Inscrutable Suicide: Politics, Gender, and the Felo de se in Early Modern Drama reveals how representations of suicide in English drama constitute new but inchoate forms of individual and collective agency in early modern law and politics. At the heart of this project is the term for a criminal suicide found to be committed willfully by a sane person: felo de se, or felon of the self. First articulated in Bracton's thirteenth-century treatise on English common law, the term felo de se provokes several questions: who is the "self' against whom the crime is committed? To whom does the self belong and from whom can this self be taken? These questions provoked early modern people to test the reach of the sovereign's power and the extent of a subject's agency. In my analysis, I focus on characters who attempt, desire, or commit suicide and who are marginalized by their gender or sexuality. I draw from early modern medical treatises, coroners' inquests, popular pamphlets, political writings, and martyrologies as I survey canonical plays (Shakespeare's King Lear and Hamlet), a non-canonical play (John Fletcher's The Tragedie of Bonduca), and a closet drama (Milton's Samson Agonistes). I suggest that legal categories of suicide-the felo de se and non compos mentis, or non-culpable suicides found to be committed by a person not of sound mind-fail to adequately describe the dramatic representations of suicide that I analyze. When audience members or readers evaluate a character who commits, attempts, or considers suicide and who is politically disenfranchised by their gender or sexuality, they implicitly critique the legal and political categories of identity upon which authorities justify their power and their regulation of non-normative bodies. This project ultimately contests a grand narrative of suicide generally accepted by literary critics and historians that proclaims suicide to have become, by the twentieth century, a medicalized and tolerated act rather than a sinful or criminal one, as it supposedly was in the early modern period. I show that multiple meanings of suicide, drawn from multiple classical and biblical models of suicide, existed simultaneously in the early modern period as well as today. The multiple meanings and models of suicide, I argue, had a profound impact on the ways that authors represented suicide in early modern dramatic performances and dramatic texts. Furthermore, these multiple meanings and models provided audiences with an array of choices that prompted them to engage in interpretative practices of evaluation and judgment. These interpretative practices invited audiences to participate in and become cognizant of the potential for collective agency that might, in some ways, challenge traditional legal and political authority. The spectacle of the inscrutable suicidal character on the stage amplifies contradictions within English law regarding how the ideal political and legal subject was to appear, act, and desire. For instance, despite early modern culture's insistence that the ideal political subject was male, both men and women suspected of suicide could posthumously face trial and punishments for their acts of self-killing because authorities viewed them as violating the monarch's authority. By idealizing the political subject as male but implicitly legitimizing the political threats suicidal women posed, authorities created a slippery space where women who killed themselves demonstrated a political agency supposedly inaccessible to them. Political authorities also idealized the political subject as able-bodied (as well as able-minded) and heteronormative. But those authorities invited debate about how to distinguish between a non compos mentis and a felo de se death. Examining the extent to which a person was mentally disabled lay at the heart of these designations; mental disabilities included not only insanity or depression but also a spectrum of non-heteronormative desires evidenced by a character's impotency and homoeroticism. When a seemingly disabled or queer figure commits suicide in the dramas I analyze, his or her death provokes audiences and readers to evaluate if insanity or non-heteronormative desire could obfuscate or invoke agency. My focus on the disruptive potential of the suicidal body on the stage energizes critical discussions of gender, disability, and queerness as I demonstrate the political subversiveness of suicide that critics have overlooked.