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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
As any parent or pet-owner knows, play seems to be a natural part of life. Dogs and cats wrestle, chase their tails, and scamper in races; monkeys, fish, and birds dance; children make toys out of any nearby prop. Play is older than man and seems to be one of the inevitable characteristics that evolution has built into all beings above the level of the most basic species. Both quiet play and active play – leisure and recreation – have a therapeutic effect that make creatures seek them. Play is ubiquitous psychologists say, because fun is essential in order to do the serious things of life – work, survive, reproduce, and live in social groups. Why then does it jar our sensibilities to think of Puritans playing and having fun? Why is it necessary to remind people – to persuade them against their instinctive reaction – that the religious settlers of colonial New England sought relaxation and pleasure in their lives? Many societies past and present have reputations for restrictive views of the pursuit of pleasure, but few peoples conjure up as strong an image of asceticism as the Puritans do.
1 Mandell, Richard D., Sport: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 1–2Google Scholar, for a discussion of the role of play in culture.
2 For discussions of the humorous attacks on the Puritans by their contemporaries see McWilliams, John P. Jr., “Fictions of Merry Mount,” American Quarterly (hereafter cited as AQ), 29 (1977), 3–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drinnon, Richard, “The Maypole of Merry Mount: Thomas Morton and the Puritan Patriarchy,” Massachusetts Review, 21 (1980), 382–410Google Scholar; Zuckerman, Michael, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly, (hereafter cited as NEQ), 50 (1977), 255–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kropf, C. R., “Colonial Satire and the Law,” Early American Literature, 12 (1977–1978), 234–38Google Scholar; Miller, Perry, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 333–35Google Scholar. For a convenient brief survey of more recent attacks on the Puritans by people such as Mencken see Hall, David (ed.), Puritanism in Seventeenth–Century Massachusetts (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1968)Google Scholar. See also Tyler, Moses Coit, A History of American Literature, 1607–1765, 2 vols, (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1973; orig. pub. 1873), 263–64.Google Scholar
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