Rafael Sabatini and The Sea-Hawk (1915)

Abstract

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) read and wrote five languages before he mastered English; his command of these, and of many additional languages as he grew older, enabled him to go to a rich variety of primary sources; of all the authors under consideration here, he may well have been the most linguistically sophisticated. Because he was born in Jesi, a small town in the marches of central Italy, he was familiar from the beginning with the odour of mouldering medieval walls and the sight of crumbling palaces. His father, Vincenzo Sabatini, was a tenor who spoke no English; his mother, Anna Trafford Sabatini, an English-born soprano, taught her son relatively little about her own language before he went off to schools in Switzerland and Portugal. Only after he sailed to England as a teenager, in the early 1890s, did he become proficient in the language that he would use as an author from the turn of the century on. He struggled (unsuccessfully) to like the disciplines necessary for success in business. Not until 1904, when he published The Tavern Knight, did he convince himself that his destiny lay in competition with such professional craftsmen as Stanley J. Weyman; and not until Bardelys the Magnificent, published in 1906, did he emerge as a popular, reliable supplier of entertainments.