Reading the revels
Early American Literature; Chapel Hill; 1999; Jack Dempsey

Volume:
34
Issue:
3
Start Page:
283-312
ISSN:
00128163
Subject Terms:
Poetry
Literary criticism
Colonialism
Personal Names:
Morton, Thomas (1576?-1647)

Abstract:
Dempsey reads Thomas Morton of Ma-re Mount's poetry with the realization that the
intercultural human behaviors most prominent in descriptions of earliest American
fish-and-trade ventures are also the most prominent Puritan charges against Morton's
kinds of colonial interaction.

Full Text:
Copyright University of North Carolina Press 1999

[Headnote]
I ask the reader to excuse these rhymes if they are not as well-polished as a well-bred man would wish.
They were made in haste. But nevertheless I have a wish to insert them here because they serve as a
part of our history and to show that we lived joyously.
French planter & attorney Marc Lescarbot, postscript to The Theatre of Neptune, performed in New
France 1606

Until recent decades, most remarks about the career of Thomas Morton of Ma-re
Mount have had two points of acrimonious departure: his New England
plantation's relatively personal relations with Northeastern Native Americans, and
his trading guns to them for the choicest pelts of the fur-trade. Objections against
the interracial, erotic, and economic practices of Morton's small group of
straggling planters, inscribed in the criminal statutes and personal writings of his
contemporary Puritan rivals and in the texts of critics and historians schooled in
their values, explicitly made mortal sins of both "intermarriage" of any kind and
gun-trade to "Indians": both were synonymous with subversion of Puritan-English
empire.1

Erotic relations and gun-trade with Native people, however, were very much the
human contexts of Canaan's "The Poem" and "The Song," which Morton's
company publicly performed and "fixed" to their Maypole over Massachusetts Bay
during the May Day Revels staged there in 1627. Can we solve the long-standing
"riddle" that the Ma-re Mount trappers and planters ("the authors of these Revels"
135) wove into these poems? The "Poem" and "Song" articulate their plantation's
history, celebrate it, and deliver a manifesto or formula for successful colonizing.
In order to consolidate their growing strength as competitors for the Northeastern
fur-trade, Morton and his colleagues took up discourses and popular cultural
forms of the Renaissance, combined them with the most widespread practices of
trade in the first ioo years of Northeast contact, and used these to address (in
both self-interest and compassion) the people of Native American New England,
who were then suffering the aftermath of catastrophic "plague."2

English trade of guns to Native Americans had begun by the late 1500s, with the
earliest West Country fishermen and fur-traders who spent time ashore long
enough to salt their catches of cod, some of them wintering in crude
encampments along the northern shores of the New-Found-Land. Traffic in
firearms, whether "loaned" to Native men to expedite the flow of pelts from inland
trap-lines, or traded outright, apparently brought Morton the lion's share of New
England trade for a brief time, between his post-1624 takeover of "Ma-re Mount"
and his first arrest in June 1628. It was, he hinted, his way of "comply[ing]" with
America's preexisting practices in order to "carry her," or outdo New England
trading-rivals (135). Quinn's "Renaissance Influences" (79) details earlier attempts
in Ireland and the Northeast to purchase "a loyal nucleus" of Native
trading-partners, a practice borrowed from imperial Roman policy by way of
Machiavelli.

Ma-re Mount's timing was right: the demand for guns in Native southern New
England had sharpened with the early 1600s and was fundamental to the Ma-re
Mount settlement's early success. It does appear the case that they complied with
"the occurrents of the time" (131) on both English and Native sides of transatlantic
trade.

Mindful of these circumstances, we come to Ma-re Mount's poetry with the
realization that the intercultural human behaviors most prominent in descriptions
of those earliest American fish-and-trade ventures were also the most prominent
Puritan charges against Morton's kinds of colonial interaction: "irregular" trade
(especially in guns), cohabitation with Native women (to Bradford "abusing the
Indian women most filthily"; Letters 62), and communal rites (generally called
"revels") often performed by Native peoples and Europeans "many days
together."3

Providing witty, magnanimous diversions to a sophisticated audience in exchange
for social and economic favors was a strategy Morton learned in London's Inns of
Court,4 and he practiced it on the American frontier with inventiveness. His likely
years at the Inns had seen 1594's extraordinary Gesta Grayorum
("Entertainments at Gray's Inn"), a days-long spectacle for Queen Elizabeth I that
entailed the creation of a mock-Court and included lyricists and orators such as
Thomas Campion and Sir Francis Bacon, processions and government-cavalry
reviews through the streets of London, arrays of torch-lit barges on the Thames,
and indoor presentations of brief poetic narratives mixed with dances. Gesta
Grayorum was to crystallize into the English court masque in the hands of young
Ben Jonson and younger Shakespeare (Welsford 162-63; Nichols ed. of Gesta).

Early in these performances for the Queen, as soon as the mock-court stood
established (of "Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of Purpoole"), offices, arms and
"royal" pardons were issued, followed by various bizarre orations and concluding
with "dancing till late," till the Queen retired. As the days of shows wore on, an
"altar" was set up for "sacrifices" and incense to the "Goddess Amity," round which
"ladies" danced as "Nymphs and Fairies, with instruments of musick, and . . . very
pleasant melody with viols and voices ... hymns and praises to her deity" (18).
Again, an array of "counselors" delivered ridiculous orations on "learned
mysteries" and the secrets of "Trismegistus" (24). Midway through its proceedings
came the performance most relevant to Morton's poetry, "Proteus and the
Adamantine Rock."

Its wisp of a story concerned the Renaissance figure of change and of human
potential, the seaside Greek demigod Proteus (Homer's "Old Man of the Sea";
Odyssey, Book 4), and his magical island, with whose written-in "magnetic"
powers he had imprisoned the Prince and his "seven knights." An "Esquire"
arrived to rescue the men and delivered a speech proving to the willful Proteus
that the "true attractive Rock of Hearts" was Elizabeth herself (46). Proteus
admitted himself outmatched and, with no choice but to set her seven knights free,
he struck the islandscenery with his staff. As he looked on (with his "attendants"
including one named "Amphitrite," below), the men emerged from within it "in a
very stately mas[que] . . . in couples, and before every couple came two pigmies
with torches .... [They] danced a new-devised measure... After which, they took
unto them ladies; and with them they danced their galliards, courants.... And they
danced another new measure" (49). (This performance-adjourning-to-dance is the
structure of Canaan's "Revels" chapter.) Gesta then shifted its shape again: an
"Antimas[que] of Mountebanks" took form in which "The greatest master of
medicine Aesculapius" appeared with his "fellow artists of severall nations" (60), to
perform a healing by means of "musical charms," songs sung with a "Chorus":

What ist you lacke, what would you buy.

What is it that you need;

Come to me, gallants, taste and buy,

Heer's that will doe the deed ...

Ailments addressed included old age, "Lost maidenhead," "greife of the spleene":
verses spoke to each ailment with a comic incantation of cure, and the Chorus
cautioned at last, "Yet let us not [in] too much lyccor delight" (62), a fine pun
somewhere between "liquor" and Homer's ichor, the substance of divine beings. In
Gesta this referred to a "powder" mixture distributed by the healer that
"preserved" one from "fate" (60): "Nectar" was to be Morton's term for such a
substance in his "Song," the second half of Ma-re Mount's Revels.

Finally in Gesta, a "player" named "Parradox" appeared, to mock virtually
everything from the learned circles of ancient Athens to current religious factions
("my father a Jesuite, my mother an Annabaptist" 65). So closed this
generation-and-more's most impressive Inns of Court entertainment, with a few
short lyrical songs in honor of "the Kinge of Love and Pleasure" and the raising of
a "May-pole" onstage. Players were to "circle it with your caprians [fertility-related]
daunces" in honor of the "Feast of Venus Citherea" (72), "Parradox" in the lead
with "his Disciples."

Gesta was a rainbow of literary genres and rhetorical styles, of symbolic actions
and powerful displays of language that commanded attention and respect.5 The
compelling exhilaration of performing/watching it came from its existence as an
"emblem" of actual Elizabethan power, as an oftendaring dialogue with as well as
entertainment for the ruling class. With no overarching "plot," its unity lay in its
creative and diplomatic negotiations of power relationships, of the frontiers
between celebration and satire. And as we might expect here in "law school" at
the Inns, the young men both performing and watching it were exhorted by Gesta
to "make emblems" of their own (21). In this sense, Gesta shared what William
Keach has shown to be a part of much Inns of Court poetic production for this
period-a kind of poetry densely woven from mythology and esoterica but,
nonetheless, rooted in an "articulated consciousness of the immediate historical
context" (40).

In this dynamic and learned atmosphere, young Thomas Morton acquired his
mythic vocabulary and developed his rhetorical powers in the practice of making
"emblems" of the people and events at hand. For example, he characterized his
and his indentured servants' American situation in Gesta's terms. Like "Prince
Henry" stranded with seven knights on an "attractive" yet confining "rock," Morton
had found himself by 1626 in New England with seven servants of an original
company of 30: he then reorganized this failing "Mt. Wollaston" into his own
successful "Ma-re Mount" by means described above (voyage-documents in
Holly). By 1627's Revels, the youths had grown seasoned enough to want to settle
down, desiring to have wives "brought over to them, [which] would save them a
voyage" (Canaan 134; and on the early, widespread practice of cohabitation
and/or intermarriage see Canny "Permissive").6 As his fur-trade profited further
from those youths' close relations with Native women, Morton smiled-in a phrase
no longer so cryptic-that "He that played Proteus (with the help of Priapus) put
their noses [at Plimoth] out of joynt." He had set those seven knights "free" to
pursue their desires for life and wife, and this (with the gun-trade) had spelled
Ma-re Mount's success as a plantation.

Cognizance of these general elements-firearms, rivalry for Native American
trade-partnership, England's Inns culture, intercultural and interpersonal
attractions in America-equips us to read Ma-re Mount's sophisticated productions.
We can perceive Morton working like a good lawyer, appropriating all available
means (here, young men's desires, Native demands and lifeways, one's cultural
education) for winning ends.

What ends? And how does "The Poem" speak to and involve its hearers to
achieve them? As we read through this esoteric oration, we notice the sudden
clarity of its final couplet, which breaks away from that pied language into a
"proclamation" for all to hear and understand.7 Indeed, the "Poem" is more than
concerned with "some contemporary occurrence": it is constructed to address
what in 1627 appeared to be America's very malleable future, both its promise
and the threats to it. You, the colonist/reveler/reader, are the one who must "Rise
Oedipus," and grasp, even practice the mysterious subtleties read aloud, danced,
and "fixed to the Maypole" 8-that embodiment of long-standing colonial formulas
for life and prosperity in New England (text slightly modernized from 131-32):

A few chief aspects: "The Poem" consists of three complete sentences (of 13, 4,
and 6 lines), and is laced with many "triplicities" that show these authors involving
their audience by playing upon many different traditions and kinds of written and
spoken language (including Native American ones). We must bear in mind that
"The Poem" was written to be read and perhaps acted-out, before a multicultural
crowd on a hilltop overlooking the sea; and that its first words demonstrate to that
crowd why they (and we) are assembled-to call upon a "spirit," for information on
a matter "underneath the mould," literally at the feet of the person declaiming. (No
doubt this was done with the Inns' special blend of true formality and pure play.)

The Poem

Some of those "threes" in "The Poem" would have evoked, then, a seance or
public consultation of an oracle. Its rising pitch and ardor, as it calls upon figure
after figure for an answer to its question, makes "The Poem" something of a
three-part incantation or prayer (in Christian, "pagan," and Native American
traditions the number 3 is of endless significance). There is also a narrative here
that moves in threes: its story unfolds spatially, from sea to shore to land (" 'Scilla'
was found by speaker 'I' and then ..."), and from past to present to future time
(she was found; here is a choice; we shall keep this day).

Further, "The Poem" invokes three famous healers for the world of human
troubles it describes: Oedipus vs. "plague" in Thebes; "forms" of "Proteus," who
gave remedy for a diseased ancient-world plantation; and Asklepios, whose cult in
Rome began with his help against epidemic (more on each below). These "threes"
that make up the three main sentences, a structure not unlike the good riddle
asked of Oedipus himself, work together to drive "The Poem" toward a "comfort,"
if not exactly a cure, for the "sick." They build up and bear their rhetorical fruit in a
couplet which is also a very understandable proclamation. Thus, "The Poem," as a
written/spoken form, appropriates many kinds of shared languageacts in order to
inspire further human actions. It entices and orders those actions according to
long-prevailing customs of literal and figurative coupling, within springtime's
"hollyday" tradition?

Prayer, riddle, story, healing, proclamation. These kinds of speech serve as a
symbolic and allusive guide through "The Poem," which evokes a number of
humans and demigods of myth, history, and folk-culture. For example, Morton
says he "raised" Oedipus as "the absolute reader of riddles" (135). Oedipus is
also, in Ovid's Metamorphoses (book 7, 176; as in older works by Sophocles and
Apollodorus) triumphant against two "plagues" of disease afflicting his city.
Morton's Oedipus seems called upon to read a riddle concerning epidemic. He
and (by identification) the speaker on the hill want to know "What means" that
"whirlpool" of the mortal body's dissolution, death "underneath the mould"-with
reference to conditions "Here," and at this time ("When" this "Scilla" was "found"
and it led to May Day's "proclamation").10

But the answer, though "we" are led on with all the implicit gratifications of
"hollyday," will be known one step at a time: without "Scilla ... in form of Niobe" we
cannot begin to learn what this epidemic "means" for us, as a crowd of different
peoples atop the hill. The "order" promised by this "hollyday" is to be neither
brutish nor anarchical: to get there, she must be our first concern. Who is
"Scilla-Niobe," and why does she sit "solitary" in grief?11 The "authors of these
Revels" needed Renaissance imagery to address the 1627 character and
condition of Native America.

Morton and company, in their effort to understand Native peoples at least enough
to enlist their help, noticed and responded in these Revels and poems to the most
catastrophic human event in seventeenth-century New England: the "Great
Mortality" of "plague" and/or other diseases that between 1616 and 1619 killed as
many as ninety percent of an estimated 90,000-135,000 Native Americans
inhabiting lands from Maine to Connecticut.12 This grieving woman is inscribed "in
threes" herself, as attractive "nymph" (like Scilla, below), as widow (gloss to 135),
and as mother Niobe. Indeed, both Scilla and Niobe resonate strikingly with the
colonial events that brought mass death by epidemic from England to the
Northeast.

In Canaan, Natives "it seems boasting of their strength" to some resentful French
captives "said that they were so many that God could not kill them" (19). This
"innocent arrogance" resembles Niobe's claim in Greek myth. This "loveliest of
women" in Ovid's Roman telling boasted that her wealth and many beautiful
children rivaled those of the Gods, and Niobe lived to lament their loss.13 This
woman's "first name," however, is Scilla: we must turn back to Classical myth, to
Thomas Lodge and the Inns, and to the Native American landscape for help on
how to read this fundamental first sentence of the three.14

In Ovid's influential telling, young woman Scilla's seaside refusals of many suitors'
advances were not a reason to punish her: when "paramour" Glaucus made his
bid (himself "only recently" a man of the sea, 309), Scilla went her way, with less
fortunate friend Galatea noting that "at least the men who seek your love are not
ruthless ... and you can refuse them, as you do, with impunity" (305). Scilla's own
interests and "interiority" consisted mainly of enjoying her pleasant natural
surroundings, and Ovid gave us this uncomplicated life as neither idyllic nor
doomed. It simply went on, until Glaucus sought out sorceress Circe for a
love-charm. Circe herself fell in love with Glaucus and, when refused, she
spitefully made Scilla "monstrous" by poisoning her favorite tidal pool. This created
a circle of fierce "dogs" about Scilla's lower abdomen. And she, in
sympatheticallyrendered anger of her own, became a danger to passing sailors
such as Odysseus's crew. At last, for her attacks on sailors who were still
nonetheless drawn to her, Scilla was transformed into a great stone land-form by
the sea.

A redoubtable woman, victimized by others' needs and problems, with respectable
feelings of her own: a danger, affiliated with "fierce animals" yet irresistable to
those neophyte sailors who all wanted something from her. The metaphor grows
clearer in light of the earliest encounters in the region (well-documented in relation
to Champlain, Capt. Thos. Hunt, Plimothers et al. in Carpenter), which were
increasingly characterized by violence, kidnap, and "poisonous" liquors and
disease, as Morton's American decade wore on.

Morton's Scilla is also in keeping (and more) with Thomas Lodge's epyllion about
her at the Inns. For as Keach has shown, where Inns writers might have been
expected to produce "frivolous" and "decadently Italianate" poetic reactions
against Petrarchan and neo-Christian valuations of Scilla's story (such as is found
in Ovide Moralise), Lodge and others displayed "sensitivity to the violent pathos
and psychic torment" in Scilla's mistreatment. Lodge's treatment, and Morton's
after him, went beyond any simply-crude "parody of orthodox moralizing" (Keach
43, 50). This distinction fostering sensitivity was, Keach writes, Lodge's aim: his
sendup of the self-absorbed Glaucus was the "dig" he aimed at the Inns' very
audience of "penny-knaves," with their cynical sexual mores. It is notable also that
while in Lodge's telling Scilla sits at first coyly displaying her attractions before a
gathered company, in "The Poem" she sits grieving and impassive, sick and silent
except perhaps for her "plaint" taken up by others. Her emotions are the first
things told of her; they originate in independent events before the speaker's
arrival; and her silence speaks, because we revelers/readers know the stories of
Scilla and Niobe. "Oedipus" must discover the cosmic "reason" for her sufferings.

Finally, we note other versions of Niobe's tale. For example, within Sophocles'
Antigone, the latter heroine is told that, like Niobe, "your selfsufficiency has
brought you down" -and Niobe here is turned to stone after weeping for her lost
children (lines 872-75, qtd. in Grant 213). In several sources available to Morton's
generation, Niobe's final fate is as a statue that "still weeps" (primary texts listed in
Graves 1-259). But these variants resonate not only with Morton's Renaissance.

A half-morning's walk north of the site of Ma-re Mount in Quincy, facing the islands
of Boston Bay at the very end of the peninsula called Squantum, stands Squa
Rock, an imposing 35-foot high outcrop of darkgray puddingstone with an
unmistakable likeness to a woman's highcheeked features. (Illustration in
Dempsey's edition of Canaan; or, you can follow the beach-side trail to the literal
end of Squantum early in the day, before the waters rise high enough to obscure
this "face" in the cliff.) A number of Native and other legends relate how this
formation became known as "Weeping Rock" or "Squa Tumble," after a Native
woman who "fell" into the sea there.

The earliest meanings of Squantum itself, however, take us back to tales of the
gigantic "Indian" couple, Maushop and Old Squant/Granny Squant (Crosby 35;
Simmons, Spirit, passim). They say that Maushop (for several "reasons")
devoured and/or transformed all their children; and that Granny Squant, in grief
for them, was herself changed into a tearful stone beside the ocean. Morton did
not miss the rock-formations called "Squanto's Chapel" at Moswetusett near his
home (noted earlier), and he cannot have missed Squa Rock so close to his
plantation. Scilla-Niobe "is" America, its land and peoples: these are figured also in
Canaan's "Author's Prologue" as attractive bride and widow grieving "fruitlessly"
over a "tomb" that was her "womb" (Canaan 7).15

All this represents an unsurpassed inclusion of Native history and experience in
four lines of early English-American poetry. These things, Ma-re Mount's "authors"
tell us, happened before ("Till") the work of "Amphitrite's Darling" in the next line,
who carried Scilla-Niobe's "plaint" to "Grim Neptune."16 He, in turn, filled New
England's "bold shore" with "Protean forms" (multilingual fishermen, trappers and
traders, lone planters, would-be missionaries, etc.), out of whose midst Scilla's
"new paramour" had stepped when he "found" her sitting "solitary on the
ground."17

And what does this learned counsel posted on the Maypole immediately say about
the winning qualities needed ("to carry" America) by any hopeful New World
paramour? Not surprisingly for poetic offspring of the Inns, this hero's strength
must be his weakness. Samson, first, stands where one expects an example of
power; but in Morton's words, the new American man must have "Samson's
strength to deal with a Delilah" (136). In Morton's own day, Samson was most
often an example of how not to behave in racial, religious, cultural, and marital
affairs (Kermode 1396): the wonderful irony behind this Biblical strongman is that
he could not resist the women of Philistine and Canaanite races, who (like the
Native Americans still in control of New England; Canaan 109) in ancient times
had "dominion" over the landscape (Judges 13). Samson was a precariously rash
and transgressive figure on the cultural frontier called Old Canaan, and he
enjoyed the challenge of being "bound" and made vulnerable to Delilah, caring
little that his elders disliked his choice in love ("she pleaseth me," he shrugs to
them; Judges 14:3-4).

Job, too, was then widely read and "performed" as a figure of "despair and
impatience," rather than as a man who bore patiently with sufferings beyond his
understanding (Lewalski 189). These were both "flawed protagonists" whose very
imperfections were part of the "deliberate allegory" created among men by God,
to serve his edifying ends in the world (Astell 179, 189; this partly describes
Milton's later Samson Agonistes as well). Each figure's "fall" was part of the show
in morality plays, giving "fallen nature its due" by voicing (for example) Job's "What
is my strength, that I should wait? And what is my end, that I should be patient?"
-thus enlisting more powerfully the audience's "undisciplined" energies, for
safe-return to "normative" standards of behavior. To wander was still to be
headed home.

A young planter of Morton's company, like him nominally Christian but without the
will or compulsion to "fetch" over an English wife (and with a Native "lass" close
by), therefore might feel encouraged to enjoy what Marcus called "a condition of
happy ambiguity in which the license and lawlessness [sic] associated with [May]
customs could be interpreted as submission to authority" (3).18 Hence too the
happy moral ambiguity in the final phrase of the poem's first sentence: one is
"directed thus, by Fate / To comfort Scilla." "Comfort"-"whatever form it may take
between you," smiles Morton the trader and chief poet-is moral, appropriate,
"heroic" action in such circumstances of mutual need. As "The Song" to follow
agrees: "Nectar is a thing assigned / By the Deity's own mind / To cure the heart
oppressed with grief. . . ."

Indeed, at this point in performance of "The Poem," the speaker (likely Morton as
the highest-ranked" gentleman" present) emerges as "I," as if to demonstrate the
way to complete this unfolding narrative, the poem's "cure" and its proclamatory
"manifesto of Ma-re Mount." With a ceremonious oath to Venus and Love itself,
"Here" is made an emphatic choice or decision to "court" the New World. Yet, why
is this important gesture rendered in terms of a "fool"?

John "Scogan" was one of the best-known English court harlequins or fools, and
of his many "squibs" the only one Morton refers to (136) was his clever evasion of
a death-sentence from his king. Sentenced to hang, Scogan "failed" to find a
gallows-tree to his "liking" (Adams lists several sources; Prince Society Canaan
278). This "fool" not only dared offend, but used a form of tradition, the last wish,
to play up a pretense that he had a "choice" at all; and the fiction turned (his)
death back into life. Morton and his audience knew that "Scogan's Choice" meant
virtually none. Such a predicament amounted to about the same nothing as the
average human being's will to deny, or resist, the almost-universal "destinies" of
"marriage" (sex-relations of some kind) and "unjust death," represented by
"hanging" or doom at the hands of overwhelming power, political, natural or other.
(See Whiting 189 and Harvey 276 on this proverb quoted in Canaan's "gloss" to
"The Poem"; consider that "where one settles down is also where one meets
doom.")

So, while there appear to be virtually no options for the "choice" required of Ma-re
Mount's company, there is an enticement here, suggesting that by practicing
"Scogan's" wit, one may elude any consequence of the social taboos being
broken. But with the enticement, "The Poem" gives a warning, to embrace here
and now what choice there is: it reminds readers then and now that each man
(including Morton) had, no doubt, less attractive options back home than here,
and that each stood relatively blessed with opportunity from the "Fate" and/or
"Love" which had "directed" their lives to New England. It might seem foolish
formality to insist on affirming one's American lot; but this could make all the
difference in a life here. The soon-to-arrive poet of Andover, Anne Bradstreet,
learned this, after feeling her "heart rise" at first sight of the "wilderness."19

This choice and "cultural courting," however, must be performed "Though Scilla's
sick." This line says many things; but note first that the poem's final sentence calls
out suddenly for help-as if things may failto a third and "ultimate" (in the "pagan"
world) healer, Asklepios. Virgil's Aeneas is an aspect (ironic and otherwise) of our
poem's speaker, who at Ma-re Mount is trying, as Aeneas did, to organize a new
"country" in humble circumstance. But here in New England the possible "new
community" is on the edge of doom from epidemic. Ma-re Mount reaches further
into early Rome for help: "Aesculapius" and his cultus saved the capital in 292
B.C.E. (Kerenyi Asklepios 5-9; and he was thanked with a watersidetemple on the
Tiber). This anxious summons of a doctor was also to draw upon standard English
mummers'-play tradition, by which, near the end of plays involving preChristian
themes of death-and-rebirth, he was called to restore "dying" players (Arner 158;
James 273-75; Thomas 72).

We have seen Asklepios' appearance in Gesta Grayorum above, and in Morton's
well-thumbed Cicero, Asklepios was one who "healed with his oratory, not
medicine" (Cicero 159). If each indentured "paramour" fails to make Native
American Scilla-Niobe recover and respond, warns "The Poem" (with refreshing
candor for both a male and a colonizer), "His" New World "labor" will be as "lost"
as this woman to the forces of mortality-to "the mould." She is "now to be taken
up[,] or laid down" (Canaan 136).

Scilla's final disposition either will or will not enable the poem's ultimate
proclamation to become human action. But we see by now that Morton learned his
lessons at the Inns. For "The Poem" enlists its audience with skillful appeals: now
it "brings them to the edge" by voicing human anxieties concerning the
overwhelming forces of "doom," which all can "relate to" because "none can
withstand." And, straight into this moment before the void comes an enjambment
which, like "the nick of time," brings resurrection.

"Doom" is met with "Citherea's Power"; and, via that tiny equating conjunction
"Nor," "The Poem" yokes together death and desire. "None" can withstand either
force. "Venus" is an equal power among the Parcae or "Fatal Sisters." And,
though Death began this oration, now it is Venus (Love) "who points" to American
land and peoples; and she speaks "with proclamation," whose fulfillment, in
regular practice by this nascent community, will carry Ma-re Mount's peoples away
from that edge of doom where they stand, and take their "narrative" into the
future. Their own actions will (hopefully) embody an answer to this prayer and
riddle. "Cure" will come in time, through annual "keeping" of "hollyday."
Scilla-Niobe's "grief" can heal only by literally acting out the promise within most
social ritual-that "life" will, somehow, go on.

"The Poem" asks for "new" understanding and "points" the New World as the
place where the twin inevitabilities of death and desire will join together in a
powerful regenerative alchemy. There is no subtext of anxiety from what Bakhtin
(432) called "official culture" that, as in Christian eschatology, these two
"devouring" forces must lie down together as lion and lamb. Morton delivers their
Ciceronian or ancient "pagan" circular configuration, as they were typically joined
in philosophy and ritual in the temples of Cythera (see for example Pausanius 1:3,
23; Cicero recommended "solace" rather than "solution" for the "problem" of
death, in actions "partaking of a common humanitas"; qtd. in Lorch 78-80).

Ma-re Mount's proclamation speaks from and to a cosmos that, like Native New
England's, is not "just" but infinitely malleable to those with shamanistic skills. It is
a cosmos of "brass," in Sir Philip Sidney's famous terms, but with plenty of "gold"
available, in the form of pleasant year-round consolations to those with the skills to
exploit them.20 It dictates that, while none can resist either death or desire, one
can build a humane) community amidst them, via "hollyday"-what Catherine
Albanese termed the "balancing act" of nature-inclusive religious practices (23).

In Anglican Church terms, "the body is where God communes with us, where we
show our worship" (Blunt vii). Choices are made in organization of a community,
and through custom and ritual each community signifies, to itself, to others, to the
universe, its choices and historical identity. Mare Mount, beginning with its
80-foot-high horns "as a fair sea-mark" to bring in people and the bulk of the traffic
in American wealth (132), signed to its neighbors in the vocabularies of seasonal
rhythm, market-town economic intercourse, and trade-sustaining human relations.

There were consequences for Native Americans in this trade and poetry, however,
that must be recognized. Most invasively, "The Poem" and the Revels themselves
carry on "Though Scilla's sick." Indeed, as with Canaan's early remark that the
epidemic "angel of the Lord" had made the land ,more fit" for the English, "The
Poem" and Revel capitalize in every sense on Native New England's human
devastation. Scilla will be courted by these English, whether or not "she" (her
desired community of fur-traders and "marriageable" women) understands what
these "paramours" are saying with their words and dances. And they will "court"
her at a time of grief she suffers partly because there is a supposed lack of "virtue
masculine" in these still-populous Native American surroundings. The last verse of
"The Song" to follow the solemnities of "The Poem," with its more accessible
round-dances, performs this colonization in an erotic cajoling of Native daughters
for the sake of their wealth, as it calls for "Lasses" to follow their own
warm-weather custom (Wilbur 83) and remove upper-body wraps, especially of
course their "beaver coats."

The "humane virtues" and "fair means" are as integral to "The Poem" as its "sins,"
because they perform the "cultural work" of extending "His Majesty's Empire" and
Native American subjection. But Morton's central metaphor of a "widow" for Native
American land and peoples, an almost singular metaphor in colonial texts,
suggests the loss of Native men rather than their fictive and convenient absence,
as it "courts" Scilla-Niobe. For the phrase "virtue masculine" has something more
cosmic than biological about it, more of the medieval apothecary or alchemical
formula (as "The Song" does with its line, "This physic will soon revive his blond"
-his race and his "melancholy" humor). Reading Morton's syntax carefully, we see
that what keeps Scilla "sick," what keeps her from any hope of a future amid the
wreckage of all she has known, is not, at last, the lack of a male at all.

"It" is specified as a "sign." Scilla remains silent, unable to answer "Scogan's
choice," because she has been crushed by the apparent failure of her civilization
and its apparently displaced system of "signs" of meaning, perspective, and
understanding, and by the failure of every traditional healing-practice that Native
peoples must have tried to save themselves. Scilla's cosmos, once assumed
fundamentally hospitable (Speck, Penobscot Man 311), has rendered no cure, no
countersign to the ritual appeals made by shamans, sages-femmes, and broken
circles of Native kin relations.

Morton's culture knew as little about "plague" as its American hosts. But in that
void ripped open in Native reality, Ma-re Mount would place not simply its own
Transcendental Signifier (the phallic "speaking" Maypole), but the entire Revel
itself and its energies: "The Poem" and "Song" are three-dimensional speakings,
performance-texts whose characters are living bodies; and they are moved by
multiform American desires (for profit, freedom, eros). The Revel itself is the
company's improvised offering of European "medicine," the best collective means
for regeneration of the "tribe" through whom they want to get rich.

There is no question of the company's imperialist motive: there is room for new
critical and historical appraisal of all aspects here. For Cronon, Morton was
"almost alone" (80) in grasping the Native sense of living "richly"; Goldberg (65)
remarked the "egalitarian" cultural mixture here; and for Jennings (Invasion) the
"widow" image alone was extraordinary. Ma-re Mount was in a contest with
Plimoth for the New England fur trade, and used ritual itself as "a present act
which historically recalls the past for the purpose of reordering-even
predetermining-the future" (Cope 170). Where the intrusive aspect of that
"Though" in "The Poem" registers the colonialist project, an anthropologist of ritual
like Victor Turner would simultaneously observe a rather typical "forcible aspect"
noted in most rites that must call for a break with the past (202).

Most importantly on this point, "The Poem" does not "act" as if Scilla has
cooperated automatically; but ends with a warning and a hope for shared renewal.
Constructed out of the interdependence of both trading partners and of
male/female, it plights a public "troth," to move "her" toward speech. The Revels
are, and call for from Scilla, a language and speech of connection rather than of
lack: what one writer has understood in our own time as "acceptance," "of the
irrevocability of absence by putting. . . death into words" (Wyatt 477).

Only if Scilla responds can the Revels achieve the opposite of a simple imperialist
ventriloquism. It is an act more grave than, but not unlike, one of Wampanoag
Sachem Ousamequin's, when he wondered to his Pilgrim guests that their King
James "would live without a wife" (Mourt 66). The Revels, responding to and/or
"reading in" the same "predicament," present the same question to a person
understood to be suffering.

The early trade that followed inevitable contact was not so different from previous
relations of trade that prevailed on both sides before contact, amongst the "races"
or nations of Europe and those of America. Cohabitation, sex relations,
intermarriage, and seasonal rituals were all employed to smooth over the constant
contests and offense-expiations that make up human intercourse; and these were
salted everywhere with profit and fighting, cheating, dancing, murder,
reconciliation, and reveling. In early-colonial New England these helped the Ma-re
Mount company over the resentments they inevitably roused in Native peoples for
their intrusion into the land and its power relations. Perhaps the only Ma-re Mount
distinction in Native eyes might be its lack of a programmatically applied racial
discrimination.21

At Ma-re Mount the typical early New England "rule" had been pleasure expedient
to short-term profit-the "haste" Lescarbot described aboveand also produced the
same imagery in French histories, of health and medicine found in shared
activities.22 A later colonial phase more characterized by outright violent conquest
departed from these early forms of "gradualism" ("bringing them to civility"), such
as Hariot spoke for in Virginia. The Dutch, treating for New Amsterdam trade
through Algonquian Canarsee "daughters" (see Capt. de Vries' Historiae qtd. in
Raesly 174), also came to scorn syncretism and intermarital methods, as did the
French by the 1700s (Dickason 277).

But as we study the poetry at the center of "The Revels of New Canaan" we
cannot discount the cultural reaching-out to Native peoples that was part of the
Ma-re Mount colony. Young New England missionary Thomas Mayhew, fourteen
years after Morton, saw likewise on Martha's Vineyard "that a way to gain the
confidence and respect of the Indians, and so further settlement by the English,
was to compete with the pow-wows, as they competed with one another, as
healers" (Mayor and Dix 157).23 Many sources on just the visible, structuring
aspects of Native public ceremonies suggest a Ma-re Mount attempt to connect
with those traditions.

A shaman or powah healed people through a ritual acting-out of problems to
envision, diagnose, and remedy those problems with the group's participation.
The aim was a ritual, sometimes including the use of narratives,24 which
"dramatized" the fact of sickness, the powah's power to heal it, and the cure of the
patient whose "energies" had hopefully been thus galvanized. Music, dance,
call-and-response- "These do begin and order their service and Invocation of the
Gods, and all the people follow, and joyne interchangeably in a laborious bodily
service," Williams observed (189-92). Winslow described "arbors" or "bowers" of
rushes raised at Native ceremonial places "as Apollo and Diana had temples"
(583-84; see also Bragdon, Peoples 219). Wood wrote that "all the auditors" of the
powah's performance "with one voice utter[ed] a short canto," a sound "like a
quire" to Williams (192). There were also, his Key added consistently with Canaan,
other kinds of "Solemne speeches and Orations," "Lectures ... concerning
Religion, Peace, or Warre and all things," heard "sometimes" by "neere a
thousand." Surely all these cultural forms (including the transatlantic art of
round-dancing, to follow here with Morton's lyric "Song") were deliberately blurred
together within the shared desire for trade between Ma-re Mount and Native New
England.

What, however, could Morton have hoped to accomplish later with his "Revels of
New Canaan" chapter, when these events had brought about his second
(thirteen-year) exile from New England? How could English readers who lacked
Ma-re Mount's frontier experience comprehend "Scilla/Niobe's" plight and
Canaan's proclamation of the way to American prosperity?

Morton's life (c.1576-c.1647) spanned the most intense period of Puritan "cultural
reform," including strident arguments for and against "sports" and the traditional
pastimes of "old England," such as Maypoles and dances on the green. Morton
the lawyer, driven back to England in 1630, resolved to avenge his burned
plantation, and did so by merging his own legal complaints with those of Sir
Ferdinando Gorges and others against the Puritan charter to New England. By
1635 Gorges, the Council for New England's mostly "Cavalier" courtiers and
aristocrats, the future Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, and ultimately King
Charles I, would revoke all Puritan powers to govern the Northeastern frontier. But
it was Thomas Morton's petitions, witness-affidavits, and legwork in service of
Gorges's private ambitions that kept the process going despite early setbacks.
New England Puritans like Winthrop (2:194) were long aware of a petition "of
many pages" in Morton's hands, which likely evolved through legal process into
his 1635 quo warranto document (the "curtain call" against New England's
government; rpt. in Hutchinson 101); and charges therein read like echoes of
pages in Canaan.

Most basically, then, "Revels of New Canaan" appropriated the ongoing cultural
battle over "sports" to help at least the devoted Elizabethans and Neoplatonists of
his courtly audience to perceive the merits of Gorges's legal suit. But surely, only
the most leisured and astute English readers had even a chance to puzzle out the
tenor of Niobe's "plaint." Given Morton's own fate, however, we should not wonder
that he so thickly veiled what Gorges had called the "discreet measures" needed
to prosper by "fair means" in and with Native New Englanders. Loren Pennington's
and other surveys have shown that English colonial writings of the 1630s, in the
wake of the 1620s Virginia "massacres" and costly wars, saw a thoroughly angry
reversal of most early optimism and hopeful toleration expressed toward Native
Americans. By now John Smith and others had come to explicitly approve the
open conquest of Native "infidels" who (like peoples of the Caribbean) resisted
European plans. While there can be no doubt that Canaan "complicated" these
brutally ethnocentric simplicities born of colonial frustrations, its most radical
counter-suggestions were just too hidden in literary camouflage to be effective. To
at least some degree we must conclude that, like "The Song" that both respects
and colonizes the Native American "lass," Canaan tries to have it both ways.
Readers who could track Morton's sophistications were likely already "his kind" of
planter, but the book's broad endorsements to colonizers helped along a less
thoughtful juggernaut.25

Still, Canaan is replete with evidence that Morton took subtle steps about these
quandaries. May Day itself proceeded from "The Poem's" oracular language to
the more accessible "misteries" of drink and hand-holding dance. Canaan's
arguments have a similar form. Book 1 is "high style": its first paragraph locates
New England cosmological(y as "The wise Creator's" own best "glasse" in which
Englishmen can practice the virtues of "moderation, and discretion" (8). And its
portrait of Native New England implies at each end (chapters 2 and 20) that
English and Native American are born of the same racial stock (18), and that both
at their best strive for the same "Plato's Commonwealth" (49). Book 2's
commercial catalogue of "commodities" is laced with a potent counter-theme
encouraging moderation: its own infectious feeling for the land (51, 87, 90), its
living creatures, its robust airs. If these cannot educate a colonist toward
"comply[ing] with" American realities, Morton offers at last the
How-Not-To-Colonize Manual of Book 3's wide-open comedy, which begins with
Native American point of view and with Plimothers' amazement that a Native man
can speak English. It proceeds to dissect the "quondam drummer" Captain Shrimp
(Plimoth's man-at-arms Myles Standish) and the stern bungler Captain Littleworth
(John Endicott, mocked as a "fiddler" by "the illiterate multitude") and to offer a
thorough critique of not just "Separatist" but "Christian" misguidedness. It further
rewards with the un-Quixotic misadventures of that priceless prince of
ethnocentric paranoia, the anonymous "Master Bubble."

Morton's multicultural short story concerns a would-be "great merchant" ("Bubble"
was a former would-be minister) who refuses to learn any Native language, and
so ends up botching an inland trade-journey for beaver. To the surprise of his
Native hosts (whose actions he has somehow "misapplied"), Bubble bolts in
needless terror into the woods at night with his pants on over his head.26 And to
the Native men's terror after a careful debate of their own (that tries to take the
bright view of the English!), Bubble's "sober" English colleagues reason their way
to exactly the wrong idea of where the fault lies. As a result they threaten to kill
Native "wifes and children" unless the guides fetch Bubble back. They rescue
Bubble: he never has an inkling of what caused all this tumult (himself), and the
very weight of such a climax of nonperception lands squarely in the reader's lap.
Like America, Canaan is filled with a speaking Native American presence and, as
in "The Poem," it waits on many levels for those who can or will "Rise Oedipus."

If the number of such readers was few enough, Sternberg's discovery of a minor
Morton document tells us that, somehow, most copies of Canaan were mistakenly
confiscated and destroyed-mistaken for subversive foreign-printed tracts-by
Morton's own government masters. The rest were reviled for most of 350 years
and more. But, as we begin to read Morton on his own terms, and perceive his
multifaceted address to the ethics of the colonial reader, we begin to wonder how
much more one man could have done to promote not only the most practical, but
also the most humane, approach to that indeed-inhabited country signified by his
titlepage: New Canaan.

[Footnote]
NOTES

[Footnote]
1. More than 30 such sources are cited in "A Sampler of Remarks" on Thomas Morton in New English
Canaan published by this editor (note below). They can be said to begin with Wm. Bradford's History, and
include Winslow, Winthrop, Dudley, and Nathaniel Morton, and their views of Morton are echoed in detail
through even the encyclopedias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the first major editors
of "American Literature," Moses Coit Tyler, was a Congregational minister; like critic/historian John
Gorham Palfrey, who reproduces William Bradford's entire version of the Plimoth/Ma-re Mount conflict,
and ferociously attacks the very idea of Native "civilizations" (1: 232 for example). Contemporary
literary historian Nina Baym found that Tyler's influential works were "followed because he was himself a
follower"; and Baym agrees with many views of Tyler, as the early-definitive editor of what was deemed,
by minister, secular ideologue, and book-publisher alike, as "fit to read" in American classrooms. None
of Tyler's works suggest that New English Canaan had ever been written. New England historians led by
C.F. Adams, Jr., including Francis Parkman, Jonathan Trumbull, and Worthington C. Ford, also
denounced Morton and Canaan in their various early American editions. These are strong lines of
agreement across the American-critical ages. What other early American text has been received this
way?

[Footnote]
Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers herein refer to New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of
"Merrymount" edited by myself (this text of Canaan based on a full collation of all extant copies and
annotated as part of my Ph.D. dissertation at Brown University).
2. The charges against Morton are not "legal" ones but derive from Bradford's History (2: 52), his
Letters (56-64 to the Council for New England), and Winslow's 1635 accusation in a "Petition" (1635:
Mass. Hist. Soc. Procs. 5: 133). Though there is no record of a hostile act by a Native New Englander
with a gun from Morton or any other trader between 1614 and 1630, a recent example of the continuing
"conviction" standing against Morton and, more importantly, against Native peoples, is Vaughan's New
England Frontier (89-90), which invokes C. F. Adams, Jr.'s hostile 1883 edition and study of Canaan in
order to reaffirm the prevailing view of "the Morton affair."

[Footnote]
The view has been that, while the Puritans of Plimoth supposedly would have been glad to leave Morton
alone on the landscape (which they knew they did not legally govern), all the early Massachusetts
planters did have "cause for apprehension" from the "poor [Native] survivors" of the "plague" to whom
Morton traded guns. Hence Plimoth's duty to behave "responsibly" as the sole party in the region
capable of "interracial diplomacy" (Vaughan's phrase for keeping guns solely in European hands), "while
behind the impenetrable veil of the forest," he adds, "were [also] the dreaded Narragansetts"-the
peoples of what James Axtell has ironically called "darkest Connecticutt."
3. Bradford centered his rival's misdeeds round a "May-pole," Ford ed., Bradford History 2: 48; and
Morton dubbed "revels" a number of different Native social gatherings, from healings to feasts to
marriages (22, 29, 32 for examples).
4. A host of tiny clues examined in Thomas Morton shows that Morton's likely birth-year of 1576
probably placed him at the Inns in his late teens roughly from 1593 to 1600 (normal tenure was about
seven years). No documents prove he was an actual attorney but he did legally bring about revocation of
New England's charter in the 1630s.

[Footnote]
5. The focus of the entire program, as of Morton's "Poem" (below), was a woman, here in the person of
Queen Elizabeth. Given her years of lavish courtspectacles such as at Kenilworth, she was impressed
by the "Proteus" performance so that, when the "lesser courtiers" joined the players to dance, she
exclaimed "What! Shall we have bread and cheese after a banquet?" (Gesta 49).
6. The concept of intermarriage as the most advisable way for Europeans to colonize America was old by
this time. Many documents in the collection Early Images of the Americas (Williams and Lewis, eds.,
1993) testify that the English (such as Sir Thomas More with his Utopia) kept abreast of ideas such as
those of the early Spanish colonizer Las Casas; who, in a memorial de remedios ("brief of appeals") to
the Spanish Crown, proposed a plan for the creation of colonies/communities where "Indians" and
"ennobled" Spanish "peasants" were to intermarry and share the coast of "Cumana" (now Venezuela).
At the opposite end of Europe, Scotsman Sir William Alexander praised John Rolfe's marriage to
Virginia's Pocahontas because he believed that "by admitting equality" one might help to "remove
contempt" from the attitudes of some English (qtd. in Kupperman 104). Morton was a latecomer to
Spanish, French, English and Dutch colonial methods practiced across the first 100 years of
transatlantic contact. Jennings (Founders 347-52) provides an overview of intermarriage as a
substantial part of early and later Native-European trade (though least practiced among the English). In
his view, so-called metis communities directly descended from these practices suggest the very real
and different

[Footnote]
possible outcomes) of an "alternative" colonial method or policy. To Nicholas Canny, English lack of
experience outside the pales in Ireland helped colonists to "believe" racist stereotypes in favor of
imperialism; and even so, many "went [Irish] native" by intermarriage (or less formal arrangements)
until the application of military discipline there. This was also the case in early Spanish Florida, where
colonizers married into Calusa and Arawak matrilinies and made more cultural "adaptations" thereby
than Native people did (Deagan 305).
7. Morton writes that these poetic works were "performed" (133), including such signs of significant
organization as a "Chorus"; and Bradford's account of these activities by "all the scum of the country"
(Ford ed., Bradford History 2: 77) at least agrees that the poetry was made quite "public." Scottow
("Narrative" 1629: 289) wrote that servant Edward Gibbons had some experience of letters, being only
"divinely illiterate." It will appear that Native Americans present could have comprehended the poems.
They were at least half of the most crucial audience being addressed.
8. Morton both follows and departs from usages (including the mythical Niobe and Proteus) in Edmund
Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and Faerie Queene (1590s). Like Spenser, Morton's impulse
is to both "make a poem" and "persuade and move" people toward his idea of a "virtuous and gentle
discipline," and considers it "So much more profitable and gratious" to present "doctrine by ensample,
[rather than] by rule" (Spenser qtd. in Maclean 427, 2). Where they chiefly differ is on the nature of
"Proteus" in human nature and best interests. For Spenser he is "father of false prophecies" (FQ III,
viii) and, as in Boccaccio's influential De Genealogia Deorum, symbol of a "changefulness" associated
"with forces opposed to order and harmonious unity" (Maclean 297). The reader can easily compare
Morton's.

[Footnote]
9. These Revels' most obvious appropriation of tradition to attract/engage with New Englanders is of
course the "fertility rite" aspect of May Day tradition. Marcus (2): "May Day had been an official feast
day of the Catholic and Anglican churches. It carried associations of fertility [healthy increase of
children, crops and livestock], renewal, frolicks in the greenwood, and restored community." Thomas
(61, 65) elucidates the English sense of "fertility rite" within folk-customs: the term has been a familiar
one in existing Morton studies, beginning with Bradford's likening these Revels to the "beastly practices
of the mad Bacchanalians" celebrating the "Roman Goddess Flora" (History 2-48). Marcus lists a
wealth of Renaissance texts (pro-sports and con) linking these agriculture-centered customs back to
Classical and pagan-European cultural sources. Adams's 1883 Canaan adopted the Puritan critique of
them (18) found in Phillip Stubbes's 1583 Anatomie of Abuses, while Slotkin, Zuckerman, and Shea
have each explored some concerns listed above.
It would have been easy, useful, and important to a central reason for the Revels, for a person with a few
Eastern Algonquian words at his command to relate what was "in the attempt" of these various "speech
acts" within "The Poem." Citations below and easily available will show Native New Englanders
practicing and interested in such actions (of religious, political and other function) performed upon
significant land-forms such as this hill. For examples and overviews see Bragdon "'Emphaticall
Speech,"' and Mavor and Dix's 1991 Manitou: The Sacred Landscape of New England's Native
Civilization 160-61. The latter and Vastokas' Sacred Art of the Algonkians (1973: 107, passim) have
collated numerous archaeological and other evidences of marked "fertility" and erotic "concerns"
(among many others) in Eastern Algonquian artifacts, from petroglyphs to the many unmistakably
phallic "effigy pestles" in Massachusetts Archaeological Society (Middleboro) and private

[Footnote]
collections: Wampanoag historian Great Moose/Russell Gardiner will also publish a detailed illustrated
study of these in the Massachusetts Archaeological Society Bulletin in igg. The careful anatomical
detail in these "grinding tools" is obvious, and one example dates from a Paleolithic (and
preagricultural) site at Squibnocket (Martha's Vineyard) c. 6000-4000 B.C.E. Fruitlands Museum
(Harvard, Mass.) has also exhibited a small stone "fertility figurine" discovered in southern
Connecticutt.
10. The other obvious way to read Oedipus might be as a figure of parricide/incest; though how that
would mesh with all the other figures in "The Poem" in a reasonable coherence of meaning (granting
Morton intelligence), or in consistency with historical and other contexts, remains to be shown. On "the
mould" and "Charybdis" as death: Morton was apparently told by Native New Englanders that, in their
cosmology, at least some deceased or "destroyed" human beings "went to Sanaconquam, who feeds
upon them," and as he heard this his informants were "pointing to the Center of the Earth" (42).
Charybdis was a mid-ocean whirlpool avoided by Odysseus's ship (but not by others') in Homer's
Odyssey.
11. The word "solitary" is a first identification of this woman with a natural and a human landscape. See
the Bible's Jeremiah, Lamentations (1:i): "How the city cloth sit solitary, that was full of people! How is
she become a widow!"
12. Many recent population estimates are reviewed in Salisbury (36) and Bragdon (People 25). On what
disease these "plagues" were, see Spiess and Spiess; for many specific reasons Cronon (87) suggests
not bubonic plague but chicken pox. In any case, Higginson (1630: in Force 2: 16) agreed with Bradford
(History 2: 208) that epidemic had left scarcely "one in a hundred" Native New England people alive by
about 1620.

[Footnote]
A number of textual sources, besides long-standing oral traditions shared with this writer by numerous
living Native scholars, agree that a matrilineal and/or matrifocal social structure was the rule in
Morton's southern New England. Sources include Salisbury's and Bragdon's careful studies of primary
evidences as well as those by Grumet, Etienne and Leacock, Simmons ("Narragansett" and Spirit),
Salwen (170), Allen (30-42), and Leland. The oldest-known limestone carving found in the region, too
(now in Harvard's Peabody Museum) represents a mother with a child on her back (Davis 2-5) and
"probably served as some sort of ceremonial object." The "Great Squa Sachem" mentioned in Canaan
(128) had powers real enough to bestow upon her three land-granting "Sachem" sons in the
1620s-30s: Morton's one sample of Native oratory was Chikatawbak's anger over desecration of his
mother's grave (Canaan 107); and before Morton, William Morrell's poem Neu,-England described
Native women as important go-betweens among feuding tribal groups. Typically, Morrell wrote, their
methods of diplomacy led to intermarriage ("Hymen" was his word for this, and it was Morton's too in
"The Song" that followed performance of "The Poem").
13. "Wherever I turn my eyes, everywhere throughout my home, I see unlimited wealth. Moreover, I am
as beautiful as any goddess. Add to all this my seven sons and seven daughters.... Can you still ask
what cause I have for pride?" (Metamorphoses 6: 139)
14. It is integral to "The Poem" that this mortal woman Scilla-Niobe's tripleaspect as nymph, mother
and widow corresponds to the poem's three invocations of the Goddess of Love Venus/Aphrodite-as
"Amphitrite's Darling" (nymph), "Cupid's ... mother," and as an aspect of The Parcae or "Fatal Sisters."
Such a divine-mortal linkage is carried further in "The Song" with its invitation to share in "Nectar."

[Footnote]
15. According to Horner (1), the word Squantum is "derived from Musquantum, a place of awesome
significance now known as Squantum Head. ... In 1635 the prefix Mu was dropped, at least from the
recording of the land deeds": Horner continues that Native residents there told of "a most awesome
male/female spirit" by that name. In Higginson (13) Squantum is "their evill god."
For other possible influences on Morton's imagery here, see the "Ditchley" portrait of Queen Elizabeth,
shown standing upon/identified with (a map of) England; and the Belphoebe-like Native figure on John
Smith's 1612 map of Virginia (rpt. in Arber), both pointed out to me by Paul Caton of Brown University.
A visual identification of Scilla with a seaside standing rock appears in Keach (41): this is de Glauco
from Nicholas Reusner's Picta Poesis Ovidiana (Frankfort 1580), one of many influential "mythological
handbooks" circulating at the Inns. That Morton was influenced by such manuals will further appear
below. He also seems repeatedly taken with widowed or grieving women: witness his brief marriage to
widow Alice Miller (documents in Banks) and his "curative" writings on and to the melancholy "Barren
Doe of Virginia."
Given strong clues that Morton came from West Country Devonshire, he may have been interested by
peculiar and historic land-forms, Devon itself being thick with them, from Neolithic barrow-tomb
petroglyphs to the markers left by Vespasian's znd Roman Legion (Hoskins 9; Whitlock 106; Fox,
chaps. 11, 2, 7). Sachem Chikatawbak's Neponsets moved to Squantum (Moswetusett Hummock) just
as Morton arrived on "Boston Bay," and may well have shown their new trade-partner around. Long
exposure to such non-English landforms and pre-English cultural ideas would help a man of the
Renaissance to appreciate the same things in his New Canaan neighborhood.

[Footnote]
16. "Amphitrite's Darling" is Roman poet Virgil's nickname for the sea-born Goddess of Love,
Venus/Aphrodite (Aeneid, book 5; Arner 161), who was attended by many sea-nymphs such as
Amphitrite. In the same verse-chapter Venus is also dubbed "Citherea" after the Greek island
long-known for her worship. "Venus" as a synonym/signifier for "Love" Morton may have borrowed from
(among hundreds of sources since Classical times) Spenser's 1595 Colin Clout's Come Home Again:
other examples of this equation follow.
"Neptune" was the force forbidding, then allowing (thanks to Venus) the hero Aeneas to reach his
intermarital, nation-founding destiny in the new-found-land of Italy (Aeneid, Book 5). For Morton
Neptune may signify James I, figured thus in Ben Jonson's unperformed 1624 masque Neptune's
Triumph for the Return of Albion (in which a "Proteus" and other characters "solicit the ladies" with
"strange obsession"; Fumerton 169). Or Neptune may be Morton's more immediate colonial employer
Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who also "filled" the seas with ships before Morton's Unity in 1624; and whose
Council for New England built a vessel for Gorges' use called The Great Neptune in the 1630s (Preston
247-48).
"Triton" was a benign seahorse-like "river god" and herald of Greek sea-king Poseidon (the Roman
Neptune; see Graves 1-44, 59). In New France planter Marc Lescarbot's 1606 Theatre of Neptune, the
boat bearing his masque's main character is drawn by "six tritons" with "trumpets" (Richardson 17, 19).
Grafton (64) reprints a woodcut showing Triton in Johannes Galle's Speculum diversarum imaginum
speculativarum (Antwerp 1638); which in turn represents Columbus on a ship surrounded by such
fish-tailed beings, themselves much like the Glaucus-figure in Keach (41) noted above. In "The Poem"
Triton seems a reference to the numerous musters of Devonshire men wanted for service in American
enterprises, since the 1580s days of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. Details of Morton's exit to America out

[Footnote]
of his 1622-24 legal embroilments are presented in chapter 4 of Dempsey, Thomas Morton (biography).

Robert Graves's Greek Myths remains the best reference work on the subject, with its lucid listings of
primary-textual variants for each myth and their historical and other contexts. For every mythological
figure used in Morton's "Poem" and "read" in these pages, I have taken primary-source variants and
Renaissance handbooks into account including Charles Stephanus' popular 1553 Dictionarium
Historicam, Starnes and Talbot's Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries, Ovid
moralise, Tottell's 1557 Miscellany, Natales Comes, works by Boccaccio, and the broad selection of
handbooks in Kermode.

[Footnote]
17. As Canaan notes (51), Native New England funereal customs included frequent grave-visitations in
which relatives would "lament and bewail" their losses. As this was a practice no doubt too common in
the epidemics of the 1610s-1620s, the poem's "finding" of Scilla-Niobe may refer to an actual event
between Morton's company and a "solitary" Native woman. John Winthrop met one (and had a very
different response) while lost near his Boston Bay house (Journal 1-68).
18. Of course a different reading is possible: Job's story does conclude with a humbling divine epiphany
that restores his "health and household" (Astell 2): Samson's suicidal destruction of the Philistines'
temple helps to purge the landscape of "pagan" cultural rivals, and this is consistent with Morton's
remarks on New England's epidemics being good for colonists' purposes. But as Morton told "Pilgrim"
readers (134), we must not read only "a part" of "The Poem." Construe Samson, then, as an exemplary
killer of heathens for God's purposes, or as a mock-heroic 11 anti-Puritan" who slays those
"philistines" with the jawbone of a "fool." And/or read Job here as a man whose deepest faith takes him
past the afflictions (boils, etc.) that defeat others, and confirms his "chosen" status. But how can such
readings cohere with the rest of "The Poem"? The undecidability of Samson and Job-the only two
JudeoChristian signifiers in the poem except for Scogan the fool -makes them yet another invitation to
wander or experiment, especially on a frontier with virtually no authorities either to reward conformity or
enforce it. Neither of the two Mare Mount servants known historically displayed enthusiasm for either
Puritanism or Christianity. Walter Bagnall definitely lit out for the "ungodly" territories of Sir Ferdinando
Gorges' Maine (see Winthrop's Journal), while the better-documented Edward Gibbon became a
merchant of no great ethical repute in Puritan Boston (his career summarized in Hale 238). Ma-re
Mount's other servants (between five and seven men at least) remain what European-style records call
"unaccounted for."
19. The "Padstow Mayers' Song" from seventeenth-century West Country Cornwall also chided
celebrants to make their choices, by mention of the grave ("whither we are going") in the midst of their
dance: "Unite and unite ... For summer is a-comin' . And whither we are going, we all will unite. . .
."Welsford details long European traditions of the court fool's dances and struggles with Death, such as
those of "Pauvre Pierrot" after a wave of epidemic: "Enfin voila le cholera ... Bim-Boum, Zoum-Zinni.
Toujours comme ca" (387). "He makes love to a rose by moonlight, and the moon has the face of a
skull."

[Footnote]
With final regard to the benefits of "choosing one's fate," Morton was familiar with Horace's Satires; and
an Italian folktale behind Horace's "II" (line 6) refers to a peasant laborer in his fields, who asks
Hercules' help in improving his life, Hercules brings the man before the wealth-savvy god Mercury, who
promises to help the man find "buried treasure"; and when the man agrees, he finds himself back in his
field with the same work ("planting") before him.
20. Connors 78. "Morton's implied comparison [Canaan 51-52] of a real coun

[Footnote]
try" to Sidney's "golden ideal" world "is not altogether farfetched: it seems to be an example of what
Tillyard would call an `Elizabethan hovering between equivalence and metaphor,' (an instance of
`equivalences shaded off into resemblances')." All of which goes to say that Morton was suggesting
America as about the closest thing to a paradise one might realistically expect.
21. See Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose courts in March 1631 (not long
after Morton's 2nd exile) ordered "all persons who had Indian servants... to discharge them by May 1,"
and that "none" should thereafter "take Indians into their households without permission of the Court"
(1-83). In his appeals for Council support against rival "irregular" traders, Governor Bradford of Plimoth
offered to increase profits by trying to stop "the unprofitable consuming of the victuals of the land" by
"these salvages" (1628; Letters 56).
12. "We spent this winter very pleasantly, and fared generously by means of the Ordre de Bon Temps,
which I introduced. This all found useful for their health, and more advantageous than all the medicines
that could have been used" (Champlain c.1604-7; Voyages 110). See the same "health/medicine"
metaphor in his companion Lescarbot's New France bk. IV, chap. 16.
Huron peoples also devastated by epidemics understood enough of Champlain's offer of French-Huron
intermarriage in order to reject it (Thwaites 5: 211, 14: 1721). Native contexts do put English "ritual
behavior" in interesting light. Dozens of Renaissance scholars write of masques and court-revels as
above all concerned with making "subjects" (in every sense) of their participants. Native New
Englanders were not without forms of "subjection" correlating with material and other status (Simmons
"Shamanism"). But they must have looked wonderingly at rituals that deployed every kind of
normally-restricted pleasure (haute cuisine, music, dance, magic, "emblems," drama, eroticism etc.) in
order to invest "leaders" -by illusion, confusion, transference-with powers that meant increased
subjection and impoverishment. (Lavish masques bankrupted aristocratic England toward Civil War.) At
another ritual the Mohawk reacted thus: "When we pray they laugh at us.... and ... ask me what I am
doing and what I want, that I stand there alone and make so many words, while none of the rest may
speak ." (Rev. J. Megapolensis, 1644: rot. in ameson 175-180).

[Footnote]
23. Scholars of Northeast Native American cultures including Frank G. Speck, Elisabeth Tooker, Bruce
Trigger and William S. Simmons have shown both variety and "great conformity" in the religious and
shamanistic practices of the region (Speck, "Penobscot Shamanism" 242): they and others (Fogelson,
Hallowell Conjuring, Vogel, Wallace) also provide useful detail on the varieties of shamans/ "powahs,"
their purposes and practices. Some healers specialized in herbal medicine: compare with Gesta's and
Ma-re Mount's distribution of "Nectar" to heal ailments listed in their respective "Song[s]." A second
kind of powah organized and conducted rituals centered on magical counter-spells, dancing, and
audienceinteractions (Heidenreich 373), and a third variety cured via the interpretation of dreams. The
two principal acts in all were diagnosis and treatment. Speck's description of a powah's "penetration in a
dream vision" to the "spiritual forces" that underlay a material condition (260) was not far from early
Europe's "Asklepian" school rooted in Bronze Age magic/medicine. Winslow's Good News (583),
Williams' Key (128), and Wood's Prospect (101) supply primary observations on these Native New
England practices.
24. These might include retellings of myths, recountings of tribe-historical acts or achievements by
other healers, or a use of short "anecdotes" that communicated healing-helpful incidents of "common
people" using magic powers. Not only an

[Footnote]
attempt to "raise healing energies," this constituted an analytical use of language (as opposed to
trance-inducing "vocables"), which could help to identify sources of disease related to breach of taboo,
or to behavior or ethical issues. Broader contexts: studies by Toelken and Zolbrod in Swann, ed.,
Recovering the Word. The former shows how, in Navajo tradition, "words and narratives have the power
to heal" (396), while Zolbrod studies Western "chantway" customs, in which rituals/narratives "merge"
patient with myth-protagonist, the former thereby "taking up quest" for cure.
25. Morton stood his Inns of Court "pastoral realism" against what he called the Puritan/New Israelites'
"Martialist" approach to America (Canaan 152-, 194; also charged in clause 13 of his quo warranto).
As a trained outdoorsman he parodied the nascent ideology of "wilderness" that solidified cultural
boundaries round the Christian-capitalist labor camps of Virginia and Plimoth (the former under martial
law and the latter with curfews and a "needless watchhouse," 115). He also qualified his remark that
Native decimation by "plague" was a sign of God's favor upon the English (20); but with a tiny marginal
gloss alluding to "2 Sam. 24." Potent as this was ("These sheep, what have they done? Let Thine Hand
... be against me, and against my father's house"), it likely counted for little with most readers against
the literally "larger" message on the page.
26. Perhaps another reason for professionally struggling pedagogue Moses Coit Tyler to leave Canaan
utterly out of his literary-historical picture.

[Reference]
WORKS CITED

[Reference]
Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., ed. Prince Society Edition of New English Canaan. New York: Burt Franklin,
1883.
Albanese, Catherine L., Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990. Alexander, Sir William. An Encouragement to Colonies and
other works
collected in Prince Society, eds., Sir William Alexander and American Colonization. Boston: Prince
Society, 1873. Rpt. Burt Franklin 1967. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine
in American
Indian Traditions. Boston, Beacon Press, 1986.
Andrews, K. R., N. P. Canny, and P. E. H. Hair, eds. The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in
Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979.
Arber, Edward, ed. Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, President of Virginia and Admiral of New
England 1580-1631. z vols. Edinburgh: John Grant, 1910.

[Reference]
Arner, Robert D. "Mythology and the Maypole Of Merrymount: Some Notes on Thomas Morton's `Rise,
Oedipus."' Early American Literature 6 (1970: 81-97.
Astell, Ann W. Job, Boethius and Epic Truth. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994. Auden, Wystan Hugh,
ed. An Elizabethan Song-Book: Love Songs and Madrigals. New York: Anchor, 1955.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984.
Banks, Charles Edward. "Thomas Morton of Merrymount." (Incl. the Will

[Reference]
of and early English records on Thomas Morton). Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 58
(1935): 147-93.
Baym, Nina. Feminism and American Literary History: Essays. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press,
1992.
Benes, Peter, ed. Algonkians of New England: Past and Present. The Dublin Seminar for New England
Folklife. Boston University, 1993.
Blunt, John Henry, ed. The Annotated Book of Common Prayer; Being an Historical, Ritual and
Theological Commentary of the Devotional System of the Church of England. London: Rivingtons Press,
1866.
Bradford, William. History of Plimoth Plantation 1620-1647. Ed. Charles Francis Adams, Arthur Lord,
Morton Dexter, Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., and Worthington C. Ford. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.
- "Letter Book" in Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 1, series 3 (1794): z7-76.

[Reference]
Bragdon, Kathleen J. "'Emphaticall Speech and Great Action': An Analysis of 17th-Century Native
Speech Events Described in Early Sources." Man in the Northeast 33 (1987): 101-11.
. Native People of Southern New England r5oo-r65o. Norman: Oklahoma Univ. Press, 1996.
Bush, David. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton,
1963.
Canny, Nicholas P. "The Ideology of English Colonization." William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 30
(1973): 575-98.
, "The Permissive Frontier: The Problem of Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and
Virginia." Andrews 17-44.
Carpenter, Dolores Bird, ed. Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England. From
the Papers of Warren Sears Nickerson. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1994.
Champlain, Samuel D. Voyages of Samuel de Champlain 1604-16i8. Ed. W. L. Grant. New York:
Scribner's, 1907.

[Reference]
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On The Character of the Orator (De Oratore), Rome c. 55 B.C.E. Trans. J. S.
Watson. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.
Connors, Donald. Thomas Morton. New York: Twayne, 11969.
Cope, Jackson I. The Theatre and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973. Cowan, William, ed. Papers of the Seventh Algonquian Conference.
Ottawa: Carleton University, 1976.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. New York:
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983.
Crosby, Connie. "The Algonkian Spiritual Landscape." Benes 35-41. Davis, William A. "Digging It In
Massachusetts." The Boston Globe, 6 June 1992.

[Reference]
Deagan, Kathleen A. "Spanish Indian Interaction in Sixteenth Century Florida and Hispaniola." Fitzhugh,
ed., 281-3i8.
Dempsey, Jack, ed., New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of "Merrymount." Text and Notes,
Biography and Criticism. [1637] Scituate, Mass.: Digital Scanning, Inc., '999.

[Reference]
Dickason, Olive Patricia. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the
Americas. Edmonton: Univ. of Alberta Press, 1984.
Etienne, Mona, and Eleanor Leacock, eds. Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. New
York: Praeger, i98o.
Fitzhugh, William, ed. Cultures in Contact: The Impact of European Contacts on Native American
Cultural Institutions. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985.
Fogelson, Raymond D. "Change, Persistence and Accomodation in Cherokee Medico-Magical Beliefs."
Symposium on Cherokee and Iroquois Culture. Ed. W. N. Fenton and J. Gulick. Smithsonian Institution,
Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin i8o. Washington, D.C., i96i: 83-Iii.
Force, Peter, ed. 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. 3 vols.
Washington: Peter Force printer, 1836.

[Reference]
Fox, Aileen. South West England. New York: Praeger, 1964.
Fumerton, Patricia. Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament.
Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press 1991
Gardner, Russell H. (Great Moose), "Anthropomorphic and Fertility Stoneworks of Southeastern New
England: A Native Interpretation." The Massachusetts Archaeological Society Bulletin, forthcoming.
Gesta Grayorum, or, The History of the High and Mighty Prince Henry, Prince of Purpoole .. . Who
reigned and died A.D. 1594. Together with a Masque.... Multiple anonymous authors at Inns of Court,
London. Rpt. in John Nichols, ed., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth.
z vols. Society of Antiquaries of London, Printers, 1788.
Goldberg, Jonathan. "Bradford's `Ancient Members' and 'A Case of Buggery Amongst Them."'
Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, iggi.

[Reference]
Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992.
Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. New York: Signet, 1962. Graves, Robert. The Greek
Myths. z vols. New York: Penguin, ig6o. Grumet, Robert Steven. "Sunksquaws, Shamans and
Tradeswomen: Middle
Atlantic Coastal Algonkian Women During the n2^th and i8th Centuries." Etienne and Leacock, eds.,
79-io6.
Hate, Edward Everett Jr., ed. Notebook Kept by Thomas Lecbford, Esquire: Lawyer in Boston,
Massachusetts Bay 138-1641. Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1988.
Hallowell, A. Irving. "Ojibwa World View and Disease." Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers
of A. I. Hallowell. Chicago, Deegan, 1976.
The Role of Conjuring in Saulteaux Society. New York: Octagon, 1971. Harlot, Thomas. Brief and True
Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. London, 1588. New York: Dover, 1972
Higginson, Francis. New England's Plantation. London, x630. Rpt. in Force, Tracts i

[Reference]
Holly, H. Hobart. "Wollaston of Mount Wollaston." Quincy [Mass.] Historical Society Publication. Rpt.
from The American Neptune 37 (11), January 1977.

[Reference]
Horner, George R. "Squantum, Moswetusett, Mattachusett, Massachusetts, Neponset, Chikkatawbut."
Quincy History. Quincy, Mass.: Historical Society zi (Winter 1989): 1-4.
Hoskins, W. G. Old Devon. Devon, England: David & Charles, Publishers 1954] 1972.
Hutchinson, Thomas. A Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of the Colony and Province
of Massachusetts Bay. Boston: Fleet, 1769. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936.
James, E. 0. Seasonal Feasts and Festivals. London: Thames and Hudson, 1961. Jameson, J. Franklin,
ed. Narratives of New Netherland 6o9-664. New York: Barnes and Noble, i9o9.
Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill:
Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975.
The Founders of America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Keach, William. Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare,
Marlowe and Their Contemporaries. New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977.

[Reference]
Kerenyi, Carolyn. Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician's Existence. New York: Pantheon,
1959.
Kermode, Frank, et al., eds. The Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Cambridge: Oxford Univ. Press,
1973.
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Settling With the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in
America 158o-164o. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, x98o.
Lamphere, Kim and Dean Snow. "European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The
Timing of the First Epidemics." Ethnohistory 35 (1988): 15-33.
Leacock, Eleanor. "Montagnais Women and the Jesuit Program for Colonization." Etienne and Leacock,
lz3-I58.
Ledger, P., ed. The Oxford Book of English Madrigals. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978.
Leland, Charles G. Algonquian Legends. Boston, 1884. New York: Dover, 1992.

[Reference]
Lescarbot, Marc. Nova Francia, or A Description of Acadia. 1606. Henry P. Biggar, ed. London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1928.
-. The History of New France. 1618. Trans. W. L. Grant. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1997-14.
-. The Theatre of Neptune in New France. 1606. Harriette T. Richardson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1927.
Levermore, Charles Herbert, ed. Forerunners and Competitors of the Pilgrims and Puritans. z vols.
Brooklyn: New England Society, 9g2z.
Lewalski, Barbara K. Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning and Art of Paradise Regained. Providence:
Brown Univ. Press, 1966.

[Reference]
Lodge, Thomas. The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge. 3 vols. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.
Lorch, Maristella. "Petrarch, Cicero and the Classical Pagan Tradition." Rabil 1: 71-94.
Maclean, Hugh, ed. Edmund Spencer's Poetry. znd edition. New York: Norton, i98z.
Marcus, Leah. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday
Pastimes. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986. Mavor, James W. Jr., and Byron E. Dix. Manitou: The
Sacred Landscape of
New England's Native Civilization. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, iggi. Morrell, William. Nova Anglia;
or New-England. London, 16 25. MHSC i (1792): 125-139.

[Reference]
Mourt's Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plimoth. London, 1621. D. B. Heath, ed. Chester, Conn.:
Globe Pequot Press, 1963.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. M. M. Innes. New York: Penguin, 1955.
Ovid's Metamorphoses. Trans. Arthur Golding. 1627. Reprint. New York: Macmillan, 1965.
Palfrey, John Gorham. The History of New England During the Stuart Dynasty. (3 vols.) Boston: Little
Brown 1890
Pausanius. Description of Greece. Trans. W. H. S. Jones. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978.
Pennington, Loren E. "The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature 1575-i6z5." Andrews, Canny,
and Hair, eds., 175-194.
Preston, Richard Arthur. Gorges of Plymouth Fort. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953.

[Reference]
Quinn, David Beers. "Renaissance Influences in English Colonization." Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 5th ser. 4974) 25: 73-93.
Rabil, Albert Jr., ed. Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. 3 vols. Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
Rae, Wesley D. Thomas Lodge. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967. Raesly, Ellis Lawrence. Portrait of
New Netherland. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1945.
Salisbury, Neal. Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans and the Making of New England
1500-1643. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 19 8z.
Salwen, Bert. "Indians of Southern New England and Long Island: Early Period." Trigger 160-76.
Seznec, Jean. Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance
Humanism and Art. Trans. B. F. Sessions. New York: Pantheon, 1953.
Shea, Daniel B. " `Our Old Professed Adversary': Thomas Morton and the Naming of New England."
Early American Literature z3 (1988): 53-69. Shurtleff, Nathaniel E. The Records of the Governor and
Company of the
Massachusetts Bay in New England. 5 vols. Boston: William White, 1853. Simmons, William S.
Cautantowwitt's House: An Indian Burial Ground in the Island of Conanicut in Narragansett Bay.
Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1970.

[Reference]
. "Southern New England Shamanism: An Ethnographic Reconstruction." Cowan, ed., 218-255.
--."Narragansett." Trigger 190-97.
Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore 1620r984. Univ. Press of New England,
1986.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-i86o.
Wesleyan University Press 1973.
Speck, Frank G. "Penobscot Shamanism." Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 4.4
(Oct.-Dec. 1919): 303-32 1
. Penobscot Man: The Life History of a Forest Tribe in Maine. 1940. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Press, 1970.
Speiss, Arthur J. and Bruce D. Speiss. "New England Pandemic of 1616-1622: Cause and
Archaeological Implication." Man in the Northeast 34 (Fall 1987): 71-83.

[Reference]
Starnes, D. T. and E. W. Talbert, eds. Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries. Chapel
Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955
Sternberg, Paul R. "The Publication of Thomas Morton's New English Canaan Reconsidered." Papers of
the Bibliographical Society of America 80. 3 (1986): 459-480.
Swann, Brian and Arnold Krupat. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1987. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Scribner's,
1971.

[Reference]
Thwaites, Reuben Gold. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the
Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-i7gi.
73 vols. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896.
Tooker, Elisabeth. Native American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands. New York: Paulist Press,
1979.
Trigger, Bruce G., ed. The Handbook of North American Indians. Volume 15: The Northeast. General
editor William C. Sturtevant. Washington, D.C. Smithsonian, 1978.
Turner, Victor, ed. Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1982.
Tyler, Moses Coit. A History of American Literature. z vols. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, i88o.
Vastokas, Joan M. and Romas K. Vastokas. Sacred Art of the Algonkians: A Study of the Peterborough
Petroglyphs. Peterborough, Ontario: Mansard Press, 1973.
Vaughan, Alden T. New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians 1620-1675. Boston, 1965. Norman:
Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1995.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. T. H. Delabare May. New York: Bantam, 1963. Vogel, Virgil J. American
Indian Medicine. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca. 1969. New York: Random House, 1972.

[Reference]
Welsford, Enid. The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship Between Poetry and. The Court Masque:
A Study in the Revels. New York: Russell and Russell, Between Poetry Whiting, B. J., ed. Proverbs in the
Early English Drama. Cambridge: Russell ard Russell, x96a: Univ. Proves in the Eurly English Drama. -
Appleton-Century-Crofts, ed. Traditional British Ballads. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1955. Traditional British Ballads. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,

[Reference]
Whitlock, Ralph. The Folklore of Devon. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.
Wilbur, C. Keith. The New England Indians. Chester, Conn.: Globe Pequot Press, 1978.
Williams, Jerry M. and Robert E. Lewis, eds. Early Images of the Americas: Transfer and Invention.
Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1993.
Williams, Roger. A Key Into the Language of America. London, T643. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J.
Hinz, eds. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1973. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1958.

[Reference]
Winslow, Edward. Good News from New-England. London, 1624. Rpt. in Arber, 525-581.
Winthrop, John. Winthrop's Journal. "History of New England" 1630-1649. Ed. James K. Hosmer. z vols.
New York: Scribner's, 1908.
Wood, William. New England's Prospect. London, 1634. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan. Amherst: Univ. of
Massachusetts Press, 1977.
Wyatt, Jean. "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Publications
of the Modern Language Association (1993) vol. 113, #4, 474-88.
Zuckerman, Michael. "Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity and the Maypole of Merry
Mount." New England Quarterly 50 (1977): 255-77.

[Author note]
JACK DEMPSEY

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited
without permission.