Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage by Katherine Gillen and; Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature by Mary Beth Rose (review)

These monographs display two vastly different methodological approaches to studying representations of female virginity, marital chastity, and motherhood in literature and popular media. Plotting Motherhood in Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern Literature by Mary Beth Rose has an expansive chronological scope and reveals striking patterns in motherhood plots from the fourth century to the twenty-first. Katherine Gillen's Chaste Value: Economic Crisis, Female Chastity and the Production of Social Difference on Shakespeare's Stage focuses on early modern England more narrowly, but likewise reveals expansive trends with respect to anxieties over, and representations of, female chastity in London theaters.

In Chaste Value, Gillen deftly provides social and historical context for her explorations of female chastity in plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and others by analyzing ideologies surrounding female chastity in early modern medical and conduct literature, travel narratives, antitheatricalist writings, anticosmetic treatises, and economic discourses. In so doing, Gillen demonstrates that female chastity comes to represent, at various points, the security of the nation and status of the body politic; English male subjecthood; intrinsic human value; a commodity subject to market forces; a treasure or object of mercantile capital; economic autonomy; spiritual purity; and whiteness. Rather than leaving these multivalent meanings in play throughout the monograph, Gillen organizes her study by chastity's analogues in a wide array of early modern plays.

"Chastity and the Ethics of Commercial Theatre in Measure for Measure, Pericles, and The Revenger's Tragedy" explores tropes of female chastity as a response to antitheatrical treatises. These texts argued that the commercial theater trafficked in prostitution by selling seats to public exhibitions of human bodies. Gillen considers the theater space and the economic systems that make theater production possible, but her argument lacks sustained engagement with historical performance practices. "Commercial Chastity and Aristocratic Value in Troilus and Cressida, The White Devil and The Changeling" uses anticosmetic treatises and conduct manuals to show how female characters reflect anxieties surrounding the commodification (and emasculation) of middle-class male bodies within an emerging capitalist system. In this chapter Gillen also argues that representations of female chastity disrupt the idea of a body's intrinsic value and thus pose a challenge to aristocratic social systems that depend upon this idea, rather than value determined by economic output alone.

Gillen's third chapter explores several plays, including Dekker's Roaring Girl, Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a number of Jonson's city comedies. She continues to reveal the nuanced ways in which these plays participate in discussions of emerging market forces, especially the commodification of women through chastity discourses and of men through the effeminizing effects of the early capitalist marketplace. By putting a number of city comedies in conversation, Gillen effectively demonstrates how "female chastity functions as an analogue to masculine temperance and is invoked to explore men's subjugation to commercial forces" (128).

Chapters 4 and 5 examine chastity's racial value through discussions of commodified blackness and whiteness-as-property, respectively. In "Chastity as Blackness: Racial Value and Commodity Potential in The Fair Maid of the West, Part I and Othello," Gillen shows how blackness is literally commodified in the form of slavery but is also balanced against female chastity as a valuable (and marketable) property. In other words, Gillen demonstrates how (white female) gendered and (black male) racialized bodies become exchange commodities on the early modern stage and in London's changing economic marketplace. In chapter 5, she explores racialized and religious identity alongside female chastity discourse to analyze the emergent ideals of whiteness-as-property in early modern England. In so doing, she puts her work in conversation with early modern race...