SOURCE: Murphy, Edith. “‘A Rich Widow, Now to Be Tane Up or Laid Downe’: Solving The Riddle of Thomas Morton's ‘Rise Oedipeus.’” William and Mary Quarterly, third series LIII, No. 4 (October 1996): 755-68.

[In the following essay, Murphy conducts a “gender analysis” of the poem “Rise Oedipus” in New English Canaan. In the poem, as in the book as a whole, Murphy contends, the land represents a widow, “her deceased husband the Indians, and her new husband the Pilgrims,” who are weak and incompetent. Morton presents himself as the “virile lover who has all the masculine qualities the new husband lacks,” she notes.]

On May 1, 1627, Thomas Morton and his men erected a Maypole at Mt. Wollaston, formerly Passonagessit, in Massachusetts Bay. The eighty-foot pole, with a pair of buck horns attached near the top, stood on a hill overlooking the ocean in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts, in sight of ships in the bay. In Morton's words, “it stood as a faire sea marke for directions; how to finde out the way to mine Hoste of Ma-re Mount.”¹ The pole challenged Plymouth Colony's control of the area by representing the pagan practices of traditional English culture. Governor William Bradford sputtered with disgust: “They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather; and worse practices.”² While the Maypole has come to represent Morton to future generations, it also included a written challenge to his Pilgrim contemporaries, for to it Morton affixed a poem that announced the new name of his settlement: Ma-re Mount.³

The poem “Rise Oedipeus,” which Morton published in his book New English Canaan, and the May Day celebration are central in his story and to his interpretation of his own and other Englishmen's experience in New England. Morton mocked the Pilgrims for being unable to decipher the poem; “being Enigmattically composed,” it “pusselled the Seperatists most pittifully.” In our own time, the message of “Rise Oedipeus,” like the meaning of the Maypole's buck horns, has eluded scholars, who have found the explanation of the poem that Morton included at the end of the chapter on the Maypole as baffling as the poem itself.⁴ This article suggests that the key to unlocking “Rise Oedipeus” is to understand the gender metaphors Morton used to describe the land, the Indians, and the dissenters. The result is a new and more complex picture of Morton and the way he sought to settle New England. Like many Europeans writers, he portrayed the North American land as a beautiful virginal woman.⁵ But in the poem and the book he went beyond that common image to depict it as a rich and lustful widow deprived of her “husband,” the Indians, who had died in a plague between 1616 and 1618. Morton used the image to make three arguments: that the land could only be content when fulfilled by men; that the Indians were no longer able to fulfill the land, which left it open for Europeans (who would be wise to learn from the Indians how to husband it); and that the Pilgrims and Puritans did not have the “masculine virtue” to fulfill the land, but that Morton and other nondissenting Englishmen did and should be allowed to do so. Morton had fundamental conflicts with the dissenters over methods of settlement, religion and culture, attitudes toward women and Indians, and political jurisdiction. A gender analysis of his poem reveals these differences along with an overriding similarity in the way he and they viewed the land: all Englishmen believed they had the right to subjugate it and to replace the Indians.

Like the poem, Morton defies easy explanation. Depictions of him have covered a wide range.⁶ Though Morton was discredited for many years as both a villain and a clown of the Puritan drama of New England,⁷ some historians have begun to rely on him as an important source and as a counterpoint to Pilgrim and Puritan renderings of the New England story.⁸ He is often portrayed as representing Merry Old England against dissenter repression or as a joyful symbol of sexuality in the New World.⁹ He has also been seen as a protoenvironmentalist.¹⁰ My interpretation of his poem confirms the views of Karen Ordahl Kupperman and Neal Salisbury that Morton was neither an egalitarian nor an environmentalist but a typical Englishman who wanted to grow rich off New World bounty and to help his countrymen do the same.¹¹ This article, unlike earlier work on Morton, also shows the centrality of gender to the argument between Morton and his opponents.

Although Morton has come down in history as a gleeful dancer around the Maypole, his experience was more prosaic. He came to New England to trade with the Indians, was shipped home twice, and finally was banished from Massachusetts. After his second return to England, he stayed for twelve years and wrote New English Canaan, which praises New England and tells his side of the story of his conflict with the dissenters. He died in Maine, shortly after the third exile, defeated by the Puritans, without having been able to profit from the bounty he celebrated so thoroughly.¹²

Morton wrote New English Canaan in 1633 and 1634.¹³ His purpose was to encourage English settlement and demonstrate the chicanery and ineptitude of the Pilgrim and Puritan settlers. New English Canaan contains three books. The first focuses on Indians; the second describes the land, flora, and fauna; the last tells the story of English settlement.¹⁴ The poem Morton attached to his Maypole appears in the last book.

“Rise Oedipeus” seems nothing more than a poor attempt to demonstrate his classical scholarship. He wrote:

Rise Oedipeus, and if thou canst unfould,
What meanes Caribdis underneath the mould,
When Scilla sollitary on the ground,
(Sitting in forme of Niobe) was found;
Till Amphitrites Darling did acquaint,
Grim Neptune with the Tenor of her plaint,
And causd him send forth Triton with the sound,
Of Trumpet lowd, at which the Seas were found,
So full of Protean formes, that the bold shore,
Presented Scilla a new parramore,
So stronge as Sampson and so patient,
As Job himselfe, directed thus, by fate,
To comfort Scilla so unfortunate.
I doe professe by Cupids beautious mother,
Heres Scogans choise for Scilla, and none other;
Though Scilla's sick with greife because no signe,
Can there be found of vertue masculine.
Esculapius come, I know right well,
His laboure's lost when you may ring her Knell,
The fatall sisters doome none can withstand,
Nor Cithareas powre, who poynts to land,
With proclamation that the first of May,
At Ma-re Mount shall be kept hollyday.(15)

Although Morton's use of the Renaissance convention of piling allusion on allusion clouds his meaning, a close reading of the poem with reference to the whole of New English Canaan shows that “Rise Oedipeus” stands at the center of his book and its message.¹⁶ Using the metaphor of marriage, the poem issues Morton's challenge to the dissenters for possession of the land.

Analysis begins with the cast of characters. The main ones are an accomplished husband who has died; his widow, crushed with grief but needing a new husband; the newly arrived paramour whom she has no choice but to accept as husband; and the hero of the piece: the virile lover who has all the masculine qualities that the new husband lacks. Morton's depictions of the land, the Indians, and the dissenters throughout New English Canaan show that the widow represents the land, her deceased husband the Indians, and her new husband the Pilgrims. The virile lover is Morton himself. He adopts the personae of the gods Aesculapius and Proteus and uses their skills to court the land. It is as rival suitor that Morton (standing in for nondissenter settlers) introduces the other three characters and defines himself in relation to them. He is an appreciative lover of the land, a respectful, admiring, emulative successor to the Indians, and a scornful victim of the “cruell Schismaticks,” who both complains about their abuse of power and marvels at their oafishness.¹⁷

The characters come to life in the context of the arguments about the fertility of the female land that run through New English Canaan and Morton's tongue-in-cheek explanation of the poem.

Morton began by calling on Oedipus to solve the riddle: “What meanes Caribdis underneath the mould”? He explains that “Oedipus is generally receaved for the absolute reader of riddles,” referring to his defeat of the Sphinx in classical mythology.¹⁸ Morton's explanation of the dead husband's name is that Charybdis was sometimes called the husband of Scylla. Four things indicate that Charybdis represents the dead Indians, who had once husbanded the land. First, Charybdis is “underneath the mould,” like the Indians who died in the plague. Elsewhere, Morton wrote that the Indians had “died on heapes, as they lay in their houses,” and there was no one to bury them. The bones and skulls in deserted settlements that he saw as he journeyed in the forests seemed to him “a new found Golgatha.”¹⁹ Second, as Morton reminded his readers, Charybdis was a danger to seamen. While he did not clarify what that danger was, earlier in the book he related an incident in which Native Americans on the coast of New England kidnapped French sailors.²⁰ Third, the name Charybdis resembles that of the Carib Indians, a name used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the inhabitants of the West Indies.²¹ Finally, throughout the second section of the book, Morton implicitly depicted the Indians as skilled husbands to the land before the great plague.

Morton's views on the Indians are critical to understanding his poem, his book, and his approach to settlement in the New World. In the first section of New English Canaan, he wrote of the catastrophic epidemic of 1616-1618: “herein this, the wondrous wisedome and love of God, is shewne, by sending to the place his Minister, to sweepe away by heapes the Salvages.” The plague had cleared a place for the English, “and by this meanes there is as yet but a small number of Salvages in New England to that, which hath beene in former time, and the place is made so much the more fitt, for the English Nation to inhabit in, and erect in it Temples to the glory of God.” Such satisfaction at the terrible decimation of the Indians compares strangely to Morton's positive depictions of Indians throughout the book. He praised their lifestyles: “They will not be troubled with superfluous commodities. Such things as they finde, they are taught by necessity to make use of.” They purchased necessities “with industry.” Their method worked so well “that their life [was] … voyd of care.” He believed that they held goods in common out of love and compassion. They rejected English “pompe” and were “better content with their owne.” In all, “they may be rather accompted to live richly, wanting nothing that is needefull; and to be commended for leading a contented life.”²² Morton's attitude toward Indians presents modern readers with a paradox. How can we reconcile the man who was glad the Indians were swept away by heaps with the man who praised their humanity, their way of living, and their ability to husband the land?

Understanding that Morton's views were shaped by his goals resolves this paradox. His highest priority in New English Canaan was to promote the settlement of New England with nondissenter Englishmen, men like himself. The Indians' deaths thus left a place for such men to inhabit. But it was also good that many of them were left to share their excellent abilities as husbandmen of the land and to help English settlers exploit its resources.²³ The Indians would help, not hinder, English settlement of the New English Canaan. Thus Morton presented Native Americans in a positive light and, specifically, showed that they would be amenable to English influence.²⁴ Morton assured his readers that Indians were critical to the success of the fur trade and that they were eager to trade with the English.²⁵

To support his contention that the English should learn from the Indians, Morton described in detail the latter's ability to live comfortably on the land. As husbandmen, they were industrious, skilled, and provident. Accordingly, “since it is but foode and rayment that men that live needeth (though not all alike,) why should not the Natives of New England be sayd to live richly having no want of either”?²⁶ In addition to using the land well to fulfill their wants, the Indians maintained it well. Their practice of firing the country in spring and fall kept it from becoming overgrown with weeds. As a result, the trees grew like those in English parks, and the country was made “very beautifull, and commodious.” In contrast to other writers, Morton depicted Native Americans as careful husbanders of resources.²⁷ They were “not without providence, though they be uncivilized, but are carefull to preserve foede in store against winter, which is the corne that they laboure and dresse in the summer.”²⁸

In the third line of “Rise Oedipeus,” Morton introduces the widowed land: “When Scilla sollitary on the ground, / (Sitting in forme of Niobe) was found.” Solitary Scylla was a widow, pining for her husband, crying endlessly like Niobe.²⁹ She was “a rich widow, now to be tane up or laid downe,”³⁰ waiting to be claimed. Morton knew the benefit of marrying a propertied widow; he had married one himself in 1621.³¹ His references to the widow's richness and sexuality reiterate the ways he depicted land throughout the book as female and fertile. Canaan was “deck'd in rich ornaments t'advaunce her state”; on his initial survey, “all her faire indowments” convinced him that nowhere “in all the knowne world” could it “be paralel'd.” His description mirrored a woman's body: “for so many goodly groves of trees; dainty fine round rising hillucks: delicate faire large plaines; sweete cristall fountaines; and cleare running streames, that twine in fine meanders through the meads.” Hair, body, and blood: the land was a beautiful woman.³²

The poem continues:

Till Amphitrites Darling did acquaint, / Grim Neptune with the Tenor of her plaint, / And causd him send forth Triton with the sound, / Of Trumpet lowd, at which the Seas were found, / So full of Protean formes.

“Amphitrite's Darling” refers to Aphrodite. Having come from the sea, she is, in a sense, the daughter of Amphitrite and her husband Neptune.³³ She assists the cause of love by enlisting Neptune's aid for Scylla. Using the sea deities Amphitrite, Neptune, Triton, and Proteus, Morton depicts the sea, a common image of fertility, as bringing Scylla a new suitor.³⁴ In his explanation, Triton's announcement “caused the Suters to muster; (as it had bin to Penellope of Greece).”³⁵ One can imagine the land, mourning the dead Indians, looking out to sea and seeing it “full of Protean formes,” the Europeans, coming to take possession.

Morton introduces Scylla's new lover with the only biblical allusions in the poem:

that the bold shore / Presented Scilla a new parramore, / So stronge as Sampson and so patient, / As Job himselfe, directed thus, by fate, / To comfort Scilla so unfortunate.

Throughout New English Canaan, Morton applies Old Testament imagery to the dissenters, calling them “the tribe of Issacar” or “the Brethren.”³⁶ Scylla's new lover was the Pilgrims, who arrived soon after the plague. Morton mocks them by saying the suitor must have “Sampsons strength to deale with a Dallila,” casting aspersions on the Pilgrims' ability to rule the female land.³⁷

New English Canaan mounts a sustained attack upon “the tribe,” satirically personified in figures like Master Bubble (a Plymouth minister) and Captain Littleworth (magistrate John Endicott of Salem). During a stay at Ma-re Mount, Master Bubble went hunting with Morton.³⁸ Morton shot some birds, breaking their wings, but Master Bubble paddled his canoe “like a Cow in a cage” and let most of them swim away. Bubble showed similar ineptitude in the beaver trade, as did the covetous and foolish Littleworth, who stole corn from Morton after unwisely trading his community's supply for furs. Morton made up his loss by shooting game, but Littleworth's incompetence “made his servants snap shorte in a Country so much abounding with plenty of foode for an industrious man, with greate variety.” Morton boasted that his own industry in providing food saved the lives of a number of sick Puritans early on.³⁹ His example showed that all the widowed land needed to become fruitful was a man with the skill and determination to realize its fertility.

The ocean did not bring Scylla the perfect lover. Morton professes “by Cupids beautious mother, / Heres Scogans choise for Scilla, and none other.” “Scogan's choice,” a popular expression, meant that having some power to choose was better than no choice at all. Scogan, a fifteenth-century court buffoon, was ordered to be hanged but allowed to choose the tree he would be hung from. When he found no tree to his liking, he escaped death.⁴⁰ Morton quipped: “But marriage and hanging, (they say,) comes by desteny and Scogans choise tis better [than] none at all.” Like Scogan, the land was being given a choice among kinds of death: the barrenness caused by having no husband and the barrenness of a union with the impotent Pilgrims. And like Scogan, she might still be able to escape her fate.

Throughout the third section of New English Canaan Morton showed that Scylla's new paramour brought death in his wake: the tribe's lack of art and industry turned the land from fruitful womb to tomb. In another of the book's poems, “The Baccanall Triumphe,” he described his capture by Miles Standish and wrote that with the assault of the Pilgrims, “Lerna Lake to Plutos court must bow.”⁴¹ In delivering Morton into their settlement (Hades) and bringing winter to the land, the Pilgrims were acting like Pluto when he took Persephone down into his kingdom through a passageway at Lerna Lake.⁴² Morton named Standish, Samuel Fuller, and Bradford “Minos, Eacus, and Radamand,” the three judges of the dead in Hades.⁴³ Like those judges, the Pilgrims had sentenced the land to eternal twilight, preventing her escape from the underworld of their creation. Dissenters brought death not only to the land but also to their own kind: Fuller, sent as doctor to Salem, killed all forty-two of the patients he treated, or so Morton claimed.⁴⁴ In Robert D. Arner's words: “As a result of Separatist policies, the land of life and springtime has been transformed into a tomb, and Morton returns to England to tell us all like one come back from the dead.”⁴⁵

Forced to choose between them and no one, the land had to settle for the Pilgrims: “Though Scilla's sick with greife because no signe, / Can there be found of vertue masculine.” Revealing their sad lack of masculinity, Morton returns to the unifying motif of his book. The land, as a woman, can be happy only if her fertility is fulfilled, and this can be accomplished only through the industry of men. In the “Author's Prologue,” Morton wrote that “if Art & industry should doe as much / As Nature hath for Canaan, not such / Another place, for benefit and rest, / In all the universe can be possest.” Art and industry were essential. The land, “like a faire virgin, longing to be sped, / And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed,” was “most fortunate, / When most enjoy'd.” But celebration turns to lament. Though the widowed land is as eager as a virgin for a marriage in which she will be “well imploy'd by art & industry,” her fruitfulness is not being enjoyed and therefore her womb “is like a glorious tombe, / Admired things producing which there dye, / And ly fast bound in darck obscurity.” Morton believed that a marriage between the New Canaan and the art and industry of Englishmen would produce a paradise. By proclaiming her beauty in England, he hoped to bring her out of “darck obscurity.”⁴⁶

It took masculine virtue to fulfill the land, and throughout New English Canaan Morton argued that the dissenters lacked it: “effeminate” was his pejorative of choice. He ridiculed William Wood for describing bears and Indians as frightening in New England's Prospect. He remarked that he would try to calm any “effeminate person” who was afraid of a bear and that there were but a “small number of the Salvages (which might seeme a rubb in the way off an effeminate minde).”⁴⁷ He called his Pilgrim adversaries “the effeminate multitude” who used “Phaos's box” to fool the land into thinking they were worthy.⁴⁸ This box, given to the old and ugly boatman Phaon by Aphrodite, contained an ointment that made him extraordinarily handsome. He eventually came to grief when caught in adultery.⁴⁹ Only with such a charm and the “imaginary gifts” it contained could the dissenters get the land to love them.⁵⁰

Morton used the arresting image of womb as tomb to warn that the union of Englishmen and land had failed in New England. Though “her fruitfull wombe / not being enjoy'd is like a glorious tombe,” the land was not at fault. Nature had done her utmost for Canaan. Morton praised the land's fertility in rapt, sensuous terms: “Fowles in abundance, Fish in Multitude … Millions of Turtledoves one the green boughes.” Grapes were “full ripe pleasant,” the “lusty” trees' “fruitfull loade did cause the armes to bend,” deer bore two or three fawns at the same time. No praise was too great: “for in mine eie, t'was Natures Master-peece: Her cheifest Magazine of all, where lives her store: if this Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore.” New England's commodities also proved the land's great fertility. Morton noted that the beaver tail was full of “masculine vertue for the advancement of Priapus.” He claimed that a fountain at Winnesimmet cured barrenness.⁵¹ Given all this evidence of the land's potential, the fault lay, not with the land, but with the tribe of dissenters. They had destroyed Morton's settlement, but he asserted that their own settlements did not develop the wealth of New England.

Fortunately for Scylla, another contender arrives to vie for her hand—Morton, who claims the skills of Aesculapius and Proteus. “Esculapius come, I know right well, / His laboure's lost when you may ring her Knell.” Aesculapius, a son of Apollo, was a healer who had the power to bring the dead back to life. For this effrontery, Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt, and he became a deity associated with wood and miraculous cures. Barren women visited his shrine, where he came to them in their dreams in the form of a snake to help them conceive.⁵² Morton summons him for both his skills. Aesculapius will defeat the death that Scylla's second husband brought, and he will cure the land's barrenness. Morton employs “ring her knell” ironically: Aesculapius, in the act of announcing the land's death (ringing a knell), will restore life. The phrase also punningly relates sex and death and makes use of the early modern English belief that in order for a child to be conceived the woman had to experience sexual pleasure.⁵³ The dissenters offered no competition to Aesculapius in this regard. Morton, as Aesculapius and Proteus, is able to win the widow: “many aimed at this marke; but hee that played Proteus best and could comply with her humor must be the man, that would carry her.” He thereby supplants the Pilgrims: “he that playd Proteus (with the helpe of Priapus) put their noses out of joynt as the Proverbe is.”⁵⁴

Morton celebrates the life force victorious in the closing lines of the poem:

The fatall sisters doome none can withstand, / Nor Cithareas powre, who poynts to land, / With proclamation that the first of May, / At Ma-re Mount shall be kept hollyday.

Fate, which had brought the Pilgrims to Scylla, also brings their doom. Morton has shifted the ground on “those Moles.”⁵⁵ It is not Providence that will decide their destiny, it is the Fates. They cannot stand against the combined power of the three sisters and Cytherea (Aphrodite) supporting Ma-re Mount. Morton had already bested the Pilgrims once in the beaver trade, and the poem foretells his continued success and their ultimate failure.⁵⁶

The song that Morton and his men sang around the Maypole celebrated their marriage to the land with this chorus:

Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes, / Let all your delight be in Hymens joyes, / Jô to Hymen now the day is come, / About the merry Maypole take a Roome.

This paean to the god of the wedding feast⁵⁷ expands the persona of Proteus to include Morton's men. They too wanted to be married and “lived in hope to have wifes brought over to them.”⁵⁸ Joined together in the settlement at Ma-re Mount, they would all bring Scylla to fruition.

Widow, effeminate new husband, virile lover: given Morton's cast of characters, the buck horns attached to his Maypole make sense. They were his laughing threat to the Pilgrims. Do what you will, he crowed, I can and will steal the land from you. As the Maypole signified the renewal of fertility in the spring, Morton and his men would bring the renewal of fertility to his New English Canaan.⁵⁹ He would take the land from the Pilgrims; he would cuckold them. The buck horns, high on the Maypole, “stood as a faire sea marke” and as a challenge.⁶⁰ The Pilgrims, and then the Puritans, grimly accepted that challenge and shipped Morton back to England.

Morton had been gone for three years when he wrote New English Canaan as part of his effort to return to New England and help supplant the dissenters. His book mourned his failed colony. While his settlement, which he called “a prodigeous birth,” survived, it had fulfilled New England's potential. Morton used the story of “a barren doe of Virginea growne fruithfull in New Canaan” to represent the fate of his colony. The barren doe was a single woman from Virginia who, though she had “tried a campe royal in other partes,” had failed to conceive a child until she came to New England.⁶¹ Both the barren doe and Ma-re Mount needed New England's fertility and the potency of men to grow fruitful. When Morton was driven out for the second time, his settlement died, as the barren doe's child did when she left New England. The woman left fertility behind in New England, and the “rich widow” lost her skilled husband and returned to barrenness: each was missing a necessary component for prosperity. The epitaph Morton wrote for the barren doe's baby also served for Ma-re Mount:

Time that bringes all thinges to light. / Doth hide this thinge out of sight, / Yet fame hath left behinde a story, / A hopefull race to shew the glory: / For underneath this heape of stones, / Lieth a percell of small bones, / What hope at last can such impes have, / That from the wombe goes to the grave.

New English Canaan—“but a widowes mite”—is the story left behind, the small pile of bones counseling that, like the barren doe when she landed in New England, New Canaan might “become [a] teeming” womb or it might become a tomb.⁶²

Attention to gender thus unlocks the riddle of “Rise Oedipeus” and New English Canaan. Thomas Morton made the Maypole, with its threat of cuckoldry, a symbol of his challenge to the dissenters for control of the land. And he used it, through his book, in his political maneuverings to defeat them in England. “Mine host,” as Morton liked to call himself, presented his case in a playful poem at the center of an often playful book. But he was deadly serious: a serious claimant to the land, a bitter rival of the “cruell Schismaticks,” and a sincere advocate of the importance of Indians to England's success in the New World. His book was an earnest effort to bring to pass the threat he had issued around the Maypole: to seize New Canaan from the Pilgrims and Puritans and bring her to a fruition they could not achieve.

Notes

1. Thomas Morton, New English Canaan … (Amsterdam, 1637; facsimile ed. New York, 1969), 132.

2. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, 1967; orig. pub. 1952), 205.

3. “Ma-re Mount” has many possible meanings. Morton wrote that it was a translation of the Massachusett name Passonagessit; New English Canaan, 132. It can mean “merry” mount and a hill by the sea; Morton, New English Canaan, ed. Charles Francis Adams (New York, 1967; orig. pub. 1883), 14n (hereafter cited as NEC). Richard Slotkin gives several possibilities: “marry” to show marriage of “two worlds and two races”; “Mary” to support Morton's Anglican pretensions or a bawdy blasphemy; and “mare” to indicate sodomy or buggery and revels where men and women dressed as beasts, in Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973). The spelling marry works well with the interpretation that follows.

4. No scholar has adequately explained the poem. Donald F. Connors accepted Morton's claim that it described a “contemporary occurrence” and did not try to decipher it, in Thomas Morton (New York, 1969), 98. Charles Francis Adams called it incomprehensible, in Adams, ed., NEC, 19. Robert D. Arner argues that the poem is similar to fertility rituals but does not explain many of the poem's allusions or Morton's statement that it dealt with occurrences of the time, in “Mythology and the Maypole at Merrymount: Some Notes on Thomas Morton's ‘Rise Oedipus,’” Early American Literature, 6 (1971-1972), 156-64; Morton, New English Canaan, 132-33.

5. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Lives and Letters (Chapel Hill, 1975), 12, and Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, 1989), 101.

6. For literary criticism of New English Canaan see Connors, Thomas Morton; Robert J. Gangewere, “Thomas Morton: Character and Symbol in a Minor American Epic,” in Discoveries and Considerations: Essays on Early American Literature and Aesthetics Presented to Harold Jantz, ed. Calvin Israel (Albany, 1976), 189-203; Richard Clark Sterne, “Puritans at Merry Mount: Variations on a Theme,” American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 846-58; Robert D. Arner, “Pastoral Celebration and Satire in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan,” Criticism, 16 (1974), 217-31, and “Mythology and the Maypole”; Daniel B. Shea, “‘Our Professed Old Adversary:’ Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England,” EAL, 23 (1988), 52-69; Hans Galinsky, “History and the Colonial American Humorist: Thomas Morton and The Burwell Papers,” in Forms and Functions of History in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm, ed. Winfried Fluck, Jürgen Peper, and Willi Paul Adams (Berlin, 1981), 21-43; John Canup, Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn., 1990), 20-24, 110-25; and William J. Scheick, Design in Puritan American Literature (Lexington, Ky., 1992), 15-18. For a treatment of Morton in fiction see John P. McWilliams, “Fictions of Merry Mount,” AQ, 29 (1977), 3-30.

7. For depictions of Morton that support the Pilgrims and Puritans see Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes in Massachusetts History: The Settlement at Boston Bay, the Antinomian Controversy, and Study of Church and Town Government, 2 vols. (New York, 1965; orig. pub. 1892), and Adams, ed., NEC. Daniel Shea calls this edition “a post-puritan attempt, by way of yet another layer of glosses, to quell the threat of the Morton text.” Adams used “his killing literalism” in a “running marginal battle” with Morton; New English Canaan, “Our Professed Old Adversary,” 67n. While Adams is scornful of Morton, his painstaking research is invaluable for understanding many of Morton's allusions. See also Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston, 1965), 89-91; Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 119; Philip Ranlet, “The Lord of Misrule: Thomas Morton of Merry Mount,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 134 (1980), 282-90; and John Seelye, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (New York, 1977), 166.

8. Minor W. Major, “William Bradford versus Thomas Morton, New English Canaan,” EAL, 5, No. 2 (1970-1971), 1-13; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Thomas Morton, Historian,” New England Quarterly, 50 (1977), 660-64; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York, 1982); and William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983).

9. For example, Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 58, 60; Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” NEQ, 50 (1977), 255-77; John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1988), 3, and Seelye, Prophetic Waters, 166.

10. John Demos, “The Maypole of Merry Mount,” American Heritage, 37 (Oct./Nov. 1986), 82-87.

11. Kupperman, “Thomas Morton, Historian,” 660-64; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 160-62; and Cronon, Changes in the Land, 80.

12. Morton was associated with the Council for New England and used his book to promote it. Sources for his history are New English Canaan; Connors, Thomas Morton, and “Thomas Morton of Merry Mount: His First Arrival in New England,” American Literature, 11 (1939-1940), 160-66; Adams, Three Episodes in Massachusetts History; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 205-17; John Winthrop, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, 2 vols., ed. James Savage (New York, 1972; orig. pub. 1825), 1:34-35; and Samuel Maverick to the earl of Clarendon, in Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1869 (1870), 38-42.

13. Paul R. Sternberg, “The Publication of Thomas Morton's New English Canaan Reconsidered,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 80 (1986), 369-74. The surviving copies were printed in Amsterdam in 1637, but Sternberg believes it was printed earlier in England and suppressed, most likely by the Puritans. For whatever reason, it did not survive, but the book was licensed in Nov. 1633 and was probably written between 1633 and 1634. Connors agrees that, while a substantial amount of it was written before the end of 1633, it was revised and completed during 1634 or perhaps 1635. References to William Wood's New England's Prospect (Morton called it “the Wooden Prospect”), published in 1634, show that Morton worked on his book in 1634 or after; Connors, Thomas Morton, 33-34; Morton, New English Canaan, 27, 28, 38, 53, 84, 95.

14. Morton, New English Canaan, 11, 59, 103.

15. Ibid., 133.

16. Arner, “Mythology and the Maypole,” 157.

17. Morton, New English Canaan, 164.

18. Ibid., 136; Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York, 1969), 256-61, 262. Morton's use of Oedipus also reinforces the idea that the land is a woman. By bringing in Oedipus, who had married his mother, to solve his riddle, Morton pointed out and accepted the paradox in the common European metaphor of land as woman—that land was both mother and wife of the men who settled it.

19. Morton, New English Canaan, 23. In his description of these virgin soil epidemics, Salisbury calls the area around Massachusetts Bay a “vast disaster zone” and supports an estimate of about 90٪ mortality for the Massachusett, in Manitou and Providence, 101-05.

20. Morton, New English Canaan, 22-23; “Charybdis,” The Oxford Classical Dictionary (hereafter cited as OCD).

21. “Carib,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed. (hereafter cited as OED).

22. Morton, New English Canaan, 15, 24, 58.

23. Morton's story of the pride an Indian father took in his son's gray eyes and the father's lack of concern when Morton told him that the eyes meant that the son was a bastard connects Indian generosity with the gendered metaphor of the land. The story suggests that the English could join with the land, even if her Indian husband survived. This anecdote also reveals Morton's flexibility with gendered metaphors: the land could be virgin and wife as well as widow; Morton, New English Canaan, 32. See Ann Marie Plane, “Bringing Forth Bastards: Gender and Indian ‘Fornication’ in Colonial New England,” 6-7, paper presented at Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1996, for a discussion of this story.

24. Morton's positive depiction of the Indians established his place in a European dichotomy between what Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., calls “good Indian” and “bad Indian.” As an advocate of the good Indian image, Morton saw colonization as being helped along by the contributions of the Indians, while those who believed in the bad Indian saw Native Americans as a hindrance, justifying attempts at their destruction; Berkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), 28, 119. Salisbury points out that Morton's sympathetic view of Indians grew out of his appreciation of their skills with the land and did not alter his belief that it was appropriate for Europeans to dominate them, in Manitou and Providence, 161.

25. Morton, New English Canaan, 11, 25-26, 104.

26. Ibid., 58 (industrious), 56.

27. Ibid., 54. Compare with William Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Vaughan (Amherst, 1977); Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 25; and John Smith, A Description of New England …, in The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1986), e.g. 1:333, 340, 342-43.

28. Morton, New English Canaan, 42.

29. Niobe cried for her children, killed by Artemis and Apollo; “Niobe,” OCD.

30. Morton, New English Canaan, 136.

31. Morton left his wife in 1623, taking all her goods with him, after a series of acrimonious disputes with his stepson; Charles Banks, “Thomas Morton of Merry Mount,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 58 (1924-1925), 149-57, 188. Morton was also playing to the comic literary convention about remarrying widows; see Barbara J. Todd, “The Remarrying Widow: A Stereotype Reconsidered,” in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society, 1500-1800 (New York, 1985), 54-55.

32. Morton, New English Canaan, 10, 60. Seelye describes the image in this passage as a saucy “figure, a wanton metaphor … like a willing savage consort,” in Prophetic Waters, 172. For European descriptions that give human physical traits to the earth see Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1980), 23-28, 38-41, and Kolodny, Lay of the Land, 9, 11. Robert Johnson, who wrote a tract promoting Virginia, made the comparison of veins and springs explicit: “sweete Springs, like veynes in a naturall bodie,” in “Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia” (London, 1609), 11, in Peter Force, comp. Tracts and Other Papers, Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America, from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776, 4 vols. (New York, 1947; orig. pub. 1836-1838), vol. 1.

33. Arner, “Mythology and the Maypole,” 161.

34. Ibid., 159-61.

35. Morton, New English Canaan, 136.

36. [Issachar], ibid., 162, 93. Other references to Pilgrims and Puritans in Old Testament terms include “where they ordained to have passover kept so zealously,” 119; his assertion that they called the Maypole an idol, a Calf of Horeb, and Ma-re Mount, Mount Dagon, 134; calling Winthrop Joshua, 153; his reference to the “Caiphas [Caiaphas] of the country” (a term for the high priest of the Jews), 154; and his frequent accusation that they wanted to collect the “tithe of Mint and cummin,” 162, 164, 179.

37. Ibid., 136.

38. According to Morison, Master Bubble was probably the Reverend Rogers in Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Morison, 210n. (no first name given).

39. Morton, New English Canaan, 123-24, 162, 172.

40. Adams, ed., NEC, 278n, 136n.

41. Morton, New English Canaan, 147.

42. Catherine B. Avery, “Lerna,” “Lernaea,” The New Century Classical Handbook (New York, 1962).

43. Adams, ed., NEC, 291n; Morton, New English Canaan, 147; Hamilton, Mythology, 39.

44. Morton, New English Canaan, 146, 153.

45. Arner, “Pastoral Celebration and Satire,” 223-27, 229. Morton also criticized them on their own terms, as attempting to draw servants away from their masters (117-18, 139) and attacking the Anglican religion (117, 119, 138).

46. Morton, New English Canaan, 10.

47. Ibid., 80, 16; Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Vaughan, 42, 76.

48. Morton, New English Canaan, 146, 136, 152, 158.

49. Adams, ed., NEC, 345n. Adams gives the passage from the Varia Historia by Claudius Aelianus (lib. XII, cap. xviii) in Latin. I thank William R. Jones for the following translation: “Phaon, being the most beautiful of all men, was by Venus hid among the lettuces. Some say he was a ferryman, and followed that kind of life. Once Venus came to him, desiring to pass over: he received her courteously, not knowing who she was and with much care conveyed her where she wished; for which the Goddess gave him an alabaster box of ointment, with which Phaon anointed himself, became the handsomest of men, and the wives of the Mytilenians fell in love with him. But at last, being discovered in adultery, he was killed.” For Phaon as old and ugly see Avery, “Phaon,” New Century Classical Handbook, 864.

50. Morton, New English Canaan, 136.

51. Ibid., 10, 60, 95, 77, 93. Morton also compared New England positively to Virginia, 89, 92-93, 94, 95, 121. Although Virginia might have the art and industry available, the land did not have the fertility.

52. Avery, “Asclepius,” New Century Classical Handbook, 177-78; James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion, 3d ed., vol. 4: The Dying God (New York, 1935), 214; ibid., vol. 5: Adonis Attis Osiris, 80-81.

53. Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984), 14-19. For death as sexual climax see Edmund Miller, “John Donne,” in Frank N. Magill, ed., Critical Survey of Poetry: English Language Series, rev. ed., 8 vols. (Pasadena, Calif., 1992). In early 20th-century slang “ring the bell” meant making a woman pregnant or bringing on an orgasm in a female partner; Eric Partridge, “ring the bell,” A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8th ed., ed. Paul Beale (New York, 1984).

54. Morton, New English Canaan, 136-37. This phrase meant to supplant or to disconcert in some way; “nose,” OED.

55. Morton, New English Canaan, 136. Beverly Russell supplied this idea.

56. Ibid., 149.

57. Hamilton, Mythology, 36.

58. Morton, New English Canaan, 135.

59. For English May Day celebrations see T. F. Thiselton Dyer, British Popular Customs, Present and Past; Illustrating the Social and Domestic Manners of the People (London, 1876), 223-73; E. O. James, Seasonal Feasts and Festivals (New York, 1961), 288-90, 309-10; and David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, 1989), 21-22, 35. For horns as a symbol of cuckoldry see Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York, 1988), 131.

60. Morton, New English Canaan, 132.

61. Ibid., 146, 120-21. “Camp-royal” is the main body of an army, hence a great number of men; “camp-royal,” OED. Though Morton criticized her incontinence and stated that marriage should precede sexual relations, Slotkin argues that he implied that sexual relations with him cured the Barren Doe, in Regeneration through Violence, 179. Morton wrote that “the water of the fountaine at Ma-re Mount was thought fit to be applyed unto her for a remedy, shee willingly used according to the quality thereof,” in New English Canaan, 131.

62. Morton, New English Canaan, 121, 3, 120.