Six Good New Books on Milton

The Modern Language Association is a fashion-conscious institution. Without money enough to buy original numbers by Gucci or Versace, we literary critical types rely on cost-free fashions. In our talks and papers and books, we advertise postmodernism, cultural studies, feminism, eco-criticism, and deconstructionism. Our current buzzwords (not that they aren’t the buzzwords of the world outside our fashion world) are multicultural, marginalization, valorization (I think that’s almost gone now), postcolonial, chaos theory, ethnicity. Milton scholars often set the fashions as well as follow them. Stanley Fish is credited with creating reader-response criticism and sometimes damned for popularizing political correctness: his postmodern hipness continues with an allusion to Office Depot in a paper delivered at the 1997 MLA in Toronto. Northrop Frye just about invented mythographical criticism, applying it to the most mythopoeic of poets, John Milton. A scholarly reputation was made for both Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar via PMLA, after they found the madwoman in the attic, when they redefined Milton’s Bogey (a Bogey in a Stan Fish title would be an allusion to the one and only Bogie, the movie star, or possibly to a bad shot in golf). Al Shoaf dis-Eved Adam in a semantic and semiotic quest for reverberating roots. And Mary Nyquist talked about Re-membering Milton, setting off a touchy bunch of reactionary deconstructionist puns.

Any given crop of books from Milton scholars is apt to set trends rather than follow them. Not one of this current lot is a rip-off in the sense that Scream 3 (or 4 or 5) might be, and not one is a mindless shuffle-along with whatever the current hip-hop in literary fashion might be. Robert Fallon is an old-line new historicist; Martin Evans is a postcolonial structuralist with an emphasis on Milton’s sources; Stella Revard is (oh, dear, should we say this?) a classicist with interest in how Milton honored and emulated Pindar, Horace, and Ovid in his earlier verse; John Rumrich wants us to re-think critical perspectives on Milton’s poetry in order to counteract a recently fashionable image of "a monolithic or institutional Milton, as censorious preacher, aggressive misogynist, and champion of the emerging bourgeoisie" (Rumrich, prefatory paragraph) and thereby to become better literary critics; and John Rogers is rummaging around in the attic of materialist science, of all places, to find out where Milton gets his vitalism and to find out what moves the blood (as in Paradise Lost 4.805).

John Rogers sets his own critical perspective from the newly uncovered turf of the history of medicine (were there any historians of medicine, professionally recognized as such, even twenty years ago?). It is all right now to talk about Harvey and the circulation of the blood in the same paragraph as one talks about Milton’s politics and poetics, as it used to be all right to talk about Milton and the seventeenth-century reader (as did Balachandra Rajan, recently honored at the MLA for fifty years of scholarship). It turns out that the discovery of the circulation of the blood has much to do with vitalism, a theory that vital substance like blood has its own internal motive power. The heart itself lost attention as the body’s pump; instead the blood got the credit for moving itself. Did God move the blood? It depended on what theologian or physiologist or alchemist you listened to. But for blood to be able to provide its own oomph, that was something to marvel at, and Harvey did.

The famous scene of Harvey inviting King Charles I to put his hand into the open chest of Hugh, Viscount Montgomery, to feel his heart (Rogers 31) had been preceded by Harvey’s realization that the heart was not sensate. Unaware of peristalsis or the existence of an involuntary nervous system, Harvey had concluded that the blood provided its own vitality: hence vitalism.

Remove the idea of the heart as the emotional center of the body, and what does one do on Valentine’s Day? What Rogers wants us to replace the heart with is the self, the individual, the equivalent of the unique atom, the indivisible self. Rogers does not concentrate on vitalism at large; he is most interested in monistic vitalism. The Royalist Harvey, followed by the Royalist Hobbes, wanted the absolute monarch to control "the violent, almost purposeless collisions of atomic particles" (37). Here we are getting close to Chaos.

In his monistic vitalism, according to Rogers, Milton was the unlikely bedfellow of Hobbes and Harvey, believing that an individual should not be divided into body and soul and believing very strongly in individualism.

Taking the theory into social revolution, Rogers investigates the Levelers and Diggers, represented by Gerrard Winstanley, and their attempts to deforest common lands. This leads us to Andrew Marvell, defending the ancestral lands of Thomas Fairfax against the threat of their being appropriated by radical Levelers, and their valuable English oaks cut down for use at fuel (rather than shipbuilding) or to release potential farm land for common cultivation.

What Rogers does very well is to lead Milton scholars into worlds they had never entered before, which is one reason why his book was honored with prizes by the MLA itself and by the Milton Society of America, in Toronto in 1997.

John Rumrich, whose book appeared in print just before Rogers, unpretentiously leads Milton scholars to question their own orthodoxy, re-evaluating the stimulating works of William Empson, who hated the Christian God whom he thought Milton was endorsing, and Stanley Fish, who taught us to put so much faith in the reader’s response, as the reader was in the process of being snookered by Milton. Rumrich quietly takes apart (I did not say deconstructs) the arguments of the Fish-followers, and he respectfully disallows William Kerrigan’s Freudian Milton and his all-but-missing mother, to replace it with a pre-Freudian matriarchal system (Rumrich 10). Milton is said to honor his female side, like the good and sensitive new-age guy he was. Rumrich does not like the images of Milton as "censorious preacher, aggressive misogynist, and champion of the emerging bourgeoisie." He does seek "a more complex Milton" than earlier critics have nailed down. The problem is that Milton can be a censorious preacher in some of his prose tracts, the Chorus of Samson Agonistes does sound at times like an aggressive misogynist, and that Milton as a middle-class son of a scrivener who managed to graduate from Cambridge does at times in his prose sound like a champion of the emerging bourgeoisie (or at least an energetic spokesperson for the emerging well-to-do Puritan or parliamentarian in his defiance of a royalist monopoly of political power and economic stability). Rumrich is not quite with Christopher Hill in picturing Milton as a wild and woolly radical ranting rogue, but he doesn’t want us to sell Milton’s politics short. He wants us rather to take Milton as someone who could contain chaos in himself, and could entertain opposing views, including "uncertainty and doubt." Rumrich would have us return to the primary research of Maurice Kelley in This Great Argument and the fastidious, unimpeachable introductions and notes of the sixth volume of the Yale Complete Prose Works of Milton, to discover exactly what sort of heretic and radical Milton might be. In his recent research, Rumrich has been debating the nature of Milton’s Chaos, and the book he has just edited (with Stephen Dobransky) is called Milton the Heretic. Stan Fish was responding to Milton as heretic in the "Home Depot" speech.

Robert Fallon, author of two other books about Milton’s involvement in the public defense of the English people, about Milton’s possible commitments to military matters, and about the poet at work in his job of diplomatic translation, turns his attention to the possible effects of the Milton’s long-term active public life on his creative works. Fallon begins by dismissing William Riley Parker’s dismissal of Milton’s state papers as of no consequence to his poetry. Having read the recent work of David Loewenstein and Sharon Achinstein, Fallon’s readers know much more now about how Milton’s political ideals were reflected in such works as Samson Agonistes., and thanks to Nigel Smith, Stanley Fish, and David Norbrook, among others, we know much more about how well-crafted Milton’s political prose could be. Parker’s dismissal, however, has kept most literary scholars from locating and identifying hitherto anonymous letters that can be proven to be Milton’s by their stylistic quirks in Latin. Like the late Leo Miller, Fallon continues to add state letters to the Milton canon, finding that each newly-uncovered letter adds something of value to what is known about Milton’s life or his poetry.

Fallon finds that the majority of the letters Milton wrote on behalf of Cromwell’s government were addressed to the triumvirate (well, two out of the three were virs) that ruled France, Anne of Prussia, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, and the child-king Louis XIV. Then Fallon cleverly applies the principal of divided monarchy or multiple rule, again and again, to governing bodies depicted in Paradise Lost. Aside from the obvious parallels with the Holy Trinity (where Fallon sees a sometimes feminine Holy Spirit), the split-reign theory works well in Eden, with Adam being first among equals but Eve by no means an underprivileged subordinate. This does not imply, Fallon says, that Milton thought such a divided empire the ideal form of government always, but that he did use the French model as a result of his experience in writing letters to the governing French triad (any letter he wrote to Anne and Louis had to be copied to Mazarin). Incidentally, Fallon acknowledges that Milton’s opinions of the French changed, positively, from the chauvinistic attitude he expressed before he himself had to take part in positive negotiations between the Cromwell government and the combination of Anne and Cardinal Mazarin.

Fallon’s study touches, as it must, on the subject of colonial conquest in the time of Milton, which is what Martin Evans concentrates on in Milton’s Imperial Epic. Evans burst on the Miltonic scene with Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition in 1968, one of the "Milton and the [blah blah] Tradition" books, as with others by Michael Krouse on the character Samson and the Christian Tradition (first published 1949) and the broadest of the bunch, C. A. Patrides’s Milton and the Christian Tradition (1966). It is wonderful to see Evans back in the saddle again, because he is not just a "traditionist": he has been thinking about what Milton might have been doing with his own country’s colonialism, probably for thirty years or so, and now he sets down his ideas in concentrated form, with plenty of primary research to back them up. He also hit the right moment, since all the Columbus business was going on. As he did with the Genesis tradition, Evans recreates patterns of thought as they were presented to Milton through reading and through his diplomatic experience. Since God is a kind of colonial power in Eden, and since Satan, too, is the epitome of a bad colonial, and since Adam and Eve must, while they are in exile, go found further colonies in a new world, Evans can work very well within the confines of Paradise Lost. Columbus is in the epic, as is the explorer of space Galileo, and the American natives are there as viewed by Columbus.

Is Milton in the modern mold of a politically correct sympathizer with native Americans? Not really. In his political writings, Evans writes, following Thomas Corns, Milton most likely

Yes, Satan is a merchant adventurer out to cheat the natives of a new world, but Evans acknowledges that one bad merchant doesn’t make all merchants bad: after all, Milton’s father was "in trade." It isn’t hard to reverse the values of Eden or even Heaven as a colony and to see Satan as the dispossessed (the way he sees himself) and Adam and Eve as the usurping colonials.

Seen from the perspective of colonial imperialism with a twist of religion, Raphael is a divine missionary who tries to warn Adam and Eve as an emissary of God; Satan finally succeeds in enslaving the natives; Adam is an indentured servant (of God!) who will eventually be released from necessary servitude when he has served his time obediently; and Michael is "the representative of imperial authority who drives the rebellious natives out of their original home into the alien wilderness" (29). The character types of colonialism fit the epic, more than casually. But, as Evans acknowledges, a simple political allegory won’t fit the complexities of the epic, which "not only breathes an Atlantic air but plays out in mythic form some of the deepest and most disturbing contradictions in England’s experience of the New World" (29).

Stella Revard quite innocently commandeered a title I wanted to use for an article I wrote years ago but never published. I was fascinated by Neaera’s curls in "Lycidas" 69, which appeared in print as "Or with the curls of Neaera’s hair" (see the new Riverside Milton 103n), but which Milton had first written as "Hid in the curls of Neera’s hair," an image of even greater male weakness or vulnerability. I thought the curls might represent a kind of fearful feminine net-building that was kin to the "snares" used by Comus and his mother Circe.

What Revard’s book is about–much beyond my article--is implied in its subtitle, "The Making of the 1645 Poems." That little book, and its later recension, the 1673 Poems, are where we get just about all of Milton’s shorter poems. Like me, Revard believes that the shape and organization of Milton’s first volume of poetry are important. Because of the way most modern collected editions are arranged, very few modern Milton critics are aware that the 1645 Poems is really "a double book" (1), divided discretely into Latin poemata and English poems with separate title pages (actually, the masque has a separate title page as well). Unlike most modern Milton critics, Stella Revard knows her Latin and Greek very well; she has had a thing about Pindar’s influence on Milton for years; and she has thought through the independent meaning of the Latin poetry quite carefully. The title page of the whole volume, as she points out, contains (1) a Latin epigraph, (2) Milton’s portrait, with classical nymphs and swains dancing in the background, and (3) a Greek epigram criticizing the fact that the portrait is very badly done.

What Revard’s book does best, I think, is to interpret Latin and English poems in each other’s context. We get not only the usual litany of all the dead classical gods and goddesses lined up behind Milton’s poetry (Apollo has the largest number of god-entries in the index), but a strong sense of the living neo-Latin tradition in the Renaissance. When Milton went to Italy, he wasn’t reading (and writing) just Italian poetry; he was seeing the literary art of the country in terms of Latin poetry by Vida (212), Mantuan (64), Pontano (102), Navagero (103), Sannazaro (104), and Crinito (104); and he was answering it in the poems he wrote, say those in response to hearing Leanora Baroni sing in Rome. There was give and take, again expressed in Latin poetry, at the Florentine academies, where Milton read some of his own poetry, presumably Latin.

I have grouped Stella Revard’s book near the end of my review because I wanted to picture it as a summary reference work on the 1645 Poems. It is like an entertaining and engaging annotated edition of Milton’s shorter poems, and I found it immensely helpful as I was trying to comment on and annotate the poems found in the 1645 collection, English, Latin, Italian, and Greek, for my own Riverside Milton. Revard, like Martin Evans, puts a scholarly lifetime of thinking about Milton into her book, and a half a lifetime of work on Latin and Greek poetry, and on neo-Latin poetry. Because most of us have not read Latin poetry extensively, especially not neo-Latin poetry, what she says is largely new to the world of Milton scholars.

It is amazing that five very bright scholars can find so much new to say about Milton. Gordon Campbell has much to say that is new about the biographical facts he has uncovered in Milton’s well-documented public life, legal life, and poetic life, in his modest little Milton Chronology. Chronologies are not supposed to be readable: they are just there as ponies for Ph.D. exams, right? This one is a readable treasure of previously unknown gossip, buried in legal depositions, diplomatic rumors, encoded spy diaries, soul-searching private letters. It is true that J. Milton French’s Life Records is full of valuable information about Milton, and that William Riley Parker’s monumental Milton: A Biography is crammed with such information as well. But Campbell’s Chronology has been to all the sources in person that French and Parker had to squint at in primitive copies (Campbell just re-did Parker’s biography), and Campbell knows that, because of the limits on French and Parker during World War II, in England and on the continent, their gathering of information was sometimes haphazard. If one tries to find the precise location of most of the public and private records cited in French, one can’t: they have been moved, or they have been re-catalogued, or they have been lost. Campbell’s Chronology begins the tedious work of gathering Psyche’s seeds, the seeds of truth about Milton’s life. To those of us who find such bits invaluable, what Campbell has constructed is a readable and accurate closet biography–a documentary life made of tidbits, not unlike that of Samuel Schoenbaum for Shakespeare. And it is up-to-date and accurate.

Let me pause over a few bits. Milton had two sisters, Sara and Tabitha, we discover. Sara died shortly after being baptized, when her brother was four, but Tabitha lived a year and eight months, to die when her brother was seven. Who will speak for Milton’s sisters, and write a biography of Sara or Tabitha? Mary Powell, Milton’s wife-to-be , was born when Milton was sixteen, and grew up in Oxfordshire, not far from the ancestral home of the Milton family in Stanton St. John. Her father was a tax-collector and lord of the manor at Forest Hill; his business dealings with Milton’s father begin in 1626, when Milton was eighteen; while Milton was at Cambridge, he himself was collecting on a debt from Richard Powell twice a year.

Campbell also lets us know that the Miltons bought a house in 1629 from Sir John Suckling (the poet, together with his father by the same name), the same poet who was to be painted by Anthony Van Dyck holding the First Folio of Shakespeare. John Milton Sr. became one of the trustees of the Blackfriars Playhouse in 1620, four years after Shakespeare’s death. Milton Sr.’s lease on the Blackfriars, within 300 yards of St. Paul’s Cathedral, might establish a tenuous connection between the Milton family and Shakespeare. Former "housekeepers" of Blackfriars had included Richard Burbage, Shakespeare himself, and Heminges and Condell, of First Folio fame. John Cotton, whose estate Milton Sr. managed be used to establish a connection between the Milton family and the Puritan movement in general, and with New England, since at least one John Cotton (1585-1652) emigrated to Boston and founded Congregationism, wrote books, and defended another Milton friend, Roger Williams, in court.

To someone with the mastery of the right names and dates and places, Campbell’s Chronology is a mine of gold bits. The Roman Catholic renegade, famous liar, and writer Kenelm Digby is there, and William Campion (any kin to the poet and composer Thomas?), and Fulke Greville, poet and biographer of Sidney.

If you are one of the readers of Review who loves good hard solid facts, read Campbell’s Chronology. If you are caught in the throes of colonial guilt, read Evans on the colonial epic. If you want your classics as they were known in the Renaissance, read Revard. If you want your cultural and scientific history alongside your lit crit, read Rogers. And if you want your theory digested, your criticism criticized, and your head straightened out about how calculatedly confused and chaotic Milton’s was, read Rumrich.