Robin and Jay:

Many thanks for your helpful comments on Kazer.  Funny, you
should mention tobacco.  Tobacco was originally taken in
America as alcohol was consumed in Europe.   Natives "inhale
the smoke until they become unconscious and lay sprawling on
the earth like men in a drunken slumber." Referred to as
sotweed, tobacco produced states of intoxication: "the
Indians for their pastime, do take the smoke of the Tobacco,
for to make themselves drunk withal, and to see the vision,
and things that do represent to them, wherein they do
delight" (Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, Historia general y
natural de las Indias, 1526). In 1611, Sir John Davies notes
that "Tobacco...Makes many drunke being taken with a
Whiffe."  In seventeenth-century Britain, tobacco
was "drunk" from a communal pipe with one pipe handed from
man to man around the table.   Thus, an analogous
transcultural exchange can be fashioned between the Old
World alcohol and New World tobacco.

Casey Diana

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 15:14:10 +0200
>From: Robin Room <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Alcoholism/addiction
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Jay --
>   Thanks very much for this reference, which I found
fascinating (also to 'cdiana' for the Henry IV part 2
quote).
>   A new and interesting idea to me in Kezar is the idea
that the modern concept of addiction is formed at least as
much around tobacco as around alcohol (Kezar is mainly
concerned with interpreting Othello in terms of addiction to
tobacco).  It makes some sense that it is the "new" drug of
their age that the Elizabethans would have focused on in
terms of its powers.
>   Kezar discusses the history of the
term "addiction": "According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, 'addiction' is invented by Othello in 1604."  As
Jay notes, Kezar has turned up an earlier use (in
1599/1600), and notes forms of it were also in other
intervening Shakespeare plays.  "It would be also be a
mistake simply to conflate the word's modern usage with
Otehllo's Early Modern meaning; not until 1779, according to
the OED, is addiction used in the specific sense of 'a
compulsion and need to continue taking a drug' (the drug
that illustrates 'addiction' here is tobacco)."
>   But Kezar uses the OED to show that there was a "shift
in usage from a legal sense derived from Roman law (to call
to court or indict, to 'deliver over formally by sentence of
a judge'...) to the increasingly common meaning
of 'inclination, bent. Leaning, penchant, habit.'" In Henry
V and Hamlet, Kezar argues, Shakespeare is using "addicted"
or "addiction" in the "newer meaning".  Kezar argues that
the new uses of the word for "forces other than the law
[again, he mentions the 'innovation of tobacco'] ... that
nevertheless have a lawlike power to sentence behaviour.
Addiction, a word that first appears only at the end of the
16th century, would seem to be the most concentrated form of
this response; for the noun fuses the subject and object of
habit, the subject and object of abuse."
>   What Kezar is saying, then, is that there are three
meanings of "addiction" historically in English, with the
modern drug-specific one only appearing in the
Romantic/revolutionary period around 1800.  But the
interesting implication in his analysis is that psychoactive
substances (specifically tobacco) were the midwives of the
second meaning in the Elizabethan period.  So the
possibility of the more specific meaning was presumably
always there, at least latently.
>   His analysis also taught me that the more extended
meaning of "addiction" criticized by Stanton Peele and
others is actually older than the restricted meaning.
>       Robin
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society
>[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of jay williams
>Sent: Monday, October 04, 2004 7:14 PM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Alcoholism/addiction
>
>
>Consider also Dennis Kezar, "Shakespeare's Addictions,"
Critical Inquiry 30
>(Autumn 2003): 31-62. Kezar cites John Marston's 1599-1600
play Antonio and
>Mellida as one of the first instances of the "modern"-use
of addiction. He
>also proposes an interesting definition or redefinition of
addiction: "the
>emphatic ascription of agency and causality to time-bound
matter that
>cannot completely support such investment." The
word "completely" takes
>care of the question of chemistry, but he's more interested
in the
>subject-position of the addict, the person who "appears so
hopelessly
>confused about the boundaries between matter and metaphor."
>
>Jay Williams