"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>
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]
[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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
[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]
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]
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]
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]
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]
[1] Written around 1580, Sidney's romance has come to be called the Old Arcadia, since he revised it at some point (most likely between 1582 and 1584) before his death in 1586. In 1590, Sidney's friend and executor, Fulke Greville, published the revised incomplete version as the New Arcadia, and in 1593 a third version was published, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, under the direction of Sidney's sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke. The last version republished the New Arcadia as though it were complete by joining it to the later part of the Old Arcadia, giving the impression of a seamless whole.
[2] Peter Earle, The Pirate Wars (London: Methuen, 2004), 17-35.
[3] Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 106.
[4] Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), xviv.
[5] Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: OUP, 1999), 305.
[6] Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 184-206. See also Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979); Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000).
[7] On Sidney's political analogies see also Brian C. Lockley, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature, (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), 47-79.
[8] Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 200.
[9] Sidney, The Old Arcadia, 306-7.
[10] Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 205.
[11] Henry A. Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World. (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 14, 260-70.
[12] Ormerod, Piracy in the Ancient World, 266-7.
[13] Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story, trans. Sir Walter Lamb, ed. J. R. Morgan., (London: Everyman, 1997). The text was rediscovered in 1526, translated into Latin in 1534, and into English by Thomas Underdowne in the late sixteenth century. For further details of the publication history of translations of Heliodorus' original see Charles Whibley, "Introduction", An Aethiopian History written in Greek by Heliodorus, Englished by Thomas Underdowne, Anno 1587 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), viv-xv.
[14] Victor Skretkowicz, "Sidney and Amyot: Heliodorus in the Structure and Ethos of the New Arcadia", Review of English Studies, N.S. xxvii (1976): 170-4.
[15] Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: the Rise of Prose Fiction. (Aldershot & Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 42-107; John J. Winkler, "The Mendacity of Kalasiris and the Narrative Strategy of Heliodoros' Aithiopika", Yale Classical Studies 27 (1982): 93-158.
[16] See Christopher Harding, "'Hostis Humani Generis' – The Pirate as Outlaw in the Early Modern Law of the Sea", in Claire Jowitt, ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder 1550-1650, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 20-38.
[17]"Privateer" The Oxford English Dictionary Online 2007.<http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50188923?query_typeord&queryword=PRIVATEER&first=1&max_to_show=10&sort_type=alpha&search_id=kgcm-1Hbisj-208&result_place=1>
[18] See Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 69-76.
[19] See Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); John Sugden, Sir Francis Drake, (London: Pimlico, 1996); Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novels: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 39-68; D. B. Quinn, ed., Sir Francis Drake as seen by his Contemporaries. (Providence, Rhode Island: John Carter Brown Library, 1996).
[20] Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering during the Spanish War 1585-1603. (Cambridge: CUP, 1964), 15-6.
[21] For details see Claire Jowitt, "Rogue Traders: National Identity, Empire and Piracy 1580-1640", in Tom Betteridge ed., Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 53-70; Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 18.
[22] For discussions of Sidney's life see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991); Jan Van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney, eds, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: Brill/Leiden University Press, 1986); A.C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1977); Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
[23] Fulke Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, written by Sir Philippe Sidnei. (London: Printed by Iohn Windet for William Ponsonbie, 1590), B4r.
[24] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, B5r.
[25] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, B5r.
[26] See Quinn, Sir Francis Drake as seen by his Contemporaries.
[27] Harry Kelsey, Sir John Hawkins: Queen Elizabeth's Slave Trader, (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003), 52-69.
[28] Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, plunder and settlement: Maritime enterprise and the genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630. (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), 116-28.
[29] Christopher Hodgkins, Reforming Empire: Protestant Colonialism and Conscience in British Literature, (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 87.
[30] For discussion concerning the variations between the Greville's and Mary Sidney Herbert's editions of New Aracdia and their editorial decisions see Joel Davis, "Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke", Studies in Philology, 101 (2004): 401-430.
[31] For discussion see Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 3-50.
[32] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, F2r.
[33] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Ee2r.
[34] Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 249.
[35] See Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), 118-38.
[36] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Ee2v.
[37] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Ee2v.
[38] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, Ee3v.
[39] Steve Mentz, Romance for Sale, 89.
[40] Barbara Fuchs, Romance, (New York: Routledge, 2004), 66; David Quint, "The Boat of Romance and Renaissance Epic", in Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee eds., Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985), 178-202 (179).
[41] Greville, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, F8v.
[42] Earle, The Pirate Wars, 54-67; David Delison Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 1616-1642. (Aldershot: Scolar, 1994), 1-16.
[43] Josephine Roberts, ed., "Introduction", The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, (Temple, Arizona: Renaissance English Text Society, 1995), xviii.
[44] Mary Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 143-4.
[45] A Royal Proclamation By the Kung. A Proclamation against Pirates, Whitehall, 8 January 1609, in Daniel Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 353. For discussion see Claire Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589-1642, (Manchester: MUP, 2003), 149.
[46] Roberts, "Introduction", The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, xxxix-lv.
[47] Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne and Their Contemporaries, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983).
[48] Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Practice, (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 1-12.
[49] J. Nichols, The Progress and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols., (London: John Nichols & Son, 1823), II, 50.
[50] Roberts, "Introduction", The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, xliv.
[51] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 30.
[52] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 31.
[53] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 31.
[54] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 32.
[55] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 45.
[56] Wroth, The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 45.
[57] For discussion of other contemporary texts which use representations of pirates as political comment see Mark Hutchings, "Acting Pirates: Converting A Christian Turned Turk", in Jowitt ed., Pirates? The Politics of Plunder, 90-104; Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 157-75.
[58] See Hebb, Piracy and the English Government, 1-16; Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, 31-2.
[59] Earle, The Pirate Wars, 61.
[60] N. A. M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain 660-1649 (London & New York: Norton, 1999), 347-78.
[61] Mary Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, (Temple, Arizona: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), 54.
[62] Roberts, "Introduction", The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, xxi-xxiii.
[63] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 54.
[64] Earle, The Pirate Wars, 39-52; see also Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe, (London: Routledge, 2000), 93-111.
[65] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 54.
[66] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 54.
[67] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 54.
[68] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 55.
[69] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 55-6.
[70] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 56.
[71] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 57.
[72] Wroth, The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania, 57.
[73] Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, 4-5;
[74] Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 347-63.
[75] See Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture, 153-87.
[76] Earle, The Pirate Wars, 63.
[77] Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 348.
[78] Christopher Lloyd, English Corsairs on the Barbary Coast. (London: Collins, 1981), 66.
Works Cited