Whereas Measure for Measure, Pericles and The Revenger's Tragedy present chastity as a sign of economic, social and representational stability, characterised by the identity of essence and representation, William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602), John Webster's The White Devil (1612), and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling (1621) all invoke commercial discourses to interrogate the concept of intrinsic chastity and in each case reveal it to be a social construct. Although written in different decades of the early seventeenth century, the three plays – tragedies or, in the case of Troilus, a semi-tragedy – dramatise the social and epistemological crises that arise from the recognition that market principles may be applied broadly, extending to evaluations of people. Each play presents a society in which market forces have disrupted traditional understandings of intrinsic value and, by extension, have destabilised the aristocratic supremacy that depends on this foundation. Female chastity proves particularly resonant in this context, as a commoditised virtue that also functions as the lynchpin of social and metaphysical hierarchies. Although this dynamic manifests differently in each play, Troilus, The White Devil and The Changeling all emphasise chastity's commodity potential in order to interrogate the constructed nature of value more generally and of aristocratic male selfhood in particular.

Chastity is often presented as a commodity in the conduct literature of the period. Richard Brathwaite in The English Gentlewoman, for example, warns women that ‘The way to winne an husband is not to wooe him, but to be woo'd by him. Let him come to you, not you to him. Profferd ware is not worth the buying. Your states are too pure, to bee set at sale; too happy, to be weary of them.’ Inclined to think in Aristotelian terms, early moderns worried that the intrinsic value of products could be obscured by exchange or by the artful presentation of merchants. Brathwaite points to this concern as it pertains to women, evincing anxiety about women's commoditisation in his depiction of them as ‘profferd ware’ and in his comment that chaste women are ‘too pure’ and ‘too happy’ to ‘bee set at sale’. Nonetheless, by situating women's desirability within dynamics of supply and demand, Brathwaite reflects women's commodity potential and suggests that women may, to some extent, manipulate their own value.