This series offers accessible, innovative approaches to major areas of literary study. Each volume provides an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to gain an authoritative understanding of a given period or movement’s intellectual character and contexts.
Chaucer | Edited by Corinne Saunders |
English Renaissance Literature | Edited by Donna B. Hamilton |
Shakespeare on Screen | Edited by Diana E. Henderson |
Milton | Edited by Angelica Duran |
The Restoration and Eighteenth Century | Edited by Cynthia Wall |
The Victorian Novel | Edited by Francis O’Gorman |
Modernism | Edited by David Bradshaw |
Postwar American Literature and Culture | Edited by Josephine G. Hendin |
Twentieth-Century American Poetry | Edited by Stephen Fredman |
Contemporary British Fiction | Edited by James F. English |
Feminist Theory | Edited by Mary Eagleton |
Angelica Duran
To harp-fingered Jacqueline and mild-eyed Paul
© 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
except for editorial material and organization © 2007 by Angelica Duran
BLACKWELL PUBLISHING
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First published 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2007
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A concise companion to Milton / edited by Angelica Duran.
p. cm.—(Blackwell concise companions to literature and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4051-2271-9 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4051-2271-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Criticism and interpretation. I. Duran,
Angelica. II. Series.
PR3588.C59 2006
821′.4—dc22
2006006917
A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website: www.blackwellpublishing.com
Paul Alpers (1953 B.A., 1959 Ph.D. English, Harvard). His first book, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (1967), remains a must-read; and his most recent one, What is Pastoral? (1996), well earned three prestigious prizes: a Guggenheim Fellowship to fund its research, and the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa and the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association to recognize its merits. Paralleling his distinguished publishing career, he has earned teaching awards and the undying gratitude of his former students, including this volume’s editor, teaching Elizabethan and seventeenth-century literature from 1962 to 2000 at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Class of 1942 Professor Emeritus. Having relocated from the west coast to the east coast to Smith College, he is now Professor-in-Residence, and his wife, Carol Christ, is President.
Juliet Lucy Cummins (1994 L.L.B., 1995 B.A. English, 2001 Ph.D. English, University of Sydney). She lectured in English and Law at the University of Western Sydney from 2000 to 2003 and has been an adjunct fellow in Law at that university since 2004. She held the position of Research Associate to the President of the Administrative Decisions Tribunal of New South Wales in 2004 and 2005, and is now practicing law part-time, working as an independent scholar, and looking after her three children, James, Oliver, and Harriet. She edited and contributed to a collection of essays called Milton and the Ends of Time (2003), and is co-editor of another collection of essays, Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, which is forthcoming. She also writes in the areas of administrative and privacy law.
Angelica Duran (1987 B.A. English with Spanish minor, 1988 M.A. English, University of California at Berkeley; 2000 Ph.D. English, Stanford). Her English and Comparative Literature courses at Purdue University reflect the research concerns of her first book projects, The Age of Milton and the Scientific Revolution (2007) and studies of Miltonic influence in Hispanophone literature. These and other shorter projects reveal her interest in showing points of unity between groups that are often seen as antagonistic and oppositional, and in extending the readership of seventeenth-century literary texts. Having been born and schooled in California, she (nevertheless and thoroughly) enjoys living in the US Midwest during the school year with her husband Sean, daughter Jacqueline, and son Paul, and traveling nationally and internationally in the summers, most recently to Costa Rica, Mexico, Spain, and Thailand.
Karen L. Edwards (1973 B.A. English and Comparative Literature, Brown; 1978 M.A., M.Phil., 1979 Ph.D. English, Yale). After teaching for 12 years at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, she moved to England and is now a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at Exeter University. There she teaches courses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature in general, and on Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible and Literature in particular. Her first book is Milton and the Natural World (1999) and she has just finished a study of the animals that have a presence in Milton’s poetry and prose. Entitled Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary, the book is being published as a series of special issues of Milton Quarterly. By what seems an inevitable progression, she is now working on a study of early modern insults.
Katsuhiro Engetsu (1980 B.A., 1982 M.A. English, Doshisha; 1985 M.A. English, Indiana University). Professor of English at Doshisha University (Japan), he has contributed chapters to Milton and the Terms of Liberty (2002) and The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (2004), and translated into Japanese Roy Strong’s Renaissance Garden in England and Christopher Hill’s Collected Essays. He has written extensively on early modern British literature and history in both English and Japanese in order to examine the politics of reading and misreading in intercultural issues. He teaches British literature as well as translation theory to his undergraduate and graduate students in Kyoto, one of the most historic cities of Japan, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. He often travels internationally to join academic conferences, most recently invited by the Wordsworth Trust to give a lecture on Milton and the Romantics.
J. Martin Evans (1958 B.A., 1963 D.Phil. English, Oxford). A native of Cardiff, he emigrated to the United States in 1963 to teach at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty ever since, most recently as the William R. Kenan Professor of English. His publishing record spans 30 years, starting with Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (1968) and leading to The Miltonic Moment (1998). He shared his familiarity with Renaissance and Milton criticism, which emerges so clearly in the “Select Bibliography” of this volume, in editing the five-volume John Milton: Twentieth Century Perspectives (2002); and in teaching courses in the English Department as well as the Introduction to the Humanities and Overseas Studies programs. He has earned numerous, well-deserved awards for his service to his students, including the editors of the Cambridge Companion to Milton and this volume. He is the 2004 Milton Society of America Honored Scholar.
Robert Thomas Fallon (1949 B.S. Engineering, USMA; 1960 M.A. History, Canisius College; 1965 Ph.D. English and Comparative Literature, Columbia). After a career as a commissioned officer in the US Army (1949–70) he joined the English faculty at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, retiring in 1995 as Professor Emeritus. He has published three books on John Milton, Captain or Colonel (1984), Milton in Government (1993), and Divided Empire: Milton’s Political Imagery (1995), and served as President of the Milton Society of America. He is a contributing editor to two volumes of A Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: The Songs and Sonnets (in progress) and The Holy Sonnets (2005). Since retirement from LaSalle, he has published four books on Shakespeare, the three Theatergoer’s Guide volumes (2001, 2002, 2004) and How to Enjoy Shakespeare (2005), as well as The Christian Soldier (2003), an edition of English Civil War political and religious tracts.
Roy Flannagan (1960 B.A. English, Washington and Lee; 1966 Ph.D. English, University of Virginia). Roy Flannagan spent 32 years at Ohio University, Athens, avoiding being Chair of his English Department only to retire and assume that position at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. The Milton Society of America has recognized his great contributions to Milton studies – founding the Milton Quarterly, editing The Riverside Milton, and directing the 7th International Milton Symposium in Beaufort, South Carolina, for example – through the Irene Samuel Award and 2001 Honored Scholar award. Listed in Who’s Who in America for the last ten years, he has also been President of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and an active member of the Renaissance English Text Society. He is a member of the Parris Island Masters’ Swimming Team (which hasn’t lost a meet in 12 years) and a regular columnist and photographer for The Lowcountry Weekly.
David Gay (1977 B.A., 1981 M.A. English, Queen’s University; 1989 Ph.D. English, University of Alberta). David Gay teaches at his alma mater, the University of Alberta, and researches Milton specifically and early modern literature generally. He also continues to develop interdisciplinary courses in biblical-literary studies and religion and literature. He is drawn to writers like Milton, Blake, and Frye in part because of the central place they give to the creative imagination in both education and religion. He has authored The Endless Kingdom: Milton’s Scriptural Society (2002) and co-edited Awakening Words: Bunyan and the Language of Community (2000). Since 1995, he has served as Secretary of the International John Bunyan Society. Like the Milton Society of America, the Bunyan Society affirms a global sense of community among teachers, students, and the general public, and encourages scholarly work that deepens our understanding of the legacy of early modern literature.
Achsah Guibbory (1966 B.A. English, Indiana University; 1970 Ph.D. English, University of California at Los Angeles). After teaching at the University of Illinois from 1970 to 2004, she joined Barnard College’s English Department in 2004. Guibbory is a recipient of many honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship (2001–2) and the Harriet and Charles Luckman Undergraduate Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Illinois (1995). She has served as the President of the Milton Society of America and the John Donne Society. Her books include The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History and Ceremony (1986) and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century English Literature (1998). Author of many essays and articles on seventeenth-century literature from Donne through Milton, she is editor of The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (2005) and is currently writing a book on the uses of Judaism, Jews, and the Hebrew Bible in early modern England.
Edward Jones (1974 B.A. English, Central Connecticut State University; 1978 M.A., 1985 Ph.D. English, Ohio University). An Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where he received the President’s Distinguished Service Award (1999), a Regents Distinguished Teaching Award (1998), and the Outstanding Teacher Award in the College of Arts and Sciences on two occasions (1996 and 1993), Jones is the author of Milton’s Sonnets: An Annotated Bibliography, 1900–1992 (1994). In addition to publishing several articles on Milton’s biography, he is completing a study of Milton and the Parish Chest and the commentary for Books 7 and 8 of Paradise Lost for the Milton Variorum. In 2005, Jones was appointed the editor of the Milton Quarterly, was asked to serve as the volume editor of Milton’s Letters of State for the Oxford Milton, and was elected the President of the Milton Society.
Annabel Patterson (1961 B.A. English, University of Toronto; 1963 M.A. with distinction, 1965 Ph.D. English, University of London). Annabel Patterson was born in England and emigrated to Canada in 1957. She returned to the University of London for her M.A. and Ph.D. She has taught in Canada at the University of Toronto and at York University, and after moving to the US, at the University of Maryland and Duke University. She has spent the last 12 years at Yale, from which she is now retired as Sterling Professor of English, Emeritus. She is a Fellow of the American Arts and Sciences and the 2002 Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. She has written or edited about 20 books, and about a hundred articles, many of them on Milton, Marvell, and Donne. She herself is most fond, for ideological reasons, of Early Modern Liberalism (1997), now reprinted in paperback, and considers the two-volume Prose Works of Andrew Marvell (2003) – a collaborative venture – her most lasting contribution to the field.
Louis Schwartz (1984 B.A. English, New York State University–Albany; 1985 M.A., 1989 Ph.D. English and American Literature, Brandeis University). As Associate Professor of Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Richmond (in Virginia), he teaches widely in the Literature of Early Modern England and in the History of English Poetry and Poetics. He is also a contributing editor to the Milton Variorum Project, has published articles on Milton, Shakespeare, and Thomas Wyatt, and has recently finished a book-length study of Milton’s responses to problems surrounding maternal mortality in the seventeenth century.
John T. Shawcross (1948 B.A. English and Mathematics, Montclair State University, 1950 M.A. English; 1958 Ph.D. English, New York University; 1975 Litt. D. Montclair State University; 1995 Litt. D. St Bonaventure University). A prolific and careful author and editor, his most recent books are Paradise Lost (2002); Milton and the Grounds of Contention (2003); “The Arms of the Family”: John Milton and the Significance of Relatives and Associates (2004); Thirteen Watercolor Drawings by William Blake Illustrating Paradise Lost by John Milton (with Robert Essick, 2004); and Rethinking Milton Studies: Time Present and Time Past (2005), with other books, volumes, and articles in press. His position as a driving force in Renaissance studies is expressed in various forms, including the publication of John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross (1995) and his induction as the 1981 Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kentucky.
Angelica Duran
A Concise Companion to Milton is the second in the Blackwell Concise Companions to Literature and Culture series (General Editor: David Bradshaw) dedicated to a single author rather than to a literary period or theory. The aim of this volume is to provide readers with key guides to understanding the great influence and endurance of the works of the seventeenth-century British writer John Milton. Introductory and succinct without being cursory, it is intended to complement the award-winning, 29-chapter A Companion to Milton (Blackwell, 2001), edited by Thomas Corns and used for advanced study.
The cover illustration speaks to the vitality of interpretations of Milton’s complex works and life. Similarly, the essays in this collection provide readers not with one coherent line of interpretation but rather with diverse, authoritative interpretations that will greatly amplify their appreciation of that complexity. Indeed, diversity is one of the hallmarks of this volume’s 12 newly commissioned chapters and two reference sections, penned by a wide range of scholars – from exciting neophytes to respected veterans, from native English speakers in England, Australia, Canada, and the United States to non-native-English-speaking scholars in Japan and the United States. The careful selection of the contributors is express recognition of the global network of scholars and institutions that contribute to the transmission of literary works that should not simply endure but thrive.
Because of its brevity, depth, and structure, A Concise Companion to Milton can serve as the one companion text to Milton’s collected works required for undergraduate and graduate Milton courses. Its accessibility also makes it an ideal companion for the general reader and for college and university survey courses. This volume’s chapters are purposefully brief and written with a minimum of scholarly jargon so that readers at any level can have time to read them alongside weekly primary reading. There are 12 chapters so that those on 10-week quarters and 15-week semesters can easily schedule reading them all, either skipping or doubling up readings assignments – chapters 1–3 will work particularly well for the introductory week(s). In the case of survey courses, an individual chapter can be assigned from a copy kept in library reserve.
In a text dedicated to a single author yet authored by many, it would be remiss to ignore the authors of each chapter. I mention the often bypassed section “Notes on Contributors” in hopes of encouraging readers to perceive of the chapters as written portions of conversations with fellow readers interested in the same author. The subsection titles of my “Chapter 4: First and Last Fruits of Education” – passion, gratitude, hope, and compassion – encompass only some of the emotions that have propelled each of the contributors’ immense and humane contributions to both literary studies and this volume. They each care about texts, they care about students, they care about their world. I thank them heartily for making my job as editor so delightful.
The volume is divided into three parts, with titles that reflect the idea of this volume acting as a guiding companion to readers on an exciting educational journey. “Part I: Surveys” explains how and why Milton’s works established and continue to maintain their central position in the English and international literary canon. Its three chapters survey the relationship of Milton’s works to historical, literary, socio-political, and theoretical trends. The nine chapters in “Part II: Textual Sites” clarify important issues that emerge in specific texts or sets of texts, and that are particularly relevant to contemporary society: cultural encounters, ecology, gender, religion, and the value of scholarship. These chapters follow Milton’s poetry primarily in chronological order, reflecting the customary organization of college and university syllabuses and the reading practices of general readers. Some chapters focus on a number of texts from various periods of Milton’s life, related by topic (education in chapter 4), genre (sonnets in chapter 5), or character (Jesus in chapter 11). Additionally, most chapters incorporate Milton’s prose works into their discussions – and by extension into current reading practices and future Milton studies – where those prose works warrant attention. “Part III: Reference Points,” comprised of the “Select Chronology” and “Select Bibliography,” helps readers in contextualizing the readings in terms of biography, history, literary studies, and Milton studies.
In Areopagitica, Milton wrote that “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are.” When books have led such public lives as have Milton’s, they contain also the lifeblood of the many readers, scholars, and institutions that have dedicated their energies to preserving them, including the collaborators of this volume. In an important sense, the collaboration of this volume extends to its readers. As such, this introduction does not conclude in closure but rather in prospect. Please contact me through Blackwell Publishing at www.blackwellpublishing.com/contacts with descriptions of your successes and challenges in using this volume so that we may improve subsequent editions. Together, we will continue to work towards clearer visions of Milton and his works.
The publication of this book in paperback form gives me great pleasure. First, such a publication reflects substantial use of this valuable resource; second, it is more affordable and therefore will increase its accessibility; and third, it gives me the chance to make up for former lapses. Silent emendations have been made to this edition. While I take responsibility for all faults in the text, I cannot take full responsibility for their correction: I thank the various friends, reviewers and contributors who alerted me of minor errors; Marissa Connell, who successfully took up my classroom challenge to detect and notify me of errata; and Blackwell-Wiley’s Caroline Clamp for her commitment to producing accurate texts.