Chaste Treasure: Protestant Chastity and the Creation of a National Economic Sphere in The Rape of Lucreceand Cymbeline Abstract

Katherine Gillen

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.