Literature and the Idea of Luxury in Early Modern England by Alison V Scott (review)

This is a work that is focused on literature and uses relatively little historical or artistic material. In it, Alison Scott concentrates heavily on analysing the works of a few iconic literary figures from the period, especially Francis Bacon, Edmund Spencer, Thomas Heywood, Ben Johnson, and William Shakespeare. Her argument is that in seventeenth-century England, luxury was a much-debated issue that only slowly became a ‘morally neutral concept’. She claims that at the beginning of the period, luxury was synonymous with lust alongside Jacobean acceptance of the Roman perception of it as misrule and social upheaval.

To support her argument, Scott analyses Shakespeare’s image of Cleopatra in terms of its difference from the classical presentation, looking also at its reflection in aesthetic, economic, and political positions. How luxury was gendered is seen as highly relevant. She goes on to consider how criticism of luxury was represented in the works of satirists and comedians who feared for the destruction of wealth it threatened, along with the damage that indulgence might bring about as it undermined order and patriarchal rule. She considers how this fitted into London’s growing importance and the rise of a middle class.

Eventually, Scott turns to the arguments in the contemporary, non-literary writings of those who favoured merchants and trade and who saw their function as a public benefit. Here, her approach diverges from that of most economic historians. Instead, she relies on Linda Levy Peck, re-using Peck’s arguments on James VI and I’s promotion of the silk industry, to treat it as a concrete shifting away from the dangers inherent in indulgence in what is pleasurable but not necessarily towards the advantages such private vices offer the state. The long pre-history of the royal necessity for magnificence and splendour is overlooked, as is the unsuitability of the British climate for silkworms, which was already well known.

Scott suggests that Jacobean drama had a significant role in the way in which seventeenth-century English attitudes to the English economy and English society developed, in what she sees as a new approach, an approach that led to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment arguments on the subject. More persuasively, perhaps, she provides a new aspect to familiar texts that may help scholars better to understand the literature that has survived from the period.