This essay examines James Bell’s narrative of the Swedish princess Cecilia Vasa’s journey to England in 1564–1565 with focus on the representation of Elizabeth I and Cecilia. The essay argues that the narrative is best understood as a travelogue whose rhetorical function is that of an encomium, celebrating first of all Elizabeth, but also Cecilia and the two women’s relationship. In doing this, the text partakes in contemporary constructions of Elizabeth as potent yet female ruler through its deployment of the so-called rhetoric of love and through its use of iconography that depicts Elizabeth as wise and legitimate ruler. By positing Cecilia as lover of Elizabeth, Bell extends the discourse of love to foreign royalty and a potential political ally; a special bond between the two is set up in ways that would have been accessible to contemporary readers more broadly but also through imagery that would have connected the two in ways open to a more select readership. While the relative status between Elizabeth and Cecilia is maintained throughout the travelogue, Bell celebrates the venture of the journey itself, and thus the meeting of the two women in a way that defines it as a diplomatic exchange with the specific purpose of furthering contact, dialogue, and goodwill between the two countries. [A.S.] This essay revisits Leander’s abduction in the Hellespont with a focus on the geopolitical significations in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The imagery of the abducted boy, often recast as the iconic Ganymede, as object of desire is prevalent in early modern literature. Tracing representations of the abducted boy within the historical context of abductions in the Ottoman Mediterranean, the essay argues that the abducted boy is not just a classical prototype from a Greco-Roman lineage, but is also a reflection of the boys actually abducted in the early modern period, especially the boys who were objects of cross-cultural circulations generated by imperial hierarchies in the greater Mediterranean space. In his addition of a homoerotic abduction plot to the classical story from Musaeus and Ovid, Marlowe deploys the figure of Ganymede as well as a rhetoric of Mediterranean trade to imprint on Leander’s body an erotic-cultural history of abducted boys. Pursuing Leander in the Mediterranean waters and thus traveling between English and Ottoman contexts, this essay offers a relational reading strategy in exploring sexual, racial, and imperial components of literary and historical abductions in a global context. This approach ultimately reveals a connected history of homoerotic desire and imperial violence between English and Ottoman cultures in the global Renaissance. [A.A.] This essay re-examines the meaning of Shakespearean soliloquies in light of both historical context and performance practice, arguing that they stage the interpersonal dimensions of identity in early modern culture. Solo speeches in Richard II and Hamlet offer textual evidence of their intended performance not as mere inward contemplation but as direct encounters with the playhouse audience. As dialogic speech acts, they constitute a deliberate ontological paradox: the act of speaking “alone” onstage becomes a dynamic interpersonal process in which the audience plays a crucial role. This key stage-audience exchange resonates with the practice of Augustinian “soliloquy” as exemplified in contemporary religious texts. Augustine’s own Soliloquies are alive with the paradox that his fullest act of self-speaking is inherently a dialogue, voicing not just subjective experience but the reciprocal recognition of an interlocutor. By the late seventeenth century, however, the neoclassical disparagement of direct-address soliloquy as unnatural and ridiculous reflects a radical shift toward conceptions of the self as a more discrete and self-contained entity. Critical readings of Shakespearean soliloquy have often followed that post-Renaissance view, missing the significant role of the audience that Shakespeare writes into the action of soliloquy. Today’s players have helped to recover that dramaturgy of interplay. [N.S.] This essay revisits Othello’s jealousy to detail the politico-theological significance of this dramatic affect. In the Hebrew Bible, jealousy maintains a covenant between God and a holy nation. When Pauline teaching defines marriage as an index of Christ’s love, this redefinition promises to replace exclusivity with a supposedly universal truth. Yet jealousy persists to reveal a clash between individual realities and corporate truths. Jealousy performs this by underscoring the fictive nature of the identification of a husband with Christ. Before The Winter’s Tale relates the problems of jealousy to a hereditary monarchy, Othello locates them within a republic. The Venetian state sidesteps the effects of tragedy because its perpetuation exists at a remove from marriage. Yet for this reason, it cannot assist Othello in occupying the fictions of Christian marriage. Othello shows us how politico-theological meaning can be communicated artistically, and in a way that thwarts any interpretation that locates real meaning in a forward-looking trajectory of state power. This essay concludes by arguing that Othello helps us to pinpoint the deficiencies in Carl Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet—and, more generally, in the way Schmitt conscribes the power of Shakespearean tragedy for his tendentious view of political history. [E.S.] This essay posits that, on the early modern stage, dance was a powerful communicative modality which performed racializing work. Focusing on The Spanish Gypsie (1623), this essay argues that Middleton, Rowley, Ford, and Dekker’s play innovatively deployed around Gypsy characters an animalizing choreographic discourse called “antics.” That discourse, given the early modern understanding...