The subject of addiction is a fertile field of philosophical debate because of the problems it poses to ordinary notions of volition and responsibility. A largely unquestioned consensus prevails, however, regarding the concept's history, as Rebecca Lemon points out in her erudite and engaging new book. According to the standard picture, the modern concept of addiction as a disease characterized by the submergence of the addict's capacity for choice did not exist until just before 1800, when it was simultaneously invented by Thomas Trotter in Britain and Benjamin Rush in the United States. Before that time, the discourse on habitual drinking was purely moralistic, which is to say it presupposed the intactness of the drinker's agential freedom. The alternative, medicalizing account of the addict's loss of self-control, the story goes, is a product of high modernity, linked intimately with Enlightenment science, Romantic ideas of literary creativity, and the politics of Victorian social reform.

Lemon shows elegantly that this story is not exactly true. Compulsive drinking was a major preoccupation of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who deployed a concept of addictive disease facially difficult to distinguish from that of Trotter and Rush. Yet these were not physicians but religious thinkers, whose use of addiction reflects its semantic and substantive linkage to a particular theological context. Addīcere (to addict) in Roman law denoted an act of pledging or binding over, with the implication of one's being placed under the authority or at the disposal of another. John Calvin in his Latin writings uses the word pervasively, in two quite distinct senses. Endemic to our fallen nature is our being subjected or addicted to worldliness; yet addictive captivation of the will also characterizes the tenacious constancy of the believer sustained by God's grace. For the English Calvinists who adopted the term, it thus came to indicate the laudable capacity for devotional attachment that might be hijacked by the material forms of Catholic ritual or, alternatively, by such comparably potent seductions as dicing and drink, tobacco and plays.

The early modern understanding of addiction differed from its modern counterpart, in other words, not by lacking a clear concept of the addict's diminished self-possession, but rather by placing it within a wider field of similar modes of subjective dissolution, some of which might prove ethically and spiritually valuable, even heroic. Lemon's aim is to describe this largely vanished space of moral imagination, and in so doing she relies for most of the book—four of five chapters—on readings of Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays. This is a notable narrowing of focus for an argument that had been framed on a rather broader scale. What Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England thereby loses in interpretive scope, however, it gains in tightness of conception. Lemon offers an impressively coherent account of Doctor Faustus, Twelfth Night, 1 and 2 Henry IV, and Othello and their depiction of relationships that are addictive in the sense of pivoting on a willed alienation of the will, a delivering over of oneself to another that at once preempts subsequent choice and establishes commitment to one's initial act of devotion as an ongoing mode of ethical being.

Hence Lemon sees in Faustus's notoriously one-sided bargain with Mephastophilis not as an unaccountable misstep so much as an embodiment of his desire to be “ravished” (43) by an external entity into which his discrete identity might altogether dissolve. In Twelfth Night this kind of “self-shattering” (xiv, 57, 58, and 136, using Leo Bersani's term) is presented as the condition of love in its most exalted form, which the play identifies with the suspension of every determinate feature of individual personality. Othello and the Henry IV plays in turn dramatize the ambivalence of such relations by staging an “addictive” character's ultimately destructive devotion to another whose atomistic selfhood places him at the opposite pole (#). Falstaff's alcoholism extends and compensates for an intimacy frustrated by Hal's remorselessly instrumentalist view of human relationships, while Iago's playing upon Cassio's weakness for drink prefigures his more far-reaching manipulation of Othello's addictive “capacity,” his ability to sustain the type of freely willed subjection radiantly realized in his marriage to Desdemona.

Lemon's final chapter considers health drinking, a social ritual that emerged as an object of condemnation in the 1580s but came to be championed from the 1630s on by royalist poets such as Robert Herrick. Health drinking exemplified with unusual literalness the sense in which addiction could mean a kind of interpersonal compulsion insofar as its basic feature was the obligation to drink by turns to the health of each participant; attempting to withdraw prematurely was treated as a gravely insulting breach of solidarity. Likewise the ritual exemplified the way such features of addictive relationality could give rise to diametrically opposed moral evaluations. What appeared from one angle to Puritan reformers as a pathological loss of rational control could be revalued by their opponents as an expression of loyalty, generosity, and collective freedom.

Lemon's basic analytical move is thus to show how early modern discussions of addictive behavior were embedded in a wider context of concern for the boundaries of selfhood and the nature of intersubjective attachment. This approach has its limitations. Lemon's tendency to treat drinking essentially as a metaphor for some more abstract set of ethical dispositions at times lends a curiously sanitized quality to her readings, as in a discussion of Falstaff's praise of sack that labors earnestly to cast it as a speech about the value of devoting oneself to others. A tension runs throughout the book between Lemon's aspiration to recover the history of the phenomenon we call addiction and the desire to exploit the fact that the word addiction was once used to mean many other things as a point of departure for exploring themes for which that phenomenon serves merely as a notional model. Yet ultimately Lemon's study does valuable work at both levels. It offers at once a compelling historiographic provocation and an appealing framework for understanding the strange ethical magnetism exerted by some of the most extravagant creations of the Renaissance stage.