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This essay explores the Elizabethan cultural construction of the virgin's ring, construed broadly within various literary, artistic, and historical works. Drawing on medical literature's negative perspective of virginal bodies, the essay focuses first on the largely unexamined device of the virgin's ring plot and its pointed relationship to bed-tricks in Shakespearean comedy, particularly All's Well That Ends Well, arguing that the presence of material ring props onstage is deeply informed by the complex cultural understanding of rings as over-determined symbols of both virginity and marital chastity since the advent of the "virgin queen's" rhetorically invoked "marriage" to England. Turning to the visual arts for examples of portraits that depict rings prominently on their canvases, the essay explains how Elizabethan culture negotiated the queen's possession of her virgin's ring even as the aging Elizabeth's hymeneal integrity threatened to devolve into a useless commodity.
GRAZIANO'S promise that he will devote himself "to keeping safe Nerissa's ring" only serves to underline, in a famous pun, how the resolutions of The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596) and All's Well That Ends Well (c. 1602-4) hinge upon the return of rings to their rightful owners.1 The distinct attention afforded to one small stage property, especially in the later play's double ring plot, signals the material object's particular currency for early modern audiences. Graziano makes clear that rings are immediately relevant to early modern cultural constructions of the physicality of virginity, particularly with regard to an age whose most exemplary figure for virginity kept safe was England's wedded queen, Elizabeth. Despite All's Well's most clearly evident and deep embedding within the discourses of virginity, however, the play's equally close emphasis on the materiality of rings has not been seen as a relevant or even related line of inquiry for a wide range of scholarship. Overall, a general lack of interest in William Shakespeare's extended focus on the physical, material construction of virginity is striking, and surprisingly, ring intrigue or "ring plots" have gone largely without comment for the deeper cultural contexts that inform their creation in Shakespeare's and other works in the period. As Richard Horwich puts it, the "ring trick has often been dismissed as trivial, a needless postscript to a plot already concluded."2
Karen Newman proposes that by...