Monograph by Katherine Gillen
Edinburgh University Press, 2017
Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations... more 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.
Review of Chaste Value by Katherine Gillen
Shakespeare Quarterly, 2019
Scholarly Essays by Katherine Gillen
The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, 2019
The Revenger's Tragedy: The State of the Play, ed. Gretchen Minton (Arden Shakespeare), 2018
Shakespeare Studies, 2016
Studies in English Literature, 2015
This essay argues that female chastity figures centrally in Bartholomew Fair’s exploration of ear... more This essay argues that female chastity figures centrally in Bartholomew Fair’s exploration of early capitalist subjectivity. In the play, Jonson suggests that the market compromises masculinity and posits Grace Wellborn’s self-conscious commoditization of her own sexual agency as a strategy for navigating commercial markets. Through Grace, Jonson revises dominant models of subject formation to account for the emergence of a bourgeois self in relation to early modern commercial forces that are often understood as compromising personal autonomy. Jonson then applies this model of commoditized subjectivity to the commercial playwright, linking his own agency as an author to his ability to negotiate the market.
Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 2014
Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion is Post Reformation England, ed. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Duquesne University Press), 2014
Early English Studies, 2011
Cahiers Elisabéthains, 2011
Other Essays by Katherine Gillen
The Shakespeare Newsletter, 2019
The Definitive Shakespeare Companion: Overviews, Documents, and Analysis, 2017
Book Reviews by Katherine Gillen
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment , 2013
Papers by Katherine Gillen
Chaste Value
Chaste Value reassesses chastity’s significance in early modern drama, arguing that presentations... more 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 nationa...
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 2015
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Monograph by Katherine Gillen
Review of Chaste Value by Katherine Gillen
Scholarly Essays by Katherine Gillen
Other Essays by Katherine Gillen
Book Reviews by Katherine Gillen
Papers by Katherine Gillen