Pirates and ‘turning Turk’ in Renaissance drama

Abstract

Probably the best-known pirate incident in Renaissance drama is the interception of Hamlet's ship by ‘a pirate of very warlike appointment’ ( iv .vi.14–15) which becomes the means by which he gets back to Denmark while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on towards England. Nineteenth-century readers were so troubled by this coincidence that several of them, independently, came to the conclusion that Hamlet had prearranged the interception as part of his revenge plot. In fact, few events could have seemed less unlikely to an Elizabethan audience than an attack by a pirate ship. For one thing, there was a long literary tradition, deriving from the Greek romances, in which pirates were, as Jacques Lezra puts it, ‘established agents of unexpected intrusion’. Pirates were also, of course, a genuine threat, as indeed they still are. It is the relation between the traditional and topical status of these characters that I propose to explore in this essay. I shall focus in particular on that aspect of piracy that was new to the seventeenth century: the brief period during which it was not only a means of cross-cultural exchange but also a threat to traditional English values.