Ebook: Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage

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.

Key Features

• Reevaluates early modern drama’s engagement with female chastity, situating them within broader anxieties about personal commoditization in early capitalist England
• Offers an update/corrective to new economic critical approaches by demonstrating how concerns about personal and economic value shape emerging hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality
• Uniquely synthesizes current topics of concern in early modern literary studies
• Offers innovative readings of seventeen literary works in relation to early modern debates about value, exchange, commoditization, and subjectivity