Jack Shaftoe

Jack Shaftoe

Jack Shaftoe is a fictional character featured in the novels of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.

Jack is an English vagabond turned soldier of fortune turned adventurer. He is highly intelligent (though uneducated), and has extraordinarily poor impulse control. The latter leads to many situations that only Jack Shaftoe could find himself in, e.g., chasing an ostrich into a Turkish harem during the Battle of Vienna. This poor impulse control, Jack claims, stems from the influence of an "Imp of the Perverse" which compels him to do things against his, or most anyone's, better judgment. Jack's sanity is, consequently, often called into question by his companions. He also apparently supplies his own heroic narration of his exploits as he performs them.

Jack is the father, with Mary Dolores (an Irish woman deceased before the start of the story) of twin boys (Jimmy Shaftoe and Danny Shaftoe) through which he is (presumably) an ancestor of Bobby Shaftoe and America Shaftoe from the novel "Cryptonomicon".

He earns the nickname "Half-Cocked" Jack when a primitive medical treatment meant to cure him of syphilis goes awry and leaves him with a mutilated penis. As accounts of his exploits circulate, he accumulates additional nicknames: the King of the Vagabonds; "L'Emmerdeur" (a French vulgarism meaning, roughly, "The guy who covers everything in shit" or "The Pain in the Ass"); Ali Zaybak (Arabic for "Quicksilver", a reference to a famous thief from "The Thousand Nights and One Night"); Sword of Divine Fire; and Jack the Coiner.

The character is based in part on the historical figure Jack Sheppard Fact|date=January 2008.


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