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
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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