Combining close readings of adventure drama with a judicious use of contextual materials, Laurie Ellinghausen productively expands upon the “Mediterranean turn” in English studies over the past two decades. In this tightly focused book, she challenges the enduring conception of piracy as a betrayal of the nation to show instead how fully England was implicated in the renegades it produced.
Ellinghausen turns to humoral theory, historical accounts, ballads, and other contextual materials to complicate our understanding of a key set of plays and the historical actors they represent. Her focus is on the intimate connections between renegades and the England that they ostensibly disavow. England's lack of class mobility, she argues, often pushed ambitious or desperate men beyond its borders. More importantly, these renegades’ singular exploits across the Mediterranean and beyond often paradoxically served as exempla for imperial actors who would formalize and systematize their achievements.
Ellinghausen usefully notes the connection between renegado—the traitor to his country or religion—and the older form runagate, which simply designated a wanderer or roving person. This double meaning links perceptions of the renegade, who largely operated outside England, with domestic challenges to authority by “masterless men” and other figures of dislocation. By recovering the disorder within as well as beyond the nation, Ellinghausen broaches the possibility of a public that might have found much to admire in the renegade. Indeed, the probable reception of pirate tales is an important part of her argument.
Beyond profitably revisiting the English adventure plays, Ellinghausen's study complements the challenge by scholars such as Arthur Marotti, Lowell Gallagher, Brian Lockey, and others to the Protestant narrative of English history. Just as Catholics were part of England rather than an external, foreign threat, so are renegades and pirates of England, produced by its social, political, and economic conditions. Ellinghausen's argument for the affective and material bonds between renegades and their communities of origin, moreover, expands the account of the connectedness of captives in the Mediterranean offered by Daniel Hershenzon. Just as captives, far from experiencing social death, maintained close connections to their homes via letters and emissaries, so did pirates and renegades, however loudly denounced, often play crucial roles in the economic wellbeing of their home towns.
Ellinghausen's first chapter, “‘Unquiet Hotspurs’: Stukeley, Vernon, and the Renegade Humour,” is perhaps the least successful, focusing on the often contradictory implications of humoral heatedness in a dramatic version of Stukeley's exploits. Ellinghausen argues that by invoking Stukeley's humors the play makes him a product of his nation, thus raising the question of how England itself might be breeding its own renegades.
The book hits its stride in chapters 2, “‘We Are of the Sea!’: Masterless Identity and Transnational Context in A Christian Turned Turk” and 3, “‘Lend Us Your Lament’: Purser and Clinton on the Scaffold.” Here, Ellinghausen contrasts dramatic versions of the pirates with other extant accounts, complicating the reception of these transgressive and supposedly reviled figures. Domestic struggles lie at the heart of their stories, however much they may seem to have left England behind. Thus, the pirate and renegade John Ward, whose comeuppance Robert Daborne's A Christian Turned Turk, imagines, may also be constructed as a plucky Englishman, determined “to subvert the determinative power of his lowly origins” (60), especially by the diverse audiences who saw the play and recognized its fictions. The pirates Purser and Clinton, for their part, are revealed as figures fully entangled in their communities, despite the drama's insistence on their extrajudicial status. In hanging ballads and other accounts, their appeal to compassion emphasizes their emotional and material connections to English publics.
Chapter 4, “‘Extravagant Thoughts’: The Sherley Brothers and the Future of Renegade England,” suggests how these most exceptional of siblings, who led extraordinarily checkered careers largely outside England, could paradoxically serve as inspiration and example. In this light, renegade activity—individual transgression, defying norms, aggression—could nonetheless become a pattern for empire.
An intriguing coda projects the figure of the renegade into the criminal biographies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and thus into the English novel, suggesting that renegade tales were one of the many forms that contributed to its development. Ellinghausen identifies in the early narratives that are her focus a similar tension between social order and individual, entrepreneurial transgression to that which critics have identified for the novel. The cultural narrative of “rampant individualism, accompanied by illicit aspiration and self-regard, taking the form of rogue economic agency” (138), she suggests, links the renegade tales and its later avatars. One might add to this the inherent perspectivism of any account of renegades, which also anticipates the novel.
Though Ellinghausen revisits texts that a generation of scholars have brought into the academic fold, she casts the figure of the renegade in a new light, insisting on the domestic significance of figures often admired as well as reviled, and fully connected to their native England. By highlighting the domestic stakes of antiheroes who supposedly renounced their nation, her book contributes to ongoing critical efforts to resituate the insular—both England and English studies—in broader contexts.
