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Source publication
The pirate tropes that pervade popular culture today can be traced in large part to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel, Treasure Island. However, it is the novel’s afterlife on film that has generated fictional pirates as we now understand them. By tracing the transformation of the author’s pirate captain, Long John Silver, from N. C. Wyeth’s illu...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... pirates are dramatically dressed, either moving fluidly in fight scenes or standing stoically while the ocean swirls around them. His pirate captain, pictured on the cover of his Book of Pirates (see Figure 1), is a case in point: he wears a long, flowing coat and baggy trousers, bearing little relation to the illustrations of Captain Johnson's accounts. Pyle's captain is, however, dramatic, forceful, and full of movement-aspects of Pyle's works that pervade the aesthetic of early cinema. ...
Context 2
... Wyeth departs from Pyle's tropes by paying close attention to Stevenson's text, while also applying Pyle's dynamic movement and dramatic mise-en-scene to Stevenson's closely observed characters and settings. billowing his dark great coat in what appears to be a rainstorm, in a style reminiscent of Pyle's "Captain" (Figure 1). Wyeth's illustration seems to resonate with the first appearance of Bones in Fleming's film (Fleming 1934, 4:10-4:37); while not on top of a cliff, Bones appears at the door of the Admiral Benbow, and as the door opens, a gust of wind catches Bones' coat in a similar fashion, with the wind and the rain following him as a metaphor for the trouble that is pursuing him. ...
Context 3
... obvious obstacle to physical authenticity is Silver's leg: cut "close by the hip" in the text, all the actors to play him are bipedal; therefore, they all had to fold and secure their left legs in what must presumably be a very uncomfortable position, making the role physically challenging (Stevenson [1883] 2012, p. 85). Such an arrangement must also make moving like Stevenson's Silver very difficult. ...
