Ebenezer Cook

Ebenezer Cook [ ɛbɪˈniːzə kʊk ] (born probably 1667 in London ; died around 1732) was an English poet. His last name is also often spelled Cooke ; in fact, he used both spellings himself. He spent most of his life in the North American colony of Maryland . His poems about colonial society, especially the satirical verse epic The Sot-Weed Factor ("The Tobacco Dealer") , are among the earliest comic works in American literary history .

Life

Little is known about Cook's life. In addition to the few documented mentions, his poems allow some conclusions to be drawn about his life, but a work-based reconstruction of his biography must remain speculative.

He was the son of Andrew Cook, who owned a tobacco plantation called Cook's Point in the North American colony of Maryland . Andrew Cook married Anne Bowyer in London in 1665, and so it is believed that Ebenezer Cook was born shortly thereafter. The assumption that he was born in England and grew up there is supported by the fact that the first-person narrator, in his first, presumably autobiographical poem The Sot-Weed Factor, crosses the Atlantic as a man. By 1694 at the latest he lived in Maryland; This year he signed a petition against the relocation of the colony capital from St. Marys City to Annapolis . In September 1700 he was back in London, and in 1708 his first poem The Sot-Weed Factor was published there as a 21-page quarto .

Andrew Cook died in London on January 1, 1712 and bequeathed his tobacco plantation to Ebenezer and his sister Anna. By 1717 at the latest, Ebenezer Cook was back in America to take up his inheritance; that year he sold his stake in Cook's Point . In 1721 he settled in Baltimore County , worked as a lawyer and was in the meantime in the service of the colonial administration. In 1726 he published an owl on the Maryland Colony Crown Attorney Thomas Bordley, who died on October 11 of the same year. In the signature of this poem, Cook describes himself for the first time as the Poet Laureate of the Colony of Maryland. It is uncertain whether this honorary position was actually awarded to him. It is more likely that Cook appropriated the title himself with satirical intent, because after all, at least his first work was not a praise poem, but rather a swan song for Maryland.

In 1728 he published in the Maryland Gazette , the colony's first newspaper founded the year before by William Parks , another owl, this time on Nicholas Lowe, the colony's late paymaster; Sotweed Redivivus followed in 1730 , a continuation of his first poem. The following year, Cook's only volume of poetry, The Maryland Muse , appeared in Annapolis , of which - like all first editions of Cook's works - only one copy has survived. The volume contains a revised version of The Sot-Weed Factor , the sequel Sotweed Redivivus and the epic poem The History of Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia , which is about the Bacon's Rebellion , a bloody uprising against the governor of Virginia. The volume claims it is the third edition of the Sot-Weed Factor ; the second edition, if it appeared at all, has not survived in any copy. In 1732 he wrote his last two known works, poems in praise of Benedict Leonard Calvert, 4th Baron Baltimore and the judge William Lock. These poems have only survived as manuscripts; it is uncertain whether they were actually printed. They are at the same time the last testimony to Cook's life; it is therefore believed that he died shortly thereafter.

Works

The Sot-Weed Factor

Contemporary representation of tobacco sellers on Chesapeake Bay

The sot-weed factor; or, A Voyage to Maryland, —a satire, in which is described the laws, government, courts, and constitutions of the country, and also the buildings, feasts, frolics, entertainments, and drunken humors of the inhabitants in that part of America ("The Tobacco Dealer, or A Trip to Maryland; a satire describing the laws, government, courts, and constitution of the country, as well as the buildings, festivals, jokes, amusements, and wet jokes of the residents of this part of America") a verse epic in so-called " Hudibrastic verses ". This form of satirical poetry, named after Samuel Butler's Hudibras , deliberately violated the style dictates of neoclassical poetry, such as that of John Dryden . Instead of the decent iambic five-key with a male end rhyme (the so-called heroic verse ), Butler and Cook wrote iambic four-key , often with "female", ie two- or even three-syllable rhymes . In German, the metric and comic effect of the Hudibrastic verse find a correspondence in the Rhenish hand-made speech . Cook's poem draws further comedy from the contrast between what is described - the barbaric conditions in the New World  - and the stilted diction of the poet, who also likes to indulge in absurd references to figures from the Bible and Greek mythology. The pronounced misogyny of the narrator and an almost infantile fixation on the processes of eating, drinking, digestion and elimination also contribute to the coarseness.

The poem is an ambiguous satire: superficially it seems as if the poet is mocking the colony of Maryland and its inhabitants - and this is how Cook's English readers may have read the poem. In fact, however, it is also the English and their prejudices against the colonies that the poet targets in his immeasurably exaggerated account of the brutalization of morals in the New World. It is thus a parody of the so-called anti-promotion literature in general, as the numerous writings of the time are called, which warned in high-pitched tones and dark images of the horrors that awaited the English emigrant in America. In particular, The Sot-Weed Factor satirizes the theme and narrative structure of A West Country Man's Voyage to New England, a ballad dated around 1632 and very popular in the 17th century about someone who hopefully emigrated to Massachusetts , but of the barbaric conditions in the colony was so disgusted that he quickly returned to England, not without first cursing the New World.

The first-person narrator of the poem is driven by fate to Maryland to buy tobacco ( Sot-Weed , literally "Suffkraut"). If the crossing was anything but pleasant, the immigrant is already deeply disturbed by the strange figures that come towards him on the first shore leave. The tobacco farmers of Maryland appear to him to be a terrible freak of nature, monsters, possibly the direct descendants of Cain , who settled in America after the fratricide:

Figures so strange, no God design'd,

To be a part of Humane Kind:

But wanton Nature, void of rest,

Molded the brittle clay in Jest.

("Figures that no god invented, / Made so strangely human: / More variation, very last remnant / For fun, pressed into crumbling clay.")

On his journey inland, the narrator becomes acquainted with American specialties, such as the canoe (which he compares to a floating pig trough), culinary specialties of the colonist kitchen (which not even a dog would eat), the American fauna (deafening loud frogs, rattlesnakes and Myriads of mosquitoes) and also meets Indians (devilish savages, albeit pretty to look at) .:

Whether his Race was framed by God

Or whether some Malignant pow'r,

Contriv'd them in an evil hour

And from his own Infernal Look;

Their Dusky form and Image took:

("Whether this race was built by God / Whether it invented sinister power - / In a bad tempered hour / In his own hell light / He forms its blackish face")

In the village of Battle-Town he attends a court hearing in which the jury is dead drunk and only the judge (to the embarrassment of the other jurors) is able to write his own name:

A reverend Judge, who to the shame

Of all the Bench, cou'd write his name

("A judge who mocked the bank / could already write his name.")

The session ends in a brawl, and the narrator takes refuge in an inn where things go wild until all the guests fall asleep in their drunkenness. He himself spends the night in a barn, but when he wakes up the next morning, he finds that his shoes and his wig have been stolen. After another night of partying, he finally put his real plan into action and bought a pile of tobacco from a hypocritical Quaker :

While riding near a Sandy Bay,

I met a Quaker, Yea and Nay:

A pious conscientious rogue,

As e'er woar Bonnet or a Brogue,

Who neither Swore nor kept his Word.

But cheated in the Fear of God:

And when his Debts he would not pay,

By light within he ran away.

(“When I rode near the sandy bay, / a good Quaker steps in front of me: / There is no such pious wretch / one does not find such a pious beast / one does not otherwise wear hats and boots, / who never swore, nor kept his word. / But godly everyone teased: / and he did not want to pay off the debt, / he ran away from there with an intimate light. ")

It is only after the deal has taken place that the narrator realizes that he has been ripped off. He hires a lawyer to sue the Quaker. But the lawyer is not only a corner attorney, but also a quack:

Unto an ambodexter quack,

Who learnedly had got the crack

Of giving glisters, making pills,

Of filling bonds, and forging Wills;

And with a stock of impudence,

Supply'd his want of Wit and Sense;

This shady lawyer allows himself to be bribed by the accused, and so the narrator is ultimately resigned not with tobacco but with trinkets and, exasperated, decides to leave Maryland. The poem ends with the curse that the colonists may be haunted by cannibals, run wild, starve or be punished by God's wrath:

May canniballs transported o'er the sea

Prey on there slaves, as they have done on me;

May never explore Merchant's trading Sails

This cruel, this inhospitable shoar;

But left abandon'd by the World to starve,

May they sustain the Fate they well deserve;

May they turn Savage, or as Indians Wild,

From Trade, Converse and Happiness exil'd;

Recreant to Heaven, may they adore the Sun,

And into Pagan Superstitions run

For Vengence ripe -

May Wrath Divine then lay those Regions wast

Where no Man's Faithful, nor a Woman Chast.

("Let God's wrath ravage this land / where men lack faithfulness and women lack discipline.")

Sotweed Redivivus

First print of Sotweed Redivivus (1730)

The sequel Sotweed Redivivus: Or The Planters Looking Glass was published 23 years after The Sot-Weed Factor as one of the first fiction texts printed in Maryland - it was not until 1726 that William Parks had put the colony's first printing press into operation. In contrast to the Sot-Weed Factor, it is not aimed at an English, but rather an American reading public. So this time satirical tips remain rare; Annapolis , the new capital of the colony, the poet straightforwardly describes as Beau Metropolis and instead of cursing Maryland, he drinks to the good of the colony. The narrator now describes himself as an “old poet”, and compared to his first work, the tone of the poem is much more solemn, even if it is also written in Hudibrastic verse. The multitude of allusions and references to ancient mythology and literature - especially Aesop and Horace  - in Sotweed Redivivus serves less satirical purposes than it takes neoclassical conventions into account.

Sotweed Redivivus is about the economic crisis that hit the southern English colonies in America in the 1720s. Unlike its predecessor, the poem is not driven by episodic action; The poet discusses - over long stretches of interspersed dialogues - the causes of the crisis and discusses possible countermeasures: Since overproduction and the colony's one-sided dependence on tobacco cultivation triggered the crisis, agriculture should be diversified and rice, hemp and cotton should also be grown. In order to cope with deflation, uniform paper money should also be introduced, and goods from the colony should be shipped on American ships instead of English. Partly because of its very specific subject matter, Sotweed Redivivus is of less interest to today's reader than to economic historians. The comic quality hardly comes close to that of the debut either.

The History of Colonel Nathaniel Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia

Cook's third and longest Hudibrastic epic appeared in his volume of poetry, The Maryland Muse , in 1731 . It also deals with an American subject, namely the uprising of the colonist and tobacco grower Nathaniel Bacon against Sir William Berkeley, the governor of the colony of Virginia in 1676. As Cook states in the subtitle of the poem, he relied on information in an "Old MS [Manuscript] ” which was probably John Cotton's contemporary account. Cook describes the course of the conflict in a truly epic breadth, from the causes and the first fighting to Bacon's death to the brutal suppression of the insurgents by the royal troops. He often draws parallels to the English Civil War and often compares Bacon with Oliver Cromwell ; but it is difficult to say on whose side his sympathies lie, since he describes both warring parties equally sometimes with sympathy, sometimes with pity, but mostly with contempt. While Cook's contemporaries were still familiar with the events, the abundance of details, especially the multitude of characters, makes it difficult for today's reader to understand the work. The literary value of the poem also appeared rather doubtful to later critics; The sloppy Hudibrastic verse is suitable for humorous works such as The Sot-Weed Factor , but is inappropriate for such a serious subject as the atrocities of war of the Bacon Rebellion .

meaning

While he is of negligible importance for the history of English literature, Cook is more frequently anthologized in American studies and discussed in literary histories - but always exclusively with his first work . The popular representations of colonial literature place the emphasis on the godly writings of the Puritans of New England as the germ of American literature. Besides George Alsop ( A Character of the Province of Maryland , 1666) and William Byrd ( The History of the Dividing Line , 1728), Cook is often cited as an early representative of another, profane line of development, namely as the forerunner of a specifically American humor, des frontier humor , which developed under the harsh conditions at the settlement boundary, the frontier . The tendency towards excessive exaggeration and “robber pistols” characterizes the literature of the American southern states, for example by Mark Twain or some of William Faulkner's novels . Some commentators have dared to claim that The Sot-Weed Factor exemplifies the process of “Americanization” of the English settlers in the New World - and thus American literature.

Cook came to unexpected prominence when John Barth made him the protagonist of his novel The Sot-Weed Factor (German: The Tobacco Dealer ), published in 1960 , which is now considered one of the classics of the postmodern novel and in Cook's first poem as a good 800 pages long Farce is retold.

literature

• Robert D. Arner: Ebenezer Cooke’s The Sot-Weed Factor : The Structure of Satire. In: Southern Literary Journal. Volume 4, No. 1, 1971, pp. 33-47.
• Robert D. Arner: Clio's Rhimes: History and Satire in Ebenezer Cooke's History of Bacon's Rebellion. In: Southern Literary Journal. Volume 4, 1974, pp. 91-106.
• Robert D. Arner: Ebenezer Cooke’s Sotweed Redivivus: Satire in the Horatian Mode. In: Mississippi Quarterly. Volume 28, 1975, pp. 489-496.
• Robert D. Arner: The Blackness of Darkness: Satire, Romance, and Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-weed Factor. In: Tennessee Studies in Literature. Volume 21, 1976, pp. 1-11.
• Robert D. Arner: Ebenezer Cook. In: Emory Elliott (Ed.): Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 24: American Colonial Writers, 1606-1734. Detroit, Bruccoli Clark 1984.
• Chris Beyers: Ebenezer Cooke's Satire, Calculated to the Meridian of Maryland . In: Early American Literature. Volume 33, 1998, pp. 63-85.
• Gregory A. Carey: The Poem as Con Game: Dual Satire and the Three Levels of Narrative in Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-Weed Factor. In: Southern Literary Journal. Vol. 23, No. 1, 1990, pp. 9-19.
• Donald V. Coers: New light on the composition of Ebenezer Cook's Sot-weed Factor. In: American Literature. Volume 49, 1978, pp. 604-606.
• Edward H Cohen: Ebenezer Cooke: The Sot-Weed Canon. University of Georgia Press, Athens 1975, ISBN 0-8203-0346-1 .
• Jim Egan: The colonial English body as commodity in Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-Weed Factor. In: Criticism. Volume 41, No. 3, 1999, pp. 385-400.
• Sarah Ford: Humor's role in imagining America: Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor. In: Southern Literary Journal. Volume 35, No. 2, 2003, pp. 1-12.
• Cy Charles League: The Process of Americanization as Portrayed in Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot-Weed Factor. In: Southern Literary Journal. Volume 29.2, 1996, pp. 18-25.
• JA Leo Lemay : Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville 1972, ISBN 0-87049-137-7 .
• Capper Nichols: Tobacco and the Rise of Writing in Colonial Maryland. In: Mississippi Quarterly. Volume 50, No. 1, 1996, pp. 5-17.
• Robert Micklus: The Case against Ebenezer Cooke's Sot-weed Factor. In: American Literature. Volume 56, 1984, pp. 251-261.
• Lou Rose: Ebenezer Cooke's The Sot Weed Factor and Its Use as a Social Document in the History of Colonial Maryland. In: Maryland Historical Magazine. Volume 78, 1983, pp. 272-277.
• Moses Coit Tyler : A History of American Literature . GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1879. (digitized version)
• Leonard C. Wroth: The Maryland Muse by Ebenezer Cooke. In: Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. Volume 44, 1934, pp. 267-336.

Web links

• The Sot-Weed Factor Digitized from an 1865 reprint by the Library of Congress

swell

1. ↑ The biographical information follows the information in Lemay 1972 and the article Ebenezer Cook by the same author in the Dictionary of National Biography at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/68519, accessed December 7, 2006.
2. ^ Tyler, p. 259.
3. ↑ Arner 1974, p. 74.
4. ↑ Lemay, pp. 81, 83.
5. ↑ Lemay, pp. 90-91.
6. ↑ Arner 1984, p. 74.
7. ^ Tyler, p. 260.
8. ↑ Lemay, p. 108.
9. ↑ Excerpts can be found in the two standard anthologies in university use, the Norton and the Heath Anthology of American Literature .
10. ↑ Arner 1984, pp. 72-73.
11. ↑ Lemay, pp. 92-93; Ford p. 1ff:

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 16, 2006 .