The Poetics of Piracy by Fuchs Barbara;

Author:Fuchs, Barbara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

In Shakespeare’s Age the English Youth inspir’d,

Lov’d, as they fought, by him and Beauty fir’d.

’Tis yours to crown the Bard, whose Magick Strain

Cou’d charm the Heroes of that glorious Reign,

Which humbled to the Dust the Pride of Spain.

While the prologue simply sweeps all predecessors under the green rug of natural Shakespearean inspiration, the epilogue pointedly avoids the fact that Spain—dusty though her pride might be—provided the source material for the play the audience is encouraged to applaud. Together, the paratexts erase the play’s source in Cervantes to enshrine Shakespeare as origin and bathe the text in nostalgia for Elizabethan exploits both poetic and pugnacious.

In his recent edition of Double Falshood, Hammond contextualizes the jingoism of the paratexts by noting how by the 1720s Shakespeare himself had become a powerful brand of Englishness, to be sought after and fought over by different political factions. Hammond notes “a general sense that Shakespeare, rapidly coming to be seen as the greatest voice of his country’s Elizabethan golden age, was himself worth co-opting as a spokesman of supposedly timeless and national virtues.”39 Crucially, Shakespeare serves to effect restoration and restitution—operations analogous to those of the editor of mangled texts (Shakespeare Restor’d) or the redactor of lost plays (Double Falshood). In this sense, the framing of Double Falshood aligns itself perfectly with Theobald’s earlier project, the Memoirs of Sir Walter Raleigh, which he published in 1719.

In this strongly jingoistic text, which Hammond describes as “hagiographic,” Theobald mounts a defense of Raleigh the privateer against Spanish intrigues, restoring the reputation tarnished by his execution under James. Christine Gerrard identifies Raleigh as the most useful figure for channeling what she calls “political Elizabethanism” in the era: whereas it was somewhat challenging to claim Elizabeth herself as a promoter of the British empire, given her “personal reluctance to initiate colonial expansion,” Raleigh, “As a naval hero, poet, historian, and Renaissance man of letters who incurred the disfavour of the monarchy . . . became a potent symbol for patriotic values held in contempt by the administration.” So strong was this identification of Raleigh with British greatness, Gerrard argues, that “The Elizabethan naval cult might in one sense more properly be called a Ralegh cult.”40

In restoring Raleigh, Theobald revives the notorious figure of the Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who figures so prominently in seventeenth-century accounts of Machiavellian Spanish plotting (including, as I note in Chapter 3, Middleton’s A Game at Chess) as the central antagonist to the brave and patriotic privateer. The subtitle announces: “In which are Inserted, The Private Intrigues between the Count of Gondamore, the Spanish Ambassador, and the Lord Salisbury, then Secretary of State.”41 Raleigh, Theobald notes, “had the Advantage of a stirring Age to second his Ambition,” and proceeded to “humble the insolence of Spain”42 at Cadiz and in the Azores. In Theobald’s version, Raleigh fell from favor under James primarily because he resisted the peace with Spain. He thus becomes a synecdoche for an Elizabethan antagonism to Spain far preferable to Jacobean amity, and the unjust persecution of that earlier, glorious age by a latter and diminished one.

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