Commercial Chastity and Aristocratic Value in Troilus and Cressida, the White Devil and the Changeling

This chapter focuses on the significance of intrinsic chastity to aristocratic selfhood and to the social and metaphysical hierarchies that support it. Whereas chastity is often depicted as an intrinsic good, characterized by an identity of essence and representation, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Webster’s The White Devil, and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling deploy economic discourses to dismantle ideologies of intrinsic chastity, revealing it to be a social construct whose worth is determined by outside forces. Conclusions reached about chastity ultimately influence the plays’ presentations of aristocratic men, suggesting that their personal worth may rest not in class-based virtue but rather in the more relativistic dynamics of the marketplace. In these tragedies, performative identity arises through resistance to discourses of intrinsic chastity.

Coda: Approaching Capitalist Modernity

The coda argues that, in its use of chastity to explore questions of value, subjectivity and commoditisation, the early modern theatre anticipates many foundational aspects of modernity, including the rise of economic subjectivity, liberal individualism, and white supremacy. While early modern plays often align with this largely oppressive epistemological regime, they also offer compelling alternatives. In closing, the coda looks to Marina in Shakespeare’s Pericles as a model that legitimates the personhood of those who must sell their bodies and labour to survive in a market economy.

Mediterranean Markets, Commoditised Masculinity and the Whitening of Christian Chastity in the Merchant of Venice and the Renegado

This chapter examines the commodity potential of white Europeans in multiracial trading environments. Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Massinger’s The Renegado register anxieties about Eastern trade, invoking the specter of captivity to explore the racial, religious, and sexual effects of commoditizing Christian bodies. Both plays resolve crises of personal commoditisation by discursively removing chastity from the commercial realm, a development that mitigates the potentially miscegenational circulation of Christian women and works to reclaim the intrinsic personal value of Christian men. The tragicomic trajectory of each play depends upon transforming chastity from a potential commodity to an inherently Christian—and increasingly white—virtue. As such, the plays’ redefinition of chastity informs their articulation of racial whiteness, which emerges as a repository of intrinsic personal value that exempts certain subjects from the most objectifying aspects of the market, leaving others even more vulnerable to its commoditising energies.

Chastity and Blackness: Racial Value and Commodity Potential in the Fair Maid of the West, Part I and Othello

This chapter addresses the role of economic chastity discourse in determining thevalue and subjectivity of racial others. Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West draws out the racial implications of city comedy’s invocation of chastity to articulate subject status. Although foreign men are judged unfavorably against Bess’s virtue, her mode of chaste agency—grounded as it is in her negotiation of market forces—is ostensibly available to Moors who regard her as a model for moral rehabilitation. Othello supplants Fair Maid’s assimilationist paradigm with an alternate discourse, expounded by Iago, that asserts chastity’s commodity value and then assesses racialised men in similar terms. In contrast to Fair Maid, Othello invokes chastity discourse to address the status of people who may, quite literally, be regarded as commodities. Reading Othello in conjunction with Fair Maid, therefore, illuminates how conceptions of chastity-as-subject and chastity-as-object converge in English assessments of racial value, and how a prevailing emphasis on commodity status proves central to the development of racist ideologies.

Chastity and the Ethics of Commercial Theatre in Measure for Measure, Pericles and the Revenger’s Tragedy

This chapter explores the ways in which chastity is invoked to designate representational, economic, and ethical legitimacy. Antitheatrical tracts often depict the theatre as a brothel that commoditizes people and as a deceptive seller of cheap, corrupt wares. Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, Shakespeare and Wilkins’s Pericles, and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy reproduce these antitheatrical arguments, presenting prostitution as a synecdoche for economic exchange that commoditizes bodies and sells them using theatrical artifice. Each play invokes the figure of a chaste woman to trouble this association between the theatre and the brothel, interrogating the imputation that the theatre, like the brothel, traffics in human bodies and in excessive, supplemental, and therefore disingenuous forms of representation. Although the plays reach disparate conclusions about the possibility of creating an ethical commercial theatre, they collectively illuminate the problematics of theatrical chastity, as it is used to interrogate the theatre’s commercial and representational investments.

Chaste Treasure and National Identity in the Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline

This chapter addresses chastity’s role in English (and British) national identity, arguing that Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and Cymbeline question the Roman myth’s application in early capitalist England. In particular, both works employ chastity-as-treasure tropes tointerrogate the ways in which commercial models disrupt national ideologies that align Elizabeth I’s virgin body with the integrity of the state. The Rape of Lucrece exposes the ways in which mercantile treasure discourse invites sexual violence, compromising a woman who metonymically symbolises the state. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare reconfigures the Lucretia myth so as to articulate a revised mode of chaste national thinking suited to a nation headed by a male monarch and aspiring to become an imperial mercantile power. By transforming Innogen’s jewellery into currency that circulates in her name, Shakespeare infuses Britain’s expanding mercantile sphere—and its imperial projects—with chaste, white legitimacy while removing the physical female body from its once central place in the national imaginary.

Chaste Selfhood: Ben Jonson’s Critique of Urban Chastity Tropes

This chapter considers the bourgeois subjectivity articulated in city comedy. It begins by addressing the tendency of city comedies such as Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and the anonymous The Fair Maid of the Exchange to juxtapose chaste women with desiring, fragmented male characters so as to critique an ineffectual masculinity that flounders in the urban marketplace. The chapter then turns to Ben Jonson, whose treatment of chastity—and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and commerce more generally—has been underexplored. Jonson satirizes conventional deployments of chastity in Epicoene, rendering chaste integrity impossible in early capitalist environments and rejecting the queer implications of a model of male subjectivity that defines itself through theatrical chastity. Bartholomew Fair, by contrast, invokes chastity’s commodity status in order to present—and largely embrace—a queer, contingent form of early capitalist subjectivity. Furthermore, Jonson applies this model of commoditised subjectivity to the condition of the commercial playwright, indicating that his own agency as an author lies in the ability to negotiate the strictures of the commodity markets to which he is subjected.

Introduction: Chastity and the Question of Value

The introduction demonstrates that chastity discourse resonates strongly with commercial discourses about currency, commodities, and value. It mines mercantile tracts, conduct books, and writings about life in commercial London to show how early moderns interpreted rapidly shifting evaluations of currency, commodities, and selfhood. Readings of several primary texts elucidate the significance of chastity within English national discourse and establishe linkages between the epistemological questions surrounding chastity and those concerning commerce. The introduction also addresses the material conditions of the theatre, as the theatre’s commercial investments and embodied, often cross-dressed modes of representation heighten its concern with questions of value, commoditisation, and economic subjectivity. This opening chapter lays the groundwork for Chaste Value’s central claim that the public theatre engages with economic chastity discourse as a means of working through questions of personal value in early capitalist England.