Title: Chaste value : economic crisis, female chastity and the production of difference on Shakespeare's stage /
Authors: Gillen, Katherine
Year: 2017
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, Characters Women.; English drama History and criticism; Chastity in literature; DRAMA / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Chastity in literature; English drama Early modern and Elizabethan; Women in literature
Abstract: Examines the way that theatrical representations of chastity inform broader concerns about the commoditisation of people in early capitalism. Chaste Value reassesses chastity's significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations of chastity inform the stage's production of early capitalist subjectivity and social difference. Plays invoke chastity-itself a quasi-commodity-to interrogate the relationship between personal and economic value. Through chastity discourse, the stage disrupts pre-capitalist ideas of intrinsic value while also reallocating such value according to emerging hierarchies of gender, race, class, and nationality. Chastity, therefore, emerges as a central category within early articulations of humanity, determining who possesses intrinsic value and, conversely, whose bodies and labor can be incorporated into market exchange.
Contents: Introduction: Chastity and the Question of Value; 1. Chastity and the Ethics of Commercial Theater in Measure for Measure, Pericles, and The Revenger's Tragedy; 2. Commercial Chastity and Aristocratic Value in Troilus and Cressida, The White Devil, and The Changeling; 3. Chaste Selfhood: Ben Jonson's Critique of Urban Chastity Tropes; 4. Chastity and Blackness: Racial Value and Commodity Potential in The Fair Maid of West, Part I and Othello; 5. Mediterranean Markets, Commoditized Masculinity, and the Whitening of Christian Chastity in The Merchant of Venice and The Renegado; 6. Chaste Treasure and National Identity in The Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline; Coda: Approaching Capitalist Modernity