Claire Jowitt’s monograph provides a valuable service in offering the first book-length study of literary representations of early modern piracy. While it complements the recent work of historians and other literary scholars on the topic, the study situates its discussion more fully within the framework of literary history through its detailed survey of representations of piracy in early modern pamphlets, plays, and prose romances. For Jowitt, the “pirate” was a figure of remarkable semantic flexibility: a template through which literary forms and genres could register the effects of England’s entrance into a global economy; a marker of shifting political and commercial alliances; and, quite often, a frame through which writers offered veiled critiques of state policy.

Definitions of piracy are relatively fluid in this period, largely due to the unsettled parameters of what constituted legitimate trade, and the book is most effective when analyzing the ways that the terms of “piracy” dynamically altered to suit changing commercial and political contexts. The opening two chapters concentrate, respectively, on the pamphlet literature surrounding the Elizabethan pirates Purser and Clinton and Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, charting the textual process in which later periods reworked these figures. The chapter on Drake, the stronger of the sections, returns to a figure who has been the subject of a number of recent studies in order to situate accounts of Drake’s circumnavigation in the context of policies governing English overseas commerce. In the Elizabethan incarnation of Drake found in Hakluyt, Drake’s voyage is concerned with the “assessment of future markets” (51), particularly for English cloth, whereas texts of the 1620s harness the image of Drake so as to encourage aristocratic investment in newly founded joint-stock companies and advocate a diversification of markets and commodities.

Chapters 3 and 5 similarly juxtapose Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, in this instance focusing on the genre of romance, as Jowitt examines the influence of Heliodorus and earlier prose narratives on Sidney’s Arcadia before turning to a consideration of the more ambivalent depiction of piracy in Wroth’s Urania and Barclay’s Argenis. In these works, the pirate provides a means for blending the generic models of epic and Romance in order to adapt aristocratic values to commercial settings. Jowitt concedes that she is sometimes basing her analysis on apparently marginal, “throwaway” references to piracy in the texts (137, 147), and, indeed, a more theoretically informed approach would certainly have facilitated a more nuanced reading of these narratives. The discussion is generally on a stronger footing when analyzing the political topicality of the texts: Wroth and Barclay, for instance, not only point to the inconsistencies in James I’s policies toward piracy but also use the figure of the pirate to comment on their monarch’s refusal to intervene in European conflicts.

The discussion of early modern drama in chapters 4 and 6 approaches the plays through a similarly topical lens. The earlier chapter, which surveys references to piracy in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, and others, is understandably hampered by its scope and provides fairly truncated readings of its texts without ever establishing an overarching framework for the section. By contrast, perhaps the strongest section of the study is the latter chapter, which examines four of Philip Massinger’s plays from the 1620s. Massinger’s running commentary on issues such as the proposed Spanish marriage and efforts to rebuild the Royal Navy is a good match for the study’s own methodological focus on coded textual references to historical contexts. But given the fact that many historians, including Jonathan Scott and Thomas Cogswell, have linked the debates of the 1620s and 1630s with the conflicts of the ensuing decades, it is curious that Jowitt’s study retains the 1630s as its terminus point and does not elaborate either on the place of piracy within broader cultural debates of these decades or on the continued resonance of the figure of the pirate in the subsequent period.

Jowitt’s study is a meticulously documented and well-historicized account of the textual representation of piracy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods and will be of value for those studying histories of English commercial, colonial, and imperial expansion. One wishes, however, that this study drew more inspiration from the adventurousness of its topic and was more amenable to taking intellectual and methodological risks. Its analysis tends to adhere to influential critical models, rarely extending the arguments of critics such as Richard Helgerson, David Quint, or Barbara Fuchs in new or unexpected ways. Some of the most original and interesting portions of the study come with its attention to historical figures such as the reformed pirate captain Sir Henry Mainwaring and the Jacobean investor and privateer the Earl of Warwick, and the study would have benefited from a more expanded discussion of the archive surrounding these individuals. Despite the study’s rich informational component, it is also surprisingly thin when situating its argument within broader intellectual and cultural histories, such as empire and international law. The figure of the pirate is a fascinating countertype to the emergent joint-stock company, for instance, a context that was never fully explored within the study. Moreover, for early modern theorists of international law such as Gentili and Grotius, the pirate was linked with other outlaw groups and stateless persons as figures exempt from the protections of the law of nations, a categorization that belies Jowitt’s emphasis on the relative fluidity of piratical identities. Recent interdisciplinary studies by Daniel Heller-Roazen (The Enemy of All [2009]) and Bruce Wathen (Sir Francis Drake [2009]) provide more engaging considerations of early modern piracy, precisely through their ability to address the implications of the topic beyond the strict boundaries of the early modern period and a canonical grouping of literary texts. Nonetheless, Jowitt’s study does helpfully pave the way for future, more capacious analyses of the subject and will be of use for readers due to its comprehensiveness, attention to detail, and productive examination of piracy’s relation to literary forms and genres.