Pirates: More Than Just Thieves
...ach other for the most trivial reasons. They burned and plundered lands, seized booty everywhere, and exposed the goods of the poor to be plundered by their wretched followers” (Babcock 75). Throughout much of history the name pirate has become synonymous with that of a high-sea criminal but in Shakespeare’s Hamlet pirates are shown in a very different, somewhat more human light. Although in the beginning Shakespeare begins telling of Hamlet’s incident with the pirates by calling them ‘a pirate of very warlike appointment’ he quickly changes the tone by admitting to the merciful way in which these men treated Hamlet by returning him to Denmark (Shakespeare 113). Like the pirates in Hamlet, many men who became pirates did not fall into the stereotypical cutthroat category. “Not all pirates of the Elizabethan era were vicious cutthroats. Some were adventurers from merchant families and gentry who treated their victims mercifully. Some had served with the royal merchant navies, and had lost their legal sea-going employment as a result of hard times” (Wentersdorf 439). This knowledge has led several critics to believe that in Scene III when Hamlet discovers the king’s plan to send him to England he makes arrangements with the pirates to pick him up and return him home. That he has discovered so early in the play that he will be taking a trip to England gives him more than ample time to make arrangements with the pirates. When George Miles presented the theory, in 1870 that Hamlet knew and had made a deal with the pirates in order to get back to Denmark, many Shakespeare critics scoffed at its possible truth (Farley-Hills 320). While it is still not widely accepted as the reason for the pirates in the plot of the play it has become a more popular explanation as to their involvement. As a counter argument, Karl Wentersdorf says “the pirate incident in Hamlet would not have seemed as melodramatic, fortuitous, and improbable to the Elizabethans as it appears to some modern critics, for the simple reason that in Shakespeare’s day the seas between England and the Continent swarmed with pirates” (Wentersdorf 436). While both positions are convincing, the shear coincidence that a pirate would attack the very ship that hamlet was on and then sail to Denmark, letting him go unharmed and with having nothing to give as payment to ensure his safe arrival makes Miles’ theory more palatable, especially when the reader notices lines in the play that seem to indicate its truth. “Hamlet’s remark ‘but they knew what they did,’ sounds suspiciously like an acknowledgement that the whole episode was under control in a way not usually associated with fights of the sea, and his description of their behavior as ‘thieves of mercy’ is not incompatible with Miles’ view that the meeting had been prearranged” (Farley-Hills 325). Knowing the nature of pirates, as people who want to loot and plunder, taking all that they can get their hands on in order to get money, it is “Difficult to believe that by chance ...