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
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form ... more All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Exemplaria, 2018
Titus Andronicus (1588) and Timon of Athens theorize what Jason W. Moore calls the Capitalocene, ... more Titus Andronicus (1588) and Timon of Athens theorize what Jason W. Moore calls the Capitalocene, a world in which capitalism has reshaped the earth's materiality while also radically reconfiguring conceptions of both human and nonhuman nature. With Titus emphasizing iron weapons and Timon interrogating the force of weaponized gold, both works draw on Ovidian Iron Age mythology to show how humans have violently impacted social and natural environments and, conversely, how these transformations threaten human exceptionalism. In addition, the unusual representational strategies employed in both Titus and Timon suggest that traditional humanist aesthetics may not meet the epistemological and political exigencies of capitalogenic crisis. Ultimately, I argue, Shakespeare presents the theater, aptly named the Globe, as a microcosm of the Capitalocenea world that humans have largely created but which nonetheless remains structured by material forces over which humans have less than total control. Rather than aestheticizing nature, Titus and Timon repurpose the matter of theatrical space, undermining assumptions about essence and representation that underlie mimesis and shocking audiences into considering their own relationships to the social, economic, and natural worlds.
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
Shakespeare and Middleton's The Life of Timon of Athens (1605-1608) dramatizes the fall of the le... more Shakespeare and Middleton's The Life of Timon of Athens (1605-1608) dramatizes the fall of the legendary Athenian Timon who falsely expects that his lavish giftgiving will insulate him from the effects of crippling debt. 1 Disillusioned when the recipients of his largesse refuse to come to his aid, Timon abruptly rejects Athenian society and its credit system and retreats to the forest, where he spews forth violent, misanthropic diatribes. In the second half of the play, Timon not only abandons his former economic behaviour, coming to see gold as a destructive force, but he also inverts his thinking about linguistic and artistic representation. His initial belief in the veracity of all speech, poetry and painting gives way to a conviction that representation consists only of lies that obscure the truth. Several critics have identified in Timon's downfall a critique of James I's financial practices and of the patronage system more generally. 2 Shakespeare and Middleton's play lays bare the financial interests and power struggles underlying patronage and, moreover, indicates that the logic of patronage, in which artistic productions are understood as flattering gifts, limits the social efficacy of art. In this essay, I situate Timon's critique of the patronage system within the play's broader interrogation of the ways in which proto-capitalist credit practices destabilize understandings of value and representation, artistic as well as monetary. Doing so not only helps to account for the drastic change in Timon's character but also illuminates the play's interrogation of the limitations and potentialities of art in proto-capitalist England. Timon, I suggest, registers the insight of new economic critics such as Marc Shell and David Hawkes that linguistic and economic representation are interconnected and that both discursive forms were topics of concern in early modern England. 3 Due largely to inflation, royal recoinages and the developing credit economy, money in early modern England seemed to be growing increasingly unmoored from the material value it was assumed to represent. This attenuation of monetary signs and signifiers called into question the mercantilist doctrine that gold and silver specie was intrinsically valuable and could therefore serve as stable metrics of exchange. 4 This evolving understanding of economic representation was part of a broader shift in early modern conceptions of value and signification, spurred not only by economic changes but also by rapid social transformation and by a Refor-
Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion is Post Reformation England, ed. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Duquesne University Press), 2014
In his famous anti-theatrical tracts, Stephen Gosson argues that the theater promotes inauthentic... more In his famous anti-theatrical tracts, Stephen Gosson argues that the theater promotes inauthentic representation and dissolute behavior. In Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), he claims that plays -falsifie, forge, and adulterate‖ reality, and that by acting -otherwise than they are‖ and feigning -things that never were,‖ actors simply weave elaborate lies. 1 Theatrical displays, moreover, are dangerously seductive, featuring -melody to tickle the eare; costly apparel, to flatter the sight; effeminate gesture, to ravish the sence; and wonton speache, to whet desire to inordinate lust.‖ 2 Even potentially educative plays, Gosson contends, are ruined by the bawdy spectacle of theater and the moral reprobates who populate it. Although Gosson's criticisms were aimed at the burgeoning public theater, his concerns were not entirely new. Not only does Gosson revive classical arguments against the stage, but his distinctions between appropriate and inappropriate forms of theater resemble those made earlier in the century by Protestant reformers. The Protestant polemicist and playwright John Bale, in fact, draws a similar line in his 1544 The Epistle Exhortatory of an English Christian, where he complains that Protestant religious theater is persecuted while authorities tolerate all sorts of blasphemous and bawdy plays. In his complaint, Bale sharply distinguishes religious plays from the sort that Gosson would later critique:
Early English Studies, 2011
This essay suggests that Shakespeare revises the Roman story of The Rape of Lucrece to fit the ex... more This essay suggests that Shakespeare revises the Roman story of The Rape of Lucrece to fit the explicitly British context of Cymbeline, a play that reflects the transition from the rule of Elizabeth I to that of James I. Reading Cymbeline as a revision of the Lucrece story reveals a shift in the relationship between private chastity and its symbolic national function. This shift, I argue, is evident in Shakespeare's use of treasure metaphors to refer to chastity alternately as a source of unquantifiable, intrinsic value or, in a more commercial discourse, as a potentially quantifiable commodity. Shakespeare uses treasure tropes in Lucrece and Cymbeline to interrogate the possessive dynamics of marriage and to consider the relationship between private and symbolic chastity. In contrast to Lucrece, which presents chastity as a material entity residing in the female body, Cymbeline presents a loosely Protestant conception of chastity as somewhat attenuated from the body, with Innogen's chastity reified in the form of actual jewels. Cymbeline's revised conception of chastity is suited for a context in which the female body no longer functions as a metonym for the state but is relegated to a domestic sphere that symbolically confers stability on the British economic and political realm.
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