Cooke's Sot-weed Factor as British American Colonial Satire
Prepared for Ibero/Anglo Early American Conference, Tucson, May 16‑19, 2002
Jeffrey H. Richards, Old Dominion University
Ebenezer Cooke first appears in Maryland records in 1694, probably at the time an adult of 27; he lives in England and Maryland periodically, then after 1712 settles in Maryland permanently. In addition to the satiric poem The Sot-weed Factor, he wrote a few elegies, a narrative poem on Bacon’s Rebellion a revised version of The Sotweed Factor, and a related poem, Sotweed Redivivus. First published in London in 1708, Cooke's The Sot-weed Factor chronicles the misadventures of an English emigre to the American colony of Maryland and his ignominious return home. The speaker of the poem leaves England to escape from debt and set up in America as a merchant or tobacco agent. He encounters mosquitoes, bad manners, and local alcoholic drinks; he suffers theft, illness, and a con-artist Quaker; and he fails in court to win an adequate judgment against the Quaker, which last frustration causes him to fly Maryland for England. The assumption at the time was that this was simply one more bad-tempered attack on a place not as civilized as London. Relatively little known as an American literary text until the turn of the last century, Cooke's poem now appears in a number of American literature anthologies as a signal example of colonial satire. Nevertheless, the interpretation of the poem has its own history, one that largely centers on the voice of the poet and the intention of the satire; and despite its relatively new popularity, at least since John Barth's 1960 novel used the poet and his poem as its starting point, much remains to be said about the poem’s inner workings, its allusions, its historicity, its cultural work, and its point of view.
Before the 1970s, most modern American readers appear to have understood the poem as a satire against the mores of Maryland in the colonial period. This was the interpretation of the major scholarly treatment of Cooke in the first two thirds of the 20th century, Lawrence C. Wroth's 1934 introduction to a reprinting of Cooke's 1731 Maryland Muse. In this view, the speaker, the Englishman turned new tobacco agent, departs America with a curse against the rude colonials and their barbarous, depraved society, after suffering numerous indignities at the hands of drunks, illiterate judges, surly peasants, and transported criminals, now Maryland planters. We are then to pity what happens when a civilized gentlemen endures colonial life. A long generation later, this reading was overturned by two scholars writing simultaneously, Robert D. Arner and J. A. Leo Lemay, whose 1971 article and 1972 chapter respectively, reversed the polarity of the satire and focused attention on the factor himself as at least a co‑object of criticism. In Lemay's terms, the speaker is a "greenhorn," who only demonstrates his own foolishness and naivete by comparison to the seasoned and wily colonials who have it all over the metropolitan in terms of negotiating an American landscape and the ungenteel culture of Maryland. In essence, both Arner and Lemay argued for a "double‑edged satire" (though Arner's was a somewhat darker reading than Lemay's), a poem that took shots at both sets of assumptions, those of the colonial and the colonial power, and by extension, two sets of readers, London sophisticates and Southern planters. Arner augmented his position in other articles in 1975 and 1976, and it quickly became the new standard interpretation.
Since then, almost all criticism of the poem grows directly from the Lemay‑Arner two‑sided satire thesis. With open season declared on the speaker, rather than the crude colonists under his gaze, critics have pounced on him in various ways, calling him everything from a "con man," in the words of Gregory Carey, to a "complete ass," in Robert Micklus's phrase. Wroth, basing his conception on the scanty biographical record, speculated that Cooke wrote the poem shortly after his first appearance in Maryland in 1694, as a direct reflection of his initial outrage and disappointment at his prospects‑‑in other words, the poem as autobiography. Edward H. Cohen in 1970 and Arner in 1971, however, suggested that it was more likely that Cooke wrote the poem nearer the publication date of 1708, a contention that was given strength in a 1978 note by Donald Coers. Coers clarified the reference to the "queen" in the poem as Queen Anne, who took the throne in 1702, not the overshadowed Queen Mary, who died in 1694. Because these scholars also knew that Cooke returned to Maryland on several occasions, including to inherit property owned by his father, they could use the time between his first arrival and publication as an argument for ironic distance between author and poetic speaker. Micklus's article represents the extreme wing of this line, a critical dead end that disavows any serious satire against the Americans in favor of the full weight of critique being heaped on the factor. Jim Egan's 1999 article re‑routes this literary way of reading Factor back toward complexity; he makes the narrator's physical failure to adapt to the country an emblem of Britain's larger failure to absorb the vitality of the Indianized English creoles who, by contrast, have adapted by remaining in Maryland and becoming vigorous, if rough‑hewn members of a wider "English" community.
There is, however, to my mind, a more profitable critical path that has developed, although it is trodden by relatively few, one that combines historical with literary criticism. David Shields, for instance, puts the poem in the context of the realities of Anglo‑American trade in his book Oracles of Empire, connecting it to the later poem, Sotweed Redivivus, in which the now resident factor and his friend from the first poem, the cockerouse, discourse on ways to improve Maryland's economy and trade position. Some other recent writers on the poem have problematized the relatively successful Arner‑Lemay thesis by also turning to the historical record. The historian Michal Rozbicki, in a 1997 article in Journal of Southern History, uses Sot-weed Factor as one of several texts that exemplifies a typical metropolitan "negative perception" of the southern American gentry. While one might read Rozbicki's use of the poem in this way with caution, a reader still has to contend with the fact that the preponderance of texts appearing in London depicting Chesapeake and Deep South planters chose to figure them as illiterate, drunken, and retaining all the character they bore with them as alleged transported felons from Britain. Thus reception of the poem in England would have been largely tinged by a mounting number of texts that pilloried American pretensions to gentryhood, at least in Britannocentric terms. In a 1998 article, Chris Beyers raised the further problem that the criticisms leveled by the factor against Chesapeake planter culture are not simply the gross exaggerations that Lemay claims issue from a greenhorn's mouth but have considerable weight in the historical record. Beyers cites, for instance, the fact that in the first decade of the 1700s, Maryland had 70 lawyers while the entire colony of Massachusetts had but one‑‑a clear sign of the litigiousness of which the factor mightily complains.
If Lemay and Arner have performed the basic service of causing us to imagine a more complex set of satiric targets, there are many things still remaining, some literary, some historical, and perhaps some cultural‑comparative. The poem is written in Hudibrastic meter, rhymed octosyllabic couplets, a fact everyone acknowledges, but almost no one has made much effort to put Cooke's work next to Butler's original 300‑plus‑page poem. By the same token, others in London are also writing Hudibrastic satires, including Ned Ward, whose Hudibras Redivivus was also published in 1708. Ward's satire, directed against non‑conforming Protestants, as is Butler's, refers to "sotweed," for instance. Might something be learned about Cooke by examining other Hudibrastics, not to mention other English satires more closely? In addition, Factor has many material culture references that deserve further elaboration in order for us to understand fully the degree and direction of satire. Lemay, for instance, discounts the factor's sighting of a rattlesnake as his fantasy, in the way he imagines cattle to be wolves, but there is also a considerable rattlesnake literature that develops very early in Anglo‑colonial discourse, whereby the desire for a cure for rattlesnake bite becomes the source of much transatlantic correspondence in 1700.
For the purposes of considering the text in an Ibero/Anglo comparison, I would call attention to two items in the poem that have not been pursued much. One is the analogy the factor draws at the end of his pastoral colloquy between the son of the first planter‑‑he who serves as guide and substitute squire, a Ralpho to the factor's Hudibras‑‑and the factor himself. They have been discoursing on the origins of the Native Americans, and to conclude, the factor says that their debate is like that between a Catholic priest and an Anglican parson over the reality or symbolic nature of transubstantiation: neither one will convince the other. Although nothing more is said directly about Catholic‑Protestant relations, one might probe this argument as reflecting the significant Catholic population of Maryland‑‑the only colony founded as a haven for English Catholics‑‑and how that plays into colonial identity formation, especially given the widespread English antagonism toward Catholic national powers, most notably Spain. In that vein, the factor makes a reference to one of the giants of Ibero‑American history, Francisco Pizarro, naming him in a footnote as "a Man of a most bloody Disposition, base, treacherous, covetous, and revengeful"‑‑in short, a far more dangerous man than anyone the factor encounters in English Maryland. If in the poem Pizarro is typed as the one who came from Spain "To Rob the Natives of their fatal Stoar," might this be a caution to other potential robbers of Maryland's "stoar"‑‑something to play against the factor's curse that others will come and destroy Chesapeake society?
In any event, The Sot-weed Factor operates at a number of levels, complicating the whole notion of satire from a writer who lived in, and reflected the views of, cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. What needs further study is that in the poem, while metropolitan culture comes across as monolithic, colonial culture is really multiple, a complex set of persons and relations that the factor sees but leaves to us to understand. Cooke’s chief success is to figure a broad array of characters and suggest the presence of others, all while indicating how difficult it is for a moderately well educated, self-important Englishman to negotiate and comprehend what Egan speaks of as the “vitality” of colonial life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Cooke:
The Sot-weed Factor; or a Voyage to Maryland. London, 1708. Reprinted in many anthologies.
Mors Omnibus Communis. An Elogy on the Death of Thomas Bordly, Esq. Annapolis, [1726].
“An Elegy on the Death of the Honourable Nicholas Lowe.” Maryland Gazette 67 (December
24, 1728).
Sotweed Redivivus: Or the Planters Looking-Glass. Annapolis, 1730.
The Maryland Muse. Annapolis, 1731. Contains “The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon’s
Rebellion in Virginia,” and “The Sotweed Factor” [revised]. For modern reprint, see
Wroth below, 311-35.
“An Elegy on the death of the Honourable William Lock, Esq. 1732.” Maryland Historical
Magazine 14 (1919): 171-73.
Works about Cooke and The Sot-weed Factor or otherwise mentioned above::
Arner, Robert D. “The Blackness of Darkness: Satire, Romance, and Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sot-
weed Factor.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 21 (1976): 1-10.
—. “Ebenezer Cooke: Satire in the Colonial South.” Southern Literary Journal 8.1 (1975): 154-
63.
—. “Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sot-weed Factor: The Structure of Satire.” Southern Literary
Journal 4.1 (1971): 33-47.
—. “Ebenezer Cooke’s Sotweed Redivivus: Satire in the Horatian Mode.” Mississippi Quarterly
28 (1975): 489-96.
Beyers, Chris. “Ebenezer Cooke’s Satire, Calculated to the Meridian of Maryland.” Early
American Literature 33.1 (1998): 62-85.
Butler, Samuel. Hudibras. Ed. John Wilders. Oxford: Clarendon, 1967.
Carey, Gregory A. “The Poem as Con Game: Dual Satire and the Three Levels of Narrative in
Ebenezer Cooke’s ‘The Sot-Weed Factor.’” Southern Literary Journal 23.1 (1990): 9-19.
Coers, Donald V. “New Light on the Composition of Ebenezer Cook’s Sot-weed Factor.”
American Literature 49.4 (1978): 604-6.
Cohen, Edward H. Ebenezer Cooke: The Sot-Weed Canon. Athens: Univ. of Georgia P, 1975.
But see Arner, Southern Literary Journal, 1975.
—. “The ‘Second Edition’ of The Sot-weed Factor.” American Literature 42.3
(1970): 289-303.
Diser, Philip E. “The Historical Ebenezer Cooke.” Critique 10.3 (1968): 48-59.
Egan, Jim. “The Colonial English Body as Commodity in Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sot-weed
Factor.” Criticism 41.3 (1999): 385-400.
League, Cy Charles. “The Process of Americanization as Portrayed in Ebenezer Cooke’s The
Sot-Weed Factor.” Southern Literary Journal 29.1 (1996): 18-25.
Lemay, J. A. Leo. Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee P,
1972. 77-110.
Micklus, Robert. “The Case against Ebenezer Cooke’s Sot-weed Factor.” American Literature
56.2 (1984): 251-61.
Robinson, David. “Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sot-weed Factor: A Satire on Pride.” Southern
Studies 17 (1978): 363-73.
Rozbicki, Michal J. “The Curse of Provincialism: Negative Perceptions of Colonial American
Plantation Gentry.” Journal of Southern History 63.4 (1997): 727-52.
Shields, David. “Henry Brooke and the Situation of the First Belletrists in British America.” Early American Literature 23.1 (1988): 4-27.
—. Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America. Univ. of Chicago P,
1990.
Ward, Edward. Hudibras Redivivus: or, a Burlesque Poem on the Times. Second Edition.
London, 1708.
Wroth, Lawrence C. Introduction. “The Maryland Muse of Ebenezer Cooke: A Facsimile with
an Introduction.” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 44 (Oct. 1934): 267-308.
There are other works on Cooke, including doctoral dissertations, that can be found in the usual bibliographies, but none that advance our understanding of Cooke’s life beyond the ones listed above.