Introduction: Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 1550–1650

Abstract

Pirates have long held a significant place in literature. Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story, for instance, begins in media res on a corpse-strewn Egyptian beach.¹ It is only five books later in the romance’s account of Theagenes’ and Cariclia’s adventures that the reader becomes fully aware that the dead men were in fact pirates, and the events and significance of the enigmatic opening scene is explained as characters’ reactions to the test of piracy are indicative of their moral and religious principles. Pirates likewise make frequent appearances in Renaissance literature. In Shakespeare’s plays pirates play small but important roles: in Measure for Measure, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, for example, pirates intervene in the action in ways crucial to each play’s plot development. Both the number of literary pirates, and their ability to change the course of the story despite the size of their role, indicate that these figures haunted the literary imagination. Sometimes they take up roles centre stage — such as John Ward in Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk — but more often than not, pirates appear on the sidelines of literary texts, unruly, discontented figures, excluded from the main story, but refusing to be wholly suppressed. For example, in Measure for Measure the conveniently deceased pirate Ragozine plays a crucial role in saving Claudio from Angelo’s injustice, when the first substitute, the condemned Barnadine, refuses to co-operate in providing a severed head to show Angelo.²