Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
least in Florio’s lexigraphical glosses, is to experience a converting, transforming devotion. And this resonance of “addict” with devotion and dedication can be further elucidated through other early modern dual-language dictionaries, where addiction suggests less compulsion than devotion, a form of fixity and determination but one with a positive valiance. As in the case of Calvin’s writings, explored in Chapter 1, “addiction” often appears as a translation for adonner. Randle Cotgrave in his Dictionary of the French and English Tongues uses addict to define s’adonner, writing “s’Addonner à. To give, bend, addict, affect, apply, devote, incline, render, yeeld himselfe unto.”19 Guy Miège, in his New Dictionary French and English, with another English and French (1677) defines s’adonner similarly: “to give (addict, or apply) himself to something,” as in “s’addonner à la virtue, to give himself to virtue.”20 Drawing on these framings of addiction not as compulsion but as devotion helps illuminate the danger, as well as the promise, of melancholy addiction. The individual suffers from the humoral disease of melancholy. But the propensity for addiction, namely devotional attachment, presages the ability to give or apply oneself fully. Addiction at once signals agency and excess, giving oneself over to a condition voluntarily and entirely. Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s imprisonment as “addicted” arguably reveals this, shifting from a permanent state to one that is chosen through devotion.
Turning to English language dictionaries further exposes the common understanding of addiction as, initially, a form of choice. Indeed, it is English language lexicographers who illuminate precisely the devotional and transformative potential of the addict in terms that resonate with Shakespeare’s stagings. In dictionaries, “addiction” is defined largely as a laudable preoccupation; far from signaling a form of slavery or tyranny, addiction signals the deepest form of chosen attachment. In Thomas Cooper’s thesaurus, he defines “addiction” (namely “Addico, addîcis, pen. prod. addixi, addictum, addícere”) as a form of giving over or bequeathing: it is “to say: to avow: to deliver: to sell” or “to alienate from him selfe or an other, and permit, graunt, and appoint the same to some other person.”21 In his examples of such addiction, Cooper turns to Latin invocations of the term from Cicero, Quintilian, and Caesar: “Addicere se alicui homini, siue cuipiam rei. Cicer. To addict or give him selfe: to bequeath. Addicere se sectæ alicuius. Quintil. To addict or give himselfe to ones sect or opinion. Seruituti se addicere. Cæsar. To bequeath him selfe.” The Latin addīcere becomes “approve,” “allow,” “give,” or “bequeath” in English. Furthermore, the English and French terms “devote” in turn draw on the English word “addict.” Cooper defines “to devote Deuoueo, déuoues, deuôtum. pe. pro. Denouêre)” as “to vowe: addict or give: solemnly to promise: to bequeath.”22
Each of these definitions grants agency to the addict. Addiction is an active process of giving oneself over, or delivering oneself, precisely as Calvin counsels in the writings examined in Chapter 1. The addict consents to be overtaken. These definitions also frame such consent in terms of promising, bequeathing, allowing, and giving—transactions that are relational and potentially generous. Cooper describes, in accordance with the term’s original usage in Roman law, addiction to service: “Addicere quempiam pro debito dicitur Prætor. Cic. To deliver a debtour to his creditors to be vsed at their pleasure. Addicere in seruitutem. Liu. To judge one to be bonde: to deliver as a bondman.”23 It is only in this last definition that any sense of bondage or compulsion appears, although even such apparently servile enslavement can signify, as in the case of Faustus, a desire for metaphysical merger. More frequently than bondage, addiction resonates with notions of faithful devotion, a kind of bequeathing that evokes friendship and marriage. Thus John Baret defines “addicte” as a form of devoted giving: “to addicte & geue him selfe to ones friend ship for ever.”24 Thomas Thomas, too, defines devotion as a form of addiction or giving: “Dēvoveo, es, ōvi, ōtum, ére. To vow, to addict or give, solemnlie to promise.”25 Most specifically, this addiction evokes notions of love. Cotgrave employs the term “addict” to help define giving, attaching, and affecting, both in the example of s’Addonner à rehearsed above, and with Affectionner, which signifies “to affectionate, beget a liking, breed an affection; excite, incite, or animate, unto. s’Affectionner à. To affect, or love; to addict, or devote himselfe; to give his mind, unto.”26
If Cooper and Cotgrave define addiction in terms of bequeathing and giving, Thomas amplifies it with a sense of delivering over or confiscating; in other words, for Thomas, addiction can designate both voluntary and compelled forms of service:
Addico: To deliver up unto him that offereth moste: to put to saile: to confiscate: to deliver some worke upon a price: to addict, bequeath or give himselfe to something: to saie: to avow: to alienate from himselfe to another, and permit, graunt, & apponit the same to another person: to condemne: to approoue or alow a thing to be done, to deliver, depute or destinate to; to judge, to constraine, to pronounce and declare.27
Thomas’s definition at once presents addiction as a kind of constraint and as a gift. This complexity of something that is and is not voluntary, something initially free but ultimately constraining, appears to Montaigne as a condition to be avoided, a form of slavery. But viewed through the vantage point of devotion to God or to a beloved, this language of devotional constraint encapsulates the rights and responsibilities, the volition and compulsion, at stake in deep, extended intimacies.
Recognizing how the term “addicted” might not amplify melancholy (Olivia is excessively attached to it) but instead temper it (she has chosen to be attached) offers a new perspective on Shakespeare’s famously multi-perspectival play. In addition to viewing the play as an anatomy of melancholy, we might also see how it toys with or stages the issue of addiction as willful release. The play’s title, in pairing the Epiphany of Twelfth Night with the “will” of Or What You Will, embeds this paradox, for it insists upon the interplay of choice and release, willfulness and devotion. This interplay structures the love relations of the play to a degree that “what you will” stands both in opposition to Twelfth Night’s celebration of Epiphany and in connection to it. “The very word epiphany,” as Bruce R. Smith writes, “means an appearance or a revelation and suggests that on that special day celebrants could expect something visionary, a miracle, a manifestation of divinity.”28 Such emphasis on the divine and magical might conventionally oppose the will, but Shakespeare announces their intimate connection in his play’s very title and, in doing so, anticipates the link of will and release at stake in the addictions he stages.
In the lexicons above, addiction appears as a form of designating, giving, bequeathing, serving, or devoting akin to marriage or religious faith. Thomas indicates the ways in which such devotion might not be entirely voluntary: one might be given over to service. But most frequently addiction appears as a commitment to something; a dedication to an activity, person, or relationship; a devotion “to” or “unto.” Thus addiction is and is not an act of will; it represents, as the lexicographical definitions suggest, a radical form of giving oneself, what Tim Dean, following Levinas, calls “unlimited intimacy,” and what Leo Bersani calls “self-shattering.”29 As Dean writes of such unlimited intimacy, “Not only the envelope of selfhood but the very distinction between self and other is undone.”30 For even as lexicographers yoke giving and bequeathing within addiction to devotion, their definitions also hint, as Thomas reveals, at a condition of release and donation of the self. One is delivered over to someone or something, one is constrained even as one also consents to this gift giving.31
Yet how might one consent when one no longer signifies or exists? How do consensual relations emerge out of forms of vulnerability and servile devotion?32 How might sharing intimacy with a stranger represent the deepest, most radical, and spiritual form of loving available? These questions resonate strongly with Twelfth Night, a play in which Olivia excitedly marries the wrong man, Sebastian weds a woman he does not know, Orsino agrees to marry a woman he’s never