ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, which discussed accounts of Drake’s circumnavigation, we saw the way in which the same events were mediated to match different political agendas and cultural viewpoints. Descriptions of Drake’s ‘piracy’ and mercantile encounters during the voyage were shaped by Richard Hakluyt and Drake the Younger to suit distinct interest groups. In particular, accounts of overseas exploration were influenced by the ongoing debate between mercantile and aristocratic values. For the rest of The Culture of Piracy my emphasis will be on literary pirates in two popular and inter-connected genres, romance and drama, and the divergent ways seaborne crimes are depicted in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts. In the chapters that follow, similar concerns are expressed about the ways pirates and piracy should be culturally understood. As we turn to Elizabethan prose romance we find an allied debate between ‘epic’ and aristocratic patterns of behaviour, such as martial valour, as opposed to ‘romance’ values, where, for example, wily duplicity and commercial venture are privileged. The figure of the pirate in prose romance, whose behaviour can be seen to operate in both registers, makes a fascinating case study to explore the competition between ‘aristocratic’ and ‘bourgeois’ points of view.
