The eighteenth century saw the curious tradition of translating Milton’s Paradise Lost into normative English prose and verse. The status of these translations as literary curiosities belies their serious ambition: to secure a universal readership of this English classic, an ambition also articulated in contemporary works of criticism and commentaries. Rather than treating this cluster of works as adaptations, this chapter conceives of them as intralingual translations, thus positioning them in the terms with which their authors describe them and within the earlier tradition of translation-as-commentary. Milton’s English translators aim at making his epic accessible to women, ‘foreigners’, ‘young people’, and ‘those of a capacity and knowledge below the first class of learning’, even if that accessibility requires some rewriting. Borrowing methods from the teaching of Latin, these authors established a practice that persists to this day in student-friendly translations of English poetry.
The earliest English prose
