[In the following essay, Arner contends that the form of New English Canaan is based on festive folk rituals which ultimately derive from ancient Greek phallic ceremonies.]

Thomas Morton's New English Canaan, a work seldom regarded seriously either by historians or literary critics,¹ is admittedly a troublesome book. As history, it is too literary for historians to trust; Morton's prejudices against the American Pilgrims and Puritans generate much of the wit, irony, and vivid imagery of the volume, particularly in the third section, but they also lead the author to invent episodes, distort chronology, and qualify the reliability of his narrative in a variety of other ways. As literature, on the other hand, the book presents a different set of problems. It is, to begin with, a literary hybrid of a kind fairly common in colonial American writing, mixing pastoral and promotional modes, satire and straight travel narrative, poetry and prose in a fashion that requires constant readjustment of critical perspectives. Further, the variety of Morton's intentions and emphases is responsible for a sharp clash in tone and imagery between parts one and two, which are simultaneously factual reports of New England's natural resources and poetic celebrations of the land and its innocent native inhabitants, and part three, in which the author castigates the Puritans in an unremitting satiric attack built around desolate landscapes, allusions to the Underworld, and scenes of Separatist cruelty. Given so acrobatic a work, we can easily understand why Donald F. Connors, who as the most perceptive critic of New English Canaan to date notes these tonal and stylistic discrepancies,² fails to find any underlying unifying principles by means of which to bring the entire book into focus. With so many literary traditions and thematic centers of interest to consider, the best policy is likely to seem the conservative one of conceding that the work is too shape-shifting for formal analysis and following Morton's own topical and sectional divisions.

One way out of this dilemma, I believe, is to place Morton's book in a comic tradition that begins in the phallic ceremonies of ancient Greece. Francis M. Cornford finds the origins of Attic comedy, in particular of Aristophanes' union of poetry and railing, in the two antiphonal elements of early phallic celebrations, invocation and abuse. In the lyric element, probably performed by the leader, the god or goddess was invoked; the iambic element, most likely performed by the chorus, attacked and blasted the reputations of those individuals who had not contributed to the celebration. The phallus, representative of the deity invoked, was both a positive agent of fertilization and a negative charm against evil spirits. “But,” adds Cornford, “the simplest of all methods of expelling … malign influences of any kind is to abuse them with the most violent language.”³ In these choral iambic elements, a later critic, Robert C. Elliott, finds one major source of modern satire.⁴

To be sure, it is a long journey from antique Greece to seventeenth-century New England; satire loses much of its magical potency along the way, and phallic ritual becomes folk drama.⁵ Nevertheless, as C. L. Barber has noted, the two basic gestures of the Greek fertility ceremony survive in the May games and other festivals of Renaissance England,⁶ so that we should not be surprised to find them also as the two fundamental elements of New English Canaan, framing the more obvious three-part structure and determining both Morton's speaking voices and his symbolism. The overriding point of view is the festive one; it generates tones and attitudes which, different as they may appear on the surface, are actually intricately interrelated. In the first two parts of the book, Morton speaks with the voice of the May Lord, a mythopoeic persona who presides over the marriage of man and nature. In the third section, his voice is that of the Lord of Misrule,⁷ a character whose tongue is sharper than the May Lord's but whose comic function is complementary; for Morton in this role, to cite Barber once again, “Abuse predominates over Invocation, though both gestures are usually present, in varying degree, when a holiday group asserts its liberty and promotes its solidarity.”⁸ Moreover, in the maypole, perhaps the central symbol of the book, Morton provides us with his version of the classical phallus. Poetically and obliquely, this symbol helps to tie the first two parts of the book to the third and to mark the transition from May Lord to Lord of Misrule, for in praising the fertility of the land in the customary fashion of the promotional writer, Morton also creates a fairyland of fantastic abundance which seems somehow dependent upon and imaged by the maypole which the Separatists are eventually to destroy. In this way, the central concerns of sections one and two of New English Canaan are related to the satire of section three.

As early as the prefatory poem to his volume, the “Authors Prologue,” Morton announces his assumption of the mythic role of May Lord. One searches in vain among the pages of other early New England authors for accounts of the landscape even remotely comparable to this poem, with its frank evocation of the land as a “faire virgin” awaiting her lover in her “Nuptiall Bed” for a consummation which shall confirm as no formal ceremony can the marriage of “art and industry” to “Nature” in a country where the elements seem “reconcil'd.”⁹ That, at any rate, is the dream, and behind it lies a vast body of pagan fertility rites, mythic associations, and images of a paradise which has eluded man's search since first he imagined it.¹⁰ Into this Arcadia come the Separatists, representatives of civilization, who seek to drive a wedge between man and nature, to dissolve the union which Morton's figurative verse has effected. Poetry is on his side; history is on theirs, as even the May Lord himself must have sensed.

For a time, however, Arcadia flourishes. Before the arrival of the Merry Mount settlers, the Indians are its only inhabitants. They live in intimate contact with the soil, and the generous abundance of New England nature teaches them the lessons of charity and humanity as rigid Puritan Christianity could never do. Of the two sorts of people Morton discovers in New England, “the one Christians, the other Infidels,” the red man is “most full of humanity, and more friendly then the other. …” (p. 123) Later he states the same idea epigrammatically: “The more Salvages the better quarter, the more Christians the worser quarter, I found. …” (p. 257) Most immediately directed against a specific contingent of civilized Europeans, the Pilgrims and Puritans, this praise of the Indians' pastoral virtues also indicates by extension the corruptions of civilization in general. Abuse is low keyed when Morton first makes this remark; in context, praise of the Indians' closeness to nature takes precedence over criticism of the Puritans. By the time he re-states the observation, however, its fullest implications have been explored and its satiric undertones have come to dominate the book.

Intimate and friendly relationships with the Indians help the settlers of Merry Mount to cast off a portion of their civilized European heritage and to come into close contact with the world of nature. The Merry Mounters strive to emulate the Indians' life style and “passe awaye the time merrily,” (p. 178) in the process of which they introduce a festival, a celebration of their own and the year's greenness, which originates in their pagan past and to which they invite the Indians. It seems almost as if their journey to this New World has also been a journey backwards in time toward a period of their own primeval innocence. The Indians, Morton believes, have already made a similar journey; he argues that they are the descendants of a small band of warriors once led by Brutus, the same mythic wanderers who are responsible for the colonization of England, (p. 117) and finds further confirmation of their classical origins in the prevalence of the word Pan in their place names, an etymological detail which suggests to him that they “heretofore have had the name Pan in great reverence and estimation, and it may be have worshipped Pan, the Great God of the Heathens.” (p. 124) Close to the Golden Age in time when they came to America, in other words, the Indians have found their way back to innocence. They offer a model for other Europeans to follow in this regard and a refreshing perspective from which to judge the vanity of European “pompe.” (p. 178) Like the characters in Shakespeare's festive comedies, they and the Merry Mounters who attach themselves to them provide anxiety ridden Europeans of the seventeenth century, soon to develop into the most unsettled century of all,¹¹ both with release (the temporary suspension of historical processes and pressures in a festive and pastoral atmosphere) and clarification (a heightened awareness of man's relationship to nature).¹²

To those who respond to nature and know her secrets, Morton finds that she promises a fertility to match her own. In the abundance of life symbols which dominates the tone of parts one and two of New English Canaan, there are several which relate implicitly to the phallic image of the maypole and which testify to nature's special kindnesses to man in the New World. Herbs in New England, for instance, possess “a more maskuline vertue than any of the same species in England.” (p. 188) Beaver tails are also “of such masculine vertue that if some of our Ladies knew the benefit thereof they would desire to have ships sent of purpose to trade for the tayle alone”; (p. 162) the beaver itself is “of a masculine vertue for the advancement of Priapus. …” (p. 205) For women who cannot conceive in the Old World, there is a spring at “Weenasemute … the vertue whereof is to cure barrennesse.” (p. 229) Morton has himself witnessed the operation of its powers on the “Barren Doe of Virginia” and takes care to underline the importance of the event for us:

I have shewed you before, in the second part of the discourse, how apt it [the land] is for the increase of Minerals, Vegetables, and sensible Creatures.

Now I will shew you how apt New Canaan is likewise for the increase of the reasonable Creatures; Children, of all riches, being the principall.

(p. 265)¹³

Such incredible fertility, combined with the great natural beauty of the landscape, elicits from Morton rhapsodic prose which finally crosses the line into poetry. Because of the evocative nature of the passage, as well as its relationship to the theme of abundance and, therefore, the symbol of the maypole, his encomium to New Canaan is worth quoting at length:

… when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, 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, making so sweete a murmering noise to heare as would even lull the sences with delight a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where they doe meete and hand in hand runne downe to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all the springs. Contained within the volume of the Land, [are] Fowles in abundance, Fish in multitude; and [I] discovered, besides, Millions of Turtle-doves one [sic] the greene boughes, which sate pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitfull loade did cause the armes to bend: [among] which here and there dispersed, you might see Lillies and of the Daphanean-tree: which made the Land to mee seeme paradice: for in mine eie t'was Natures Masterpeece; Her cheifest [sic] Magazine of all where lives her store: if this Land be not rich, then is the whole world poore.

(pp. 179-80)

Like New Canaan, this passage can scarcely be paralleled even in the promotional literature of the South, a region blessed with much greater natural abundance. Everywhere we look, nature bursts with life and gives evidence of boundless creative energy. The care with which Morton composed the piece may be heard in the measured cadences of his clauses, his delicate assonantal repetitions and variations which counterpoint the consonants and lull the reader even as the author claims the streams lulled him. Throughout runs the controlling metaphor of dream, a vision that can only be created and sustained by the force of language and imagination working in consort. We respond to it partly because it is effective prose by any standards and partly because, in admitting the dream metaphor, Morton implicitly acknowledges and forces us to acknowledge, reluctantly to be sure, what both we and he know: that it is all illusion, doomed to disappear the instant that the dreamer awakens to the realities of time and history that surround him.

For there is a blight upon this enchanted land: the Separatists. Running throughout the volumes is an implicit assumption that if the promise of the land is to be fulfilled, if Eden is actually to be rediscovered, and “art and industry” are to be wed in fruitful union with nature, the evil spirits must first be exorcised.¹⁴ Seen from an historical perspective, New English Canaan attempts to insure the fulfillment of that promise by persuading men of the right religious convictions to emigrate to America.¹⁵ As Morton states in his dedication to the Privy Council, “Natures Masterpeece … may be lost by too much sufferance.” (p. 109) His book first aims to cast out malign influences by celebrating the fertility of the land, and only when the image of the phallus fails does he resort to direct attacks of the sort customarily found in satiric writing. Magical potency has been reduced to hoped for governmental policy, the purpose that underlies his frontal assault on the Separatists. The voice of the May Lord rises above that of the Lord of Misrule for the last time in the book in two poems, “Rise Oedipus” and “The Songe,” which relate to the May festival itself. The prose introduction to the first of these corresponds roughly to the iambic element of Greek phallic song; in it, Morton lampoons the scant intellectual powers of the Puritans, who, he reports, “puzzled their brains most pitifully to expound” (p. 277) his verses. The poem itself seems a poetic record of a folk fertility drama performed by the Merry Mount revelers and is rich in phallic imagery.¹⁶ It is followed by “The Songe,” which is explicitly associated with phallic ritual by its invocation of Hymen; the poem is antiphonal, consisting of a chorus and four verses, but there is no satire in it except insofar as it celebrates drinking and sexual license, at both of which (as Governor Bradford's accusations show) the saints took offence.

Once the Separatists have invaded Merry Mount and hewn down the maypole, the theme of the abundance of the land disappears from New English Canaan. Instead, Morton concentrates on the saints themselves, as if aware that he can no longer count on the potency of the life symbol as a counter charm but must resort to verbal abuse and exchange the role of the May Lord for the voice of the Lord of Misrule, the critic of those in power. The death of the May Lord is treated figuratively and allusively in a mock heroic poem relating “th' adventures of mine worthy wights” (pp. 290-4) who invade Merry Mount and carry Morton captive to “Plutos Court.” (p. 292) John Endecott, Samuel Fuller, and William Bradford become “Minos, Eacus, and Radamand” (p. 293) and sentence him to be conveyed across the “Stix” [Atlantic] to higher “godds” [English judges]. (p. 293) Like a host of mythic predecessors, in other words—Balder, Attis, Adonis, and Osiris are among them—the May Lord finds himself a prisoner in Hades, and his symbolic death, foreshadowed by the destruction of the maypole, blights the landscapes by forcing him to assume a second identity, whose main function is to abuse rather than to praise. Loss of the power symbolized by the sexual potency and liberty associated with the maypole, we might note, occasions the transformation. Morton puts on an antic disposition and becomes the outcast jester, fool, or satirist whose apparent madness is his best protection from prosecution.¹⁷

To make certain that we do not miss the mythic point of this transformation, Morton closes his poem with an account of the “Court Revells, antiques and a world of joyes” (p. 294) in which the Separatists indulge to celebrate his captivity. The aristocratic metaphor informs us that the Puritans' infernal forces now rule, and the contrast between the Merry Mounters' May festival and their “Brave Christmas gambols,” (p. 294) where “the Divell” (p. 294) and his cohorts sport and where “Charon Cerberous and the rout of feinds / Had lap [drink] enough,” (p. 294) tells us what we may expect from this new regency. The “Stigean Holliday” (p. 294) of Christmas, a scene of drunken merriment quite out of character for the Pilgrims and Puritans, is doubtless Morton's own invention; its wintry background agrees well with his change from May Lord to Lord of Misrule, for the latter is the title formally used for the satiric master of indoor winter revels.¹⁸ Morton's irony cuts in several directions simultaneously, for it not only reveals the saints as hypocrites, since they practice themselves what they do not countenance in others, but also suggests their perverse love of death. What they celebrate, as the allusion to transportation across the River Styx implies, is the figurative death of the May Lord rather than his return to the world, as the Merry Mounters had. Thus their festival, Bacchanalian and Dionysian as it seems on the surface, is in reality a testimony of their grimness, humorlessness, and hostility toward springtime, joyful sensual exuberance, and—in a word—life itself.

This turn of events and imagery Morton foreshadowed, perhaps without full awareness of all his implications, in the first book of New English Canaan. In the third chapter of that section, he deals with the “great mortality that happened amongst the Natives of New England, neere about the time that the English came there to plant.” (p. 130) The plague was so widespread and severe, he reports, that

in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left alive to tell what became of the rest; the livinge being (as it seems) not able to bury the dead, they were left for Crowes, Kites and Vermin to pray upon. And the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my comming into those parts, that, as I travailed in that Forest nere the Massachusets, it seemed to mee a new found Golgotha.

(pp. 132-3)

Here is the counter to Morton's pastoralism: Et in Arcadia Ego. Like most Englishmen of his time, he believed that the plague had been divinely ordained to depopulate New England and make room for the English, but since these themes would have undercut his Arcadian image, he did not dwell upon them very long. He tells us that a Frenchman captive among the Indians prophesied the plague as a punishment for the natives' mistreatment of him, (pp. 131-2) but it is not until the third section of his book that he explicitly develops the connection between Europeans and death. In the first chapter of that section, Massasoit asks Squanto what the English have buried in the hole where, as Squanto knows, they keep their gunpowder; Squanto answers, “The plague,” and he warns that if “the Sachem … should give offence to the English party they would let out the plague to destroy them all. …” (p. 245) Squanto spoke more truthfully than he could have guessed, for gunpowder was indeed to become worse than a plague to the red man, inflicting more death than any disease could have done as the children of the saints carried their invasion of Arcadia through the next two and a half centuries. Morton did not know this, of course, but in relating Squanto's lie he has figuratively conjoined the counterforces of both pre- and post-industrial pastoralism and exposed Arcadia to attack on two fronts: by the forces of intractable nature (time, disease, and death) and by the advance of technological civilization.¹⁹ Given the precarious situation of the pastoral landscape and its innocent inhabitants, his dream of paradise, cited earlier, gains added poignancy for the modern reader.

Nor is this the only episode that adumbrates the eventual defeat of the May Lord and his children and the victory of death's ambassadors, the Pilgrims and Puritans. Morton and his men manage to escape the negative implications of their European heritage by virtue of their aesthetic appreciation of nature, their close ties with the Indians, and their celebration of a life symbol, but the record of other Englishmen in New England is uniformly dark both before and after the destruction of the maypole. The “Planters of Plimmouth” defile and Indian grave, an event that triggers armed conflict with the Indians and leads to the red man's defeat. (pp. 247-9) One of Thomas Weston's servants at Wessagusset robs an Indian's corn supply and kills the Indian; he is condemned by a tribunal headed by Edward Johnson, but another man is executed in his stead.²⁰ (pp. 249-52) Then several “Plimmouth planters” massacre a number of Indians at the same settlement, an act which provokes retaliation and earns for all Englishmen (Morton and his company included for a time) the name of cutthroats. (pp. 252-4) The Pilgrims seize Robert Gorges' ship, the Swan (pp. 255-9) and confiscate its cargo. They use insinuating arguments, “like the Serpent” (p. 261)—an allusion totally appropriate both to the Separatists' connections with death and to their role as the marplots of Eden—to induce Morton's servants to cast him away upon a desolate island, but he foils their plan and escapes. This catalogue of horrors, which also includes the exile of John Oldham and John Lyford, (pp. 262-4) precedes the invasion of Merry Mount and lends force to Morton's allusions to the Underworld and his association of the Separatists with the Kingdom of Death.

Once introduced, the complex of infernal and destructive images dominates the book metaphorically. Samuel Fuller, one of Morton's judges (Aeacus), continues to serve his master, Death, by sending patients prematurely to their reward; (pp. 298-9) a “zealous Professor” who becomes a prominent member of the Puritan community had previously been a “tombe maker” (p. 313) in England and served a turn as “the tapster at hell.” (p. 316) To celebrate John Winthrop's arrival, the Separatists erect their own version of the maypole upon the ashes of Morton's house:

The smoake that did ascend appeared to be the very sacrifice of Kain. …

… All was burnt downe to the ground, and nothing did remaine but the bare ashes as an embleme of their cruelty: and unless it could, (like to the Phenix,) rise out of the ashes and be new againe, (to the immortall glory and renowne of this fertile Canaan the new,) the stumpes and postes in their black liveries will mourne; and piety it selfe will add a voyce to the bare remnant of that Monument, and make it cry for recompence, (or else Revenge,) against the Sect of cruell Schismaticks.

(pp. 312-3)

With its reminder of the fantastic reproductive and regenerative powers of the New World—Morton seems to be imagining that his house, a projection of his personality onto the landscape and therefore more closely related to nature than to civilization, might be restored by nature herself, grown again like a tree—this passage contains a hopeful element. But the hope is enclosed by parentheses; the black stumps and posts, charred phallic emblems, represent the reality that has replaced the garlanded and festooned maypole. There is nothing left for Morton but the chance for revenge, one form of which he takes by exchanging the role of the May Lord for that of the satirist, the Lord of Misrule.

Morton's account of Separatist cruelty culminates in the punishment of “Mr. Innocence Fairecloath,” (p. 316) whose real name was Philip Ratcliff. The classical Underworld merges into the Christian Hell when Faircloath openly expresses the point towards which Morton's imagery has been working: “the Divell was the setter of their Church.” (p. 318) The official response to this blasphemy is to metamorphose the maypole into a whipping post; the “Deacon of Charles Town,”²¹ (p. 319) whom Morton names “Shackles,” is eager to perform his public duty, “as ready as Mephistopheles, when Doctor Faustus was bent upon mischiefe.” (p. 319) When the sentence has been carried out, “Fairecloaths Innocent back” seems “like the picture of Rawhead and bloody bones, and his shirte like a pudding wifes apron.” (p. 320) Not one to miss an opportunity for irony, Morton entitles his next chapter, Chapter XXVI, “Of the Charity of the Separatists.”

These isolated portraits of the saints as demons of one description or another combine to produce a bleak and dreary prospect of New England as a land fallen from the “golden meane” (p. 115) Morton identified early in his book. The metaphorical gold of the sun and the complex of societal, psychological, geographical, and climatic ideals figured in the golden mean have been transmuted into literal gold, the lust for which, in Morton's view, underlies many of the Separatists' actions.²² Viewing New England's distressed situation, Morton, reflecting on his confinement in the hold of the ship taking him to trial in England, invokes once more the metaphor of the Underworld, this time abandoning pagan in favor of Christian mythology. He casts himself in the role of Jonah, “haveing past many perillous adventures in that desperate Whales belly,” and sees himself so “metamorphosed with a long voyage that hee looked like Lazarus in the printed cloath.” (p. 344) Then he prophesies: “Repent you cruell Separatists repent, there are as yet but 40. dayes of Iove vouchsafe to thunder, Charter and the Kingdome of the Separatists will fall a sunder.” (p. 345) Versed in typological traditions as were most men in the seventeenth century, Morton undoubtedly saw both Jonah and Lazarus as foreshadowings of Christ, whose death and resurrection provides yet another version of the ancient story of a god's sacrificial death.²³ The host of perilous adventures possibly refers to something more than the sea voyage alone and may take in the entire New England experience as well. 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.

In these final allusions, both May Lord and the Lord of Misrule disappear entirely from Morton's pages. If, on the one hand, their disappearance suggests a steady increase in seriousness throughout the volume from the essentially comic scenarios of the May Lord to the scathing satire of the Lord of Misrule to the jeremiads of the Biblical prophet, on the other it signals the final defeat of the spirit of festival in New England. By meeting the Separatists on their own grounds, as it were, Morton unwittingly concedes that the festive point of view has failed; many years later, British soldiers will again erect a maypole in Samuel Sewall's Boston,²⁴ but the symbol will never again flourish in America as it did during that brief green period at Merry Mount. The loss, it should be said, is both Morton's and our own, at least according to one contemporary theologian, Harvey Cox, for whom the rituals of release and clarification are not simply useful terms to describe the effects of festive comedy but fundamental psychic necessities. According to Cox, Protestantism, with its emphasis upon man as an historical creature and upon life as a serious business, is especially culpable of divorcing modern man from his festive, historical self and of the psychic dislocation consequent upon that separation.²⁵ Cox's argument is considerably more involved than this statement suggests and should be read in its entirety. If it be granted the significant degree of validity that I think it possesses, then the Puritan invasion of Merry Mount may mark a far more important turning point in American cultural attitudes than nearly anybody (Hawthorne is the possible exception)²⁶ seems to have suspected to date.

Whatever the value of New English Canaan as a cultural document, however, both its content and its quality argue that the book must be taken seriously as an important contribution to American literature. It is not only the first comic work produced by an “American,” but it is also the first to make significant use of folk resources in a way that prefigures later developments in American poetry and fiction.²⁷ Indeed, as I have argued, its very form depends upon a folk ritual derived from ancient Greek ceremony. Moreover, Morton's deepest message, which I read in terms of release and clarification—that is, a heightened awareness of man's festive identity and his relationship to nature—is inherent in the form no less than in the overt attacks upon the Puritans. There are, of course, departures from this pattern; the book is not as neat as this essay suggests, even though it is better designed than we may at first suspect. In the last analysis, however, New English Canaan lives as few other American works of the same period do, largely because Morton was able to create for himself such attractive personae. Historians will undoubtedly continue to debate his reliability as a witness to and reporter of one of the truly formative moments in the American past, but in spite of the controversy he survives securely in the American imagination. In the roles he created, the May Lord reluctantly turned satirist as the Lord of Misrule, he seems a legendary embodiment of the fresh, green breast of the New World, and he continues to speak eloquently to us of a remote time in our infancy when things seemed to have a chance to go another way.

Notes

1. This is not to say that historians have ignored the work, though most literary critics have, but rather that Morton's version of events is not generally given credence. His most consistent historical critic is Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who sets forth his views in the Introduction to his edition of New English Canaan (Boston: The Prince Society, 1883); in “The May-Pole of Merrymount,” Atlantic Monthly, 39 (1877), 557-67; 686-97; and in Three Episodes in Massachusetts History, 5th. ed. rev. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), I. Morton's defenders include Charles Edward Banks, History of York, Maine (Boston: The Calkins Press, 1931), I; B. F. DeCosta, “A Few Observations on the Prince Society's Edition of the New English Canaan,” The Churchman, 48 (1883), 180-1, and “Morton of Merry Mount,” Magazine of American History, 8 (1882), 81-94; Donald F. Connors, Thomas Morton (New York: Twayne, 1969); and Minor Wallace Major, “William Bradford Versus Thomas Morton,” Early American Literature, 5 (1970), 1-13.

2. Connors, p. 81.

3. The Origins of Attic Comedy (London: E. Arnold, 1914), pp. 35-52.

4. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 261-2.

5. For an account of the transformation of phallic ritual into folk drama and romance, see Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957).

6. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); repr. (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing, 1963), pp. 7, 18.

7. For this identification of Morton the satirist, see William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 205, where Morton is called the “Lord of Misrule.”

8. Barber, p. 24.

9. New English Canaan (Amsterdam: Jacob Frederick Stam, 1637); repr. as New English Canaan of Thomas Morton, ed. Adams, p. 114. Further references are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically in text; pagination corresponds to Adams' superscript numbers.

10. An extended treatment of this theme may be found in Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). Though Morton is mentioned only briefly (p. 83), Sanford's work, particularly the first three chapters, fills in an intellectual context for Morton's dream of Paradise as essential as Barber's literary and dramatic contexts for a full understanding of Morton's prose.

11. There have, of course, been numerous studies, both specific and general, of political turmoil in seventeenth century Europe. One whose title captures the tenor of the times is Alanson Lloyd Moote's The Seventeenth Century: Europe in Ferment (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1970).

12. Barber, pp. 6-10.

13. Since Morton probably wrote Book III of New English Canaan before he wrote Books I and II (Adams, pp. 170n; 233-4 nn.), this passage, with its cross reference to the first two sections, provides some indication of the care with which Morton attempted to fit the pieces of his book together to produce a coherent whole.

14. On p. 181, Morton grudgingly acknowledges that the Separatists possess the virtue of industry, but the tone of his work leaves no doubt that this one merit is not sufficient to overbalance their many demerits and make them acceptable citizens of this brave New World.

15. Minor Wallace Major, “Thomas Morton and His New English Canaan,” Unpub. diss., University of Colorado, 1957, argues throughout that this was Morton's main motive for writing his book. See also Connors, p. 51.

16. Robert D. Arner, “Mythology and the Maypole of Merry Mount: Some Notes on Thomas Morton's ‘Rise Oedipus’,” Early American Literature, 6 (1971), 156-64.

17. Enid Wellsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, [1936]) and William Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969) have both treated the fool's unique relationship to power and political authority at length.

18. Barber, p. 24.

19. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 24-6.

20. Adams, pp. 251-2n., provides the historical background of this episode and speculates on its influence on Samuel Butler's Hudibras, Canto II, 11. 409-36.

21. Adams identifies “Shackles” as William Aspinwall (p. 319n.) and for once shares Morton's view of the Puritans' actions.

22. The Separatists' quest for wealth and furs dominates much of the third book of New English Canaan. Possibly Morton's familiarity with Ben Jonson's works (see his marginal comment on p. 290, for instance), which would presumably have included a knowledge of The Alchemist, may have suggested his charges against Puritan worldiness.

23. For more on Jonah and incidental, indirect support of the thesis that New English Canaan commands careful critical attention to its interwoven images, see William J. Scheick, “Morton's New English Canaan,” Explicator, 31 (1973), Item 47.

24. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Fifth Series, 5 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878), I, 187. This maypole, like Morton's, was cut down by the authorities.

25. The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).

26. Richard Clark Sterne, “Puritans at Merry Mount: Variations on a Theme,” American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 846-58, offers an overview of nineteenth and twentieth-century treatments of the invasion of Merry Mount in literature and seems to agree with William Carlos Williams' and Richard L. Stokes' interpretation of the destruction of the maypole as an act of sexual repression. This motive may indeed have played a part in the Puritans' actions—in fact, Bradford's complaints make clear that it did—but to ascribe all or even the largest part of the meaning of the episode for later generations of Americans to this single motive is to commit for a culture the same sort of oversimplification that Freud, according to some of his disciples and critics at least, committed in individual analysis. Hawthorne's assessment that jollity and gloom were contending for empire in this controversy (see “Maypole of Merry Mount”) seems simpler on the surface, but takes in both Sterne's theory and Cox's observations about the anti-festive spirit of Protestantism.

27. See especially Daniel Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).