Some Observations on the Theme of Chastity in The Changeling

TLDR: In fact, this essential truth underlies C. B. J. Watson's observation that the theme of feminine infidelity was one of the most popular and yet most serious themes of Shakespeare's age as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: THOMAS Middleton’s More Dissemblers Besides Women (1615) opens thus: “To be chaste, is Womans glory, / ’Tis her fame and honors story.” Sung offstage in the theater, this value-laden declaration may be read in the study as both a literary leitmotifand a major social truism of the seventeenth century. The jewel of woman’s chastity was of great price partly because it was so susceptible to being lost or stolen. In fact, this essential truth underlies C. B. Watson’s observation “that the theme of feminine infidelity was one of the most popular and yet most serious themes of Shakespeare’s age.”’ Watson’s statement, in turn, provides a good frame in which to view B. J. Baines’ more specific reference to “The almost obsessive concern with some aspect of honor which dominates the Middleton canon”-honor for a female being “defined almost exclusively by her sexual behavior”2 From his early poem on “The Ghost of Lucrece” (1600) through his Mad World (1606), in which a mother comments on the numerous times she has sold her daughter’s virginity, through Hengist (1618), where a test for virginity is depicted onstage, Middleton continued to write on the subject. In The Changeling, his 1622 collaboration with William Rowley, however, he gives us his most important treatment of it? Throughout The Changeling the virginity of Beatrice-Joanna is a matter of concern-when the dazzled Alsemero sees her at church, when she