Chaste Value : : Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage / / Katherine Gillen.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2017
• VerfasserIn: Gillen, Katherine,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2017
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Edinburgh Critical Studies in Shakespeare and Philosophy : ECSSP
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.)

Examines the way that theatrical representations of chastity inform broader concerns about the commoditisation of people in early capitalismChaste 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 FeaturesReevaluates early modern drama’s engagement with female chastity, situating them within broader anxieties about personal commoditization in early capitalist EnglandOffers 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 nationalityUniquely synthesizes current topics of concern in early modern literary studiesOffers innovative readings of seventeen literary works in relation to early modern debates about value, exchange, commoditization, and subjectivity

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgements -- Series Editor’s Preface -- Introduction: Chastity and the Question of Value -- 1. Chastity and the Ethics of Commercial Theatre 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 the West, Part I and Othello -- 5. Mediterranean Markets, Commoditised 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 -- Index