British Pirates in Print and Performance by Frederick Burwick and Manushag N. Powell (review)

In the last several years, popular culture’s obsession with pirates, initiated largely by the release of the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, has given way to successive waves of vampire and now zombie fiction; however, as Frederick Burwick and Manushag N. Powell state in the first line of the first chapter of British Pirates in Print and Performance: “To speak very generally, pirates are always of interest to the reading public” (15). Throughout this important critical work, this case is made strongly in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the sheer breadth of literary works with which Burwick and Powell engage—from Daniel Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720) to lesser known and studied works, such as American Maturin Murray Ballou’s Fanny Campbell, Female Pirate Captain (1844). With the transnational turn in British and American literary studies and the articulation of various “oceanic” critical models theorized by critics such as Hester Blum, Margaret Cohen, William Boelhower, and Paul Giles, among others, it would seem the ideal moment to direct scholarly attention to the transgressive and nomadic figure of the pirate. That said, Burwick and Powell emphasize less their work’s position in these critical conversations and more the transatlantic history of the many familiar performative tropes that come to represent pirates in the twenty-first-century public imagination through figures such as Johnny Depp’s swaggering Jack Sparrow, who surfaces from time to time in the book.

In their introduction, Burwick and Powell establish the literal and figurative connection between “striding the deck” and “strutting the stage” as “the heart” of their book (1). Their focus on the performativity inherent in the pirate figure provides the core for a larger discussion that emphasizes pirate dramas as being performed in port towns and in London theatres where, Burwick and Powell note, there would have been actual pirates and smugglers in the audience. As a result, they assert that “the performances engendered a faltering or total breakdown of the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that left the audience constantly aware of playacting as playacting” (6). Much of the more fascinating work done by Burwick and Powell here reconstructs these performance histories as a way of encompassing the remarkable flexibility and innovation within genealogies of pirate representation. At its best, this study treats the performative nature of the pirate figure as the ideal test case for examining the complex triangulation of literary texts, public performances, and popular reception.

If these vibrant genealogies seek to provide a narrative history of contemporary pirates in popular culture and the durable collection of tropes that attend them—peg legs, eye patches, the Jolly Roger—Burwick and Powell are careful to define the parameters of a term too often utilized neglectfully. Their admirable interest in precision is evident in the first two chapters, which catalogue historical and literary instances of “piracy” as a way of stabilizing this term. As they state: “‘Pirate’ is a legal as well as a social term: a true pirate is hostis humani generis, the enemy of all mankind, considered to have no nation or national protections” (16). This definition is by no means arbitrary, and Burwick and Powell argue that the distinctions between pirate, privateer, and corsair held within them vastly different political inferences and relationships with territorial national entities. One distinction that could have been discussed in more depth is that between Euro-American piracy and the orientalist tropes surrounding the long history of representations and performances of North African Barbary piracy. While Burwick and Powell periodically touch on texts regarding Barbary corsairs, such as John Brown’s Barbarossa (1754), their engagement lacks attention to specific cultural and religious contexts, undoubtedly owing to the fact that these distinct genealogies might be considered tangential to the succession and evolution of tropes at the centre of the authors’ stated interest.

The central chapters of...