ABSTRACT
Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1609-1612) included, as we saw in the last chapter, an outspoken representation of the sexual behaviour of a pirate-king and its consequences. The potent, epic and aggressive masculinity of earlier pirate figures was connected in new ways to homosocial and homoerotic behaviour in Daborne’s work. In the last years of James’s reign a series of four interconnected plays were written by Philip Massinger, either as sole author or in collaboration with John Fletcher, which engage with and rework for new circumstances earlier pirate figures and types: with John Fletcher The Double Marriage (1621) and The Sea Voyage (1622); as sole author The Renegado (1624) and The Unnatural Combat (1624-1625). To varying degrees each play is indebted to the use of piracy as political comment apparent in Daborne’s play, focusing on the connections between piracy, sexual behaviour, political legitimacy and tyranny. In these four plays various types of pirate figure are presented, indebted to the different traditions we have been tracing in the course of this study, and representative of particular cultural and political dilemmas of the time. I suggest that in early-to-mid 1620s drama and romance we can detect a grammar of piracy, as different pirate typologies focalize and explore key debates and issues facing the nation. In other words, the ‘meme’ of the pirate considerably developed in Renaissance literature, so that in the plays under discussion here Fletcher and Massinger appropriate and refashion pirate typologies for different circumstances, using the ideological coordinates and meanings associated with earlier pirate figures to position afresh their new pirate characters.
