Piracy, Hospitality, and the Sea in Early Modern English Drama

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of hospitality, this chapter explores the form of accommodation offered renegade pirates on the North African coast in the early seventeenth century. Its investigation is focused through two English plays set in Tunis: Robert Daborne’s _A Christian Turned Turk_ (first performed 1609–1612) and Philip Massinger’s _The Renegado_ (1623–1624). In these plays and beyond, it argues, European pirates who had converted to Islam were presented as having exorbitant appetites closely linked to the sea, a site understood as fundamentally divorced from the social and religious codes that establish moral behavior. The argument is advanced through sections examining the legal status of bodies of water and of piracy in early modern Europe; the place of Tunis and Algiers in relation to the Ottoman Empire of the early seventeenth century; and the wider understanding of the Mediterranean world in plays staged in early modern England. The conclusion then considers the implications of these dramatic representations of piracy, Tunis, and its adjoining waters for wider understandings of hospitality—and its hazards—in the Mediterranean world.