SOURCE: Wayne, Valerie. “The Woman's Parts of Cymbeline.” In Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, edited by Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda, pp. 288-315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Wayne explores the commoditization and objectification of Imogen in Cymbeline.

In his introduction to The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai proposes that “economic exchange creates value,” and that focusing on the things that are exchanged rather than the forms or functions of exchanges, as Marxist critics have traditionally done, makes visible the political linkages between exchange and value.¹ Drawing on the insights of Georg Simmel, Appadurai explores the conditions under which objects circulate in different regimes of value in space and time. His approach “justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives” (p. 3), and that “specific things, as they move through different hands, contexts, and uses” may be regarded as having...