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, with the Elizabethans appearing in their extravagant regalia, but that doesn’t mean the problem, and its attendant demotions, not exists. Just ask Shakespeare about the Dark Lady of his.***

Spending the spirit on a waste of shame

it is lust in action; and even the action, the lust

is perjured, murderous, bloodthirsty, full of guilt,

Wild, extreme, harsh, cruel, distrustful,

Enjoyed not before but despised right,

Hunted past reason, and there was hardly

The past reason hated, like a swallowed bait

On purpose to make the policyholder angry;

Crazy in the chase and in the possession like that;

Had, having and looking to have, extreme;

A happiness in the test, and tried, a misery;

Before, a proposed joy; behind, a dream.

All this is well known to the world; yet no one knows well

Avoid the heaven that leads men to this hell.

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

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

The plight of those who live in that part of Vancouver became a minor cause celebrated 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-too-gentle way, that we had problems downtown as bad as some cities south of the border. The port of Vancouver is a gateway for the drug trade and it seems that at least some of these drugs don’t travel very far – they form the livelihood of those wretched souls who live in the center of the city.

So why look at Canada’s Skid Row when we’re talking about Shakespeare? It’s because his 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 having many of the same feelings and experiences described by Shakespeare. Those haunting sounds of agony, the addict’s anguish, are distilled, painfully and completely, into this poem.

Starts:

Spending the spirit on a waste of shame

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

Lust is Shakespeare’s drug of choice and is believed to have been directed at the infamous Dark Lady, that promiscuous creature who had Shakespeare and others completely intoxicated.

Spending the spirit on a waste of shame

it is lust in action; and even the action, the lust

is perjured, murderous, bloodthirsty, full of guilt,

Wild, extreme, harsh, cruel, do not 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 verses, that is, the first verse rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth, etc. Lines are usually made up of sentences that go towards sentence formation. However, in this quatrain, the last half is simply a list of adjectives or adjective phrases, enumerating Shakespeare’s agonies. And these agonies are forcefully expressed, with words like murderous, bloody, savage, and extreme.

This is a man in the throes of an obsession, an obsession that doesn’t even allow him to form coherent thoughts; instead, he spits out a list of adjectives to convey his feelings. Shakespeare, the wordsmith, created this list for a reason. He is there to denote an outburst of feeling that cannot be contained.

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

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

Enjoyed not before but despised right,

Hunted past reason, and there was hardly

The past reason hated, like a swallowed bait

On purpose to make the policyholder angry;

Here we see the structural and thematic interpretation of the cycle of addiction. Let me translate: the addict hardly enjoys (uses) his drug when he immediately (immediately) begins to despise its consequences. However, beyond all reason, he continues to search for it, and again, as soon as he consumes it, he hates it beyond all reason because he can’t stop. Shakespeare then expands on the subtle animal imagery and blames the providers and enablers. His drug is like a trap set on purpose and it drives her crazy, whoever takes it. Mad here is used in the British sense of the word, meaning crazy.

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

I had an addiction and it was to Swedish berries, those soft red candies that taste heavenly but have no nutritional value. These darlings came in handy at midnight when I had an essay to finish and needed a sugar boost. However, the problem was that she didn’t 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 stood in front of that container and scoop after scoop, was that I would save some for later.

Good.

So I would eat them until I felt sick and this process, during the last two years of my undergraduate degree, was repeated more times than I care to 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. So I would think: Hey! Swedish berries! Great idea! And I’d drag myself to the store, come back and eat too many. Only afterwards would I say to myself, “Did I really have to gobble up that whole bag?” Gold: “Good idea? What was I thinking?”

This is also how the cycle of addiction goes: there is the persecution, the consumption and the aftermath. In other words, the anticipation, the intoxication and the remorse. This cycle will be expanded in the next quatrain.

Crazy in the chase and in the possession like that;

Had, having and looking to have, extreme;

A happiness in the test, and tried, a misery;

Before, a proposed 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 his addiction. The latter is significant because it does not provide new information. Yet he repeats the three-part cycle, and Shakespeare’s repetition is always significant: he uses it to let us know to pay attention. Here we are told, again and with more emphasis, that an addict is crazy while he is chasing the drug and crazy while he is using it. And, of course, it is that madness, 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 aftermath: had, moves on to consumption: to have, and then moves on to the first stage of the cycle, the chase: in search of having. He does it to create the impression of back and forth movement: the addict moves back and forth, back and forth, ad infinitum. Because? Because that’s what happens when you become 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 for panhandlers, especially young people, as they pass the Atwater subway, the subway that services Dawson. I almost always get the same reaction: the class goes quiet, the airflow in the room stops, and these young people, with their future ahead of them, pay more attention. This suffering, expressed so poetically by Shakespeare, is only a few steps away.

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

I’ve been criticized for doing this, “he’ll 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 “killing themselves on the installment plan” as a good friend of mine says.

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

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