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Being a playable pamphlet, study, and cabinet of colonial absurdities

THE SOT-WEED
FACTOR

or, The Poet Laureate of Maryland brought to Account

Follow Ebenezer Cooke from London vanity to Chesapeake mud: preserve a vow, lose a plantation, suspect every alias, and revise a noble epic until it smells honestly of tobacco, bilge, and human folly.

Study it: editorial notes explain Barth’s games with history, authorship, and imposture.
Play it: choices alter the account, the marginalia, and the final Marylandiad.
Handle it: collect forged papers, bawdy fragments, and dubious testimony.
After John Barth’s 1960 novel and the older Ebenezer Cooke satire; this adaptation paraphrases, invents, and takes unlicensed liberties in the spirit of the thing.
☙ printed for the use of the curious, the credulous, and the recently deceived ❧