SOURCE: Shea, Daniel B. “‘Our Professed Old Adversary’: Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England.” Early American Literature 23, No. 1 (Spring 1988): 52-69.

[In the following essay, Shea argues that Morton's failure to be taken seriously as a writer of literature is another effect of the triumph of Puritan ideology and the discourse of Puritanism, which silenced other voices that sought to shape the American consciousness.]

No less than love and war, literary history has its winners and losers. The triumphant ideology in colonial America was Puritan, and the discourse of Puritanism, as Sacvan Bercovitch has very fully demonstrated,¹ not only dominated its own time but continued to supply the national lexicon long after the power of Puritanism had waned. It follows that the triumphant text is much studied among us and that the historical hegemony of Puritanism would become in our time the hegemony of Puritan studies in early American literature. Yet a loser's case can be instructive, if only to remind us of the ephemerality of all language, including that in which literary history is written.

Among those whose speech, for any purpose of discourse, the New England Puritans silenced, the most interesting case perennially has been Thomas Morton, like many American writers after him the author of a single book, great in its aspirations and greatly flawed. Morton's defeat was in fact a double one. He suffered the loss of his estate, his house at Mt. Wollaston being burned before his eyes by order of the Massachusetts General Court (Adams 242). And he has suffered as well since the publication of the New English Canaan in 1637 from habits of memorializing and romanticisation² that have little to do with his book and that virtually assure that the counter-text he wrote against the Puritans will, as they intended, go largely unread. The figure of Morton, his Maypole looming behind him, has long been important to a variety of readers. In almost direct proportion it has seemed less important to attend to the literary act which is the New English Canaan.

From the point of view of literary history, Morton's book is admittedly an evolutionary relic and dead end, clumsy-winged, perverse even in its flights. It has been knowledgeably annotated. It has served as an important source for historians studying the Puritans' consolidation of their authority. And it has served to symbolize the early demise of the Laurentian god in America.³ But it has not been sufficiently clear that the contest Morton lost was primarily a literary one, since the struggle he entered as presumptive winner yet fated loser was for the naming of New England and ultimately for the naming of America.

A literary history conscious that its terms are fictional knows that it writes in water, yet it must recognize the kinds of political, social, and economic power that have in fact conferred a power of naming. However won, the authority to name was a power passing in Morton's time from kings to authors as surely as political power was passing from King to Parliament to People. Unlike the Puritans, who saw themselves as exegetes of a divinely ordained language, Thomas Morton was conscious of the literariness, that is the fictionality, of what he wrote. He saw too that while there was nothing absolute in his acts of naming, such a power once secured could determine event by constituting the field in which event took place. His own text prevailing, the literary history continuous with Ovid and Virgil and flourishing contemporaneously in the satires and masques of Ben Jonson would write a different sort of New England from that self-fulfilling prophecy being indited by the Puritans. The nature of this opposition was no less clear to Morton's judges. It was with more than moral outrage that John Winthrop could speak of Morton as “our professed old adversary,” identifying Morton's threat as a literary one, “who had set forth a book against us and written reproachful and menacing letters to some of us” (2:154). At Morton's final trial in 1644, the one preceding his nearly fatal winter imprisonment in Boston and his exile to Maine, his text was produced against him in the form of a letter he had written William Jeffreys. The letter, written in exile and with unrepentant symbolism on May Day 1634, contains what we now recognize as the ringing conclusion to the New English Canaan: “Repent you cruel schismatics, repent.” Even shut up in the custody of Winthrop's journal (2:194-96), the letter threatens its readers with a figuring of the author as resurrected Jonas, intent on preaching a Laudian sermon to a sectarian Nineveh.

Synecdoche before them, Morton's judges should have had no difficulty guessing the remainder of Morton's text. William Bradford, whose account in Of Plymouth Plantation would come to represent the literary opposition, knew the New English Canaan to be “infamouse and scurrillous” without having set eyes on it (251). John Winthrop, the second of Morton's three judges in 1644, knew the old adventurer, in his infirmities, to be no longer a threat either to the colony's economy or to its morals, yet as he entered the ten-year-old letter to Jeffreys in his journal he encapsulated in his own text that which threatened to unword it: “‘They find, and will yet more to their shame, that they abuse the word and are to blame to presume so much,—that they are but a word and a blow to them that are without’” (2:196). In the end, as Samuel Maverick saw most clearly, Morton had “nothing laid to his charge but the writeing of a Booke entituled New Canaan, which indeed was the truest discription of New England as then it was that ever I saw” (Connors 29).

But if the language of Morton's New Canaan were taken for true—because within its mimicry it had wrapped a serious claim to priority—what could be the status of that language of Canaan of which New England was already the flowering invention? Morton's text no longer seeks empowerment from its reader. Although vastly overmatched by the quantity of the Puritan text, it simply seeks equal status, history apart, as a compelling fiction.

I

Thomas Morton was a Royalist rather than an Adamic namer. He distinguishes carefully in dedicating his book between addressing the members of the Board of Commissioners in their own right and as servants of the King, and in alluding to their jurisdiction he eschews the term plantations in favor of “his Majesties forraigne Provinces” (Connors 137, n.). In the matter of deferring to a royal power of naming, Morton had a predecessor in John Smith. Smith's famous map of New England, described in 1880 as “the real foundation of our New England cartography” (Winsor 1:52), proved a wobbly foundation in its nomenclature. While the map as Barbour reprints it includes the phrase, “The most remarqueable parts thus named by the high and mighty Prince CHARLES, Prince [after 1625 altered to ‘nowe King’] of great Britaine” (Smith 1:320-21; 2:394-95), Charles's participation in the naming of New England came only after the publication of A Description of New England in 1616. Smith himself had accepted Indian names for the most part: Accomack, Sagoquas, Passataquack, Accominticus. But he readily affixed an apology to his book after Prince Charles, then 16, had altered the names supplied to him on the draft of Smith's map. A table inserted in some early copies reconciles the map and the book by asking the reader to note “the correspondence of the old names to the new” (1:319), and in The General Historie Smith described himself “humbly intreating his Highnesse hee would please to change their barbarous names for such English, as posteritie might say Prince Charles was their God-father …” (2:401). Few of the new names other than Plymouth, Cape Anne (which Smith had first named for his Turkish mistress), and the Charles River proved durable in their original locations, “Boston” appearing in Maine and “London,” “Edenborough,” and “Abordeen” failing to take root. Charles's “new” names, though doomed in a genuinely new environment, suggested royalty's assumption of a stable and extendable order that would eventually supplant savage with civilized names.

In 1637 Morton's intention is consonant with but more complicated than that of his sovereign. On the cartographical foundation provided by church and king could be deployed the Renaissance language of metamorphosis, a language of change but one in which change meant escape from time rather than progress in it. To establish priority for this language would be to establish continuity in the New World with the Ovidian text and its positing of a Golden Age in a world of ceaseless flux. Taking into his own hands a New World whose malleability was vulnerable to Puritan demands for typological fulfillment, Morton would attempt to transform its contours into those of a Galatea who would be both the expressed body of his imagination and, as language, his sensible, answering partner. The depth of Morton's commitment to church and king has always been suspect, but rightly considered that allegiance in Morton is profound. For without their authority, the texts for which he believes he requires their sanction are null and void. Morton professes an intention to teach the Indians the language of the Book of Common Prayer for the same reason that he asserts that their lexicon is part Greek and Latin and that they pay homage to Pan in their place names. It is the Renaissance, not the Reformation, that is alive in Morton, and during the period of the exile in which he wrote the New English Canaan the renaissance in which he most fervently believed, the metamorphosis he most earnestly sought to make textual, was his own. The Puritan text permitted him no point of entry. Only in the literary company of Ovid could he write progress as return and think simultaneously of his own return to New Canaan.

By contrast, as Bercovitch has made clear, the errand into the wilderness of which Samuel Danforth eventually spoke in 1670 meant a different kind of “progressivity,” one that was “typological rather than archetypal” and that would bring history to an end. Hence the “insistent temporality” in its rhetoric of terms like prepare, foretold, herald and harbinger (American Jeremiad 12-13). Long after the banishing of Morton's text, its features and its theme of return would appear briefly in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, much humbled in piety's chains and marking a radical change in signification. “In short,” Mather says, thinking at once of the primitive church and no doubt of New England's first saints, his grandfathers, “the First Age was the Golden Age: to return unto That, will make a Man a Protestant, and, I may add, a Puritan” (“A General Introduction,” sig. C 1).

Already too late, Morton proclaims in the doubleness of his title an act of translation. In place of that Canaan already beginning to be figured as the Promised Land of a nest of sectarians he will substitute a more fundamental scripture written in the milk and honey of human appetite. He will retain the figure but alter its sense, loosening the Puritan hold on New World cartography by the disruptions of irony and caricature, metamorphosing their apocalyptic typologies backward into an Arcadian imagery more ancient than ancient Christianity. Morton's keenest perception as he introduces the revels of Book III is that his opponents share with him one fundamental article of faith: language is prior to the worlds they each wish to create; the naming is all he says, shrouding his urgency in irony:

And, since the Seperatists are desirous to have the denomination thereof, I am become an humble Suter on their behalfe for your consents, (courteous Readers), to it, before I doe shew you what Revels they have kept in New Canaan.

(233)

Behind the mask of the reveller is the mask of piety and behind the mask of piety, as anti-Puritan satire always has it, are the lineaments of the lustful reveller. When Morton's own appearance of cool disdain falls away, it reveals the alarm signalled by his references to “nomination.” These creatures of the Word intend to rewrite history. The New English Canaan, in its title and in its strategies of masque, myth, poetry, and enigma, constitutes an apparently failed attempt to rewrite the rewriters.

II

When he named himself “mine Host” and portrayed himself as the Master of the Revels at New Canaan, Morton left little doubt that appropriate literary access to the book he set out to write would be gained by way of the tradition of the masque and its vulgar play within a play, the antimasque. As a member of Clifford's Inn, an Inn of the Chancery, Morton would have been at or near the scene during the early development of the Jacobean masque, for which the Inns of Court, to which the Inns of Chancery were subordinate, frequently had responsibility.⁴ Moreover, the only literary debt Morton explicitly acknowledges (290) is to Ben Jonson, who would have provided a relevant model of several-sided accomplishment in poetry, anti-Puritan satire, and the masque.

The flourishing of the Jonsonian masque during the period of Morton's association with Clifford's Inn constitutes an index to much of the imagery and vocabulary of the third book of the New English Canaan. A sampling of Jonson's titles would include Hymenaei (1606), The Golden Age Restored (1615), News From the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620), Pan's Anniversary (1620), and The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621). In the most relevant work of this period, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), presented at the Court of King James three years before Morton's marriage and six years before his trip to New England, he would have encountered the figure into which he wrote himself in his own antimasque. Jonson's Comus, more corporeal and less ominous than Milton's version, appears at the outset of the masque, “riding in triumph,” and is greeted by his followers: “Room, room, make room for the bouncing belly, / First father of sauce, and deviser of jelly …” (263).

Scholars have not been slow to follow up on Morton's generic associations (Connors 96; Slotkin 62-63; Seelye 169). What now needs to be considered is the way in which the elements of masque and antimasque adapt or fail to adapt themselves to an environment far removed from the court that had been their domain and fittest venue as well as the source of their noble, sometimes royal, players. Morton, who had entered a first version of his book in the Stationer's Register in 1633, wrote virtually at the same time as Milton, whose masque, not called Comus until the eighteenth century, was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634. Historians of English literature will not note it, but the revels of the New English Canaan are in their own quite different way as much a last, nova-like flourishing of the masque as is Milton's in the passage of the form toward its extinction during the Puritan interregnum. The effect of Milton's presentation of Comus and his crew and the rescue of the virginal Lady was to dissolve the Jonsonian masque in the spirit of Puritan pastoral, using a provincial Shropshire castle to chasten and platonize Court gorgeousness. Morton's revels, already marginalized as text by their 1637 publication in Amsterdam, would seem rashly to be working toward precisely the opposite effect, presuming against all odds (as we now count them) to test the viability of a Royalist art form on the terrain of a Bible Commonwealth. Milton's Comus, son of Bacchus and Circe, is a rover of Celtic and Iberian, but never of American fields, who characteristically betakes himself to an “ominous wood” (179, line 60) and later proclaims: “I know each lane, and every alley green / Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood …” (191, lines 310-11). That same wood, morally and symbolically considered, becomes the New World court of Morton's text, and his players are a crew of fellow adventurers, their consorts “lasses in beaver coats.”

A formula suggests itself. In the English environment, the masque's final form is its sublimation in Comus; in the New World, it undergoes devolution, a metamorphic degradation backward to its primitive origins. Regarding Morton at least, William Bradford would then be a thoroughly accurate genealogist when he observed that it was “as if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora …” (238). The formula has interest if only because it suggests that, long before Buffon, it could seem plausible to remark a degradation of forms in America.

Yet to read Morton only in this way would be to miss the dimension of his text that constitutes a creative adaptation to environment, indeed a forward-looking species of rhetorical prescience. To read Morton's masque only in the light of its tradition is unavoidably to judge it a failure, just as to concentrate on the historical Maypole is to permit Bradford, as well as Hawthorne, to overdetermine our sense of Eros embattled at the beginning of New England's historical time. What Morton's text represents is the attempt to write New England as masque, not for the sake of New England or even for the sake of masque, but in order to effect the magical end and essence of the form, a metamorphosis that by its very nature could exclude the Separatists, make them exiles in their own kingdom, and forbid them entry to Canaan.

The protean power with which Morton identifies himself is closely associated with the power of naming because its acts of transformation are also acts of translation. The total text of any masque is poorly represented by its diminishment into a verbal record alone. As historians of the form point out, the genius of the masque lay in its performance—its lavishness of music, dance, and costume; in the participatory process by which it made its spectators players; and in the change it wrought out of mere revelry, transforming it into an idealized world of beauty and harmony (Orgel, Complete Masques 2-3). Thus words, the currency of drama, are refined by music and dance into something higher than themselves. There is a sense in which king and courtiers are for the space of the masque's unfolding made to speak the same language by virtue of the associative and assimilating element of dance and the removal of the barrier between dancers and spectators. In the New England version of this text the barriers are more severe. There is more than one sense in which the English Christian and Native American do not speak the same language. Yet there is no reason to say that Morton has over-extended the protean potential of the form by making courtiers of savages, savages who for that matter speak at times unconscious Greek and Latin, when Jonson had already made fortune-telling gypsies out of courtiers with the Duke of Buckingham in the leading role (Orgel, Complete Masques 495, n.).

Under the spell of masque, a trans-Atlantic inter-textuality is possible; a translation of Englishman and Indian into dancer is possible; the English text can translate itself into the speech of the Sachem Chickatawbut, through which in turn speaks the shade of the Sachem's mother, her grave defaced by English settlers (“my sonne, whom I have cherisht, … canst thou forget to take revenge of those wild people … ?”) (248). What is not possible is that the Separatists should gain entry to this text. As readers, they have disabled themselves, Morton's rhetoric would have it, by unleashing a spirit of exclusion in the land. His mocking invitation to the Separatist revels, as he makes the transition from Book II to Book III, is in fact a disinvitation to the dance, ironic in everything but its motive, which is indicated in a marginal note as “The Nomination” of the land, “since the Seperatists are desirous to have the denomination thereof …” (233).

The highest ground to be contested, for purposes of naming, is Merry Mount itself. Unscrolling his indictment of that sinful eminence, Bradford passes immediately from the transient outrage of Bacchanalian “beasly practieses” to cite the much greater threat posed by a translation into permanency of the name under which the revels might safely flourish: “They chainged allso the name of their place, and in stead of calling it Mounte Wollaston, they call it Meriemounte, as if this joylity would have lasted ever” (238). Without having seen Morton's book, Bradford had again read correctly the sense of his antagonist's attempt, first metamorphic in its effect on the original Indian name, and then, however vainly, ambitious to fix an immutable name on transient activity. When Morton, in a corresponding passage, describes the process of his naming, he deletes entirely the name of the Englishman, Captain Wollaston, mention of whose brief presence could only obscure the direct lineage he wished to establish between two kinds of ancient naming: “The Inhabitants of Pasonagessit (having translated the name of their habitation from that ancient Salvage name to Ma-re Mount, and being resolved to have the new name confirmed for a memorial to after ages,) …” (276). As students of Merry Mount recognize, even as they write “Merry Mount,” our own usage grants the victory to Bradford's text, which if unknown to Morton is nevertheless adumbrated in his image of those who threaten “to make it a woeful mount and not a merry mount” (278). Mine Host distances himself from so bald and univocal a term. His own reiterated preference is “Ma-re Mount,” a name that hovers near a variety of sexual resonances interestingly suggested by Richard Slotkin (61), but even more mysteriously associates itself with the sea, its tides and generative powers, and the polymorphic energies of its deity, Proteus.

Bradford need not have worried about an everlasting jollity of revels. It was characteristic of masques that they should enjoy only a single performance, and Morton writes elegiacally when he speaks of “Ma-re Mount” as a memorial to later ages. That dimension of his text which foresees a passing away of its revels is not yet evident in a response to the Separatists' litany of infidel names: “They termed it an Idoll; yea, they called it the Calfe of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place, naming it Mount Dagon …” (278). Morton would not live long enough to see references to the Philistine god Dagon become a slogan for the iconoclastic forces in England's Civil War (Gilman 6). Nor would he hear Milton's Samson characterize the battle array in similar terms: “all the contest is now / 'Twixt God and Dagon” (362, lines 461-62). But having inscribed himself in New Canaan as Comus, Morton must also obey a certain fatality associated with his role.

For the masque to accomplish its metamorphosis into order and harmony, Comus, the spirit of the antimasque, must be banished. Morton-Comus can exult in the apparent triumph of libidinal fluidity over precisionist rigor: “Hee that played Proteus, (with the helpe of Priapus,) put their noses out of joynt, as the Proverbe is” (281). Yet because, as Orgel has said, “to the Elizabethans he [Proteus] is also the great enemy, Mutability, threatening the establishment of order and denying the value of permanence,” the masque must be rid of him in order to accomplish its ends (Jonsonian Masque 10). Mutability needs to be distinguished from metamorphosis. Proteus is “an embryonic antimasque character” (Jonsonian Masque 14), but because we must move beyond Proteus “the transition from antimasque to masque is a metamorphosis …” (Complete Masques 9). Mutability is the property of Neptune's court, of which “Ma-re Mount” enjoys a view, and its virtues, by definition, do not endure.

There is a certain convergence, then, between the textual momentum Morton has set in play, necessitating the banishment of Mine Host, and the historical intentions, as we know them from Bradford and Winthrop, of his Separatist-Puritan antagonists. Both require the banishment of the Comus-Proteus figure, but in the case of Morton's text, as against the historical situation, that banishment makes possible a distinctive kind of New World metamorphosis. Physical removal from the king creates a power vacuum in which authority passes more rapidly than it otherwise might from sovereign to poet, a passage already suggested in England by Milton's non-Stuart Comus in its Shropshire setting. The poet alone, as Emerson and Whitman would proclaim, must be the New World's self-authorized namer. Finally, it is neither the historical Maypole nor the revels of the New English Canaan to which we must attend in order to assess the significance of this evolutionarily extraordinary book, neither English nor yet American, but its poetry, broadly considered, and the strategies by which it attempts to convict the Separatists of what is worse than heresy: as readers of any Word other than that sectarian one in which they see their own image, they simply do not exist. In Morton's text, satire's opportunistic indulgence will grant them the quaint ontology of comic names (Captain Shrimp, Littleworth, Master Ananias Increase), giving them temporary entrance; and they have a certain jargon which bears italicizing, but they are otherwise radically illiterate, and having no words can give no names, “for the construction of the worde would be made by them of the Seperation to serve their own turnes” (307).

III

As to the literariness of Morton's Maypole, both its author and William Bradford are in at least broad agreement. Bradford notes that “to shew his poetrie” Morton had affixed to “this idle or idoll” Maypole “sundry rimes and verses” tending to lasciviousness, detraction, and scandal (238). Morton's version accepts the accusation of literature but not its account of motive, instead relating the heavily coded poem, “Rise Oedipus …,” to his entire strategy of naming and of creating the Separatist as befuddled, incapacitated reader:

And because it should more fully appeare to what end it was placed there, they had a poem in readines made, which was fixed to the Maypole, to shew the new name confirmed upon that plantation; which, although it were made according to the occurrents of the time, it, being Enigmattically composed, pusseled the Seperatists most pittifully to expound it. …

(277)

Morton carries the literary contest to his opponents' point of pride. In his rendering, as in modern scholarship, the New England Puritans are supreme expounders of texts. A large portion of Chapter 27, Book III is given over to a series of vignettes depicting styles of textual attack by Separatist elders and deacons whose rhetoric is a metaphor for their laymen's trades, the tailor dividing the text in many parts and paring away superfluity, the tapster offering a text drawn from a fountain free of Popery, another deciding for brevity's sake to divide the text into one part, his dispatch in running ahead of his task suggesting descent from “some Irish footeman.” The comic portraits make a further serious point. For this tribe, the text and the preaching of it is all: it “is the meanes (O, the meanes,) that they pursue” (330). Whatever they may profess about taking on the task of Jonas by preaching to the unconverted, their text is no more than an instrument of power: “The meanes is that they pursue to obtaine what they aime at: the word is there, the meanes” (338).

Pretending a scriptural friendliness, “glozing upon the text,” the Separatists attempt for example to prevent friendly contact between new settlers and the Indians, whom they depict as subtle and dangerous. But Morton provides “a glosse upon the false text” (256), resisting the exclusionary tendency of his opponents' vocabulary and, since their languages cannot coexist, excluding them from his own text. As Morton's readers, our experience is to be confronted by a language of “means” and “gifts” that will forever bar us from the doctrinal Canaan, rendering us in our carnal views “one of them they terme, without.”⁵ Within Morton's text, however, the poet confidingly gives us entrance through his Maypole poem, “which, (for the better information of the reader,)” he both inscribes and expounds, giving “the true sence and exposition of the riddle that was fixed to the Maypole, which the Seperatists were at defiance with” (277, 281). We are not, perhaps, the “absolute reader of riddles” invoked at the beginning of the poem: Morton's covertness, imaged in his habitual parentheses, resists the creation of a perfect Oedipus. But we have important access, all the same, to the total poem by which the New English Canaan attempts to transform the New England landscape and its native inhabitants into a text continuous with the metamorphoses of Ovid and the Arcadian populations of Virgil.

Though we shall never know precisely the order of composition of Morton's manuscript, there is an important sense in which Books I and II follow from Book III, reaching a climax in the final chapter of Book II and in its concluding poem, “New Canaan's Genius.” It is not only that Book III was most likely the first composed (New English Canaan 233-34, n.; Connors 34-35). It is also that entrance to the metamorphosed landscape of Books I and II depends upon the processes of Book III by which, successively, the Separatists refuse to accept the masque's assimilation of spectator and dance; the Separatists are tried and excluded by the test of the Maypole poem; and Mine Host is banished in his role as Comus-Proteus in favor of a higher metamorphosis as poet. It is this poet, created out of what appears the text's conclusion, who has shaped from the very beginning a verbal “modell of a Rich, hopefull and very beautiful Country worthy the Title of Natures Masterpeece …” (109). By comparison with the shifting tones of Book III, which move from taunt and scorn to injured indignation, the note of the first two books is one of serenity, a note struck by the opening emphasis on the Creator's use of temperate zones like New England to teach moderation and discretion. We will not hear that tone as an achieved one unless we follow Morton in his metamorphosis from anti-Puritan satirist, to Master of the Revels, to banished Comus-Proteus, to Poet, the role out of which at the conclusion of Book II he makes his boldest move yet in the contest for the naming of New England.

In a chapter on “the Great Lake of the Erocoise in New England,” which may well, by order of composition, constitute Morton's final word, he seeks by word alone to move the capital of New England from either Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay to the lake we now call Champlain. The poet derives his ostensible authority for the move from the “many men of good judgement” who have seen at that lake “called of the Natives the Lake of Erocoise” the “prime seate for the Metropolis of New Canaan” (235). And dutifully, he gives the lake a respectably scriptural lineage by linking it to “the Lake of Genezereth” in Palestine. But in fact the poet has been engaged in creating his own authority. The name Erocoise, while still capable of passing for Greek and, as Seelye suggests, still sufficiently mindful of Eros (173), remains in this important case Indian and unchanged. The poet has portrayed himself throughout the first two books as a student of the Indian language, “for the Salvages are significant in their denomination of any thing …” (213). Here at last, having put behind him the time when “wee were but slender proficients in the language of the Natives” (237), the poet has arrived at a confluence of tongues simultaneously with his text's relation of the lake he would never see and the sea-dominating “Ma-re Mount” that would live again only in his hymning of it. Supremely, then, “New Canaan's Genius,” newly sited, flourishes in the poem of that title, which now becomes “Epilogous” to the chapter, indeed to all his chapters, and consummate figure for the naming process of Morton's text.

It is no longer sensual Comus's “charming rod” but Prospero's creation wand that the New World poet now takes in hand, populating the lake and its “flowry bancks” with “sporting Najades” and “Bigg lim'd Druides” and loosing meandering nymphs among its new-ancient groves. In the poems that mark the turns and climaxes of Morton's naming strategies, poems he has played, especially at the ends of chapters, like trump, he writes as if to say I have not had my say until I've been a poet on this subject. In “New Canaan's Genius” it has come time for the poet to replace even the adventurer, the rogue behind the rhetoric. Only the poet can urge the reader, “Colcos golden Fleece reject,” necessarily comprehending within that rejection not only the golden profit of the “Beaver Fleeces” anticipated at the poem's beginning but the whole catalogue of “marchantable” commodities for which the venturing stockholder has lusted throughout Book II, confounding the economic and the aphrodisiac beavers and wandering dangerously into the lexical field that, as he has had to acknowledge (181), the Separatists have cultivated more successfully than he.

If rich furres thou dost adore,
And of Beaver Fleeces store,
See the lake where they abound,
And what pleasures els are found.
There chaste Leda, free from fire,
Does enjoy her hearts desire[.]

(241)

A more important kind of possession is at stake. For the parallel efforts out of which Morton generated both literary and legal texts between 1634 and 1637, the latter in his role as solicitor for Archbishop Laud's Board of Lords Commissioners for the Plantations, finally and necessarily became an effort on the level of the imagination only. If the New English Canaan is a kind of possession by fiction, the same is true of the paper successes by which the Council for New England declared the Massachusetts charter void in 1634, re-divided its lands among themselves in 1635, and secured Morton to file a writ of quo warranto against the Massachusetts Bay Company for repeal of their patent, an effort that in 1637 succeeded formally in the Court of King's Bench but with no practical effect whatsoever in Massachusetts Bay, coinciding in impotent symmetry with the Amsterdam publication of the New English Canaan. When Morton wrote William Jeffreys on May Day 1634, he made clear to his “very good gossip” that he fully expected to accompany a new general governor in a triumphant return to New England to reclaim his old lands (Winthrop 2, 195). The claim of “New England's Genius” and its charge to the reader are of a different order entirely, suggesting possession by song and a securing of the right to name rather than to own:

In sweete Peans let thy voyce,
Sing the praise of Erocoise
Peans to advaunce her name,
New Canaans everlasting fame.

(242)

With the letter to Jeffreys before him, John Winthrop was able in 1644 to mark a degraded transformation of the man Thomas Morton from the arrogant gossip who believed he might “safely cry, repent you cruel separatists, repent, there are as yet but forty days,” to the figure he found too old and infirm to sustain further judgment and whom he released to wander to Canaan's farthest corner and to die there “poor and despised.” Unlike the man, Morton's text is metamorphic and open-ended in its final words. It preempts the sermonic cry “Repent” from the earlier letter for a last ironic turning of the Puritan language of Canaan against itself, but it moves now explicitly to the language of metamorphosis. Mine Host, after the long ocean voyage of his second banishment, which he likens to Jonas' voyage in the whale's belly, is finally set ashore “so metamorphosed with a longe voyage that hee looked like Lazarus in the painted cloath” (344). The powers of regeneration have not, however, been conceded to those false Jonases who merely preach regeneration. New Canaan's poet, forced to witness his own dispossession by fire when the Separatists burnt his house to the ground, can still write himself as Phoenix. It may be that the literal “stumpes and postes in their black liveries will mourne,” but only a poet will venture that a house built of words could “rise out of these ashes and be new againe, (to the immortall glory and reknowne of this fertile Canaan the new,) …” (312).

IV

At the end of all his recreations of himself, the poet, quoting Virgil's Eclogues, becomes an itinerant poster of broadsides. Speaking in the third person of his final avatar, he confides: “if you will hear any more of this proclamation meete him at the next markett towne, for Cynthius aurem vellet [the Cynthian (Apollo) will pluck your ear].”⁶ The book's concluding enigma is a final assertion of the poet's authority. The Virgilian context, as provided by Adams (345),⁷ suggests that the poet is in one sense hors de combat. He will no longer sing of kings and battles—but only because the god has plucked his ear and admonished him to tell a pastoral tale of origins, as indeed he has, writing his ending as if it were a beginning and suggesting that the reader too must change his tune.

Gentleman of Clifford's Inn, Mine Host, Caliban flimsily disguised as Ariel, Oedipus to his own riddles, Lazarus, Jonas: Thomas Morton is America's last Renaissance poet speaking in his open-ended invitation to further encounters as if he were father to its first national poet: “Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Having failed to name New Canaan after the Virgilian-Ovidean text in his mind, he promises to return through an endlessly receding series of proclamations. Having lost the contest who should have the first word, he seeks in our court the last.

There was no inherent unsuitableness in Morton's stocking Lake Champlain with nymphs and dryads, any more than there was in Spenser's speaking in the Epithalamion of Irish nymphs in the Vale of Mulla, but it requires a moment to trace one's sense of anomaly to its root. What we now recognize in the image of an Upstate Leda is the fossil of a failed mythology, an evolutionary loser in what had been Morton's failed attempt to supply the New World's word-hoard. One can only wonder, with Miranda, at the American literature that might have resulted had the secular Renaissance gained the power to give the New World an Ovidian nomination. With equal validity, that hypothesis could deny Hawthorne the source of his moral imagination or permit him to wander Rome without Hilda in hand; could remove the reason for Thoreau's strategic retreat yet populate his pond with fertile reasons to prolong his stay beyond two years. Counter-factual speculation in literary history can only multiply varieties of what did not happen, but it is a despicable fiction only if we are certain that the word has been given us, not as a wand of transformation, but as an instrument of power.

Notes

1. The Puritan legacy of rhetoric, myth and ritual is discussed particularly in the final chapters of Puritan Origins (136-86) and American Jeremiad (176-210).

2. The history of responses to Morton, touching on such works as Hawthorne's “The Maypole of Merrymount,” Motley's Merry-Mount: A Romance of the Masachusetts Colony, and Lowell's Endecott and The Red Cross, is detailed in Connors (123-32), Gangewere, McWilliams, and Sterne.

3. There is some helpful annotation in Major, which also supplies a modernised text. Connors provides the fullest historical and literary background, the more useful for its freedom from ideological or critical predisposition. He is free in particular of attempts to magnify Morton as a New World flourishing of the Id, which is put down, together with the profoundly libidinal Red consciousness of the Indians, by the Puritan super-ego. Williams, Zolla, and Slotkin offer variations on this theme. In addition to Arner's suggestive work with Morton's allusions, the most thoroughly literary approach has been taken by Seelye in his chapter, “Womb of Nature: Thomas Morton and the Call of the Wild” (159-85). The emphasis of historians like Kupperman and Zuckerman, while complementing the Lawrence-Williams-Slotkin tradition, is primarily political. Zuckerman describes Morton's “casual democracy” as a threat to the Puritans' “corporate solidarity” (276). Kupperman, characterizing the Plymouth attack on the Wessagusset Indians as a “pre-emptive strike” (660), argues that Morton's version of the incident tallies closely with modern accounts.

4. Welsford, having discussed the presentation of The Masque of Proteus at Gray's Inn in 1595, observes that the masque “was shaped into a definite genre by the young lawyers of the Inns of Court, though apparently more by accident than by deliberate design” (168), a view echoed by Green (99). On the status of Clifford's Inn, Headlam remarks: “Clifford's Inn was always regarded, except by its members, a dependency of the Inner Temple” (179). And see Connors (133, n.).

5. It is possible, even necessary, to argue that the Puritan language of Canaan, which in Morton's text is one of exclusion, constitutes in its own verbal environment an alternative language of inclusion and transformation in the face of which Morton is precisely the same sort of disabled reader he characterizes puzzling over his enigmatic poetry. The language of grace spoken of by Rosenmeier (1-3) and the language of typological fulfillment described by Lowance must necessarily be an impenetrable poem for the reader still captive in Babylon.

6. Knowingly or not, Morton's text cast vellere in the future tense, throwing the action ahead and implicating the reader, since another use of the expression “to pluck the ear” is as a conventional way of summoning a witness to testify in a legal action (Coleman 176; and see this usage in Horace, Satires I.ix.74-78). In an important sense, the future reader's testimony is a continuing adjudication of the naming contest Morton entered in 1637. The Virgil passage, from Eclogues VI 3-4, reads:

   cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem
   vellit et admonuit:. …

   Writing Lycidas just as the New English Canaan was published, Milton uses the same figure (line 77) as authority for the god's assertion of a poet's immortal fame. I am grateful to my colleagues George Pepe and Joseph Loewenstein for their help in glossing these lines.

7. One may view the Adams edition of the New English Canaan as a post-Puritan attempt, by way of yet another layer of glosses, to quell the threat of the Morton text. Adams appears moralistic only on grounds of taste when he characterizes Morton as a “vulgar Royalist libertine,” but the essence of his running marginal battle with the author is his killing literalism. Of necessity, he corrects Morton on matters of fact, but his point of view systematically excludes the possibility of poetry and erupts into annoyance with Morton's “positive pleasure in concealing what he meant to say under a cloud of metaphor” (96). Even as he edits, Adams counts himself among the company of puzzled Separatist readers.

   The point of view is that of a descendant of the Adamses, who acquired Merry Mount from Colonel John Quincy through his granddaughter Abigail Smith Adams. Her husband, John Adams, Charles Jr.'s great-grandfather, writing Jefferson in 1812, described the curiosity of a copy of the New English Canaan that had come to his hands as a purchase at a Berlin auction by his son John Quincy and bearing an inscription of several words in handwriting that seemed remarkably like his own father's. Morton, he explains to Jefferson, was an “incendiary instrument of spiritual and temporal domination,” and he remarks: “It is whimsical that this Book, so long lost, should be brought to me, for this Hill [Merry Mount] is in my Farm” (2: 312, 315). Later, John Quincy Adams II, the brother of Charles Jr. and of Henry Adams, cleared the wooded hill of Merry Mount and in 1877-1878 built an ungainly Victorian house there, his descendants eventually selling the property for a Merry Mount development. A final word belongs to the daughter of John Quincy Adams II, Abigail Adams Homans: “My father himself, being of a convivial turn of mind, wanted when he built his house there, to continue to call his place Merry Mount, but Puritan prejudices still lingered and he compromised on the more conventional name of Mount Wollaston” (7; additional information supplied by H. Hobart Holly, historian of the Quincy Historical Society, letters to the author of 17 Oct. 1986 and 23 Jan. 1987). The full resonances of the chapter “Quincy” in The Education of Henry Adams can only be appreciated by mentally substituting “Merry Mount” as title.

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