By now it has become commonplace that a thorough understanding of early modern English culture must take into account those on its margins. Yet viewing marginal others as external to culturally dominant discourses can cede to alterity what may pertain more properly to likeness. By countering an interpretive tradition that treats its titular pirates, traitors, and apostates according to a metrics of difference, Laurie Ellinghausen's new book considers the embeddedness and appeal of these figures in the changing cultural contexts of early modern England. Foundational to the book's argument is a link between the renegade (often imagined to have severed ties to Englishness) and the “runagate”—the vagrant or masterless man. Through this connection, the book describes how the renegade mediates domestic and transnational problems and forges an English capitalist subjectivity. Renegade tales, argues Ellinghausen, render disruptions of English status hierarchies “not only visible, but entertaining, provocative, and even inspiring” to a diverse audience (17).
This wide-ranging book combines textual analysis across multiple genres with a diverse critical apparatus that borrows from new economic criticism, empire studies, and Anglo-Ottoman studies, as well as more focused treatments of pirates and rogues. With such excursive tendencies of its own, it's not surprising to find certain aporia in the book's methodological frame. An argument about diverse audiences might, for instance, clarify its relation to reader-response theory and the concept of interpretive communities. And with Ellinghausen's sustained interest in social mobility and change, I wonder at the omission of works like Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz's Rogues and Early Modern English Culture, which merits billing alongside frequently cited works by Linda Woodbridge and Patricia Fumerton. But such gaps are inevitable, and they detract in no way from the book's focus on reinterpreting its archive.
While each chapter reads an array of narrative histories, pamphlets, romances, ballads, and plays, Ellinghausen tends to find the most complex representations of renegades in the drama. Chapter 1 explores the “ambiguous line between swashbuckling heroism and ‘faithelesse’ treason” through the English gentleman-turned-mercenary Thomas Stukeley (24). Reading the anonymous play The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley alongside Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Ellinghausen compares Stukeley's temperamental “heat” to that of Shakespeare's homegrown rebel Hotspur and Stukeley's melancholic friend Vernon, arguing that renegade behavior originates not in foreign influence but in the “discursively pre-political” site of the porous humoral body (39). Chapter 2 reads Robert Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk, a play about the pirate John Ward. Despite the play's fabrication of Ward's ignominious execution, argues Ellinghausen, it nevertheless suggests that it is Ward's economic restlessness, born of class discontent, that propels him to the renegade life and its possibilities for both democratic order and individual advancement.
The especially cogent and persuasive chapter 3 turns to the Elizabethan pirates Clinton and Purser. While Thomas Heywood and William Rowley's play Fortune by Land and Sea enshrines the two as renegade others, Ellinghausen argues that John Stow's Annales portrays the pirates more sympathetically by highlighting their ties to the local communities that benefited from their piracy. Chapter 4 treats the renegade adventures of the Sherley brothers (Thomas, Anthony, and Robert) as represented in John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins's The Travels of the Three English Brothers. In contrast to conventional depictions of the brothers as “venal ‘gentleman on the make’” (103), Travels presents them as catalysts for a strain of imperial thinking that fuses the pursuit of individual profit with the advancement of national interest. The book concludes by tracing renegade identities into eighteenth-century criminal biographies, positing both the early modern and later traditions as precursors to the novel.
Pirates, Traitors, and Apostates uncovers a rich variety of moral and affective resonances across textual representations of famous renegade figures, and it complicates our reading of putatively dominant cultural attitudes by attending to the diverse motivations for renegade behavior, as well as heterogeneous textual receptions. The book's most lasting contribution is its understanding of Englishness not just through evidence of state power but through a set of social behaviors that includes mutual responsibility and compassion, and the imaginative capacity to see forms of civic participation outside those conventionally prescribed.
