Commercial Chastity and Aristocratic Value in Troilus and Cressida, the White Devil and the Changeling

This chapter focuses on the significance of intrinsic chastity to aristocratic selfhood and to the social and metaphysical hierarchies that support it. Whereas chastity is often depicted as an intrinsic good, characterized by an identity of essence and representation, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida , Webster’s The White Devil , and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling deploy economic discourses to dismantle ideologies of intrinsic chastity, revealing it to be a social construct whose worth is determined by outside forces. Conclusions reached about chastity ultimately influence the plays’ presentations of aristocratic men, suggesting that their personal worth may rest not in class-based virtue but rather in the more relativistic dynamics of the marketplace. In these tragedies, performative identity arises through resistance to discourses of intrinsic chastity.