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