Pirates and Pretending: Books and Videos to Get Your Little Pirate Going

Ah, the theatrical gorgeousness of being a pirate! With an eye patch and swordplay. Flying the skull-and-crossbones. The lively lingo: “Avast!” and “keelhauling” and “walking the plank.” Parrots and treasure maps, doubloons and pieces of eight. The easy mention of–and wonderfully named--Blackbeard and Captain Kidd.

It all began, more or less, with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island where the boy Jim Hawkins falls into the company of buccaneers lead by that rogue Long John Silver, the peg-leg pirate with a parrot named Captain Flint. But as a realistic as that novel was, the Pirate Story soon veered in the theatrical direction of Penzance.

A few years later, James Barrie repositioned the Pirate Story to fantasyland when he transported Stevenson’s buccaneers to Neverland. That Peter Pan was first a play may not be surprising. Its villain Captain Hook is theatrical and gorgeous, more dashing than swashbuckling, all smarted out in his jacket and frills. Dustin Hoffman plays a wonderful version of him in Steven Spielberg’s sequel to the story, the movie Hook.

Of course, it’s not a far step from there to Johnny Depp in the wonderful film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (I confess that I don’t much care for the sequel, Dead Man’s Chest). Depp moved the seagoing villain in an even more histrionic direction by adding a gay sensibility to the mincing menace of Hoffman’s Hook. With his eye shadow and swish, Depp’s Captain Jack Swallow is doubly theatrical: RuPaul playing a pirate.

To understand the Pirate Story’s vector into increasing heights of staginess, we can turn to a lovely book written between the two world wars: Swallows and Amazons. Arthur Ransome’s children’s novel tells of youngsters passing their summer holidays on a lake in England, making their time more interesting by pretending to be pirates, dodging each other in their sailboats and raiding each others’ camps. They also harass Uncle Jim, an adult and a writer who is trying to finish a book, by fancying him (in a bow to Treasure Island) “Captain Flint,” warning him with the Black Spot, and attacking his cottage.

Ransome’s book reminds us how youngsters before puberty spend extended time in make-believe, rehearsing life in theatrical ways. How many adults have attended backyard “shows” put on by kids for neighborhood audiences? How many can recall afternoons spent imagining with playmates: “You be the Teacher and we’ll be the students” or “You be the Baby and we’ll be the parents”? These prolonged stays in periods of pretending are a perquisite of the young. To be sure, there are beefy adults who gather on weekends in medieval attire at meetings of the Society for Creative Anachronism and others who become Confederate soldiers for Civil War re-enactments, but the grown-up who comes to work on Monday dressed as a Star Trek Commander is cause for apprehension and concern. With some exceptions, protracted make-believe is mostly for the young.