ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two notorious Elizabethan pirates, Purser and Clinton, who were hung at Wapping in 1583, and explores some of the complexities involved in fictionalizing pirate lives and behaviour. To take advantage of the popular interest in their case three broadsheet accounts of their exploits were published within weeks of the hangings, and then they seemed quickly forgotten as other more topical stories replaced them. However Purser and Clinton enjoyed an impressive textual afterlife. Over 20 years after their trial and executions, circa 1607, the playwrights Thomas Heywood and William Rowley included an ambiguously sympathetic representation of the pirates in their tragi-comedy Fortune by Land and Sea, and 30 years after that, in 1639, there appeared an anonymous two-part pamphlet about the case, A True Relation of the Lives and Deaths of the two most Famous English Pyrats, Purser, and Clinton.1 This first chapter of The Culture of Piracy compares the representations of these two pirates published over this 50year period across three different genres. The case of Purser and Clinton provides an opportunity to focus on the rhetorical capitol made from ‘piracy’ by a variety of writers through emphasising particular characteristics in their accounts of the pirates’ lives and deaths. There are both alterations and repeated features in the depictions discussed here, which engage with the key aspects of the ‘culture of piracy’ in the Renaissance: the way shifting political circumstances shaped attitudes to the criminality of piracy; English colonial expansion; and European competition for trade and empire. Each representation of Purser and Clinton was produced during the reign of a different monarch, with contrasting policies towards piracy and what constituted seaborne crime. As a result, a comparison between the depictions of their activities produced over the three reigns provides insight into how ‘piracy’ is culturally produced and disseminated.
