Introduction -- 1. Early Modern Political Aesthetics -- 2. Leonardo's Hand: Mimesis, Sexuality, and the Polis -- 3. Shakespeare Distracted: Political Aesthetics from Spanish Tragedy to Hamlet -- 4. "To throw out our eyes for brave Othello" -- 5. Aesthetics and Absolutism in The Winter's Tale -- 6. The Beating Mind: The Tempest in History -- 7. Hobbes and the Hydrophobes: The Fate of the Aesthetic in the Time of the State.