ABSTRACT
Elizabethan England tolerated piracy and its perpetrators as necessary, if at times unpalatable, instruments of foreign policy, and as a result literary depictions of pirates from that period reveal an increasingly sophisticated response to violence at sea which attempted to rehabilitate the pirate from the position of straightforward criminality to appreciate the strategic value of certain types of pirate.1 At times ‘pirate’ figures represent a conflation of aspects of the ‘heroic’ gentleman adventurer and the ‘shrewd’ mercantile venturer, and combine epic direct action with antiepic wily duplicity. Contrastingly, under King James piracy was condemned wholesale, and after peace was concluded with Spain at the Treaty of London in 1604 no distinction was made between the types of men who committed violence and robbery at sea: all were outlaws. The government also sought to alter the way in which piracy was perceived in maritime and other areas. In the sixteenth century it had largely been regarded as a condonable offence, akin to smuggling, but in the seventeenth century strenuous efforts were made legally and culturally to encourage piracy to be more widely condemned. This book has traced the ways representations of notorious Elizabethan pirates such as Drake, or Purser and Clinton, altered in texts published a generation later, suggesting that they and other later emergent pirate figures focalize the ideological parameters of cultural debates about the type of masculinity required for English overseas expansion. In other words, over time these key figures develop into pirate typologies; for example, the emphasis on mercantile nationalism in 1580s accounts of Drake’s piracy is recycled in representations of later pirate figures such as Thomas Stukeley and, perhaps more surprisingly, Orsino and Antonio in Twelfth Night. Similarly Pyrocles, the pirate-prince from New Arcadia, appears refashioned as Bess in Fair Maid of the West Part I, and his influence can even be detected in Q2 of Hamlet. In order to show the continued cultural valence of literary depictions of piracy as James I’s rule bedded down, and to explore further emergent typologies for pirate figures, I want to begin this chapter with a consideration of the significance in early Jacobean writing of even apparently throwaway references to seaborne crime.
