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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. The economic imagery surrounding chastity ranges from romantic evocations of treasure to more quotidian references to usury, counterfeiting, and commodity exchange. Attending to such discourse in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, Chaste Value argues that representations of chastity (married fidelity as well as virginity) figure centrally within the early modern theatre’s interrogation of early capitalism, particularly with regard to the incorporation of people into commercial exchange. 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 labour can be incorporated into market exchange.
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