Humanities

Listening to what she terms 'unruly pirate voices' in early modern English literature, in this study Claire Jowitt offers an original and compelling analysis of the cultural meanings of 'piracy'. By examining the often marginal figure of the pirate (and also the sometimes hard-to-distinguish privateer) Jowitt shows how flexibly these figures served to comment on English nationalism, international relations, and contemporary politics. She considers the ways in which piracy can, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, overlap and connect with, rather than simply challenge, some of the foundations underpinning Renaissance orthodoxies-absolutism, patriarchy, hierarchy of birth, and the superiority of Europeans and the Christian religion over other peoples and belief systems.

Jowitt's discussion ranges over a variety of generic forms including public drama, broadsheets and ballads, prose romance, travel writing, and poetry from the fifty-year period stretching across the reigns of three English monarchs: Elizabeth Tudor, and James and Charles Stuart. Among the early modern writers whose works are analyzed are Heywood, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Wroth; and among the multifaceted historical figures discussed are Francis Drake, John Ward, Henry Mainwaring, Purser and Clinton.

What she calls the 'semantics of piracy' introduces a rich symbolic vein in which these figures, operating across different cultural registers and appealing to audiences in multiple ways, represent and reflect many changing discourses, political and artistic, in early modern England.

The first book-length study to look at the cultural impact of Renaissance piracy, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630 underlines how the figure of the Renaissance pirate was not only sensational, but also culturally significant. Despite its transgressive nature, piracy also comes to be seen as one of the key mechanisms which served to connect peoples and regions during this period.

Contents:  Introduction; Subversive pirates? Representations of Purser and Clinton 1538–1639; The uses and abuses of 'piracy': discourses of mercantilism and empire in accounts of Drake's 'famous voyage' 1580–1630; 'Et in arcadia ego': piracy and politics in prose romance 1580–1603; Pirates and politics: drama of the 'long 1590s'; Jacobean connections: piracy and politics in 17th-century drama and romance; Politics and pirate typology in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's late Jacobean pirate drama; Bibliography; Index.

'Pirates' hold enormous popular appeal as swashbuckling rogues performing feats of daring on high seas. Yet 'pirates' possess deeper meanings as they undertake a rich variety of cultural work: as allegories of religious and political issues; as actors in the theatre of empire; in terms of gendered behaviour, national, legal and racial identities. Even the application of the term itself is contested since one person's 'pirate' is another 'privateer'. The new, inter-disciplinary essays in this collection work together to show how various, and how important, were the figures of the 'pirate', the 'corsair', the 'buccaneer' and the 'privateer' in the years 1550-1650. This period is one of the most lively in maritime history as it marks the beginning of the Age of Empire when, for example, the English nation seriously attempted, for the first time, to express ambitions for an empire to rival that of Spain and Portugal in the West and the Ottomans in the East. The discussions of the politics of plunder in this book by noted historians, lawyers, and literary scholars, provide an illuminating, previously neglected window on the cultural meanings of 'pirates' at the start of the Age of Empire.

The ethical dilemma that the play attempts to resolve is the competition between the female characters (Lucre, Conscience, and Love) for mastery over the behaviour and morals of Englishmen, and by so doing it initiates a battle of the sexes. But the terms of the debate make it clear that there can only be one eventual winner: the men. The text evaluates women morally by their sexual continence, but simultaneously it demonstrates that women can achieve power only through promiscuity. The inevitable result is that the women cannot win the battle of the sexes set up as the play's central psycho-sexual dilemma. The play lays a trap: Conscience and Love participate in a competition where success on one level means certain failure on another. Performance options (how these roles are gendered) will inevitably shape the ways an audience experiences the ethical dilemma, and interprets its gender politics.

Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London occupies an important place in the history of English drama. It belongs to a set of Elizabethan plays on the subjects of Jews and usury, and may have been a response to the anonymous lost play The Jew, thought to have been written in the 1570s, which portrayed the conventional social attitude toward Jews depicting, according to Gosson, ‘the greediness of wordly chusers, and the bloody mindes of Usurers’. The Three Ladies of London appears to have provoked a hostile response in another anonymous lost play, London Against the Three Ladies (c.1582). In turn, these plays influenced important later plays representing the connections between Jews, trade, moneylending, and the assimilation of Jews into Christian society. As the play's plot and the characters' names indicate, The Three Ladies of London is indebted to the medieval allegory and the morality play, which includes characters who are personifications of abstract qualities rather than distinct individuals.

This article explores the reasons behind the use of a particular generic feature in Caroline travel writing - the dream or dream vision - in two mid-to-late 1630s texts, William Davenant’s generically complex poem ‘Madagascar. A Poem written to Prince Rupert’, which was published in 1638, and Richard Brome’s play The Antipodes (performed 1638, published 1640). In both texts a dream, or a dream vision, is central to the text’s plot, but it is also important thematically; the travel described is presented as wholly imaginary which, paradoxically, I will argue, allows a searching, though nuanced in Davenant’s text, critique of domestic politics. Each text uses travel as a vehicle to explore the unease and tensions created by the years of Charles I’s personal rule, and some of the political difficulties it created for the king and his subjects, as well as offering suggestions of potential ways to defuse the situation.

1.This article explores the increasing sophistication of representations of pirates in three of the greatest prose romances and key cultural documents of  the "Long 1590s" Philip Sidney's late-Elizabethan texts Old Arcadia (1580) and New Arcadia (1590), and his niece Mary Wroth's two-part Jacobean prose romance Urania (1621 and 1621-6?).[1] I suggest in what follows that the treatment of piracy in these romances becomes more complex, both as a result of generic developments and changing political circumstances. The alterations in genre coincided with a period of intense English piracy: in the last decades of the sixteenth century Elizabeth Tudor regularly used extreme violence at sea as foreign policy, and in the early years of the seventeenth century – despite James Stuart's hostility to piracy – England was known internationally as "a nation of pirates".[2] As a result political changes concerning attitudes to the ideology and material practice of piracy affected the treatment of seaborne crime in the work of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century prose romance writers. However, as this article establishes, depictions of piracy in prose romance do not merely reflect, or alter in tandem with, government policy regarding violence at sea. Rather, it seems that piracy becomes a key motif, or "meme" as Helen Cooper terms it, for prose romance in the "Long 1590s".[3] In 1580 it is represented as a distant horror, but later romances demonstrate an increasingly familiarity with such activities, so much so that piracy becomes used as an index of, and symbol for, other domestic policies.

The rediscovery of Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian Story in 1526 dramatically changed English romance, emphasizing the importance to the genre of elements such as shipwrecks, exotic settings, far-flung quests, and pirates. In the late 1580s there was what William Sherman has termed ‘a Heliodoran moment’, referring to the way that the generic innovations offered by the Greek romance and its translations influenced English writers. In the wake of An Aethiopian Story, the representation of seaborne violence and its perpetrators in English romance became more sophisticated.  As a result, pirates in late Elizabethan and Jacobean romance become capable of being, at times, active, heroic, and creative forces in a narrative. This essay focuses on the particular ways in which one late Jacobean romance, Argenis (1621) by John Barclay, uses pirates to express a variety of political concerns.

The Island Princess is centrally concerned with human differences of nation and religion, of color and ethnicity. It is a play preoccupied by the “racial” markers that distinguish
Europeans—specifically Portuguese colonialists—from the indigenous inhabitants of the Spice Islands. In this chapter, I explore The Island Princess in relation to Renaissance understandings of human difference, focusing on the ways in which culturally constructed markers of color, ethnicity, religion, and nation are deployed.

This article explores the ways that John Fletcher’s Roman
play Bonduca engages with early-seventeenth-century British
colonial ambitions. The play ends with the defeat of the Britons
by a more powerful civilization and the establishment of the Roman occupation in the British Isles. The rout of the Britons described in this text might, initially, seem unpromising material
for Fletcher to use to question the merits of contemporary colonial policies. Yet, through a series of resemblances between contemporary Virginia and pre-Christian Briton, between ancient British characters and contemporary or near-contemporary monarchs, and through the dramatization of questions concerning the benefits and drawbacks of “Romanization,” this is exactly what the play achieves.

Cannibalism, plunder, starvation and murder… they all appear in an epic Tudor account of English voyages of discovery, compiled by Richard Hakluyt, a man who rarely left the country.
This article, published in BBC History Magazine (2012) hails one of history’s greatest travel books

This essay examines the complex interaction between gender and the New World in two early-to-mid-seventeenth-century comedies, Fletcher's and Massinger's collaborative The Sea Voyage (1622) and Massinger's single-authored The City Madam (1632). Both texts engage with the Virginian enterprise and the troubled history of the Jamestown venture. Indeed, characters' attitudes towards, and behaviour in, colonial situations are used to measure their conformity to expected
gender behaviour. Furthermore, this article  argues that characters' gender performance -specifically their attitude to sexual commerce - figures as a metaphor for a larger set of commercial relations with the New World.

Richard Eden is best known as the first English translator of Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo Decades (1516). In this text, and in his 1553 translation of sections of Sebastian Muenster's Cosmographiae Universalis, Eden, for the first time, made available detailed information about the New World to an English speaking readership. Consequently, his texts are highly significant in determining the ways in which Spanish control of New World territory and riches was mediated to an English audience. Eden translated these texts in a troubled and unstable political climate. England officially reverted to the old faith in 1553 after nearly twenty years of Protestantism. Mary Tudor married Philip of Spain in 1554, and some commentators argued that England, similar to the New World, became little more than a vassal of Spain. Therefore, an analysis of this first English translation of descriptions of the New World is important in assessing whether Eden wanted his readership to support Spanish interests in the New World and England, or was urging the English nation to compete for territory abroad and remain staunchly independent of Spanish interference at home.

This article focuses on one particular transition between the foreign policies of Elizabeth and James, the state's attitude to piracy. By focusing on the representation of piracy in a dramatic text, Fortune by Land and Sea (1607–9), by Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, I explore the extent to which such seaborne activities are aligned with the oppositional discourses which were critical of Jacobean policies. I argue that Fortune by Land and Sea uses values and activities associated with Elizabeth in James's reign as a contrast to those promulgated by the new monarch. In the play we have two spheres represented—one at sea with young Forrest, one on land with Philip—and the contrasts between the brave and adventurous young Forrest and the passive, arguably weak, Philip can be seen as tapping into a nostalgia for Elizabethan values that threatens to undermine Jacobean policies. In what follows, then, I test the extent to which Fortune by Land and Sea should be read as expressing a growing, but coded, sense of dissatisfaction with the king.

Margaret Cavendish appropriated images of Elizabeth I in order to show her support for an imperialist England and to question the status Restoration society awarded to women. During the seventeenth century hagiographic representations of Elizabeth I were increasingly used to criticise the policies and
personalities of the Stuart monarchs. William Cavendish, for example, harked back to England’s glorious past under Elizabeth in order to inculcate in Charles II’s government expansionist and imperialist policies. Margaret Cavendish in The Blazing World demonstrates similar concerns but Cavendish’s work is also interested in using representations of Elizabeth I as a way of exploring both the disenfranchisement of women and, I argue, the possibility of female empowerment.

Claire Jowitt & Liz Oakley-Brown (2011) A pirate for all seasons? Captain Kidd and pirates in popular culture: A review of ‘Pirates: the Captain Kidd story’, an exhibition at
the Museum of London Docklands, 20 May–30 October 2011, Journal for Maritime Research,
13:2, 180-183, DOI: 10.1080/21533369.2011.622883

This article explores the figure of the pirate in literature and criticism. In particular it pays attention to some of the ways literary critics and cultural historians have suggested pirates should be understood: whether as political or sexual radicals, as interceptors of and disrupters to networks of economic and cultural exchange, or as key, if often unrecognised, players in the formation of Empire. The role of pirates and piracy is examined in a number of genres here, but the complex and contradictory ways these exciting but dangerous figures are represented in Renaissance drama is of central concern.