Shakespeare on Addiction: Sonnet 129

Something interesting happens every time I teach Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. I’m reasonably sure the term “sex addiction” didn’t exist in his day, and neither did 12-step groups for him, with Elizabethans showing up in their outrageous outfits, but that doesn’t mean the problem and its attendant degradations didn’t exist. Ask Shakespeare about his Dark Lady. ***

Spending the spirit in a waste of shame

Is it lust in action? and even action, lust

He is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of guilt,

Wild, extreme, rude, cruel, do not trust,

Enjoyed, but directly despised,

The last reason was hunted, and as soon as

Hated past reason, like a swallowed bait

Purposefully placed to drive the taker crazy;

Crazy in pursuit and in possession like that;

Had, having, and seeking to have, extreme;

A joy in trial, and proven, a true misfortune;

Before, he proposed a joy; behind, a dream.

All this the world knows well; however no one knows well

Avoid heaven that leads men to this hell.

Why am I thinking of sonnet 129? Shakespeare’s sonnets call for interpretation, and it is not just because they are formal masterpieces that we should, as intelligent people, feel compelled to dissect for the sake of dissection. No, there is more to them than that. His sonnets are relevant today and I am going to show you why.

A few years ago, I came across an hour-long documentary made about the notorious east side of downtown Vancouver. The area has been devastated by the influx of drugs and their victims, earning it a reputation as a kind of elephant graveyard – it’s where addicts go to die. The film was called Through a Blue Lens and it was filmed, for the most part, by two policemen who wanted to portray the lives of the addicts who lived there. It’s not a warm fuzzy movie about drug addiction, but it’s not damning either. Here is an excerpt:

The plight of those who live in that part of Vancouver became a notorious petty cause in 1999, in part because The Globe and Mail published a photo essay of its inhabitants that left many Canadians speechless. It made us realize, in a not very kind way, that we had problems in the city center as serious as in some cities south of the border. The port of Vancouver is a gateway for drug trafficking and it seems that at least some of these drugs don’t travel very far – they form the lifeblood of those impoverished souls who live downtown.

So why look at Canada’s Skid Row when we talk about Shakespeare? It’s because your definition of addiction is one of the best I’ve ever read. It’s relevant today, and that’s because when addicts talk about their suffering, they report (albeit less eloquently) many of the same things. And when I say things, I mean that they report that they have many of the same feelings and experiences described by Shakespeare. Those haunting sounds of agony, the addict’s anguish, are painfully and completely distilled into this poem.

Starts:

Spending the spirit in a waste of shame

Shakespeare believes that we lose our spirit, our soul, when we engage in addictive behavior. The expense, or the price of the addiction, is paid with it. Waste is used here literally (implying that addiction wastes lives) and also symbolically to denote a place. This double meaning is made evident by the use of the preposition en, as “in” a waste of shame. Waste as a place fits perfectly with that other hell, hell, mentioned in the closing couplet.

Lust is Shakespeare’s drug of choice and the belief is that it was directed at the infamous Dark Lady, that promiscuous creature who had Shakespeare and others completely intoxicated.

Spending the spirit in a waste of shame

Is it lust in action? and even action, lust

He is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of guilt,

Wild, extreme, rude, cruel, don’t trust

What are the signs of Shakespeare’s slavery? The form of a sonnet is strictly prescribed: it consists of three quatrains, three groups of four lines, and a closing couplet. The rhyme scheme tends to alternate lines, that is, the first line rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth, etc. The lines are usually made up of sentences that go towards the formation of sentences. However, in this quatrain, the last half is simply a list of adjectives or adjective phrases that list Shakespeare’s agonies. And these agonies are expressed powerfully, with words like murderous, bloody, savage, and extreme.

This is a man in the midst of an obsession, an obsession that will not even allow him to form coherent thoughts; instead, he spits out a list of adjectives to convey his feelings. Shakespeare, the creator of words, created this list for a reason. It is there to denote a burst of feeling that cannot be contained.

But does this Shakespearean fury capture the state of those sad, gaunt souls that roam the east side of downtown? I would say yes and the keyword here is shame. Ask any active addict how he feels about his life and you are sure to discover, beneath the anger and street bragging, a deep and murky pit of it. That shame is what keeps them consuming; it is what prevents them from wanting to feel.

After Shakespeare establishes his narrative voice, he turns to the cyclical nature of his illness. In the second quatrain, he states:

Enjoyed, but directly despised,

The last reason was hunted, and as soon as

Hated past reason, like a swallowed bait

Purposefully placed to drive the taker crazy;

Here we see the structural and thematic interpretation of the addiction cycle. Let me translate: the addict hardly enjoys (uses) his drug when he begins to despise its consequences directly (immediately). Yet beyond all reason, he continues to search for her, and again, as soon as he consumes her, he hates her beyond all reason because he can’t stop. Then Shakespeare expands on the subtle images of animals and blames the providers and facilitators. Her drug is like a trap set on purpose and makes her, whoever takes it, go crazy. Crazy here is used in the British sense of the word, which means crazy.

Usually it is at this point in my class that I stop and ask students to think of an activity, any activity that they do excessively. Do they spend too much time online? Did you eat too much of the wrong kind of food? Do you text incessantly? And this is also where I tell you my own little addiction story, the one that made me run to the store on the corner of the neighborhood in Toronto when I was a student.

I had an addiction and it was Swedish Berries, those soft red candies that taste heavenly but have no nutritional value. These darlings came in handy for me at midnight, when I had a rehearsal to finish and needed a sugar boost. However, the problem was that he did not know when to stop. The store sold them in bulk and I didn’t have the discipline to buy just a few. My reasoning, as I was standing in front of that container and serving spoonful after spoonful, was that I would save some for later.

Right.

So I ate them until I felt sick and this process, during the last two years of my undergraduate degree, was repeated more times than I can remember. But it was the sequence of events in this process that was important. I would come to realize that it was late. I knew I had to keep working but I didn’t want coffee. Then I thought: Hey! Swedish berries! Great idea! And I’d crawl into the store, come back and eat too many. Only later would I say to myself, “Did I really have to zip up that whole bag?” Or: “Good idea? What was I thinking?”

The cycle of addiction also occurs: there is the persecution, the consummation and the aftermath. In other words, anticipation, drunkenness, and remorse. This cycle will be expanded in the next quatrain.

Crazy in pursuit and in possession like that;

Had, having, and seeking to have, extreme;

A joy in trial, and proven, a true misfortune;

Before, he proposed a joy; behind, a dream.

The first quatrain establishes, through the use of enumeration, Shakespeare’s loss of control. The second establishes the cyclical nature of your addiction. The latter is significant because it does not provide new information. Yet he repeats the three-part cycle, and the repetition in Shakespeare is always meaningful – he uses it to let us know to pay attention. Here we are told, once again and with more emphasis, that an addict is mad while pursuing the drug and mad while consuming it. And, of course, it is that insanity, that inability to reason, that starts the cycle all over again.

But take a look at the second line. Shakespeare reverses the order of the cycle: he begins with the sequels: he had, he moves towards the consummation: to have, and then he moves on to the first stage of the cycle, the persecution: in search of having. He does this to create the impression of a back and forth movement: the addict moves back and forth, back and forth, ad infinitum. Why? Because that’s what happens when you get addicted: life stagnates.

At the beginning of this article, I said that something interesting happens every time I teach this sonnet. Here it is: After reading it aloud, I tell my students to look closely at beggars, especially young people, as they pass through the Atwater tube, the tube that serves Dawson. I almost always have the same reaction: the class falls silent, the airflow in the room stops and these young people, with the future ahead, pay more attention. This suffering, so poetically interpreted by Shakespeare, is only a few steps away.

And it happens in other places. When I drive home, I stop at a busy intersection that leads to the freeway. That’s where I often see a young woman, with blonde hair in dreadlocks, holding a sign asking for spare change. I always give her a little and now she knows how to come to me. If the traffic light allows it, we can even exchange a few words.

I have been criticized for doing this – “she will just spend the money on drugs” is what I heard – but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how we can prevent people from “committing suicide on the quota plan,” as a good friend puts it.

Shakespeare didn’t know either, but luckily for us, that didn’t stop him from looking deeply into that darkness and writing about it anyway.

*** For the sake of brevity and understanding, I will refer to the narrator as Shakespeare.

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