Elizabeth among the Pirates: Gender and the Politics of Piracy in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part 1

Abstract

In the first part of The Fair Maid of the West (published in 1631, but probably composed between 1596–1597 and 1603),

Heywood’s character Bess—short, of course, for Elizabeth—is, on one level an allegory of Elizabeth I.¹ Jean Howard has argued that Bess “owes much to representations of Elizabeth I, ” since the problems Bess experiences—she is both desired by and threatening to the male characters in Heywood’s text—are precisely identical to the oscillating and anxious representations of Elizabeth produced in the last decades of her reign. But she is “ not simply a screen for Elizabeth”: her epithet fair maid “of the West, ” according to Howard, associates her with a “particular region of the country, not with the court” suggesting “a form of nationalism that defined itself in relationship to the land of England and its distinct regions… as an alternative to the monarch-based ideologies of dynastic statehood.”² Howard is absolutely right to signal the importance of this section of Bess’s epithet, but this essay reads “of the West” rather differently. In the late sixteenth century, the English West Country was particularly associated with piracy and its legitimate twin, privateering—Elizabeth’s seadogs Ralegh, Drake, Hawkins were all from the region.³ Bess’s connections with seaborne crime and how it links with her allegorical role as an avatar of Elizabeth I are explored here in order to understand more fully the significance and implications of her swashbuckling behaviour in the play.