Scaffold Performances
The Politics of Pirate Execution
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20075063 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Claire Jowitt (0000-0001-5232-7003, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Pages | 151-168 |
| Publication date | 2007-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Pirates? the Politics of Plunder, 1550-1650 (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1057/9780230627642_10 |
| OpenAlex | W2499849561 |
| ISBN | 9780230627642 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 15 |
This essay explores the politics of pirate executions. Focusing on the pirate scaffold speeches of Thomas Walton and Clinton Atkinson contained in the anonymous pamphlet Clinton, Purser and Arnold, to their countreymen wheresoever (1583), in Thomas Heywood's and William Rowley's tragic-comedy Fortune by Land and Sea (1607–09), and the execution of the 'pirate' Walter Ralegh in 1618, it seeks to read depictions of the manner of pirates' deaths and their scaffold behaviour in political terms.1 The essay examines the various ways pirates were able, sometimes in surprising and resourceful ways, to use their scaffolds as a pulpit from which to express their antagonism to the state that condemns them. The figures of Purser, Clinton, and Ralegh, may not initially seem to have much in common, since Ralegh was executed in 1618 for treason not piracy. Yet 'piracy' against Spanish settlements in Guiana in 1617 was also part of the case against him. Furthermore, the pirates and Ralegh are also explicitly linked in terms of theatrical representation, since, as this essay shall establish, one of the subtexts for Heywood's and Rowley's representation of their play's privateer hero, Young Forrest, (whose fate is contrasted with that of the pirates Purser and Clinton), is the career of Ralegh. Using the work of Michel Foucault, J. A. Sharpe and Peter Lake concerning the subversive politics of scaffold speeches more generally, this essay explores the conventions specific to pirate scaffolds
Art · Comedy · HERO · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Representation (politics) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Maritime Security and History · Philippine History and Culture
Cheap print and popular piety, 1550-1640
The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642
Discipline and Punish
Sir Walter Ralegh and his Readers in the Seventeenth Century
Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns
Turning Turk
Trading with the Enemy 1585–1604
Discipline and Punish
Elizabethan Privateering
Last Dying Speeches
A Nation of Pirates
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,06 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2008 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |