During the Royal Shakespeare Company's Christmas 2013 production of Wendy and Peter Pan, the reluctant pirate Martin (Jamie Wilkes) replies to Wendy Darling (Fiona Button), “but I don't think pirates are meant to be wise,” when she praises him for his good advice. The exchange takes place in the confines of Captain Hook's ship as the pair assess their chances of escape and, more broadly, discuss whether they can shape their destinies and move beyond the constraints that gender and generic role (as “pirate” and “damsel,” respectively) place upon them. Written by Ella Hickson and directed by Jonathan Munby, Wendy and Peter Pan is a new version of J. M. Barrie's classic play and book Peter Pan (1904), which emphasizes Wendy's journey and her swashbuckling rather than Peter's or her brothers'. In Hickson's play, Wendy comes to realize the limits of the damsel-in-distress role that the male characters want her to occupy and learns to delight in her own agency. As such, Wendy and Peter Pan certainly conforms to Neil Rennie's argument in his new book, Treasure Neverland, that one of the key changes in recent depictions of pirates is their emphasis on the “broad.” Rennie writes: “[T]he popular pirate of the twentieth century was increasingly female” (244). The Royal Shakespeare Company's production also confirms Rennie's analysis that recent incarnations of male pirates are reduced, “emasculated” figures compared to their literary antecedents: Hook (Guy Henry) isn't very frightening and appears, at times, domesticated and tender, and Peter (Sam Swann) is easily and repeatedly defeated when sword fighting.

Rennie's learned book Treasure Neverland establishes for the first time a pirate family tree for both real and imaginary pirates over the three-hundred-year period between what is known as the “Golden Age of Piracy” (i.e., 1660–1730) and the present day, tracking and tracing a complex web of interrelationships. In so doing, he explodes perhaps the biggest myth of all about the figure of the popular pirate, a belief often repeated in both literary and historical studies, that imaginary pirates in eighteenth- to twenty-first-century Anglo-American culture were based, in whole or part, on the “real-life” exploits of pirates such as Captain Kidd, Mary Read and Ann Bonny, and Blackbeard, aka. Edward Teach. In fact, Rennie shows that accounts of the lives of these individuals, right from the get-go, were fictionalized. Even though in each case a real-life individual who turned to piracy did exist, the earliest, supposedly true, records of their exploits were some considerable distance from both the scene of the crime and its perpetrator, shown by the ways accounts of the same person and same event contradict, overgo, and outsensationalize each other. Chapter 2 “Yo-Ho-Ho and a Cup of Bumbo,” on Anne Bonny and Mary Read, for instance, shows how small scale, and how short-lived, were these women's lives of crime, yet, because of the novelty of their gender, they were quickly romanticized as figures and accounts of their prowess exaggerated. Piracy, for Rennie, is principally driven by economics: he shows that pirate stories of the violent redistribution of wealth and buried treasure provided, first and foremost, literary capital. Eighteenth-century Grub Street—where stories of outrageous pirate behavior were manufactured and fashioned for, and marketed to, an avid reading public—was the site of production that was central to the rise of the pirate figure, not Tortuga, Madagascar, or Port Royal. No text, according to Rennie, was more important to this process than the General Historye of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, first published in 1724 under the name of Captain Charles Johnson and repeatedly reprinted ever since. What Rennie's book charts, then, are the literary by-ways traveled by generations of fictional pirates, penned by writers such as Lord Byron, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. He shows how these characters have often, mistakenly, been seen as indebted to historical pirates when, in fact, they are the direct descendants of earlier literary traditions. Hickson's diminished Hook thus may be seen to share the characteristics of what Rennie's careful assessment suggests the “real” Bluebeard might actually have been like.

As the joke of the title Treasure Neverland indicates, this is a clever book, and a witty one: 416 pages in length, with 8 example-packed chapters and 26 well-chosen black-and-white illustrations, and costing only forty-five dollars, it is also an exceptionally good value for the money. I have minor quibbles: as a Renaissance specialist, I was frustrated at times by the book's lack of detailed engagement with the ways earlier literary pirate figures, and their typologies, intersected with those under discussion here. Chapter 1, “Every and All the Averys” (there is no introduction), provides a short survey of some of this earlier material, but it never engages fully with how the repeated use of pirate figures in the popular Renaissance genre of prose romance (mentioned briefly in relation to Shakespeare's late plays and their influence on James Fenimore Cooper on p. 149) intersects with later pirate typologies. In typical pantomime fashion, I kept shouting “look behind you,” willing the book to trace the pirate family tree further back in time to consider how prominent fictional and factual earlier pirate types—the renegade who deserts country and religion, the pirate-catcher-turned-thief, the alienated courtier, and the disbanded and underemployed privateer—influence their real and imaginary descendants. The book would also have benefitted from the inclusion of an introduction (or the addition of an extra section in chapter 1) that précised the argument to come; and, generally, more extensive and explicit signposting of the developing argument would have broken up sometimes dense and complex material, and helped to orient the reader. But these are small points against what is an impressive and compelling study. In sum, Treasure Neverland is a fine, original, and challenging book; undoubtedly, it will swiftly become essential reading for all those interested in Golden Age to contemporary pirate studies.