the same character.”4
Such addicted loving stands in opposition to another practice more obviously associated with addiction for modern audiences: drunkenness. Sir Toby and Sir Andrew prove incapable of surrendering their own material desires—for money, status, and