This book offers a social semiotics of contact on the early modern stage. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships, with different forms of touch embodying different power dynamics, from submission to reciprocity, to mutuality and consent. Second, touch acts do not have stable meanings offstage, to which characters’ behavior conforms. In this period, the proper social role of touch was up for debate, especially in conduct literature addressing courtesy and civility. The theater, therefore, does not simply reflect offstage codes of conduct. Instead, it participates in debates surrounding the appropriateness of touch gestures like kissing, embracing, or holding hands in contexts like courtship, friendship, marriage, politics, and business. In the playhouse, then, audiences encounter new models or scripts for interpersonal behavior. With its focus on social signification, this approach addresses topics central to early modern sensory studies—affect, cognition, the nature of sensation—from the outside-in, offering a sociology rather than phenomenology of contact. In the process, it shows how theatrical depictions of touch are central to the Shakespearean theater’s investigation of questions surrounding embodiment, among them consent, gender, sexuality, intimacy, and individual agency.