Milton

Afterlives

Ideas for today

• Authorship/ adaptation• ‘Afterlife’/ Responses

The ‘author’ before Milton

• Ben Jonson the first to put his complete works through the press

• The ‘professional’ writer did not really exist outside the theatre

• Models of patronage• Education and literacy

• The religious writer• Models of plagiarism,

borrowing, influence• The writer as an advisor

(Sir Phillip Sidney) or a lover (John Donne), but not a political figure

• And then there is Shakespeare

Milton’s authorship and the period 1640-70

• New models of ‘writing’ available due to collapse of censorship

• New types of writer:– Preacher– Seer– Journalist– Scientist and educator– Women– Closure of theatres– Soldier-writers

• Censorship – rules for writing (and punishments for writers, publishers)

• Book-burning (the physical punishment of the material thing)

• Post-Restoration: Professional writers, new models of patronage/ funding

Milton and Dryden develop literary criticism, idea of authorship

• Prefaces and essays• A series of texts that begin to

think about writing criticism• Literary inheritance and

development of literary history

• Set of ‘rules’ for literary worth

• Clear sense of aesthetic criticism rather than the usefulness or educative power of the verse

• The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy

• ‘Preface’ to his translation of Aeneid

• ‘Heads of a note to Rymer’

• Essay of Dramatick Poesy

Milton as craftsman• If I were to name a poet that is a

perfect master in all these arts of working on the imagination, I think Milton may pass for one; and if his Paradise Lost falls short of the Æneid or Iliad in this respect, it proceeds rather from the fault of the language in which it is written, than from any defect of genius in the author. So divine a poem in English is like a stately palace built of brick, where one may see architecture in as great a perfection as one of marble, though the materials are of a coarser nature.– Joseph Addison: Spectator, No. 417.

Echoes Dryden pref to Aeneid

• There is nothing to be left void in a firm Building; even the Cavities ought not to be fill'd with Rubbish, which is of a perishable kind, destructive to the strength: But with Brick or Stone, though of less pieces, yet of the same Nature, and fitted to the Cranies. Even the least portions of them must be of the Epick kind; all things must be Grave, Majestical, and Sublime

Post-1660 authorship and adaptation

• Dryden rewriting of key texts – including: – Oedipus Rex– Antony & Cleopatra– The Tempest– Troilus and Cressida– Chaucer– Paradise Lost (rewritten

as State of Innocence, 1671)

• Most notorious adaptation:

• Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear

Adaptation

• Does adaptation change the text? • How does it reflect the historical period of its

rewriting• Models of authorship, literary worth• > > Milton central to debates about this

Collecting and editing– Collecting Milton (reception,

transmission)– Bentley, 1732, ‘emended’

Milton– PL published with explanatory

notes and a ‘life’ of Milton • Combining of author’s biography

with the text• The ‘meaning’ explained by an

authority• Milton’s own explanations and

literary paratexts had already begun this

• Exegesis and marginal annotation as common in the period

• The rise of ‘editing’ – collecting works together, finding a ‘complete’ or key text

• Editing Shakespeare and Milton

• Discerning what an author ‘meant’

• The apparatus of a literary text

Step back: Bloom on influence• Poetic history […] is held to

be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves

• Milton as key writer here due to his investment in ‘authorship’?

• My concern is only with strong poets, major figures with the persistence to wrestle with their strong precursors, even to the death. Weaker talents idealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves. But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves the immense anxieties of indebtedness, for what strong maker desires the realization that he has failed to created himself?

Foucault:

• ‘an author’s name is not simply an element in discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others.’

Foucault:

• ‘Modern literary criticism, even when – as is now customary – it is not concerned with questions of authentification, still defines the author the same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design.’

Afterlife: versions of Milton

• Vagaries of ‘taste’ • ‘Great’ writing• Reputation• Canon• Political usage

Looking to Milton as an example

• Wordsworth: ‘London, 1802’

• MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

• Desire for a historical figure to return

• Harold Bloom: the importance of Milton to the poet (as a ‘father’ ie an historical presence)

• Need for a committed writer – the intervention that might be made by the poet

• Shelley, Masque of Anarchy

Blake’s Milton

• Images of PL• ‘Milton was of the

devil’s party without knowing it’

• Milton: A Poem >>• Engagement with:

revelation; prophecy; humanness; angels

Afterlife: Responses