In Selfish Gifts: The Politics of Exchange and English Courtly Literature, 1580-1628, Alison V. Scott examines a wider range of "romance" textsactually lyric and dramatic expressions of romantic, political, and personal reciprocity, failed as well as successful .Well informed by anthropological and theoretical studies of gift giving from Marcel Mauss, Jacques Derrida, and Natalie Zemon Davis to Arthur Marotti, Scott supplies more detailed close readings of courtly literature (especially poetry) than any of the other authors surveyed above. Her introduction considers the subtle giving and withholding of gifts in Shakespeare and Jonson, the nonreciprocation of gifts in the Petrarchan Court of Elizabeth I and in Sidneys Astrophil and Stella, and the mutation of this tradition in Samuel Daniel and in Shakespeares Merchant of Venice, with some consideration of Walter Ralegh and Michael Drayton along the way. This chapter is followed by a close but not terribly innovative reading of the ambivalences of Shakespeares sonnets, and another, better one on competitive and strategic gift giving in the Court of James I. The latter chapter is especially good at tracing the economic and tactical problems attendant upon gift giving in procapitalist society and the strategic sponsorship and structure of gift receiving in Jacobean masks. The remainder of the study builds on this material by examining highly conflicted tributes to the Somerset wedding and the Duke of Buckingham, including poetic tactics of giving while withholding praise. These sections are sound, interesting, and somewhat more original than the earlier ones, which nevertheless constitute appropriate matter for Scotts argument.
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