[Contemporary Docs] The Successful Pyrate
The Johnson who wrote The Successful Pirate is unlikely to be the same Johnson who allegedly authored the General History. The former was a popular target of contemporary satirists such as Pope, who describes Johnson in The Dunciad as a writer with “less human genius than God gives an ape,” famous only for “writing a Play every season, and for being at Button’s every day [. . .] He may justly be called a Martyr to obesity, and to have fallen a victim to the rotundity of his parts.”[1]
Johnson’s reputation did, in fact, come in large part as a result of publishing a play every year for almost two decades. The Successful Pyrate is a bit more original than many of his other plays, which were often rehashed (and occasionally, by modern standards, semi-plagiarized) versions of earlier works by other authors.
This staged version is, in a sense, a doubly-fictionalized creation; already, by 1713, the real pirate Avery had been through several fictional incarnations. The ballad included in this project, “A Copy of the Verses, Composed by Captain Henry Every, Lately Gone to Sea to seek his Fortune,” had become so entrenched in the popular culture as fact that it had actually been submitted as evidence in the trial of several of the men who participated in the mutiny on the Charles. An author named Van Broek’s oublished a novella, fiction presented as fact, which was circulated widely in the guise of a true account. Johnson is the first author to free himself from these confines and see the greater potential of a shamelessly fictionalized Avery, outdone only by a later novella written by Daniel Defoe, entitled King of Pirates.
[1] Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope: A Reduced Version of the Twickenham Text, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 368.