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 Elizabethans showing up in their outrageous garb, but that doesn’t mean the problem, and its attendant degradations, didn’t exist. existed. Just ask Shakespeare about his Dark Lady.***

Spending the spirit in 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,

Past reason hunted, and there was hardly

Past reason hated, like bait swallowed

On purpose to make the taker angry;

Mad in pursuit and in possession as well;

Had, having and looking to have, extreme;

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

Before, a proposed joy; behind, a dream.

All this the world knows well; yet no one knows

Avoid 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 is 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 downtown Vancouver’s notorious east side. The area has been ravaged 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 shot mostly by two neighborhood policemen who wanted to portray the lives of the addicts who live there. It’s not a warm, fuzzy movie about drug addiction, but it’s not damning either. Here is an exception:

The plight of those living 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-so-gentle way, that we had problems downtown just as bad as 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 livelihood of those miserable souls who live downtown.

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

Begins:

Spending the spirit in a waste of shame

Shakespeare believes that we lose our spirit, our soul, when we engage in addictive behavior. With it you pay the expense, or the price of addiction. Waste here is used 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 it is believed that it was aimed at the infamous Dark Lady, that promiscuous creature who had Shakespeare and others completely intoxicated.

Spending the spirit in 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 Shakespeare’s signs of 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, i.e. the first line rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth, etc. The lines are usually made up of sentences that go towards forming sentences. However, in this quatrain, the last half is simply a list of adjectives or adjective phrases, listing Shakespeare’s agonies. And these agonies are expressed forcefully, 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 a burst of feeling that cannot be contained.

But does this Shakespearean fury capture the state of those sad, haggard souls who roam 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 will surely discover, beneath the anger and street bragging, a deep, murky well. That shame is what keeps them using it; 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,

Past reason hunted, and there was hardly

Past reason hated, like bait swallowed

On purpose to make the taker 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 begins to despise its consequences immediately (immediately). 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 drives her crazy whoever takes it. Crazy 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 do too much. 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 story of addiction, the one that had me frequently running to the local 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 poured 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, repeated itself 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 then would I say to myself, “Did I really have to gobble down that whole bag?” Gold: “Good idea? What was I thinking?”

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

Mad in pursuit and in possession as well;

Had, having and looking to have, extreme;

A happiness in the test, and proven, 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. However, he repeats the three-part cycle, and repetition in Shakespeare is always meaningful: 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 pursuing the drug and crazy while consuming 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: have, and then moves on to the first stage of the cycle, the chase: seeking to have. He does it 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 ones, as they pass through the Atwater subway, the subway that serves Dawson. I almost always get the same reaction: the class goes silent, 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. As I drive 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 how to come to me. If the traffic light allows it, we may even exchange a few words.

I’ve been criticized for doing this, “you’ll just spend the money on drugs” is what I’ve heard, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how we can prevent people from “instalment suicide” as a good friend of mine puts it.

Shakespeare didn’t know 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.