| The present study situates three popular adventure dramas written by Thomas Heywood Fair Maid of the West Parts I and II (1631) and Fortune by Land and Sea (1607-1609), coauthored by William Rowley, alongside early modern discourses on piracy and class structure in order to expose the ways in which Heywood's drama seeks to assert the superiority of the emergent Protestant/Capitalist ethic over the traditional aristocratic one as a key component to English social identity. At the heart of these plays is a complex discourse regarding the legitimacy and efficacy of the existing social hierarchy, and within the dramas, well-established dangers, such as the fluidity and mimicry associated with mercantile groups at sea are replicated in the dual plot structure on land in order to expose a similar destabilization of the hierarchical structure caused by burgeoning social mobility. To this end, Heywood establishes a quasi-class structure of legitimacy among the various seafaring groups and aligns it with the official one on land. Although the traditional structure is ostensibly reinforced, Heywood employs the increased license of the dramatic space in order to call into question the very existence of discrete categories, to challenge the superiority of the aristocracy, and to promote a model of gentility that can incorporate the features of the emerging Capitalist/Protestant ethic. The resulting view of society suggests that "piracy" is not confined to ventures at sea, but is also at work in the looting of the gentility's claim to superiority by the "middling" groups. Further, for their complacency and collaboration, Heywood establishes the aristocracy itself as the primary agent in its own demise. |
