"Et in Arcadia Ego": The Politics of Pirates in the Old Arcadia, New Arcadia and Urania

Claire Jowitt
Nottingham Trent University
claire.jowitt@ntu.ac.uk

Claire Jowitt. "'Et in Arcadia Ego': The Politics of Pirates in the Old Arcadia, New Arcadia and Urania". Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October, 2007) 5.1-36 URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-16/jowiarca.htm> 

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.   
    
2. This discussion of the representation and significances of pirates in Renaissance romance begins with the text that Blair Worden calls the "unread classic of English literature", Philip Sidney's Old Arcadia.[4] In Sidney's original version there is only one mention of piracy, but it comes at one of the most politically significant moments in a text that is rich in such meanings. In the Last Book or Act Arcadia faces a succession crisis after the supposed death of Basilius. The "wise and honest" Philanax, Basilius's faithful councilor, on hearing that "the renowned Euarchus, King of Macedon […] was now come within half a mile of the lodges  […] thought he [Euarchus] might be the fittest instrument to redress the ruins they were in".[5] This textual moment embeds a political allegory; the death of the monarch, caused by the King's failure to manage his erotic appetites resonates, as Worden has suggested, with the most significant political decision in England in the late 1570s, Elizabeth I's plan to marry the youngest brother of the King of France, Francis Valois, the Catholic Duke of Anjou.[6] In Old Arcadia the monarch's untimely death – with no secure succession – provokes a political crisis of the highest magnitude.[7] Both shepherds, representative of the courtier class, who retreat impotently to the hillside, and the population at large, who riot, cannot rise to the dilemma facing them.[8] Thus, as the Arcadians stand on the brink of civil war, Philanax attempts to pacify the tumultuous and potentially violent populace:

   I may have reason to require of you, as men are wont among pirates, that the life at least of him that never hurt you may be safe. Methinks I am not without appearance of cause, as if you were Cyclops or cannibals, to desire that our prince's body […] be not torn in pieces or devoured among you, but may be suffered to yield itself […] to the natural rest of the earth […] I have reason, as if I had to speak to madmen, to desire you to be good to yourselves.[9]

3. Philanax represents pirates as a particularly bloodthirsty breed of men who can only be restrained from killing indiscriminately by directing them away from innocent victims: his rhetoric links them with cannibals, Cyclops and madmen – other groups that were seen as beyond the limits of civility. For Philanax, pirates are barbarous and depraved, and his representation of his countrymen in such ungovernable and depraved terms is a damning indictment. This is, perhaps, the moment of the most extreme political crisis described in the text. As Worden puts it "[i]t is not only the shepherds who, in the face of that crisis, fail in public spirit. The nation fails in it. In such a crisis, fears Sidney, the English nation would fail in it too".[10] The fact that the word "piracy" is used only at this point, when the nation teeters on the verge of chaos, suggests the degree to which it was seen to be abhorrent and against the interests of the political community in the late 1570s. Yet the very fact that it was used so sparingly is also indicative that it was not as yet a key term in the political and ideological landscape of prose romance.
   
   
4. By contrast in New Arcadia pirates make frequent appearances, and their political and ideological resonances are far more complex. There are several reasons for this alteration. Though pirates are one of the stock characters of both classical and later romances, in the late sixteenth century there were significant developments in terms of the genre's use of pirates.[11] In many texts, such as Xenophon's Ephesiaca, written in the mid-second century AD, pirates are chiefly important to the plot as encounters with pirates usher in a whole series of adventures and misadventures until the protagonists are finally reunited. [12] In later classical texts – such as Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus - the deployment and significance of pirates increases and, in particular, the late sixteenth-century English Renaissance romance rediscovers, appropriates and develops the Heliodoran model of using pirates as an important literary topos.[13] Though other contemporary romances, such as Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589) and Emanuel Ford's Ornatus and Artesia (1595?) contain Heliodoran-inspired encounters with pirates, both structurally and thematically New Arcadia is particularly indebted to Ethiopian Story: "[a]s Heliodorus was the only writer of Greek prose romance to begin in medias res, it was here that Sidney found a model in prose which obeyed the stylistic conventions of heroic poetry, beginning in the middle, having tales of the past recounted, and progressing in short, natural units which suspended the action" and "[u]nder the influence of Heliodorus, Sidney completely abandoned the classical five-act dramatic structure of the Old Arcadia in favour of the Heliodoran heroic".[14] Further, Steve Mentz has recently shown the influence of Heliodorus' romance on New Arcadia suggesting, in particular, that Sidney embraced an anti-epic model indebted to the Greek text's emphasis on passive duplicity or mendacity, as evidenced by the anti-epic heroism of Calasiris and Cariclea, rather than direct action and martial prowess.[15] In what follows this reading is extended by considering the ways that the repeated use and representation of pirates within the narrative of New Arcadia participates in this debate. In other words, my argument explores the significance of Sidney's pirates: firstly to question the extent to which they reflect patterns of behavior associated with epic martialism or with the Heliodoran model of indirect action and crafty deception, or both; and further to explore what this depiction of piracy reveals, more broadly, about the politics of Sidney's text.
   
   
5. Sidney's representations of piracy also need to be read against the complexity of late Elizabethan policies concerning violence at sea.[16] In England at this time the margin between licit and illicit activities was fluid, and was frequently breached, partly because though the Statute of 1536 regulated piracy as a criminal offence, the term "privateer" – a redaction of the term "private man of warre" - did not emerge until the mid seventeenth century.[17]  Of course the activities to which the term referred - an armed vessel owned and officered by private persons, and holding a commission from the government authorising the owners to use it against a hostile nation (especially to capture merchant shipping) – were long established since "letters of marque" had been issued by governments and powerful individuals since the twelfth century.[18] As a result in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the category of  "pirate" in England included amongst its numbers a wide variety of figures from all sorts of social, religious and ethnic backgrounds, and, as a result, is difficult to define or circumscribe. Late Elizabethan "pirates", therefore, tend to be represented with a good deal of ambivalence, depending on both the individual who was being described and the person who identified them as a "pirate", as well as the reasons for using such terminology: who and why matter. For example, to many Englishmen and women in the 1570s and 1580s Francis Drake was a hero, his habit of plundering Spanish ships in the New World and elsewhere a cause of celebration and national pride; to the Spanish he was a menace, La Dragontea, an infidel pirate who should be brought to justice, and some English commentators shared the Spanish view on occasion.[19] In other words violence at sea was a legally contradictory and ambivalent material practice in this period as one person's criminal "pirate" is, to another, a national hero. Certainly, explicitly and officially, piracy was outlawed by Elizabeth I as repeated proclamations were issued against it, yet at times the state's attitude was far less draconian. As Kenneth R. Andrews outlines "ordinary indiscriminate piracy remained a serious social evil and the government's attempts to suppress it were unavailing. But in times of crisis pirates could be useful, provided they concentrated on the right prey".[20] Even repeated offenders, such as the well-known early 1580s pirate Captain Clinton Atkinson, might on occasion be harnessed into state service either in an official or semi-official capacity to take part in, or certainly sail with, expeditions supported by the government.[21] After war was declared against Spain in 1585 attitudes to "pirates" moderated further. It is therefore possible to read the changes in both volume and meaning of Sidney's depiction of pirates between the Old and New Arcadia as reflective of, in part at least, the increased strategic importance of the seaborne activities of men such as Drake in times of war. Certainly in 1585, Sidney had himself made a covert, and unsuccessful, attempt to join Drake's expedition to Cadiz without Queen Elizabeth's permission.[22]
   
   
6. New Arcadian pirates are read here with these twin contexts in mind – the Heliodoran influence on the romance genre, and the effect the war with Spain had on perceptions of extreme violence at sea and those that participated in it. Like the Greek text, New Arcadia begins in medias res with an enigmatic and unexplained set of circumstances, both of which are in one way or another concerned with pirates. Whereas Heliodorus' text begins with a scene of carnage, whose cause - pirates - is only revealed in Book Five, at the beginning of Book One of New Arcadia two lovelorn shepherds discover Prince Musidorus washed up naked and almost dead. On being revived, Musidorus laments the apparent death at sea of his friend Prince Pyrocles, and entreats the shepherds to help him recover the body. As soon as they are out at sea the shepherds see "a stayne of the waters colour" and "and some sparkes and smoke mounting thereout", and Musidorus recounts his story of "a great fire, which had driven both him & his friend rather to committee themselves to the mercie of the sea".[23] Akin to Heliodorus' text, the reader is not told the back-story that has lead to these tragic circumstances, or that piracy has played a crucial role in the Princes' plights. In the midst of an extraordinary scene of shipwreck Pyrocles is found alive upon the mast of the ship holding "a sword aloft […] which often he waved about his crowne as though he would threaten the world in that extremity", and Musidorus attempts to rescue him.[24] The first attempt fails because the fishermen think he is a God, so that they pray rather than fish him out of the water. They are just about to make a second attempt when a new threat suddenly appears: pirates.

   [A] Galley […] came […] directlie in the chase of them; and […] it was a well knowne Pirate, who hunted not onely for goodes but for bodies of menne, which hee imployed eyther to bee his Galley slaues, or to sell at the best market. Which when the Maister vnderstood, he commaunded forthwith to set on all the canuasse they could, and flie homeward, leauing in that sort poore Pyrocles so neere to be reskewed […] Therefore praying for him [Pyrocles], and casting a long look that way he [Musidorus] saw the Galley leaue the pursuite of them, & turne to take up the spoiles of the other wrack: and lastly he might well see them list up the yong man; and alas (said he to himselfe) deere Pyrocles shall that bodie of thine be enchayned? […] But that opinion soone ceased when he saw the gallie setting vpon an other ship, which held long and strong fight with her: for then he began a fresh to feare the life of his friende, and to wish well to the Pirates whome before he hated, least in their ruyne hee might perish. But the fishermen made such speed into the hauen, that they absented his eyes from beholding the issue.[25]

7. Both the pirate ship and the politics of piracy more generally are of interest here. The pirates appear a morally ambiguous force. Initially the description seems to follow the conventional official politics of vilification of pirates since this "well knowne", but tantalisingly un-named pirate seeks not only "goodes" but also "bodies of menne" which he uses as galley-slaves or sells. But as the passage continues the text appears to become less certain of the values the pirates represent. Just as Drake's activities provoked complex and contradictory responses in English and foreign commentators, this slave-trading pirate is not condemned here outright.[26] In fact, in 1590 the trade for slaves was by no means despised. John Hawkins was the first Englishman to be involved in the slave trade, mounting highly lucrative voyages down the coast of Africa in the 1560s.[27] The financial success of this trade soon attracted aristocratic backers, such as the earls of Leicester and Pembroke, prominent London merchants, and the most powerful sponsor of them all, Queen Elizabeth who, in 1564, lent Hawkins her ship Jesus of Lubeck. Famously, the fourth slaving voyage in 1567 ended in disaster as the fleet was attacked and largely destroyed at San Juan de Ulúa in the Gulf of Mexico by the Spanish flota despite promises from both the English and Spanish to keep the peace. This attack was something of a watershed in Anglo-Spanish relations, as maritime violence, called "piracy" by its victims, became endemic as an unofficial war of reprisal developed.[28] Clearly Sidney's description of this unnamed pirate does not directly refer to Hawkins or  Drake (who was Hawkin's second-in-command on later missions), but the association between the Queen and Hawkins and Drake, and the similarities between these men's "patriotic" violence at sea after 1567 and the complexities of morality of the "well knowne Pirate" who Musidorus starts to support (he begins "to wish well to the Pirates") indicate that the text is not necessarily condemning wholesale the pirate for his slave-trading or other activities. By the late 1580s to Francis Walsingham and many others on the Queen's Council Drake was, as Christopher Hodgkins puts it, "an object of suspicion, and his successful thievery a diplomatic embarrassment".[29] Indeed, given Drake's extreme unpopularity with Francis Walsingham and his "complete eclipse at court" after the failure of invasion of Portugal in the summer of 1589, it is possible that Musidorus' balanced view of the pirates in a text published the following year is intended, in part, as a political rehabilitation of the breed of man – such as Drake - capable of direct action.[30]
    
8. Furthermore, Pyrocles only falls prey to the pirate because Musidorus and the fishermen fail in their attempt to pluck him out of the sea. By contrast the pirate makes no such mistake and, as we have seen, with Pyrocles onboard the pirate ship, Musidorus' attitude to the pirates moderates. The fact that the boat he is on flees so fast that he is unable to see the outcome of the encounter, and hence is powerless either to intervene on Pyrocles' behalf or to know who wins, merely serves to increase this sense of ambivalence, and emphasise both Pyrocles' and Musidorus' subordination. For Musidorus here, piracy and pirates per se are not condemned outright; his attitude, like that of Queen Elizabeth, appears a flexible one. If the pirates can be serviceable to his cause, and are successful, then he supports them, similar to the way England's Queen was able to accommodate, either through the semi-official nature of the enterprise or the retrospective issuing of letters of marque, the men who returned with valuable commodities wrested from their victims by acts of extreme violence at sea.[31]
    
9. Indeed Pyrocles' version of this encounter with pirates further confirms the ambivalent attitude to piracy already glimpsed in Musidorus' account. 

   There you missing me, I was taken vp by Pyrates, who putting me vnder boorde prisoner, presentlie sett vppon another shippe, and mainteining a long fight, in the ende, put them all to the sworde. Amongst whom I might heare them greatlie prayse one younge man, who fought most valiantlie, whom […] I thought certainely to be you. And so holding you as dead […] in trueth I sought nothing more then a noble ende […] Triall whereof came within two dayes after: for the Kinges of Lacedaemon hauing sett out some Galleys […] to skowre the Sea of the Pyrates, they met with us, where our Captaine wanting men, was driuen to arme some of his prisoners, with promise of libertie for well fighting: among whom I was one, and being boorded by the Admirall, it was my fortune to kil Eurileon the Kings nephew: but in the end they preuailed, & we were all taken prisoners.[32]

10. In terms of morality the pirates are no worse than any other group of fighting men. Pyrocles' tale of triumph by direct action would seem to make the pirates just one more martial band for whom he is prepared to fight. Indeed, believing Musidorus to be dead, he recounts that "in trueth I sought nothing more then a noble ende" by which he means death in battle; fighting on behalf of the "pirates" is represented as compatible with a "noble ende", apparently demonstrating an adaptable attitude to what constitutes piracy akin to the policies towards violence at sea followed by Elizabeth in the late 1580s. Aristocratic terminology and epic prowess associated with direct action and martial chivalry can accommodate pirates as they appear to be capable of epic heroism.
    
    
11. The morality of epic heroism is of central concern since Pyrocles is here associated with pirates, and their behaviour is identical to that of other fighting men. Yet Sidney postpones exploring these issues further at this point since the reader has to wait before New Arcadia returns to the encounter which immediately preceded the shipwreck described in the opening pages. In Book Two, Chapter Twenty Four, Pyrocles finally describes to Philoclea his adventures prior to arriving in Arcadia and finishes off the account of the way piracy figures in the narrative of their arrival. He recounts how the Princes were shipwrecked when traveling from Asia back to Greece in a ship supplied by Plexirtus of Tresibond, a bastard, usurper king who they mistakenly believe has reformed. Once embarked, Plexirtus' councilor, impressed by the Princes' nobility, confesses his monarch's plan to murder them. Though the councilor refuses now to have anything to do with the scheme, others – including the ship's captain – have already been recruited. The encounter and battle that follow use piracy as political comment:
    
    

    But when we came within halfe a daies sayling of the shore, […] came the Captaine and whispered the councellour in the eare: But he […] disswading him from it, the Captaine (who had bene a pyrate from his youth, and often blouded in it) with a lowde voice sware, that if Plexirtus bad him, he would not sticke to kill God him selfe. And therewith cald his mates, and in the Kings name willed them to take vs, aliue or dead; encouraging them with the spoile of vs, which he said […] would yeeld many exceeding rich iewels.[33]

12. The pirate captain's behavior mimics that of the tyrant king, Plexirtus, who "as he came to the crown by […] unjust means, as unjustly […] kept it by force of stranger soldiers, the nests of tyranny and murderers of liberty, disarming all his own countrymen".[34] Indeed, the captain may indeed be one of these "stranger soldiers", in other words a paid mercenary hired to shore-up Plexirtus' usurpation of Galatia. Certainly, the pirate's depravity knows no bounds since, in arguably the most iconoclastic image of the whole text, if his monarch asked him "he would not sticke to kill God him selfe". The text appears to be here representing piracy as the first stage on a continuum of increasing alienation from orthodox behavior.[35] The captain had been "a pyrate from his youth, and often blouded in it", and the text implies both that he (and his shipmates?) remain pirates and, most importantly, creates a causal link between his early piracy and his later extreme heresy. This depiction of piracy, unlike the earlier ones, appears to condemn piracy wholesale.
     
13. Further, the manner in which the pirates fight is also criticised since martial values and direct action become indicative of wrong-headedness. The battle which ensues between the pirate captain and his forces and those that support the princes swiftly becomes chaotic. Noticeably the princes "never performed less in any place" because, not being able to tell friend from foe, "we thought it less evil to spare a foe than spoil a friend".[36] Their deliberate reticence is not matched by the forces of the pirate captain, and a carnage ensues with "no place lefte, without cries of murdering, and murdered persons" and "no man almost could conceiue hope of liuing, but being lefte aliue: and therefore euery one was willing to make him selfe roome, by dispatching almost any other: so that the great number in the ship was reduced to exceeding few".[37] Even the pirates that remain alive do not escape unscathed: some, when attempting to abandon ship, capsize and drown, and others perish in the huge fire.
     
14. There is also a final hand-to-hand combat between Pyrocles and the pirate captain:

But I had swomme a very little way, when […] seeing the maste […] flote cleare from the ship, I swamme unto it, and getting on it, I found mine owne sworde, which by chaunce […] had honge to the maste. […] I saw at the other end, the Captaine of the ship, and of all this mischiefe; who having a long pike, belike had borne him selfe up with that, till he had set him selfe upon the mast […] With that bestriding the mast, I gat by little and little towards him, after such a manner as boies are wont (if ever you saw that sport) when they ride the wild mare. And he perceiving my intention, like a fellow that had much more courage then honestie, set him selfe to resist. But I had in short space gotten within him, and (giving him a sound blowe) sent him to feede fishes. But there my selfe remainde, untill by pyrates I was taken up, and among them againe taken prisoner, and brought into Laconia.[38]

15. Pyrocles and the pirate, both astride the mast, fight for possession of all that is left of the boat. Though Pyrocles wins the battle, his praise of the pirate's "courage" and the mimicry between the men's behaviour suggests that the pirate is not portrayed as one-dimensionally evil which, up until this point, had seemed to be the intended effect. This narration, of course, finishes where the text started chronologically; the reader is now back to the beginning of Book One Chapter One where Musidorus discovers Pyrocles astride the mast "a sword aloft […] which often he waved about his crowne as though he would threaten the world in that extremity". Mentz's reading of this scene is unconvincing: he explains Pyrocles' aggression as the narrator's mistaken interpretation of gestures which should, he suggests, be read attempting to attract attention.[39] Instead, this description of Pyrocles resonates with the one of the pirate who "would not sticke to kill God him selfe" since Pyrocles aggression seems to mirror him, though Pyrocles merely menaces "the world" with his sword rather than threatening God himself. Furthermore, no sooner has this pirate been killed, than Pyrocles is captured by another set. As we have already seen, the pirates who scoop him from the sea were represented far more ambiguously than the dead pirate captain. Taken together, the swift succession of pirates in the plot, the ways that both groups of pirates are employed by the different princes, the resonances between Pyrocles' behavior and that of the pirate captain as well as his martial service and direct action on the side of the pirates who rescue him, all hint that the politics of piracy are more uncertain in New Arcadia than a straightforward condemnation of violence at sea.
    
    
16. Initially, especially in terms of plotline, it might seem that Sidney's text expresses the official government line of hostility to piracy, since seaborne crime certainly interrupts the Princes' journey. The way the chronology is broken up in the narrative and the emerging similarity between the princes and pirates complicates the view that this text expresses an attack on seaborne crime. As Barbara Fuchs and David Quint have suggested, the emphasis in romance writing on the hero's adventures on the way rather than getting to a particular destination further indicates that encounters with pirates – who interrupt journeys and present challenges to be overcome - might hold special significance.[40] Indeed, the last use of piracy in New Arcadia which occurs in a different, yet related, context further amplifies the text's politics concerning the activities and use of the theme. Chronologically the usage occurs later in the text than the others previously described, though the narrative structure means that the description occurs in Book One, Chapter Ten. When Pyrocles deserts Musidorus to pursue his love for Philoclea, Musidorus chides him for his changed behaviour and absence:

    Ah (said he) Pyrocles, what meanes this alteration? what have I deserved of thee, to be thus banished of thy counsels? Hereto fore I have accused the sea, condemned the Pyrats, and hated my evill fortune, that deprived me of thee; But now thy self is the sea, which drounes my comfort, thy selfe is the Pirat that robbes thy selfe of me: Thy owne will becomes my evil fortune.[41]

17. Pyrocles has become the "Pirat", stealing himself from Musidorus. Unusually, there seem to be two victims of the crime of piracy: both Musidorus and Pyrocles since Pyrocles both "deprived me [Musidorus] of thee [Pyrocles]" and "robbes thy selfe [Pyrocles] of me [Musidorus]". Piracy in this context is represented as a crime which it is possible to commit against oneself, as Sidney's syntax constructs Pyrocles as the victim of his piracy as well as Musidorus. Moreover, Pyrocles is also the perpetrator of the crime. This conflation of the roles of perpetrator and victim is striking. Piracy now operates in a new, behavioral register as a type of self-harm. In other words, here piracy seems to refer to both epic, martial, active, external patterns of behavior – something we have seen ambiguously represented throughout the text – and simultaneously, it is also used in a figurative way to describe duplicity against both others and oneself. Epic values associated with direct action and anti-epic ones of indirect action appear to come together in this double representation of piracy. This description of piracy suggests, perhaps, a corrective to Mentz's reading of epic and anti-epic values as always oppositional. The heroic Pyrocles is a "pirat" in two senses: his piracy is modeled on epic values of direct action and martial aggression, and it represents a wily duplicity more readily associated with anti-epic Heliodoran values.
    
    
18. The political implications of Sidney's representation of piracy are important. Since Pyrocles is both predator and prey, his dual identity forcefully suggests the difficulty of distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate violence at sea. The moral certainty of the condemnation of piracy in Old Arcadia is replaced with a pragmatic attitude which doesn't necessarily view pirates as a group to be excluded and punished. Some pirates clearly should be condemned, but some are useful to the state, and some, such as Pyrocles, are extremely powerful, even royal, individuals who are, in fact, the state. The easy moral judgement of Old Arcadia thus gives way to a more balanced but also less morally clear-cut appreciation of the variety of pirates and the benefits and drawbacks of violence at sea in line with the complexities of late Elizabethan attitudes concerning the strategic value of violent direct action at sea against the nation's enemies, and its attendant problems concerning the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate targets. Similar to the ways in which the reputations and perceptions of England's sea-dogs, such as Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins or Frobisher, fluctuated with both the Queen and her Council, in New Arcadia descriptions of "pirates" are equally unstable. In Greville's 1590 edition of Sidney's text it seems that, except for the most hardened individuals, pirates are capable of being rehabilitated to serve a nation's interests against foreign enemies. Further, piracy in New Arcadia offers a new angle on the manner in which the central romance metaphors of the journey and adventure operate since we have, for the first time, seaborne crime simultaneously represented as an activity with an internal and external dimension. In other words Pyrocles, like many of the most powerful individuals the late Elizabethan state, is simultaneously victim and perpetrator of piracy.
    
    
19. The final section of this article focuses on the representation of piracy in Wroth's Jacobean romance Urania and explores whether it keeps pace with the changes in attitude to piracy between the Tudor and Stuart regimes. Queen Elizabeth tolerated the activity and its perpetrators as a serviceable, if at times unpalatable, instrument of foreign policy, and in keeping with the state's flexible attitude Sidney's texts show an increasingly sophisticated response to violence at sea which attempted to rehabilitate the pirate from a position of straightforward criminality to appreciate the strategic value of certain types of pirate. Under King James piracy was condemned wholesale, and after peace was concluded with Spain in 1603 no distinctions were maintained between the types or motives of the men who committed violence and robbery at sea: all were outlaws.[42] As a result how legitimate, and illegitimate, trade is defined, and whether Wroth's pirates reflect the changing political climate, thus reversing some of the ideological associations present in Sidney's text, are important considerations in determining the larger politics of Urania.
     
20. Wroth's Urania is in two parts: the first was most likely composed between 1618 and 1620, and was published in 1621; the second is harder to date since it was probably composed between 1621 and 1626, and survived only in a unique holograph manuscript.[43] Piracy is only mentioned twice in Book One. Chronologically, the second reference is a throwaway one towards the end of the Book during the account of the attempted abduction of Pamphilia, when the perpetrators confess:

    The Sonne to this wicked man seeing the picture of Pamphilia, which  was sent some two yeeres before by Pamphilia to her uncle, but taken away by Pirats who after landed at Sio, and among other things sold that; He fell in love with it […]  which the devill his father perceiving, plotted all waies he could […] that might bring them meanes to find a tricke to gaine her.[44]

21. Here the picture of Pamphilia, stolen and fenced by pirates, enflames the tyrannical lord of the island of Sio's unnamed son to such an extent that it spawns the whole dastardly plot to abduct and rape her. Though the mention of pirates is in some ways a mere detail in the complex narration of the events of this crime, which involves Dolindorus, Prince of Negroponte's capture and impersonation by the Lord of Sio's son; the Lord's own impersonation of the King of Negroponte; the perfidious story of the "King's" repentance concerning his previous favoring of his daughter Ramiletta, and her persecution of him and her brother; the battle between Ramiletta's champions and the King of Morea and his courtiers; the actual abduction and its safe resolution, and, recounted separately, the rescue of the real Dolindorus by Amphilanphus; the tryant's wife's execution; the final exposure of the imposter. Of course, it is perfectly possible to read the pirates as a mere detail in all these interwoven plots, but it is also the crime that causes all these events. In other words, entirely in keeping with King James' hostile view of pirates - articulated, for example, in 1609 when he described them as "lewd and ill disposed persons, accustomed and habituated to spoil and rapine" - the canker of piracy spreads out of control if unchecked.[45]
     
22. This deployment might suggest Urania to be politically orthodox. However Josephine Roberts and others have suggested that Urania should be read as a critique of James I, specifically with regard to the failures of the King's foreign policy.[46] From his accession onwards, as Jonathan Goldberg has shown, James' self-fashioning emphasised his bringing all Britain under one rule as the revival of the Holy Roman Empire in the West. His iconography repeatedly depicted him in Roman guise, and represented the new empire as bringing universal peace.[47] However, by the second decade of James' rule, with the crisis in the Palatinate involving James' daughter Elizabeth and her husband Frederick, and the King's refusal to intervene, Rex Pacificus was increasingly out of kilter with the sentiments of the nation's more warlike subjects who wanted James to act decisively as a Protestant prince against Catholic Spain and her allies.[48] James' rhetoric of peaceful and revived empire had not been matched by international events and, casting the debate in the terms we have been exploring in relation to Sidney's text, criticism of the King focused on the need for direct action rather than wily duplicity: indeed, as early as 1606 the King's foreign policy was under attack when Sir Henry Neville wrote "the Kingdom generally wishes this peace broken, but Jacobus Pacificus will scarse incline to that side".[49] In contrast, Wroth's hero, Amphilanthus, is represented in the role of an emperor who unifies the western world, "an emperor who through his personal strength and diplomacy becomes “Master of the greatest part of the Westerne World” and brings about an era of peaceful religious toleration".[50] In a text that critiques King James' perceived failures by contrast with the success of another monarch, it is important to consider whether the representation of piracy also operates as political critique.
     
23. The second representation of piracy in Book One is given an extended treatment. When Urania, Parselius and the others leave Pantaleria hoping to be reunited with Amphilanthus, King of Naples, they are surprised to discover once aboard that the ship has been taken over by pirates. "[C]ontrarie to their expectation", the pirate, Sandringal, kneels before Urania and, promising he means them no harm, tells them his life story:

    My name,' said he, 'is Sandringal, borne and bred in the land of Romania, being servant to the King thereof; this King lived long […] blest in his government with peace, and love of his people, but principally happy in two children, a son, and a daughter […] he being called Antissius and she Antissia […] The King my Master having […] a strict league of friendship […] betweene him, and the King of Achaia […] the Achaian King […]  being growne in yeares, sent a Embassadours to demand his daughter in marriage for his sonne, and withall to have the Princesse sent unto him […] My master soone consented to the Achayan king's demand […] and for this end he sent for me.[51]

24. He describes how, intending to steal the dowry and shut up the Princess in a religious house, once at sea he set fire to the ship but the plan backfires and he fleas for his life with Antissia in a smaller boat until: 

    [W]e [were] set on by rovers, who kept about these coasts. The Princesse they tooke from me, and all the treasure, leaving me in the boate, and towing it by the ship in the midst of the sea, left mee with bread and water for two dayes, but without oare, sayle or hope; yet such, and so favourable was my destinie, as within that time a Pirat scouring the seas tooke mee up, who not long after was set upon by another. But then did the first arme me to serve him, which in gratitude I did, and so well defended him as we had the victorie by the the death of the other, slaine with my hand: for requitall whereof, he bestowed the new won Barke upon me, and men to serve me.[52]

25. Sandringal now vows to recover the Princess he betrayed using his own pirate bark and, it emerges, he has kidnapped Urania in the belief that she is the lost Antissia. When the mistake is discovered, there is an awkward pause amongst the group as they struggle to assimilate the extent of Sandringal's treachery: "[t]hus they remained, the pirate vexed, Urania grieved, Parselius in soul tormented […] all sitting with arms crossed and eyes cast down upon the earth except the pirate, whose mind was busied with higher thoughts, none knowing to what end they would have ascended had not a voice awaked them" warning them of the approach of another pirate "the great Pirat of Syracusa, whose force was thereabouts too well knowne".[53] The new threat breaks the pause as Sandringal arms Parselius, and the fight starts:

    being grapled, Parselius encountered the chiefe Pirat; Sandringal a blacke Knight, who was so strong and valiant, as Sandringal gaind much honour so long to hold out with him. Parselius kild his enemy, when at that instant the black Knight strake the head of Sandringal from his shoulders, which Parselius seeing, "Farewell Sandringal," said he, "now are Antissia and Leandrus well reveng'd for thy treason.[54]

26. Both pirates die in the same instant: in Urania pirates are punished, it seems in straightforward terms, for their crimes, and there appears to be no way for Sandringal to be re-assimilated into Rumanian society. Similarly "the great pirate of Syracusa", who the Black Knight – Leandrus in disguise – has been forced to serve, also, it emerges, was seeking pardon for his crimes. As Leandrus later recounts, the pirate Parselius killed was martially impressive: he "had as much strength and skill, as in any one man need remaine".[55] He also treated Leandrus well since "knowing me, and some power I have with the King of Cecile, my deere and worthy friend Perissus his uncle, whose excellent company I gain'd in Achaya […] this man, on condition I would mediate for him to the King, or his Nephew, let me go at libertie, and arm'd in his ship, till such time as we fortun'd to land; alwaies concluded, that while I was with him, I should defend him with my best meanes".[56] However, like Sandringal, this pirate is not able to make amends for his abdication of orthodox national identity through piracy, and both die in combat as textual retribution for their piracy. There appears no possibility of re-assimilation for pirates.
    
    
27. Yet, the politics of piracy in Urania are not as clear cut as this outcome would seem to imply.[57] In 1612 James offered, reluctantly, amnesty to English pirates through a General Pardon with, as David Hebb describes, twelve pirate captains and their crews taking up the King's offer.[58] James' offer of amnesty was controversial since the King was forced to it by the inability of his navy to deal with the problem of piracy. In other words, it was a policy of weakness rather than strength, signaling the nation's maritime failures or, as the Privy Council put it, it was "more for the King's honour to consume them all than to accept any to mercy".[59] It is possible to read the pirate amnesty in Urania in a similar way. Since pardons for pirates are merely a possibility rather than a reality in Book One it is difficult to establish with certainty Wroth's views on this matter. The narrative seems carefully balanced since Sandringal is represented with some sympathy, but nevertheless Urania and others' reaction to his treason is telling. His use of piracy to recover the Princess is again ambiguous since he is seeking to make amends through the further use of crime, yet his motives are good, and his treatment of his captives is courteous. Sandringal is a man who has embraced piracy reluctantly as the only avenue now open to him, and he is represented as an elite, gentlemanly pirate who has no thoughts of plunder or rape. The text even makes an effort to rehabilitate the "great pirate of Syracusa", who similarly has qualities that could be serviceable to a nation state. Hence, it is possible to view both pirates sympathetically, perhaps indicating that the narrative, at least in part, mourns their demise, and that they perhaps should be offered General Pardon as King James had done to his English subjects. Yet, as is clear from the way they are dispatched by the text's heroic figures, Parselius and Leandrus, there is no strategic necessity to offer pirates' amnesty as, in contrast to James' ineffectual navy, pirates in Urania can be brought to justice.[60] In other words, Book One's failure to reincorporate these pirates is politically ambiguous.
     
28. The issue of pardons for pirates is revisited in Book Two. There is only one depiction of piracy in this later section, but it is an unambiguously positive representation of an Italian pirate, Dolimandro, who rescues Dolorindus and Antissia (who by this time is King of Negroponte and has married Antissia) from the evil giant Limorando, who is in the service "to the unlawfull but usurping Sophye of Percia".[61] As we have seen Book Two was most likely composed in the mid-1620s; as such it belongs to the last years of James' reign, when the King's foreign policy was increasingly at odds with the wishes of his more warlike subjects, including Wroth's lover William Pembroke, the man Amphilanthus "shadows" in the narrative.[62] Dolimandro, "a mighty Piratt rovinge alonge the seas"  boards Dolindorus' ship only to be immediately "boorded by another ship", commanded by Limorando who, as the "fiercest and cruellest esteemed of any in all thos partes" tries to "ruin all such as showld gainsay his [the Sophy's] title ore seeke the delicate and Lawfull hiers right".[63] In other words Limorando's activities at sea clearly mark him out as a pirate, more precisely a corsair, one of the Muslim pirates who roamed the Mediterranean attacking Christian shipping, whose depredations were at their height in the 1620s and 1630s.[64] A fierce fight ensues between the two pirates, with Dolorindus and Dolimandro, previously "tow ennimy like ships" which now "joine in friendly defence, and the piratt to arme Dolorindus in a most costly and stronge armour", but nevertheless the giant takes them prisoner.[65]

    The brave piratt also was subject to his mercy, who now studied all meanes to help the princes, from his hart hating that such bravery and sweetnes showld bee under such Villany and bace usage […] Wherfor though he was forced in showe to yield, yet hee resolved to finde some way wherby hee might free them and him self from this bondage, and soe patiently hee yielded his ship, carriage and all, with him self, into the Giants hands, conditionally that the ladys honors were safe.[66]

29. However, the giant reneges on the agreement, since as a "Turk" he "thought itt against his owne religion to holde faithe with infidels, as hee termed Christians, [and] resolved to satisfy him self in his bacer desirs", that is to rape Antissia.[67] Antissia's plight inspires the "brave piratt" – an Italian by birth – who "though fierce in sight yet never was knowne to doe any ignoble ore disloyall act".[68] Hence, when the giant decides to throw a party and get drunk, foolishly releasing Antissia, Dolorindus and Dolimandro from their "bolts and Irons", Dolimandro takes advantage of the giant's inebriation to "sease" him and "strake him to the hart" with a "Turkish knife".[69]
    
    
30. After Dolimandro's heroic defeat of the giant, he relates the story of his life prior to becoming a pirate. Dolimandro is already acquainted with Antissia since he had been "Squier to Amphilanthus att that time when hee was pleased to bee or showe to bee servante to this Lady Antissia".[70] But, he relates how he:

    left my master; after that, taking to the Albanian war, ther was taken prisoner, after made a galley slave, thence came in time to rule a galley, and soe came to bee master my self, and then liking fighting, and especially bouties, I came to this greatnes, to be the chiefe Piratt of thes parts, and keept all in awe till thes stragling Giants of Percia came into these quarters, on whom I now Vowe onely Vengance.[71]

31. This history confirms Dolimandro's worth, as it becomes apparent that his piracy was not an abdication of either national or religious identity. Rather his piracy is a crusade against the "Turk", represented here as the monstrous and incontinent "Giants of Percia". In contrast to Sandringal or the unnamed pirate in Book One who both die, it appears Dolimandro is able to regain his lost allegiance.
     
32. It is important to establish the reasons why Dolimandro is re-assimilated when the other pirates are not. Distinctions are being drawn between their piracies as Dolimandro is clearly welcome at court (though the text merely indicates he is likely to be pardoned rather than actually showing it). In the absence of the King and Queen, Dolimandro decides to go:

    in search of his first master [Amphilanthus], giving order to his servants to settle all things well and in readdines against his returne, which showld bee with all speed after hee had kissed his masters hands, from whom hee doubted nott butt to have commission to goe on in his resolved course against the Giants, which command hee likewise left with his followers and ships, yet with strict command to use all Christian ships with kindness and Christian knights and Princes with respect.[72]

33. Piracy here is not represented as a crime; in fact, when directed against the "Turks" it appears to be something of a patriotic duty. Dolimandro's mission to "kiss his master's hand" will, he believes, result in the issuing of letters of "commision" to resume his policy of eradicating Turkish forces. In other words, Dolimandro seeks letters of marque from Amphilanthus, King of Naples. His actual activities at sea will not change, but their legal status will. Piracy is represented here as a useful phenomenon, since in times of national need able seamen could be usefully employed. The text appears to support a flexible attitude to the crime like that of Elizabeth I in the "Long 1590s", where serviceable men can be reincorporated into orthodox national identity despite a history of violence at sea. In other words it appears then that piracy is viewed differently in the two parts of Urania and it is important to consider what this alteration might signify.
     
34. There are several likely reasons for the alterations in the ways piracy is depicted in Book Two. First, in the 1620s the perception of the threat that "Turks" represented to the nation increased, as English towns and cities suffered high-profile attacks: the coast of the West country was repeatedly raided, a Turkish pirate ship was captured in the Thames estuary in October 1617, and in 1621 Vice Admiral Sir Robert Mansell led an unsuccessful assault on Algiers, much to James' chagrin.[73] Second, increased political and diplomatic tension between England and her neighbours, particularly Spain and France in the 1620s, made good mariners a precious commodity for actual or future use in the navy.[74] Implicit in Wroth's representation of Dolimandro's rehabilitation is a sense of nostalgia for the reign and policies of Elizabeth I, where a more flexible attitude to what constituted "piracy" allowed serviceable individuals to be reincorporated by the state. Nostalgia for past glory under Elizabeth was also widely understood as coded criticism of James' regime.[75] Finally, several prominent ex-pirates, for example Henry Mainwaring, had been reincorporated into society through the issue of "pardons" for their crimes. As Peter Earle recounts "[t]his gentleman pirate was so fully taken back into the English fold that he was knighted two years later and served with distinction in various public offices and in the Royal Navy".[76] Famously Mainwaring, like Dolimandro, never attacked the shipping of his home nation, and finished his career as an admiral and a knight.[77]
     
35. Dolimandro's pardon has political implications. Superficially his situation seems to support the wisdom of King James' General Pardon. Yet, there is a crucial distinction: Dolimandro wishes to be a privateer in the employ of Amphilanthus, a monarch whose diplomacy and foreign accomplishments as "Master of the greatest part of the Westerne World" exceed those of the English King. Wroth's representation of Amphilanthus appropriates the imperial iconography of the Stuart King not as a compliment to the perspicacity of James' wily indirect action but rather as a way of highlighting the failures of Rex Pacificus. Amphilanthus chooses to pardon Dolimandro: he is not forced to it, like James, by the inability of his navy to capture him. Dolimandro hopes that a pardon will be forthcoming. In other words he is still subservient to his monarch, awaiting signs of favour and forgiveness, unlike the pirate leader Peter Easton who, having a pirate navy of at least twenty ships disdainfully declined to take advantage of the King's pardon, remarking "I am, in a way, a king myself".[78] In Urania Book Two, perhaps, the success of the policy of pirate pardon is, like Amphilanthus' appropriation and betterment of King James' other policies, also designed as a critique. Amphilanthus is a monarch full of military might and epic prowess; he is capable of the kind of direct action that will subdue any pirate. His policy of pirate pardon is based on martial confidence rather than the inability of his forces to best a pirate. Wroth's Urania modifies the ideological assumptions apparent in Sidney's representation of pirates. The later romance continues to use piracy as a key meme, but for Wroth, it seems, anti-epic indirect action based on wily mendacity – which at its largest level refers to King James' international policy – is only appropriate when backed by the ability to undertake direct action. Put another way, for Wroth pirate pardon – which reincorporates serviceable and active men – is to be applauded, but only when their epic qualities do not dwarf those of the monarch that issues the pardon.      
     
36.  In the years between the publication of Old Arcadia in 1580 and the composition of Book Two of Urania in the early-to-mid 1620s, England's maritime history is full of acts of extreme violence at sea and, as a result, the ways these actions were perceived and regulated was of considerable concern. For the last eighteen years of Elizabeth's reign  the nation was at war, and for all of James' rule the nation was at peace; hence the ways in which "pirates" and "piracy" were defined and regulated were equally distinct between the two regimes. "Pirates" are also represented differently in prose romances written in the late sixteenth - and early seventeenth-centuries, though these alterations were not necessarily in tandem with government policy. In fact these texts' debates concerning who is a "pirate" and what constitutes "piracy" should be recognised as important indicators of a romance's political orientation, as expressions of support for or disparagement of "pirate" characters, as well as disputes over how piracy is defined and controlled, become an increasingly sophisticated generic feature.