Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon

the puritan concern about addictive drinking as a form of diseased compulsion lies a contemporaneous discourse on drinking as laudable commitment to community and nation. When examined through the ubiquitous early modern conversations on good fellowship, certain aspects of drinking culture—namely, the community ties, friendships, and national allegiances—parallel the devotional addiction to God or love, a point taken up in Chapter 3 of this project. Mark Hailwood’s recent study provides a succinct definition of this capacious category of good fellowship and, in doing so, highlights its links to drinking and to loyalty to community: “It was an activity structured by a number of rituals—toasting, drinking contests, games and gambling, songs—and by a series of behavioural conventions that encouraged liberal spending, heavy but controlled drinking, and the maintenance of a jovial—or ‘merry’—disposition and atmosphere. These rituals and conventions expressed a number of values: courage, self control, loyalty, financial prosperity and independence, a pride in hard work, a bold defiance of dominant gender norms.”⁹²

      In sharp contrast to the godly condemnations of diseased drinking, the rituals of good fellowship and its attendant values, including “courage” and “loyalty,” attest to the cultural benefits of drinking culture. Exclusive friendships sustain drinking communities in times of strife. In his poem “Good Fellowship,” for example, Hugh Crompton’s speaker trumpets his dedication to communal drinking:

      Fill, fill the glass to the brim,

      ‘Tis a health unto him

      That refuses

      To be curb’d, or disturb’d

      At the power of the State,

      Or the frowns of his fate;

      Or that scorneth to bark or to bite at our Muses:

      And that never will vary

      From the juyce of the Vine, and the cups of Canary.⁹³

      The emphasis on exclusive loyalty—one who “never will vary” in his drinking—appears in a range of writings on good fellowship that are structured around those who “refuse” to be daunted in their commitments to each other. Thomas D’Urfey’s “The Good Fellow” offers a similar rallying cry:

      A pox on the times,

      Let ’em go as they will,

      Tho’ the taxes are grown so heavy;

      Our hearts are our own,

      And shall be so still,

      Drink about, my boys, and be merry.⁹⁴

      The speaker upholds his unity with his drinking “boys,” who still claim ownership of their loyal “hearts” even in times of political isolation. “To quaffe is fellowship right and good,” writes William Hornby; such drinking fellowship helps “maintain friendship and nourish blood.”⁹⁵ Even the critics of good fellowship recognize its connection to forms of loyalty and devotion. Thus drunkenness goes, William Prynne writes, “under the popular and lovely titles of hospitality, good-fellowship, courtesie, entertainement, joviality, mirth, generosity, liberality, open house keeping, the liberall use of Gods good creatures, friendship, love, kindnesse, good neighbour hood, company-keeping, and the like.”⁹⁶

      The language of good fellowship resonates with a model of addiction in urging one’s release into a spirit—the spirit of alcohol—as a sign of loyalty, with the alehouse functioning as an alternate family.⁹⁷ “To consider seventeenth-century drinking,” Adam Smyth writes, is “to consider friendship, community, conviviality.”⁹⁸ Tavern drinking helped establish affiliation and loyalty, often to a community structured around shared gender, class, regional, or political affiliations made evident in drinking habits.⁹⁹ Since one’s choice of alcohol helped to signify one’s class status, drink functioned as a mode of social recognition.¹⁰⁰ Drunkenness, or claims of drunkenness, might serve as a way for the gentry to distance themselves from those impoverished visitors who haunted the alehouse; or drinking could help designate political affiliation, either through the types of beverage consumed or the spaces of consumption.¹⁰¹ Smyth’s collection, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality, elucidates the range of such sociable drinking, from the English versions of Anacreontic verse studied by Stella Achilleos, to the ballads analyzed by Angela McShane, to the drinking communities illuminated by Michelle O’Callaghan, Marika Keblusek, and Charles C. Ludington. A range of studies of admirable drunkenness also expose the flourishing of carnivalesque ritual and the politics of mirth, both dependent on drinking culture for political and social union.¹⁰²

      Despite the seemingly opposed (and equally voluminous) cultural responses to drinking from puritan critics and inspired tavern haunters, both groups share an embrace of the spirit as connection to community and fellowship. Ravishment, be it through transforming God on the one hand or inspired drinking on the other, reshapes the devoted addict.¹⁰³ Indeed, these drinkers of divine and alcoholic spirits wrestle over the claim to good fellowship itself, as the godly attempted to assert their form of pious “good fellowship” in their communities of the faithful. The link of good fellowship to drinking thus provoked particular ire, with puritan critics calling out the deception of secular calls to “good fellowship” that served merely as a synonym for drunkenness. As Henry Crosse claims in Vertues common-wealth (1603): “If we looke into the monstrousnesse of sinne in this age, we may see every abhomination sport it selfe, as though there were no God. Drunkennesse is good fellowship.” Indeed, he warns, one might “carrie the verie badge of good fellowship upon his nose.”¹⁰⁴ As William Perkins asks, in dismay, “Is not drunkennes counted good fellowship”?¹⁰⁵ George Benson also derides the “drunkennesse of good fellowshippe,” while Thomas Cooper condemns how “drunkenesse is counted good fellowshippe.”¹⁰⁶

      The oppositions and countercurrents in discourses of drinking help reveal such ideological clashes between the godly and the good fellow as less directly oppositional than fraternal or sororal, two intimately connected, if fractious, impulses. Further, it is precisely in the vexed responses to drunkenness that we see addiction’s range and pliability. Both devotional and compulsive at once, drunkenness provoked the variety of cultural responses that are at stake in early modern addiction and then are buried in later centuries. For even as conversations on excessive habitual drinking increasingly insist on drunkenness as a disease and pathology, they nevertheless retain the notion of addiction as a laudable pastime, a form of good fellowship that proves constant amid cultural changes.

      Project Outline

      Each of this project’s chapters wrestles with addiction in relation to devotion, compulsion, agency, and authority. To do so each chapter offers a discussion of addiction in a different arena, moving from theology and lexicography to medical writings and puritan polemic to legal tracts and national politics. In the process, rather than concentrate solely on those texts that repeatedly deploy the word “addiction,” I instead select texts that pose the broader philosophical issues at stake in invocations of addiction, drawing particularly on the imaginative richness afforded in the study of literary texts.¹⁰⁷ “While other discourses may be compromised by ambiguity, literature,” Roland Greene writes, “is drawn to it—and can fashion it into something new, granting the premium of fresh perspective to old problems.”¹⁰⁸ Sermons attempt to convert readers; literature, by contrast, serves to “entertain,” both in the sense of offering a pleasurable pastime and in the sense of considering new ways of thinking about familiar issues. Through concentration on a literary text in concert with cultural and political writings, each chapter illuminates an aspect of addiction’s rich possibilities.

      When The English Faust Book describes Faustus as “addicted” to study, and when Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus depicts necromantic study as “ravishing,” these texts draw on classical and Renaissance notions of addiction as a beneficial and laudable form of commitment. Tracing the invocations of addiction in classical and theological writings ranging from Cicero and Seneca to Calvin and Perkins, Chapter 1 overturns