Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly LiteratureAlison V. Scott
Book Review
Alison V. Scott's lucid and engaging book considers the rhetoric and practices of early modern gift exchange within the Elizabethan and Jacobean literary patronage systems. Animating her study is the inherited tension between the Senecan ideal of personal disinterestedness in giving and the Aristotelian ideal of balance, which stipulated that every gift implicitly demanded reciprocation and postulated a necessary amity and equality between giver and recipient. Both ideals proved inadequate to the Political realities of a patronage system motivated by the dependence of clients and suitors upon political, financial, and social superiors. Nevertheless, they exerted continual pressure on writers, who sought in varying ways to maintain the appearance of magnanimously giving just praise, rather than prostituting themselves through the sale of base and undeserved flattery. The book is divided, somewhat misleadingly, into two parts, with the first purporting to treat Elizabethan "sexual" gifts and the second Jacobean and early Caroline "political" gifts. These labels suggest an artificial and perhaps even sexist bifurcation of patronage relations in the two periods. But as Scott herself argues, and as the individual chapters testify, the political and erotic spheres overlapped throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, one of the most valuable contributions of Scott's first part is her complication of the Modern truism that Elizabethan sonneteers vocalized their political aspirations using the language of Petrarchism. By considering patronage relations not merely in terms of social or gendered power relations but as participating in a gift economy, Scott reveals that as a female queen Elizabeth violated the gift ideal of an exchange motivated by the dispassionate love of male friendship. She was "rhetorically rendered incapable of liberality" by virtue of her status as an object of erotic male desire and could only be sued for patronage in the language of love. Rather than embody the Aristotelian ideal of balance, Elizabeth "manifested that imbalanced 'other"' (49). Frustration over the queen's refusal to reciprocate properly her literary lovers' gifts of praise and her courtiers' gifts of service manifested itself violently in Astrophil's and Parthenophil's respective fictional fantasies of anger and rape, and in the real life rebellion of the Earl of Essex. Chapter 2, a study primarily of Shakespeare's young man sonnets, offers a bridge between the representations and practices of gift culture characterizing the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Unlike Sidney and Barnes, Shakespeare's suing of a male patron places him firmly within the ideal sphere of amicable homosocial exchange. Nevertheless, because the poet appeals to someone above his own station, the relationship remains imbalanced. The author seeks to create the illusion of equality by asserting h s own moral worth, by emphasizing the value of his gift, and by positioning himself as self-sacrificing. The undeservingness of the addressee, however, undermines the poet's self-representation, for in praising an unpraiseworthy subject, the poet's disinterested epideictic verse threatens to collapse into a self-serving lie. Gift economy slides into market economy as the language of poetic immortality and intangibility becomes polluted by the language of commerce. The rival poet's arrival in the sequence highlights the competitive and mercenary nature of patronage relations. In the second part of Selfish Gifts, Scott considers the reconfiguration of patronage relations that followed upon the accession of James I and its effect on poetic engagements with the gift ideal. With the shift from a female to male monarch, the "language of erotic love" was replaced by a "discourse of homosocial exchange" (125) more suited to the Aristotelian premise of balanced reciprocity. The king's liberal delegation of authority to male favorites, though, complicated this model in other ways. His distribution of power and rewards to men of low birth such as the Earl of Somerset and the Duke of Buckingham, like his authorization of the sale of titles, depreciated the value of the royal gift and provided a corrupt model of gift exchange. The establishment of separate households for the king, queen, and princes, each supporting and supported by its own factions, further decentralized and mediated the distribution of favors. Chapter 4, which examines the literary "gifts" proffered in celebration of the Somerset wedding, offers particularly rich insights into the impact of these complications on patronage- seeking writers. Poets were required both to compete openly with one another in a fragmented patronage marketplace and to praise a powerful bridegroom whose marriage was surrounded by scandal and whose position was vehemently opposed by other patrons. Chapman unabashedly praises Somerset, apparently resting all of his hopes on the favorite, and in the process opens himself to charges of literary prostitution. Presenting himself as unable to escape the duty of writing an epithalamium for the occasion, Donne distances himself from Carr and effectively devalues his poem as gift. Jonson, Campion, and the anonymous author of The Masque of Flowers address the favorite and his king rather than the bride and groom, honoring Carr while acknowledging the threat to social order posed by his relationship with James. In its examination of these texts and others, Selfish Gifts suggests that the ideals and practices of gift exchange had important implications for the early modern patronage system. Its fresh engagement with well-known texts will appeal to a broad range of readers, while its reconfiguration of the literary-critical models established by Marotti, Dubrow, and others will be of special interest to students of lyric poetry. Patricia Crouch, Temple University, Sixteenth Century Journal, 2007 More about this title To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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