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Contents Introduction 13 The Begetting and Exaltation of the Son: The Junius Manuscript and Milton's Paradise Lost Albert C. Labriola 22 Uncertainty and "the sociable Spirit": Raphael's role in Paradise Lost Kent R. Lehnhof 33 Hierarchy, Alterity, and Freedom in Paradise Lost W. Gardner Campbell 50 Cain and Abel in Paradise Regained: Fratricide, Regicide, and Cultural Equity Joan Blythe 70 The Power and the Glory: Paradise Regained and the Toleration Controversy Robert L. Entzminger 83 "The Revolt[ing] Welsh"?: Milton and "the Dark Corners of the Land" Hugh Jenkins 103 Nietzsche for Girls William Shullenberger 116 Milton's "Sonnet 14" and Puritan Funeral Sermons for Women Leland Ryken 136 Composing 1629 James Dougal Fleming 149 The Passion in Poems of Mr. John Milton: Milton's Poetics of Omission and Supplement Erin M. Henriksen 165 The Damnation of Excessive Praise Amy D. Stackhouse 180 Milton's Ideal Readers Stephen B. Dobranski 191 "Out of His Treasurie Things New and Old": Milton's Parabolic Householder in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina Christiana David V. Urban 208 Truth or Consequences: Johnson's Life of Milton and the Moral Biographer's Dilemma Sarah R. Morrison 220 The Loyalty and Subsidy Returns of 1641 and 1642: What They Can Tell Us about the Milton Family Edward Jones 234 Notes on Contributors 248 Index 251 Introduction In 1642, a thirty-three year old John Milton, who had quite literally "spent . . . half his days,"1 published his antiprelatical tract The Reason of Church-Government which, he argued, was "ordain'd and set out to us by the appointment of God in the Scriptures" (1:750).2 But Milton does more in the prose work than attack bishops. As Ralph A. Haug explains, he also "announces himself as a serious national poet, mentions the types of poetry he will write, and lays down at least the outlines of a poetic creed" (741).3 Prompted "to venture and divulge unusual things of my selfe" (808), Milton claims that, as a result of the encouraging reception at the "privat Academies of Italy" of "some trifles . . . compos'd at under twenty or thereabout" (809), "I began thus farre to assent both to [the Italians] and divers of my friends here at home, and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die" (810). The prophetic quality of Milton's remarks has been demonstrated in the centuries intervening since his death, for while the critical response to the Miltonic legacy has ranged from vitriolic contempt to near idolatry, his works, especially the epics that were yet to be penned when Milton was charting his poetic plans in Reason of Church-Government, have rarely been ignored. Diane K. McColley observes, "One measure of the power of Milton's poetry is that readers so often either love it or hate it, and that those who hate it nevertheless go on writing about it."4 To attack Milton's poetic choices, his political views, his God, his Eve, or his Samson is hardly the same thing as willingly and willfully letting his work die through inattention. Even the young Milton, committed as he was to achieving a place in the annals of poetic history, might have been surprised by the strenuous efforts in "aftertimes," on the part of detractors as well as supporters, to keep his legacy alive. Although the fifteen essays that comprise this collection are intentionally eclectic, suggesting the diverse topics and works that engage contemporary critics, there are nonetheless numerous connections between and among them. A number focus, from varied perspectives, on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and A Mask, poems that have attracted sustained critical attention. Several consider shorter poems, such as the Nativity Ode, "The Passion," "Upon the Circumcision," and "Sonnet 14." Some pursue issues of sources, authorship, and audience, while still others probe extant biographical records or reflect on the author as a biographical subject. Albert C. Labriola, in the opening essay "The Begetting and Exaltation of the Son: The Junius Manuscript and Milton's Paradise Lost," argues that "the Son is thrice begotten: first as a divine being [before the start of the poem], then as an angelic being [in book 5], and third as humankind [the prophesied Incarnation]." Comparing the Caedmonian poems Genesis and Christ and Satan with Paradise Lost, Labriola identifies significant "overlapping content" and an analogue of the Christological angel (also discernable in "the apocryphal books and early Christian theology"). In particular, he looks at "(1) whether or when the Son is manifested as an angel, (2) why and to what extent Satan envies the Son, and (3) how the role of the God-angel prefigures that of the God-man or theanthropos, namely Jesus." Labriola maintains, "[i]n effect, the works in the Junius manuscript and Paradise Lost paraphrase, adapt, and interrelate many of the same biblical episodes." Labriola examines the "causes and circumstances surrounding Satan's revolt in the Caedmonian poems" as "a literary analogue for the originary and earliest events in Paradise Lost; namely, the begetting and exaltation of the Son as an angel." He concludes that "for Milton and Caedmon, the Son as the God-angel begins the humiliation of the deity as a process of revelation. . . . Such humiliation by the godhead, which correspondingly elevates the angelic nature that it has chosen to adopt, fuels Satan's envy" and precipitates his rebellion. Dealing with Raphael, a character in Paradise Lost who is unarguably an angel, Kent R. Lehnhof, in "Uncertainty and Ôthe sociable Spirit': Raphael's Role in Paradise Lost," contends that "Raphael's role . . . is perplexing on several points" and he "seems to commit a number of mistakes." Lehnhof focuses on several instances of what he calls "interpretive uncertainty" related to the angelic visit, which at times "appears to provide not the moment of but rather the momentum for the Fall of humanity." According to Lehnhof, "the epic does not assert that Raphael's message is evil. But the epic does assert on any number of occasions that Raphael's message is potentially evil." Relating the poem's position to Areopagitica, Lehnhof believes that "The fact that Adam and Eve might make a Ôbad book' out of Raphael's text, misinterpreting his words in such a way as to encourage their eventual eating of the forbidden fruit, serves to illustrate the Father's commitment to the authentic virtue that arises only in an environment of choice." Thus, the Father's "licens[ing] the publication of a morally ambiguous text" reinforces the idea "that freedom of expression and interpretation are so meaningful that they must be ensured at all costs; even if it means the loss of Paradise." In "Hierarchy, Alterity, and Freedom in Paradise Lost," W. Gardner Campbell also addresses the concept of freedom, but his interest is in the relationship between Adam and Eve as it illustrates the concept of alterity put forward by French philosopher Francis Jacques. Says Campbell: "Heterogeneity, diversity, individuality: all these nouns valorize alterity as the foundation of any just community. Yet alterity can hardly register as alterity unless difference makes a difference." He goes on to explain that "the relation of person," of self and other, is complicated by the problem of hierarchy, with its attendant problems of domination and subordination." In fact, "the chronological action of Milton's epic begins with the problem of hierarchy" in Satan's questioning of the Father's elevation of the Son. "Read[ing] several instances of hierarchy in Paradise Lost closely and complexly, with attention to their implications for freedom, personhood, and alterity," Campbell observes that "Milton's idea of hierarchy does not diminish the personhood of subordinates or superiors, and further, that at least some aspects of Milton's idea of hierarchy in Paradise Lost may justifiably be celebrated as productive of true personhood and free relation." Joan Blythe, in "Cain and Abel in Paradise Regained: Fratricide, Regicide, and Cultural Equity," proposes that "the evocation throughout Paradise Regained of Cain and Abel lore accruing from Gen. 4; exegetical, political, cultural, and psychological; constitutes a main subtext . . . both for Milton and for his seventeenth-century readers." She explains that "Abel stood for equal opportunity, personal freedom, and creativity; Cain embodied tough-minded support for the status quo, monarchy, despotism." In addition to highlighting "sibling strife," the biblical text was itself a source of conflict of interpretation "that was integral to heretical disputes" both in the early church and in the seventeenth century. Blythe "look[s] at the exegetical traditions arising from Gen. 4" and "considers[s] Paradise Regained from the perspective of seventeenth- century pamphlets and sermons where Cain and Abel provided a scriptural battleground for English religious and political controversy." In closing, she states that "Via the Son, the new Abel, Milton condemns the hegemonic Cain's violence and monolithic government suppression of religious freedom in his own time and in all time." Robert L. Entzminger also sees Paradise Regained as the site of religious controversy, during a period when Protestants "[set] aside the sectarian disputes that had divided [them] in favor of seeking solidarity against a common enemy. It was in an attempt to place Catholics beyond the pale of toleration that [Milton] published the pamphlet Of True Religion in 1673, but the position he articulated there was one he had already given expression in Paradise Regained." In both works, he made sharp distinctions between the "beliefs and practices" of Protestants and Cath-olics. Entzminger's essay, "The Power and the Glory: Paradise Regained and the Toleration Controversy," goes on to explore Satan's temptation of the Son in the epic, which reveals different theological views of the sacraments, "the Catholic tendency to elevate the authority of tradition over that of Scripture," and the "idolatrous" "imputation to physical objects of a power that belongs exclusively to the Word." Ultimately, ar-gues Entzminger, "it was the corruption of the Catholic Church through its implication in temporal splendor and power and its reliance upon physical force to ensure conformity, as well as the pope's usurpation of the Son's position as head of the church, that rendered it, for Milton, intolerable." Also concerned with issues of religious conflict, Hugh Jenkins's "The Revolt[ing] Welsh"?: Milton and Ôthe Dark Corners of the Land'" considers seventeenth-century Protestant views of "the Celtic fringe of the British Isles . . . as mysterious, even dangerous places." Differences in culture and languages were compounded by "[p]agan beliefs. . . . [W]orse still was the persistence of Catholicism." Jenkins claims that "[t]hroughout his polemical career, Milton was particularly caustic toward the Irish." As for the Welsh, his attitudes are "ambiguous and shifting" and are "intricately tied with views on ÔEnglishness'; his own and his country's." His "shifting representations . . . tell us much about Milton's persistent political doubts about his own nation, and much about the creative tensions these doubts created, doubts that led to some of his best poetry and most compelling prose." In surveying Milton's presentation of the Welsh in his poetry and prose, most notably in Comus and in works directed at Oliver Cromwell, Jenkins seeks to demonstrate that "[b]y looking squarely at the Welsh as both seductive Ôother' and as the titular forebears of the country he chronicled and castigated, loved and despaired of, Milton could examine the character of his own nation in the broadest sense and exercise his own poetic and historical talents in its reformation." From a distinctly different angle, William Shullenberger offers "a treatment of the Mask in light of Nietzsche's conceptualization of tragedy." In "Nietzsche for Girls," Shullenberger cites Comus's genealogy as "The wild child of the Greek deity whom Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, identified and celebrated as the sponsor and secret protagonist of tragedy: Dionysus, or the Roman Bacchus. . . . [T]he tragic subtext of the Mask requires us to reckon . . . with Comus's legacy from his father." Since "growing a girl into a woman, the initiatory program of the Mask, means ritually submitting her to the possibilities of tragic experience," the Lady "endures exposure to threat, temptation, and terror suffered [in advance of her, and on behalf of her] by her mythological types, in order to recoup, in the very moment of vulnerability, the potential for translation, for the refiguration of tragic energies into the imaginative activism of the Puritan conscience." As Shullenberger points out, neither Dionysus nor Apollo has "the last word in the Mask." That belongs to "Christ, the ÔCelestial Cupid' of the Mask's epilogue," who "contains the antinomies of Dionysus and Apollo, at once the victim of a redemptive violence and the ground and harmonic ordering power of existence. . . . Thus, Milton invokes the tragic, in order first to confront and recuperate its existential potency, and then to direct this potency into the Mask's harmonic ritual ordering." Leland Ryken, in "Milton's ÔSonnet 14' and Puritan Funeral Sermons for Women," challenges the "conventional view" of "Sonnet 14" as "bland, simple, and commonplace. . . . The key that unlocks the overlooked achievement of the poem is the context of Puritan funeral sermons for women." After a discussion of rhetorical strategies in the sermons, Ryken analyzes Milton's use of these strategies in his sonnet, arguing that this "unjustifiably slighted poem" is, in fact, "one of Milton's best sonnets, both artistically and intellectually. At the level of artistry, Milton constructs a host of specific motifs around the central journey motif, with the poetic texture enriched by a network of carefully chosen biblical allusions. The content of the poem, moreover, participates in one of the grand theological debates of the Reformation era." Contextualizing the poem reveals that "Puritan mythology . . . serves an indispensible role," and through this mythology, Milton in "ÔSonnet 14' transforms the Puritan funeral sermon for women into an exalted poem." In "Composing 1629," James Dougal Fleming questions the traditional dating of Milton's Nativity Ode to Christmas 1629, based on the poem's headnote, "Compos'd 1629," in the 1645 Poems of Mr. John Milton. Fleming believes that the headnote may be "hermeneutic. But if it is," he goes on to say, "it is probably not reliable as an authorial statement of time line. For the year 1629, attached to a poem on Christ's Nativity, published in the winter of 1645/46, is a politically reactionary and; one would therefore think; un-Miltonic interpretant." Considering Milton's poem in the context of the official Parliamentary banning of Christmas a year before Poems was published and of post-Caroline Christmas poetry, which is "conservative, arch-Royalist, nostalgic, and reactionary," Fleming suggests that "[i]f ÔCompos'd 1629' recalls the dissolution [of Parliament] at all, the recollection would seem to function, vis-ê-vis Christmas poetry, in a distinctly positive and pro-Caroline way." Thus, maintains Fleming, "[I]f Milton is responsible for ÔCompos'd 1629,' then the Nativity Ode becomes an ideological problem. If the Ode is not considered an ideological problem; a view that entails suppressing the headnote as nonauthorial; then we do not know that Milton wrote this poem in 1629." Erin M. Henriksen's "The Passion in Poems of Mr. John Milton: Milton's Poetics of Omission and Supplement" also looks at the Nativity Ode, along with "The Passion" and "Upon the Circumcision," three poems that "[narrate] the life of Christ," in light of "the complex and potentially perilous relations of the poet to the Bible." Milton's recognition that the author "is both invited by biblical precedent to elaborate and amend Scripture and forbidden in doing so, to add or subtract anything from the divine work" is, Henriksen contends, played out in his poems on the Passion, with their "acts of omission and supplement." She suggests that "ÔOn the Morning of Christ's Nativity' and ÔUpon the Circumcision' evoke the violence and redemption of the Passion through typological analogies to other events in Christ's life," while "ÔThe Passion' is the first instance in Milton's poetry in which the subject matter of Christ's death exerts a defining influence over the poem's formal properties." Henriksen believes that "[t]he self-referential elements of the poem, its conscious artifice, draw attention away from the Passion and toward the poet" and concludes that "Milton's engagement with the Passion contributes a significant dimension to our understanding of the poetry of the Reformed Church." Complexities of authorship also engage Amy D. Stackhouse in "The Damnation of Excessive Praise," which has as its subject the 1645 volume of Milton's Poems and "odd features" that "come to play prominently in the textual apparatus . . . as Milton struggles with various parties who help bring the volume into being" and the resultant "authorial anxiety." In an effort to "present himself in and create an audience for the volume," Milton in his 1645 Poems reveals multiple strategies to address the advantages and disadvantages of the collaborative nature of publication. Through careful analysis of the textual apparatus, Stackhouse claims that "[t]he multilingual volume demonstrates the multivocality necessary for creating and disseminating texts. While the frontispiece to the volume and double title pages serve to place Milton in the social nexus that is literary textual production, the commendatory poems and letters serve to place Milton in a community of readers. The English dedicatory letters introduce Milton to an English audience by depicting the authors of those letters as readers of Milton's works and as men worthy to be emulated by the potential purchaser of the volume. The Latin commendatory poems tell the English purchaser that Milton has already been introduced to the Italian literati with great success." Finally, "[t]he dedicatory material to the two volumes announces that Milton has been a good reader of poets and poetic tradition; he is an individual talent who collaborates with the canon of literary tradition as he sports with sonnets, elegies, epigrams, masques, pastoral lament, psalms, odes, hymns, and the range of shorter poetic genres." Focusing specifically on the collaboration between writer and reader, Stephen B. Dobranski, in "Milton's Ideal Readers," "[discusses] Milton's concept of reading within the context of readers' prefaces and other seventeenth-century descriptions of writing. Based on these accounts, many Renaissance writers, like Milton, understood that they needed an active, collaborative audience. . . . Such an audience would participate directly in the texts they perused and forge a collaborative relationship with writers." Tracing Milton's "readerly rhetoric" through selected prose and poetry and comparing it to Renaissance treatises on writing and authorial dedications and introductory epistles, Dobranski, like Stackhouse, detects "an anxiety," one which he posits was possibly "influenced by the spread of print culture, which brought an author's works to unseen, distant audiences." Although Dobranski warns that "[w]e can never know how many Renaissance readers actually lived up to Milton's standards, how fit they were and how few," throughout his authorial career "Milton continues to appeal to a learned audience and have faith in the value of careful interpretation," and his "many comments about reading reveal a poet who again and again wanted his audience to collaborate with him." David V. Urban's "ÔOut of His Treasurie Things New and Old': Milton's Parabolic Householder in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina Christiana" examines Milton's use of the parable of the Householder (Matt. 13.52) to illustrate "the enormous hermeneutical concerns that inform Milton's perception of himself as a poet- prophet." Whereas Dobranski describes Milton's ideal reader, Urban, in exploring "Milton's personal connection with the parable of the Householder," shows us "a Milton who self-consciously portrays himself as one who fits the New Testament model of an ideal biblical interpreter . . . one whose careful analysis uncovers new insights from the Bible, insights that were there to be seen all along, but which hitherto had been ignored, neglected, and misinterpreted." In addition, Urban asserts that "the similar manner in which the parable is presented" in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and De Doctrina "adds strength to the position that Milton did in fact compose De Doctrina." Milton's self portrayal "as one whose biblical interpretation transcends the corruption of church traditions and coincides with the pure, original meaning of the Scriptures themselves" is significant, Urban argues, appearing as it does in "two works in which Milton's own exegetical conclusions clash . . . with orthodox historical teachings. By aligning himself with the parabolic Householder, Milton aligns himself with the very words that Jesus used to describe the ideal teacher of Scripture . . . a teacher anointed by Jesus himself." Biographical portrayal, and to some extent Samuel Johnson's self- portrayal, is the subject of Sarah R. Morrison, in "Truth or Consequences: Johnson's Life of Milton and the Moral Biographer's Dilemma," who claims that however "perverse" the "tactics" in Johnson's Life of Milton, his "enduring influence as a biographer and critic has made this work difficult to ignore." The Life of Milton, Morrison points out, is not the only one of Johnson's Lives "to be criticized as unfairly biased," but her interest is "not in defending Johnson against charges of bias against Milton or in justifying his approach to biographical writing in general but rather in the special problems that Milton posed for Johnson as a subject of a literary biography." The issue for Johnson is, Morrison suggests, one of "moral influence" on the "reading public" that he "envisions." She reasons that "the unevenness of the Life of Milton" results from "what Johnson felt he must at all costs avoid. Forestalled; by his own didactic theory and his sense of responsibility to a popular audience; from detailing and countering Milton's radical political and theological views, Johnson yet feels compelled to register his disapproval even as he reduces those works to mere indicators of Milton's personality. The Ôirritation' that so many readers detect in the Life of Milton is in large part traceable to the frustrations of the moral biographer hampered by contradictory goals. Johnson is at cross-purposes with himself in the Life of Milton." Four extant documents, which like many others "have yet to be exploited for biographical, political, and religious content," are the focus of Edward Jones's "The Loyalty and Subsidy Returns of 1641 and 1642: What They Can Tell Us about the Milton Family." Jones maintains that such records can tell us a great deal "not just within the context of what Milton himself was doing during these years . . . but also through the activities of his father and brother Christopher." After investigating the documents in detail, Jones summarizes why such records deserve careful scrutiny: "They can add new and correct old information; they can clarify and complicate our understanding of mundane matters such as taxes and significant issues such as loyalty to one's notion of the state. They can confirm information we already know from other sources and through such comparisons allow balanced perspectives to emerge. Furthermore, in providing information unique to themselves, they can add new sources to the Life Records of the family as well as help date other documents more accurately." Finally, "[w]hether establishing boundaries for the time frame of a change of residence, determining the family's financial well-being, or suggesting political and/or religious affinities, they warn against an oversimple view of life in the seventeenth century by underscoring the significance of context." These essays were originally among those presented at the 2001 Conference on John Milton, sponsored by Middle Tennessee State University, and, because of their critical merit, the authors were invited to expand work for this collection. Diverse though they are in subject matter, approaches, and emphases, all demonstrate how Milton scholarship in the twenty-first century continues to be committed to not letting Milton's literary legacy "die." Notes Ê1. Milton was born December 9, 1608, and died in November, 1674, just weeks before his sixty-sixth birthday. Ê2. John Milton, The Reason of Church-Government, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953/82). All references to Milton's prose are to this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. Ê3. Ralph A. Haug, preface to The Reason of Church-Government, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. Ê4. Diane K. McColley, "Milton and the Sexes," in The Cambridge Companion to John Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; repr., 1997), 147.
Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:
Milton, John, 1608-1674 -- Criticism and interpretation.
Milton, John, 1608-1674. Paradise lost.
Milton, John, 1608-1674 -- Influence.