David Jenkins has explained that the inspiration for his hit television show Our Flag Means Death, which has just concluded its second season, came partly from poring over the historical record of eighteenth-century pirates Stede Bonnet and Edward Teach, a.k.a. Blackbeard. Jenkins realized that the two had an intense but mysterious relationship. He filled in the gaps with a story in which the inexperienced Bonnet and his crew, the Revenge, team up with Blackbeard in what initially appears to be an adventure story but turns out to be a romance.
Jenkins found himself in a position to explain his creative process in part because his show’s inaugural 2022 season generated so much interest in the history of piracy and queerness on the high seas. Countless internet articles went on to explore matelotage (civil unions for sailors), celebrate the accuracy of small details (yes, Bonnet paid his crew a wage), and ponder the show’s omissions (Bonnet was an enslaver in real life, but not on the show). Despite all this attention, an underexplored historical dimension of the show is hiding in plain sight: the fact that Stede Bonnet is a fop.
A fop is a British cultural archetype that emerged in the seventeenth century, especially in theater. Our Flag Means Death makes a quick gesture to Stede’s relationship to the fop. One of Stede’s antagonists on the show quips, “You don’t want to stick around with this fop, do ya?” to his crew. On cue, a reviewer for the Guardian labeled Stede “a nervous fop,” and a reviewer for Variety called him “a foppish bookworm.” In an article titled “The Real Gentleman Pirate,” Nick Howard argued that the real Bonnet, an “infamous pirate,” was far from the “bumbling fop” portrayed on the show. In contrast, I’m inclined to take the label seriously in my interpretation of the show’s first season.
Fop, a largely pejorative term that became popular in the 1600s, describes a fashionable, foolish comic character who inspires both ridicule and fascination. But on Our Flag, the spirit of foppery, especially its gentler masculinity, is celebrated.
Let’s back up. What makes Stede, played by Rhys Darby, a fop? He’s exceptionally fashionable, for one thing, appearing in a series of eighteenth-century silk suits with sumptuous lace cuffs, overflowing with ribbons. His treasure shovel even has a purple velvet cover. This is all expensive stuff. In other words, the show doesn’t hide that Stede is an aristocrat whose expenditures veer into the absurdities befitting a fop. In Episode 7, the crew berates him for using their entire orange supply for a cake and glaze. In other episodes, we see Stede’s on-ship library, stuffed with volumes and graced with a completely impractical open fire.
But even more absurdly: why would someone with no knowledge of piracy and a fear of its requisite violence build himself a ship, hire a crew, and make sure all his exploits are meticulously documented in a journal—all for the sake of escaping a monotonous domestic life—as Stede does?
Stede’s extravagant response to his domestic crisis can be explained by his love of display and being the center of attention, qualities essential to any good fop. His understanding of piracy as theater runs through nearly every episode. In the pilot, Stede cries “Places everyone!” as he prepares for a raid. From there, he disguises the ship as a lighthouse to divert the Spanish navy, stages his own death, and more. There’s even in-show lingo for this kind of practical performance: “the theater of fear” and “the art of f**kery.” Stede also understands the “pirate” to constitute a performative role. Shortly after branding himself “The Gentleman Pirate,” Stede says to Lucius, his amanuensis, “Polite menace. That’ll be my brand. Every pirate needs one. You getting all this?” These words are meant to be written down in a journal, which itself signals Stede’s interest in performing not just for a live audience but for a wider reading public.
Stede is a comic character, but the comedy is gentle. As a result, what could’ve been a satire of foppery is in fact a celebration of its spirit, especially its gentler masculinity. Far from being just fun and frivolous, foppery on Our Flag is deeply connected to the show’s beating heart: the romance between Stede and Blackbeard. The fop is all about fashion, and fashion—more specifically, fabric—is Stede and Blackbeard’s love language.
Blackbeard, or Ed, as Stede calls him, is no fop. Taika Waititi, who plays Ed, notably played a foppish vampire in a previous project, What We Do in the Shadows. In Our Flag Means Death, however, Waititi plays Ed as a ruthless, rakish pirate who feels a powerful spark of attraction for Stede, foppery and all, from the first. Exhausted from his brutal life as Blackbeard, he is refreshed to find “someone doing something original” in the world of piracy. To be sure, Stede might have attributes of the stereotypical fop, but as a pirate he’s an original. During their first conversation in Episode 4, Stede and Ed talk about a piece of fabric lying around Stede’s sumptuous quarters. Ed wants to know if it’s silk. Stede replies that it’s “a rather exquisite cashmere,” and Ed repeats his exact words, “a rather exquisite cashmere,” savoring them. Evidently picking up on his tone, Stede asks, “Do you fancy a fine fabric?” and Ed replies, “I think maybe I do.” Are we still talking about fabric here?
After this exchange, fabric and fashion continue to facilitate pirate romance. Stede shows Ed his secret, auxiliary wardrobe, and the two have fun switching outfits. In Episode 5, they go to a fancy party together, their hair bedecked with flowers. Afterwards, Ed lets Stede handle a scrap of silk, his only keepsake from a mother who raised him under difficult conditions. Gently folding and placing the silk in Ed’s breast pocket, Stede murmurs, “You wear fine things well,” and it’s clear that Ed is starstruck. If you haven’t figured out by now that this is a sincere romance, watching them gaze into each other’s eyes in the center of the camera frame, with a luminous full moon behind them, should clue you in.
That Ed and Stede don’t just talk about fabric but wear each other’s clothes shows that fabric isn’t just a language, a way of talking about love, but a literal conduit for it. Wearing another man’s clothes means touching what has touched his body, and on the eighteenth-century high seas, who knows how often those clothes are getting laundered! Although Ed and Stede eventually resume their usual outfits, Ed doesn’t return the black ribbon from Stede’s handsome cravat. I found this out from an assiduous fan who asked David Jenkins on X (formerly known as Twitter) whether the ribbon Ed wears throughout the show is Stede’s, adding, “I need to know, so I can sleep at night…thank you.” “Yes. Go to bed,” Jenkins answered.
Why should fabric, in particular, be a conduit for love? Here, fabric represents softness and gentleness; it is woven, if you will, into Our Flag’s critique of toxic masculinity. As Stede and Ed influence each other, the show’s opening gimmick—can the gentlemanly Stede become a pirate?—gives way to a more provocative question: can the pirate Blackbeard become a gentle man? So while fans often praise the show for how it normalizes queerness by featuring several queer relationships and very little homophobia, we might also praise it for the way it depicts men that society devalues and ridicules for being feminine. This issue is intimately related to the history of the fop.
The figure of the fop has long been associated with non-normative masculinity. Perhaps the most iconic fop of this period is from George Etherege’s 1676 play, The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter. The play’s main plot follows rakish hero Dorimant’s attempts to juggle lady loves past, present, and future. But a subplot features his hanger-on, the titular Sir Fopling, whose wig is “more exactly curled than a lady’s head.” Fopling’s overtures to Dorimant—“Pray let thee and I be intimate,” he pleads—are not necessarily romantic, but they are insistent and earnest. Though Dorimant avoids Fopling, he starts to worry about becoming a fop himself.
As if straight out of Restoration Drama, the idea that foppery might be contagious features dramatically in Our Flag. Stede is sometimes ridiculed for being gentle and feminine (“Who’s the big gal?” smirks Jack, the same character who called Stede a fop), but this is nothing compared to the conflict that arises when Ed develops these qualities. Ed/Blackbeard’s first mate Izzy Hands, as Urayoán Verges-Rodriquez puts it, “can’t conceive Blackbeard as something other than the embodiment of the white cis-straight pirate mythos, a violent, ruthless, authoritarian pirate king.” Stede’s gentleness threatens to infect Izzy’s beloved captain. This comes to a head in the Season 1 finale, which follows Stede’s choice to go back to his family instead of running away with Ed.
Without any idea where Stede is, Ed is left confused and heartbroken. These vulnerable emotions are as much evidence of Stede’s influence as they are signs of his absence. Wearing Stede’s dressing gown, Ed holes up in a pillow fort, writes poetry, and sings to the ship’s crew—all healthy break-up behaviors if you believe that it’s okay for a man to show some emotion! Izzy, however, is incensed. Shoving a picture of “Blackbeard” from one of Stede’s books into Ed’s face, he says that this is the real Blackbeard, not Ed, a “namby-pamby in a silk gown pining for his boyfriend.” Izzy’s verbal abuse seems to do the trick, leading Ed to don Blackbeard’s leather outfit and persona once more.
But the ending frame of the show tells us that Ed isn’t dead; in private, he’s still wearing Stede’s dressing gown, crying in his bunk. Far from a tragic end to Season 1, this scene shows that there’s hope yet for Ed to embrace falling in love with a fop. Cue Season 2, which has just finished its run this October.
Lucina C. Schwartz is completing her PhD in English literature at Rutgers University. She specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture and co-organizes the Rutgers Nineteenth-Century Group.