Milton and Transcendent Authorship

This chapter examines Milton’s notion and practice of authorship over the first half of his career. Beginning with Sonnet 8 and some of Milton’s other early poems—‘On Shakespeare’, Mansus, ‘The Passion’, and Lycidas—the chapter shows how as a young writer he embraced an idealistic notion of poetry’s preservative power but always in terms of his texts’ material transmission. Two crucial experiences helped to develop Milton’s thinking about his authorship: the outrage prompted by his divorce tracts underscored his works’ vulnerability, while the printing of his Poems in 1645 drove home the need for collaboration if his writing were to survive. All of Milton’s early works illustrate how his concept of authorship anticipates the monist philosophy that will animate Paradise Lost. He understood early on that his writing was both letter and spirit: his words needed an appropriate material form if they were to have a lasting spiritual life.

Making Connections with Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis

Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis is often described as a profoundly lonely work, marking the loss of his oldest and most intimate friend, Charles Diodati. It also one of the first works to announce Milton’s epic ambitions, and accordingly it holds an important place in narratives that describe Milton as a singular, or even antisocial, poet, producing poetry from the deep well of his interior self. But this chapter examines the poem as a deeply social, collaborative work, and one of Milton’s important early experiments in using print publication to cultivate and maintain relationships. Milton needed printers to establish his name; printers like Augustine Mathewes and Matthew Simmons needed authors with established names as allies in their own extended war against print licensing and monopolies. The wider context of the Epitaphium Damonis’s production makes it clear that the circumstances of Milton’s stationers cannot be disentangled from the arc of his own career. His emerging authorial identity was not solitary but social, and print was an essential strategy for constructing, promoting, and preserving it.

Repackaging Milton for the Late Seventeenth-Century Book Trade

This chapter focuses on the magisterial 1688 folio edition of Paradise Lost, published by Jacob Tonson and Richard Bentley, exploring the possible reasons why these men chose to publish Milton at this time, as well as the impact the edition had both on Milton’s authorial afterlife and on their careers as stationers. The chapter places the 1688 Paradise Lost folio in the wider context of Tonson’s career, including his involvement in pirate publication schemes and his status (from 1678) as Dryden’s publisher, to argue that the 1688 edition of Paradise Lost, one of the most profound turning points in Milton’s authorial afterlife, had less to do with the political context of 1688 and the perceived vendibility of the poem and more to do with Tonson’s own ambitions and frustrations as a stationer.

Do I Amuse You?

When Milton invokes the muse at the opening of Paradise Lost, he also introduces ambiguities of her identity, religious insight, and poetic purpose. Drawing on queer readings of Milton’s work, this essay reveals an inherent—and vexed—eroticism in the relationship to the muse and artistic inspiration. Milton plays upon the verb ‘muse’ throughout Paradise Lost, often associating it with satanic deception, but that implication operates in contrast to Milton’s earlier work with the muse in his Latin elegies and poems to Charles Diodati. In the end, we find that by claiming his status as the epic poet, Milton must foreclose the abundant possibilities in the eroticism of musing.

Joseph Addison and the Domestication of Paradise Lost

This chapter examines the profound impact the editorial interventions and elaborate textual notes that Patrick Hume contributed to Tonson’s sixth edition of Paradise Lost in 1695 had on Milton’s status as a popular and accessible writer. Hume’s Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first significant editorial treatment of a vernacular poet, acknowledges that a new readership had emerged that needed the kinds of assistance that Milton’s educated Protestant contemporaries had not required when reading the lifetime editions of 1667–9 and 1674. The shift in Milton’s status, from that of an elite-culture writer embedded in a radical political and theological tradition to that of the cultural icon of a broadly conceived English Protestantism, both prompted and was advanced by Joseph Addison’s remarkable series of essays on Paradise Lost in The Spectator.

Milton and Radicalism

In the half-century before the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth in 2008, the dominant attention to his poetry and prose was of a historical nature and focused on exploring in detail his career as an apologist for aspects of the English Revolution: versions of radical Puritanism; republicanism; and domestic reform in the shape of the divorce argument. Yet the recent resurgence of formalist approaches, with particular focus on the poetry, has obscured or banished the politics, and work on Milton and philosophical/scientific reform has produced a picture not of the seventeenth-century Voltaire or Jefferson but of a republican Newton. This chapter insists on Milton’s identity as a radical religious and political thinker, writer, and actor, over and against some recent contrary arguments, taking account of a more recent return to historical scholarship, where some of that work has been inspired by changing definitions of radicalism in our own time.

Milton’s Erotic Dramas

This chapter considers recent performances of Book IX of Paradise Lost, preceded by a play in Middle English from the York Mystery Cycle also telling the Fall of Adam and Eve, and A Maske Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle. Considering the first two together emphasizes anew the intensity with which Milton dramatizes the quarrel and the Fall sequence. The production served as a brilliant reminder of how theatrical is the scene, and how it echoes, or anticipates, the other major dramas among Milton’s works such as A Maske. Seeing the scene from the epic in relation to the medieval play made it obvious how Milton’s imagination worked in dramatic terms, and indeed reminds us that Milton had originally set out to write a tragedy of the story. The chapter focuses on the extremely odd choice that Milton made to retell the myth of Adam and Eve as a love story.

What Made Milton?

This introductory chapter opens with a material reading of the John Milton that emerges from a publication produced early in his career, Humphrey Moseley’s 1645 Poems, arguing that Milton projected his authorial identity into the world alongside an ambitious stationer who likewise sought to fashion himself through the book trade. The authors consider the volume, its contents, author portrait and inscription, and relationship to Moseley’s contemporaneous publications as a case study that attests to ways in which Milton worked both with and against stationers in order to promote both his authorial status and his personal politics. The essays of Making Milton are then summarized as the editors set out the collection’s three main threads of argument: for the importance of the book trade and the ways in which Milton’s books were made available, read, and sold; Milton’s exceptionalism as an author who participated in the construction of his own profile as a writer; and the ways in which readers and other writers have contributed to shape Milton’s afterlives.

Afterword

The Afterword situates the subject of ‘making Milton’ in the broader context of Milton’s value, that is, of making Milton matter, historically, intellectually, and materially. Sauer explains how the volume’s contributions bring Milton Studies into conversation with scholarship on book history, material culture, and the mechanisms of public dissemination. The volume’s tripartite structure is shown to highlight relationships among printing and book trade practices, authorship, and the generation of afterlives, while the collection at large demonstrates how the historical and material operations of ‘making Milton’ intersect. Marking a material turn in Milton Studies, Making Milton serves as a welcome resource and rewarding contribution to the cultural capital of collective book production and reception. While reviewing the book’s key features and arguments, the Afterword also maps out future directions in this ever expanding field.

Mexican Miltons

This essay follows key traces of John Milton’s presence in Mexico and concludes with a discussion of their extensions into twentieth- and twenty-first-century Mexico, the hispanophone world, and related critical discussions. Milton’s works circulated in Mexican collections despite the fact that, starting in the eighteenth century, Milton was proscribed by two significant texts that circulated in the Americas: the Spanish Catholic Inquisition’s and Roman Catholic Inquisition’s infamous indexes of proscribed works and authors. English, Spanish, and French versions of Milton’s works appear at the first public library in the Americas, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, confirming the multilingualism of and active participation in Western cultural trends by Mexican readers. After Mexican independence (1821), Mexico’s Francisco Granados Maldonado published his hispanophone translation of Paradise Lost (1858), even though three others by European Spaniards were available. Granados Maldonado’s translational choices reflect a linguistic and political engagement with, but independence from, Spanish and European cultural trends.