ABSTRACT
A fraudulent conveyance occurs when someone in debt places his or her property out of reach of his or her creditors’ process. The ethical idea behind the legal concept of a fraudulent conveyance is that integrity is preferable to generosity.1 A person should not give away property until all debts are paid. Both ethical and the legal concerns occur in Ben Jonson’s play Epicene, when the character Truewit describes the conveyances some women make before marriage. “This, too, with whom you are to marry, may have made a conveyance of her virginity aforehand, as your wise widows do of their states before they marry, in trust to some friend, sir, who can tell?” (II. ii. 123-126). Truewit’s quip reflects the actual law. Throughout the seventeenth century, a woman’s efforts to convey her property to trustees before marriage were judged to be fraud against the marital rights of the future husband.2 But Truewit’s comparison is also meant to be clever, as his name implies. Virginity cannot be conveyed in a legal sense; a court cannot order it returned to the injured party. No property is literally transferred. Yet the comparison to a fraudulent conveyance is apt. It is not just Ben Jonson’s knowledge of the law that we admire in this passage, but his literary conceit.
