Virolet and Martia the Pirate’s Daughter: Gender and Genre in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Double Marriage

Abstract

Around 1621 the King’s Men first performed a play by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, The Double Marriage . 1 This is one of a series of plays written by Fletcher and Massinger for the King’s Men in the last years of the reign of James I, many of which return to the seemingly interlinked figures of the pirate and the Amazon. They include, in addition to The Double Marriage , Fletcher and Massinger’s The Sea Voyage (1622), Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1619–21), Massinger’s The Unnatural Combat ( c . 1624–25) and Love’s Cure , which may date in its extant form from around 1625. 2 The Double Marriage and The Sea Voyage in particular demonstrate a complex interaction between piracy and political and sexual unease in the Jacobean fin de siècle , an unease also exemplified in the Hic Mulier and Haec Vir pamphlets of 1620. 3 The Sea Voyage juxtaposes a pirate who has abducted his enemy’s sister with a community of shipwrecked women who have set up an Amazonian community, while The Double Marriage features not only a pirate but also an Amazonian pirate’s daughter, involving them both with pressing questions of political legitimacy and tyranny. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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