Imagining India before the East India Company

This chapter reads The Queen's Majesty's Entertainment at Woodstock (1575) alongside the diplomatic letters written by Elizabeth I to Eastern rulers, including one addressed to the Mughal emperor Jalal-ud-din Akbar as “Zelabdim Echebar” King of Cambay or the port city of Khambat in India. It argues that the entertainment, an answer to Leicester's marriage proposal in The Princely Pleasures performed at Kenilworth, stages not only English desires for East Indian commodities but also recasts the English queen within an Indian geography. Set well before the establishment of the East India Company, this chapter provides an analysis of early English acquaintance with newer global maps and the indebtedness to Portuguese and Italian sources describing major Indian trading centers like Khambat.