Capital criminals
Description
While seventeenth-century pirates earned admiration, the eighteenth-century pirate appeared as the worst of all possible criminals. The government fought against pirates through laws and on sea, but a war was waged against them at home also in print. These works bring to the fore questions of discipline and nationalism as writers attempted to explain or to explain away the pirate's rejection of country The first two chapters deal with works that attempt to discipline the pirate. The theme of home present in stories about John Avery, a pirate who established a colony on Madagascar, serves two purposes: it allows England the power to exclude since Avery never successfully returns home, and it presents the definition of a good colonist, one who wishes to be ruled by England and to remain disciplined in spite of the distance that prohibits the disciplining gaze. The second chapter juxtaposes privateer Woodes Rogers' account of his voyage, a primer on disciplining his men without the support from land-based institutions, with Defoe's story of Mary Reed, a female cross-dressing pirate. Because of Reed's gender, she carries a priori for Defoe the qualities necessary to the disciplined privateer The concluding chapters complicate the categories of disciplined and undisciplined subject and the power of print to discipline. Chapter Three explicates John Gay's Polly, in which all European characters demonstrate corruption, while their Indian counterparts retain discipline and honor. Through a parody of Dryden's All For Love, Gay demonstrates that the values of heroic drama embodied in the Indians leave them vulnerable in a time marked not by stable, intrinsic aristocratic honor, but by a new way to assess individuals in a market economy, the values of credit. The last chapter studies a land-based 'pirate,' Jonathan Wild, who styled himself as Thief-Taker General of Great Britain. Wild uses the tools of discipline--the gaze provided by his network of spies and the print culture that allowed him to place ads and engage in public relations--to dupe the public. In turn, works about Wild, including Henry Fielding's comic novel, castigate the public for their role in Wild's success