Leander in the Ottoman Mediterranean: The Homoerotics of Abduction in the Global Renaissance

Abstract

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.]