Life
Cooke was an important contributor to the tradition of southern and southwestern humor. Like the work of Thomas Bangs Thorpe and other Old Southwestern humorists of the 19th century, Cooke's works spoke of persons of culture and refinement being confronted with the vigorous, often semibarbaric doings of frontier Americans. In the 1960's the Maryland novelist John Barth wrote a comic prose epic of the early days of his native state; it was called by the same name as Cooke's poem and used its author as his protagonist. Despite Cooke's contribution, his work has not appeared in many anthologies of American literature, and he has been ignored in all but a few of the many studies of American humor. In Robert D. Arner's biography of Ebenezer Cooke in American Colonial Writers 1606-1734, he writes, "He is the best American writer of satire before Benjamin Franklin and even Franklin, it is arguable, did not produce a single piece that is better than The Sot-Weed Factor" (72). Arner in the same reference says, "Cook initiated a tradition of southern humor that eventually spawned Mark Twain and William Faulker and that remains vitally alive today." (73) James A. Leverner, contributor to Reference Guide to American Literature claims: "Although they lack the Clever wit and polished charm of his other poems Cooke's elegies are numbered among the finest surviving examples of colonial American elegiac verse" (146).
Works
"The Sot-Weed Factor"
"The Sot-Weed Factor" is a Juvenalian satire composed in hudibrasts, poetic lines of iambic tetrameter with several outrageously rhymed couplets. An example of hudibrastic lines in the poem is "A city situate on a plain, / Where scarce a House will keep out rain: / The Buildings Fram'd with Cyprus rare, / Resembles much our Southwark Fair" (22).
The satirical form that Cooke uses is a literary composition in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule. There are two types of language in a satire: Juvenalian (nasty or mean) and Horatian (gentle, pocking fun at). In "The Sot-Weed Factor" the narrator is an Englishman coming from England penniless and friendless. His anticipation is to find a new Eden and a land of unbounded opportunity. The Sot-Weed Factor sails to Maryland; upon arrival he mocks the frontier's clothing, and then he sets them apart from all "Humane kind" (19). He says, "Figures so strange, no God desingned," (19). The narrator then tries to compromise by using his vivid imagination. "At last a Fancy very odd; / Took me, this was the Land of Nod; / Planted at first, when Vagrant Cain, / His brother had unjustly slain: / Then conscious of the Crime he'd done, / From Vengeance dire, he hither run; / And in a Hut supinely dwelt, / The first in Furs and Sot-weed dealt, / And ever since his Time, the Place, / Has harbour'd a detested Race; / Who when they cou'd not live at Home, / For Refuge to these World's did roam; / " . (19) As the story progressed this "detested race" (19) cheated the narrator of the goods he brought and sent him raging back to England. In the narrator's fancy or vision he sees the people as descendants of Cain (son of the biblical characters Adam and Eve). Cain killed his brother Abel and for punishment had to leave his home. He ran to Maryland which the narrator refers to as "the Land of Nod" (a world that had fallen) and began a new life. Cain began the trade of furs and tobacco and since his time the place has been a shelter for outcasts. The narrator's conclusion was, people still come to the land when they cannot live at home.
The story of Cain and Able is a biblical allusion taken from "Genesis 4: 1-16." An allusion is the casual reference to something, either directly or implied. Here Cooke is using the reference of brother turning against brother to imply that Maryland patriots have turned away from England. Now Maryland is in economic competition with England. Therefore Cain's curse is, an "empty purse" and of "Friends unkind" (18).
This hudibrastic satire concludes with a curse upon all who live in Maryland, bringing a divine wrath in forms of slave insurrection and cannibalism: "May Cannibals transported o'er the Sea / Prey on these slaves, as they have done to me" (22). "The Sotweed Factor third edition" concluded in a much milder way. Cooke wished that all residents of the province and all traders would deal fairly. Some believe that Cooke's new conclusion in the third edition testifies to an altered loyalty to the South, but not to the perceptiveness of his editorial eye. Do you agree with this statement? Give reasoning for your belief.
"The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia"
In Cooke's last satire, "The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon," he employs a mock epic technique to elevate himself above the masses. Nathaniel Bacon in 1676 actually led a frontier militia against the British governor Sir William Berkeley and achieved success. In the satire Cooke versified the causes and eventually defeated Bacon. Ebenezer even applauded the death of Bacon "So Vermin slew this public evil, / That fear'd not God nor man nor Devil" ("Southern Writer," 170). Cooke so strongly mocked Bacon that Sir William had to promote him in order to appease the public. Why was there such controversy between Cooke and Bacon?
Bibliography