Dante and Milton : Envisioned Visionaries [1 ed.] 9781443887472, 9781443885751

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Dante and Milton

Dante and Milton: Envisioned Visionaries Edited by

Christoph Singer and Christoph Lehner

Dante and Milton: Envisioned Visionaries Edited by Christoph Singer and Christoph Lehner This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Christoph Singer, Christoph Lehner and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8575-4 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8575-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Envisioning Visionaries: The Cultural Construction of Dante and Milton Christoph Lehner and Christoph Singer Chapter One ............................................................................................... 15 “Swaggering in the fore-top of the State”: Milton, the Prelates and the Protestant Dante, from Lycidas to Of Reformation Nick Havely Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 41 On His Blindness: Milton’s Reputation in the Nineteenth Century Andrew Sanders Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 53 Milton and the Question of National Identity: Political Reality and Ideal Conceptions Eliza Richter Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 67 Milton in Material Culture Christoph Ehland Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 85 “Unteaches conquer’d Nations to Rebel, By Singing how their Stubborn Parents fell”: Exploring and Exporting John Milton in the Long Eighteenth Century Anne-Julia Zwierlein Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 107 “Heretics in the Truth”: Miltonic Echoes in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition Christoph Singer

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 123 “With Fry Innumerable Swarm”: Reading Milton as Intertext in Nineteenth-Century Popular Science Alison E. Martin Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 147 Envisioning the Visionary: Poetic Quality and Allegorical Language in T.S. Eliot’s Dante Criticism Christoph Lehner Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 163 “Denti Alligator” and “the humours of Milltown”: The Canonical Comedy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Zachary Leszek Kell Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 181 From Fallen Angel to Dark Lord: Traces of Dante and Milton in the Harry Potter Series Elizabeth E. J. Gilbert Contributors ............................................................................................. 203

INTRODUCTION ENVISIONED VISIONARIES: THE CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION OF DANTE AND MILTON CHRISTOPH LEHNER AND CHRISTOPH SINGER

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and Virgil encounter the giant Antaeus in the last circle of Hell. Antaeus agrees to help them proceed their journey, setting the two poets down into Cocytus. In return, the poets promise, Dante will increase Antaeus’ fame on earth. This scene, famously illustrated by William Blake in 1826, features prominently on the cover of this volume and perfectly underlines the role literary criticism plays in the process of cultural remembrance: by bridging the—historical, cultural, political—gap between those canonical writers and our times, by “setting their works down” in a different socio-cultural environment, such an Antaeuean moment becomes a vital actualisation of cultural objectivations and engrains these writers deeply in our cultural memory. Looking back the influence between Dante and Blake may as well be considered reciprocal, in the sense that the perception of both was increased by Blake’s illustrations. Stephen Prickett and Adina Ciugureanu point out that, “one might even argue that more than any other factor, it was Blake’s discovery of Dante that, within a hundred years of his death, was to turn him from an eccentric unknown on the very fringes of the literary world into an iconic British and international artist.” (2015, 8) In a sense Antaeus becomes a place-holder for the artist, the critic or the reader alike, all of which are essential in bridging the gap between different periods and cultures. This metaphor, as illustrated by William Blake, evokes a similar argument Percy Bysshe Shelley made five years earlier. In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry” Shelley famously claimed that

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Introduction The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized, are merely the mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. (Shelley 1821, 289f)

The bridge “thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and ancient world” serves as a beautiful metaphor to illustrate the function and conception of cultural memory this collection of essays is interested in. Whether intentionally or not, the poetry-as-bridge-metaphor paradoxically represents the construction of cultural memory while similarly problematizing the very performance of memorial culture. Explicitly this metaphor installs the writer, here Dante, as the architect of said connecting structure. Implicitly it is fair to assume that Shelley presents the critic as the creator of said bridge, who by means of elucidation and dissemination opens the bridge for the reading public. In this light the metaphor serves to show that the process of connecting is also based on the agency of said reader, who after all, has to be willing to cross the bridge. Only the bridge’s use transforms the artistic artefact from a merely decorative monument into an integral part of a society’s cultural memory. Ultimately, Shelley’s poetic metaphor retains a paradoxical element considering that cultural memory serves, as does a bridge, not only to connect distant entities. At the same time the bridge stresses the very difference it tries to gap. This dialectic is taken up by Shelley’s notion of Dante and Milton as “rivals,” who only by means of opposition can become equals. Dante Alighieri and John Milton, the two vernacular composers of epic poems, hold firm positions in the literary canons of Italy and England respectively. Both authors have also become universal cultural icons deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory, with their importance extending vastly beyond their literary and political influence: on the one hand, Dante as the exiled avenger of sins and supposed father of the Italian nation, on the other, Milton as the blind polemicist and observer of current political affairs. This anthology aims to explore the synchronic as well as the diachronic constructions of Dante and Milton as cultural icons, and so the main focus of analysis is the production of cultural memory, national and transnational alike. The juxtaposition and comparison of Dante and Milton invites a broader perspective that goes beyond the merely national contexts and also touches on the question of the emergence of a European Dante and a European Milton. At the same time, this comparison allows us to explore the opposite of cultural memory, namely processes of forgetting

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and side-lining authors or parts of their respective histories, which both authors have been subjected to throughout their literary reception. In line with this reading of Shelley’s metaphor this anthology on Dante and Milton is not only interested in their lives and works proper but also their cultural appropriation. In consequence the articles deal less with the envisioned, that is Dante and Milton, but more with those who envisioned, imagine and reimagine both writers and their (proposed) influence. The authors in the compilations analyse this anatomy of influence by looking at various realizations thereof: paintings, pamphlets, material culture, literary criticism, scientific writing as well as revisions of Dante and Milton from the highbrow to the lowbrow.

Cultural Memory and the Social Sphere What exactly is meant by the term cultural memory? What implications does it denote? How do cultural memory studies relate to the topic of this book? A look back at the very beginnings of this discipline will help answer these questions. The following paragraphs will outline the theoretical framework provided by the mental ancestors of cultural memory studies: generally speaking the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs can be regarded as the forefather of cultural memory studies. His two books La mémoire collective and Les cadres sociaux circumscribed what he called the collective memory and the social sphere and had a lasting impact on all socio-cultural studies to follow. 1 In particular Jan Assmann’s work would be unthinkable without his mental ancestor. In his seminal 1988 essay “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität” (“Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”), Jan Assmann gave a definition of cultural memory as the characteristic store of repeatedly used texts, images and rituals in the cultivation of which each society and epoch stabilizes and imports its selfimage; a collectively shared knowledge of preferably (yet not exclusively) the past, on which a group bases its awareness of unity and character. (Assmann 1995, 125-33) 1

See Halbwachs’ seminal books La mémoire collective and Les cadres sociaux. Freud and Jung, contemporaries of Halbwachs were also developing theories of collective memory; however, they adhered to the inner and personal level of memory and delved in the unconscious depths of the human psyche. For Jung and Freud and their concepts see Jürgen Straub, “Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present” in: Erll / Nünning, Cultural Memory Studies. pp. 215228.

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Introduction

Dante and Milton have become such carriers of cultural memory, since their texts and politics helped strengthen Italy’s, England’s and to some extent European self-identity in various epochs and formed a foil upon which societies could project various anxieties, hopes and revelations. In particular the multitude of political responses to both authors reveal the cultural longevity and historical resilience of their texts. Assmann discerns three levels of memory, the inner level, the social level and the cultural level of memory. The first one refers to the highly subjective perception of time and self-identity and can also be considered a person’s individual memory. As Assmann points out “memory is the faculty that enables us to form an awareness of selfhood (identity), both on the personal and on the collective level.” (Assman 2008, 109)2 The awareness of ourselves therefore is inextricably linked to our storage of information about ourselves and our past. Consequently the inner level of memory is characterised predominantly by a person’s cultural upbringing, social experiences, and individual circumstances. In contrast to this the social level of memory feeds itself of identity as a person as carrier of social roles and goes back to Maurice Halbwachs’ idea of the collective memory. Halbwachs’ immense accomplishment was to show that our memory, like consciousness in general, depends on socialisation and communication, and that memory can be analysed as a function of our social life. Memory and communities have a reciprocal relationship, since memory enables us to live in groups and communities, and living in groups and communities enables us to build a memory. Art historian Aby Warburg coined the term social memory with regard to the third, the cultural level of memory. He was the first historian to treat images, that is, cultural objectivations, as carriers of memory. In his project called “Mnemosyne”, the ancient Greek term for memory and the mother of the nine muses, he set himself the task to study the afterlife of classical antiquity in Western culture by examining what he called Bildgedächtnis (iconic memory). His groundbreaking visual approach to the study of cultural memory became the basis for the so-called Warburg School, with Ernst Gombrich and Erwin Panofsky being his most prominent art historical successors.3 In his opinion images have the capacity to store 2

Jan Assmann: “Communicative and Cultural memory“, in: Erll, Astrid / Nünning, Ansgar (eds.), Cultural memory studies (Berlin & New York: De Gruyter 2008). pp. 109-118.p.109. 3 However, Warburg never used the term cultural memory. Harking back to Halbwachs’ and Warburg’s ideas, this concept has been developed only during the last twenty years, when the three-dimensionality of memory was gradually crystallizing in the Humanities.

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social and cultural energy, which can be preserved for a long time and given off in future epochs. His task, however, to analyse and describe the iconic memory of the Western World remained fragmentary. Cultural memory and its images are part of a process of reciprocal production. The related construction of identity can be analysed as an act of differentiation, of drawing a line between those who partake in the creation and consumption of a particular cultural memory and those that don’t. One example would be related to literary taste and class, as illustrated by Virginia Woolf’s essay “Middlebrow,” (1981) originally a letter that “was written, but not send to the New Statesman” (ibid.). In this essay Woolf refutes the claim that her writing were middlebrow and she decidedly asserts her highbrow ambitions. This letter, which is as vitriolic as it is humorous, closes with a description of her experience of reading a middlebrow book: I rise. I dress. I proceed weakly to the window. I take that book in my swollen right hand and toss it gently over the hedge into the field. The hungry sheep—did I remember to say that this part of the story takes place in the country?—the hungry sheep look up but are not fed. (Woolf 1996, 200)

This short excerpt beautifully illustrates the process of discussing, defining and creating cultural memory by means of differentiation. For one, the essay is a clear statement by Woolf on what kinds of literature and art are not worthy to be remembered—anything middlebrow. She formulates this argument by employing quotation that evokes, what could be called, highbrow cultural memory: “the hungry sheep look up but are not fed” (ibid.). By means of a device that could be called hyper-textual Woolf implicitly refers to a whole history of cultural memory. Firstly, this quote is taken directly from John Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” which—with its extensive use of literary references—is a vehicle of cultural memory in its own right. Secondly, Milton is reusing a quotation from Dante’s Paradiso: “sì che le pecorelle, che non sanno, / tornan del pasco pasciute di vento” (Paradiso 29, 107-08).4 Thirdly, this quotation also evokes Vergil’s “Eclogue III,” especially Menaclas’s feelings concerning a flock of sheep. So while Woolf figuratively is tossing her middlebrow-novel to the sheep, she similarly is tossing a whole history of literary references and discourses at the reader of her essay. Whether she is casting pearls before swine depends on the readers.

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For a detailed discussion of this quote see Nick Havely’s article in this anthology.

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When Woolf thus likens the readers of middlebrow literature to “sheep that are not fed” she not only uses a canonized part of highbrow-literature to distance herself from those readers. She further establishes said quote and its extended discourses as highbrow. And by refusing to indicate the quote as such, Woolf creates a bond with those readers who can identify the quote without additional help. Cultural memory thus serves to signify how the underlying ideologies (de-)construct cultural heroes in a process akin to stereotyping. In the words of Stuart Hall “Stereotypes . . . reduce everything about the person to those traits, exaggerate and simplify them . . . stereotyping reduces, essentializes, naturalizes and fixes ‘difference’” (Hall, 257). Similar processes of reducing writers, their lives and works to specific aspects play an important role in regards to cultural memory. This reduction is essential for appropriating, embedding and (mis-)using historical figures and their work for specific causes, be these causes driven by questions of literary taste, class or nationalism. A case in point would be transformation of the Florentine poet Dante into a “großen nordischen Italiener[.]”—a great Nordic Italian— by national-socialist philosopher Alfred Rosenberg in 1930. (cf. Hausmann 2007, 367) How reductive and essentialist representations of cultural memory are depends of course on a number of variables amongst others their sociohistorical-contexts, the underlying ideologies and the media that represent them. Still the importance differentiation by means of reduction plays for cultural memory is illustrated in various of the articles in this anthology. That cultural icons such as Dante and Milton are highly flexible in regards to their cultural appropriations, irrespective of their biographical background or previous representations, becomes clear in a post-modern context. In post-modern cultural production both, Dante and Milton, transcend canonicity, class and categorizations. In the last decade alone both others were written into various (pop-)cultural contexts. And the motivations may differ from name-dropping to appreciative reference: Dan Brown’s thriller Inferno (2013) presents the reader with a professor of symbology hunting for—amongst other things—Dante’s death-mask. In Electronic Arts’ computer-game Dante’s Inferno (2010) the player guides a fearless version of Dante through hell. Here confrontation beats conversation. In fact, Dante seems to be more popular now than ever, with Roberto Benigni’s lectures on Dante filling stadiums around the world, his likeness adorning computer games, his figure surfacing in contemporary Italian

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telecommunication adverts.5 However, Dante himself understood the fickleness and ephemeral nature of earthly fame and compared the futility of human endeavour to a gust of wind in a famous passage from Purgatorio: Oh vana gloria de l'umane posse! [...] Non è il mondan romore altro ch'un fiato di vento, ch'or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perché muta lato. O empty glory of the power of humans! [...] Wordly renown is nothing other than a breath of wind that blows now here, now there, and changes name when it has changed its course. (Dante, Purgatorio, 11.91, 100-2)

In Dante’s case, the wind has changed its course several times in the history of his appropriation. His name, however, has never fallen into oblivion. As already mentioned in passing, this study, therefore, promotes the view that Dante’s earthly fame has not been blown away by the changing course of the winds—not only because of his poetic quality and literary authority, but also because of the manifold adaptations and reinterpretations of work and author, which have secured their cultural longevity. Milton also features prominently in popular fiction. German author Christopher Marzi titled his intertextual debut Lycidas (2004). Mike Mignola’s graphic novel Hellboy in Hell leads his titular character in a Dantesque journey through hell, where he discovers Hell’s capital Pandemonium and its surrounding sea. And the two-page comic Pancakes, also set in the Hellboy cosmos, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to John Milton’s representation of Eve biting into the apple in “evil hour.” As a 5

The Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni toured with his show Tutto Dante in Europe, the United States, Canada and South America from 2006 to 2013, interpreting and reciting selected passages of the Divina Commedia. He also published a set of DVDs and a book on Dante. See Roberto Benigni, Il mio Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 2008). Electronic Arts published the video game Dante’s Inferno in 2010, which was loosely inspired by Dante’s journey through hell. In 2012, an advert for the Italian telecommunication company TIM featured Dante, Virgil and Beatrice and was broadcast throughout Italy. Dan Brown’s novel Inferno was published in 2013 and will be adapted for the screen in 2016. The story largely takes place in Florence and extensively uses themes taken from the Divina Commedia.

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result “Nature from her seat / sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost.” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.783f). In Mignola’s short account a young Hellboy indulges in his first pancake, resulting in Hell’s creatures to give signs of woe and sorrow. All Ashtaroth— “granduke of the infernal legions” (Mignola 2000)—can do, is to accept defeat: “Truly this is our blackest hour.” (ibid.). The cultural reception of Dante and Milton seem to be as thriving as ever. This anthology wants to shed light on various such instances throughout the centuries and cultural backgrounds. The intention is to illustrate how and under what circumstances cultural memory is being produced/performed, authors and their backgrounds are being adapted, altered, and appropriated. The opening essay of this volume, “Swaggering in the Fore-Top of the State”: Milton, the Prelates and the Protestant Dante, from Lycidas to Of Reformation, explores John Milton’s appropriation of Dante Alighieri in the aftermath of the Protestant reformation. Spurred by the recent discovery of Milton’s own annotated copy of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante Poeta Fiorentinus, commonly known as Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, Nicholas Havely gives evidence of Protestant readings of Dante within Milton’s cultural circle and traces Milton’s own encounters with Dante’s Commedia. Thereby his essay not only suggests the impact of historical Protestant polemic on Milton, but, set against the backdrop of Milton’s travels to Florence, it also addresses the Miltonic debts paid to Dante for several dantismi, which “could be quarried for missiles against the Papacy and the preachers and prelates of the Roman Church.“ (Havely, 20) Furthermore the author reiterates the success of Dante’s Monarchia in British Protestant circles, which rubbed off on Milton’s anti-prelatical polemic in Of Reformation with its “emphasis on Church governance and corruption closer to home.” (Havely, 25) Ultimately, the presence of Dante’s political opera magnum in late 16th and early 17th-century Britain fuelled the national reformational flames and testified to “the construction of Dante’s identity as witness against Rome.” (Havely, 27) Thus Milton becomes a Protestant Aeneaus, bridging the gap between Dante’s genuinely Catholic culture and his own, making him palpable for a Protestant audience, and finally ‘protestantizing’ the Florentine poet to serve Protestant cause. Christoph Ehland analyses Milton’s memorization in form of material culture to show how certain aspects of Milton’s biography—such as his support of the regicide that ended the reign and life of Charles I—are edited out of Miltonic memorial culture. Alison Martin gives a detailed analysis of how Milton was employed in Victorian popular science. How

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Dante and Milton echo in the Harry Potter series is explained by Elizabeth Gilbert. Andrew Sanders article “On His Blindness: Milton’s Reputation in the Nineteenth Century” examines the perception of Milton in Victorian commemoration, at the heart of which lies the discrepancy between Milton as writer and political actor. Sanders illustrates how writers like Thomas Babington Macaulay in his critical and historical essays tried to combine these two perspectives rather than assuming their opposition. For Macaulay, Sanders argues, “the poet and the political thinker were integrally linked. Milton’s greatness as a poet could not be viewed as somehow detached from his politics.” (Sanders, 41) Sanders argues that Macaulay’s reading of Milton was essentially based on a post-French Revolutionary liberalism. In light of these political philosophies Milton was “recast in the role of a hero who had struggled for enlightenment against the forces of darkness.” (Sanders, 42) Based on this nineteenth-century re-imagination of Milton Sanders illustrates how the relationship between John Milton and Oliver Cromwell was re-written and conceptualised in literary and visual representations such as Alfred Waterhouse’s designs of Manchester’s new Assize Courts, Scott’s Woodstock, Horace Smith’s Oliver Cromwell: An Historical Romance or Augustus Egg’s Cromwell before Naseby and Ford Madox Brown’s painting AD 1630. In her essay Milton and the question of national identity: political reality and ideal conceptions Eliza Richter examines Milton’s ideas of ideal governance and relates them to his own political career and their socio-historical circumstances. In particular the concept of liberty as an “ideal form of rule” (Richter, 55) reveals a multitude of connotations for Milton, which deserve closer scrutiny. The author gives evidence of the repercussions these concepts had on Milton’s political writings, particularly on Tenure, Defence, and Eikonoklastes. Furthermore she explores how Milton gradually integrated the concept of liberty into his idea of a British national identity, since “the English appeared to be the only people who lived up to this natural, innate liberty by freeing themselves from what Milton deemed religious and monarchical tyranny”. (Richter, 60). In his article “Milton in Material Culture” Christoph Ehland discusses the ways in which writers and their “two bodies”—their work and their biographies—are commemorated. Ehland attempts “to establish a plotline for the story of Milton’s afterlife by looking at the various public acts of commemoration by which the poet was invested in material culture“ (Ehland, 69). In doing so Ehland illustrates how acts of commemoration

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such as statues, plaques, memorials and others serve in the construction of a writer’s public perception and in ‘writing ‘ his or her life posthumously. In doing so certain aspects are foregrounded whereas other biographical details are repeatedly omitted to serve the ideological purpose of those creating commemorative sites. In regard to Milton, Ehland focuses on how John Milton is mainly represented in relation to his poetic work, whereas his political writings and convictions are being glossed over. Ehland claims that in “the case of Milton there seems to be a strange hesitation to remember his life in the form of public monuments and museums.” (Ehland, 69) The article illustrates this hesitation and the related discourses with regards to Milton’s cottage in Chalfont St Giles, the Temple of British Worthies in Stowe, Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner and Milton’s grave at St. Giles Cripplegate. Anne-Julia Zwierlein traces Milton’s appropriation as a national and, later, as a significant imperial poet. In her essay “Unteaches conquer’d nations to rebel, By singing how their stubborn parents feel”: exploring and exporting John Milton in the long eighteenth century she argues that such a process of enhanced cultural importance went pari passu with Milton’s gradual depolitization and a steady reevaluation of his universal multilinguism. In particular the expansion of the British Empire led to new contexts in which “the language of Milton’s epic was increasingly scrutinized and keyed to a new ‘national’ understanding of the vernacular.” (Zwierlein, 87) Examples of such close linguistic scrutiny are Milton’s insertion into the English school curriculum as well as aesthetic considerations regarding the sublimity and universality of his language in neo-classical and romantic discourses. In this regard the author analyses poetological and linguistic considerations ranging from the early Milton critics Patrick Hume and Christopher D’Addario to, among others, Jonathan Richardson and Joseph Addison. Christoph Singer outlines John Milton’s influence on Edward Young’s concepts of the ‘genius’ and ‘originality’. In his article “‘Heretics in the Truth’: Miltonic Echoes in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition” Singer discusses the influence of Miltonic mythologies on Young’s seminal 1759 essay. In Young’s elaborations on the ‘genius’ and ‘original composition’ several Miltonic references illustrate the author’s theory on reading, learning and writing. In a seemingly counter-intuitive move Young presents the Miltonic version of Eve as a genius that experiences an epiphany that actually leads to the individual’s selfactualisation.

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It is especially in relation to Young’s discussion of critical, learning and knowledge that Milton’s own epistemic convictions become discernible. Singer illustrates how Young borrows a number of Miltonic metaphors and similes—such as the angel Raphael’s verdict: “food is as knowledge”—and the related theories of learning, critical reading and ultimately composing. Regarding Young’s influential essay it may be argued that the Miltonic influences found in this work ultimately—and ironically—helped to path the way for a Romantic re-discovery of Milton as a genius himself. In that sense Milton by way of Young is re-created as a “British original.” Alison Martin explores Milton as an intertext in Nineteenth-Century scientific writing. Her article—“With Fry Innumerable Swarm”: Reading Milton as Intertext in Nineteenth-Century Popular Science—she illustrates how Milton’s poetic writing was appropriated in scientific discourses, such as Philip Henry Gosse’s The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea from 1854. Arguing that “mixing molluscs and Milton was not a stylistic device typical only of Gosse” (Martin, 123) she traces Miltonic influences and their function in the publishing history of similar works. This intertextual and discursive synthesis of British literary heritage and Victorian science illustrates two things: firstly, the perpetuation of cultural memory; secondly, the ideological inferences underlying supposedly value-free scientific discourses. Martin analyses how “processes of borrowing, appropriation and (half-)digestion that characterise the intertextual layering which brought Milton into dialogue with the authors of British marine natural history.” (Martin, 125) In tracing this intertextuality of Milton and scientific discourses Martin examines the contemporary readerships familiarity with the original Miltonic sources, and goes to show how this intertextual approach became increasingly formulaic. Christoph Lehner’s and Zachary Kell’s essays explicitly relate to Dante’s and Milton’s appropriation by Modernist writers. In his essay Envisioning the visionary: poetic quality and allegorical language in T. S. Eliot’s Dante criticism Lehner reevaluates T. S. Eliot’s texts composed as a literary critic and Dante connoisseur. He moves Eliot’s acts of envisioning Dante as a ‘visionary’ poet to the foreground, whose capacity to communicate through “clear visual images, . . . , springs from a clear vision in the poet’s visionary mind.” (Lehner, 154) The author explores the etymology and the history of the terms ‘visual’ and ‘visionary’ as well as their application by Eliot, concluding that the use of allegory stresses “the enhanced imagination and high memorability inherent in cerebral visual perception.” (Lehner, 154) Furthermore it becomes evident that

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Eliot’s debts to Dante comprise the discovery of poetic quality in his texts and had a mutual effect on both writers’ fame, since Eliot’s texts on Dante, as the author argues, strongly increased Dante’s international fame and his insertion into the literary cultural memory. Zachary Leszek Kell examines James Joyce’s appropriation of the two canonical writers Dante and Milton with a particular interest in the way “canonicity from the perspective of the writer comes to be formulated”. (Kell, 179) His essay “Denti Alligator” and “the humours of Milltown”: The Canonical Comedy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake touches upon the questions how Joyce formally integrates the two epic poets into his self-sustaining work and how Finnegans Wake relates to the Modernist tradition. Here Kell argues that “the layering of multiple allusions allows the Wake to simultaneously recreate and destroy the art of the past, leaving behind a new vision of the universe no longer held back by canonical/historical bias”. (Kell, 178) Such a treatment of past canonical writers goes clearly beyond the Modernist approach established by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and presents Dante and Milton “less as figures of the past being supplemented by arguments of the present”. (Kell, 178) Instead they become “living, breathing artists who belong in Joyce’s text as comfortably as their presence in their own” (Kell, 178). In her article “From Fallen Angel to Dark Lord: Traces of Dante and Milton in the Harry Potter Series” Elizabeth Gilbert traces the intertextual sources of J. K. Rowling’s bestselling book-series. Gilbert illustrates a range of explicit and implicit references in the Harry Potter series, which can be traced back to Dantean and Miltonic mythologies. This serves to illustrate how processes of cultural memory not only employ and re-write their predecessors but also how the original sources’ philosophical underpinnings shape their modern successors. In regards to the Harry Potter-universe, Gilbert argues how the Dantean and Miltonic influences on the semantics of setting, the construction of story arcs and the representations of characters goes beyond a mere referential gimmick. The sources also influence and undermine the representation and deconstruction of seemingly binary concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’. By analysing these epic influences Gilbert intends to show how our “perception, understanding and explanation of the nature and quality of evil have been vitally influenced by the works of the two grandmasters of European epic, Dante and Milton.” (Gilbert, 182)

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Works Cited Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” In New German Critique. 65: 125-133. —. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Cultural Memory Studies. Edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter. 109-118. Brown, Dan. 2013. Inferno. New York: Doubleday. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1950 (1939). La Mémoire Collective. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. —. 1952 (1925). Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hall, Stuart. 1997. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices. Edited by Stuart Hall: London, Sage. 257. Marzi, Christopher. 2004. Lycidas. München: Heyne. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Teskey, Gordon. New York: Norton, 2005. Mignola, Mike. 2014. Hellboy in Hell: The Descent. Milwaukie: Dark Horse. —. 2000. “Pancakes.” In Hellboy: The Right Hand of Doom. Milwaukie: Dark Horse. Prickett, Stephen, Adina Ciugureanu. 2015. “Dante in the Nineteenth Century.” In International Journal of Cross-Cultural Studies and Environmental Communication. 4 (1): 7-16. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. 1951 (1821) “A Defence of Poetry.” In Shelley’s Prose. Edited by David Lee Clark. London: Fourth Estate. 275-79. Straub, Jürgen. 2008. “Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present.” In Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Errl and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter. 215-28. Woolf, Virginia. 1981. “Middlebrow.” In Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays. Vol. 2. Edited by Leonard Woolf. London: The Hogarth Press. 196-203.

CHAPTER ONE “SWAGGERING IN THE FORE-TOP OF THE STATE”: MILTON, THE PRELATES AND THE PROTESTANT DANTE, FROM LYCIDAS TO OF REFORMATION NICK HAVELY

[B]lind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold a sheephooke, or have learn’t ought else the least that to the faithfull heardsman’s art belongs! what recks it them? what need they? they are sped; and when they list, thire leane and flashie songs grate on thire scrannel pipes of wretched straw, the hungrie sheep looke up and are not fed, but swolne with wind, and the rank mist they draw, rot inwardly, and foule contagion spred . . . (Milton 1645, ll. 113-27)1

The Dean of Wells, E.H. Plumptre, in the extensive notes to his late nineteenth-century terza rima version of the Commedia, pointed to a parallel between Milton’s “hungrie sheep . . . swolne with wind” (Plumptre 1886-7, 2: 171n.) and the pecorelle that preachers leave pasciute di vento, according to Dante’s Beatrice in Paradiso 29.2 Paget Toynbee’s monumental early twentieth-century collection tracing “the history of Dante in English literature” noted that “[t]his apostrophe of 1 Milton, Lycidas (spellings as in Trinity College Cambridge MS); ll. 113-27 in modern editions. The reference to ‘corrupted clergy’ is from the headnote in the 1645 Poems. 2 For comments on his translation, see Cunningham 1965: 131-6 and (quoted here) Pite 1998: 99-105.

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[Milton’s] St Peter is evidently a reminiscence of that put into St Peter’s mouth by Dante, Par. xxvii. 19ff.”, whilst also suggesting specific comparisons with that canto and (again) Beatrice’s denunciation of corrupt pastors two cantos later.3 Irene Samuel has explored more fully Lycidas’s “large debt to the Commedia”, suggesting that in deploying the “authoritative voice” of St Peter here, Milton “was probably adopting the device from Dante.” (Samuel 1966: 251, 277) Samuel also argued that the passage showed the poet taking “impetus from Paradiso 27 and 29” (ibid. 36-9) whilst responding to both St Peter’s and Beatrice’s invocations of apocalyptic judgment, and that his close reading of Dante would serve to strengthen bonds with Florentine intellectuals (and defenders of the Commedia), such as Benedetto Buonmattei and Carlo Roberto Dati during his subsequent Italian journey of 1638-9.4 The present essay aims to place evidence of such reading and reminiscence in Lycidas and Of Reformation (1641) within the context of the “proto-Protestant” Dante constructed by Reformation polemicists in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. During and shortly after his Italian journey, Milton explicitly invoked Dante on several occasions, indicating that the precedent of the Italian poet was contributing to his vocation and formation as an author.5 Like Lycidas in its wide stylistic and lexical range, Of Reformation—the first of his antiprelatical tracts and his first major work to be published after return from Italy—reflects a Dantean plurilinguismo suggesting that Milton was continuing to learn the lessons of the Commedia’s invective. Like Lycidas, too, it shows how “at the highest pitch” in his writing of this period, he “links satire . . . to the role of the poet-prophet.” (Lewalski 2000, 138) In Of Reformation (Book 1), as the argument about the baleful effects wrought by the Donation of Constantine upon the Church and clergy gathers to a head it converges with one of the recurrent concerns in the Commedia and the English polemicist turns to an Italian tradition which has Dante at its source: Now lest it should bee thought that somthing else might ayle this Author thus to hamper the Bishops of those dayes; I will bring you the opinion of three the famousest men for wit and lear[n]ing, that Italy at this day glories of, whereby it may be concluded for a receiv’d opinion even among men 3

Toynbee 1909: 1. 123n. and 124n. For a more recent account of Milton’s relationship with Buonmattei and the possible influence of the latter’s Dante commentary, see Cinquemani 1998, esp. 17, 17-18, 29-30, and 117-62. On Milton’s two visits to Florence in 1638 and 1639, see also Lewalski 2000: 90-3. 5 As a recent and important article has concluded; see Poole 2014: 160. 4

Milton, the Prelates and the Protestant Dante

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professing the Romish Faith, that Constantine marr’d all in the Church. Dante in his 19. Canto of Inferno hath thus, as I will render it you in English blank Verse. Ah Constantine, of how much ill was cause Not thy Conversion, but those rich demaines That the first wealthy Pope receiv’d of thee. So in his 20. Canto of Paradise hee makes the like complaint . . . (Milton 1641, 30)

Milton will go on to translate a passage from each of the other two “famous Italians” (Petrarch and Ariosto), and so gives no further details of this later “complaint.” (Milton 1641, 30)6 However, “receiv’d opinion . . . that Constantine marr’d all in the Church” had been equally if not more powerfully reflected in Dante’s portrayal of Constantine crowning the eyebrow of the Eagle in Paradiso 20: ‘L’altro che segue, con le leggi e meco, sotto buona intenzion che fé mal frutto, per cedere al pastor si fece greco: ora conosce come il mal dedutto dal suo bene operar non li è nocivo, avvegna che sia ‘l mondo indi distrutto.’ (Par. 20, 55-60) [“The next that follows, bearing both the laws and myself (the Imperial Eagle)—and with good intentions that bore bad fruit— by yielding to the (Papal) Shepherd turned himself into a Greek: now he can see that the evil consequences of his well-meant act do not harm him, although it brought ruin to the world.”]7

For Dante the paradox of the Donation of Constantine is—like others he faces in the Heaven of Jupiter and justice—a painful one, as Milton seems to recognize. After citing the accounts of the Donation’s consequences in Petrarch and Ariosto (Orlando furioso 34. 79-80) and suggesting how the Italian antipapal tradition might converge with the English “Chaucerian” 6 The Petrarch sonnet (‘Fontana di dolore’) cited as ‘108’ here is numbered 138 in modern editions. On Milton and the Protestantizing of Petrarch, see the recent article by Serjeantson (2014). 7 All quotations from the Commedia are from the edition with commentary by Chiavacci Leonardi (Dante 1997), and all translations are my own.

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one, Milton raises the question of “whether ever any, though perhaps not wittingly, set open a dore to more mischiefe in Christendome”. (Milton 1641, 31) His sentence’s slightly awkward parenthesis seems more consonant with Dante’s uneasy view of Constantine’s buona intenzion in Paradiso 20 than with Petrarch’s or Ariosto’s less complicated portrayals of the Donation and the Emperor. Another direct response to the Commedia’s antipapal invective could have helped to shape Of Reformation’s eventual conclusion. Here two antithetical paragraphs contrast the anticipated paradisal state of those who “have been earnest for the Common good of Religion and their Countrey” with the judgment awaiting those “that by the impairing and diminution of the true Faith, the distresses and servitude of their Countrey” down in “the darkest and deepest Golfe of HELL”. (Milton 1641, 89-90) Milton’s final vivid representation of the latter’s overthrow—his status-conscious prelates now becoming “the trample and spurne of all the other Damned” and the “most underfoot and downe-trodden Vassals of Perdition” [his italics]—has much in common with Dante’s carnivalesque portrayal of the simoniac clerics in Inferno 19 (the canto which Of Reformation has already cited) and of the pope planted upside down in the rock with his legs flailing above it. Moreover, Milton’s contrast between the souls in his heavenly city “progressing the datelesse and irrevoluble Circle of Eternity” and those in “the darkest and deepest Golfe of HELL” parallels a rhetorical pattern that is traced near the end of the Commedia. In Beatrice’s final speech to the pilgrim Dante she too begins by lyrically celebrating the collegiate and civic ideal of the circling and eternal Rose (Mira/ quanto è ‘l convento de le bianche stole!/ Vedi nostra città quant’ella gira . . .) and marking the place in it reserved for the righteous ruler Henry of Luxemburg.8 But she then concludes her whole speech, and all her utterances in the poem, with a balancing passage of ferocious invective against the “blind greed” (cieca cupidigia) of the Emperor’s adversary and (in Dante’s view) betrayer, Pope Clement V.9 Beatrice’s pope, like Milton’s prelatical “Vassals of Perdition” will also, she prophesies, participate in a Dantean form of infernal “trample and spurne”: the parody of apostolic succession, whereby one simoniac pope, having spent due time flailing his legs above the surface of Hell’s eighth circle, will be driven by the next arrival yet further into the fissures of the rock:

8 9

Par. 30, 128-38. Par. 30, 139-48.

Milton, the Prelates and the Protestant Dante

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. . . ch’el sarà detruso là dove Simon mago è per suo merto, e farà quel d’Alagna intrar più giuso’. (Par. 30, 146-8) [“For he will be thrust down there where Simon Magus has his reward, and he will force the Anagni Pope (Boniface VIII) further down”.]10 Milton’s appropriations of Dantean invective are, however, not based solely upon his impressively close reading of the text of the Commedia. It has long been recognized that he was also following a century-long polemical tradition in conscripting Dante amongst a host of medieval and trecento writers as one of the “notabile doctours” (to quote John Bale) who “hath in theyr famouse wrytynges called upon the churches reformacion”; (Bale 1548 (?), sig. Aa 8v)11 or as (in John Foxe’s more concise characterization) “an Italian writer against the Pope”. (Foxe 1570, sig. T3r (shouldernote))12 Several of the Miltonic dantismi already mentioned in this essay themselves have a history in Protestant polemic. Beatrice’s metaphor portraying hapless audiences of frivolous preachers as flocks “fed with wind” (Par. 29. 107; Lycidas 125) had been cited and translated in critiques of “the vayne fables of Monkes and Friers” from the mid sixteenth century and in one of the key texts of this Protestant tradition: Matthias Flacius’s Catalogus testium veritatis qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae (“Catalogue of witnesses for the truth who before our time spoke out against the Papacy”).13 Flacius’s Catalogus appeared in at least five editions from 1556 to 1608 and was used by some of the main

10 The workings of the simoniac conveyor-belt have already been described by Dante’s Nicholas III in the canto which Of Reformation has cited: Inf. 19 (73-7). 11 The citing of Dantes Aligerius (along with Franciscus Petrarcha) among fiftyone such ‘notabile doctours’ appears to be the earliest (as yet) known conscription of Dante to the Protestant cause; see Havely 2014: 46-9. 12 See Toynbee 1909: 1. 58, Caesar 1989: 278-9, and Havely 2003. On the early tradition of establishing Protestant legitimacy through historical precedent, see Ryrie 1996. 13 See Flacius 1556: 868; and (with 39 lines of Latin translation from Par. 29) the second edition of the Catalogus: Flacius 1562: 506-7. Subsequent editions are Lyon 1597 (twice), Geneva 1608, Frankfurt 1666-7 and Frankfurt 1672. On Flacius and the Catalogus, see Toynbee 1909: 1. 148n; Grimm 1973: 398-401 and 490-1; Caesar 1989: 30-1; Frank 1990: 11-25; Lindberg 1996: 6-7, 242-5, 374; and Backus 2003: 343-50. On Milton and Flacius, see also Serjeantson 2014: 839 and Poole 2014: 151-2.

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English Protestant polemicists before Milton, a number of whom specifically refer to the passage about preachers in Paradiso 29.14

The Protestant “Inferno” Flacius’s Catalogus had shown (especially in its expanded 1562 edition, including translations of passages from the Commedia) that the Paradiso and the Purgatorio could be quarried for missiles against the Papacy and the preachers and prelates of the Roman Church; but Protestant polemicists in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would also begin to mine the Inferno. Amongst the latter a leading figure was a French Huguenot: Francois Perrot de Mézières. Perrot was one of a number of French Protestant polemical writers whose work appeared or was translated in England around this time.15 Fluent in several languages including Hebrew and Italian, he was resident in major centres of intellectual culture such as Geneva and Venice, and he met and corresponded with Sir Philip Sidney in the 1570s when Perrot was translating the Psalms into Italian.16 Responding to Sixtus V’s bull of 1585 excommunicating Henri de Condé and Henri de Navarre and excluding them from the succession to the French throne, Perrot published a “friendly warning” to the people of Italy, who might not have noticed that Rome was the new Babylon and the Pope the Antichrist. His Aviso piacevole dato alla bella Italia (1586) was not only in Italian but also reinforced its argument with ample reference the tre lumi della tua nobil favella, o Italia (“the three leading lights of your noble language, O Italy”), including nineteen passages of quotation from Dante’s Commedia, a number of Petrarch sonnets, and summaries from Boccaccio’s Decameron.17 Although its title page announces the work to have been published in Monaco appresso Giovanni Swartz, Perrot’s antipapal 14 For example (as well as Foxe), Laurence Humphrey, Matthew Sutcliffe, and Simon Birckbek; see Havely 2004b, 93-101 and 2014, 60-5. On Milton and Foxe, see: Boswell 1975, 105 (item 617), Havely 2003, 149 and 2014, 66-7; and Serjeantson 2014, 834. 15 Other such writers who cited Dante against Rome were Simon de Voyon, whose Testimonie of the True Church of God was translated in 1585, and Philippe de Mornay, whose dual-language (Latin and French) Le Mystère d’Iniquité was published at Saumur in 1611 and appeared in an English version (by Sampson Lennard) the following year; see Havely 2014, 54-5, 62, 64, 103 and 108 with n. 244. 16 See van Dorsten 1986, 209. 17 Perrot 1586, 7v-11r; see also Balsamo 1998, esp. 84-90 and Sozzi 1999, 17-18.

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anthology actually reflects what one recent writer has described as “the international nature of early-modern Protestantism and Protestant writing”, since this book by a French author in Italian was actually brought out in London by John Wolfe, associate of Italian Protestants such as Giacomo Castelvetro, and publisher of English editions of Machiavelli and Aretino.18 A striking and quite innovative feature of Perrot’s Aviso piacevole is the amount of space it allots not only to the Purgatorio and Paradiso but also to the Inferno, selecting anticlerical or antipapal material from five of the latter’s cantos (Inf. 3, 11, 15, 19 and 27).19 Of these, Inferno 19 provides Perrot with the largest amount of antipapal material. He cites the first four lines condemning Simon Magus and his followers, and adds a note that the Popes are followers of the wrong Simon (“i Papi sono successori, non di Simone Pietro, ma di Simone Mago”). (Perrot 1586, 14r) His longest quotation from this canto (with his comment on it) brings him closer to Milton. Nearly all of the simoniac Pope Nicholas III’s confessional speech about himself, his predecessors and successors is included (67-87) and so—more importantly in this context—is the whole of the pilgrim Dante’s ensuing condemnation of papal avarizia with his final lines lamenting the Donation of Constantine—lines which Milton would translate in Of Reformation: “Ahi, Costantin, di quanto mal fu matre, non la tua conversion, ma quella dote che da te prese il primo ricco patre!” (Inf. XIV, 115-117)20

Perrot’s comment on this terzina follows Landino’s commentary (which like the verses themselves would be subject to expurgation early in the following century), arguing that Seguita il poeta la commune opinione che Consta[n]tino Imperadore convertito alla fede donasse alla chiesa il temporale: ma non si truova in historia alcuna, che mai facesse questa donatione. Et Lorenzo Valla ne ha fatto un libro, per prouar che ella è falsa. (Perrot 1586, 16r)

18

On Wolfe, see Wyatt 2005, 185-99; Serjeantson 2014, 840; and Poole 2014, 152. From Purg. passages in cantos 6, 16, 20, 32 and 33 (the last with Perrot’s comment citing Henri de Condé and Henri of Navarre as those through whom Dante’s DXV prophecy may hopefully be fulfilled); from Par. cantos 9 (misprinted as ‘6’), 18, 21, 22, 24, 27 and 29. 20 For Milton’s translation, see above, p. 000. 19

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Chapter One [The poet adopts the common view that the Emperor Constantine when converted to the Faith donated his temporal possessions to the Church, but it is not recorded in any history that he ever made this donation. And Lorenzo Valla has produced a book about it proving it to be false.]21

Although Perrot’s Aviso does not appear to have been reprinted after 1586, it provided a major precedent for the use of the Inferno alongside the Purgatorio and Paradiso in Protestant polemic during the early seventeenth century. At the turn of the century, the indefatigable antipapist Dean of Exeter Matthew Sutcliffe, whilst making the more familiar allusions to Dante’s popes as shepherds turned into wolves (from Par. 9.132 and 27. 55), notes also that the poet found a place for some of them in Hell (apud inferos locum assignavit). (Sutcliffe 1600, 63r)22 Ten years later another “satirical enemy in his writings against the Romanists”, Alexander Cooke, vicar of Louth in Lincolnshire, targeted Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s admission that Dante had damned six popes (including Nicholas III) in his Pope Joane: A Dialogue betweene a Protestant and a Papist. (Cooke 1610, 62)23 More specific and closer to Milton’s time are references to and paraphrases from Inferno 19 in two further polemical works: Thomas Beard’s Antichrist the Pope of Rome (1625) and Simon Birckbek’s The Protestant’s Evidence Taken out of Good Records (1634). Thomas Beard, Rector of Wistow in Huntingdonshire (and master of the grammar school attended by Oliver Cromwell), was well-practised in turning Italian writers against Rome: in an earlier work—his Retractive from the Romish Religion (1616)—he had cited Petrarch and Marsilius of Padua, and provided a lively paraphrase of Boccaccio’s tale of Frate Cipolla (Dec. 6.10), whilst also identifying Dante as a “fast friend of Popish Religion” who nevertheless (in Par. 29) witnessed against Catholic preachers’ use of “idle tales, and meere tales, and fables”. (Beard 1616: 200, 328, 352 and 415) The full pugnacious title of his later polemic was Antichrist the Pope of Rome OR The Pope of Rome is Antichrist, and here, together with his

21

(mispaginated as ‘22’). In the 1564 Venice: Sessa edition of the Commedia with the Landino-Vellutello commentary ed. Francesco Sansovino (the edition that Perrot may have used), the comparable passage is on p. 102. On its expurgation, see below, p. 000. 22 See also Boswell 1999, 114-15. On Sutcliffe’s polemical work, see Havely 2014, 54, 63-4, 72 and 99. 23 Quoted (with the description of Cooke as satirist by Anthony Wood) in Toynbee 1909, 1. 110-11 and Boswell 1999, 135. On Bellarmino’s role in the debate about Dante, see Havely 2014, 56 and 63.

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other authorities, Beard assembles a constellation of Italian writers comparable to those in Of Reformation: thus Rome’s identity as the new Babylon is early on said to have been demonstrated by “the writings of Petrarch and Boccace, with the Satyrs of Ariosto and others”. (Beard 1625, 17)24 Shortly afterwards in the first “treatise” of his Antichrist the Pope of Rome, Beard turns to a range of fourteenth-century reformers, including Franciscan opponents of John XXII who “wrote directly against the Pope, and called him Antichrist, and the Church of Rome, with her Prelates, the whore of Babylon made drunke with the blood of the Saints”. (ibid., 31)25 This is the immediate context for a reference to “the renowned Italian Poet Dante” and for two summaries of material from what Beard calls the “Sonnets” of the Commedia. The second of these visits what is by now quite familiar ground: the condemnation of the Church’s assumption of temporal authority in the “sixt [actually the sixteenth] Sonnet of Purgatory”.26 Less usual—although obviously grist to Beard’s apocalyptic mill—is his account of a passage from Inferno 19, where the poet saith (speaking of Pope Nicholas the third) that it was hee, of whom the Evangilist S. John intendeth to speake, under the name of the Whore which sitteth upon many waters, with whom the Kings of the earth committed fornication. (Beard 1625, 31)27

Beard’s paraphrase here takes us to within a very few lines of the end of the pilgrim Dante’s speech, immediately before the verses that Milton would translate in Of Reformation. Significantly closer in time and effect to Of Reformation—actually quoting the original and attempting a verse translation—is Simon 24 Later (104) Beard also cites Petrarch’s account of the Curia as ‘Fountaine of Dolours, and the Schoole of Errors, the Temple of Heresie, Babylon, and the Ship of Fraudes’. 25 The words are attributed to Michael of Cesena, leader of the ‘Conventual’ Franciscans, who came to oppose John XXII in the 1320s, but the language has rather more in common with Petrus Iohannis Olivi and the more radical Franciscan ‘Spirituals’; see Havely 2004a, 172-3. 26 Purg. 16. 106-14 had been cited by Perrot and De Mornay; it also appeared as a new item in the 1608 (Geneva) edition of Flacius’s Catalogus , cols 1765-6, sig. EE ee 4. Beard’s mistaken reference may indeed be due to his use of this latter edition, which presents the passage immediately after a quotation from Purg. 6, and without assigning it a canto number. His confusion between canti and ‘sonnets’ could perhaps be due to his reading of Petrarch’s invectives against Avignon; see above, n. 31 (although the term 'sonnet' had a wider semantic range at this time). 27 Cp. Inf. 19, 106-8.

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Birckbek’s appropriation of Inferno 19 in The Protestant’s Evidence Taken out of Good Records (1634). Birckbek was another (as he would describe it) “laborious” anti-Romanist vicar—of Gilling in Yorkshire—and he follows a long line of Protestant legitimists in the aim he announces on his title-page: that of “shewing that for fifteene hundred yeares next after Christ, divers worthy guides of Gods Church, have in sundry weightie poynts of religion, taught as the Church of England now doth”.28 Calling upon a large “Catalogue of Witnesses”, (Birckbek 1634, sig. A4 4r) Birckbek headed this list Catalogus Testium Veritatis—in obvious tribute to one of his acknowledged authors: Flacius.29 Among those “witnesses produced . . . in the fourteenth age” he hauls in a number of the usual suspects, such as “Gulielmus Ockam, Marsilius Patavinus, Iohannes de Rupe-scissa, Francis Petrarch, Saint Bridget, Iohn Wickliffe, Sir Geoffrey Chaucer”—as well as “Dantes.” (ibid. 57) Turning to the trecento in the text of the treatise, he then locates “those famous Florentine Poets, Dante and Petrarch” amid a similarly international group of authors who “found fault with the Romish faith, as well as with her manners”. (ibid.) At the end of this section Birckbek proposes a new “Triumvirate of famous Poets” comprising the “two Italians” and “our English Laureat Sir Geoffrey Chaucer”, (ibid.) although it is Dante who here receives most attention. Over three pages of paraphrase, commentary, quotation and translation, in the Protestant’s Evidence (pp. 57-61) outline how the Commedia “found fault with the Romish faith”, using passages from three cantos in the Paradiso (9, 18 and 29), and concluding with one in the Inferno, where “[t]he same Dante in covert termes, calleth Rome the whore of Babylon.” (ibid. 60) Birckbek then quotes the original lines from Inferno 19 (106-11)—alluding to Revelation 17, 1-3 and envisaging the corrupt leadership of the Church as a combination of the Whore of Babylon and the beast on which she sits—followed by his own translation and commentary: The Evangelist meetes with you well You [Romish] Pastours ; when he doth tell How he did see the woman, which Sits on the waters [that foule witch] To play the whore with Kings ; that Beast 28

On the tradition of Protestant legitimism, see above, n. 17. Like Beard, he used the 1608 Geneva edition of Flacius’s Catalogus, with its additional quotations from Dante, and he cites that edition (under ‘C’) in his ‘Catalogue of Authours cited in this Treatise’. On Flacius, see above, p. 000 with n. 18. 29

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That borne was with seaven hornes at least. And had the signe of some ten more T’appease her husband by their powre. The Authour alludes to that in Revelation, of the great whore that sitteth on many waters, Revelat. 17.1. and of the beast that beareth her, which hath seaven heads and ten hornes, vers. 7. with whom the Kings of the earth commit fornication. Chap. 18. v. 3. (ibid. 60-1)30

Birckbek’s rollicking four-stress couplets here as elsewhere convey something of the concision of Dante’s invective, although his account of heads, horns, whore and husband in the last three lines is far from clear.31 His main concern with radical apocalyptic exegesis leads him to omit the final terzina of the Dante-persona’s speech to Nicholas III and the complex issues it raises about Constantine and the relationships between Church and State. Such issues will of course be addressed some seven years later when Milton translates that terzina to buttress his argument about the Donation of Constantine.32 In Of Reformation Milton thus takes up the Dantean story where Birckbek left off, and with an emphasis on Church governance and corruption closer to home.

The Protestant “Monarchia” Both Lycidas and Of Reformation may reflect some awareness and refocusing by Milton of another Dantean text, besides the Commedia, that had frequently been conscripted by earlier Protestant polemic. The recent discovery of Milton’s own annotated copy of the 1544 edition of Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante Poeta Fiorentino (now known as the Trattatello in laude di Dante) has raised important questions about his formative reading in the late 1630s and his awareness of the content and fortunes of Dante’s key political work: the Monarchia.33

30

Here, as with the passages from Par., page numbers in the margin refer to the 1571 Lyon edition of the Commedia. 31 A modern version of the last line (Durling & Martines) interprets the seven heads as the sacraments, with the ten horns as the Commandments and reads: ‘as long as virtue pleased her husband’, i.e., as long as the Pope was devoted to virtue (Dante 1996, 295 and 302). 32 Milton 1641, 30. 33 Poole 2014. Poole’s discovery was first announced in the Times Literary Supplement for 23 May 2014 (pp. 14-15).

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It has long been known from the evidence of his Commonplace Book that around the time of Lycidas’s composition and very shortly before his travels in Italy, Milton was reading material by and about Dante, and that he was using his copy of Daniello’s 1568 Venice edition with commentary as the source for notes on the Inferno (four passages) and the Paradiso (one passage).34 Under the item Rex (King), Milton noted (as Flacius and Bale had long before) that “in the book whose title is Monarchia” Dante wrote that “the authority of a king does not depend upon the Pope” (authoritatem regiam a Papâ non dependere), that the Monarchia itself “was burned as an heretical work” , and that Boccaccio’s account of the burning (by a papal legate around 1328/9) was itself censored in an edition subsequent to the one that he himself owned, read and annotated.35 As Flacius was probably the first to recognize, the Monarchia’s arguments against papal temporalities and its repeated condemnations by the Papacy itself made it doubly attractive to Protestant polemicists. In the 1556 edition of his Catalogus, the first work that Flacius ascribes to the “pious and learned” Dante is: . . . librum quem appellauit Monarchiam. In eo probauit Papam no[n] esse supra Imperatorem, nec habere aliquod ius in Imperium, ob eamq[ue] rem à quibusdam haereseos est damnatus. (Flacius 1556, 868) [a book, which he called the Monarchy. In it he showed that the Pope was not superior to the Emperor, nor had he any rights in the Empire, wherefore he is condemned by some as a heretic.36

As well as including translations from the Commedia, Flacius’s later (1562) edition of the Catalogus refers to and paraphrases considerably more of Monarchia’s arguments: about the invalidity of the Donation of Constantine (Mon. 3.10); and about the dubious motives of Dante’s 34 For the Commonplace Book (currently being re-edited by William Poole), see Milton 1953, 1. 344-513, and for the Dante items only, Toynbee 1909, 1. 121-2. 35 Milton 1953, 1. 438; see also Toynbee 1909, 1. 122; the Rex entry is dated ‘in or just after 1637’, Poole 2014, 142. Milton’s copy of the Boccaccio Vita di Dante was of the ‘first free-standing’ edition, following the Trattatello’s initial appearance in print (also uncensored, and appended to the 1477 Venice Commedia); see Milton 1953, 1. 438 n. 4, and Poole 2014, 145. On the later censored version (appended to the 1576 Florence edition of the Vita Nuova), see Toynbee 1909, 1. 122, n. 4, and Poole 2014, 145-6. For Boccaccio’s original account, see Boccaccio 1974, redazione I, paragraphs 196-7, and on the early controversies about the Monarchia, see Kay 1998 and Cassell 2004. 36 (tr. in Caesar 1989, 30).

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political opponents (Mon. 3.3).37 By 1562 two further (and probably related) events had taken place in the troubled textual history of Dante’s treatise: in 1559 it had been printed for the first time by Flacius’s initial publisher, Johann Herbst (Oporinus) of Basel; and in 1560 the Italian Protestant convert Pier Paolo Vergerio had published an annotated account of officially censored heretical works.38 In the latter, Vergerio notes the presence of Monarchia in several of the recent papal Indices (1550 and 1559); he also gives considerable space to its pro-Imperial arguments and notes its earlier condemnation in the fourteenth century.39 Alongside the Commedia, Monarchia was thus by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries firmly incorporated into the construction of Dante’s identity as witness against Rome and (in Foxe’s phrase) “Italian writer against the Pope”. But even amongst the more learned of the Protestant polemicists in this period (such as Foxe, Laurence Humphrey, George Abbot, Thomas Beard and Simon Birckbek) Dante’s treatise was referred to more often as a cause celèbre, rather than as a text to be read and paraphrased, let alone quoted. And as with many of the polemical references to and quotations from the Commedia at this time, intermediate sources (as was sometimes acknowledged) would have included the 1562 and 1608 editions of Flacius’s Catalogus. On the other hand, a couple of exceptions to this practice may be identified in the early seventeenth century. The 1612 English translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Mysterium Iniquitatis is much more specific about (for example) Monarchia’s views on the Donation of Constantine and the Decretalists (translating the attack on the latter from Mon. 3.3. 9-10); whilst the distinguished Oxford scholar and preacher, Richard Crakanthorpe in his late work The Defence of Constantine: with a Treatise of the Pope’s Temporall Monarchie (1621) not only cites Dante among “learned writers” of the fourteenth century who condemned that “temporall monarchie”, but quotes, translates and comments on several passages from Monarchia Book 3.40 Milton certainly knew about the Monarchia’s main conclusion and about the early attempts to suppress it, as the Commonplace Book and his copy of Boccaccio’s ‘Vita di Dante’ demonstrate, but, as has recently been argued, the note in the former “implies no direct knowledge of the Monarchia itself”, (Poole 2014, 144) and there is likewise no clear 37

Flacius 1562, 490 and 505. Vergerio’s work carries the title Postremus Catalogus Haereticorum Romae conflatus (Pforzheim: Corvinus, 1560). 39 Vergerio 1560, 6v, 18r-19v and 47v. 40 For the relevant excerpts from the De Mornay translation and from Crakanthorp, see Boswell 1999, 144-5 and 172. 38

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evidence that he consulted any of the three editions of Dante’s treatise that were available in his time.41 Caution is certainly in order here, but it is nonetheless worth considering Monarchia’s presence in Milton’s culture and how knowledge of the text might possibly have contributed to his antiprelatical polemic. At least one British writer—the pro-papal polemicist Adam Easton— had been reading Dante’s political treatise even in Chaucer’s time; and around the mid fifteenth century Dans de monarchia mundi was referred to (ill-informedly) in an article on “Papacy” by the encyclopedist Abbot of St Albans, John Whethamstede.42 In the following century, John Bale—the first British writer to recruit Dante as a proto-Protestant (and one who knew of both Easton and Whethamstede)—would mention the poet’s opposition to the temporal claims of the Papacy and that Dantes Aligerus . . . opusculum scripsit de Monarchia. In quo fuit eius opinio, quod Imperiu[m] ab ecclesia minime dependeret. (Bale 1557-9, 1: 377) [Dante Alighieri . . . wrote a little book De Monarchia. In which it was his view that the Empire should hardly at all depend upon the Church.]

Bale’s Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytannie . . . Catalogus in which this item appears was itself far from being a “little book”. A massive survey of British and European writers, it was published at Basel in 1557-9 by Oporinus, who had just brought out Flacius’s Catalogus and in 1559 and 1566 would print the first two editions of Monarchia itself. It has even been suggested that the then exile John Foxe, whom Herbst employed as a proof-reader, may have been involved in the 1559 production process, but if so he does not seem to have paid a great deal of attention to the text: his actual references to the Monarchia’s arguments (in the 1570 edition of the Ecclesiastical History) are not very precise; he does not cite or quote from it; and he seems to confuse Dante with Lorenzo Valla on the subject of the Donation of Constantine.43 By Milton’s time, several important academic and private collections in Britain held copies of the Monarchia. In his Explanation or Enlarging of the Ten Articles in the Supplication of Doctor James of 1625, the first 41 On the available editions, see below, p. 000. Several modern surveys seem more confident that Milton ‘knew’ Mon.; see Samuel 1966: 34 and Wallace 2007: 286. 42 See Havely 2014, 22-30. 43 See Toynbee 1921, 109-10. For Foxe’s account of ‘Dantes’, see Foxe 1570, 4856, sig. T3r-v.

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Librarian of the Bodleian at Oxford, Thomas James, lists Dante among authors “rescued out of the Papists hands and restored by me . . . repurged and restored vnto their former integritie”. (James 1625, 7-9)44 This suggests that Italian copies of the Commedia which James had by then acquired—and which had been subject to expurgation for instance under the terms of the Lisbon supplement to the Index (1581) and the Madrid Index Expurgatorius of 1614—would have had antipapal passages, such as Inferno 19. 101-18 (with Landino’s commentary on it) exposed again to the Protestant reader’s view.45 By 1625, as his catalogue entries show, James’s antipapal acquisitions campaign and his rescuing of authors “out of the Papists hands” had also extended to the purchase of several Protestant editions of Monarchia. These included the 1566 “folio” text, listed in 1602-3, and the 1610 (Offenburg) edition which appears in James’s 1620 Catalogus Universalis.46 The Monarchia listed in the 1602-3 catalogue is almost certainly the copy still in the Bodleian, with its title-page carrying the signature (dated 1592) of an earlier British owner, Stephen Rodvey, who is recorded as a donor of printed books in 1601.47 A similar ideological context seems to account for the presence of “Dant. Aligherius, De necessitate Monarchiae” in the catalogue of the Presbyterian Sion College in London. John Spencer (librarian there from 1631-5 and again from 44

See also Boswell 1999, 185. The methods of such ‘restoration’ are not specified by James, but they would have included writing in the original material above inked-out phrases and lines, or on (or beside) paper that had been pasted over the offending passages. They might even (technology permitting) have extended to removing the pasted paper, as has certainly happened at some stage in a censored copy of the 1564 LandinoVellutello Commedia acquired by the Bodleian in the 19th century (Mason K. 199). Here in 1640 (as a note on the title-page indicates) the directives of the 1614 Madrid Index were followed: a number of passages for expurgation (including Inf. 19, 101-18 and parts of Landino’s comment on it) have been crossed out in ink, and there are obvious signs of paper having been pasted over them. On the expurgation of the Commedia, see also Toynbee 1921, 111-12 and Martinelli 1966, 75. On the wider issue of censorship in the period, useful guidance is in Poole 2014, 150-1, with links to the bibliography. 46 See Toynbee 1909, 1. 103 with n.2 and 104 with n. 7. The Bodleian now has two copies of the 1610 edition. 47 See Macray 1890, 420. The copy is at C 10. 8(1) Jur.. Rodvey is known to have donated a copy of a late 15th-century anticlerical text, the Libellus contra beneficiorum reservationes by Antonius de Raymundia around this time; see http://incunables.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/record/A-356. The Bodleian has two copies of the 1610 Monarchia, one of which at least would have been there in the 1620s. 45

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1640) compiled the catalogue, which lists a number of polemical texts by authors such as Prynne and Sutcliffe, and Spencer’s preface significantly pays tribute to Thomas James’s work in developing the “use and utility” of a library.48 A private collection of the time, that of the Catholic aristocrat Sir Kenelm Digby, reflected somewhat different interests and agenda, but it too included a version of Monarchia. Digby was, along with Milton, probably one of the most accomplished British Italianists of his time; he travelled in Italy during the early 1620s and was sufficiently familiar with il vostro Poeta (as he called Dante) to quote from the Paradiso during an address to the Sienese “Accademia de’ Filomati”.49 When his library (along with that of his kinsman George, earl of Bristol) came to be auctioned in 1680, the catalogue listed six Dantean items: five printed texts (including editions of the Commedia and Convivio) and one in manuscript.50 The manuscript (among a category of 69 “Manuscripti Diversis Voluminibus”) is of a text deriving from Florentine culture of the mid quattrocento : “Monarchia di Dante Alighieri tradotta da Marsilio Ficino di Lingua Latina in Lingua Toscana”, and it seems very likely that Ficino’s Platonizing of Dante in the preface to this translation would have chimed with Digby’s interests and ideas.51 Such bibliographical evidence suggests that opportunities for close engagement with the text of the Monarchia in early seventeenth-century England were—whilst still rare— definitely available, especially for a writer who, like Milton, was in Oxfordshire during the 1630s, had contacts with Oxford, knew of the text’s existence and was interested in its ideological history.52 Whether he discussed the still-censored Monarchia with any of his Florentine friends such as Buonmattei or Dati is not recorded, but there seems no reason to suppose that his conversations about Dante with such avid readers and defenders of the poet would have been confined to the Commedia.53 48 Spencer 1650, sig. A3r, and pp. 6 and 138-9. Spencer also lists two of James’s own works (p. 75). 49 See BL Add. MS 41846, f. 119v. On Digby’s travels in Italy, see Gabrieli 1957, 28-36. 50 For more details see Havely 2014, 99-101. 51 On Ficino’s translation of Mon. (completed in 1456), see Caesar 1989, 20 and 216-18; also Shaw 1974-5 and Gilson 2005, 142-5. 52 On Milton’s contacts with Oxford and the Bodleian, see Poole 2014, 142, with nn. 8 and 9. 53 Earlier on this journey Milton encountered Hugo Grotius in Paris (early May 1638), and Lewalski (2000, 89) thinks he would have been interested in Grotius’s De Jure belli ac pacis, which had been published in 1625 (with a second edition at

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Firm textual evidence of how Monarchia or Protestant readings of it might have informed or affected Milton’s early anti-prelatical writing is somewhat harder to find (beyond the reference in his Commonplace Book), yet there are some possible pointers and convergences. Lycidas has been shown to have appropriated and redirected Protestant readings of St Peter’s and Beatrice’s invectives in Par. 27 and 29, but it is also possible that a passage from Book 2 of Monarchia might have influenced the rapidfire rhetorical questions directed by the “Pilot of the Galilean Lake” at the ruthless greed of “our corrupted clergy”: what recks it them? what need they? they are sped . . .

A similarly articulated outburst occurs near the end of Dante’s second Book, as he consciously digresses to attack those among his clerical opponents who corruptly appropriate revenues that should go to “Christ’s poor”: Quid ad pastores tales? Quid si Ecclesie substantia diffluit dum proprietates propinquorum suorum exaugeantur? Sed forsan melius est propositum prosequi: & sub pio silentio, Salvatoris nostri expectare succursum. (Mon. 2.10.3) [What does this matter to such shepherds? What do they care if the Church’s substance is wasted, as long as the wealth of their own relatives increases? But perhaps it is better to return to our thesis, and wait in reverent silence for help from our Saviour.]54

This pattern of urgent questions about pastores could well have caught Milton’s eye as he read towards Monarchia’s main arguments about Papal temporalities in Book 3—and the “help” that Dante looks for might even prefigure the “two-handed” apocalyptic intervention famously looked for in Lycidas—but the resemblance between the texts may in the end be more one of convergence rather than influence. Lycidas marks an important if problematic stage in Milton’s ideological and poetic formation. It raises questions about his “radicalism” and “nationalism”; it has been seen as conveying “an intensity of both

Amsterdam in 1631), and would later appear in an English translation. If so, he might have noticed Grotius’s rejection of Dante’s universalist arguments in Mon. 1 (part 2 ch. 110; p. 416 in the 1655 English translation). 54 With tr. by Shaw in Dante 1996b: 58. Latin text as in the 1566 edition, which here .

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intertextual self-consciousness and sharp political criticism” and being in short “a politically charged poem, a prophetic, Spenserian attack on Laudianism and a call for reformation”.55 The process of the poet’s political and cultural education seems to have accelerated rapidly during the following few years, which included his journey to Italy, his return to the political and ecclesiological turmoil of Britain in the late 1630s and early 1640s, and his emergence as a fully fledged polemicist in Of Reformation (1641).

Of Reformation, Commedia, and Monarchia In May 1641—three years after the publication of Lycidas, two after his return from Italy, and in the same month as the Root and Branch Bill that called for the abolition of the episcopacy—Milton would engage directly with what he called “the chaff of overdated ceremonies” and the prelates as residue of Catholic hierocracy in his first major prose work, Of Reformation. Towards the end of this treatise’s first Book, he—like Dante in the later stages of Monarchia and at points in the Commedia— investigates the mythic origin of the Church’s temporalities and wealth: the Donation of Constantine. In seeking to demonstrate how “Constantine marred all in the church” he thus, as we have seen, draws upon the culture that he had so recently encountered in his travels and recruits to his own catalogue of witnesses against Rome and the bishops those “three the famousest men for wit and learning, that Italy at this day glories of.” (Milton 1641, 30)56 His translation builds upon the more recent polemical appropriations of the Inferno, such as Birckbek’s couplets in The Protestants Evidence a few years earlier. In approaching the last terzina of the speech denouncing voi pastor in Inferno 19, his decision to “render it to you in English blank verse” rather than in Dantean terza rima (as he was perfectly capable of doing) has been seen as a symptom of “his committed patriotism, a patriotism that identified English liberties with support for international Protestantism”, as is evident especially in the second Book of Of Reformation.57 The resolutely English rendering of Dante’s denunciation of Constantine’s dote by “the excellent Mr. J. Milton” would moreover be quoted with approval by a writer against “Popery” during the Protectorate. (Stubbe(s) 1659, 174-5)58 55

Lewalski 1998, 57-9 and Raymond 2008, 140 and 151. See above, p. 000. 57 Maltzahn 2008, 406-7. 58 Cited by Maltzahn 2008, 407. 56

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Nationhood, “English liberties” and “international Protestantism” are key issues in Of Reformation’s subsequent (second) Book, and Milton’s way of addressing the threat posed to all of these by the power of the English prelacy suggests some analogies with the way in which Monarchia (especially in Book 3) approaches Papalist claims to temporal authority. Here possible parallels consist not so much in specific forms of rhetoric or invective as in similar dialectical tactics. Both texts for example associate clerical cupidity closely with the Church’s claims to temporal power and authority, and both seek to discredit the motives of opponents who (in Milton’s words) “covet to be expert in Canons and Decretals”. (Milton 1641, 66; c)59 In Of Reformation’s second Book, the words Monarch and Monarchy of course recur frequently, as Milton examines the latter institution’s constituent parts—“the Liberty of the subject and the supremacie of the King”—dramatizing by contrast the role of the prelacy in not only “sapping the out-works and redoubts of Monarchy” but striking “at the very heart and vitals”. (ibid. 64) Early in Of Reformation Book 2, when refuting the argument “that no form of Church government is agreeable to Monarchy but that of Bishops”, he presents at some length the early Papacy’s addiction to temporal power in opposition to the rights of the Empire as ultimately “a caution to England to beware of her Bishops in time, for that their ends, and aymes are no more freindly to Monarchy then the Popes.” (ibid. 44 and 47-51) His explicit authorities at this stage are Petrarch, the spurious Chaucerian Plowman’s Tale and “the great Venetian Antagonist of the Pope”, Paolo Sarpi; but the ghost of Constantine also haunts the scene here, and the myth of the Donation (the “lavish Superstition” now being recognized as myth) continues to provide a way of imagining how the “pastor” came to turn into a “wolf”—as it had in both the Commedia and Monarchia. (ibid. 48-50)60 Of Reformation’s second Book also displays some strategic similarity to Dante’s argument about the Papacy’s arrogation of “the power to confer authority on this earthly kingdom” in the last Book of Monarchia.61 Milton here presents the prelates’ hierocratic claims to temporal power and authority as invalid, incompatible with and actually inimical to effective Monarchy. In terms whose vividness matches those of Dante’s 59

Compare Mon. 3.3.9. Constantine is invoked four times in these three pages. His Donation is mentioned in all three books of Mon. (1.16.3, 2.11.8, and 3.10), obliquely but prominently at the end of the first two Books; explicitly and extensively in the third. 61 Mon. 3.15.9 (tr. by Shaw, Dante 1995: 90. 60

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antiprelatical invective (for example at the end of Par. 21 or in Mon. 2. 10 .3) he describes how French and Dutch visitors to “this Britannick Empire” would find it in thrall to a pompous new Armada: that of a Tympany of Spaniolized Bishops swaggering in the fore-top of the State , and meddling to turne, and dandle the Royall Ball with unskilfull and Pedantick palmes . . . (Milton 1641, 59)

Milton’s ideal “free and untutor’d” monarchy and Dante’s are of course vastly different polities, geographically, historically and ideologically; but both are conceived of as providentially ordained “empires”, threatened by a hierocratic ideology, yet capable of renewal. The bishops would eventually be back, though not fully in the “fore-top of the State”; Monarchia would not appear in English until the late nineteenth century (appended to a book on Dante by the Dean of St Pauls),62 but the second Book of Milton’s first anti-prelatical treatise could meanwhile have served as a kind of cultural translation. Some of the key antitheses in Of Reformation’s second Book could thus be (very speculatively) aligned with those in Monarchia as well as in the Commedia: the clash of authority between “Monarchy” and “Popery”; the sudden Dantean plunge at the end from God’s “universal and milde Monarchy” down to the “trample and spurne” of the clerics in Hell. (Milton 1641, 89)63 Those who might (with some justice) think this is carrying speculation too far could bear in mind some of the ways in which Dante and the protestantized Dante continued to affect Milton’s authorial self-awareness—for example, through his identification with the anticlerical Dante and Petrarch in the 1647 letter to Carlo Dati.64 He would later include in his Commonplace Book a passage from the Purgatorio about Rome’s “two suns” to illustrate Ecclesiastici et Politici regiminis confusionem: the passage (from Purg. 16. 106-12 and 127-9) is one that was popular with Protestant polemicists and is thought to have been added (some time between 1650 and 1667) in the hand of one of his amanuenses for Paradise Lost.65 And in the great argument of Paradise Lost itself has 62

The first translation by F.J. Church was published in R.W. Church’s Dante: An Essay (1879). 63 See also above, p. 000. 64 On the Dati letter, see Samuel 1966, 39 and Poole 2014, 154. 65 See: Toynbee 1909, 1. 123 with n. 1; Milton 1953, 1. 476 n. 2; and Samuel 1966, 44. There is no need to assume any intermediate source for this quotation, but the passage had been quoted for example in Perrot 1586, 21 (misnumbered as ‘12’), De Mornay (tr. Lennard) 1612, 444.

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been seen to reflect in its later stages a concern that converges with Dante’s anxieties about “the assumption of civil power by a corrupt church.” (Samuel 1966, 257) Toward the end of its last book, one of the darker moments in the Archangel Michael’s account of world history involves “the state of the Church and the displacement of apostolic ‘teachers’ by ambitious ‘wolves’ who . . . seek to avail themselves of names, Places and titles, and with these to join Secular power, though feigning still to act By spiritual . . . and from that pretence, Spiritual laws by carnal power shall force On every conscience . . . (Milton 1986, 635)66 Meanwhile, Dante (in name at least) would continue to form part of the currency of British Protestant polemic through the Civil War, into the Protectorate and beyond. A popular Oxford preacher to the House of Commons almost exactly two years after Of Reformation would (in the printed version of his sermon) cite both Dante and Petrarch when urging his audience to “consider that Rome is Babylon . . . a drunken whore, a bloody whore”.67 The following year a professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews in a Peaceable Plea for the Government of the Church of Scotland listed Dantes and Petrarcha alongside Occam and Wickliff among “the servants of God, who opposed Popery after the times of Bonifacius the eight”. (Rutherford 1644, 296) During the early years of the Protectorate, yet another French Protestant polemic urging the “necessity of separation from the Church of Rome was published in English (at Cambridge), and its Preface named the two Italians amongst those who complained, That all the miseries and civil warres in Christendome came from the ill lives of their [Rome’s] Monastical and Clergy-men”.68 And, as we have seen, in the penultimate year of the

66

(Paradise Lost 12. 515-22). The Oxford scholar Francis Cheynell’s sermon (Sions Memento and Gods Alarum) was preached ‘before the Honorable House of Commons, on the 31. of May 1643. the Solemne day of their monethly Fast’ and was printed in the same year; the references to Dantes and Petrarcha are in a shouldernote on p. 12. On Cheynell’s prominence among preachers to Parliament during the Civil War period, see also Wilson 1969, 70 (with n. 40), 82, 124 (with n. 66), 190 (with n. 143), 241, 244, 247, 259, 265 and 268. 68 The Huguenot minister and controversialist Jean Daillé’s Apologia pro Ecclesiis 67

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Protectorate the “anabaptistically inclined” West Country minister, Henry Stubbe(s) when harking back to a prelapsarian Christian priesthood “in the primitive times” also harked back to “the excellent Mr. J. Milton” and his blank verse translation of Dante’s lament about the Donation of Constantine.69 Independents (such as Milton), Presbyterians, Huguenots, and pseudoAnabaptists were far from being the only British Protestants to conscript Dante as witness against Rome in the later seventeenth century (nor had they been earlier). It would be as well, as Of Reformation urges, not to “run into a paroxysm of citations again in this point”; but it may be relevant (pace Milton) to end by also citing a bishop. With the Restoration the bishops would return, and a few years after the 1688 “Glorious Revolution” one of the more influential of them, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, would in his biography of an Irish Anglican Bishop (William Bedell) quote from one of Bedell’s letters in which the poet of the Commedia and Monarchia is aligned with “the Authors of this Age in any way inclining to reformation”. Burnet’s text then goes on immediately to record Bedell’s complaint that, like even older writers, such authors are subject to censorship: set to School to learn the Roman Language, and agree with the Trent Faith. For it is not the Authority and Monarchy of the Pope alone that is sought, though that be Summa Summarum . . . but no voice must be heard dissenting from that which he teaches. (Burnet 1692, 396)

Bedell had become Bishop of Kilmore and Ardagh in 1629 and died in 1641, the year in which Of Reformation was published. Portraying and quoting him half a century later, the latitudinarian Burnet thus helps to

Reformatis appeared in 1652 and was published in an English translation by a scholar of Milton's own former college, Thomas Smith, as An Apologie for the Reformed Churches in (1653). Smith was 'a champion of the Church of England during the Interregnum' (ODNB, s.v. 'Smith, Thomas (1624-1661), scholar and theological controversialist'); this was the second of his translations from Daillé, and the references to Petrarch and Dantes are on p. 31. 69 See above, p. 000. The description of him as being ‘anabaptistically inclined is from Anthony Wood, quoted in ODNB, s.v. ‘Stubbes [Stubbs], Henry (1605/6– 1678), clergyman and ejected minister’. His more well known contemporary (and eventual eulogist), the Presbyterian Richard Baxter also cited Dante in two antipapist polemics around the same time; see Baxter 1657(The Safe Religion), sig. a4, and 1659 (A Key for Catholicks): 220.

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propel the Protestant Dante of Milton’s youth into the era of the “Whig Supremacy”.

Acknowledgement For comments on and advice about this essay I am very grateful to Cicely Palser Havely, Anne Laurence, William Poole and Deirdre Serjeantson.

Works Cited Backus, Irena. 2003. Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378-1615). Leiden and Boston Mass.: Brill. Bale, John. 1557-9. Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie quam nunc Angliam & Scotiam uocant: Catalogus. 2nd edition. Basel: Oporinus [Johann Herbst]. —. 1548? The Image of Bothe Churches after the most wonderfull and heauenly Reuelacion of Sainct John the Euangelist, enlarged edition. Antwerp: Stephen Mierdeman for Richard Jugge. Balsamo, J. 1998. “Dante l’aviso piacevole et Henri de Navarre.” Italique 1: 79-94. Baxter, Richard. 1659. A Key for Catholicks. London: Robert White for Nevil Simmons. —. 1657. The Safe Religion. Or Three Disputations for the Reformed Catholike Religion against Popery. London: Abraham Miller for Thomas Underhill. Beard, Thomas. 1625. Antichrist the Pope of Rome: or, The Pope of Rome is Antichrist, proved in Two Treatises. London: I. Jaggard for J. Bellamie. —. 1616. A Retractive from the Romish Religion, Contayning Thirteene Forcible Motives dissuading from communion with the Church of Rome. London: William Stansby. Birckbek, Simon. 1634. The Protestants Evidence, Taken out of Good Records London: for R. Milbourne. Boswell, J. C. 1975. Milton’s Library. New York and London: Garland. —. 1999. Dante’s Fame in England: References in Printed British Books 1477-1640. Newark NJ and London: U of Delaware P and Associated University Presses. Burnet, Gilbert. 1692. The Life of William Bedell, D. D. Lord Bishop of Killmore in Ireland. London: Richard Chiswell. Caesar, Michael. 1989. Dante: The Critical Heritage 1314(?) – 1870. London and New York: Routledge.

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Cassell, A. K. 2004. The Monarchia Controversy. Washington D.C.: Catholic U of America P. Cheynell, Francis. 1643. Sions Memento and Gods Alarum. In a Sermon at Westminster, before the Honorable House of Commons, on the 31. of May 1643. the Solemne day of their monethly Fast. London: Samuel Gellibrand. Cinquemani, A. M. 1998. ‘Glad To go For a Feast’: Milton, Buonmattei, and the Florentine Accademici. New York: Peter Lang. Cooke, Alexander. 1610. Pope Joane: A dialogue betweene a protestant and a papist. London: Edward Blount and William Barret. Cunningham, Gilbert F. 1965. The Divine Comedy in English: A Critical Bibliography, 1782-1900. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd. Dante Alighieri. 1997. Dante Alighieri: Commedia con il commento di Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols. Milan: Mondadori. —. 1996. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 1: Inferno, edited by and translated by Robert M. Durling. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1995. Monarchia. Edited by and translated by Prue Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. De Mornay, Philippe. 1612. The mysterie of iniquitie: that is to say, the historie of the papacie. Translated by Samson Lennard. London: Adam Islip. Flacius, Matthias. 1562. Catalogus testium veritatis qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae, enlarged edition. Strasbourg: Machaeropeus. —. 1556. Catalogus testium veritatis qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt Papae. Basel: Oporinus [Johann Herbst]. Foxe, John. 1570. The Ecclesiasticall history contaynyng the Actes and Monumentes of thynges passed in euery kynges tyme in this Realme especially in the Church of England. Newly recognised and inlarged. London: John Day. Frank, C. B. M. 1990. Untersuchungungen zum Catalogus testium veritatis des Matthias Flacius Illyricus. Ph.D. thesis. Tübingen: self-published. Gabrieli, Vittorio. 1957. Sir Kenelm Digby: un inglese italianato nell’età della Controriforma. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Gilson, Simon A. 2005. Dante and Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Grimm, Harold J. 1973. The Reformation Era. New York: Macmillan. Havely, Nick R. 2014. Dante’s British Public: Readers and Texts, from the Fourteenth Century to the Present. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 2004a. Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the ‘Commedia.’ Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

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—. 2004b. “Feeding the Flock with Wind: Protestant Uses of a Dantean Trope, from Foxe to Milton.” In John Foxe at Home and Abroad, edited by David Loades, 91-103. Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate. —. 2003. “‘An Italian Writer Against the Pope’? Dante in Reformation England, c. 1560 - c. 1640.” In Dante Metamorphoses: Episodes in a Literary Afterlife, edited by Eric G. Haywood, 127-49. Dublin: Four Courts Press. James, Thomas. 1625. An Explanation or Enlarging of the Ten Articles in the Supplication of Doctor James, lately Exhibited to the Clergy of England. Oxford: Lichfield and Turner. Kay, Richard, ed. 1998. “Monarchia.” Translated with a Commentary. Toronto: PIMS. Lewalski, Barbara K. 1998. “How Radical was the Young Milton.” In Milton and Heresy, edited by Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, 49-72. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —. 2000. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell. Lindberg, Carter. 1996. The European Reformations. Oxford: Blackwell. Macray, William D. 1890. Annals of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, with a Notice of the Earlier Library of the University. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maltzahn, Nicholas von. 2008. “Milton: Nation and Reception.” In Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, edited by Daniel Lowenstein and Paul Stevens, 401-42. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Martinelli, Luciana. 1966. Dante. Palermo: Palumbo. Milton, John. 1641. Of Reformation, Touching Church-Discipline in England: And the Causes that hitherto have hindered it. London: Thomas Underhill. —. 1968. Paradise Lost, edited by A. Fowler. London: Longman. Perrot de Mézières, François. 1586. Aviso piacevole dato alla bella Italia sopra la mentita data dal re di Navarra a pap Sisto V. (‘Monaco appresso Giovanni Swartz’; actually London: John Wolfe). Plumptre, E.H. 1886-7. The Commedia and Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri: A New Translation, 2 vols. London: William Ibister. Poole, William. 2014. “John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante.” Milton Quarterly, 48 (3): 139-70. Raymond, Joad. 2008. “Look Homeward Angel: Guardian Angels and Nationhood in Seventeenth-Century England.” In Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, edited by David Lowenstein and Paul Stevens, 139-72. Toronto: UP.

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Rutherford, Samuel. 1644. The Due Right of Presbyteries, or A Peaceable Plea for the government of the Church of Scotland. London: E. Griffin for Richard Whittaker and Andrew Crook. Ryrie, Alec. 1996. “The Problems of Legitimacy and Precedent in English Protestantism, 1539-47.” In Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, edited by Bruce Gordon, 2 vols, vol. 1, 7892. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Samuel , Irene. 1966. Dante and Milton: The Commedia and Paradise Lost. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Serjeantson, Deidre. 2014. “Milton and the Tradition of Protestant Petrarchism.” Review of English Studies, New Series 65. 272: 831-52. Shaw, Prudence. 1974-5. “La versione ficiniana della ‘Monarchia.” Studi danteschi 51: 289-408. Sozzi, Lionello. 1999. Boccaccio in Francia nel Cinquecento. Geneva: Slatkine. Stubbe(s), Henry. 1659. A Light Shining out of Darknes: or Occasional Queries submitted to the Judgement of such as would enquire into the true state of things in our Times. London: n.p. Sutcliffe, Matthew. 1600. Matthaei Sutlivii De vera Christi Ecclesia adversus Rob. Bellarminum. London: Edmund Bollifant. Toynbee, P.J. 1909. Dante in English Literature, from Chaucer to Cary (c. 1380-1844), 2 vols. London: Methuen. —. 1921. Dante Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Van Dorsten, Jan Adrianus. 1986. Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend. Leiden: Brill. Wallace, David. 2007. “Dante in English.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, 2nd ed., 281-304. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wilson, John Frederick. 1969. Pulpit in Parliament: Puritanism during the English Civil Wars, 1640-1648. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP. Wyatt, Michael. 2005. The Italian Encounter with England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

CHAPTER TWO ON HIS BLINDNESS: MILTON’S REPUTATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY ANDREW SANDERS

To read Thomas Babington Macaulay’s critical and historical essays, and, to judge from their phenomenal sales many literate Victorians did read those essays with something akin to religious zeal, John Milton’s elevated reputation as a writer went unchallenged in the nineteenth century. Milton, it would appear, was honoured both as a poet and as a man of principle. This was not, however, a universally held opinion. Milton’s status as one of the greatest poets in the English language was rarely questioned, but his freely expressed political opinions and his avowed republicanism tended to provoke Victorian commentators as much as they had divided his contemporaries. For Macaulay, however, the poet and the political thinker were integrally linked. Milton’s greatness as a poet could not be viewed as somehow detached from his politics. In many ways this was a novel argument because Milton’s political opinions, and his avowed republicanism, had been singularly ill-received during the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson’s strictures, as expressed in the Lives of the Poets (1781) can be taken as representative: His [Milton’s] political notions were those of an acrimonious and surly republican . . . Milton’s republicanism was, I am afraid, founded in an envious hatred of greatness, and sullen desire of independence; in petulance impatient of control and pride disdainful of superiority. He hated monarchs in the state, and prelates in the church; for he hated all whom he was required to obey. It is to be suspected that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish, and that he felt not so much the love of liberty as repugnance to authority. (Johnson 2009, 420)

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Such conservative disdain represented a good deal of informed opinion in its day, and, it scarcely needs to be pointed out, that it is a prejudice that is far from dead in the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, such conservative disdain for Milton’s republicanism was actively challenged in the opening years of the nineteenth century by those who espoused the radical principles of the French Revolution (such as William Blake) and by those who actively sympathised with Milton’s defence of republicanism (such as Shelley). Famously (for us), both Blake and Shelley were to see Milton as of the “devil’s party” and his Satan as the archetypical and heroic republican opponent of divine tyranny. The poetry was inseparable from the politics. Macaulay’s essays, written for the most part in the 1820s, are not republican either in tone or inclination, but they are the product of a postFrench Revolutionary liberalism. More properly, they express a liberalism conditioned both by the radical formulations of Revolutionary France and by an earlier European Revolutionary process: what we now call the “English Revolution” of the seventeenth century. Macaulay was a Whig, insistently proclaiming an inherited Whiggish view of English history in which the late-seventeenth-century Stuart kings were cast as tyrants whose ambitions had been thwarted by the representatives of the people assembled in Parliament. The struggle against unlimited monarchical power, it was argued, had begun with Magna Carta. It had later brought about the challenges to royal power in the 1640s which led to the trial and execution of King Charles I. Its principles had triumphed constitutionally with the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. For Macaulay the Whigs’ mission in the 1830s was to espouse the cause of gradualist parliamentary reform. This cause was emphatically a moral cause if not a republican one. The historic Milton was recast in the role of a hero who had struggled for enlightenment against the forces of darkness. This is how Macaulay defined Milton’s politics in his essay of 1825: His public conduct was such as was to be expected from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so powerful. He lived in one of the most memorable eras in the history of mankind, at the very crisis of the great conflict between Orasmades and Arimanes, liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That great battle was fought for no single generation, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty principles which have since worked their way into the depths of the American forests, which have roused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand years, and which, from one end of Europe to

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the other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors with an unwonted fear. (Macaulay 1825, 30-1)

Milton had therefore stood firm in a Zoroastrian struggle between light and darkness. Moreover, the victory of the principles he had espoused were now belatedly bearing fruit in the political systems of the modern European and American world. Gone are any ideas of “petulance”, “surliness” and “envious hatred.” Now we have Milton cast as a prophetic libertarian, a man whose words and actions have been wilfully misinterpreted by those who decline to accept the inevitability of political progress. Milton’s defence of the Commonwealth against the Crown, and his arguments in favour of a Republic, were to be those that fed into the intellectual justification of the Revolution of 1688. They in turn had come to shape the nineteenth-century debate about Reform and the Constitution: The principles of the [Glorious] Revolution have often been grossly misrepresented . . . There is a certain class of men, who, while they profess to hold in reverence the great names and actions of former times, never look at them for any other purpose than in order to find in them some excuse for existing abuses . . . To the blessings which England has derived from the Revolution these people ate utterly insensible. The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for nothing with them. (Macaulay 1825, 33)

Macaulay’s heroic Milton is no longer the despised, and perhaps deluded, regicide who happened to be a great poet: he is the harbinger of what have become the established liberties of the English people and the most articulate definer of novel political ideas. He belongs not just to a historic moment when he joined with other embattled radicals, but to the evolving debate about the nature of modern representative government. For Macaulay Milton the political apologist deserves to be seen in conjunction with the author of Paradise Lost as a key figure in the developing history of English life and letters: If he exerted himself to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted himself in conjunction with others. But the glory of the battle which he fought for the species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own . . . It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to be acquainted with the full power of the English language . . . Not even in the earlier books of

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Macaulay was perhaps the first critic to recognise not simply the genius of Milton as a prose writer but also the centrality of his polemics to the long discourse on the nature of personal and public liberty. It is clear from Macaulay’s pioneer essay that Milton has to be accepted within his historical context. As such Milton’s reputation cannot be selectively judged, with the “acrimonious and surly republican” somehow divorced from the Christian poet. What had intruded itself between Samuel Johnson’s assumptions and Macaulay’s was the French Revolution. Not only had the Revolution re-defined the Rights of Man, it had also taken republican principles to a new extreme. Charles I had been accused of tyranny and of making war against his people. Kings had been deposed and done away with often enough before, but none had been tried and judicially put to death in the name of the abused subjects of that king. A court, assembled in the name of the English people, had been set up by a victorious Parliament. It had found the King guilty of tyranny and imposed the penalty of death. The regicide may have profoundly shocked seventeenth-century Europe, but it established a new principle, albeit a dangerously radical one, for future generations. Whiggish historians like Macaulay saw the triumph of the representatives of the people over the arbitrary decisions of Charles I as the key to future political change. For Macaulay the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, by means of which Parliament assumed the right to depose and appoint kings, signified how the United Kingdom had come to embrace progressivist politics and had firmly established the idea of a constitutional monarchy. After 1789 the French Revolution was to take a singularly more radical path. Louis XVI readily recognised the parallels between himself and Charles I (indeed he was reading a French translation of Hume’s History of England during the last weeks of his imprisonment) but key members of the French Revolutionary tribunal had moved the debate about monarchy towards definitions alien even to the most radical of Oliver Cromwell’s followers. To the most radical French Revolutionaries the very idea of monarchy had become indefensible. A monarch was born a tyrant and he was, therefore, by definition the enemy of his people. Louis XVI’s crimes lay not in his actions as king but in the simple fact that he was a king. Macaulay’s determination to defend Milton as an apologist for regicide was an attempt to claim him back for the British constitutional model as opposed to a French one. In order to avert any return to what many saw as the “excesses” of Revolutionary France it seemed to Whigs like Macaulay

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that the English model of revolution must be explained, reinforced and adulated. The death of Charles I, it was argued, had established a monitory principle for future kings of England, and later of Great Britain. Charles’s successors had been required to recognise that they effectively shared in a “social contract” with their people. English kings had not been regarded as criminals by nature of their birth, but, as the reign of Charles I’s son, James II, had demonstrated, kings could be deemed tyrants if they undermined the Protestant settlement and the rule of law. From 1688 the kings of England were required to accept the checks to royal power that had been established by the representatives of the people in Parliament following what had come to be called the ‘Glorious Revolution’. This “Revolution” and the Declarations and Acts associated with it had formed the unwritten British Constitution that had held force throughout the eighteenth century. With debates about further, gradualist, reform of this Constitution current in the late 1820s Macaulay was determined to reclaim the regicidal and republican John Milton for the moderate English tradition in order to rescue him from the taint of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or, even worse, of Jean-Paul Marat. The immediate background to Macaulay’s essay on Milton is, therefore, that heated and extended debate about the nature of the British Constitution that culminated in the fraught passage of the Reform Act of 1832. It should also be remembered that the “Milton” essay is in fact a review of the English translation of the poet’s Latin treatise De Doctrina Christiana (the manuscript of which had recently be rediscovered). Macaulay asserts that the treatise contained “traces of a powerful and independent mind,” if one tainted by Arianism and biased towards polygamy. “The book,” Macaulay adds, “were it far more orthodox or far more heretical than it is, would not much edify or corrupt the present generation.” (Macaulay 1825, 3-4) The chief reason for such faint praise is that Macaulay seeks to redirect his readers’ attention away from theology and towards Milton’s other prose works, notably to the more politically charged pamphlets (though he is certainly aware that religious heterodoxy was more intellectually acceptable in the 1820s than it might have been in the 1660s). The “era of reform,” we should remember, was also the age in which the discriminatory laws against Protestant Nonconformists were repealed. These laws, which dated from the time of the Restoration, had effectively driven Dissenters out of the Church of England and obliged them to accept limited civil rights. Non-Conformists had been excluded from the English Universities and under the terms of the Test Act of 1673 had been banned from holding public office. The earlier Corporation Act had restricted members of civic corporations to communicant members of

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the Church of England. English Dissenters (Quakers, Independents, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Unitarians and latterly Methodists) had been politically marginalised but had been free to concentrate on commerce, trade and industry (as they had done very successfully). After the repeal of the discriminatory Acts in 1828 and 1829, and with the removal of sanctions against Catholics in 1829, Great Britain and Ireland had ceased to be dominated by a single religious confession and had been effectively a “plural” nation. By 1830 the Restoration religious settlement had been undone and in the northern industrial cities in particular the nonconformist presence had emerged as emphatic. Though the Church of England remained the dominant and “established” church, liberties had been newly accorded to the non-Anglican Protestant sects which had flourished in Cromwell’s time and which had most nearly echoed John Milton’s definitions of Christian practise and doctrine. When discriminatory tests, which had excluded non-Anglicans from study at Oxford were finally removed in 1871 a dissenting presence gradually, but emphatically, manifested itself. The Unitarians established themselves at Manchester College in 1889 (as it name suggests, this pioneering college had been founded a hundred years earlier at Manchester). In 1886 Mansfield College, a theological institution founded in Birmingham for Congregationalists in the 1830s, was transferred to Mansfield Road in Oxford. Its Chapel looks conventionally Anglican but its stained glass windows tell an alternative story. Instead of showing founding or patron saints from the Catholic tradition, one window boasts images of Cromwell and Hampden. Another is dedicated to Milton.

Milton and Cromwell Macaulay’s essay on Milton is essentially a response to a new liberal, bourgeois Zeitgeist. Both Milton’s politics and his religion are described as if they have a fresh modern resonance. Where a link between radical politics and dissenting religion might have affronted an eighteenth-century Anglican, such as Samuel Johnson, a nineteenth-century advocate of Reform seems to be required to respond to them with an open-minded sympathy. Crucially too, Macaulay’s Milton could now be linked to what was once the semi-toxic name of Cromwell without evoking an established set of negative prejudices. Cromwell was a hero not simply to constitutional reformers, but, more importantly, to religious nonconformists. To many members of the English establishment Cromwell remained irredeemably villainous, but to those who shared Cromwell’s religious predilections (such as the founders of Manchester and Mansfield

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Colleges), and to those who had espoused the spirit of Reform, he was increasingly viewed as a champion of liberty and conscience. Macaulay’s fanciful Conversation between Mr Cowley and Mr Milton concerning the Great Civil War published in Knight’s Quarterly Magazine in August 1824 suggests something of Cromwell’s newly acquired heroic status. In this “imaginary conversation” Milton adulates Cromwell’s character, valour and talent for good government: He gave to his country a form of government so free and admirable that, in near six thousand years, human wisdom hath never devised any more excellent contrivance for human happiness. To himself he reserved so little power that it would scarcely have sufficed for his safety, and it is a marvel that it could suffice for his ambition . . . what sovereign was ever more princely in pardoning injuries, in conquering enemies, in extending the dominions and the renown of his people? What sea, what shore did he not mark with imperishable memorials of his friendship or his vengeance? . . . While every foreign state trembled at our arms, we sat secure from all assault. War, which often so strangely troubles both husbandry and commerce, never silenced the song of our reapers, or the sound of our looms. Justice was equally administered; God was freely worshipped. (Macaulay 1824, Vol.1, 327-28)

This “conversation” purports to have taken place in the 1670s and it is replete with Biblical reference and telling anecdote. It is, however, the mention of “the sound of our looms” that suggests that it is also meant to have an immediate relevance to modern industrial England. It was indeed in the city of looms, “Cottonopolis”, Manchester, that Cromwell’s reputation saw its strongest revival in the nineteenth century. When Manchester’s new Assize Courts were constructed in 1859-64 to the designs of Alfred Waterhouse they were decorated with heads of English sovereigns (with Cromwell conspicuously amongst them). A marble bust of the Lord Protector (by Matthew Noble of 1861) was placed in the sculpture gallery of the new Town Hall and a third sculpture (also by Noble) was erected in 1875 in close proximity to the Anglican cathedral (the diocese was founded only in 1847). This last image, doubtless intentionally provocative of Anglican sensibilities, was moved to Wythenshawe Park in the mid-twentieth century. It should not surprise us that Manchester, with its high percentage of Dissenting opinion, should find Cromwell so sympathetic a figure and so potent a symbol. By the middle years of the nineteenth century Cromwell had a radical following that stretched beyond religious nonconformity. A far from unfavourable portrait of him had been presented in Scott’s Woodstock of 1826. Scott had even given the Lord Protector a considered apologia for

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his military pursuit of the defeated Charles II after the Battle of Worcester, an apologia replete with Biblical reference and noble statesmanlike reasoning. A yet more noble Cromwell is the central character in Horace Smith’s Oliver Cromwell: An Historical Romance of 1840. Smith’s Cromwell is more than a Biblically justified statesman: he is a latter-day David, called by God to be a King over His chosen people. At one point he prays for due humility amidst strong affirmations of his vocation to rule: But thou, Lord, knowest—thou beholdest—yea! thou readest the most inward thoughts of this thy servant—continue me then, O thou most merciful and mighty One, continue me thine instrument; and shield me from the power of the evil one; and be thy word a lantern to my feet; and keep me, even as I am now—thine O Lord, thy servant and thine only! (Smith 1840, Vol.2, chapter 8)

This too is the Man of Destiny adulated by Thomas Carlyle both in the last of his lectures on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History of 1841 and in his Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches of 1845. For Carlyle, Cromwell is a Davidic King by the nature of his actions, if not in name and title. He is, moreover, representative of “our English genius against the world” and the very soul of the Puritan revolution in human affairs that has proved to be “a revolt transcendentally memorable, and an epoch in the World’s history.” (Carlyle 1846, Vol.1, 12, 18-19) Carlyle’s sense of Cromwell as the divinely-inspired revolutionary who galvanised the historical moment at a crisis in the evolution of English politics was to inspire a generation of susceptible Victorians. This was particularly true of those drawn to the kind of radicalism represented by the Chartists. The account in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford (1861) of the radicalisation of the novel’s hero is revealing. Tom, whose morally upright schooldays at Rugby under Dr Arnold, had been so memorably chronicled by Hughes, finds himself in the later narrative briefly drawn into a world where Chartism offers a plausible political future. Despite Tom’s social privileged, conventionally Tory background, Dr Arnold’s insistent moral indoctrination has evidently inclined the university student towards radical action (what is described as a belief in “democracy” and “glorious humanity”). He consequently takes down an engraving of George III, which had decorated his college rooms, and replaces it with “the solemn face of John Milton”. He adds to this decorative scheme a facsimile of Magna Carta and, in a place of honour, a facsimile of “the death-warrant of Charles I with its grim and resolute row of signatures and seals.” When Tom’s father, a Berkshire squire and a man “full of living and vehement convictions,” comes to visit he leaves his don’s rooms downcast (“he had

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been bred in the times when it was held impossible for a gentleman or a Christian to hold such views as his son had been maintaining.” (Hughes 1906, 402, 408) Tom Brown grows out of this temporary extreme, but his undergraduate sympathies are telling for they have gone far further than the Macaulayan liberalism that had first moulded his ideas. He is doing far more than reacting against his father’s conventional Toryism. He is attempting to re-define himself, his politics and, indeed, English history. It may well be that these re-definitions of English history, and the reassessment of both Cromwell’s reputation and of his achievement, are reflected in the resurgence of interest in nineteenth-century paintings of the Lord Protector. It is true that there is a particularly conspicuous absence of a representation of Cromwell in the pictorial and sculptural decorations of the new Houses of Parliament, but that may well reflect a particular, and perhaps local, sensitivity.1 Elsewhere, the image of Cromwell as man of action and man of prayer appears to have had a real currency. Augustus Egg’s Cromwell before Naseby of 1859 shows the general rapt in prayer with an open Bible before him. He is shown in his tent on the eve of the momentous battle, but his armour is laid by in order, it seems, to address himself to the God of Battles. As Cromwell is seen through an opening of his tent, Victorian observers might well have been reminded of Hogarth’s famous representation of the actor David Garrick as the tormented Richard III. Shakespeare’s Richard is haunted by the ghosts of those he has slaughtered while his rival, Richmond, is ritually blessed by these same ghosts. Hogarth had shown a solitary Richard, just as Egg shows us the isolated figure of the devout Cromwell, but there is no doubting the torment of the cursed king as opposed to the devout earnestness of the Puritan general and his cause. There is also no sense of this man as a rebel or a usurper. A brooding, if less military, Cromwell appears in Ford Madox Brown’s painting AD 1630. Cromwell on his Farm (originally painted as a watercolour 1853-54 and reproduced in oils 1874). Brown’s Cromwell is shown as a young man contemplating his unfolding destiny at a low point in his life. The true nature of that destiny is suggested by the half-open Bible in his left hand. Brown had taken his cue for his painting from a passage in Carlyle’s Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches which describes the as yet dejected young man “hoping to walk with integrity and humble devout diligence through this world; and by his Maker’s

1

For this see Andrew Sanders, In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2013 pp. 107-123.

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infinite mercy, to escape destruction, and find Salvation.”2 Here then is the man awaiting his moment. When Ford Madox Brown returned to a Cromwellian subject in 1878 with his Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois Cromwell has evidently realised his destiny. Crucially however, it is the presence of John Milton in Brown’s painting that seems to reinforce the divine nature of Cromwell’s mission. Juxtaposing the Lord Protector and the poet serves both to politicise Milton and to give Cromwell something akin to philosophical justification. Milton had been portrayed in Horace Smith’s novel Oliver Cromwell as an essentially humanising presence, but in Brown’s painting the poet is shown as dramatically and morally integral to Cromwell’s policies. The dramatic scene represented by Brown shows Cromwell’s reaction to the news of the murder of Waldensian Protestants in Piedmont in 1655. The scandal of the massacre had famously prompted Milton’s sonnet On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints’), a poem that had moved the sonnet form far away from its origins as a moody love-poem into the realm of prophetic utterance inspired by the Hebrew Bible. Brown shows Cromwell in armour poised as if already prepared for military action. Across a map-strewn table sits a blind Milton who is engaged in translating the general’s angry English words into diplomatic Latin (his dictation is recorded by an attentive figure who is generally taken to be Andrew Marvell). Significantly, Brown originally intended this painting to form a companion piece to a representation of “John Brown rescuing Negro slaves”. Its, and Milton’s, radical credentials were thus never in doubt to alert nineteenth-century audiences. In Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois we are presented with the image of the man of affirmative military action, one prepared to take diplomacy a stage further. But we are also shown a passive Milton. His blindness precludes physical action, but his anger at the persecution of fellow Protestants is about to be translated into words and verse. This is Milton the poet and intellectual who is also tempered by a love of music (he is seated in front of a chamber organ). Brown is showing us the vita contemplativa complemented by the vita activa. Brown’s painting re-casts Cromwell and Milton as the joint defenders of Protestantism, and thus, in the eyes of many latter-day Protestants, as progressives and libertarians. A parallel Protestant affinity may be evident in the work of two other once popular nineteenth-century painters of historical subjects. Neither was British. David Dalhoff Neal was, by origin, a New Englander who had studied at the Royal Academy in Munich. He latterly divided his time 2

For this see Sanders op. cit. pp. 109-12.

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between the studios he maintained in Bavaria and New York City and he exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite his inherited Protestant sympathy Neal’s subjects are not uniformly biased towards Protestant history (The Chapel of the Nonberg Convent, Salzburg of 1864, and Nuns at Prayer of 1884 show ostentatiously devout nuns) but his Oliver Cromwell of Ely visits Mr John Milton of 1883 follows the pattern set by Ford Madox Brown. Neal’s painting, which is now in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, shows a well-furnished seventeenth-century apartment in which a buff-jacketed young Cromwell stands rapt as he listens to Milton playing a chamber organ. Milton seems to be unaware of his visitor’s arrival, but whether this is indicative of his failing eye-sight we cannot tell because the instrument at which he is seated is on a half landing. What is manifest is that Cromwell is playing court to a scholar whose well-stocked book-case and untidy desk suggest intellectual as well as musical aspirations. Yet again Cromwell is represented as responsive to Milton’s humanism and tempered by it. A similar Protestant bias may well inform Mihály Munkácsy’s The Blind Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughters. The picture had been first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1878. Like Neal, Munkásy had studied in Munich (as well as Vienna and Düsseldorf), but, having changed his name from Michael von Lieb, he espoused a strident Hungarian nationalism. Perhaps surprisingly, the image of Milton may well be integral to this nationalism for Milton had long figured both in a European Protestant hagiography and in antiCatholic propaganda. Hungary had an influential Calvinist minority and its nationalist hero, Lajos Kossuth (himself a Protestant), had apparently taught himself English in an Austrian prison by reading the King James version of the Bible. The Blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost was in many ways the making of Munkásy both in Hungary and abroad. The painting was bought, and then re-sold, by the Austrian dealer Charles Sedelmeyer who also offered the artist a ten year contract. This not only made him a rich man but opened up the international art scene to him. Three versions of the Milton remain in public collections (including the Hungarian National Museum and the New York Public Library). It also enjoyed considerable success as an engraved image. Neal’s and Munkácsy’s paintings indicate the wide currency of Milton’s reputation as a poet and a political radical. Neal’s picture emphasises the Cromwellian connection without intimating that Milton’s political commitments might ever have struck later generations as compromising. Munkácsy’s shows a Protestant poet heroically pursuing his art despite his disabilities (there is no proto-feminist suggestion that Milton might be exploiting his hard-pressed daughters). Through the

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medium of engraving and photogravure both pictures appear to have shared the kind of popular esteem accorded to their contemporary, Ford Madox Brown’s Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois. The pictures share with Macaulay’s Essays the awareness that Milton’s ideas possessed a real currency in the nineteenth century. Influential historians, critics and artlovers were happy to reassess Milton’s achievement and to see his political affiliations as integral to his art as a poet. Johnson’s “envious hater of greatness” could now be accepted both as a radical hero and as a great national poet. The last word must again be Macaulay’s: The sight of his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us . . . Nor do we envy the man who can study either the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot, without aspiring to emulate, not, indeed the sublime works with which his genius has enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he laboured for the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his country and with his fame.3

Works Cited Carlyle, Thomas. 1846. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucudations, Vol. 1. London. Hughes, Thomas. (1861) 1906. Tom Brown at Oxford. London: Macmillan. Johnson, Samuel. (2009). “Milton.” In Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson: A Tercentenary Celebration, edited by Peter Martin, 420. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Macaulay, T. B. (August 1824) 1898. “Conversation between Mr Cowley and Mr Milton concerning the Great Civil War”. Reprinted in The Works of Lord Macaulay: Speeches, Poems and Miscellaneous Writings. 327-28. 2 Vols. London. —. (August 1825) 1845. “Milton.” In Vol. 1 of Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (8th ed). 30-31. London. —. Critical and Historical Essays Vol. 1. pp.60-61. Sanders, Andrew. 2013. In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smith, Horace. 1840. Oliver Cromwell: An Historical Romance. Vol. 2 Chapter 8. London. 3

Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays Vol. 1. pp. 60-61.

CHAPTER THREE MILTON AND THE QUESTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: POLITICAL REALITY AND IDEAL CONCEPTIONS ELIZA RICHTER

Thinking of John Milton as a visionary, according to the title of the present publication, his perception of English national identity is particularly relevant. Milton’s relevance pertains not only to his ideal conceptions of national identity but also to his personal identity as an Englishman; and further to the development of these during his lifetime. As a Secretary for Foreign Tongues Milton held an office in the Commonwealth of England from 1649 until 1659. Thus, he became an official representative of the English government, a position that influenced his personal and ideal conception of English national identity decisively. The focus of this chapter is Milton’s complex national identity in regard to his ideal conceptions and personal identity as published in his political writings between 1649 and 1660. Of main interest here is the period of the English Commonwealth when he became a civil servant, although his earlier and later works are also touched upon. The portrayal of Milton’s relation to England as well as his personal and ideal national identity will be analysed in terms of characteristics and decisive developments. The aim of this essay is not to be an in-depth analysis of a specific text, but rather to give an overview of how Milton’s conceptions of national identity changed over time to a general defence of liberty that transcended nationality but paradoxically remained a characteristic of Englishness for Milton. While he was on his ‘grand tour’ through France and Italy in 1638 and 1639, Milton visited Count Camillo Cerdogni, a Protestant aristocrat, in Naples and wrote the following quote by Horace in his autograph book: “I change my sky but not my mind when I cross the sea.” (in Latin: “Coelum non animam muto dum trans mare curro.”); and he signed: “Joannes Miltonius, Anglus” (“John Milton, Englishman”) as Stephen Dobranski

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points out (2012, 15). Thus, Milton was abroad shortly before the advent of the English Civil War; his identity as an Englishman with an ‘English mind’ apparently stable at that point in time. Even prior to his time on the Continent, Milton planned to write a great English epic to celebrate “the glory of the nation”. This serves as accentuation of his strong sense of national identity and intention to propagandise Englishness (“John Milton” 2000, 1771). As remarked by Paul Stevens (2009, 345), these brief examples already foreshadow that the category of ‘nation’ would play a central role in the majority of Milton’s political writings. Furthermore, Milton and his work were closely connected to contemporary English politics and the rule of the Parliament as well as the Council of State (and later also Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector) in the Commonwealth of England. Milton’s involvement with the English government greatly impacted both his career and private life. Despite (or conversely, specifically because of) this involvement, the relation of the poet to his home country during the turbulent seventeenth century was not always as clear-cut as his self-portrayal from his journey through Europe might suggest. The Council of State offered John Milton the appointment of Secretary for Foreign Tongues in 1649, after Charles I was convicted of high treason. This would turn Milton into a spokesman for England. Milton himself reminisced about the taking up of his profession: “[T]hose very deliverers of the country . . . by general consent . . . spontaneously assigned me; namely, to defend publicly (if any one ever did) the cause of the people of England, and thus of liberty itself” (Second Defence 1999, 316). His profession as a spokesman consequently influenced his role as a poet; for Milton his work came to represent a service to his country. Milton had earned a reputation as a supporter of republicanism and the conviction of Charles I, through the publication of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. This reputation made him an eligible candidate for the office of Secretary for Foreign Tongues. The Tenure was meant to demonstrate that the people possessed a lawful right to execute a sovereign if he had violated their freedom and had become “a Tyrant, or Wicked King” (Tenure 1999, 53). Freedom plays a significant role in Milton’s political writings and conceptions of English national identity. The first page of the Tenure already indicates as such: “For indeed, none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence” (Tenure 1999, 53). Thus, deposing a tyrant from office and executing him for his crimes against his people, which he had turned into the “Kings slave[s]”, as Milton put it, was an act of liberation that good men were bound to

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perform (Tenure 1999, 61). According to this interpretation, the government of the Commonwealth of England stood for this liberation from tyranny. It became an ideal form of rule for Milton; corresponding to a characteristically English aspiration for liberty which he emphasised in his political writings (cf. Milton, 1999, 53; 315; 416). It is apparent that his personal situation was directly influenced by the English government from 1649 onwards. His work was commissioned by the government owing to his position as Secretary for Foreign Tongues. Lois Potter points out that Milton’s duties included the translation and composition of foreign correspondence; but that “[h]is first and most immediate assignment was to set minds at rest in England by writing an answer to Eikon Basilike – a thankless task since it obliged him to attack a dead man” (1980, 24). Eikon Basilike, which means ‘royal portrait’, was an alleged autobiography of Charles I, which turned out to be immensely popular. The beheading of the king had turned England into a political outsider within Europe and the emerging cult of King Charles as a Christian martyr aggravated this situation. In response to the growing popularity of Eikon Basilike, Milton was commissioned to write a defence of the regicide: Milton’s Eikonoklastes, meaning ‘image-breaker’, was published in October 1649. It was widely-read even though the period of nine months ensuing the execution of Charles I was long enough for the image of the king as a martyr to spread further. Milton might have anticipated that this publication could not shatter the king’s positive image. He therefore emphasised at the outset that this work had been assigned and that he had not chosen to write against a king (Eikonoklastes 2013, 277). This reluctance of Milton to condemn monarchy on principal is corroborated in the Tenure, in which he stressed that it was necessary to differentiate between monarchy and tyranny. Consequently, he did not automatically view every monarch as a tyrant. In Eikonoklastes, Milton’s main aim was to rail against the mystification of the king. This is accented in the preface: Nevertheless for their sakes who through custom, simplicitie, or want of better teaching, have not more seriously considered Kings, then in the gaudy name of Majesty, and admire them and thir doings, as if they breath’d not the same breath with other mortal men, I shall make no scruple to take up […] this Gauntlet, though a King, in the behalf of Libertie, and the Common-wealth. (Milton, Eikonoklastes 2013, 275)

Milton not only denied the mystification of the king but also ranged him on the same level as every other “mortal man”. He contended that he did so on behalf of “Libertie, and the Common-wealth.” This calls attention to Milton’s conviction of himself as a spokesman for the nation; a man who

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thought to know what was best for England. Liberty and the English Commonwealth are inextricably bound in Milton’s ideal conception of national identity. These bound elements oppose a mystified monarchy as embodied by Charles I in Eikon Basilike. So what was the role of the monarch according to Milton? The demystification of the king in Eikonoklastes correlates with the monarch’s position under the law, which Milton emphasises in the Tenure: “be he King, or Tyrant, or Emperour, the Sword of Justice is above him” (1999, 58). Milton ascribed the institution of monarchy to a human longing for organisation. To his thinking, this was why people “saw it needful to ordaine som authoritie” to particularly apt men (ibid., 59). According to Milton, the fact that the office of king was invested by the people confirmed his notion that the monarch was neither chosen by God nor was he superior to other men. As it was the people that put a king in office “in trust . . . to the Common good of them all” it was in their hands to take that office away (Tenure 1999, 60). Thus, a king or a magistrate who transgressed this agreement became a tyrant and could, in Milton’s opinion, be dethroned and even lawfully executed. Milton held that the relation between king and people was based on a contract, an agreement to assure that the king’s power would be “imployed to the common peace and benefit”. The implication of this being that it was the people’s “liberty therefore and right remaining in them to reassume it to themselves, if by Kings or Magistrates it be abus’d” (ibid., 66). Thus, a king or a magistrate who transgressed this agreement became a tyrant and could, in Milton’s opinion, be dethroned and even lawfully executed. Some of these transgressions are mentioned in Tenure, for example, if the king reigned only for himself; did not regard the law or common good; or if he committed “innumerable wrongs and oppressions” in his position as monarch (ibid., 66). Such breaches of the agreement belabour the likelihood of a king turning into a tyrant as “the temptation of such a power left absolute in thir hands, perverted them at length to injustice and partialitie” (ibid., 59). While Milton clearly differentiated between a monarch and a tyrant and implied that these concepts do not automatically coincide, he admitted that there were potential disadvantages to a governing system with a single ruler and preferred the system of the Commonwealth. He therefore asserted the importance of a parliament: “To sum up the whole truth, Parliament is the supreme council of the nation, constituted and appointed by an absolutely free people, and armed with ample power and authority” (Defence 1999, 275). A parliament as appointed by the people stood in contrast to a monarch who claimed investment by God. Convinced of the

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advantages of the Commonwealth of England, Milton addressed readers of other nations; asking provocatively why they still relied on kingship: How is it, that what I am seen to do openly against kings, in a commonwealth, you have not the spirit to attempt, unless secretly and by stealth, against a commonwealth in a kingdom, and under the patronage of kings? Why cast a cloud over supreme power, the sovereign grace, by this invidious and suspicious timidity? (Milton, Second Defence 1999, 323)

Milton ridiculed other nations for lacking the spirit of the English, apropos of their establishment of a Commonwealth and the abolishment of kingship. These monarchical nations were thus to be denied “supreme power”; the power of the people represented in parliament without a monarch who might easily become a tyrant. This again emphasises Milton’s strong belief in the system of the Commonwealth and his perception of it as substantial progress. The significance of liberty as a central value and characteristic, in particular with regard to his ideal conception of national identity, is apparent in Milton’s writing. It is, however, necessary to define what he meant by ‘liberty’. In Tenure, he remarked: “No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all creatures, born to command and not to obey” (Tenure 1999, 58). Milton perceived freedom as innate and God-given to man in general. He further maintained that the nature of man was to be unwilling to be subordinate. It is in man’s nature to command, or as Martin Dzelzainis put it: “For Milton, to be independent and free [was], literally speaking, not to be dependent in the slightest degree” (1995, 1617). He therefore argued against tyranny as it goes against human nature in its subordination of others and constraint of people’s liberty. The English identity that Milton idealises in his political writings is marked by an aspiration for liberty that manifested in two historical events: first, in the break with the Catholic Church and the Pope in the Reformation under Henry VIII; and second, in the execution of Charles I for high treason. In a 1654 publication called the Second Defence of the People of England Milton had defended the English against foreign disparagement and glorified these events : “[T]he effulgent virtue of its [England’s] citizens . . . delivered the Commonwealth from a grievous domination, and religion from a most debasing thraldom” (Second Defence 1999, 315). Protestantism is the subject of this remark in the first Defence: “we cannot endure Popery; for we perceive it to be not so much a religion as a pontifical despotism decked out, under pretence of religion” (Defence 1999, 112). He thus regarded the English desire for liberty as being

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embodied in both the people’s Protestantism and the establishment of the Commonwealth following the execution of the ‘tyrant’ Charles I. His use of the inclusive ‘we’ accentuates that Milton spoke for the English people in the Defence. He further established that the English national identity was inconsistent with popery, which constrained their freedom and hence represented a form of tyranny. Milton celebrated, furthermore, the regicide of Charles I as liberation from slavery by his “glorious fellow-citizens . . . , their country’s saviors, whose deathless deeds . . . ring round the world” (Defence 1999, 102). Both events were presented as particularly ‘English’ and served as proof of the national nature to strive for freedom. Milton also attested his admiration for these achievements by referring to the doers’ “magnanimity peculiar to heroes” (Defence 1999, 123). Within Europe, England was turned into a political outsider by way of these events. The execution of the English king was regarded as disreputable by many on the Continent. This disreputableness is averred by the Frenchman Claudius Salmasius (Claude Saumaise) in his Defensio Regia pro Carolus I written in 1649. Salmasius attacked the English people and their Parliament for the execution of their monarch and even accused them of parricide: “A horrible message has lately struck our ears, but our minds more, with a heinous wound concerning a parricide committed in England in the person of a king, by an execrable conspiracy of sacrilegious men” (Salmasius 1999, 104). Milton was again compelled to reaction; he wrote the Defence of the People of England (Defensio pro Populo Anglicano) which was published in 1651. On the title-page, the author presented himself as “John Milton an Englishman” (“Ioannis Miltoni Angli”) underlining his national identity and his role as a spokesman for and defender of the English (Defence 1999, 99). Milton condescendingly referred to Salmasius as a “tuppenny-thrippenny outlandish pedant” (Defence 1999, 109) and “a foreigner and an utter stranger” who did outlandish experience England under Charles I in contrast to John Milton, “an eye-witness and a native” (Defence 1999, 116). An emphasis on Milton’s national identity ensured a clear contrast between Salmasius’s status as stranger and Milton’s credibility as an eyewitness. Englishness thus served as a bond of cohesion against any foreign criticism and Milton again presented himself as a spokesman for the English people and took a firm stance on the conviction of Charles I. Milton discussed Salmasius’s Defensio Regia almost word by word, thus trying to debunk the Frenchman’s charges against the English: Take notice now how much I, a single of one of those Englishmen that you have the impudence to call ‘madmen, unlearned, ignoble, wicked,’ slight and despise you: that the English nation in general should make any public

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notice of such a worm as you would be an infinite undervaluing of themselves. (Milton, Defence 1999, 124-5)

Milton perceived the country’s development as evidence of the English people’s unique, characteristic aspiration for liberty. The Continent, on the other hand, viewed events in England with suspicion. Milton’s Second Defence was written in reaction to the anonymous publication Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanos (The Cry of the Royal Blood to Heaven, against the English Parricides) written by the French-English Anglican clergyman Peter du Moulin in 1652. Milton falsely identified the author as Alexander More: “He is one ‘More,’ part Scot part Frenchman, . . . an unprincipled fellow, who . . . is without fidelity, without veracity, without gratitude” (Second Defence 1999, 326). As he had done with the Defensio Regia by Salmasius, Milton commented du Moulin’s attack exhaustively, intending to confute his accusations that were not only aimed at the English but also at Milton’s persona. For example, when du Moulin mocked him for his blindness, Milton responded. “As to blindness, I would rather at last have mine, if it must be so, than . . . yours. Yours, immersed in the lowest sense, so blinds your mind, that you can see nothing sound or solid” (Second Defence 1999, 342). He further clarified that “I am not grown torpid by indolence, since my eyes have deserted me, but am still active, still ready to advance among the foremost to the most arduous struggles for liberty” (Second Defence 1999, 343). These “struggles for liberty” represented Milton’s greatest asset as he held a perspicuous belief that men were born free; the English appeared to be the only people who lived up to this natural, innate liberty by freeing themselves from what Milton deemed religious and monarchical tyranny. For this reason, he reinforced the popular perspective of the English as God’s ‘elect nation’. Andrew Hadfield remarks that this view of the English had come about earlier, after the break with the Catholic Church (2003, 178). Milton himself had emphasised England’s ‘elect’ status in one of his early poems, “On the Fifth of November” (“In Quintum Novembris”) from 1626. The poem, in remembrance of the thwarted Gunpowder Plot of 1605, described Satan’s arrival in England and how he is moved by what he sees: ‘And having roamed the world, I’ve found this thing alone worth tears,’ he said: ‘this race alone rebellious to me, resentful of rule, and still stronger than my skill’ (2009, 213; vv.40-42)

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He sees the English as the only “race” that actively resists Satan, which in this case must be read as a reference to the Reformation. In this fashion, Milton turned the tables and changed the position of England from an outsider into that of a pioneer. He turns the English into “[a] people that has felt the yoke of slavery heavy on its neck” who was “wise and learned and noble enough to know what should be done to its oppressor” (Defence 1999, 123). National identity notwithstanding, Milton underlined the importance of a world-wide brotherhood of men: “Who knows not that there is a mutual bond of amity and brother-hood between man and man over all the World” (Tenure 1999, 68). Even though this global brotherhood and the elect status of the English nation seem to stand in contrast at first glance, they are both rooted in Milton’s ideal of liberty: He therfore that keeps peace with me, neer remote, of whatsoever Nation, is to mee as farr as all civil and human offices an Englishman and a neighbour; but if an Englishman forgetting all Laws, human, civil and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the Law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better then a Turk, a Sarasin, a Heathen. (Milton, Tenure 1999, 68)

Milton did circumscribe his idea of a global brotherhood to a Christian community; excluding Turks, Sarasins and heathens from it. He referred to those (Christian) men “of whatsoever Nation” that kept peace with him as fellow Englishmen. This marks a frame of reference that expresses a paradoxical acceptance, which transcends the national. Milton’s sentiment signifies that being an Englishman is not necessarily bound to England or to being English by birth. He sees being an Englishman as synonymous with a common aspiration for liberty and keeping peace with one another. It follows that those who adhere to these principles and are of Christian belief are Englishman to him. Consequently, it can be argued that English identity embodies an ideal according to Milton, changing from mere nationality to a desirable status which is obtainable to people of other nationalities. Elizabeth Sauer refers to this concept as “a fascinating expression international nationalism” in order to grasp the paradoxical nature of Milton’s ideal conception of Englishness (Sauer 2014, 15). This term employed by Sauer, however, might be slightly misleading as it is not nationalism that is of primary importance to Milton; for him, Englishness becomes an embodiment of peacekeeping and liberation, which are his greatest assets. As an ideal, Englishness thus represents a community of shared values that is independent from actual nationality, detached from the nation and which Milton primarily glorifies because of the values it stands for.

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This difference between Englishness as an ideal and Englishness by birth becomes particularly clear when these values are violated: those born Englishmen might be banned from Milton’s ideal concept of Englishness if laws are transgressed or liberty is restricted. This inevitably leads to exclusion and results in denunciation of them as being no better than heretics. Consequently, Milton’s ideal concept of English national identity is different from the usual meaning of the term: it becomes a form of distinction that stands for peace, Christian belief and a general aspiration for liberty. In the Second Defence, Milton elaborated on his role as a defender of liberty which he expanded from a national level to a “universal” level: I am aided by the divine favour and help, in undertakings of the greatest magnitude, planned for the needed service of my country, and tending to be of the highest use to society and to religion, not in respect of one people only, [...] but rather of the universal race of man against the enemies of man’s freedom. (Milton, Second Defence 1999, 321)

Milton considered his service as a speaker of the nation and his profession as a Secretary of Foreign Tongues to be beneficial not only to England but also to “the universal race of man” and its liberty. Freedom thus served as a binding principle that went beyond national borders. England was again presented as a pioneer in terms of its aspiration for freedom and in being a role model for other nations. In this Milton believed himself to play no small role through his office in the Commonwealth of England. Moreover, the fact that the English were “aided by the divine favour” according to his interpretation further underlines the idea of England as an ‘elect nation’. This concept was originally applied to the people of Israel in the Old Testament to underline their status as God’s chosen people (Grabes 2001, 174). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this idea was transferred to the English people as a means to legitimise and promote the Protestant Reformation; Milton also employed it in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published in 1643 in which he explained that “England hath had this honour vouchsaft from Heav’n, to give out reformation to the World” (Divorce 2013, 110). Therefore, Milton emphasised the outstanding role of Protestantism in the Christian community. When the Second Defence was published in 1654, Milton appeared to anticipate that despite his effort and support the Commonwealth might not be a durable governing system for the English. With this in mind, he declared: “As for myself, to whatever state things may return, I have performed, and certainly with a good will, I hope not in vain, the service which I thought would be of most use to the commonwealth” (Second Defence 1999, 412-413).

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So how did the Restoration shape Milton’s perception of England? Dzelzainis summarises his development from the launch of his career as a Secretary for Foreign Tongues until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 as “an initial enthusiasm followed by a grim slide towards disenchantment” (1995, 82). Milton’s idealised notion of English national identity had relied on the governing system of the Commonwealth. With the collapse of this system he became embittered and disappointed in the English people whom he had seen as the “brightest example” of liberation from tyranny (Second Defence 1999, 413). Shortly before the return of the son of Charles I to England, Milton published his 1660 treatise, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. This work was a bold attempt to persuade the English to reject the return of kingship. Here, Milton clearly contrasted the merit in preserving the free Commonwealth to the disadvantages of kingship; monarchy being a form of government he believed to be “unnecessarie burdensome and dangerous” (Free Commonwealth 1999, 416). Milton elaborates that the English Parliament “knew the people of England to be a free people, themselves the representers of that freedom”. This form of government accordingly respected the “law of nature” of the English and of man as such; which was, according to Milton, “the only law of laws truly and properly to all mankind fundamental” (Free Commonwealth 1999, 417). As pointed out, in the global brotherhood Milton had espoused in Tenure eleven years earlier, it seemed more important to respect each other’s liberty than being an Englishman by birth. Milton appealed to people’s conscience in Free Commonwealth. He expressed his disappointment in the English people for the loss of their freedom if they returned to kingship, “making vain and viler then dirt the blood of so many thousand faithfull English men, who left us libertie, bought with thir lives” (Free Commonwealth 1999, 421). The “faithfull” Englishman appeals to his synonymously used and inseparably connected belief of liberation from tyranny as the ideal English identity. The restoration of the monarchy destroyed this ideal notion of English identity by putting an end to his perception of the English as an ‘elect nation’ that stood up for liberation from tyranny. In a last attempt, Milton tried to convince the readers of the advantages of the free Commonwealth to avert a return to kingship: [It is] not only held by wisest men in all ages the noblest, the manliest, the equallest, the justest government, the most agreeable to all due libertie and proportiond equalitie, both human, civil, and Christian, most cherishing to vertue and true religion. (Milton, Free Commonwealth 1999, 421-2)

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Milton obviously regarded himself as one of these “wisest men” to whom he refers. He placed this system as champion to people’s liberty and equality in contrast to kingship, which but diminished these aspects. Trying to convince the reader that no other system might secure these significant aspects of their lives better, he also described it as advantageous in terms of religion. This advantage rose from the fact that there was no king who needed to be “ador’d like a Demigod” (Free Commonwealth 1999, 422). In light of the impending restoration of the monarchy, Milton described the king as “the natural adversarie and oppressor of libertie”. In as much as he was “though good, yet far easier corruptible by the excess of this singular power and exaltation” (Free Commonwealth 1999, 435). The return of the king would lead to the disposal of Milton’s ideal conception of English identity. This can be deemed unavoidable, as his ideal had manifested as liberation not only from the constraints of Catholicism but also from monarchical tyranny. Milton perceived the restoration of kingship as a heavy setback, as it would be contrary to the English national and human nature. His appeal to the English people that “we may obtain a free Commonwealth and establish it for ever in the land” fell on deaf ears (Free Commonwealth 1999, 426). Parliament dissolved itself on March 16, 1660, and the king returned. Milton had to go into hiding due to this bold attempt to prevent England’s return to monarchy. Publishing the Free Commonwealth, Milton had risked his life to uphold his ideal conception of the English national identity. This ideal conception was founded on the notion that the Commonwealth was the best form of rule to respect people’s liberty. Even though he later received a general pardon and could live a quiet life in London, Milton’s ideal and personal conceptions of an English national identity was scarred by his experience of the dissolution of the Commonwealth. Milton distinctly expressed his disappointment in his home country in a 1666 letter written to the state councillor of Brandenburg, Peter Heimbach. Milton states: “[What] you call Policy (and which I would prefer you call Patriotism), after having allured me by her lovely name, has almost expatriated me, as it were. [...] One’s Patria is wherever it is well with him” (Milton “Letter” 2013, 469). His experience of the restoration of monarchy in England drove Milton to conclude that his patriotism was no longer consistent with England as his home country. Consequently, he had become “deeply ambivalent about his own patriotism” (Loewenstein 2008, 43). This stands in contrast to the confidence he had displayed in his national identity during his travels on the Continent before the Civil War.

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In conclusion, one can assert that Milton’s national identity and his role as a national visionary were based on his perception of freedom and self-determination. These stood as an innate right pursued by the English; particularly regarding their break with popery and the Catholic Church and their deposition of their tyrant king. Milton obviously preferred the English Commonwealth to monarchy. He actively supported it through his service as a Secretary for Foreign Tongues and his political writings. Stevens points out that in this context his “republicanism [began] as a function of his nationalism” as this form of government “perpetuate[d] what he imagine[d] to be the nation’s historic values” (2009, 355). Milton’s understanding of historical English values was betrayed by the restoration of monarchy which represented, to him, a regress that was inconsistent with the nature of the English. The concept he held of the English identity was apparent in the casualness with which he had initially presented himself as “John Milton an Englishman”. The English aspiration to liberty had also been stressed in 1626’ “On the Fifth of November”. The impending restoration of monarchy caused Milton’s belief in the uniqueness of this aspiration to crumble.

Works Cited Dobranski, Stephen. 2012. The Cambridge Introduction to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Dzelzainis, Martin. 1995. “Milton’s Classical Republicanism.” In Milton and Republicanism. Edited by David Armitage. Ideas in Context 35, 324. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Grabes, Herbert, ed. 2001. “‘Elect Nation.’ The Founding Myth of National Identity in Early Modern England.” Writing the Early Modern Nation. The Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. Amsterdam et al.: Rodopi, 2001. 173190. Hadfield, Andrew. 2003. “The English and Other Peoples.” In A Companion to Milton, edited by Thomas N. Corns, 174-190. Oxford: Blackwell. “John Milton.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by Meyer H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, 1771-1774 7th edition, 1771-1774. New York: Norton, 2000. Loewenstein, David, ed. 2008. “Milton’s Nationalism and the English Revolution: Strains and Contradictions.” In Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, edited by Paul Stevens, 25-50. Toronto et al.: U of Toronto P, 2008. 25-50.

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Milton, John. (1651) 1999. A Defence of the People of England, ed. John Alvis, 99-314. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. —. (1649) 2013. Eikonoklastes. In John Milton Prose. Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education, edited by David Loewenstein, 275-317. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. —. (1666) 2013. “Letter to Heimbach.” In John Milton Prose. Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education, edited by David Loewenstein, 469. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. —. (1626) 2009. “On the Fifth of November in his seventeenth year.” In John Milton. Complete Shorter Poems, edited by Stella P. Revard, 21023. Chichester et al.: Wiley-Blackwell. —. (1654) 1999. Second Defence of the People of England, edited by John Alvis, 315-413. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. —. (1643) 2013. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In John Milton Prose. Major Writings on Liberty, Politics, Religion, and Education, edited by David Loewenstein, 103-169. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell. —. (1660) 1999. The Readie and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth, edited by John Alvis, 415-45. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. —. (1649) 1999. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, edited by John Alvis, 53-98. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999. Potter, Lois. 1980. A Preface to Milton. 3rd edition. London: Longman. Salmasius, Claudius. (1649) 1999. Defensio Regia pro Carolo I. Quoted in: John Milton. (1651) 1999. A Defence of the People of England, edited by John Alvis, 99-314. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Sauer, Elizabeth. 2014. Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Paul. 2009. “Milton and National Identity.” In The Oxford Handbook of Milton, edited by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, 342-63. Oxford: Oxford UP.

CHAPTER FOUR MILTON IN MATERIAL CULTURE CHRISTOPH EHLAND

Introduction Should writers be commemorated posthumously in stone and mortar? Milton himself seems to have been rather hesitant about this. In his poem “On Shakespeare. 1630” he writes: What needs my Shakespear for his honour’d Bones, The labour of an age in piled Stones, Or that his hallow’d reliques should be hid Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid? Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame, What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thy self a live-long Monument. (Milton 1958, 418)

Of course, what Milton alludes to in these lines is a standard notion in the commemorative culture of writers and artists where the source of the person’s fame is his or her work rather than his or her persona. This notion is paradigmatically expressed by the commemorative plaque in honour of Christopher Wren in St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose Latin inscription reads Si monumentum requiris, circumspice: “If you seek his monument, look around you.” In fact, in his poem Milton brings the idea of the work as being the venerable aspect of a writer’s endeavour to a most provocative level of confidence when he imagines the poet’s posthumous if immaterial fame to be the envy even of kings: And so Sepulcher’d in such pomp dost lie, That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die. (ibid.)

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Elsewhere Milton muses on the peculiar nature of a writer’s death when one body dies but another may live on. In one of his poems in Sylvarum Liber he expresses the following view: Me too, perchance in future days, The sculptur’d stone shall show, With Paphian myrtle, or with bays Parnassian, on my brow.1 (Cowper 1934, 398-9)

One might ask whether Milton’s laconic indifference to posterity is rather tongue in cheek: humbly accepting death as inevitable but assuming that there will be an afterlife in marble and stone for the poet. One may be reminded of John Keats’s rather famous double bind where he confidently states in one of his letters “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death” (25 October 1818) only to prepare later the epigram he wishes to be written on his gravestone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”2 With regard to the posthumous life of the poets Samantha Matthews has alerted us to the curious cultural compost that a writer’s existence leaves behind. In her book Poetical Remains she muses on the “peculiar vulnerability of authorial death” (Matthews 2004, 1). Matthews’s inference derives from her observation of the fact that “[w]here the bodies of obscure humanity rot undisturbed, the poet’s two ‘bodies’ are in the public domain, subject to homage and exploitation.” (ibid.) This does not necessarily need to go to such extremes as the necrophilic excessiveness of the Romantics who pinched whole body parts from graves and funeral pyres.3 With regard to society’s investment in the furniture of its collective memory it is clear that any historical figure who is seen to have made a 1

Here given in the translation of William Cowper from Milton’s Latin: “Forsitan & nostros ducat de marmore vultus / Nectens aut Paphiâ myrti aut Parnasside lauri / Fronde comas […]” (Milton 1958, 558-9). 2 John Keats wished these words to be inscribed on his gravestone. The entire inscription reads: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal,/of a/YOUNG ENGLISH POET/Who,/on his Death Bed,/at the Malicious Power of his/Enemies,/Desired/These Words to be engraven on his/Tomb Stone/‘Here lies One/Whose Name was writ in Water’/Feb 24th 1821”. For a detailed account of the procedures relating to the erection of the headstone, see Matthews 2004: 144-9. 3 At the cremation of Shelley, Edward Trelawny ‘snatches’ from the funeral pyre what he assumes to be the poet’s heart (cf. Trelawny 2000, 92) which he would later give to Mary Shelley.

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contribution of some distinction to society will leave a trace in its cultural memory. Although this generally holds true, in the case of a writer it must be recognised that our vision is inevitably complicated by the fact that the shadow of the biographical persona and the radiance of the poetical work coincide. In a sense, as Matthews argues, there are two ‘poetic bodies’ in the public domain, living in problematic coexistence in the wider discourses of literary history. The notion of the two bodies is important for this essay. Literary culture oscillates between the two poles of these entities since they determine, influence and coincide with each other in the production of the writer’s afterlife as a new text in the material world. Books as well as the biographical persona of the writer begin to live on simultaneously. With regard to the biographical extension of a writer’s afterlife in the material realm Nicola Watson reminds us in her book The Literary Tourist that the habitual visiting of places with literary associations as well as the provisions made for the literary tourist produce a supplementary text beyond, yet rooted in, the literary text (cf. Watson 2008, 7). Although visitors to Shakespeare’s grave in Stratford-upon-Avon are documented as early as the seventeenth century, to give but one prominent example, the imagining of the biographical persona, the widening of literary culture to include the traces and places of the writer’s physical existence was largely an idea of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular the hagiographical spirit of the Victorian age fostered vast investments in the material traces of the writer: monuments were erected, memorials installed and writer’s houses acquired. Literary culture in much of the nineteenth century is characterised not only by the veneration of writers but also by the desire to add something tangible to the ephemeral discourses of literature. This essay will attempt to establish a plotline for the story of Milton’s afterlife by looking at the various public acts of commemoration by which the poet was invested in material culture.

Ambivalent Traces In the case of Milton there seems to be a strange hesitation to remember his life in the form of public monuments and museums. The only remaining former habitat of Milton which survives, the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, is not really a place that engages a biographical discourse, as will subsequently become clearer. It contains traces of it, but it is the literary work which is kept centre stage. In fact, as one lists the cases and places of

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Milton’s memorialisation it is difficult to avoid the impression that he provokes literary but not biographical commemoration. If it holds true that in such cases as for example those of William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns or John Keats the memorial activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are intensely focussed on the biographisation of the person and his life in the material realm, Milton seems to sail straight from the sepulchral to the metonymical, bypassing most of the typical stages of the writer’s biographical extension into the material world. While he is surely not in any way as contentious as Oliver Cromwell, the shadow of the ‘regicide’, or at least that of the politically problematic scatterbrain, still seems to hang over John Milton (cf. Sanders 2013, 107ff.). His commemoration therefore is more polarised and complicated than that of most other writers who have found a lasting place in the collective memory. Collier’s History of English Literature of 1896 gives rise to an air of discomfort when he states that “[t]he period of eleven years, coming between the Regicide and the Restoration, presents perhaps the deepest contrasts of light and shadow that we find in the chequered life of Milton” (Collier 1896, 200). This notion of the “chequered life” is as revealing as the fact that Collier finds it “sad to see a magnificent genius like Milton stooping to fling those paving stones of abuse” (201) at the sovereign. Between the lines he regrets Milton’s dabbling in politics and tries to dissociate these activities from the less controversial side of the writer’s life, that is to say his literature. Milton provokes, no, he invites polarisation. In complete contrast to Collier, Henry Morley writes in his history of English literature of 1881 about Milton’s political campaigning: [Milton] wrote, in Latin, for all Europe, . . . his first ‘Defence of the People of England,’ and sacrificed his failing eyesight over the labour of a second Defence. In all this there is to be felt under passing accidents of controversy, the labouring of English thought towards the settlement not reached till 1689. (Morley 1881, 56)

Although Morley connects Milton heroically with the libertarian tradition of the Glorious Revolution even in such a retrieval of the poet’s honour in the field of politics, he feels compelled to reassure his readers that “Milton had not taken part in the physical struggle” (54), that is, the beheading of the king.

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Milton att Stowe The first prooper trace of Milton’s M posth humous life ““in piled Ston nes” is the bust of him at Stowe in Buckinghamsh B hire. Stowe is a prime exam mple of the polarised discourses of Milton’s M posth humous recognnition. Williaam Kent’s redesign of the grounds during the 1730s includee the so-called d Elysian Fields (17333-38), an areaa of the garden ns in which thhe classical id dea of the paradise forr dead heroes was meantt to find its contemporary y revival. Among otheer structures erected to ceelebrate and eemulate antiq quity, The Temple of B British Worthhies (1734-35)) stands out.4 Although thee original design of thhe Temple was w intended for Chiswickk Park in Lo ondon the Temple is one of the most inteegral parts oof Stowe’s complex iconographical and ideollogical message. The symm metrical desig gn of the structure alllows for an allusive a displaay: eight nichhes on the lefft provide space for thee busts of eighht ‘Men of Ideeas.’

Temple of Worrthies, Stowe5 Fig.5-1: The T

These are coontrasted withh the busts off eight ‘Men oof Action’ on the right. The inclusioon of Milton in i the contextt of the men oof ideas in The Temple of British W Worthies firstt of all gives evidence of his canonisaation as a writer. The allusion to his “unbounded genius” admired at Stowe in conjunction with the busst refers to th he poetic bodyy of the writer. But it does so in ann abstract wayy. 4

For a detaileed account of the history of th he garden and itts buildings and d artworks cf. George Cllarke “The Meaaning of Stowe”” and Jonathan Marsden “Description of the Garden” iin Stowe Landsccape Garden: A Comprehensivve Guide (2005 5). 5 All images aare taken by thee author.

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One must read the Temple of British Worthies in the broader context of the political ideals of the owner of Stowe, the Whig politician Richard Temple, Lord Cobham (1675-1749). The garden and its monuments were meant to be a radical statement of its owner’s political stance and a postulate of the Whig party’s vision of history: on the political side of the temple’s display the particular choices of persona serve to emphasise Cobham’s idiosyncratic vision of cultural and political continuities. Stretching from King Alfred—celebrated as the founder of the English constitution—to William III—honoured as the saviour of British liberty— the temple’s political perspective is clearly rooted in the achievements of the Glorious Revolution and the ideals of a constitutional monarchy. Turning from the men of action to their creative counterparts, the pervading rhetoric of national history helps to explain the implications that arise from the inclusion of Milton in the temple’s design. Framed by such figures as Shakespeare, Inigo Jones and Newton, Rysbrack’s sculptured bust of Milton is reduced to a cultural icon with metonymical potential. Interestingly, however, if Shakespeare’s inclusion in the temple is largely an abstract reference to a national tradition in the arts Milton’s is more particularly bound up with the political message of the garden. In fact, what had hindered Milton’s burial in Westminster Abbey now appears to his advantage. For the inclusion of such artists as Inigo Jones or William Shakespeare implies that the idea of their life beyond their artistic output is insignificant at Stowe. Where Shakespeare’s bust in the temple is an abstraction which stands for literature, or rather English literature, the inclusion of Milton’s image develops a meaning that inevitably goes beyond such an abstraction and points to Milton’s role during the English Republic. The political thrust of the temple’s allusive symbolism may be carried predominantly by the men of action in its design (cf. Marsden 2005, 30) but the inclusion of John Milton helps to connect the artistic realm with the political one and thus refers to a broader base of a particular English libertarian tradition. In the story of Milton’s afterlife such utilisation of his political character will remain an exception—at least in Britain. Most of the time Milton’s political life is an obstacle to his commemoration in the public realm. With regard to the influx of the biographical element into the discourses of memorial culture, however, Milton even overtakes Shakespeare here: the particularities of his life bring the biographical element of commemoration to the fore at a time when this element is not necessarily part of the public memory of a writer.

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Westminster Abbey, Poets’ Corner Only a few years later, in 1737, Milton’s image is even successful in entering the nation’s most revered literary space: Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. In direct comparison to the use of his image in the highly political “satire”6 of Stowe his inclusion in the English Pantheon at Westminster represents an act of a broader canonisation of the writer. Here at the heart of English literary sanctity Milton’s political persona requires an act of purification, as it were. In the context of the Abbey the biographical traces of the man are suppressed and Milton’s monument in Poets’ Corner becomes a mere icon. The neo-classical wall epitaph serves this neutralising purpose. Its inscription reads: In the year of Our Lord Christ one thousand seven hundred thirty and seven this bust of the author of PARADISE LOST was placed here by William Benson Esquire one of the two Auditors of the Imprests to his Majesty King George the second, formerly Surveyor General of the Works to his Majesty King George the first. Rysbrack was the statuary who cut it[.]

Despite the fact that “Milton’s reputation as a poet . . . stood high in the eighteenth century”, as Andrew Sanders reminds us (Sanders 2013, 119), the very inclusion of Milton in Poets’ Corner seemed a revolution in itself. The dedicatory text even avoids his name and links the monument merely “To the author of Paradise Lost”. Milton’s name is painfully but deliberately absent from the inscription on his monument. Westminster demonstrates that it is the afterlife of the poetic body that grants Milton entry into such illustrious company from which his life would have barred him. His monument is a gesture of his canonisation but painstakingly not of his biographisation: too dangerously loomed the air of the regicide still over Milton. Later generations would begin acutely to feel the discrepancy in the representation of Milton in the Abbey. George Lewis Smyth complains rather bitterly in 1826 about the fact that the poet being honoured is almost marginalised by references to the donor and the sculptor in the commemorative inscription: No one can look at the monument which is erected to Milton, in the Poet’s Corner [sic] of Westminster Abbey, without an indignant sense of the mean

6

Clarke points to the provocative political message of Stowe when he writes, “Horace Walpole, the Prime Minister’s son, who visited in 1770, protested that he had ‘no patience at building and planting a satire’ . . .” (Clarke 2005, 7).

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Smyth’s criticism of the “vain economy of information” is interesting since it betrays a new sensibility towards the memory of the writer. Smyth looks at the monument from the perspective of someone whose imagination is steeped in romantic sensibilities: he expects more than just the image, more than a mere metonymical marker for the writer’s persona. He wants the poet himself. For a long time in the history of literary culture it is the written discourse that has to compensate for the lack of the material markers of the writer’s life as a life. Smyth is quick to fill the gaps of what he perceives as the deficiencies of the Westminster monument by adding a biographical sketch in his guidebook. Despite his craving for the real Milton, that is the man made immortal by his writing, Smyth displays the typical hesitation about Milton’s biographical persona and its inevitable association with politics visible elsewhere. About the revolutionary phase in Milton’s life he writes with audible irritation: “Neither was he negligent in the use of his pen. But what came from it for some time after this period is neither instructive to peruse, nor grateful to think of.” (Smyth 1826, 667) Nevertheless, the fact that Smyth still wants to see more of Milton in the Abbey gives evidence of the fact that—using Andrew Sanders’s words— Milton’s “sins, mortal for the eighteenth-century commentators, seem to have been reclassed as merely venial by their . . . successors” (Sanders 2013, 119). One should note in this context that material commemorative culture is clearly more conservative than written culture. Milton is a prime example of this. A book with unpleasant or controversial ideas can lie forgotten in the library whereas a public building adorned with problematic imagery can hardly be hidden. If it took time to have Milton commemorated in Westminster Abbey it is precisely because of the public unease with the man. It takes time for his image not to provoke disturbing political associations. By the 1820s we may sense in Smyth’s despair those processes of reclassification at work which according to Andrew Sanders eventually allowed the Victorians to forgive the man his political sins. It is

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this absolution, as it were, which would be necessary for the wider inclusion of Milton in the discourses of material literary culture.

Milton’s grave at St Giles Cripplegate Westminster Abbey, of course, is a shrine of national pride, a British version of the Valhalla. It is naturally a place of iconisation rather than biographisation. In the case of many of those who find themselves commemorated in the Abbey, their presence is a mere abstraction of their posthumous fame since there is nothing else than the monument itself to link them with this place. Their remains are not buried there, only their memory preserved. In the case of Milton this also holds true. The sympathiser with regicide could and would not be buried in the coronation church of English kings in the Restoration period. His burial took place in St Giles Cripplegate. This church, which is today enclosed by the Barbican complex, is in fact the first truly biographical space in which Milton is publically remembered. Initially, however, his interment in the church in 1674 is a private family matter rather than a public event. Only later would the church add a simple slab of stone in the floor, marking approximately the spot where the poet was laid to rest near his father: Near this spot was buried John Milton Author of Paradise Lost Born 1608 – Died 1674

The fact that the slab is an afterthought and that the precise burial place is unknown is strangely indicative of Milton’s commemorative afterlife. There is a time lapse during which his immediate traces seem to vanish and only later are they reconstructed. The slab of stone denotes a transition of Milton’s memory in Cripplegate from the private into the public realm and thus opens a new chapter in the history of his posthumous life. Stowe and Westminster may be much earlier instances of the use of Milton’s image for commemorative purposes but neither place is linked in any way to the life of the man. They can, as Stowe does, allude to the biographical extension of Milton’s reputation, but they cannot establish a direct link with the physical persona. In this the situation in Cripplegate is different. The inscription on the stone, later also copied to a small wall epitaph in honour of Milton, refers to three different layers of commemoration: first, it establishes the link between the particular place and the man (“Near this spot . . . ”), second, it emphasises the biographical dimension of this link

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by reference to the dates that demarcate a life as a life (birth and death) and third, the person remembered is linked to the literary work (“Author of Paradise Lost”). In these four lines the two bodies of the poet are coordinated with each other and affiliated to this particular place. When in 1793 the brewer Samuel Whitbread donates a more sophisticated wall epitaph for Milton the points of reference do not change. They are merely further emphasised. If previously it was a mere name and a set of dates which had to evoke Milton, it is now the likeness of the bust which strengthens this association. The fact that both the slab of stone and the epitaph mention Milton as the “Author of Paradise Lost” reveals an implicit unease with his other possible associations. It is an echo of the Westminster debate, of which Dr. Johnson gives an account in his Lives of the English Poets: the Dean finds Milton’s name still too “detestable” to have it written on the wall in his abbey.7 St Giles Cripplegate seems to be at greater ease in this respect but the reference to the literary work must still be read as a precaution which serves to guide the commemorative act in the right direction. Despite this safeguard Whitbread’s gesture of commemoration indicates a changing perception of Milton. Here in the safe sanctuary of the sepulchral context of a church does the slow reclassification of Milton’s sins begin. When in the late eighteenth century rumour had it that Milton’s grave had been desecrated William Cowper wrote in despair: Who then but must conceive disdain, Hearing the deed unblest Of wretches who have dar’d profane His dread sepulchral rest? Ill fare the hands that heav’d the stones Where Milton’s ashes lay! That trembled not to grasp his bones, And steal his dust away! Oh! ill-requited bard! neglect Thy living worth repaid, And blind idolatrous respect As much affronts thee dead. (Cowper 1934, 398-9)

7

Johnson’s description of the scene reads as follows: “When the inscription for the monument of Philips, in which he was said to be soli Miltono secundus was exhibited to Dr. Sprat, then dean of Westminster, he refused to admit it; the name of Milton was, in his opinion, too detestable to be read on the wall of a building dedicated to devotion.” (Johnson 1977, 418)

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Today the church indeed tries to repay Milton’s ‘living worth’ and offers even more traces of the writer: two busts and a life-size statue of the poet make it difficult to miss the fact that Milton has some connection with the place. The presence of the statue in the church, however, is accidental rather than intentional. When in 1904 Milton was finally given the honour of a full-length statue it was placed outside the church in the public space. In 1940 the Blitz’s devastating attack on the Cripplegate area knocked Milton off his pedestal and when the statue was retrieved from the rubble it was never restored to its original place. Despite this the original conjunction between the statue and its pedestal deserves a closer look: until the bombing raids the pedestal carried scenes from Milton’s works whereas the writer is depicted in a meditative stride “‘walking in his garden, and apostrophising the Spirit’, seeking inspiration for Paradise Lost” (Ward-Jackson 2003, 354). Again symbolism wavers between biographical references and the literary work. In the minimal gesture of the head—“the appropriate upward twist . . . to suggest the search for inspiration” (355)—one can see how the sculptor Horace Montford tried to fuse the one aspect into the other, how the physical refers to the literary element in the commemoration of the writer. That the idea of the statue was basically due to a land deal the congregation aimed to secure for itself and that Milton was seen as an appropriate campaign mascot is an aspect one might want to keep rather in the background.8 Until the bombing raid Montford’s was the only free-standing statue of Milton in London’s civic space. Thrown off its pedestal by the blast of the bombs the statue never returned to its highly significant place. The fact that today it is stored rather than exhibited in the side aisle of the church may have to do with unresolved issues of ownership with the Cripplegate Foundation but in the story of Milton’s afterlife it must seem a regression of commemorative culture since the writer has lost his place in the public domain and has been moved back into the close proximity of funeral rituals in a sepulchral setting.

Milton’s Cottage at Chalfont St Giles Of all the traces of Milton preserved in the material culture for posterity the cottage in Chalfont St Giles stands out as the place that is most closely associated with his biography. If commemoration in the church is not only confined in its referentiality by expectations of funeral rituals but also

8

On the details of the land deal, cf. Ward-Jackson 2003, 355.

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limited by the fact that it demarcates the end of the writer’s life, the house engages Milton’s life rather than his death. The cottage had for long been a fixed point of literary associations and featured prominently in literary guidebooks and travelogues from the 1820s onwards. By the second half of the nineteenth century the cottage was the only surviving building directly associated with Milton. Already in 1841 an anonymous author complains in Fraser’s Magazine: Milton’s London residences have all, with one exception, disappeared or ceased to be distinguishable. The continual crowding in and building up of this vast metropolis, the influx of trade, and the mutations of two centuries, joined to the devastations of the Great Fire of 1666, have made sad havoc among the old poetical scenes of London. (Anon. 1841, 533)

With regard to such stories of loss the saving of the house naturally became imperative. Nonetheless, one may stress how exceptional this gesture actually is. In fact, the campaign for the acquisition of the cottage in Chalfont is the first to take place after Shakespeare’s so-called Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon had been—to use a typically Victorian phrase—‘saved for the nation’ in 1847. It is thus only the second writer’s house in Britain to become a public memorial. In contrast to Shakespeare’s Birthplace, however, the idea of buying Milton’s cottage is a local campaign gone national. Despite the fact that Queen Victoria contributed £20 to the funds it is the local people of Chalfont that want to remember the writer who once briefly lived in their rural community. In preparation for the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 the inhabitants of the village had decided to buy the cottage. It is a particular irony that the scheme is initially promoted as a commemoration not of Milton but of the queen. Once the cottage was acquired, however, it was to provide a public stage for a particular engagement with Milton. What before had been only a private initiative on the part of the odd literary pilgrim coming to the village would now be publically sanctioned and encouraged by the institutionalisation of the cottage as a museum. To get a glimpse of this form of commemorative engagement it is useful to look at an account of a visit that took place long before the cottage was bought by the Milton Trust. In an article on a “Miltonic excursion” in 1827 a self-appointed “Philo-Milton” comes to Chalfont in what he calls his “hunt” for “houses which had been consecrated by Milton’s residence” (Montgomery 1827, 362). On his pilgrimage he finds the cottage “a sad wreck” but he also encounters the traces of his literary hero:

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The room was occupied with materials for making or mending rush-bottom chairs; but it had been Milton’s study!—Ecce signum, his arms were in the wall above the mantelpiece. “This is glorious indeed,” I said. The worthy chair-mender and his wife stared. They saw only their half-naked children and the wretchedness of their hovel: I saw only “the poet, blind yet bold,” seated in his armchair . . . . (Montgomery 1827, 363)

This humorous account pinpoints the commemorative discrepancies of the tourist’s imagined amalgamation of the two bodies of the writer and a particular place. It thus gives evidence of the transfiguration of the literary imagination from the immaterial to the material realm. Nicola Watson states in this context: “This typically takes the form of a fixation upon the author’s body, which in turn leads to an emphasis upon locality.” (Watson 2008, 13) In the passage quoted above the visitor’s exclamation of enjoyment depends on the fact that the associations of place allow him to imagine the physical persona of Milton “seated in his armchair” and thus to make the connection between literature, biography and place. In fact, the preservation of the house as a public museum fosters such fixation on the writer’s biographical and physical persona. In the museum the displays serve this particular purpose as they provide the metonymical link and cross-reference between these spheres. The cottage at Chalfont St Giles in its current form is rather oldfashioned in its approach to its representation of Milton and lacks the sophisticated apparatus and narrative of more modern personality museums. However, it contains the typical higgledy-piggledy collection of odd bits and pieces that are connected with the writer and his wider historical and literary context. The rooms are stuffed with editions of Milton’s works and items once thought to have been in his possession. Among these the locks of hair may represent the most direct trace of the physical persona but even more abstract displays make this particular connection. The image of the writer, either in the form of a portrait or a bust, is omnipresent in such a house and serves to create the presence of the physical persona. In the case of the small writing table and the empty chair displayed in Chalfont, the absence of the writer becomes metonymical for Milton’s former presence in the place. It is the awkward yet typical absence-presence paradox on which the whole idea of the memorial house rests.9 As a public institution the cottage gives evidence of the fact that by the late 1880s the time seems to have been ripe for allowing even the sinful Milton such a physical presence in the public realm. 9

On this paradox in the construction of a writer’s life cf. Ehland 2005.

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Other Traces T of Milton M in Loondon Not withoutt reason can one say thatt the two placces that havee a direct biographicall link with Milton’s M life— —Cripplegate and Chalfontt—remain exceptional in the way thhey evoke hiss memory. Thhis is not only y because they are thhe only oness that can reeally lay claiim to any degree d of authenticity,, but also sincce they are thee only ones thaat cannot avoiid making the biographhical connectioon. In the caase of Milton, who spent most of his life in London, ch hanges in the metropoolis have wiped out most off the places asssociated with him such as the “prettty box” in Petty P France or his birthpplace in Breaad Street. Historic maarkers and com mmemorativee plaques havve to fill in where w the material tracce is lost. Andd even these are not safe, ass the one on th he wall of St. Mary le B Bow illustratees.

Mary Le Bow Fig.5-2: St M

Ironically, tthese abstracct markers acchieve a far closer link with the physical perrsona than many m of the scculptured likeenesses of Milton M that have adorneed a number of o public build dings in Londdon since the 1870s. A simple markker such as thhat in Bread Street S reflects a biographicaal interest

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in the writer. Marking hiis birthplace, it alludes to the story of a life and thus shares tthe thrust of biographical b teeleology. By compparison, the faar more promiinent and notiiceable statuetttes of the poet scattereed over the Loondon public scene remain strictly limiteed in their referentialityy. Despite thee fact that they y display the pphysical perso ona of the writer—som metimes evenn in full-leng gth—none off them referrs to the biographicall Milton and it may even be b doubtful w whether they hint h at his literary bodyy. Significantlly, Milton’s reepresentation appears exclu usively in conjunction with buildinggs. His image thus becomess not only inccorporated in and suppplementary to the architeecture but allso dominated d by the institutional denominationn of the buildin ng. Whether oone looks at hiss statue at the former headquarters of the Univ versity of Loondon at 6 Burlington B Gardens or hhis relief bust at the former College C of Preeceptors in Blo oomsbury Square, he iss an icon not a man. In all of o the incidentts of the later Victorian and indeed E Edwardian com mmemorative use of the poeet’s image it iss true that they invariabbly fail to connnect with both h of the poet’s bodies. When M Milton sits withh Shakespearee in the nichess that grace th he gallery above the enntrance of thee former Carn negie Central Library on Sh hepherd’s Bush Road hhis image no longer l represeents him as a bbiographical persona. p

Fig.5-3: Carnnegie Central Liibrary

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He has becoome a metonyymy of learnedness and eduucation. The quality q of this sculpturre does not chhange the fact that on a libraary he may still point at literature buut he hardly stands s for his literature. Thhe same is tru ue for his likeness sittiing on the terrrace of 6 Burlington Gardenns mentioned above.

Fig.5-4: Burliington Gardenss

Here, howevver, he has beccome part of a wider Panthheon of learned dness and sits among such men as a Galileo, Goethe, G La P Place, Galen n, Cicero, Aristotle, Pllato, Archimeedes, Justinian n, Hunter, Huume, Davy (aas well as Leibnitz, C Cuvier, Linnaeeus, Newton,, Bentham, H Harvey, Adam m Smith, Locke, and Bacon on thhe lower level). The repreesentation of Milton is subjoined too the purpose of the archittecture that reeserved a spacce for his commemoraation. It is diff fficult to say why Milton’s image in thhe public spaace never really acquiires a biograpphical dimensiion. Probablyy it is the resu ult of the obvious disccrepancy betw ween his literaary significannce and the beelated and hesitant pubblic acts of commemoration n. Although tooday it may have h to do more with a lack of interrest in Milton than any uneease about hiss political radicalism oone may still wonder w why this indifferennce appears to close the circle of whhat seems to be characteristiic of the long story of the neglect n of Milton.

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Works Cited Anonymous. 1841. “Rural Scenes of Pope and Milton.” The Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, 529-535. Philadelphia: Littell. Clarke, George. 2005. “The Meaning of Stowe.” Stowe Landscape Garden: A Comprehensive Guide, 4-7. London: Centurion. Collier, William Francis. 1896. A History of English Literature in a Series of Biographical Sketches. London, Edinburgh and New York: Nelson and Sons. Cowper, William. 1934. “Stanzas on the Late Indecent Liberties Taken With the Remains of the Great Milton.” In The Poetical Works of William Cowper, edited by H.S. Milford, 398-9. London: Oxford UP. Ehland, Christoph. 2005. “Approaching Keats: In Search of the Writer in Factual and Fictional Spaces.” In Proceedings Anglistentag Bamberg 2005, edited by Christoph Houswitschka et al., 387-99. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Johnson, Samuel. 1977. “Milton.” In Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Brady and W.K. Wimsatt, 385-444. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P. Marsden, Jonathan. 2005. “Description of the Garden.” Stowe Landscape Garden: A Comprehensive Guide, 8-51. London: Centurion. Matthews, Samantha. 2004. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford UP. Milton, John. 1958. “On Shakespear. 1630.” In The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by Helen Darbishire, 418. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1958. “Poemata: Sylvarum Liber.” In The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited by Helen Darbishire, 511-559. Oxford: Oxford UP. Montgomery, James. 1827. The Spirit and the Manners of the Age. Vol. iii, London: Frederick Westley and A.H. Davis. Morley, Henry. 1881. Of English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. With a Glance at the Past. Leipzig: Tauchnitz. Sanders, Andrew. 2013. In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Smyth, George Lewis. 1826. The Monuments and Genii of St. Paul’s Cathedral and of Westminster Abbey; With Historical Sketches and Descriptions of Both Churches. Vol. 2. London: John Williams. Trelawny, Edward. (1858) 2000. Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley & Byron. London: Constable and Robinson. Ward-Jackson, Philip. 2003. Public Sculpture of the City of London. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. Watson, Nicola J. 2008. The Literary Tourist. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

CHAPTER FIVE “UNTEACHES CONQUER’D NATIONS TO REBEL, BY SINGING HOW THEIR STUBBORN PARENTS FELL”: EXPLORING AND EXPORTING JOHN MILTON IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY ANNE-JULIA ZWIERLEIN

During the post-Restoration political ascendancy of the Whig party and the concomitant expansion of the British trade empire, John Milton was transformed into a cultural icon and appropriated as a national and, later, imperial poet. The former revolutionary and regicide was increasingly depoliticized, and eventually came to be memorialized at the very centre of the political and cultural establishment, by a bust mounted in Westminster Abbey in 1737. 1 The emphasis of early Whig readers had been on Milton’s seemingly universal, apolitical poetry rather than on his polemical prose—as the anonymous reader “W.T.” had noted in a copy of the 1697 Tonson edition: “I spare this Book from the Thames for the sake of Paradise Lost”.2 According to Blair Worden, “the distance between the two Miltons, the polemicist and the poet, has persisted in the public mind” until today (Worden 2010, 1), despite the massive attention given to Milton’s republican pamphleteering and political activism in the critical output of the last decades. Building on this observation of the increasing post-Restoration separation between Milton’s prose and poetry, this 1

See Michael Dobson,1992. On the ‘Whig’ Milton see George F. Sensabaugh, 1952, and Nicholas von Maltzahn, 1995, 229-53. 2 “W.T.”, MS note before the preface to Eikonoklastes (microfilm, Library of Congress; MFW reel No. 111, WING M2086: Milton, Works, London: Jacob Tonson, 1697, vol.1). On the late-seventeenth-century preference for Milton’s verse over his prose see Blair Worden, 2010, 1 and 21, and von Maltzahn, 1996.

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chapter inquires into the adaptation processes and publication events that popularized Milton (alongside Shakespeare) as British national poet. Among those were famous pieces of encomiastic criticism as well as numerous Milton florilegia, commentaries, and prose paraphrases. Together they familiarized and simplified what some perceived as the “Babylonian dialect” of Paradise Lost, and expounded the intertextual and material worlds of Miltonian references, often referring to their own endeavours as a ‘cultivation’ of his textual soil, as we will see. Critics and commentators, this chapter argues, prepared Milton’s poetical writings for the role they would eventually take on as part of the nineteenth-century British school syllabus, which was also in turn exported to Britain’s colonies and taught to Indian or Caribbean school children. Throughout the Long Eighteenth Century, our focal period, Milton’s epic poetry with its depictions of broad geographical and cosmological expanses was increasingly read in the context of a new proto-imperial ideology of travel and exploration. Bruce McLeod sees Paradise Lost as an early example of the “Baconian project” that explicitly invokes the programme of the Royal Society (McLeod 1999, 53)––and indeed, Milton was to some extent a Baconian, proposing an ascent to the divine through “orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature” in Of Education (1644),3 and advising readers through Raphael’s exposition on astronomy in Paradise Lost that “[i]n contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (PL 5.511-12).4 Notwithstanding, what McLeod sees as the epic’s work of “cataloguing and classif[ying] . . . space under the commanding eye of English standards” had hardly begun in Milton’s time; while a deep interest in travel accounts, world maps and recondite information about exotic countries certainly does pervade Paradise Lost, the epic voice is not a systematic “compiler of cartographic data” (McLeod 1999, 55, 57).5 Such compilations, prompted by the epic’s sweeping vistas, were in fact the work of the epic’s later critics and commentators during the Long Restoration. It has often been observed that from the Restoration onwards, earlier ideas of time as the medium in which God’s purposes unfold became increasingly obsolete, while interest in the earth’s horizontal expanses, the synchronicity of geographic regions, was slowly 3

John Milton, 1644, 366, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Hereafter cited as CPW. See also Catherine Martin, 2007, 111. 4 All quotations from Paradise Lost are from the edition by Alastair Fowler, 1998, referenced in the text as PL. 5 McLeod’s essay can be confronted productively with Diane McColley’s in the same volume (McColley 1999) which argues against Milton’s endorsement of a Baconian dominion over nature.

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but unceasingly on the rise,6 and that the radical impulses of the republican experiment (which had carried on the Elizabethan and Jacobean investments in overseas trade) were redirected into the wider projects of commercial and military expansion. Wilfrid Prest argues that after the failure of the commonwealth, the “millenarian spirit was at least partly rechannelled into a secular utopianism, some of whose adherents looked to science, trade, and empire to build a bright future for the English people in this world.” (Prest 1998, 24) In its investigation of eighteenth-century Milton commentaries and criticism, this chapter proposes that readings of Paradise Lost came to negotiate these cultural, social and political developments which saw science, exploration and the expansion of the trade empire as ever more intricately linked. The 1707 Act of Union which created Great Britain, as well as Britain’s mid-eighteenth-century acquisition of large overseas territories introduced a new imperial dimension to previous assertions of British commercial and maritime dominance.7 In these new contexts the language of Milton’s epic was increasingly scrutinized and keyed to a new ‘national’ understanding of the vernacular, as will be exemplified in the section that follows. The two subsequent sections will then deal with the new language of critical appropriation in eighteenth-century Milton criticism, from the Addisonian ‘revelation’ of the epic’s hidden riches to critics’ ‘discovery’ of the globe and space in Miltonic language. Such new critical attitudes could also incorporate explicit references to Milton’s text as a social disciplinary instrument in colonial settings, as when Samuel Cobb in his progress poem Of Poetry (1707), dedicated to a British planter in Barbados (of which more later), envisages that Milton’s Muse “Unteaches conquer’d Nations to Rebel, / By Singing how their Stubborn Parents fell” (Cobb 1707, 195-96).8

“A second Babel” or Linguistic “Spoils”: Exploring and Exporting Milton’s Language The link between material and linguistic riches in Paradise Lost had been probed from Milton’s earliest commentators onwards, with Patrick Hume leading the way in 1695. Christopher D’Addario sums up the epic’s semantic and chronological expansiveness from a more recent perspective: 6

See Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward, 1999, 11. See Lawrence Stone, 1994, 6. 8 On the genre of the ‘progress poem’ see Howard D. Weinbrot, 1993. This chapter expands on an argument that was made in Anne-Julia Zwierlein, 2001. 7

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“[J]ust as the poem attempts to encompass the full scope of human knowledge, its language pushes the boundaries of semantic capability, digging for etymologically obscure meanings at some points, deriving novel or remarkably contemporary Latinate meanings at others.” (D’Addario 2007, 122) On the one hand, the epic’s approach to language seems to reiterate the Baconian belief that, “washed clean from opinions,” humanity could eventually redeem the Babylonian confusion of tongues, a utopian conception embodied in the various post-Baconian quests for a perfect universal language (Snider 1994, 132-33).9 And indeed, John Hale and Alastair Fowler see Milton’s multilingualism and his emphasis on etymological meanings as an attempt at “going back to the roots of knowledge,” “as if Milton were attempting to appropriate the linguistic qualities of all Europe and naturalize them in a single, universally intelligible, pre-Babelian utterance” (Hale 1997, 100, and Fowler 1998, 15). Yet on the other hand, Paradise Lost is notoriously skeptical about traceable origins and causes. Christopher Ricks (Ricks 1963, 110-11) and John Leonard (Leonard 1990, 233-92) emphasize that Milton’s gestures towards postlapsarian language are present even in his descriptions of prelapsarian paradise, and Edward Said also regards “the language of Miltonic epic as always already fallen, inevitably estranged from the world it represents” (Said 1975, 279-80). Harmonizing these opposites, Kristen Poole argues suggestively that “while he may not have joined his contemporaries in writing pamphlets about perfect language, in Paradise Lost Milton creates a literary laboratory for exploring linguistic theories and debates.” (Poole 2008, 540) In his earlier hopes for a Christian republic on earth, Milton had also emphasized the intercultural nature of language; in The Character of the Long Parliament (1648) he drew attention to Britain’s necessary reliance on imported learning: For the Sun which we want, ripens Wits as well as Fruits; and as Wine and Oyl are Imported to us from abroad: so must ripe Understanding, and many civil Vertues, be imported into our minds from Forreign Writings, and examples of best Ages, we shall else miscarry still, and come short in the attempts of any great Enterprise. (CPW 5:450)

Connected with both Milton’s theory of climatic influence and his admiration for the Greek and Roman republics, this passage reminds us that according to him the British Protestant commonwealth had to be achieved through assimilation of superior (ancient) models. Even if this process finally stalled, as Milton saw it, through the voluntary self9

On the perfect language see Nigel Smith, 1989, ch. 5.

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enslavement of the English people under a new monarch, his implicit theory of interculturalism remains a key factor here and elsewhere in his writings: according to Catherine Martin, Milton uses “languages as a key to the whole cultures incorporated in them” (Martin 2007, 101). Regardless of Milton’s own implicit poetology, the linguistic innovativeness of his epic seems to have obscured its content for many early readers, as D’Addario has argued pointing to the famous early demand for added prose paraphrases and the debate about Milton’s use of blank verse: . . . the poem is aggressively vernacular and novel, participating in and driving the rapid transformation of English as the influx of Latin and French words continued in the late seventeenth century. What we experience as linguistic obtuseness is partly, in fact, linguistic novelty. Yet [we should take care not] to overstate the ease with which readers read the poem even in 1667-8. We can assume, based upon the publisher’s request from Milton to add a justification of the poem’s blank verse to the second issue and the content of that apology, that readers were perplexed syntactically by the lack of rhyme and considerable enjambment in the poem. In Nicholas von Maltzahn’s investigation of early readers’ reactions, further, we find that the initial reaction of many readers was one of unworthiness, an unworthiness that might be construed as arising out of the difficulties the poem presented to the reader. (D’Addario 2007, 122-23, referring to von Maltzahn 1996)

Only slowly do Milton commentaries and critical writings of the Long Restoration pick up on Milton’s own awareness of the intercultural nature of language. Among the critics of Milton’s multilingualism had been Leonard Welsted with his “Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language” (1724), who claimed that by “introducing foreign Treasures” into the language, Milton had created “an uncouth unnatural Jargon, . . . a second Babel, or Confusion of all Languages” (Welsted 1724, ix). Samuel Johnson’s ambivalent verdict about Milton’s use of “English words with a foreign idiom” ran along similar lines: “of him, at last,” he claimed, “may be said […] that he wrote no language, but has formed . . . a Babylonish Dialect, in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning, the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure, that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity.” (Johnson 1779, 86) While Alexander Pope still reiterated objections to Milton’s “exotic style” and claimed that through his latinisms and other linguistic imports Milton had created “a second Babel” (Pope 1820, 174), William Hayley in his Life of Milton was one of the first critics to rebut Johnson’s criticism, reasserting the essential “harmony” of

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Milton’s multilingualism. In fact, according to Hayley, the progress of English civilization itself could be judged from its capacity of appreciating Milton’s style: “in proportion as our country has advanced in purity of taste, she has applauded the poet.” (Hayley 1796, 226) Deriving from the early modern inkhorn debate,10 the construct of a ‘pure’ vernacular was reinforced through the eighteenth-century Gothic revival and the remnants of a mercantilist ideology which motivated the promotion of native over foreign arts. But in fact, as Hayley showed, ‘purity’ could also be found in a judicious readjustment of eighteenth-century standards of taste rather than in a fictitious ‘clean’ vernacular. In the context of the unfolding vistas of Britain as a new maritime and proto-imperial power critics also increasingly voiced the idea of Milton’s (and all) language as a mixture and collection, the result of imports from abroad, in the same way that Paradise Lost now came to be read as a postBaconian collection of knowledge.11 This Post-Restoration collectors’ mania extended to linguistic spoils, in a discourse on translation that John Dryden’s neoclassicism had initiated, with much praise of Milton’s ‘Anglicizing’ of the classics.12 Soon critical writings were coloured metaphorically by the language of international commerce and colonization. Thus Hume in his 1695 commentary described the linguistic diversity of Paradise Lost as a “Commerce” in words, analogous to the traffic in mercantile commodities: “why may we not presume that our Island Ancestors, by situation inclined to Commerce, might bring home and adopt into their Language many Greek Words, as probably as their Sailing-Successors daily transport Foreign Commodities and Fashions” (Hume 1695, ad 2.289). Likewise, James Paterson proclaimed in the preface to his 1744 Milton commentary that the English tongue is “enriched with the Spoils of all the rest” (Paterson 1744, viii), and that Milton himself was an outstanding master of this inherent diversity—a linguistic conqueror. Both commentators thus reinforce emphatically Milton’s own acknowledgement of intercultural enrichment from The Character of the Long Parliament. The idea of a Miltonic traffic in languages had become topical by the time it reached the Jonathan 10

A famous example from the debate is John Cheeke’s prefatory letter to Thomas Hoby’s translation of The Courtier (1561), which insists “that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges” (Cheeke 1561), 12. 11 On this post-Baconian utopian vision of ‘regaining paradise’ by (re-)assembling knowledge lost at the fall see Joanna Picciotto, 2010. 12 See D’Addario 2005, 559, on Dryden’s Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693).

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Richardsons in the first third of the eighteenth century. In his “Life of the Poet” (1734), Jonathan Richardson senior states that Milton’s “Tongue, as Us’d by Him is Poetick English, ’tis Enrich’d and Strengthen’d with Attick and Roman Spoils, in Words, Phrases, and Idiom” (Richardson 1734, 210). Milton’s peculiar genius, both Richardsons claim, lies in appropriating other languages and poetical creations so as to improve upon them: “What is Inserted Fits as well as in the Original Work; or if That is not Equal to Milton’s Own, He makes it So by Raising its Native Character” (Richardsons 1734, 320). 13 This topical assertion derives from a long classical and neoclassical debate: usually conducted with reference to Virgil’s adaptation of Homer and often taken up in Milton commentaries, the debate revolves around the difficulties of appropriating similes and images from earlier and foreign writings. Implicitly, the Richardsons here also allude to Milton’s narrator’s discussion of the accommodation of divine truth to human understanding, as in his plea to the Holy Spirit: “what in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support; / That to the height of this great argument / I may assert the eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.” (PL 1.22-26) Such claims about Milton’s sublime elevation of his subject matter were, in turn, linked to new ideas about the epic as a model of taste, to be divulged to readers both at home and abroad; in fact, Paterson’s reasoning for his Milton annotations can be cited as exemplifying a general tendency: “this Commentary will be an useful Vocabulary to those that would learn this Language: And therefore I humbly recommend it to all Parents, Schoolmasters, Tutors, Travellers, Merchants, Foreigners, . . . both at Home and abroad.” (Paterson 1744, v) Paterson and other critics thus prepared the prominent role that Milton’s writings would attain in the British school curriculum, eventually to be exported to the empire’s colonies.14 The languages of cultivating and colonizing that critics employed were intricately connected to the language of ‘civilizing’, both “at Home”, in Paterson’s terms, “and abroad”. Turning now to the new eighteenth-century ‘cultivation’ of the Miltonic text and of 13 The Richardsons compare Milton’s successful appropriation of similes to a famously misapplied Homeric simile in the Aeneid: “You will find No Such Instances in Milton” (ibid.); for criticism of Virgil’s Homer adaptation from classical antiquity see Gellius, Noctes Atticae 9.9.12-15, and the Vita Vergilii of Suetonius, § 46. See Newton, ed., 1749, ad 10.412: “whatever Milton imitates, he adds a greatness to it”. 14 See Roger Mais, 1996, 183 and Gauri Viswanathan, 1999, 291: “One of the most consistently taught books in the Indian curriculum was Milton’s Paradise Lost.” On postcolonial reactions to the eighteenth-century ‘imperial’ Milton see Zwierlein 2001, 407-423.

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readers “at Home”, we will also inquire how Milton was here simultaneously popularized and claimed for an elite audience.

Criticism as Revelation: Digging for Riches in Paradise Lost Critical inquiries into Milton’s multilingualism on the one hand and the new neoclassical aesthetics of reading on the other coalesced in a strange union when Joseph Addison and his followers started ‘digging up’ the soil of Milton’s paradise for its riches, endeavouring to make it attainable and comprehensible while also, paradoxically, stressing its exclusivity. The vogue for Milton florilegia partly prepared, and was partly propelled by, this new metatextual “gust for paradise” (see McColley 1993): Some dozen years after the first publication of Paradise Lost, Henry Hare in The Situation of Paradise Found Out (1683) cited, as Henry John Todd in his Life of Milton (1826) phrased it, “with taste and judgement several passages from the fourth book of Paradise Lost.” Hare, referred to by Todd as an “unknown author,” illustrates his claims of having tracked down the earthly paradise with Milton’s own description of the location: “‘Now gentle Gales / Fanning their odoriferous wings . . . ’ [PL 4.145-55]. Thus have I . . . led you into this Eastern Eden, this illustrious and holy Vale: and here I could pluck you many a Flower.” (Hare 1683, 24) 15 Paradise here becomes accessible: you can take your pick, pluck the flowers, in a literalization of the ‘florilegium’ metaphor. Similarly, Edward Howard, the Earl of Suffolk’s The Shepherdess’s Golden Manual, to which is annex’d, Elegancies taken out of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1725), presents pre-selected scenes and topics from Paradise Lost, offering “several fine Pictures,” sublime and picturesque, introduced by brief descriptions. In its address “To the Reader” it gestures towards a movement ‘back to the garden,’ in a facetious tone that nonetheless ties in with post-Baconian notions of geographical exploration and secular revelation: “HERE are several fine Pictures drawn in the delicious Garden of Eden (where the fair EVE sat Naked) and because it’s rude to let a Gentleman stand at the Door, I desire you’ll walk in, and fix upon what You like best.” (Howard 1725, 28) In slightly salacious mode, the reader is challenged to ‘take his pick’—here paradise (and possibly unfallen Eve) once more become accessible. Paradise, in these fashionable florilegia, is a physical, ‘graspable’ reality.

15

See Todd 1826, 200.

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The eighteenth-century discourse of sublimity was, perhaps surprisingly, part of this development of ‘fragmenting’ the classics and more recent great poets, as neoclassical critics, while using a discourse of sublime elevation, routinely isolated choice pieces of their literary material for special contemplation. Such criticism both elevated and popularized Milton: While Richard Blackmore in 1716 still regretted that “Paradise Lost, an admirable Work of [Epick Poetry], publish’d by Mr. Milton, the great Ornament of his Age and Country, lay many Years unspoken of, and entirely disregarded” (Blackmore 1716, iv), Joseph Addison’s eighteen Spectator essays (31 December 1711 - 3 May 1712) had already started the process of expounding the poem for a general reading public. Drawing his theoretical orientation from Aristotle, pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime and “Boileau’s criterion of truth in ‘sentiment’” (Haugen 2011, 222), as well as emphasizing Milton’s Homeric and Virgilian parallels, Addison aimed to elucidate the poem for common readers while both concealing and emphasizing the labour necessary to achieve an understanding of Paradise Lost. His Milton essays are closely linked to his subsequent series on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (Spectator, 17 June - 3 July 1712), where he announced to his readers that exerting their imagination will “like a gentle Exercise to the Faculties, awaken them from Sloth and Idleness, without putting them upon any Labour or Difficulty” (Addison, 17 June 1712, 478). Yet as Trevor Ross claims with reference to the Paradise Lost essays, “that Addison requires eighteen weekly essays just to help readers enjoy Milton’s poem may suggest […] that this pleasure is in fact to be gotten with considerable labour and difficulty.” (Ross 1998, 218) Paradoxically both democratizing Paradise Lost and appropriating it for a cultural elite, Addison’s Spectator essays initiated a discourse about the epic’s “concealed Beauties” (Addison, 2 February 1712, 41) visible to the initiated only, that was taken up by the Richardsons and numerous later critics and commentators. Paradise Lost was declared one of the prime examples of the literary sublime, a tendency which in turn, as we have seen, prompted an increasing mania for isolating selected passages for rapt contemplation. In metaphorical terms, commentators were jointly ‘digging up’ the soil of the epic for its hidden riches (the Richardsons), they were “plucking its flowers” (Hare) or “fixing upon what [they] liked best” (Howard). In the Richardsons’ Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734), the epic itself appears as a microcosm in need of exploration, and much thought is given to the question of sense perception. Like Addison’s discourse of “concealed Beauties,” the Richardsons’ preface also stresses the labour involved in appreciating Milton: “a Reader .

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of Milton must be Always upon Duty . . . He Expresses himself So concisely, employs Words So Sparingly, that whoever will Possess His Ideas must Dig for them, and Oftentimes pretty far below the Surface.” (Richardsons 1734, 70) These ‘digging’ metaphors, placing the burden and labour entirely upon “the Duty of a Reader” (Richardsons 1734, 71), imply “that there is a meaning which inheres in the text and that can be excavated” (Festa 2006, 130), but they also link this literary enterprise to the post-Baconian vogue of global exploration. Perhaps inadvertently, they establish metaphorical links with the ‘devilish’ practice of gold-digging that is condemned in Milton’s Pandemonium passages––and with the long history of learned Milton commentaries that, with surprising enthusiasm, entered into discussions of foreign mineral resources and how best to discover and exploit them.16 Calling Milton’s literary landscape, in neoclassical manner, “Well Separated and Regularly Order’d”, the Richardsons emphatically insisted that this landscape had to be discovered and appropriated by careful readers (Richardons 1734, 315-16). In his earlier Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur (1719), Richardson senior had claimed, using the example of Milton’s description of paradise, that the aesthetic appreciation of literature also instructs readers in the right way of responding to nature: “the beauties themselves of those all-perfect works of the great author of nature are not seen but by enlightened eyes.” (Richardson 1719, 323-24)17 Milton’s paradise, the post-Baconian microcosm, here becomes a textual site scrutinized for its hidden riches, in metaphors implying the exploitation of a landscape. Addison and the Richardsons are also united in adapting John Locke’s labour theory of value, arguing that such labour of informed reading creates both ideal property and (here) revelation. 18 Addison presented learning as cultural capital when he insisted that Paradise Lost contains “Multitudes of Beauties” most of which “are not so obvious to ordinary Readers” (Addison, 8 March 1712, 75), and this elitist discourse, as Ross observes, “was becoming a critical commonplace at the time, though rarely had it been applied to English writings” before the Spectator essays on Milton (Ross 1998, 216). Aesthetic pleasure became an exclusive kind of spiritual if not actual appropriation, as Addison himself explained in “The Pleasures of the Imagination”:

16

See Zwierlein 2001, “Pandemonium’s Mining Arts”, 307-314. See also Stephen Copley, 1992, 36, on Richardson’ allusion to his earlier Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715). 18 See John Locke, 1690. 17

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A Man of a Polite Imagination, is let into a great many Pleasures that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. He . . . often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another Light, and discovers in it a Multitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind. (Addison, 21 June 1712, 478)

Aesthetic appreciation here binds together a segment of society by a secret code, revealing to the initiated “a Multitude of Charms” otherwise concealed, and bestowing upon them “a kind of Property” in what they knowingly contemplate, turning ‘nature’ into ‘culture’ in a metaphorical language that also served to legitimize overseas plantations.19 Addison’s metaphors of hidden beauties were further developed by later critics who referred to his essays as an originating moment: thus Richard Meadowcourt in his Critique on Milton’s Paradise Regained (1732) similarly hoped to have “open’d a new Field of Pleasure to his Countrymen, or discover’d hidden Stores of Instruction and Entertainment” (Meadowcourt 1732, 29). William Somervile in 1727 praised Addison for “set[ting] the Jewel [of Milton’s works] in a fairer Light” and, again, for ‘cultivating’ nature: “New Beauties spring in Eden’s fertile Groves, / And by his Culture PARADISE improves” (Somervile 1727, 34 and 35). Finally, “Dr” Watkinson’s retrospective account in 1763 explicitly attributed the eventual triumph of (a fragmented, anthologized) Milton among English readers to Addison: “Who discovered the inimitable beauties of Milton’s Paradise Lost till opened, unfolded, and disclosed by the masterly pen of the ingenious Addison? . . . These beauties lay dormant, latent, and concealed (till investigated and opened by his able pen), so that this island did not set a just value on such ‘a burning and shining light’.” (Watkinson 1763, 2) The metaphors in this passage, clustered together in the tricola of “dormant / latent / concealed” and “opened / unfolded / disclosed,” create homologies between English literary and material resources. They emphasize an implicit “semiotics of desire” as defined by John Gillies in the context of colonialist land-taking processes (1994, 62). Milton, Blackmore’s “great” but “disregarded” “Ornament,” had now received his due; and well into the 1750s and 60s, commentators on Paradise Lost used 19

On the ideology of the ‘cultivation’ metaphor see Richard Waswo, 1997. But Andrew Hadfield is also right in warning us against the “danger of suggesting that no rose could be pruned in the home counties without there being an imperial purpose or analogue” (1999, 24).

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a similar language of revelation, John Marchant’s 1751 edition, for instance, promising to introduce “Persons unacquainted with the Learned Languages, and Polite Literature, . . . into a familiar Acquaintance with the various Beauties and Excellencies of this Master piece of Heroic POETRY,” and insisting that Milton “left it to the Commentators, Etymologists, &c. to explore the Depths of his Knowledge” (Marchant, ed., 1751, ad 1.713). This future mission of revelation that also paraphrases Marchant’s own, self-chosen task is here figured as having been anticipated by Milton himself. This commentator’s language also metaphorically links the microcosm of Milton’s poem and the macrocosm of divine creation in ways that are tied to more explicit representations of the exploration (and appropriation) of the globe—and space—in eighteenth-century criticism and commentaries on Paradise Lost, as we will now see.

Post-Baconian Labour: Exploring and ‘Civilizing’ on Earth and in Space Returning to the Richardsons’ 1734 Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost, we can again inquire how this text, through its emphasis on sense perception, establishes a link with the Baconian ideology that sees fallen humanity as potentially restorable through labour, travel and exploration. To reassemble the parts of the creation that had been dispersed at the Fall was the ideological investment behind the Baconian tradition of the learned and scientific collection and the topical exhortations to post-Baconian travellers. Indeed, we can argue that Long Restoration Milton commentators saw their engagement with Paradise Lost as the microcosmic, representational platform for such endeavours, drawing together their own ideal collecting activities when they routinely enlisted eyewitnesses or their printed records to help expound geographical and astronomical material presented in the epic.20 The epic was also employed to discuss British colonies and foreign countries, with commentators eagerly enumerating, weighing and measuring distances, navigational routes, winds and tides, climate, mineral resources, flora and fauna. They adopted a discourse of exploration, travel, and translation, of digging and telescope-watching, which established parallels between divine and aesthetic revelation, between transcendental and secular ‘discovery.’

20

For a more detailed engagement with these concepts see Zwierlein 2015.

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Neoclassical criticism was heir to such Baconian discourses about the ‘labour’ of revelation, as we have seen. One significant link between this metaphorical language of Milton criticism and the post-Baconian enterprise was the discussion of astronomy: the labour of revealing and exploring worlds in space. Milton’s stars and planets, about which Raphael advised Adam to be “[c]ontented that thus far hath been revealed” (PL 8.177), were frequently turned into new “paradises” in space by Long Restoration commentaries. Discussing enthusiastically the technological enhancement of sense perception through compass, microscope, or telescope, most commentaries displayed a confidence in modern discoveries and a utilitarian perspective comparable to Eve’s question about the stars: “But wherefore all night long shine these?” (PL 4.655) They adduced scientific ‘proof’ for Milton’s passages about astronomy and toyed with the idea of other worlds in space. Richardson senior even employed the metaphor of the “Telescope” to explain his writerly symbiosis with his son. He was not proficient in Latin and Greek but contributed, as Ants Oras assumes, most of the “general speculations” and “personal experiences . . . in reading the poem” (Oras 1931, 102), and thus in the preface to their joint Explanatory Notes the father claims that “[i]n what depends on the Knowledge of the Learned Languages my Son is my Telescope”: “’tis by the help of This I have seen That in Milton which to Me Otherwise had been Invisible; though before I had my Instrument I saw a Sky of shining Stars, How much more Throng’d and Bright soever That Sky Now appears” (Richardson 1734, 301). The authorial team’s joint critical powers make visible the invisible; like the ‘digging’ metaphor they employ elsewhere, the metaphor of the optical instrument emphasizes the labour necessary to exploit the riches of Milton’s poem, in a Baconian spirit of scientific meliorism which remains untainted by the Lockean critique of unbounded trust in optical instruments and which, instead, rehearses Locke’s labour theory of value. 21 In an earlier expanded reference to Milton, Richardson senior had compared the “connoisseur [who] sees beauties in pictures and drawings which, to common eyes, are invisible [and who] learns by these to see such in nature,” to Milton’s Adam “after the angel had removed the film from [his] eyes, and purged with euphrane and rue the visual nerve”. Here, literary criticism becomes secular revelation. Like the explorer intent on realizing Bacon’s ‘plus ultra,’ the connoisseur-as-explorer “seeth beauty, divine and human, as far as human may”; here and elsewhere, the Richardsons acknowledge the 21

On Locke’s critique of reliance on optical instruments see John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (2.23.12), quoted in Wilson 1995, 240-41.

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deficiencies of the postlapsarian state but also emphasize the power of criticism to reveal what was hidden.22 Elaborating on the implications of the astronomical imaginary, Thomas Newton’s 1749 variorum edition even combined an affirmation of the plurality of worlds with an emphasis on interstellar settlements and possibly colonization, claiming that the notion that “every star was a world designed to be inhabited . . . [was] not so well establish’d in those days as in these” (Newton, ed., 1749, ad 7.621). The link between visions of interstellar exploration and imperial conquest on earth was also made explicit in the aforementioned progress poem Of Poetry (1707) by Samuel Cobb, who according to the DNB was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then served as ‘under grammar master’ at Christ’s Hospital from 1702 until his death in 1713. This patriotic poem, which was published in the year of the Act of Union and during the War of the Spanish Succession, addressed “Glorious Milton” as uniting both spiritual and geographical expansion. While Milton’s Muse penetrates “far as the Confines of retreating Light,” on earth he is “known / To Lands which Conquest has insur’d our Own.” British literary achievement, with Milton as its apogee, is institutionalized by the rapt narrative voice as the goal of global cultural history; Paradise Lost attains civilizatory powers in very concrete terms indeed: cast in the subtitle as “a Letter to Richard Carter Esq; late of the Middle-Temple, now living in Barbadoes,” Cobb’s poem celebrates Milton’s epic for “tell[ing] the sindg’d Moor, how scepter’d Death began / His Lengthning Empire o’er offending Man. / Unteaches conquer’d Nations to Rebel, / By Singing how their Stubborn Parents fell.” (Cobb 1707, 195-96) Just as Cobb had earlier compared the ancient Britons under Roman rule to “Moors” (1707, 187), in accordance with the classical model of translatio imperii, the progression of empire and civilization from one country to another, he now depicts the modern, ‘civilized’ British as ruling the “sindg’d Moor”— with the help of Milton’s poetic message reread as a deterrent to the subjugated. God’s imperium has here become a model for the British Empire, in the framework of a Whig reading of history as progress. Similarly, at Stowe Gardens, the famous landscape garden in the possession of the Whig Temple family, the Temple of British Worthies (designed by William Kent in 1734) groups a bust of Milton together with the busts of fourteen English discoverers, poets, kings and queens, and eminent Whig merchants. Below the bust of Sir Francis Drake we find the inscription: “WHO . . . CARRIED INTO UNKNOWN SEAS, AND 22

Richardson 1719, 323-24.

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NATIONS, THE KNOWLEDGE, AND GLORY OF THE ENGLISH NAME,” and the inscription below the bust of Milton reads, similarly: “WHOSE SUBLIME AND UNBOUNDED GENIUS EQUALD A SUBJECT THAT CARRIED HIM BEYOND THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD”.23 The syntax is parallel, the wording partly so; the rise of the trade empire is implicitly envisaged as carried further through a Miltonic conquest of the stars.24 Juxtaposed with Whig celebrations of conquest and expansion, the celebration of Milton as one of Britain’s most eminent writers is inflected by imperial perspectives. The eighteenth-century version of Milton, both elitist and popularized, heavily anthologized and fragmented, and finally increasingly associated with post-Baconian exploration and imperial conquest, is still very much present with us today. Significantly, this was also the version of Milton exported to the colonies as a prominent element of the British school curriculum. Towards the end of the Long Eighteenth Century, in 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Conversations painted a vision of a single, hegemonial universe of values when he praised Milton as spreading his influence “into the remotest seclusion of the civilized world”: How the heart opens at the magic name of Milton! . . . one of the Poets of the World.—It belongs only to the noblest intellect thus to identify itself with all nations, and to find countrymen wherever the spirit of humanity dwells. Into the remotest seclusion of the civilized world, the voice of the ‘old man eloquent’ [‘Sonnet X’, l.8] has penetrated. Even the lone Icelander, placed ‘Far amid the melancholy main’, has listened in his own tongue to the Story of Paradise.

Britain’s civilizatory mission to the world, as implied in such imaginings, has ensured that even the “Icelander” can now listen to Milton’s voice translated into “his own tongue,” and that Milton’s epic has become a fundamental allegory explaining “the combat of Evil and Good” everywhere (quoted in Wittreich 1970, 274-75). Yet in casting Milton as one of the “noblest intellect[s]” of the world and identifying his message with the “spirit of humanity,” Coleridge also ultimately claims him for an entirely Western set of values. While the entire “civilized world” is 23

Inscription copied personally at Stowe. See Robinson 1990, 13-14. On Sir William Temple as the leader of the “Patriot” Whigs see Michael Dobson, 1992, 135. 24 The inscription recalls Lucretius’ eulogy of Epicure, founder of civilization, who reaches beyond the “flaming walls of the universe” (De rerum natura 1.73-75); and indeed, Royal Society rhetoricians had earlier revived Lucretius as an important commentator on the exploration of the natural world.

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envisaged as audience for Milton’s song, this is in fact a proleptic figure: the regions of the world become civilized by listening to Milton. Thus Paradise Lost was turned in the course of the Long Eighteenth Century into an ‘export article’ destined to convert Europe and the wider world, implicitly communicating, as part of the British school syllabus, the Whig assumptions of the labour theory of value and the benefits of British exploration and dominion over foreign regions. In documents of colonial administration such as Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “Minute on Indian Education” (1835), English literature was famously institutionalized as part of a colonial educational programme designed to turn those who were “Indian in blood and colour” into what V.S. Naipaul later called “mimic men”: “English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” (Macaulay 1835, 430; Naipaul 1967). Postcolonial criticism has long since drawn our attention to the options for oppositional as well as hegemonic readings played out in non-Western adaptations of Western canonical texts, and we have seen that Milton himself had been a very reluctant and conflicted national visionary. However, in summarizing Long Eighteenth Century developments we can conclude that by the beginning of the nineteenth century Milton’s readers, critics and commentators had transformed him, with lasting consequences, into a visionary nationalist – or even visionary imperialist.

Works Cited Addison, Joseph. 1712, June 17 and 21, “The Pleasures of the Imagination.” The Spectator. 478. —. 1712, March 8. “Criticism on Milton’s Paradise Lost.” The Spectator. 75. —. 1712, February 2. “Criticism on Milton’s Paradise Lost.” The Spectator. 41. Blackmore, Richard. 1716. “An Essay on the Nature and Constitution of Epick Poetry.” In Essays upon Several Subjects London: E. Curll and J. Pemberton. Cheeke, John. (1561) 1900. “A Letter of Syr J. Cheekes to his loving frind Mayster Thomas Hoby.” In The Book of the Courtier, by Baldassare Castiglione, translated by Sir Thomas Hoby. Edited by Walter Raleigh. 12-13. London: David Nutt. Cobb, Samuel. (1707) 1967. Discourse on Criticism and Of Poetry from Poems on Several Occasions. Repr. Augustan Reprint Society Publications, No. 2: 176-226. New York: Klaus Reprint Corporation.

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Copley, Stephen. 1992. “The Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture.” In Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850. Edited by John Barrell. 13-37. Oxford: Oxford UP. D’Addario, Christopher. 2007. Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —. 2005. “Dryden and the Historiography of Exile: Milton and Virgil in Dryden’s Late Period.” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (4): 553-72. Dobson, Michael. 1992. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon. Festa, Thomas. 2006. The End of Learning: Milton and Education. London: Routledge. Fowler, Alastair. 1998. “Introduction.” In John Milton, Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Edited by Alastair Fowler. 1-48. London: Longman. Gillies, John. 1994. Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hadfield Andrew. 1999, December 17. “Colonial Roots in English Gardens.” TLS. 24. Hale, John. 1997. Milton’s Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hare, Henry. 1683. The Situation of Paradise Found out: Being an History of a Late Pilgrimage unto the Holy Land. London: J.C. and F.C. for S. Lowndes. Haugen, Kristine Louise. 2011. Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Hayley, William. (1796) 1971. The Life of Milton, in Three Parts. To which are added, Conjectures on the Origin of Paradise Lost (London: T. Cadell, 1796), repr. English Literary Criticism of the Eighteenth Century, 51: 233-80. New York: Garland. Howard, Edward, Earl of Suffolk. 1725. The Shepherdess’s Golden Manual. to which is annex’d, Elegancies taken out of Milton’s Paradise Lost. London: printed for J. Crokatt. Hume, Patrick. 1695. Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost. London: Jacob Tonson. Johnson, Samuel. (1779) 1951. Life of Milton; The Lives of the English Poets. In Milton Criticism: Selections from Four Centuries. Edited by James Thorpe. 65-88. London: Routledge. Leonard, John. 1990. Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve. Oxford: Oxford UP. Locke, John. (1690) 1924. Two Treatises of Civil Government. Edited by William S. Carpenter. Book 2: An Essay Concerning the True

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Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, Ch.5: “Of Property”, 129-41. London: J.M. Dent & Sons. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. (1835) 1995. “Minute on Indian Education.” Reprinted in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 428-30. London: Routledge. MacLean, Gerald, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward. 1999. “Introduction.” In The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Edited by Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward. 1-23. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mais, Roger. 1996. “Where the Roots Lie.” In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Edited by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh. 182-84. London: Routledge. Maltzahn, Nicholas von. 1996. “The First Reception of Paradise Lost (1667).” Review of English Studies 47: 479-99. —. 1995. “The Whig Milton, 1667-1700.” In Milton and Republicanism. Edited by David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner. 22953. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Marchant, John, ed. 1751. John Milton, Paradise Lost. London: R. Walker. Martin, Catherine. 2007. “Rewriting the Revolution: Milton, Bacon, and the Royal Society Rhetoricians.” In Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England. Edited by Juliet Cummins and David Burchell. 97-123. Aldershot: Ashgate. McColley, Diane Kelsey. 1993. A Gust for Paradise: Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts. Urbana: U of Illinois P. —. 1999. “Ecology and Empire.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision. Edited by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer. 112-32. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. McLeod, Bruce. 1999. “The ‘Lordly eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision. Edited by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, 112-32. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Meadowcourt, Richard. (1732) 1971. Critique on Milton’s Paradise Regained. In Milton’s Paradise Regained: Two Eighteenth-Century Critiques by Richard Meadowcourt and Charles Dunster. Facsimile Reproductions. Edited by Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. Milton, John. (1644) 1954. “Of Education.” In The Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol 2. Edited by Don M. Wolfe et al. New Haven: Yale UP.

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—. 1998. Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Longman. Naipaul, V. S. 1967. The Mimic Men. London: André Deutsch. Newton, Thomas, ed. 1749. John Milton, Paradise Lost. [...] A New Edition, 2 vols. London: J. and R. Tonson. Oras, Ants. (1931) 1967. Milton’s Editors and Commentators from Patrick Hume to Henry John Todd (1695-1801). A Study in Critical Views and Methods. Revised edition. New York: Haskell House. Paterson, James. 1744. A Complete Commentary [...] on Milton’s Paradise Lost. London: R. Walker. Picciotto, Joanna. 2010. Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Poole, Kristen. 2008. “Naming, Paradise Lost, and the Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language Schemes.” English Literary Renaissance 38 (3): 535-59. Pope, Alexander. (1734-36) 1820. Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men, collected from the Conversation of Mr. Pope. Section IV, collected by Joseph Spence. Edited by Samuel Weller Singer. 134-81. London: W.H. Carpenter. Prest, Wilfrid. 1998. Albion Ascendant: English History, 1660-1815. Oxford: Oxford UP. Richardson, Jonathan. (1719) 1969. A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur. In The Works of Mr. Jonathan Richardson. Edited by Jonathan Richardson Jr. London: T. Davies, 1773. Reprinted by Anglistica & Americana 37: 241-346. Hildesheim: Olms. Richardson, Jonathan. (1734) 1932. “Life of the Poet.” In Jonathan Richardsons, Father and Son, Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost, With the Life of the Author, and a Discourse on the Poem by Jonathan Richardson Senior. London: James, John, and Paul Knapton, 1734. In The Early Lives of Milton. Edited by Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1932) 199-330. Richardsons, Jonathan, Father and Son. 1734. Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost, With the Life of the Author, and a Discourse on the Poem by Jonathan Richardson Senior. London: James, John, and Paul Knapton. Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Milton’s Grand Style. Oxford: Clarendon. Robinson, John Martin. (1990) 1998. “The National Trust, Buckinghamshire: Stowe Landscape Gardens.” 2nd ed. The National Trust.

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Ross, Trevor. 1998. “Addison Reads Milton.” In The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP. Said, Edward. 1975. Beginnings. New York: Basic Books. Sensabaugh, George F. 1952. That Grand Whig Milton. Stanford: Stanford UP. Smith, Nigel. 1989. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660. Oxford: Oxford UP. Snider, Alvin. 1994. Origin and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England: Bacon, Milton, Butler. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Somervile, William. 1727. “Imitation of the Ninth Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace.” Occasional Poems, Translations, Fables, Tales, &c. 33-45. London: Bernard Lintot. Stone, Lawrence. 1994. “Introduction.” In An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815. Edited by Lawrence Stone. 1-32. London: Routledge. Todd, Henry John. 1826. Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton, derived principally from Documents in his Majesty’s StatePaper Office. London: C. and J. Rivington et al. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1999. “Milton and Education.” In Milton and the Imperial Vision. Edited by Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer. 273-93. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Waswo, Richard. 1997. The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam. Hanover: Wesleyan UP. Watkinson, Dr. (1763, July 16). “Enquiry into the Nature and Tendency of Criticism, with regard to the Progress of Literature.” The Critical Review: 1-5. Weinbrot, Howard D. 1993. Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Welsted, Leonard. 1724. “A Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, &c.” In Epistles, Odes, &c., Written on Several Subjects. London: J. Walthoe and J. Peele. Wilson, Catherine. 1995. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton: Princeton UP. Wittreich, Joseph Anthony, ed. 1970. The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve UP. Worden, Blair. 2010. “Milton: Literature and Life.” In John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation. Edited by Paul Hammond and Blair Worden. 121. Oxford: Oxford UP.

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“W.T.”, MS note before the preface to Eikonoklastes. Microfilm, Library of Congress; MFW reel No. 111, WING M2086: Milton, Works, London: Jacob Tonson, 1697, vol.1. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. 2015. “Purging the Visual Nerve: Exploration, ‘Revelation’, and Cosmography in Milton Commentaries and Criticism of the Long Restoration.” In Milton in the Long Restoration. Edited by Ann Baines Coiro and Blair Hoxby. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming. —. 2001. Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667-1837. Muenster: LIT.

CHAPTER SIX “HERETICS IN THE TRUTH”: MILTONIC ECHOES IN EDWARD YOUNG’S CONJECTURES ON ORIGINAL COMPOSITION CHRISTOPH SINGER

“What there thou seest, fair creature is thyself.” This quotation from John Milton’s Paradise Lost supports the main argument in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition from 1759. Young’s essay is regarded as central in the formation and popularization of the concept of the artist as genius. In the following I want to illustrate how Young, firstly, traces back the origin of the genius to its reading and learning. Secondly, this article will argue that the underlying concepts of (re-)reading, learning and self-creation, are very much influenced by Milton, explicitly by the aforementioned Paradise Lost, implicitly the prose tractate Areopagitica. In light of the proposed similarities between Milton’s and Young’s argument, I would like to argue that Young is actually less interested in the discussion of the individual author as genius, rather he discusses ways of becoming a critical reader and thus to author ones own identity. And the central figure in this process of self-creation, while only mentioned in passing, is Milton’s Eve from Paradise Lost. “What there thou seest is thyself.” In Paradise Lost this is God’s voice we hear, it is God guiding Eve away from her self-reflection in the lake she finds so fascinating. Still Young takes this guided epiphany as an illustration for the genius finding itself. Counterintuitive at first, Young’s reading makes more sense considering that Milton, to speak with Gordon Teskey, was a poet on the threshold of a post-theological world . . . [He] is the last major poet in the European literary tradition for whom the act of creation is centered in God and the first in whom the act of creation begins to find its centre in the human. (Teskey 2006, 5)

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Young’s Conjectures are at the centre of a similar shift of convictions, a shift that increasingly shuns imitation in favour of original thought. This is a transition “from the literary doctrine of tradition and imitation proclaimed in Alexander Pope’s ‘Essay on Criticism’ (1711) to the Romantic emphasis on genius and originality.” (Odell 2012, 143)

“Out of Thy Head I Sprung”: Milton and Young Milton’s influence on Young is hard to dispute. The degree of influence, however, has been open for discussion. Critics have either focused on Miltonic traces in Young’s thinking and writing, or they have attempted to present them as equals. In Der Nordische Aufseher from 1758 Johann Andreas Kramer praises Edward Young in the highest terms: “Er ist ein Genie, das nicht allein weit über einen Milton erhaben ist, sondern auch unter den Menschen am nächsten den Geist Davids und der Propheten grenzet.” (Kramer 1758, quoted in Barnstdorff, 29) [He is a genius that not only surpasses a Milton, but is closest to the spirit of David and the prophets amongst all humans.] As effusive this praise may appear— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wonders if it isn’t “ein wenig übertrieben” [a litte bit over the top] (Lessing 1807, 149)—it points towards some key aspects regarding the reception of John Milton via Edward Young. Konrad Feilchenfeldt explains: “Fragt man nach Vorbildern, von denen Young sich inspirieren ließ, so ist zweifellos an erster Stelle John Milton zu nennen.” [If one looks for models Young was influenced by, Milton has to be named first.] (Feilchenfeldt 2006, 65) Referring to Harold Bloom’s description of Milton as “the great Inhibitor, the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles” (Bloom 1973, 32), Feilchenfeldt claims: “Young hat er nicht erwürgt, Young ist kein Epigone.” [Young wasn’t strangled by Milton, Young wasn’t an epigone.] (Feilchenfeldt 2006, 65) Like Kramer Herbert Croft appreciates Young’s achievements. Like Lessing his verdict is hesitant. In the 1822 edition of “The Life of Young” Herbert Croft claims that Young “was always the Lion of his master, Milton, ‘pawing to get free his hinder parts.’” (Croft 1822, 49) Croft’s metaphor compares Young not just to any lion. The source domain for Croft’s metaphor can be found in Paradise Lost’s account of creation. This rhetorical choice is rather cunning, since it directly transforms Young into a creation of Milton’s mind. Thus this metaphor serves to praise Young— by pointing out the Miltonic influence—and criticizes Young—for never having been able to free himself from this very influence.

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This metaphor can be read as an ironic genealogy of influence considering Milton similarly represents Sin as a creation of Satan’s mind: “a goddess armed / Out of thy head I sprung!” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.757-58). If this argument seems to far-fetched one should not forget that a prominent episode in “The Life of Young” revolves around Young meeting Voltaire. After Voltaire mocked Milton’s representation of Sin and Death Young supposedly responded with an impromptu epigram: “No stranger, sir, though born in foreign climes. / On Dorset downs, when Milton’s page / with Sin and Death provoked thy rage, / Thy rage provoked, who sooth’d with gentle rhymes?” (Young quoted in Croft 27). Croft questions Young’s originality and simultaneously answers a central question in Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition: “Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?” While Croft has some problems in placing Young’s influences his final verdict is very clear: “His verses are formed by no certain model; he is no more like himself in his different productions than he is like others. He seems never to have studied prosody, nor to have had any direction but from his own ear. But with all his defects, he was a man of genius and a poet.” (Croft 346) Interestingly Croft’s attitude towards Young is as uncertain as is Young’s attitude towards Milton. John Broadbent argues that Young’s essay was symptomatic of the mix-up of attitudes towards Milton. He addressed the work to Richardson, the realist whose novels he admired, but he also invited poets to emulate Milton’s brand of originality, not to pastiche blank verse but to write it, as a symbol of human potential . . . [I]n the late 18th century, ‘Milton’ comes to mean a style of thinking and feeling, more than a style of writing; his influence helped to undermine the passive literary orthodoxy established in his name.” (Broadbent 1973, 313)

However contradictory Young’s use of Milton might seem at times, the influence is clearly discernible and at the end Young’s poem “Night Thoughts” as well as his letter Conjectures on Original Composition proved highly important transitional texts. These helped usher in the end of Enlightenment-aesthetics while setting the tone—even more so in Germany than England—for Romantic theories of writing and learning to come. Sanford Budick argues in his study on Kant and Milton: “Curiously enough, when commentators on Kant and his contemporaries mention the impact of Edward Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’ or Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man or The Rape of the Locke, they show no awareness of the dominant Miltonic features, even Miltonic mythologies, which significantly underpin

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these works’”. (Budick 2010, 16) The same is true for the importance of Miltonic features in Edward Young’s Conjectures: Explicitly, Paradise Lost features prominently in Young’s discussion. Besides the reference to Eve at the lake Young uses several quotations by Milton—for example in his discussion on the unfallen nature of blankverse—and Young employs Milton as an example for a British genius. Implicitly, in regards to critical thinking, powerful echoes of Milton’s tractate Areopagitica are discernible in the Conjectures on Original Composition.

The Case Against Imitation In his discussion of the differences between “originals” and “imitators,” the “ancients” and “moderns,” one of Young’s basic assumptions is that “The less we copy the renowned Antients, we shall resemble them the more.” (Conj., 21) But what is a copy in Young’s terms? Does a copyist, whether as writer or critic, merely re-create pre-existing ideas, concepts, and philosophies? And is a genius prohibited from doing so? At first sight Young’s essay seems to argue just that, and its insistence on firstness seems to echo Paradise Lost’s invocation of the Holy Spirit. In Paradise Lost the invocation of the Holy Spirit focuses on the attempt to start anew. Milton makes very clear that his undertaking is nothing less then recreation: “first Disobedience” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.1), “first taught” (ibid., 1.8), “from the first / Wast present” (ibid., 1.19f), “Say first” (ibid. 27, 28), “first seduc’d” (ibid, 33), he “pursues things unattempted in Prose or Rhyme” (ibid., 15). This importance of firstness is taken up in Young’s Conjectures. The genius is not made out of “preexisting materials” (Conj., 12). The genius is self-originating without prior influence or guidance. This concept echoes Milton’s, especially Paradise Lost. The poet describes his muse, here the Holy Spirit, not Urania, the following way: thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss And mad’st it pregnant . . . (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.19-22)

In both passages we find the curious image of the Holy Spirit that not only is brooding on the egg representing the creation. The spirit also “mad’st . . . pregnant” and infuses it with “vital virtue.” The spirit is hermaphroditic in the sense that he/she is father/mother of the creation at the same time.

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But more importantly it is self-originating; without any external influences it transforms chaos into form. Eve, in a similar vein, tries to find an explanation for the reflection in the lake beneath her and like the Holy Spirit she gives meaning to the “watrie” surface below. Matthew Wickman, consequently, reads Eve in analogy to the Holy Spirit when he argues: In this sense, Eve (or perhaps her sonorous reflection) is Eden’s first poet . . . In effect, she is a surrogate and analogue to the Holy Spirit, brooding over and impregnating the originary abyss bay adopting a polyphony of voices and inspiring grand sequences of action. (Wickman 1998, 908)

Young’s insistence on originality might appear rather ironic considering his extensive use of quotations and references. But for Young originality is less based on avoiding influences. Originality is the result of critical engagement with these very sources. The central Miltonic reference, Eve’s lake-episode, supports this thought. Superficially this scene is presented as an example for Eve turning into an original, a genius herself. Looking beyond the textual surface the scene of Eve’s self-identification reveals its referential genealogy. After all Milton himself modelled his description after Ovid’s “Narcissus and Echo”-episode in the Metamorphoses. An episode which itself is a rewrite of pre-existing versions of this myth. As such this scene and its textual history are congruent with Young’s bigger argument. He explicitly stresses the importance of prior influence on personal creation: had “there been no Herodotus, there might have been no Thucydides, and the world’s admiration might have begun at Livy for excellence in the province of the pen.” (Conj., 45) Consequently, this long line of authorial influence may appear to stand in stark contrast to Eve’s birth as a self-originated genius. Yet, Young isn’t really concerned with cutting off earlier influences, the focus lies on rereading and re-interpretating the ancient sources. This leads to originality. Thomas Festa argues that Young’s interpretation of Eve’s lake-episode has the effect of resuscitating the representation of Eve as itself a representation, of demonstrating how productive and liberating such an interpretation has been in literary history, and, consequently, of opening the field of contemporary interpretation to include more extensive aesthetic and even moral imperatives that might be impossible without it. (Feste 2012, 184)

But in a sense Eve does create her own identity and constructs her field of knowledge and understanding. When the angel Raphael in Paradise Lost

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states that “knowledge is as food” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 7.126) he outlines a rhetoric and epistemic device that shapes Milton’s thinking about thinking. According to this Baconian metaphor, “Knowledge is as food” it needs to be chosen, tasted and digested. The themes of ‘choosing’ and testing are essential. According to Milton’s didactic theory in “Of Education,” the teacher has to decide on the curriculum. He knows, e.g., that only late in the students’ education “it would be wholsome enough to let [them] taste some choice Comedies“ (Milton, “Of Education”, 328) Students are only served pre-selected food to avoid that “asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles which is commonly set before them” (ibid.). But even then one can teach these texts only with “wariness” (ibid.). They may prove poisonous and might require a “good antidote” (ibid.). Had Eve been educated based on Milton’s “Of Education” “years and good general precepts [would] have furnished [her] more distinctly with that act of reason which in ethics is called proairesis that they may with some judgement contemplate upon moral good and evil.” (Milton, Of Education, 328) Aristotle’s concepts of Proairesis (choice) and sophrosune (temperance, self-control) both require, in Emily Speller’s words, “the harmony of desire and reason.” When it comes to choosing Eve is presented as a model of Proairesis, she is able to choose without a fault. Her preparations for an evening dinner for the angel Raphael are described as thus: She turns, on hóspitable thoughts intent What choice to choose for delicacy best, What order, so contrived as not to mix Tastes not well joined, inelegant, but bring Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.332-36)

Eve is pictured not only as being hospitable. She is “choosing a choice”, she selects, sorts, and orders. If we read this passage with the imagery of food as knowledge in mind, one might get the impression that Eve is observed following the rules of rhetoric, or composing an essay. The fruit—read knowledge—she grew herself. While Raphael instructs Adam on the origin and history of creation, Eve slowly Rose, and went forth among her fruits and flow’rs, To visit how they prospered, bud and bloom, Her Nursery. They at her coming sprung And touched by her fair tendance gladlier grew. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.44-47)

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She does not reject the knowledge the divine messenger is able to deliever, she not only prefers to hear the angel’s report from Adam, to some extent she is intent to create and grow knowledge by herself. To read this scene with Young one could argue that she rejects learning by means of external sources and prefers to create knowledge by herself: “Learning is borrowed knowledge; Genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own.” (Conj., 36) Ironically it is the “borrowed knowledge” received from the deceitful Satan that leads to Eve’s and Adams’s fall. This is the one moment where Eve does not stay critical. Nonetheless, by growing her own food Eve is closer to genius than to an imitator. The following argument by Young, yet again based on the metaphoric field of food as knowledge, allows us to read Eve as such: “If there is a famine of Invention in the land, like Joseph’s brethren, we must travel far for food; we must visit the remote and rich, Antients; but an inventive Genius may savely stay at home; that, like the Widow’s cruse, is divinely replenished from within; and affords us a miraculous delight.” (Conj. 44) While Young argues in other places that the genius is free from external influence, he repeatedly stresses that, despite everything, such an influence remains: “An Evocation of vegetable fruits depends on rain, air, and sun; an Evocation of the fruits of Genius no less depends on Externals.” (Conj. 46) The influence of “externals” appears to be a given, it is a question of how to deal with these influences, rather than refusing their impact outright. As shall be seen, Young’s discussion is inherently concerned with what Harold Bloom later would call “Anxiety of Influence” (Bloom 1973). Young proposes a didactics of how to be an original rather than an imitator. And this didactics is concerned with getting to know one’s voice and artistic identity in light of the ancient’s oppressive influence.

The Didactics of Originality “What there thou seest, fair creature is thyself.” (Milton, quoted in Young, 51). In John Milton’s Paradise Lost Eve is famously instructed on the nature of the watery image she adores. After a short confusion on the image’s origin divine guidance helps Eve to identify the “amiablie milde” (ibid.) representation as what it actually is—a reflection of herself. According to Thomas Festa, Young’s Conjectures suggest the metamorphic potential of critical selfconsciousness to unbind the episode from traditional, misogynistic interpretations of the kind proposed by Hume’s note on the passage. . . .

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In line with this reading Young does exactly what Harold Bloom should demand many years later: “quest antithetically enough, and live to beget yourself.” (Bloom 1973, 79) In Young’s Conjectures this episode allegorically represents the artist’s discovery of his previously dormant qualities that render him a genius rather than an imitator. This epiphany Young describes as thus: “The writer starts at it, as at a lucid Meteor in the night” (Conj. 50). Eve is represented in this scene as a reader and critic. Eve misreads the image in front of her. Her interpretation of the watery signifier is wrong. Only divine intervention forces her to align signifier and signified and to realize the identity of both—herself and the watery reflection. For Young this epiphany as a result of critical reading is an essential theme of his essay. Matthew Wickman argues: “The Conjectures opening paragraph expressly alerts its readers to the importance of developing a sharp, critical eye.” (Wickman 1998, 902) Being a critical reader of the self, that shuns preordained interpretations and dares to deconstruct preexisting convictions, allows the self-realization of the sentimental subject to be “less ignorant of his own powers, than an Oyster of its pearl, or a Rock of its diamond” (Conj., 50). Only then can the individual avoid being like an “Ulysses under disguise, and a beggar to the last.” (Conj., 57). According to Young, the self-realization of a genius is based on two rules “from Ethics, which are no less golden in Composition, than in life. I. Know thyself; 2dly, Reverence thyself.” (Conj., 52) The first rule, “Know Thyself,” is directly connected to the aforementioned scene of Eve discovering her mirror image in the lake. As is the image on the watery surface, the quote itself has referential depth, referring directly to Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo episode in the Metamorphoses. Here the water-nymph Liriope, mother of Narcissus, requires to know whether her son would “long years and ripe old age enjoy” (Ovid, 61). The blind seer Tiresias answers in Delphic fashion with a confusing affirmative: “If he shall himself not know” (ibid.). The very moment Narcissus does ‘know himself’ initiates the moment of his transformation into a flower. New knowledge of the self comes with a price, and transforms the individual, whereas the mere imitation of pre-existing knowledge, that is accepting preconceived interpretations results in Young’s words in thinking “in wreteched unanimity with the throng.” (Conj., 55). Reading Young’s Eve-simile it becomes clear that the critic faces the danger—as did Narcissus—to fall into deceptive self-love. To avoid the sin of vanity in reading and criticism Young proposes a kind of reading

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that is overtly critical. Criticism that is merely imitative represents for Milton and Young a heretical act. To avoid heretical reading requires to question everything. In Milton’s words: A man may be a heretick in the truth; and if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determins, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie. (Milton, Areopagitica, 365)

A similar notion of heretical thinking echoes through Young’s Conjectures. The idea of genius for him is less based on refusing imitation as such, rather he warns against uncritical imitation. While the ancients should not be imitated in regards to their literary achievements, their critical approach towards each other is commendable: “Her men of Genius struck fire against each other, and kindled, by conflict, into glories no time shall extinguish.” (Conj., 66). Especially in the context of Miltonic mythologies the requirement to “know thyself” takes an interesting referential turn, since it implicitly introduces another rule into Young’s argument. In Paradise Lost Michael advises Adam to “well observe / the rule of not too much by temp’rance taught / In what thou eat’st and drink’st” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 11.530) This rule stems from the temple of Apollo in Delphi: “Meden Agan— Nothing too much” and “gnothi seauton—Know thyself.” Interestingly in Paradise Regained Christ identifies Satan as the Delphic oracle, who is “Ambiguous, and with double sense deluding” (Milton, Paradise Regained, 1.435). Christ warns Satan that “thou no more / Shalt be inquired at Delphos or elsewhere” (ibid., 1.458). Here we find a hint at a language that is fallen, where signifier and signified are not conjoined and communication is treacherous, deceitful, “with double sense deluding” (ibid.) and ultimately requires a critical reader to be decoded correctly. In alignment with this Miltonic image, Young’s concept of knowledge and truth is equally grounded in the belief that it is destructed and disjointed. Young chooses as an image that equally illustrates truth as a severed, scattered, and hidden body. According to this extended simile, Typhon and his conspirators attacked the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a thousand peeces, and scatter'd them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl'd body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all. (Milton, Areopagitica, 368f)

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Truth is scattered and hidden far and near, obtaining truth thus necessitates to wander, necessitates to err, and even if the search is successful the final pieces will be ever missing. Young describes the search for truth in similar terms. He advises writers to “cherish every spark of Intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull dark mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a body.” (Conj. 53) Being a critical reader requires to taste and to test, a concept of utmost importance for Milton and Young. The word to “taste” appears thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone. According to Denise Gigante “Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both ‘to taste’ and ‘to know’.” (Gigante 2005, 89) Like hardly another of Milton’s texts, in prose or poetry, Areopagitica, stresses not only the possibility of tasting various things, he demands it: To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil'd. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance; and yet God in that unapocryphall vision, said without exception, Rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each mans discretion. (Milton, Areopagitica, 348)

Milton argues “that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary” and “it was out of the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.” (ibid., 350) A belief in the binary opposition of good and evil gives way to a dialectic understanding: knowledge on good can only be gained by knowledge of evil. To do so, one has to taste. This sentiment is echoed by Young in his poem Night Thoughts, when he argues “If Vice (as sometimes) is our Friend on Earth, Then Vice is Virtue; ‘t is our sov’reign Good. (Young, “Night Thoughts”, 126) Reading might result in misreading, nonetheless it is essential to choose and test for one self. Mistakes and errors may occur on the way. This is exemplified by Milton and Young with the notion of wandering. Milton’s representation of truth is metaphorically tied to the necessity to wander and to leave a predestined path. The verb “to wander,“ in the context of Paradise Lost, takes on its Latin meaning to ‘err’: “on th’ Aleian Field I fall / Erroneous, there to wander and forlorne.” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 7.19-20) It is into such a world of wandering/erring Adam and Eve are evicted after their original sin:

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The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitarie way. (Milton, Pardise Lost, 12.646-49)

The underlying worldview may still be a providential one, but man’s freedom lies in the ability to choose, which includes the possibility to choose wrongly. In Areopagitica Milton argues: “Many there be that complain of divine providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions.” (Milton, Areopagitica, 356) To avoid being reduced to a passive puppet, the freedom of choice has to be accepted. In consequence this notion of wandering as erring is not connotated as negatively as one might assume. Henry Weinfield argues: Milton recognizes that the delights of wandering are such as even the gods would want to cultivate, and yet he knows that there is a sense in which to wander is to be in error, and thus not only prone to falling but (to make use of his own pun) vulnerable to what ever might ‘befall’. (Weinfield, 47)

Wandering for Milton and Young equals discoursing, and in doing so taking the risk of being wrong. Getting lost is just a diversion on the way to truth, reason and originality, as Milton argues: “all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest.” (Milton, Areopagitica, 349) This understanding of wandering/erring as a means to obtain the truth might explain the fascination Milton had on many Romantics. To quote John Broadbent: “ . . . Milton is himself Romantic in his willingness to risk error for the sake of a freedom that he regards as the truest index of our humanity.” (Weinfield, 2) To wander/err means to get lost, and Young takes this equation a step further by demanding that wandering is not only a side-effect of thinking for yourself but a precondition. It is also a way of finding oneself, and hence to “know thyself” and “reference thyself” (Conj., 52). He tells the reader to “Wander off”: “All Eminence, and Distinction, lies out of the beaten road; Excursion, and Deviation, are necessary to find it; and the more remote your Path from the Highway, the more reputable” (Conj. 22f). The road less taken leads to originality and individuality. In that sense the Conjectures do not necessarily imply that human individuality is a

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given, a status quo. Rather it is something one has to earn, it is a project that can, ultimately fail or it can succeed, if “you fall not into a Ditch, in your way to Glory.” (Conj., 23) Still the willingness to err, to walk astray is essential in finding one’s own voice and to find a critical distance from the ancients. It hardly comes as a surprise that Harold Blooms argues in his seminal The Anxiety of Influence: “The God of poets is not Apollo, who lives in the rhythm of recurrence, but the bald gnome Error, who lives at the back of a cave” (Bloom 1973, 78). To err and to wander are essential in order to discontinue poetry and to create something new. Harold Bloom uses similar images when he argues: “Most of what we call poetry—since the Enlightenment anyway—is the questing for fire, that is discontinuity. Repetition belongs to the watery shore, and Error comes only to those who go beyond discontinuity, on the airy journey up into a fearful freedom of weightlessness.” (Bloom 1973, 79) Here Bloom, like Young, seems to be both influenced by the Miltonic genius that is Satan, who leaves his “watery shore” to fly through chaos in order to discover new lands. It is Satan who is willing to go beyond the confines of his surroundings. To illustrate this process Milton uses the imagery of seafaring, and by explicit extension, of colonisation. Satan, after his journey through chaos, is compared to a “weather beaten Vessel” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.1043). Edward Young similarly describes the practice of the Genius as that of a discoverer, who claims new realms for the empire: “Originals . . . extend the Republic of Letters, and add a new province to its dominion.” (Conj., 10). Young adds, recalling Satan’s ability to see and think beyond the barrier that is chaos: “Moreover, so boundless are the bold excursion of the human mind, that in the vast void beyond real existence, it can call forth shadowy beings, and unknown worlds, as numerous, as bright, and, perhaps, as lasting, as the stars” (Conj., 70). This demand to venture forth ties into a greater argument of Young’s philosophy. As David Shields argues: Edward Young dared to envision a boundless Britannia . . . . The task of British literature, according to Young, was to recognize trade as the predominant heroic action in the modern era. . . . He wished to see ‘the British mast with nobler laurels bound,’ and trade granted the same prestige that Virgil granted agricultural production in imperial Rome. (Shields 1990, 25)

In the Conjectures Young also fuses his discussion of individuality with nationalistic elements. In regard to British originals Young states: “we [the Britons] have great Originals already: Bacon, Newton,

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Shakespeare, Milton, have showed us, that all the winds cannot blow the British flag farther, than an Original spirit can convey the British fame; their names go around the world; and what foreign Genius strikes not as they pass.” (Conj., 76) Especially in the context of travel and exploration, literally and figuratively, Young’s Conjectures carry many traces of Milton’s Areopagitica. Young and Milton are concerned with the importance of a free and productive press, since to explore requires choices which can be explored in the first place. Where Milton’s main intention is to advocate against licensing (he is, however, in favour of censorship), Young—100 years later—argues: “Some are of the opinion […] that the press is overcharged” only to continue “Overcharged, I think, it could never be” (Conj., 4). The quantity of published texts is not per se to the intellectual detriment of a reading nation: “the more composition the better.” (ibid.)

Metaphors of Originality This contradiction at the heart of the Conjectures between originality and imitation, the genius and the copyist is replicated on the level of metaphorical imagery. Young uses imagery similar to Milton’s Areopagitica to illustrate his conviction. Milton argues, in reference to the Proverb 18:4, that “Truth is compar'd in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick'n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” (Milton, Areopagitica, 365). Young turns the press itself into the very “Fountain of Fame” (Conj., 4) and a precondition to promote “the sacred interests of Virtue, and real Service of Mankind.” (Conj., 4) And just like Milton he discusses the dangers of this fountain drying out. Where Milton identifies licensing as the main danger, Young regards imitation as a threat to achieving said virtues, especially to the liberal arts. Young argues that the “arts Mechanic are in perpetual progress, and increase . . . whereas the Liberal are in retrogradation and decay.” (Conj., 41). As a result he wonders whether imitating authors are nothing but “mere leaden pipes . . . perhaps mudded in the pass” (Conj., 71) of transferring water from the reservoir of the ancients to the present (rather than procuring their own, fresh water). For Young, these ancient sources have a decidedly negative connotation: “High in the towering Alps is the fountain of the Po; high in fame, and in Antiquity, is the Fountain of an Imitator’s Undertaking; but the River, and the Imitation, humbly creep along the vale” (Conj., 16) and, are again in the danger of muddening. Edward Young’s argument shares this notion when he argues: “Moreover, so boundless are the bold excursion of the human mind, that in

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the vast void beyond real existence, it can call forth shadowy beings, and unknown worlds, as numerous, as bright, and, perhaps, as lasting, as the stars; such quite-original beauties we may call Paradisical.” (Conj., 70) Consequently, Young quotes Ovid’s Metamorphoses, particularly the account of creation and the Golden Age (which also influenced Milton in his concept of self-origination). Originals, Young says, are “Natos sine semine flores” – “The flowers born without seed.” (Conj., 70) Young’s metaphor of the genius as a flower is used extensively: “Originals are the fairest Flowers: Imitations are of quicker growth, but fainter bloom.” (Conj., 9) The “[m]ind of the Genius is a fertile and pleasant field.” (Conj. 9) Originality is of a “vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of Genius; it grows, it is not made.” (ibid.) Here Young’s definition of genius hints again at the concept of selforigination. For Young “Genius is from Heaven . . . Learning is borrowed knowledge; Genius is knowledge innate; and quite our own.” (Conj., 36) This concept of the “knowledge innate” directly relates Young’s argument to Miltonic philosophies of learning and truth. While these philosophies do not cancel out divine influence and guidance, they do stress the necessity of thinking for oneself. This concept of constructivist thinking leads to knowledge that is “quite our own.” (ibid.) Reading, learning and composing are processes of gradual refinement. In “Of Education” Milton proposes to teach students from “arts most easy” and “most obvious to the sense” to “things invisible” (Milton, Of Education, 323). In Paradise Lost Milton illustrates this thought by a metaphor that is at once static and at the same time processual. Raphael’s represents this gradual evolution of knowledge with the image of a flower. To make this image more dynamic Raphael’s metaphor requires the recipient to observe the flower from the bottom to the top, from the root to the smell emitted by the petals: ……………………………………..So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More airy, last the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes: flow’rs and their fruit, Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual, give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding, whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive, or intuitive (Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.479-88)

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This image is structured from bottom to top, from the earthy to the aerial, from the crude to the refined. The ideal outcome is “reason . . . / Discursive, or intuitive,” with Intuition representing the highest, angelic degree of knowledge. To achieve said intuition one needs to complete a process of learning and proper critical practices. In consequence imitation and intuition are not to be understood as dichotomies and absolute opposites. Imitation and intuition are connected. In analogue to this image Edward Young describes the author as one who (to speak accurately) thinks, and composes; while other invaders of the Press, how voluminous, and learned soever, (with due respect be it spoken) only read, and write. (Conj. 54)

The ideal author “thinks, and composes”, whereas the lesser writer just “reads, and writes”. What the lesser author lacks is understanding his sources. This is an argument one finds later in Coleridge’s discussion of genius. M.H. Abrams argues in The Mirror and the Lamp that Coleridge “appraise[s] two modes of poetry . . . The other and greater class of poetry is organic. It has its source in living ‘ideas,’ and its production involves the higher faculties of imagination, ‘reason,’ and the ‘will.’ Hence it is the work of ‘genius,’ and its major instances are to be found in the writings of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.” (M. H. Abrams 1953, 176). It is by way of this Baconian concept of learning Young opens an extended analogy of “food as knowledge” and the proper way to deal with such knowledge, that Young connects his own argumentation with that of Milton. Francis Bacon argues in his essay “Of Studies” that “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts” (Bacon, Of Studies) The Milton—“Of Education” at least— similarly requires for a successful education is a “well continu’d and judicious conversing among pure Authors digested, which [the students] scarce taste“ (Milton, Of Education, 323).

Works Cited Bacon, Francis. 1597 (1856). “Of Studies.” Essays. London: John W. Parker and Son, West Strand. 432. Barnstorff, Johannes. 1895 (2013). Youngs Nachtgedanken und ihr Einfluss auf die Deutsche Literatur. London: Forgotten Books, 2013. Budick, Sanford. 2010. Kant and Milton. Harvard: Harvard UP.

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Croft, Herbert. 1822. The Poems of Edward Young. (The Life of Edward Young). In The British Poets. Festa, Thomas. 2012. “Eve and the ironic theodicy of the New Milton Criticism.” In The New Milton Criticism. Edited by Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, 175-92. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Gigante, Denise. 2005. Taste: A Literary History. Yale: Yale UP. Hughes, Merrit. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1957. vii. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. 1807. Sämtliche Schriften. Berlin: In der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung. Milton, John.“Areopagitica.” 1644. Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Rosenblatt, Jason P., 333-79. New York: Norton, 2011. —. “Of Education.” 1644. Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Rosenblatt, Jason P., 318-32. New York: Norton, 2011. —. Paradise Lost. Ed. Teskey, Gordon. New York: Norton, 2005. —. Paradise Regained. Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Rosenblatt, Jason P., 91-152. New York: Norton, 2011. Odell, D. W. 2012. “Genius and Analogy in Young’s Conjectures and the Theology of Night Thoughts.” REN 64 (2): 143-216. Speller, Emily. “For Knowledge is as Food: Digesting Gluttony and Temperance in Paradise Lost.” Early English Studies 2:2009. 1-28. Teskey, Gordon. 2009. Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity. Harvard: Harvard UP. Weinfield, Henry. 2012. The Blank-Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wickman, Matthew. 1998. “Imitating Eve Imitating Echo Imitating Originality: The Critical Reverberations of Sentimental Genius in the ‘Conjectures on Original Composition.” EHL 65: 899-928. Young, Edward. 1759. Conjectures on Original Composition In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. London: Printed for A. Millar, in The Strand; and R. and J. Dodsley, in Pall-Mall. —. 1830. “Night Thoughts.” In Select British Poets. Edited by. T. F. Walker, 91-165 Edinburgh: Printed for J. M’Baldry, & Co.

CHAPTER SEVEN “WITH FRY INNUMERABLE SWARM”: READING MILTON AS INTERTEXT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR SCIENCE ALISON E. MARTIN

“Forthwith the sound and seas, each creek and bay, / With fry innumerable swarm” quoted Philip Henry Gosse at the opening to a chapter on jellyfish, spiny cockles and sea worms in The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea (1854, 210). A ‘popular’ account of the flora and fauna of the seaside, this work abounded with literary references, not just to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which brought these texts into dialogue with Gosse’s own reflections on the abundance of deep-sea life and the wonders of creation. Published in London by John van Voorst, who specialised in natural history, The Aquarium was an immediate success. The lure of the seaside to the Victorian middle classes as a place of leisure and learning had stimulated an upsurge of interest in marine natural history, amply fed by a range of works aimed at non-specialist adult and child readers alike (Allen 1976, 118ff.). With its high price-ticket of 17 shillings, due to its many coloured and black and white pictures, Gosse’s Aquarium was scarcely a pocket money purchase. But as the Christian Remembrancer enthused, its illustrations were “of ravishing beauty, quite miracles of tinted lithography,” and complemented well Gosse’s “reverential style” which made this work attractive “to the scientific and popular student” (Anonymous 1854, 260). This work therefore derived its vibrancy as much from the coloured plates and engravings as from Gosse’s flair for scientific description, interwoven with intertextual references from the Bible and the British literary canon. But mixing molluscs and Milton was not a stylistic device typical only of Gosse. Mid-nineteenth-century books on marine biology were particularly rich in allusions to Milton’s works. Paradise Lost, which described the emergence of landmasses out of the oceans at the Creation, was an obvious source of reference, as to a

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lesser degree were the masque Comus (1634), in which the water-nymph Sabrina frees the steadfastly virtuous “Lady,” and the pastoral elegy Lycidas (1638), written in memory of a learned friend drowned off the Welsh coast. Gillian Beer observes that “Milton, Wordsworth, and to a surprisingly lesser extent, Shakespeare” were the three British poets and dramatists most frequently quoted in Victorian scientific writing (1996, 211). As the sciences underwent profound changes in the course of the nineteenth century, not least as they grew increasingly professionalised, this “mixed economy of old and new methods, and the uncertainty of public appreciation,” Beer notes, caused writers to have frequent recourse to shared, “safe” forms of language and allusion (2012, 467). These were traditionally found in classical literature, the Bible and works from the British literary canon, notably by Milton. The common language used by nineteenth-century scientists was therefore forged out of past literatures, and drew on those works common to a generation of men schooled in the classical tradition. Their writing, Beer argues, fostered “a benign continuity for scientific enquiries with the imaginative past of human society,” thereby strengthening the link with texts we would now classify as firmly “literary,” and a congruity with poetry, “perceived as the authoritative utterance within common language” (1990, 83). But the new theories that some scientific writers of the Victorian period wished to propose would have appeared to more conservative readers anything other than “benign”. As James A. Secord has noted of the geologist Charles Lyell’s writings on the earth as an ever-changing planet, divisive issues “were introduced in measured prose, with quotations from Horace, Ovid, Pindar, Pliny, Virgil, Thucydides, Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare” to make the conceptually problematic more palatable to a British readership (2014, 162). Scientists therefore referred readers back to familiar texts and to the authoritative language of canonical literature as a way of allaying greater anxieties about new understandings of the universe. Works such as Gosse’s Aquarium drew actively on Britain’s literary heritage as a means of perpetuating cultural memory in strikingly modern works of Victorian science. Literary and cultural historians working on the relationship between literature and science have increasingly turned towards an exploration of what Gowan Dawson has termed “the cultural embeddedness of science,” arguing that science writing has neither been value free nor operated outside of cultural influences, but rather has raised “important questions regarding the production of meaning and the transmission of knowledge” (Dawson 2006, 302-3). Ground-breaking work by George Levine has highlighted how the construction of Darwin’s

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arguments and the nature of his language—vividly descriptive, brimming with exclamations of wonder and alive to the power of metaphor—were key to the energy of his prose (Levine 1991, 2011; also Beer 2000). The young chemist Michael Faraday, urgently seeking to improve the rhetorical force of his own writing, actively extended his reading to include a number of literary sources, including Milton, Pope and Thomson, to develop his powers of expression and persuasion (Jenkins 2008, 31). In a wider study of Victorian science, Alice Jenkins has also highlighted how scientists were keen to use literature to tie new ideas into an “older matrix of cultural references” (2007, 24-5) as part of what she has more generally termed the “uncontrollable nature of the processes of cultural borrowing, appropriating, half-digesting, and half-comprehending, processes that respect no boundary of disciplinary dignity,” processes which “turn literature into science, science into literature, and all into the fertile culture of a society with widespread literacy and access to publishing” (ibid., 142). It is precisely these processes of borrowing, appropriation and (half-)digestion that characterise the intertextual layering which brought Milton into dialogue with the authors of British marine natural history. Such intertextual references do not always represent moments of great narrative artistry. But their recurring presence in a genre widely read by both adults and children suggests they are an important, if hitherto overlooked, facet of nineteenth-century British readers’ wider engagement with Milton as a cultural and literary icon. How exactly did Victorian readers interpret the Miltonic references woven into works as varied as Gosse’s Aquarium, the anonymously authored Wonders of the Sea-Shore (1847), William Henry Harvey’s The Sea-Side Book (1849), David Landsborough’s Popular History of British Seaweeds (1851) or Robert Fraser’s Ebb and Flow: The Curiosities and Marvels of the Sea-Shore; A Book for Young People (1860)? How did they make sense of this interplay of present and past that was also bound up with the presentation of scientific knowledge as part of a specifically British cultural identity? And who exactly belonged to this imagined community of readers confronted with the complexities of literary quotation, allusion and influence at the same time that they were seeking to identify specimens of the aquatic world? Astrid Erll draws on a useful distinction made by Jeffrey K. Olick that cultural memory operates on two different levels, namely one “that sees culture as a subjective category of meaning contained in people’s minds and one that “sees culture as patterns of publicly available symbols objectified in society” (in Erll 2010, 5). While it is difficult to restore those subjective categories of meaning which were generated by readers as they turned the pages of The Aquarium, it is

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easier to investigate how the embedding of Miltonic references into texts like this can be understood within the context of Milton’s works as “publicly available,” canonical cultural objects. As Matthew Bradley and Juliet John have recently reminded us, while capturing the essence of the reading process still remains something of a “problematic empty centre” in scholarly discourses, some of the greatest advances in our understanding of nineteenth-century reading have come from those interested in the material facts of books and their history (2015, 5-6). Viewing cultural memory as a kind of “working memory” (Assmann 2010, 97, 100), constantly being redistilled through reading, quoting and commenting on it, enables the cultural capital of Milton’s writing to be continuously reaffirmed. Roland Posner (1991, 65) has argued that cultural memory can be understood as a form of social memory, since culture operates as a collective (and selective) mechanism for retaining information in much the same way that our own memories record our individual experiences. Understanding cultural memory in this way also enables us to investigate culture within a three-dimensional framework that comprises social aspects (such as people, social relations and institutions), material aspects (the very books themselves) and mental aspects (culturally defined ways of thinking). In what follows, we shall be looking at how Milton’s work resonated through the writing of early Victorian science, and how these references could have been interpreted by a ‘popular’ readership. While Landsborough’s work on seaweeds was aimed at an adult audience, its reference to six named female algologists and conchologists (1857, v-viii) suggests it actively courted female readers’ interest and its chatty tone and 22 illustrations meant that it was a more broadly engaging work for the general reader. Harvey’s Sea-Side Book, priced at just 5 shillings in its second edition, boasted 69 illustrations that similarly aimed to make its subject matter visually vibrant to a wide audience. Published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), the Wonders of the Sea-Shore also sought imaginative rapport with its readers who accompanied the anonymous author on “our excursions” to the coast, and was reviewed as “conveying to the youthful mind real facts more wonderful than fiction” (1849, 421). Fraser’s Ebb and Flow was very explicitly marketed as “profusely illustrated, neatly printed, and cheap,” and “well adapted for a school prize or present to young people” thus presenting it as a work which the young reader could aspire to own (1860, back material). This chapter starts by examining the material presence of Milton’s writing on the book market, analysing how the various editions were tailored to different readerships, and reflecting on how works such as

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Paradise Lost sustained their position in the British cultural memory as classical, canonical texts. It is, however, worth bearing in mind the potential disjuncture between envisioned audiences and actual buyers and readers: works written for children were also read by adults, since the sociability of reading practices meant that what was read aloud to children would also automatically be “consumed” by parents (Fyfe 2000, 286). Moreover, some children could well have learnt their science from books intended for adults, and working class readers were attracted to children’s books by their low price (ibid., xi-xii). In a second section, we analyse nineteenth-century experiences of reading Milton to understand the motivations for tackling a reading of his poetry. We then examine in a third section how the intertextual references to Milton’s writing transmuted its form and content to generate new meanings and extend the reach of marine natural history beyond the bounds of purely factual scientific narrative.

Publishing Milton: “The Text-Book of a Nation’s Feeling” As Herbert Grabes has noted, “almost all nineteenth-century histories of English literature will reveal that their hierarchical canons are meant to disseminate moral values and great pride in long-standing national excellence in order to foster national unity and identity” (2010: 314). Milton’s inclusion in the British canon was no exception. Throughout the Victorian period, James G. Nelson has argued, Milton was a national figure who aroused strong feeling, “loved by many, hated by some, but ignored by few” (1963, 12). Thomas De Quincey, writing in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1839, had described Paradise Lost as “not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces” (1839, 777), thus lending this work a supranational, classical status. The article “On Poetry in General,” also published in 1839, which appeared in Dearden’s Miscellany, was more concerned to see Milton’s achievements in a national light: “in descriptive poets of all ages are contained lovely and melodious passages, which form the text-book of a nation’s feeling . . . ; the night scenes in Homer and Milton, the ‘mediations, fancy free,’ of our beloved Shakspeare [sic]; the deep droppings of music from the lips of our venerated Wordsworth” (Anonymous 1839, 2). Where De Quincey had placed Milton in a category of his own, here Milton was located within a wider corpus of “reusable,” re-iterable texts which collectively offered a sense of stability, durability and tangible cultural self-image. Written in English, rather than Latin, Paradise Lost had also, by the Victorian period, come to be seen as

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“poetry fit for empire,” as Britain rapidly developed into a colonizer and exporter of culture in her own right (Zwierlein 2011, 671). Echoing the title of Joseph Wittreich’s recent work Why Milton Matters (2006), this chapter asks why Milton “mattered” to nineteenthcentury readers, not only in terms of his prosody, diction and syntax, but also in terms of his imagery, themes and preoccupations. The British book market was already awash with single and multivolume editions of Milton’s writing by the start of the nineteenth century. Archdeacon Henry J. Todd, who produced a seven-volume Poetical Works of John Milton in 1809, recorded 114 British editions of Milton prior to 1800, and 18 just in the nine years previous to the appearance of his own edition. Milton’s Paradise Lost, which forms the main body of the intertextual references found in the marine natural history writing explored here, was one of the most commonly re-edited books in the nineteenth century, with thirty-nine British (and almost as many American) editions appearing between 1801 and 1860 (see Stevens 1930, 66-99). The appearance of these different variants was justified by publishers through the inclusion of new engravings, details of Milton’s life, the addition of related texts from scripture, explanatory notes, and, in the case of “Paradise Lost, a Poem in Twelve Bucs. By Jon Miltun. Lundun,” an entire reworking of the text in phonetic spelling (Pitman 1846). This was also the period in which Milton’s life as a writer and public persona was being reflected upon more intensely: Todd’s own Life of Milton appeared in 1801, followed by Charles Symmons’ competing edition in 1806 and John Mitford’s Life of John Milton (1851), as well as later versions by Douglas Hamilton and by Thomas Keightley in 1859. As the nineteenth century saw a shift from books being enjoyed solely at home to being incorporated into school teaching (Alderson and Immel 2009, 384), so Milton increasingly entered the corpus of texts read in school. Thomas Goodwin, Headmaster of the Greenwich Preparatory School, produced The Student’s Practical Grammar of the English Language (1855) subtitled “Together with a Commentary on the First Book of Milton’s Paradise Lost,” which offered a grammatical treatment of passages from Milton’s work that became an increasingly common way of exposing children to his writing in the midVictorian period. The publisher Longman and his trade associates offer an interesting case study of the dynamics of publishing Milton’s writing in early nineteenth-century Britain. Todd’s multi-volume Poetical Works of John Milton (1801), on sale for the princely sum of two pounds and 14 shillings, “traversed the regions of our English Parnassus with a discriminative eye and a discerning taste,” according to an enthusiastic reviewer in the

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Monthly Mirror, to produce a work satisfactory even to the greatest admirers of Milton, for “their favourite never has been introduced to the British nation in so advantageous and satisfactory a manner” (Anonymous 1802, 249). Todd’s Poetical Works remained popular for the next forty years, enjoying a reprint of 1000 copies in July 1826, with a fourth edition in July 1842 running to 750 copies, and in November 1851 a fifth edition with a similarly large print run of 750 (Longman Impression Books, MS 1393/1, H11: 124, H14: 243). At the same time that Todd’s six-volume work was consolidating its position in the market, so too was the fourvolume Poetical Works of John Milton, originally by Samuel Johnson, and re-edited and prefaced with an essay by the non-conformist physician John Aikin, which likewise appeared in big print runs of 1500 copies in February 1801 and December 1807 (Longman Impression Books MS 1393/1, H5: 2, H6: 77). Volumes of Milton’s writing which sold in series appear to have been particularly popular with readers, presumably because of the motivating impulse to continue buying the series as it expanded, as well as the aesthetic satisfaction of collecting books bound and presented in a similar fashion. In the “Walker’s British Classics” series, Milton’s Poetical Works had an enormous print run of 5000 when it first appeared as a handily sized duodecimo in June 1818, followed by a further 5000 in October 1822 (Longman Impression Books MS 1393/1, H6: 120, 193). Although Longman and associates clearly had a firm grasp on all things Miltonic appearing on the British book market, the ruthless publisher Henry Bohn was undeterred. Despite entering the market relatively late, he produced Milton’s Works, Both Prose and Poetical (1847), with an introduction by Robert Fletcher, priced at one pound one shilling, boasting in the back pages of his catalogues, “This is the only complete edition of Milton’s Prose Works, at a moderate price”. Twenty years later he produced a work purporting to draw on all previous key editions—including James Montgomery’s two-volume Poetical Works of John Milton. With a Memoir, and critical Remarks on his Genius and Writings (Tilt and Bogue, 1843) that had gone on sale in a cloth binding for 24 shillings and a deluxe Moroccan leather edition for 34 shillings. Bohn, with a good eye for business, brought out what he presented as the most authoritative edition around, comprehensively titled the Poetical Works of John Milton, with a Memoir and Critical Remarks on his Genius and Writings by James Montgomery, and One Hundred and Twenty Engravings […] With an Index to Paradise Lost: Todd’s Verbal Index to All the Poems; and a Variorum Selection of Explanatory Notes (1861). Priced at just five

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shillings per volume, it sharply undercut the competition and made Milton accessible to a mass audience. While adult editions of Milton’s writing were clearly becoming ever more affordable, attractive and accessible through the addition of notes and indexes, historical accounts of children’s literature have largely ignored editions of Milton. Indeed, Harvey Darton’s seminal Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life (1958) contains no references to his works at all. Yet as Lee A. Jacobus reminds us, Comus could well be thought of as children’s literature, given that the leading role and two important supporting roles were actually written as children’s parts (1973, 67). As Joan F. Gilliland has demonstrated, young people’s editions of Paradise Lost did in fact proliferate in England in the nineteenth century (1985, 26-7). While by the end of the eighteenth century, attempts were being made to establish separate poetic and dramatic canons for children and the appropriateness of giving adult poetry to children was being queried (Grenby 2011, 118-20), glosses such as the Anglo-Irish educationalist Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People (1802) were making Milton seem altogether much more accessible for younger readers. In his Essays on Professional Education (1809) Edgeworth noted that among “our classical English authors” Milton was “here and every where preeminent: It is unnecessary to name with feeble applause those beautiful parts of Paradise Lost, which are impressed on the mind of every reader of taste and feeling” (1809, 93). He was, however, swift to add that “[i]t is by no means advisable to insist upon the young reader’s going regularly through the Paradise Lost; he would be tired and disgusted, and would probably conclude, that he had no relish for good poetry” (1809, 93). Sarah Siddons was less cautious in recommending Milton as suitable reading matter for children. In the preface to her abridgement of Paradise Lost as The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, which appeared with the London publisher John Murray in 1822, she stressed the possibility that Milton offered of combining “the sublime and beautiful” as “an approach to virtue” (1822, iii). By cultivating an early admiration of Milton in her young audience, she aimed to make a reading of Paradise Lost less a duty than a pleasure, precisely because of the human interest aspect the work had to offer. While her assertion that the 190-page volume was “calculated to offer occupation and amusement for four evenings” seems rather ambitious, she was aware of the difficult nature of her task, given how tiring Milton’s complex prose could be on “the young attention of my auditors” (1822, iv). Not all Siddons’s reviewers were convinced of this

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new departure into children’s literature. The Literary Melange of 1822 admitted that “if our children are to be familiarised with Milton, we consider the present method far better than the common one of short and disconcerted extracts, such as are found in our common school antholigies [sic],” but notwithstanding these achievements it voiced grave “doubts as to the propriety of the proceeding altogether” (1822, 413). In a playfully vicious mode, The London Magazine asked: Could Mrs. Siddons take poor Milton, and thus “first cut the head off, and then hack the limbs?” Could she thus snip up the sublime and beautiful into what Dr. Kitchener would call thin “slices”? Could she really condescend to become an authoress on the strength of an eighteen-penny copy of Paradise Lost, and a pair of scissors? (1823: 216)

Milton, that great national treasure, was clearly not to be trimmed, truncated or generally trifled with.

Reading Milton: “Returning Day after Day to Devour the Contents” While different editions of Milton’s writings obviously existed that were tailored to different readerships, they were clearly also read with rather different motivations in mind. Milton was certainly present in many homes, whether in the “resplendent bindings on the same shelf with Shakespeare and Milton and Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe in the bookcase that stood in the dining room” of the middle-class family (Cruse 1962, 17) or in working-class households which, besides the Bible, would have had owned religious classics by Bunyan and Milton but perhaps little else (Vincent 1981, 110). Tangible records of reading Paradise Lost that do remain are striking for the readership to which Milton appealed. The Lanarkshire shoemaker’s daughter Janet Hamilton, was clearly yearning in the late 1790s for education as a source of inner fulfilment (Boos 2012, 65) when she took up her copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which she discovered in a similarly working-class setting: I do not remember when I became mistress of the alphabet, but I read Bible stories and children’s half-penny books with eager delight before I was five years of age. When about eight, I found to my great joy, on the loom of an intellectual weaver, a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost and a volume of Allan Ramsay’s Poems. I carried them off in triumph to the kitchen, returning day after day to devour the contents. I soon became familiar with,

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Milton’s Paradise Lost was therefore a text to be savoured and read intensively, and it was its imaginative and rhetorical power that appealed to Hamilton. Likewise Samuel Bamford, the Manchester cotton spinner, read widely, and delighted in the poetry of Milton: “O! John Milton! John Milton! of all the poetry ever read or heard recited by me, none has spoke out the whole feelings of my heart as have certain passages of thy divine minstrelsy” (quoted in Cruse 1962, 127). That Milton’s work was deemed valuable reading matter for its religious content is confirmed by Thomas Burt, a miner from the age of nine, who grew up in a pious household with a love of reading and who, having walked nine miles to buy a second-hand copy of the English hymnodist William Cowper’s poems, then progressed to works by Milton and the Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing (Cruse 1962, 128). Common to many of the early-nineteenth-century reading experiences of Milton’s Paradise Lost is a sense not only that Milton affirmed more contemporary religious teachings, but also that his work elicited a sense of rapture and wonder at the scenes portrayed. Thomas Keightley, Irish writer of books on mythology and folklore, recalls his own “discovery” of the work as follows: It was just as I was emerging from mere boyhood; the season was summer; the scene a residence amid wood and water, at the foot of mountains, over which I beheld each morning the sun rising, invested with all his glories. (1855, vii)

That Keightley should position his revelationary reading of Paradise Lost within a natural setting affirms Milton’s own Baconian conception of the natural world, namely that observation rather than speculation, and experience rather than abstraction were central in gaining an understanding of the world (see Edwards 1999). From this perspective, then, Milton’s works seem not only through their subject matter but also through their mode of viewing the natural world to be well attuned to Victorian marine natural history, which continuously invited its readers to observe, examine and record the flora and fauna they encounter at the coast. But the existence of Siddons’ much-maligned elementary reader of Paradise Lost suggests that not all children found Milton such immediately appetizing fare. The less ambitious shoemaker’s apprentice and later Chartist preacher and schoolmaster Thomas Cooper was much more prosaic about his first encounter with the work. He noted in his

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autobiography that as a thirteen-year-old he had enjoyed Byron’s Childe Harold and Manfred but: I do not remember that poetry really touched any chord in my nature . . . I had read the “Paradise Lost;” but it was above my culture and learning and it did not make me feel, though I read it with interest, as a mere story. (1872, 35, Cooper’s emphasis)

This did not deter him from giving lectures later in life on Milton and Shakespeare, geology and history, to Chartist groups. But clearly the inspirational potential of Milton’s writing was lost on Cooper. While he may have shared with Hamilton the sense that this was an idealized work, it was one he understood as “a mere story” to which he had difficulty relating (Cruse 1962, 169). Where Keightley had implied that the countryside offered an optimal setting in which to enjoy Milton’s writing to the full, John Naule Allen reflected more specifically on where Milton was, and was not, to be appreciated. His article “Railway Reading. With a Few Hints to Travellers” published in Ainsworth’s Magazine in 1853 argued most forcefully for readers to appreciate Milton “by their home fireside” (1853, 484) rather than on the move as a form of light, leisured reading: There are book-stalls at the principal stations all along the different lines. I am very glad of it. Many books are sold at those stalls, I believe. I am very glad of that. But did I for a moment think that these same books were perused whilst the train was on its way, and then ‘laid on one side’—by which process many copies of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, &c., are daily consigned to oblivion—I should be very sorry . . . . I defy the most constant of all “constant readers” to make either head or tail of even a child’s primer while in a travelling railway carriage. (1853, 483)

Naule Allen’s article therefore reflects an innate tension between the increased accessibility of Milton’s works, facilitated by the likes of publishers such as Longman and Bohn, and more conservative concerns to ensure that canonical literature was read “properly” in “appropriate” spaces that paid the respect due to such cultural greats as Milton. Mrs Siddons, allegedly prepared to slice up her cheap “eighteen-penny” copy of Paradise Lost as she dumbed down Milton for child readers, was essentially the target of various anxieties about the rise of a lower-middleclass and working-class nineteenth-century readership, about the appropriateness of women’s involvement in publishing “high” literature and whether child readers could expand their own knowledge through private enjoyment rather than primarily through formal instruction.

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Milton was therefore an economically and intellectually accessible author by mid-century. Readable even by the working class, as the testimonies of Hamilton and Bamford demonstrate, Milton’s Paradise Lost in particular appears to have belonged within the core publications that were owned or perhaps received as Sunday School prizes or for merit in school exams. Given that the vast majority of the British population lived in relatively close proximity to the sea, and that one-day group outings to the coast, organized by church groups, societies or at the goodwill of larger employers, became increasingly common, “popular” accounts of the seaside aimed at instruction as much as entertainment could afford to assume familiarity with Milton. The dual appeal of his work in conjuring up imaginatively the sublimity of the coast while reinforcing religious doctrine on the Creation would also have enhanced the acceptability of works such as the SPCK’s Wonders of the Sea-Shore in the eyes of those interested in children’s intellectual and spiritual education.

Milton and Intertext: Science, Literature and Memory “Literature,” Renate Lachmann has persuasively argued, “is culture’s memory” (2010, 301). Intertextuality is the means by which a culture draws on other moments in its history, a commemorative action by which it rewrites and transcribes itself. But intertextual references not only make present what might otherwise be absent: they are also transformatory moments in which the quoted element is “incorporated, absorbed, quoted, distorted, reversed, resemanticised” (ibid., 304). While, as Graham Allen notes, the dialogic aspect to intertextuality might seem at first sight to “threaten the unitary, authoritarian and hierarchical conception of culture” (2011, 29), it is in essence a highly creative enterprise, foreignising and “foregrounding” in Jakobson’s sense of the term the integrally familiar. Direct quotation is the form of intertextual referencing used by the scientific authors on which this chapter focuses, a form which, as Mary Orr rightly remarks, is both “extraneous ornament” and yet “reference of the most overt and saturated kind,” whether homage, authority, or a complex shorthand that may even parody or question the author who is being quoted (2003, 130). In reflecting on what makes a quotable quote, Orr proposes that three main elements are important: brevity (qualified by a certain pithiness), aptness to the host context and “extraction,” namely the process of cultural transmission and transformation that underpins intertextual referencing, since quotation is never a fixed piece or a freestanding authority (ibid., 134-35). Quotation as meaning-making is central to the analysis here of how Milton was deployed by scientific writers,

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which modes of integration were used (if any) to incorporate quotations from his works into their texts, whether or not these quotations were marked as such, and what tacit assumptions were made about whether the reader would recognise the provenance of the quoted section. While few of the intertextual references to Milton could claim brevity, what they do reveal is a crystallization of quotations within marine natural history writing around one particular set of lines from Paradise Lost. These span a passage from Book VII with which this chapter opened: Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay With fry enumerable swarm, and shoals Of fish that with their fins and shining scales Glide under the green wave, in sculls that oft Bank the mid-sea: part single or with mate Graze the seaweed their pasture, and through groves Of coral stray, or sporting with quick glance Show to the sun their waved coats dropp’d with gold, (Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.399-406)

At the heart of Milton’s epic lies an account of the creation of the world and all the creatures in it: a section largely modeled on the creation story from Genesis 1 and 2, in which God shows the fallen angels that his glorious kingdom can be extended indefinitely. This passage dwells on the seemingly infinite variety of life in the waters once God has shaped the earth and given it light. This emphasis on ‘God the Creator’ rather than ‘Christ the Redeemer’ was typical of the way in which natural knowledge was presented by the SPCK’s series in which the Wonders of the SeaShore appeared, and references to the “bounteous Creator” are legion in this work. Taking the first four lines of this passage to head a chapter on saltwater fish, the anonymous author also drew on the imaginative power of Milton’s text, ending with “Glide under the green wave,” as a transition into the start of the chapter itself: Watch the shoal of small fish which has been left in this pool by the tide, and observe the elegance as well as the rapidity of their movements, circling their present confined home so incessantly. As they turn and the underpart is seen for a moment, it looks like a flash of light. (165)

This represented an imaginative entry point into a subject that would become more scientifically complex as the chapter progressed towards discussing Linnaean classifications across the next few pages as various species of fish are introduced–the blenny and the stickleback, the perch and even the fearsome angler-fish. Drawing on the work of Georges

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Cuvier, John Audubon and the Comte de Buffon, the chapter addresses quite complex questions about sociability in fish and their care of their young, as well as their powers of sight and hearing and their ability to sleep. The initial quotation by Milton not only serves to give the opening scene visual appeal. Its associations with the Creation are also echoed throughout the chapter in observations such as this: Fish have frequently been supposed by naturalists to be of all the larger animal world the least possessed of sensibility, to be incapable of powerful impressions, and to be gifted with very little of that species of intellectual power which is shared by so many of God’s creatures. (167-68)

The anonymous author of The Wonders of the Sea-Shore therefore merged rational recreation and scientific reflection with what was essentially morally virtuous study, given that the discussions turned upon the myriad life forms generated at the Creation. Gosse’s Aquarium, as we saw at the beginning, likewise used this reference from Milton’s Paradise Lost. He too placed it at the opening of a chapter to enhance the process of scene-setting that would then slip, as had occurred in the Wonders of the Sea-Shore, into a more factual, scientific appraisal of different species of fish, their collection and use in the aquarium: The summer was over, but I still lingered at Weymouth. Spring-tides came and went with tantalising regularity . . . but fierce autumnal gales blew with characteristic violence and tenacity . . . In a brief interval of gentleness, however, I found an animal which had long been an object of desire to me, a normal form of the genus Lucernaria. (210)

It is unsurprising that Philip Henry Gosse should have been one of the most avid users of literary references in his own scientific writing. He himself recognised that the work of the field-observer was “the careful and conscientious accumulation and record of facts bearing on the life-history of the creatures,” whereas the poet’s approach corresponded to the aesthetic aspect which dealt with “the emotions of the human mind,— surprise, wonder, terror, revulsion, admiration, love, desire, and so forth,— which are made energetic by the contemplation of the creatures around him” (Gosse 1860, v). Gosse, an evangelical and leading populariser of natural history by the mid-1850s, therefore adopted a poetics of description for the natural world that would combine the approach of the scientist with that of the poet. And for Gosse, a believer in the literal truth of the accounts of the creation of the world, Milton’s Paradise Lost still

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remained a key literary work that asserted the presence of God in creation (Beer 2012, 481-2). Gosse, the “Puritan Naturalist” (as the London Quarterly Review described him from his son Edmund Gosse’s unforgiving biography), in fact put the seventeenth-century Puritan Milton’s text to good use in demonstrating its imaginative possibilities for thinking about and depicting the natural world (Anonymous 1891, 15). While some authors used this passage as a descriptive non-scientific opening to contrast with the body of the chapter itself, others, such as the Irish marine botanist William Henry Harvey, took it to close a section and provide a transition to the next. In his Sea-Side Book (1849, 3rd edition 1855), one chapter on marine animals that inhabited the rocky sea-shore— limpets and sponges, polyps and sea-weeds—ended with that same quotation from Book VII of Paradise Lost, albeit extended to include the next 10 lines following that passage: The transparent shrimp, now resting on its oars, midway in the water, watching your motions with its peering eyes, and attentive to the slightest disturbance, now darting through the pool, and hiding himself among seaweeds; the basking Sea Anemone displaying his starry flowers; the Purple Rock Urchin studding the bottom of the pool with spiny globes; and the quiet Molluscs leisurely pursuing their way, feeding as they go: these, mingled with the varied contour and colour of delicate sea-plants, form a picture which has its prototype nowhere but in fairyland. “The sounds and seas, each creek and bay, […] Or, in their pearly shells at ease, attend Moist nutriment; or under rocks their food In jointed armour watch: on smooth the seal And bended dolphins play: part huge of bulk, Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gait, Tempest the ocean: there leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep, Stretched like a promontory, sleeps or swims, And seems like a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out, a sea.” MILTON (146-47)

The transition from the line “nowhere but in fairyland” to the quote from Milton suggests a different set of associations from those found in Gosse or the anonymous SPCK publication. The religious element is downplayed by Harvey as he instead emphasizes the almost unimaginable beauty of these seaweeds that seem to come from an enchanted place: that these might reflect the artistry of a divine creator is not explicitly mentioned.

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Certainly terms like “Creator” or “God” are to be found in the Sea-Side Book, albeit with only half the frequency than in The Wonders of the SeaShore (where indeed the closing word of the book is “God” (1847: 264)). Harvey therefore appears to have drawn on Milton less to give his work an overt religiosity than for its imaginative appeal. The additional lines included from Paradise Lost refer to the Leviathan image of an epic large sea creature, which in Harvey’s context was the whale. Here mythology and science engage in a rather jarring encounter, not least because Milton speaks of “gills” and presumes whales to breathe like fish, whereas by the mid-nineteenth-century, scientists were well aware that whales were mammals and breathed air into their lungs through blowholes. One final example of how this same extract from Milton’s Paradise Lost was woven, arguably with little artistry, into scientific writing on the coast, was in the Church of Scotland minister Robert William Fraser’s Ebb and Flow: The Curiosities and Marvels of the Sea-Shore. A Book for Young People (1860). Here it is placed at the end of a rather eclectic, associative chapter on “Algae or Sea-Weeds” which focuses on species native to Britain but also expands to include foreign seaweeds that grow in much larger banks on which animals feed. It follows a few lines quoted from Sir George Grey’s Australian travelogue Journals of two Expeditions of Discovery in North West and Western Australia, during the years 1837, 38, and 39 (1841) which, as Fraser noted, described “animals of whose habits and means of existence we have, from the nature of the element they inhabit, but little acquaintance” (82). Quoting Grey first in this passage, Fraser then went on to include the same passage from Paradise Lost used elsewhere: . . . . No portion of the globe is more thickly inhabited, or affords, in proportion to its size, a greater amount of animal enjoyment than did this wave-tossed isle. On it were innumerable barnacles, several species of teredo; one of which, having its head shaped like a screw divided into two equal portions, I believe to have been quite new. Many varieties of crabs and minute insects, shaped like a slug, fed on the sea-weed growing on the log.” A description which reminds one forcibly of that given by Milton, in his account of the Creation, where he says: “Forthwith the sounds and seas, each creek and bay, . . . . (83)

Here the transition lacks the stylistic elegance and thematic coherence of the previous authors as it lurches from the ugly factuality of slug-shaped insects feeding on a log into Milton’s rich poetic description of the abundance of sea life: it seems that the inclusion of this quotation by Milton had now become a formulaic iteration, a stock reference and a

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standardised nod both to the Creator and to Milton. While it has been argued elsewhere in this chapter that intertextual referencing has the potential to be creative or innovative, here its failure to be well seamed into Ebb and Flow generates a jarring multivocality rather than a smooth and meaningful dialogue between sources. Not all those writing on marine natural history drew on this particular passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost for their inspiration. To head the fifth chapter on the fructification of seaweeds in his Popular History of British Seaweeds (1857), the Scottish clergyman and naturalist David Landsborough took lines 694-97 and 702-4 from Book III of Paradise Lost, in which Milton lauds those who seek after knowledge: Thy desire which tends to know The works of God, thereby to glorify The great Work-master, leads to no excess That reaches blame, but rather merits praise, The more it seems excess; .................................. For wonderful, indeed, are all his works, Pleasant to know, and worthiest to be all Had in remembrance always with delight. (Landsborough 1857, 31)

To recognize the complexities of Creation is therefore to come closer to recognizing the achievements of its Creator. Landsborough successfully links this quotation with assertions at the start of this chapter that twenty years previously little had been known about the fructification of the Fuci genus but since then “very great progress has been made in this department” (31). Distinguished algologists, “aided by vastly improved microscopes” were therefore working in the same spirit of intellectual curiosity that Milton had encouraged some three hundred years previously. What is doubly interesting about this quotation, seen in combination with a Latin quotation from a classical source “Raius” that preceded it, is that this dual reference from Raius and Milton had appeared in exactly the same form at the opening to George Johnston’s A History of British Sponges and Lithophytes (1842). By incorporating this quotation into his text, Landsborough was therefore not only referencing Milton, but also paying indirect homage to “my excellent friend Dr. Johnston” (ix), with whom he shared an energetic interest in furthering scientific knowledge. Landsborough was one of few writers on marine natural history to borrow from other works by Milton to enhance the imaginative appeal of his account. At the end of a description of the Wrangelia genus, and

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specifically the finely fronded red seaweed Wrangelia multifida found off the Atlantic coasts of Europe (particularly Ireland and the southernmost tip of England), Landsborough drew on Milton’s Comus: Once or twice during the summer it may be found by us, floating, but the specimens are always exceedingly fine, though not the fourth part of the size of the Irish specimens, some of which would cover a quarto page. “By the rushy-fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the osier dank, My sliding chariot stays; Thick-set with agate, and the azure sheen Of turkis blue, and emerald green, That in the channel strays; Whilst from off the waters fleet, Thus I set my printless feet, O’er the cowslip’s velvet head That bends not as I tread; Gentle swain, at thy request I am here.” Milton’s Comus. (191)

While the figure of the water-nymph Sabrina, who sings these lines, is an intriguing figure for her ability to free the virtuous woman from her torment by the debauched Comus, the gendered aspect inherent in this quotation is played down here. Rather, Landsborough appears to be drawing on it as a reminder of the magical beauty of her underwater palace, the brilliance of the colours of marine life and the fascination that the underwater world holds for him.

Conclusions While the countless series and volumes of Milton’s work that were in circulation in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century suggest that his writings were widely known amongst readers not just from the (upper-) middle classes, the majority of intertextual references taken up by writers of Victorian marine natural history were surprisingly narrow. A particularly concentrated image of his writing is thus presented that crystallises it into those scenes thematically most useful to those working on texts pertaining to marine life. What appears to have made Milton’s work most valuable, and, in a capitalist market system, consumable, were those passages which appealed to the reader’s imagination by inspiring in them a sense of awe and wonder at the power of nature. Certainly, some of

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these works were also written with a particular set of religious teachings in mind, and the morally virtuous study of the Creation, encouraged through these works of “popular” science, intimately linked them to the theology of nature. In others, though, a more rationalist approach to reading the book of Nature prevailed. Precisely how well such passages were “extracted” for inclusion in natural historical writing is debatable. Without a doubt Milton’s writing belonged among that body of “resuable” texts from the British literary canon with which all authors expected their readers to be familiar, even if the original authorship of the quoted sections from Paradise Lost or Comus was almost always made explicit. But an analysis of later works of popular marine natural history seems to suggest that inclusion of his work had started to become formulaic, a “standard” voice in all discussions about marine life, regardless of how apt and appropriate the intertextual reference really was. Nevertheless, the inclusion of Milton’s work in all the works of Victorian marine natural history explored here demonstrates the importance of intertextual referencing in strengthening the cultural connectivity between science and literature by resonating back across three centuries of human observation and reflection on how to conceive of and describe the natural world.

Acknowledgement The author would particularly like to thank Susan Pickford for her helpful and detailed comments on this chapter.

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Anonymous. 1822. Review of The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, by Sarah Siddons, The Literary Melange 1: 413 Anonymous. 1823. Review of The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons, by Sarah Siddons, The London Magazine 7: 216 Anonymous. 1839. “On Poetry in General.” Dearden’s Miscellany 1: 1-11. Anonymous. 1847. Wonders of the Sea-Shore. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Anonymous. 1849. Review of Wonders of the Sea-Shore. Annals of Horticulture and Year-Book of Information on Practical Gardening 4: 420-22. Anonymous. 1854. “Notices.” The Christian Remembrancer 27.85: 258264. Anonymous. 1891. “Philip Henry Gosse: A Puritan naturalist.” London Quarterly Review, 16. 151: 15-35. Assmann, Aleida. 2010. “Canon and Archive.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 97-107. Berlin: De Gruyter. Assmann, Jan. 1995. “Collective Memory and Collective Identity.” German Critique 65 (1995): 125-33. Beer, Gillian. 1990. “Translation or Transformation?: The Relations of Literature and Science.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 44 : 81-99. —. 1996. Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 2000. Darwin’s Plots. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —. 2012. “Science and Literature.” In The Cambridge History of Victorian Literature, edited by Kate Flint, 466-86. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Boos, Florence. 2012. “Janet Hamilton: Working-Class Memoirist and Commentator.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Glenda Norquay, 63-74. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Colón Semenza, Gregory M. 2006. “Adapting Milton for Children: Margaret Hodges’s Comus (1996) and the Tale of Childe Rowland.” In Milton in Popular Culture, edited by Laure Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, 71-82. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, Thomas. 1872. The Life of Thomas Cooper Written by Himself. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Cruse, Amy. 1962. The Victorians and Their Books. 3rd ed. London: Allen and Unwin.

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De Quincey, Thomas. 1839. “Milton.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 9: 775-80. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. 1809. Essays on Professional Education. London: Johnson. Edwards, Karen. 1999. Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Erll, Astrid. 2010. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 1-15. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fraser, Robert W., ed. 1860. Ebb and Flow: The Curiosities and Marvels of the Sea-Shore; A Book for Young People. London: Houlston and Wright. Fyfe, Aileen. 2000. “Young Readers and the Sciences.” Books and the Sciences in History, edited by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, 276-90. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. —. 2003. “Introduction”, In Science for Children edited by Aileen Fyfe, 7 vols., I: xi-xxii. Bristol: Thoemmes Press and Edition Synapse. Gilliland, Joan F. 1985. “Paradise Lost and the Youthful Reader.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 10: 26-28. Gosse, Philip Henry. 1856. The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea. 2nd ed. London: John van Voorst. Gosse, Philip Henry. 1860. The Romance of Natural History, London: Nisbet and Co. Grabes, Herbert. 2010. “Cultural Memory and the Literary Canon.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 311-319. Berlin: De Gruyter. Grenby, Matthew O. 2011. The Child Reader, 1700-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hamilton, Janet. 1870. Poems, Essays, and Sketches. Glasgow: Maclehose. Harrison Stevens, David. 1930. Reference Guide to Milton: From 1800 to the Present Day. New York: Russell and Russell. Harvey, William Henry. 1855. The Sea-Side Book: Being an Introduction to the Natural History of the British Coasts. 3rd edn. London: John van Voorst. Jacobus, Lee A. 1973. “Milton’s Comus as Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature 2: 67-72. James, Frank A. J. L. 2000. “Books on the Natural Sciences in the Nineteenth Century.” In Thornton and Tully’s Scientific Books, Libraries and Collectors, edited by Andrew Hunter, 258-71. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Jenkins, Alice. 2007. Space and the “march of mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain, 1815-1850. Oxford: Oxford UP. —, (ed.). 2008. Michael Faraday’s Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay Circle in Regency London. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. John, Juliet and Matthew Bradley. 2015. “Introduction”. In Reading and the Victorians, ed. Matthew Bradley and Juliet John, 1-11. Farnham: Ashgate. Keightley, Thomas. 1855. An Account of the Life, Opinions, and Writings of John Milton. With an Introduction to Paradise Lost. London: Chapman and Hall. Lachmann, Renate. 2010. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 301-310. Berlin: De Gruyter. Landsborough, David. 1857. A Popular History of British Seaweeds, Comprising their Structure, Fructification, Specific Characters, Arrangement and General Distribution, with Notices of Some of the Fresh-Water Algæ. London: Lovell Reeve. Levine, George. 1991. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. Darwin the Writer. 2011. Oxford: Oxford UP. Longman Impression Books, Special Collections, University of Reading, MS1393/1. Marz Harper, Lila. 2004. “Children’s Literature, Science and Faith: The Water-Babies.” In Children’s Literature: New Approaches, edited by Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, 118-43. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Naule Allen, John. 1853. “Railway Reading. With a Few Hints to Travellers”. Ainsworth’s Magazine 24: 483-7. Nelson, James.1963. The Sublime Puritan: Milton and the Victorians. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. O’Gorman, Francis. 2000. “‘More interesting than all the books, save one’: Charles Kingsley’s Construction of a Natural History.” In Rethinking Victorian Culture, edited by Juliet John and Alice Jenkins, 146-61. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Orr, Mary. 2003. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pfeiffer, Julie. 1999. “‘Dream Not of Other Worlds’: Paradise Lost and the Child Reader.” Children’s Literature 27: 1-21. Posner, Roland. 1991. “Kultur als Zeichensystem: Zur semiotischen Explikation kulturwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe.” Kultur als Lebenswelt und Monument, edited by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth, 37-74. Frankfurt/M.: Fischer.

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Richardson, Alan. 1994. Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780-1832. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Ritvo, Harriet. 1985. “Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Children’s Literature 13: 72-93. Secord, James A. 2009. “Science, Technology and Mathematics.” In The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. VI, 1830-1914, edited by David McKitterick, 443-74. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Secord. James. 2011. “Self-Development.” The History of Reading: A Reader, edited by Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone and Katie Halsey, 361-73. London and New York: Routledge. —. 2014. Visions of Science: Books and Readers at the Dawn of the Victorian Age. Oxford: Oxford UP. Shonoda, Mary-Anne. 2012. “Metaphor and Intertextuality: A Cognitive Approach to Intertextual Meaning-Making in Metafictional Fantasy Novels.” International Research in Children’s Literature 5: 81-96. Siddons, Sarah. 1822. The Story of Our First Parents, Selected from Milton’s Paradise Lost: For the Use of Young Persons. London: Murray. Vincent, David. 1981. Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography. London: Europa. Wilkie, Christine. 1999. “Relating Texts: Intertextuality.” In Understanding Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, 130-37. London and New York: Routledge. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. 2011. “Milton Epic and Bucolic: Empire and Readings of Paradise Lost, 1667-1837”. In The Oxford Handbook of Milton, edited by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith, 669-86. Oxford: Oxford UP.

CHAPTER EIGHT ENVISIONING THE VISIONARY: POETIC QUALITY AND ALLEGORICAL LANGUAGE IN T. S. ELIOT’S DANTE CRITICISM CHRISTOPH LEHNER

In the course of his reception in the last 700 years the iconic Dante has been envisioned as the father of Italian poetry, the avenger of political crimes, the doomed and exiled wanderer and the symbol of Italy’s unification, to name but a few of the associations that his name conjures up. Interestingly, Dante can also be considered a monolithic cornerstone in the critical engagement of Modernist writers with the Western literary tradition. Unlike the term Modernism suggests, many Modernist poets did not cut themselves off from the literary heritage of preceding epochs. On the contrary, they often entered into a dialogue with the literature of the past and extensively used it for the creation of poetry in their own present. What had changed, however, was the way the production of poetry and the absorption of literary heritage was regarded: for T. S. Eliot the engagement with the literary past represented a vital component of his own creative process. To a certain extent, Eliot’s reading of Dante’s poetry can be described as a counteraction to Dante’s appropriation in the 19th century, as a kind of “anti-romantic” and “anti-Rossettian” (Ellis 1983, 211) stance, and his appeal to the Modernists lies in a sort of moral and allegorical function that draws together political vision and poetic efficacy. This essay, therefore, aims to do three things: first of all, it analyses T. S. Eliot’s attitude towards artistic creation and its relationship with the literary past. Secondly, it reassesses his engagement with Dante’s texts as a literary critic and as an astute reader. Thirdly, it argues that the knowledge gleaned from these critical studies directly influenced the most Dantesque lines in English poetry, found in Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding” in the Four Quartets. Furthermore it argues that Eliot envisioned Dante as

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a visionary poet, whose works communicate first and formost through their allegorical language and their poetic quality.

“All ages are contemporaneous”: Modernist artistic creation and the literary past In his engagement with Dante and the poets of the past, first published under the title of The Spirit of Romance in 1910, Ezra Pound stated that early Tuscan sonnets are often very “Elizabethan”, and the Spanish imitations of the Tuscans are often more so. Great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain. (Pound 1910, 162)

This metaphor, which establishes a metonymic relationship between the construction of a building and the construction of a poem, not only implies that there is no poetry without tradition, it also suggests that the literature of the past provides an indispensable construction material for the contemporary poet. The converse argument of Pound’s statement exhorts that a poet failing to exploit his literary predecessors is destined to fail in his attempt to become a great and, paradoxically, also an inimitable poet. This paradox stems from the fact that all great poets have to study and emulate their predecessors in order to achieve stylistic greatness and to finally achieve their own inimitableness. It is here that the style of Dante, as Eliot formulated twenty years later, can help make a poet better in any language, since Dante was “the most universal of poets in the modern languages”. (Eliot 1965b, 9) To a certain extent, Eliot’s and Pound’s convictions echo Humanist teachings, which comprised the imitation of Latin and Greek literary ideals, and can be traced back to the Aristotelian precept of emulatio, the emulation of the masters as a first step towards literary authority. In the Modernist appreciation of the literary past, this concept of emulation, however, becomes a vital ingredient in the search for artistic originality. In particular, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw a continuous occupation with the literary past, and a huge number of often contradicting artistic manifestos, such as F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto (1918), were published. T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” coincided with this wave of publications and was first issued in the newspaper The Egoist in 1919. Unlike Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, which advocated a decisive

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break with the literary past, Eliot did not frown upon the literary masters like Dante, who had preceded his own artistic creation.1 Instead, Eliot argued that the contemporary writer is yet another member of the largest collective of all writers, dead or alive, thereby establishing a “conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written”. (Eliot 1920, 53) Thus, an author conscious of the literary tradition “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past”. (ibid. 59) Such a concept of the contemporariness of all literature and of all ages, already enunciated by Pound in The Spirit of Romance, regards the past as a literary archive the contemporary poet has to draw upon.2 As Pound famously stated: All ages are contemporaneous. . . . This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries . . . . (Pound 1910, 8)

Therefore, it is inevitable that a great poet puts his talent to the test by subscribing to the idea that “[he] must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career”. (Eliot 1920, 52) Interestingly, in such an understanding of poetry and the creative process, new works emerge by reassembling, reassessing and restructuring ideas of the past. This strongly relates to Eliot’s so-called ‘impersonal theory,’ also set out in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: it is only the poet’s “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations”. (ibid. 53-4) In such a creative process, therefore, the poet merely becomes a medium capable of regrouping sentiments and ideas, while at the same time relinquishing his own personality. Eliot argues that since “the emotion of art is 1

F. T. Marinetti published his manifesto “La ‘Divina Commedia’ è un verminaio di glossatori” in 1909 and, like him, many intellectuals sceptically frowned upon the political appropriation of Dante as an ideological forefather of Italian unification. In their opinion, a cult of Dante, the so-called Dantismo, would prevent the next generation of literary talents from blossoming in the newlyformed Italian nation and nip their own creative endeavours in the bud. For further information, De Maria 1994. 2 The philosophical background of this notion can be found in the theory of the French phenomenologist Henri Bergson, whose lectures Eliot attended in 1911. Bergson described time as a duration, a continuous present, in contrast to a division of time into single moments. On Bergson’s concept of time, see, Guerlac 2006, 42105.

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impersonal, . . . the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.” (ibid.) Moreover, for Eliot, “the other aspect of this impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author.” (ibid.) The poet must be aware of “the present moment of the past,” (ibid.) so that the terms tradition and individual talent ultimately become interchangeable, because the individual talent reveals itself in the treatment of the material gleaned from the literary past. The tradition, on the other hand, constantly resurfaces as an indispensable element of Modernist poetry, as in, for example, the ubiquitous literary quotations found in Eliot’s The Wasteland. To a certain extent, such a concept of artistic production enhances the the concept of a prophet-poet receiving divine messages, in which the author becomes the mere mediator between the text, which the poet can claim material authorship of, and a divine or God-given inspiration, which represents the genuine initiator of the text. The exception, of course, is the fact that in the case of Eliot’s impersonal theory, in lieu of a divine inspiration we find the engagement with the literary past and the poetic tradition as a permanent creative “catalyst”, (ibid. 54) as Eliot calls it, or prompter of literary cues for artistic production. Both writers, Pound and Eliot alike, share the conviction that only the engagement with the literary past brings about modern forms of poetry and attaches value to their own artistic creation. Even more than Pound, Eliot stressed the monolithic prominence of Dante for his personal poetic growth and regarded him as a leading example for poets of any language to follow. Ultimately, the Divina Commedia had successfully demonstrated how the engagement and conversation with dead masters, as the narrator of the Commedia had undertaken, can lead to the discovery of one’s own distinctive poetic voice.

“The comfort and amazement of my age”: T. S. Eliot’s three Dantean lessons “No one will deny Eliot’s temperamental and ideological affinity with his Italian master”, (Manganiello 1989, 7) stated Dominic Manganiello in his essay on Eliot and Dante, thereby summing up the symbiotic relationship between the medieval and the Modernist authors. For Eliot, reading Dante was, in Eliot’s own words, “the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.” (Eliot 1920, 250-1) Indeed, Dante’s pervasive influence on Eliot can be found in his poetry, in his critical essays as well as in his personal outlook on life. The benefit, however, was mutual, since Dante’s

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reassessment in the twentieth century and his revitalisation for modern readers can undoubtedly be ascribed to Eliot and Pound.3 Eliot critically engaged several times with the Florentine poet, most notably in his essay “Dante” (1929) and in his lecture given at the Italian Institute in London entitled “What Dante Means to Me” (1961, published in 1965). Even though the first impetus to compose an essay on Dante came from publisher Geoffrey Faber, who convinced Eliot that if he “would do this it would be a first-rate essay to start the [Poets on the Poets] series,” (Eliot/Haffenden 2013, 280) Eliot was convinced that his occupation with Dante might one day even exceed the length of an essay and—once gained “the solidity required” (ibid. 285)—be turned into a book. Interestingly, Eliot sought out scholarly approval for his essay and also considered publishing it in Germany, once he had “receive[d] the approval of Curtius”. (ibid. 580)4 As far as Dante’s influence on his own work is concerned, Eliot explains that “the important debt does not occur in relation to the number of places in one’s writings to which a critic can point a finger, and say, here and there he wrote something which he could not have written unless he had had Dante in mind.” (Eliot 1965a, 132) More than that, the important debts are represented by the “three lessons [Eliot] had been taught by Dante’s poetry, the lessons of craft, of speech and of exploration of sensibility . . .” (ibid.) All of these lessons are, to a certain extent, interdependent, because the representation of the “complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion” Eliot 1965b, 51) in the Commedia requires a number of artistic skills and choices concerning craft and speech. The first lesson, the lesson of craft, was thoroughly addressed in his essay “Dante,” in which Eliot states that the poetry of Dante is the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language; . . . there is no poet in any tongue—not even in Latin and Greek—who stands so firmly as a model for all poets. (ibid. 50)

According to Eliot, Dante’s Florentine speech represented a “universal language” (ibid. 10) close to medieval Latin, the widespread intellectual lingua franca at the time. Eliot argues that speech inevitably influences the 3 On Eliot’s and Pound’s engagement with Dante’s ideology and his poetry see, for example, McDougal 1985. 4 On this matter Eliot conversed extensively with the German professor Ernst Robert Curtius, who held a chair in Romance Languages in Bonn. Curtius saw Dante as a mediator between medieval Latin and early modern culture, a conviction put forward in his opera magna Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, published in 1948.

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mindset:5 at the time of Dante’s Europe, despite “all its dissensions and dirtiness, [it] was mentally more united than we can now conceive.” (Eliot 1965, 11) Intellectual communication in written form, therefore, is governed by the use of certain words, which “have associations, and the groups of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local self-consciousness, because they are the growth of a particular civilisation.” (ibid.) Hence, Eliot claims a linguistic and cultural unity for Dante’s Europe, since “the culture of Dante was not of one European country but of [the whole of] Europe”. (ibid.) This implies that Dante not only thought in the way in which every man of his culture in the whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which was common and commonly understood throughout Europe . . . , the allegorical method [which] was a definite method not confined to Italy. (ibid. 14)

Even though Eliot does not mention it explicitly, it is evident that Europe’s common ground at the time was cultivated by the Catholic Church. The allegorical method in action, therefore, refers to the tradition of rhetoric as an ancilla theologiae, a discipline serving as the exegesis of the Holy Scripture.6 This implies, as Eliot argues, that “allegory was not a local Italian custom, but a universal European method.” (ibid. 16) In The Spirit of Romance, Pound had already hinted at the quality of allegory in medieval texts, which enabled the author “to separate himself, not yet from complete moods, but from simple qualities and passions, and to visualize them.” (Pound 1910, 85) Allegory can be defined as a form of displacement, in which the signifiers become exchanged and the exchanged signification is extended or sustained several times. Furthermore, an allegory serves to illustrate complex ideas and concepts and conveys meaning through symbolic figures or images, which often stand for an abstract idea. In Dante’s case, the allegorical meaning of the “selva oscura” (Inf. I, 2), for example, symbolises the sinful life, which has led the narrator of the Commedia astray and forces him to search purgatory for his sins. For Eliot, the masterful use of allegory in poetry has multiple stylistic implications for authors and readers alike: despite the common degradation of allegory as a “tiresome crossword puzzle” (Eliot 1965b, 14) 5 Note that around the time that Eliot composed his essay on Dante, the philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein received his PhD at Cambridge University and went on to usher in the linguistic turn in the Humanities. 6 Dante himself explicitly mentioned the fact that he would like his Commedia to be interpreted with the help of the fourfold exegesis.

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or its association with “dull poems,” the use of allegory in Dante’s case, paradoxically, leads to a “particular effect” (ibid.): the “lucidity of style,” (ibid.) which ultimately “makes for simplicity and intelligibility”. (ibid.) Eliot stresses several times how his first exposure to Dante provided him with a “direct shock of poetic intensity”. (ibid. 8) This poetic revelation at a time when he was not capable of grasping the Italian language directly, had taught him that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. (ibid.)7 Hence savouring sounds, words, and rhymes, and the awareness of the fact that “the [allegorical] meaning is there, too” (ibid. 15) without comprehending it intellectually at first, constitute what Eliot termed Dante’s so-called “poetic lucidity”. (ibid.) In The Sacred Wood, Eliot specified that there are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the Divine Comedy which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated reader, just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of the language to decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty. (Eliot 1920, 14)8

Thus, the application of allegory makes it possible for the reader, who might not even be a good speaker of Italian, to appreciate Dante, since allegory is a widely understandable visual device, and while “speech varies, . . . our eyes are all the same,” (ibid. 15-16) as Eliot argues. It seems that Eliot found inspiration to apply allegory in his own poetry from Dante, with one of the most prominent examples being “The Game of Chess,” an allegory of a woman’s mature manipulation and careful calculation in The Wasteland. Eliot expounded that “for a competent poet, allegory means clear visual images. And clear visual images are given much more intensity by having a meaning.” (ibid. 15) Ellis has observed that Eliot’s constant turn towards allegory offered the “opportunity . . . for escaping from self . . . into a common, external order, and thus the opportunity for appeasing the extraordinary burden of self . . . it is the ‘objective correlative’ in a more extended and significant form.” (Ellis 1983, 214) This way, in Eliot’s writing, allegory acquires a form of previously unexperienced “therapeutic value.” (ibid. 216) 7 Loc. cit. Note that here Eliot contradicts Pound, who claimed that it takes a fine understanding of the Italian language in order to grasp “Dante’s supremacies”. See Pound 1910, 154. 8 Note that the title of Eliot’s collection of critical essays, first published in 1920, alludes to Dante’s sacred wood at the end of Purgatorio, which the Florentine poet crosses right before his ascension to Paradiso. It also alludes to the dark wood at the beginning of Inferno.

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Envisioning the Visionary When explaining the significance of allegory for Eliot, his use of the term ‘visual’ needs further clarification, since it differs from the common connotation of a mere sensory ability. When Eliot calls Dante’s imagination a visual one, he explicitly refers to the shared Latin root visus, denoting the ‘power of sight,’ inherent in both the terms visual and visionary alike. The application of clear visual images, therefore, springs from a clear vision in the poet’s visionary mind: Dante’s . . . visual imagination . . . is a visual imagination in a different sense from that of a modern painter of still life: it is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions—a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated—was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers in consequence. (Eliot 1920, 15)

In particular, the ironic remark delivered in the last sentence of this quotation—an allusion to the psychological id and the subconsciousness of dreams explored by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung—makes it clear that Eliot regrets the loss of the pre-Freudian concept of visionary dreaming. This has a further implication: in Eliot’s statement the written and the visual intersect, arguing that poetry communicates more through images than through words. Thus the visual perception, spurred by the use of allegory in poetry, has the effect of lingering in the reader’s mind, and to connect beyond the mere significance of words. Modern cognitive psychology confirms such a claim, stressing the enhanced imagination and high memorability inherent in cerebral visual perception.9 As far as a poet’s craft is concerned, Eliot addressed two fundamental concepts in his essays: the theory of impersonality, already mentioned in passing, and the general themes of poetry. The latter were also expounded in his essay “Dante”, in which he stated that “it took me many years to recognise that the states of improvement and beatitude which Dante describes are still further from what the modern world can conceive as cheerfulness, than are his states of damnation.” (Eliot 1965, 42) This 9 Some scientists even claim the existence of so-called imagery neurons, which respond to perceiving and imagining visual concepts and objects. See, for example, Goldstein 2011, 279.

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occurred to him because of the premise that “poetry not only must be found through suffering but can find its material only in suffering.” (ibid.) The preference for severe and lugubrious topics as inspiration for artistic creation as a revolt against the ostentatious “cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness” (ibid.) of some 19th-century art, therefore, prevented him for a long time from thoroughly enjoying Dante’s Paradiso. Furthermore, Eliot states that he was influenced by the conviction that a poet has to suffer and express his suffering, but that the study of Dante convinced him that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” (Eliot 1920, 54) For Eliot, there must be a distancing between the experiences made as a protagonist in one’s own life and the poetic creation, which subsequently follows it. Such a process of “hierarchical ordering of experiences and emotions” (Ellis 1983, 219) is, for Eliot, supremely illustrated in Dante’s Commedia, in which Dante also becomes the mere recorder of events. Eliot strongly opposes the nineteenth-century cult of genius surrounding Dante and his work by focusing on the poetic quality of the text instead. He states that “very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.” (Eliot 1920, 59) In the most successful poetic passages of the Paradiso, Eliot detects such a mature poetic mind, capable of sacrificing the poet’s personality for the sake of poetic quality. An example is the description of the Holy Trinity, which Dante encounters in the last canto of Paradiso, and whose radiant light makes the narrator burn with love from within: O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta e intendente te ami e arridi! Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself! (Par., XXXIII, 124-6)

For Eliot, these passages of Paradiso are among the most beautiful lines ever written, first and foremost because here the narrator of the Commedia completely fades into the background and gives way to a haunting description of the Holy Trinity. Summing up Dante’s excellence in craft and style, Eliot argues that “for the science or art of writing verse, one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance.” (Eliot 1920, 28)

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As far as Dantean themes are concerned, certain images of the Commedia have proven to be flexible and to lend themselves to modern adaptations. In his annotations to The Wasteland, Eliot himself quotes Dante, whose lines he alluded to in the poem: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus. (Eliot 1963, 68)

The passage referred to is the story of Count Ugolino and his starvation in the tower. Alongside the textual reference, in his annotations Eliot also quotes F. H. Bradley, who wrote in Appearance and Reality that “my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside . . . every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it . . . the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul”. (Eliot 1963, 75) Ugolino’s fate, therefore, becomes reinterpreted as representing the modern individual’s fate of being caught up in their own mind, thinking only of the key to their own prison, which excludes them from partaking in a community. The allusion to Coriolanus, a Roman outcast who had turned his back on Rome, confirms such a reading of self-constructed exclusion. In this respect, the use of Ugolino resembles Eliot’s “Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,” in which “the Ugolino episode serves as an element in a complex ironic depiction of a vain man proud of living within the walls of his own prison.” (Douglass 2011, 91) In Modernist poetry, it seems, Ugolino’s prison has moved inside the protagonist, alienating him from the outside world he so desperately wishes to gain access to. Interestingly, Pound and Eliot also often used references to, or from, Dante to sing one another’s praises. The most famous examples are, of course, Eliot’s dedication of The Wasteland to Pound, using Dante’s words that referred to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio: “Il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound.” In Italian, the comparative form ‘miglior’ can also be understood as a superlative; the meaning in Dante, as well in Eliot, therefore, remains ambiguous and can either denote the ‘better’ or the ‘best craftsman’. Dante refers to Arnaut Daniel in Purg. XXVI, who is introduced as “a better artisan of the mother tongue” (Purg. XXVI, 116-7) by Guido Guinizelli. The mutual poetic references between Pound and Eliot culminated in Pound’s famous dictum “His was the true Dantescan voice—not honoured enough, and deserving more than ever I gave him,” (Pound quoted in Bernstein 1988, 180) uttered at Eliot’s funeral in 1965. Moreover, the final

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line of Purg. XXVI served Eliot well as it became one of the fragments “shored against my ruins” (Eliot 1963, 69) in the final verse of The Wasteland. Similarly, the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante encounters while he is caught in the purgatorial fire, delivered the title of Eliot’s second poetry collection, Ara Vos Prec (1920), and various of Arnaut’s lines also reappeared in “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and in “Four Quartets” (1943). It seems, therefore, that Purg. XXVI, in particular, had made a lasting impression on Eliot, and the insinuating lines of Arnaut’s soliloquy, Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, e vei jausen lo jorn, qu’esper denan. . . . I am Arnaut, who, going, weep and sing; with grief, I see my former folly; with joy, I see the hoped-for day draw near. (Purg. XXVI, 142-44),

which express Arnaut’s mournful purgatorial suffering along with his hopeful expectation to rise beyond his present state, might encapsulate Eliot’s own disposition as a poet. Massimo Bacigalupo observed that “the image of the suffering poet who weeps and sings would be recognised by Eliot as a portrait of his own ordeals.” (Harding 2011, 180-1) Dante’s miglior fabbro, as Daniel is addressed in the Commedia, had already been ranked among the literary masters by Ezra Pound, though Pound considered him to have been overshadowed by Dante’s fame. The new context, in which the quotation is used in the dedication of The Wasteland, establishes a new frame of signification, making Arnaut and Guinizelli out of Eliot and Pound. This constellation reflects Dante’s and Guinizelli’s playing out of their Provençal poetic role model. Ironically, despite this dedication, Eliot’s fame overshadowed Pound’s literary work. As already outlined above, Eliot is often associated with Arnaut Daniel. Even though one should hesitate before confounding Eliot’s and Arnaut’s biographies and jumping to premature conclusions,10 there is some validity in stating that Arnaut’s persona represented a template for Eliot’s compound self in “Little Gidding”, which will be discussed in the following section.

10

Massimo Bacigalupo, for example, suggests allusions to Eliot’s “more than usually conflicted . . . sexuality” (Harding 2011, 181) because of the fact that Arnaut was punished among the lustful.

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“His was the true Dantesque voice”: the allegory of eternal truth and poetic vigour in “Little Gidding” Eliot’s late work, the “Four Quartets”, published in 1943 in the United States and in 1945 in Britain,11 remains today as one of Eliot’s most highly debated poems. In a recently published essay, F. W. Bateson harshly criticises the poem when stating: There are, of course, some brilliant moments—notably the Dantesque airraid episode in “Little Gidding”—but the writing is in general slack and tired, and too often merely pretentious, groping towards profundity by contortions of repetition. (Newton-De Molina 2014, 16)

“Little Gidding”, the last poem of the “Four Quartets”, however, is beyond reproach and is interesting from various perspectives: on a formal level, it contains an imitation of Dante’s rhyme scheme terza rima, the tercets deliberately invented for the Commedia. On an intertextual level, it is full of allusions to Inf. XV and Purg. XXXVI, Dante’s encounter with Brunetto Latini in hell, and his meeting with Arnaut Daniel and Guido Guinizelli in the purgatorial fire. On a programmatic level, it can be regarded as “a deliberately retrospective summary of Eliot’s poetic career” as well as “an evaluation of the influences that have shaped his poetic voice.” (Emig 1995, 84) Therefore, many of the lessons learned from Dante and the poetic convictions laid out in his essays as a critic are put into action in this poem. Eliot named all the poems in the “Four Quartets” after biographically important places. Little Gidding is a small parish in Cambridgeshire, which used to be a fortress of Anglican faith, particularly during the Civil War. Eliot visited the place in May 1936, while preparing the lecture of a historical play dealing with Charles I, who had gone thrice to Little Gidding.12 For Eliot, the small parish Little Gidding had always been “a distant paradigm of contemplative life.” (Schuchard 1999, 175) The church had been ransacked by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army almost 300 years before Eliot’s visit to the place, yet the Ferrar family running the parish continued to lead their pious parish life full of prayer and duty.

11

Eliot’s Four Quartets has been thoroughly discussed in literary criticism. See, for example, Gardner 1978, and Emig 1995, 80-7. On the biographical circumstances of the poem‘s composition, see Schuchard 1999, 175-97. 12 Schuchard 1999, 175.

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The historicity of the site and the political circumstances of World War II experienced by Eliot during the period of the poem’s composition are reflected in the writing: right at the beginning of the first section, ‘midwinter spring’ is evoked; an almost unreal season which can only be imagined. An array of antithetic expressions sets up a field of tension between hot and cold sensations: “between pole and tropic,” “with frost and fire,” “the sun flames the ice,” “between melting and freezing.” (Eliot 1963) Thus, the nature conjured up in the poem captures a timeless hybrid state between summer and winter, when it is “neither budding nor fading.” The reason for this unusual spring, which appears out of the natural order, and therefore, “not in time’s covenant,” nor “in the scheme of generation,” lies in the unexpected eruption of ravaging and chaos; the destruction of Little Gidding in the 17th century is combined here with the air raids in England in 1941. The lyrical I’s reaction to this is a deeply felt shock, which comprises the “heart’s heat,” the quivering of the “soul’s sap,” and “a glare that is blindness.” Thus, the paralysed narrator desperately wishes for the restoration of order or a constant pattern in his stricken human existence, which is expressed in the question “where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer?” The narrator then alludes to the historical dimension of the place and answers, akin to a tourist guide pointing the way, “If you come at night like a broken King,” in reference to Charles I. In the fourth section of “Little Gidding,” Eliot imitates and modifies Dante’s original rhyme scheme, the terza rima, and establishes an intertextual relationship with the Florentine poet on a formal level. Eliot’s rhyme scheme goes ABA BA CC DED ED CC, thereby ending the first five lines of each stanza with a rhyming couplet, which leads the imitated Italian rhyme scheme to a traditional English ending, since in early modern English poetry in particular, rhyming couplets were used to emphasize the theme of a poem.13 Such a modification perfectly illustrates Eliot’s accomplishment in emulating his master by honing his skills and transposing them onto his own tradition of poetry. This fourth section also emulates Dante linguistically, since “love,” “flame,” “despair,” “fire” and “suspire” recall Dante’s vocabulary that was elaborated in the poetic tradition of the dolce stil novo: “amor,” “fiamma,” “disperazione,” “sospiri” are the ingredients of the love poetry, in which the unrequited love for an angelic woman, who gazes at the spectator, 13

The most prominent example is Shakespeare’s sonnets, which often display rhyming couplets at the end for the sake of emphasis. Interestingly, Eliot marries Dante’s invented rhyme scheme to Shakespeare’s sonnet tradition on a structural level, thereby illustrating in practice his theoretical view on literary tradition, in particular his statement that Shakespeare and Dante complement each other.

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leads the narrator to moral purification. Dante distilled the dolce stil nuovo together with Guido Guinizelli from the Sicilian School of Poetry as well as from troubadour poetry, whose most prominent poet was Arnaut Daniel. Eliot bridges a gap between literary periods ranging from the twelth to the twentieth century and pays formal and linguistic homage to his adored Provençal master. Eliot, for example, takes up the metaphorical flames used in the tradition of the dolce stil novo, which in his case carry the seed of destruction and fall from the sky bringing “incandescent terror”, a metaphor for the German air raids on England during World War II. Similar to the narrator in Dante’s love poetry and Arnaut Daniel in Purg. XXXVI, the narrator in “Little Gidding” can only be purged by fire and reach moral fulfilment by his being consumed by the flames. The “tongues” and “doves” in the first and the third lines refer to the miracle at Pentecost described in the Acts of the Apostles. In particular, this “vision with clear biblical overtones . . . creates the impression of a transcendental reality outside the text by linking its metaphors and metonymies to established, namely religious, symbols, thus supplying them with a symbolic aura.” (Emig 1995, 85) Similar to the Acts, Eliot’s plea for an authoritative and comprehensible voice can be understood as a necessary tool to spread the word and offer guidance in the modern world. As soon as the narrator encounters the ghost, he admits that he is “Knowing myself yet being someone other.” Different personalities begin to merge, and the ghost character, a fusion of famous poets such as Dante, Swift and Yeats, becomes the allegory of eternal truth personified by a literary ghost. Eliot’s words in the third section of “Little Gidding,” spoken by the literary ghost, thereby assume an almost programmatic character: “last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice”. This refers to the unremitting quest to find one’s own literary voice, which might be heard in society. The narrator found “words he never thought to speak”; his ultimate goal as a speaker, as a narrator and as a poet was to “urge the mind to after sight and foresight”, which directly alludes to Dante’s journey to the hereafter and his description of what will happen there as a warning to the living. Here, Eliot formulates the role of the poet in society, and he finds his master and role model in Dante. The ghost in “Little Gidding” becomes an allegory of the auteur engagé par excellence. In “Little Gidding”, therefore, Eliot achieved “that for which he envies Dante—namely, a poetry of belief, in

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which belief and words are one, and in which the thought cannot be prized free from the controlled and beautiful language”.14

Works Cited Bornstein, George. 1988. Ezra Pound Among the Poets. Chicago: Chicago UP. Chmielewski, Inge. 1969. Die Bedeutung der Göttlichen Komödie für die Lyrik T. S. Eliots. Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag. Douglass, Paul, ed. 2011. T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1920. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1963. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1965a. To Criticize the Critic. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1965b. Dante. London: Faber and Faber. —. 1972. Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber. Eliot, Valerie and Haffenden, John, eds. 2013. The Letters of T. S. Eliot 1928-1929. Vol. 4. London: Faber and Faber. Ellis, Steve. 1983. Dante and English Poetry-Shelley to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Emig, Rainer. 1995. Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits. London: Longman. Gardner, Helen. 1978. The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’. Oxford: Oxford UP. Guerlac, Suzanne. 2006. Thinking in Time-An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell UP. Harding, Jason, ed. 2011. T. S. Eliot in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hawkins, Peter S., Rachel Jacoff, eds. 2001. The Poet’s Dante-TwentiethCentury Responses. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Heaney, Seamus, 1985. “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet.” Irish University Review 15 Spring: 5-19. Les Prix Nobel en 1948. Stockholm: Norstedt and Söner, 1949. Maddrey, Joseph. 2009. The Making of T. S. Eliot: A Study of Literary Influences. London: McFarland & Company. 14

Roger Scruton, ‘T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor’, in: First Principles Journal, Issues 1-2, Spring (2004) [ISI web journal, ]. [accessed: 20 August 2014].

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Manganiello, Dominic. 1989. T. S. Eliot and Dante. New York: St. Martin’s Press. McDougal, Stuart Y., ed. 1985. Dante Among the Moderns. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Miller, J. Hillis, ed. 1994. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Newton-De Molina, David, ed. 2014. The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot: New Essays. London: Bloomsbury. Pound, Ezra. 1910. The Spirit of Romance. London: Dent and Sons. Scruton, Roger. 2004. “T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor.” In First Principles Journal 1-2, Spring. Schuchard, Ronald. 1999. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP.

CHAPTER NINE “DENTI ALLIGATOR” AND “THE HUMOURS OF MILLTOWN”: THE CANONICAL COMEDY OF JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGANS WAKE ZACHARY LESZEK KELL

Introduction In 1912, James Joyce delivered two lectures at the Università Popolare di Trieste examining the works of Daniel Defoe and William Blake. Entitled “[v]erismo ed idealismo nella letteratura inglese,” Joyce commented on the interrelationship between the English canon and the continental European tradition, intimating that the achievements of the former were dependent on imitating the latter. In an oft-quoted passage, the crux of the lectures is that English literature needs to be put in its place within the overall Western canon: La letteratura inglese durante I secoli che seguirono la conquista francese andava a scuola ed I suoi maestri erano Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso e messer Lodovico. I racconti di Canterbury di Chaucer sono una versione del Decamerone o del Novellino; Il Paradiso Perduto di Milton è una trascrizione puritanical della Divina Commedia. (Occasional, 270)

R.J. Schork calls this “exaggeration . . . typical and obvious,” and yet, despite Joyce’s “hyperbolic claim” (70), he argues that Milton displays “direct imitation of [the] matter and form” (73) of Dante’s works. Declan Kiberd has gone one step further by using Joyce’s claim as evidence that Joyce was situating himself within this daisy chain of influence, specifically the literature of the Gaelic revival “which Joyce saw as a return to a vibrant medieval world” (33) akin to that of a Dante or a Chaucer. However, Kiberd falls into the trap of strictly tracing a single

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thread of influence throughout the development of the writers he cites. Lucia Boldrini has pointed to Dante’s ability to defeat the simple binary relationship of influencer and influenced, a technique Boldrini asserts is somewhat comparable to Joyce’s“silent silencing” (2) of Dante in Finnegans Wake. On Dante’s approach towards his classical sources of influence, Boldrini states: The principle issues are thus that of originality, understood both as temporal anteriority and as novel treatment of one’s poetic material, and that of the competition with one’s sources and models in order to surpass or defeat them; what is really at stake, then, is the assertion of one’s own rights to authorship, the victorious reversal of Harold Bloom’s notion of anxiety-laden influence into an appropriation and metamorphosis of the early poet, guided by an awareness of the superiority of one’s poetic weapons. (2)

Whilst Boldrini concludes the paragraph by accepting that Dante’s success in overcoming the competition of his predecessors has led to him becoming a poetic model vulnerable to the same methods of defeat by future authors, the image of a writer subsuming his literary forefathers in such a calculated way is potent, given that canonical inheritance is not as simple an automatic cycle as Kiberd, or Joyce’s 1912 lectures, may suggest. In the context of the Wake, Joyce’s ability to have all of his literary influences living alongside each other within the same text may be seen as the ultimate attempt at sublimating the previous canonical tradition—as Boldrini axiomatically states: “no son will suffer from any oedipal anxiety when he has too many fathers.” (13) Nevertheless, this may also be too simple an approach for the “funferall” (13.15)—a pun on fun and funeral—which the Wake is described as by Joyce. This portmanteau connotes several things: first, that the Wake is designed for the enjoyment and celebration of these manifold literary influences; secondly, that Joyce intends to create a text that can be enjoyed by an audience of unprecedented size and scope; finally, that the Wake is a canonical cemetery where past spheres of influence may find their final place of rest. This essay will attempt to explain the canonical relationship between Dante, Milton, and Joyce as they all have in a common an integral place in the canons of Italian, English, and Irish literature respectively. My methodological framework for defining what is canonical is derived from Frank Kermode’s seminal collection of lectures, Forms of Attention. Kermode posits that an author’s literary authority is the result of a “[p]ermanent modernity . . . conferred on chosen works by arguments and

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persuasions that cannot, themselves, remain modern.” (72) For Kermode, these arguments and persuasions are the duty of “canon-defending, theoryladen professors” whose critical endeavours create an enduring narrative whereby a work of literature may become canonical, carrying with it an everlasting relevance to contemporary thought. The issue underpinning Kermode’s statement is that in order for a work to maintain a presence in cultural discourse it must rely upon apologias, the latter of which are doomed to expire under the weight of the inevitable changes in normative values. In short, a work’s value is forced to be consistently reconsidered against the contemporary culture within which it finds itself. Due to the length of this article, I will place my focus on what I submit to be two core themes: issues relating to the canonical nature of an author’s chosen language; and the interpolation of highbrow and epic tropes alongside lowbrow and localised culture. By comparing the Commedia, Paradise Lost, and the Wake across these areas, I will show how all three authors are somewhat aware of their own canonical presence. However, whilst Milton and Dante rely upon the apologias and intertextual sources of others to supplement the importance of their works, Joyce uses these techniques to subvert the very nature of the canon. I will argue that Joyce creates a self-sustaining canonical text which deploys a perpetual textual system that simultaneously creates and destroys the very apologias required to maintain its canonicity; in short, the Wake is canonical per se, whilst removing the need for a definable literary tradition.

A Common Language Historically, criticism of Milton’s approach to the English language has been rife with polemic. T. S. Eliot claimed he had done it damage with his “perpetual sequence of original acts of lawlessness” (141-2) whilst F. R. Leavis merely claimed he had forgotten English for a mechanical process of layering words in a way akin to how one lays bricks. (60) Nevertheless, the narrative voice in Book One of Paradise Lost is aware of the linguistic challenge ahead. When invoking the Heavenly Muse, the poetic voice asks for the ability to describe that which is within him as a Christian so that he may reproduce and share it with other men: . . . what in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal providence, And justify the ways of God to men. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 22-26)

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This passage echoes the Roman sequence Veni Sancte Spiritus (Fowler, 60), a plea which calls upon the light of the Holy Spirit to comfort the souls of the faithful. Milton needs this Christian light because he is undertaking “[t]hings unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.” Whilst this braggadocio may seem commonplace for an epic writer attempting to lay claim to his uniqueness in the canon, the phraseology has a specific origin, namely Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Sir John Harington’s translation, which the editors of the Riverside Milton assure us Milton was familiar with, (1998: 354) contains the line “A tale in prose ne verse yet song or sayd,” and here we see the extent of Milton’s lawlessness with the English vernacular. By carving out his lexical and syntactical framework from manifold sources—and I will discuss later how all three authors are guilty of this—Milton has managed to develop a poetic language which maintains its canonicity by referential incorporation. In short, Milton’s justification of God’s ways is built from the discourse of other men, and by that careful intertextual weaving he manages to fuel his canonicity. However, the issue remains that in order to maintain his stature the frames of reference themselves must also be supported by the very same arguments, theories, and interest that Paradise Lost itself relies upon in order to maintain its relevance. For Milton these observations can be taken as particularly prescient given the political sea-change he had witnessed: While Milton wrote on in his watchful and creative retirement, the restored regime experienced a series of probably gratifying reverses. Charles II and his courtiers proved to be as dissolute as Milton had predicted, fitting heirs to the stereotypical cavaliers of the early 1640s. In the autumn of 1662 the king’s first-born bastard was created duke of Monmouth. (Campbell, 326)

Witnessing this decline coupled with Charles’s “outlandish and papist bride,” and the king’s first child being a bastard rumoured to have been baptised at a Catholic ceremony, Milton was as far from the bliss of the republican project as he would ever find himself. With this context in mind, one begins to appreciate the depth of understanding and potential empathy Milton has for the disintegration of Satan’s influence in Book X: So having said, a while he stood, expecting Their universal shout and high applause To fill his ear, when contrary he hears On all sides, from innumerable tongues A dismal universal hiss, the sound Of public scorn; he wondered, but not long Had leisure, wondering at himself now more;

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His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare, His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining Each other, till supplanted down he fell A monstrous serpent on his belly prone, Reluctant, but in vain, a greater power Now ruled him, punished in the shape he sinned, According to his doom: he would have spoke, But hiss for hiss returned with forkèd tongue To forkèd tongue, for now were all transformed Alike, to serpents all . . . (Milton, Paradise Lost, 10.504-520)

Echoing Cadmus in Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Satan’s transformation carries with it a more sympathetic tone compared to its classical source. Rather than feeling the effects of godly intervention, Satan is reacting to “public scorn” like a politician caught out in a scandal. It is his own wondering that seems to cause the transformation as if he is suffering a psychological transformation rather than a physical one.Satan’s ultimate misunderstanding of his position in his kingdom near the end of Paradise Lost leads him to lose all sense of logical political discourse and instead be reduced to a “dismal universal hiss.” Whilst “dismal” can carry several connotations ranging from “unlucky” to “devil” (1998: 639), it is the universal nature of that dismalness on which Milton places emphasis, as the most polysyllabic word in the line. This is an all-encompassing sound, capable of overturning canonical works, kingdoms, and even God’s favourite angel. For Milton, the potential force of this change is what helps him understand and cultivate his own canonical presence in the epic tradition. It is less an attempt at lawlessness, despite Eliot’s admonishment, and more an acknowledgement of the moving tides within the traditional framework. Satan’s need for political legitimacy becomes analogous to the desire for literary regard. By subverting his previously charming and lyrical lines, Milton reminds us how easily authors and demagogues can fall by the very language upon which they relied. Dante too was aware of the sea-changes both political and literary. As Marianne Shapiro posits: Both Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia belong fundamentally to a perspective through which Dante’s exile grows into a guiding metaphor. Framed in the topos of the Fall of man and the end of Edenic language, the compensatory activity each work advocates takes the form of transcendence through language. (4)

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Through this linguistic transcendence Dante does not only find solace from his exile but utilises it to develop and preserve his canonicity. Bloom argues that Dante provides the greatest example for that truly canonical achievement: “a strangeness that we . . . never altogether assimilate” (4) and this is best evidenced by his historically unique relationship with language. Whilst trying to defend his choice of the vulgate for his most revered works in De vulgari eloquentia, when Dante approaches the ultimate end of his poem, his career as a poet, and—one would assume by his resounding faith—the hopeful destination of his spirit, he decries, with almost Wittgensteinian aplomb, his failings as a poet to depict such a scene: All’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e ‘l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. (Dante, Paradiso, 23.142-145 )

The key to understanding why Dante makes such an admission lies in the concept of “fantasia”, or imagination. Aristotle claimed that “the soul never thinks without an image” (De anima, III.7), and this image is conjured by one’s “fantasia”. In the Convivio, Dante describes “fantasia” as a “virtù organica” through which our own sensory perceptions are translated into something comprehensible to humans: Tornando adunque al proposito, dico che nostro intelletto, per difetto de la vertù da la quale trae quello ch’el vede, che è virtù organica, cioè la fantasia, non puote a certe cose salire—però che la fantasia nol puote aiutare, ché non ha lo di che—sì come sono le sustanze partite da material; de la quali se alcuna considerazione avere potemo, intendere non le potemo, né comprendere perfettamente. E di ciò non è l’uomo da biasimare, ché non esso, dico, fue di questo difetto fattore, anzi fece ciò la natura universal, ciòè Iddio, che volse in questa vita privare noi da questa luce; che, perché elli lo si facesse, presuntuoso sarebbe a ragionare. Sì che, se la mia considerazione mi transportava in parte dove la fantasia venia meno a lo ‘ntelletto, se io non potea intendere, non sono da biasimare. (2014: 159-160)

Whilst Dante’s “theory of poetry […] is at once the great synthesis of medieval theories” (Bundy, 224) which develop Aristotle’s original ideas, the above apologia for man’s blameless inability to perceive beyond his “fantasia” shows Dante at his most innovative and humanistic. At the opening of this chapter, the focus is not spirituality but courtly romance—

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namely, the ineloquence to do justice to a courtly female, or a Beatrice figure. Even in the above passage, the nature of the imaginative organ is fused with historical connotations of virtus, the classical theories surrounding masculine virtue. Man is not only blameless for this failure but actually praiseworthy, somewhat contradicting the citation of Aquinas in the preceding paragraph that one should not be praised either for that which is outside one’s control. However, Dante , as a poet by profession contends that his linguistic failure is simultaneously inside and outside his control, and therefore capable of being a praiseworthy virtue. Dante’s ability to conflate ethical and ontological discourses within his lexis is similar to Milton’s political and spiritual declamations in Paradise Lost. However, whereas Milton builds his language from manifold sources used as static blocks to be manipulated into unique arguments, Dante focuses his canonical endeavour by conflating and converging different sources, theories, and terms in order to create the strangeness that Bloom refers to which no reader can fully reach. This is ultimately an intentional failure of language implemented by Dante in order to ascribe to himself the virtue of depicting universal tropes of humanism, love, and faith whilst failing to describe them properly. As readers we remain in the “selva oscura” by the end of the Commedia despite seeing Dante’s message of hope—salvation through God—because the poem is not designed to transport us to Paradise but merely to satisfy the virtuous organ present in our minds that may lead us on a constant quest towards that goal, and thus in a lifelong relationship with Dante’s masterpiece. Shapiro concludes her book by explaining this achievement: Dante remains ambivalent about the ability of sensory signs to denote reality. But the paradox of his experimental period of exile, both as imposed and self-imposed, enabled him to pass beyond the imperfections of his lyric medium, beyond the transgression of mistaking signs for things, beyond the now-manifest limitations of the canzone to write a universal poem. (195)

Both Dante and Milton find this universality, albeit through different linguistic means, by attempting not only to depict a human perspective coloured by their ingrained national cultures, but also by utilising works outside this range in order to maintain the permanence of their modernity. Joyce shares Dante’s unreachable level of strangeness. In The Books at the Wake, Atherton opens with the prima facie pessimistic declaration that “a final literary evaluation of Finnegans Wake will never be made.” (11) Nevertheless, this statement is actually testament to Joyce’s canonical aim within the Wake—creating a text which confers upon itself permanent

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modernity without total reliance upon other arguments, contexts, and source materials keeping it canonical. In a sense Joyce is purposefully attempting to be a “Seudodante” (Finnegans Wake, 47.19) by conflating different styles and tropes in order to cover up the gaps left by human and linguistic inadequacies. However, the intertextual design of the Wake is gargantuan to the point that one may be left questioning Joyce’s canonical intentions. For example, Joyce’s own use of a canonical source such as the Commedia can combine, explicitly and implicitly references to the original Italian, overlaid with pseudo-translation, and the Italian underworld slang known as Amaro: . . . He nobit smorfi and go poltri and let all the tondo gang bola del ruffo. Barto no know him mor. Eat larto altruis with most perfect stranger. (247.09-11)

Joyce cites Paradiso XVII, where Cacciuguida delivers his prediction of Dante’s exile, and the suffering he will undergo as a result: Tu proverai sì come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle Lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’altrui scale. (Dante, Paradiso, 17.58-60)

The direct connection comes from “Eat larto altruis / with most perfect stranger” whereby “larto” comes from the Amaro slang term for “bread,” and “altruis” is the Low Latin for “by others” (McHugh, 247). Nevertheless, Joyce undermines the seriousness of Cacciguida’s prediction by having the foul-tasting bread with the “most perfect stranger.” One’s face is “smorfi” at the taste of the salt in the loaf, combining “smorfia”— Italian for a grimace—with the Amaro “smorfire” (ibid.)—to eat—making the act of eating and the effect of eating the salt loaf derive from a single word in the sentence. As a result, the experience can lead one to go to bed—Amaro: “poltriero” (ibid.)—and tell the whole world—Amaro: “tondo”—to go or walk into hell—Amaro: “bola dal ruffo”, literally translated as “city of red”. In this part of the story of the Wake, the children in the novel are playing a guessing game whereby Shem’s failure to answer Isabel’s riddle leads him to be exiled from the other children in disgrace. (Tindal, 153) The way in which the Wake uses its sources to create multiple concurrent layers of meaning provides a realistic example of the failings of human understanding Dante discussed in the Convivio. One cannot see a word and have several meanings enter one’s perception simultaneously. Instead a reader is logically working through,

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understanding and applying the meaning that appears most fitting for the overall comprehension of the sentence, paragraph, page, and so on. Despite this restriction, Joyce has created a prosaic delivery system whereby this multitude can be conferred organically to readers as they revisit that part of the text. These endless arguments are not merely being derived from references to other works—that is only one element of Joyce’s canonical endeavour in the Wake. Instead they are emanating from the text itself, creating its own permanent modernity. Similarly, Joyce appropriates the linguistic schema inherent in Paradise Lost alongside nursery rhymes, French, Irish Gaelic, and Biblical quotations. In Book I, Chapter 7 the character of Shem as “writer/forger/artist” (Fordham, 12) faces the possibility of his reputation being attacked by his brother Shaun, until the boys’ mother intervenes. Throughout we find intertextual references to canonical influences, allowing Shem to “forge” both in the sense of steal and replicate. Shem’s career in forgery echoes the ideas of Stephen Dedalus at the conclusion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—namely using a smithy to shape the artistic object:1 . . . and all that has been done has yet to be done and done again, when’s day’s woe, and lo, you’re doomed, joyday dawns and, la, you dominate) it is to you, firstborn and firstfruit of woe, to me, branded sheep, pick of the wasterpaperbaskel, by the tremours of Thundery and Ulerin’s dogstar, you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil, ay, clothed upon with the metuor and shimmering like the hoescens, astroglodynamonologos, the child of Nilfit’s father, blzb, to me . . . (194.10-17)

Joyce echoes the opening three lines to Paradise Lost: Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1-3)

The “woe” is “when’s day’s woe,” punning on the line from the English nursery rhyme Monday’s Child, “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”. We are children of the “firstborn” who ate the “firstfruit of woe” from that “windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil” and made us “branded 1

“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” (Portrait: 194)

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sheep” destined for the wastepaper basket. The final word in the passage is a truncation of Beelzebub, showing that in the Wake only four letters are needed to signify the canonical character of the Lord of the Flies because “all that has been done has yet to be done and done again”. Theorising the cyclical nature of the Wake is far from innovative. During its time as the serialised Work in Progress, the earliest critics such as Samuel Beckett pointed to the influence of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova. (Exagmination, 6) Vico’s theory of a turning back, or ricorso, in history has often been used to explain the very structure of the Wake, with its opening and concluding lines joining together to form a cyclical reading experience. However, one should also note the influence this would have on an author’s canonicity. If the world’s histories and cultures are to return back to their primitive beginnings, in order for them to progress forward into a technocratic future, then Joyce has created an immortal text because of its linguistic conflagration covering all possible historical points in time. One should not be surprised when Zhenqi Ding suggested that the Chinese translation of the Wake be The Record of the Changing World because not only does it record international literature and culture, but also attempts to produce a schema alongside which it can evolve.

High and Low As discussed above, Harold Bloom has approached the Commedia with a similar thesis to this essay, citing the “perpetual originality” and “strangeness” of Dante’s work which allows him to maintain his own canonicity without the assistance of scholarly discourse. In the Western Canon, Bloom looks to what he posits as the unusual position of Beatrice as a combined muse, angel, and human woman: Beatrice is Dante’s knowing, according to Charles Williams, who had no sympathy for Gnosticism. By knowing he meant the way from Dante the knower to God the known. Yet Dante did not intend Beatrice to be his knowing alone. His poem argues not that each of us is to find a solitary knowing, but that Beatrice is to play a universal role for all who can find her, since presumably her intervention for Dante, via Virgil, is to be unique. The myth of Beatrice, though it is Dante’s central invention, exists only within his poetry. Its strangeness cannot truly be seen, because we know of no figure comparable to Beatrice. Milton’s Urania, his heavenly muse in Paradise Lost, is not a person, and Milton qualifies her with the warning remark that it is the meaning, not the name he calls. (84-85)

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Bloom finds it strange that Dante has managed to simultaneously create a human guide who has her own narrative, whilst also standing for a universal divine model with which all readers can connect. This for Bloom is never really achieved again by either those who preceded or succeeded Dante; and it is one of the reasons he is “the very centre of the canon after Shakespeare” (ibid., 89). Milton’s heavenly muse may have helped him to conjure an unusual formulation of English to aid the task of Paradise Lost, but she remains an abstract epic figure devoid of form or personality. Beatrice, on the other hand, is unique in the same way as any person who has lived. She carries her own localised meaning to Dante as well as maintaining herself as an epic tool to guide the Dante-pilgrim through the latter stages of the Commedia, and a universal symbol of pure love which inspired the pilgrim to undertake his journey in the first place. If we turn briefly to these two concurrent versions of Beatrice–he localised person, and the generalised divine presence—we will see exactly the system Dante has put in place: S’io ti fiammeggio nel caldo d’amore di là dal modo che ‘n terra si vede, sì che del viso tuo vinco il valore, non ti maravigliar; ché ciò procede da perfetto veder, che, come apprende, così nel bene appreso move il piede. Io veggio ben sì come già resplende ne l’intelletto tuo l’etterna luce, che, vista, sola e sempre amore accende; e s’altra cosa vostro amor seduce, non è se non di quella alcun vestigio, mal conosciuto, che quivi traluce. Tu vuo’ saper se con altro servigio, per manco voto, si può render tanto che l’anima sicuri di letigio.’ Sì cominciò Beatrice questo canto; e sì com’uom che suo parlar non spezza, continuò così ‘l processo santo: . . . (Dante, Paradiso, 5.1-18)

The self-referential moment at the end of this passage emphasises Beatrice’s strangeness. She is both a character in the poem and an external figure, or muse, from which the poem springs. The warmth of her love is that which Dante the man, and Dante the pilgrim, felt for her as a mortal– which is the key subject of his earlier works such as La vita nuova–but is also a universal representation for God’s love, the ultimate divine love

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which can reach us all. The divine love and clarity which she imparts on Dante, comes from both versions of Beatrice. When she warns him of any other love seducing him, it is both the warning of a divine creator, and a human lover offering her partner one last chance. In Inferno X, Dante attempts to turn himself far away from the poetry of dolce stil novo, thereby sticking close to the holy figuration of Beatrice. He meets Cavalcante de Cavalcanti, the father of his friend and contemporary Guido. When the elder Cavalcante asks why his son has not accompanied the Dante-pilgrim on his journey, the reply betrays a deep regard for preserving canonicity by rejecting any literary styles that may hold the Commedia back: piangendo disse: “Se per questo cieco carcere vai per altezza d’ingegno, mio figlio ov’ è? e perché non è teco?”. E io a lui: “Da me stesso non vegno: colui ch’attende là, per qui mi mena forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno”. Le sue parole e ‘l modo de la pena m’avean di costui già letto il nome; però fu la risposta così piena. Di sùbito drizzato gridò: “Come? dicesti ``elli ebbe”? non viv’ elli ancora? non fiere li occhi suoi lo dolce lume?”. (Dante, Inferno, 10.58-69)

The Dante pilgrim has no time to correct Cavalcante’s mistake about his son’s death. Instead the issue disappears along with Guido’s father, and we are left wondering who it is that Dante claims his friend had held in contempt. The choices range from Virgil to Beatrice and God, yet regardless of to whom the direct connection is made the issue remains the same–Guido no longer fits within the same sphere of canonicity as the Commedia. The poem itself is similar to the strangeness of the Beatrice figure in its ability to present the loftiest of themes alongside the commonplace realities of Dante’s own life. It develops itself as a holy text, and a mortal autobiography allowing Dante to fully realign his place within contemporary literature. This is also why Guido himself is not placed in Inferno X; whilst Beatrice needs to maintain multiple dimensions in order to give her muse-like presence a uniquely relatable dimension, providing Guido with a voice would weaken the blow against the courtly romantic poetry of Dante’s past. Unlike the case of Dante, when examining Milton’s use of localised tropes within the epic framework of Paradise Lost one faces a seemingly

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impossible task. The only contemporary of Milton directly referred to in the poem is Galileo, whose discoveries are presented as prima facie heretical and linked to the figure of Satan. As Sakar concludes in Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost: The perfection of the imagined cosmos is quite unlike anything early modern astronomy discovered and reflects the simplicity and harmony of the prelapsarian condition. Cosmological events that belonged to the postlapsarian situation or the early modern world and are integrated into the narrative framework of the epic include references to the new stars and comets and to Galileo’s observations with his telescope. The chain of allusions to the new stars and comets relate to Milton’s presentation of Satan. Millenarian debates encouraged by these variable celestial phenomena in the seventeenth century are utilized by Milton in Paradise Lost to frame specific images that provide significant insights into Satan’s character. The context framework of these references exposes the errors and false hopes generated by contemporary speculations related to observation of new stars and comets. (Sakar, 195)

Of course, the work of the great astronomers during Milton’s time was not erroneous or filled with false hopes but contributed to the development of modern astrophysics. Nevertheless, Milton appears wary of this and is writing according to the canonical mind-set he perceives as a seventeenthcentury Arminian poet. With this in mind, we can begin to understand why Joyce claims in the 1912 lecture that Milton was merely transcribing Dante through a single lens (Occasional, 270). However, what Joyce fails to realise is that Milton’s approach to his contemporary world is key to maintaining his literary authority.. The fact that the text of Paradise Lost seems disconnected from its contemporary world allows it to exist beyond its own temporality. Even when first referring to a figure as recognisable and controversial to a contemporary reader of the poem, Milton manages to remove any relatable sense of this context: He scare had ceased when the superior fiend Was moving toward the shore; his ponderous shield Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, Behind him cast; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.283-91)

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All the references to the Florentine region seemingly focus the reader precisely onto the allusion. However, the key part of this passage is what the Tuscan artist is actually viewing–the moonlike shield hanging from Satan’s shoulders. It was originally forged in heavenly fire, potentially used when the archfiend was Lucifer, in defence of God’s kingdom. Now it no longer represents light but an antithesis, the moon, an unknown land akin to those Galileo had attempted to understand. What Milton perceives as a heretical attempt at reaching for godhead and other-worldly knowledge is so analogous to the fall of Lucifer that Milton allows the latter to consume the former within the text. The reference finds itself being less of a comment on the contemporary scientific practices with which Milton questions than a Biblical retelling merely supplemented by a brief mention of the Tuscan astronomer. By choosing this safest of grounds, Milton allows himself to maintain canonicity without the allusion holding the text back. Joyce’s sense of localised referencing finds potency in his exile from Ireland, which is analogous to Dante in Ravenna, and Milton in monarchical England. Whilst he was a self-imposed exile, unlike the other two, he saw it as the only thing to do when faced with what he believed was a problematic Irish nationalism. In his essay “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages”, he considered: [w]hat race or language . . . can nowadays claim to be pure? No race has less right to make such a boast than the one presently inhabiting Ireland. Nationality . . . must find its basic reason for being in something that surpasses . . . changeable entities such as blood or human speech . . . (Occasional, 118)

Joyce does not view nationhood as a static singular construct, but rather as a series of entities which, coming together can formulate an individual’s sense of it. As he comically suggests in the Wake, his universe is one of “[m]iscegenations on miscegenations.” (18.20); blood is changeable, and identity is not something fixed to a flagpole. This is why Joyce’s approach to Milton can be somewhat problematic in view of his nationalist puritanical agenda: Language this allsfare for the loathe of Marses ambiviolent about it. Will you swear all the same you saw their shadows a hundred foot later, struggling diabolically over this, that and the other, their virtues pro and his principality con, near the Ruins, Drogheda Street, and kicking up the devil’s own dust for the Milesian wind? (518.2-7)

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The image of wind recurs throughout Paradise Lost; for example, in Book I the lines “[w]ith floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.77) or “[s]ublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds” (ibid., 1.235). Joyce transforms these into the “Milesian wind,” the Milesian people being the last ancient colonisers of Ireland. The entire passage is a diatribe against that which is viewed as typically Miltonic. Milton attempted to use his multilingual skills to “[l]anguage this allsfare” for the English masses who, in the end, violently reacted to the republican project. All he has done is kick up “the devil’s own dust”, and even that has amounted to nothing but being blown on the winds of an ancient race that any true Cromwellian would view as inferior. Moreover, hidden in the negative “loathe of Marses” is the pun “love of Moses”, whom Milton praises in his first invocation as: That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.8-10)

Even though Joyce would have felt strongly adverse to Milton’s opinion of the Irish, he maintains a simultaneous layering of ideas. The passage includes a point of localisation to a specific street in Dublin: Drogheda Street, which is now known as Upper O’Connell Street. It is interesting to note that the original name came from Henry Moore, the Earl of Drogheda, whereas it was replaced with O’Connell in honour of Daniel O’Connell, an Irish nationalist leader of the early nineteenth century. Again, Joyce resists the single meaning of the latter street name, and by referring back to its early incarnation forces us to compare them.

Conclusion Derek Attridge has often come to the aid of the Wake and its woeful absence from what most readers would consider the canon. He argues that the hypothetical drive to make Joyce’s final work accepted by the majority will allow for a subversion of the canon’s institutionalising function: I am not suggesting that there is the remotest possibility of the anglophone cultural establishment’s going back on its exclusion of Finnegans Wake from the central, defining core of the literary tradition, as enforced within the institutions of education and publishing. Indeed, the reasons I have given for the value of thinking through such a reversal are precisely the reasons why it will not happen within the context of current political and

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From this vantage point we are helped not only in the study of Joyce and the Wake, but also in finding new ways to understand central canonical figures such as Dante and Milton. Joyce’s appropriation and conflation of the two epic poets’ own canonical undertakings underpins his desire in the Wake to create a work which is self-sustaining. Whilst the wider success of this endeavour remains to be fully realised, it gives readers and literary scholars the opportunity to question canonicity, and break away from the ingrained personas and conservative apologias that have canonised classic works of literature. By layering multiple allusions the Wake is allowed to simultaneously recreate and destroy the art of the past, leaving behind a new vision of the universe no longer held back by canonical or historical bias. The collapsing of canonical pinnacles on which Dante and Milton are placed grants an uninhibited appreciation of both poets, and presents them less as figures of the past who are supplemented by arguments of the present. They become living, breathing artists who belong in Joyce’s text as comfortably as their presence in their own. Kermode’s concerns with Hamlet in Forms of Attention consider the idea of a text so canonical that the constant need to find new arguments to supplement its existence and study may lead to absurdities. (31) In the final chapter, Kermode chooses a more conservative approach: What is not good is anything whatever that might destroy the objects valued or their value, or divert from them the special forms of attention they have been accorded. (Kermode, 92)

What we are left with is the timeless argument between preserving canonical works which are beneficial to appreciate and study according to contemporary aesthetics and morality, and subverting the canon in order to allow for a fairer reflection of our constantly developing culture. By examining the different ways in which Dante, Milton, and Joyce have helped to preserve their own canonicity I have shown that both sides of the debate are equally compelling, and can easily coexist. Within Joyce’s

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subversive prose reside the very central canonical figures that he is seeking to reappraise. Whilst Joyce places them alongside various other cultural and intertextual allusions, the canonical poets never lose the ability to voice their own perspectives. Even with Milton’s own anti-Irish, monarchical, and puritanical connotations, Joyce gives the reader space to appreciate all vantage points simultaneously. All three authors are attempting to protect their own interests as literary figures, whilst also defending the very art that founded their careers. By examining how these interests converge, criticism can further itself in understanding how canonicity from the perspective of the writer comes to be formulated. Rather than being restricted by arguably outdated and problematic notions of a Western Canon, or a politically motivated canon, we can return to a simpler definition using the ideas of Kermode expressed above. All writers are concerned in some way by their relevance and authority, regardless of the size and scope of the audience they are intending to reach. By reappraising this deceptively simple concept we can start to close read the ways an author utilises their self-awareness of the literary traditions in which they reside, and how works like Finnegans Wake maintain their literary authority whilst shattering the very canons upon which they rely.

Works Cited Atherton, James. 2009. The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Aristotle. 1986. De Anima. Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin. Attridge, Derek. 2004. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. New York: Psychology Press. Beckett, Samuel. 1961. Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. London: Faber and Faber. Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon. Orlando: Harcourt Brace & Company. Boldrini, Lucia. 2004. Joyce, Dante and the Poetics of Literary Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bundy, Murray Wright. 1927. The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gordon Campbell, Thomas Corns. 2010. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford UP. Dante, Alighieri. 2014. Convivio. Edited by Giorgio Inglese. Milano: BUR Rizzoli.

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—. 1961. The Divine Comedy: Volume 1: Inferno. Edited by John D. Sinclair. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 1961. The Divine Comedy: Volume 3: Paradiso. Edited by John D. Sinclair. Oxford: Oxford UP. Eliot, T. S. 1953. Selected Prose. Edited by John Hayward. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fordham, Finn. 2007. Lots of Fun at Finnegans Wake: Unravelling Universals. Oxford: Oxford UP. Joyce, James. 2012. Finnegans Wake. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. —. 2008. Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Edited by Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. 2001. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions. Kermode, Frank. 2011. Forms of Attention. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Kiberd, Declan. 2009. Ulysses and Us. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Leavis, F. R. 1936. Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus. McHugh, Roland. 2005. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Milton, John. 2006. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Routledge. —. Paradise Lost. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg and Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Oxford UP. —. The Riverside Milton. Edited by Roy Flannagan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sarkar, Malabika. 2012. Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schork, R. J. 1991. “The Via Negativa: Miltron’s Use of Dante.” ANQ 4 (2): 69-73. Shapiro, Marianne. 1990. De Vulgari Eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Tindal, William York 1996. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. New York: Syracuse UP.

CHAPTER TEN FROM FALLEN ANGEL TO DARK LORD: TRACES OF DANTE AND MILTON IN THE HARRY POTTER SERIES ELIZABETH E. J. GILBERT

“There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” (Philosopher’s Stone, 211).

In recent years, numerous academic studies have been dedicated to the various facets of Joanne K. Rowling’s work, ranging from ethical and educational issues to questions of gender and genre.1 The findings invariably support the view that Rowling created an exceedingly convincing mix of various familiar sources and narrative patterns to create a new world of magic. The Harry Potter books are replete with various elements from classic epic literature and the adventure genre in general, from Homer through to Spenser—such as the overall mission of one central hero figure to constitute or save his society from a looming reign of terror; the multi-layered quest motif and its sequence of separation, initiation, challenge and return, which can be seen as spanning the entire seven volumes as well as unfolding on a smaller scale in every single volume; or the basic plot and character schemes that can be related to the universal archetypes defined by Carl Gustav Jung.2 Rowling also effectively uses imagery and patterns known from folklore and mythology—indeed, many of her descriptions tap into images which the Western reader is already familiar with but cannot locate exactly—this 1

See the collections edited by Anatol 2003 and 2009, Baggett 2004, Berndt & Steveker 2011, Granger 2009, Whited 2004. 2 E.g., hero, companion, shadow, mentor, shape shifter, threshold guardian and herald. See Jung 1959; Dickerson and O’Hara 2006; Mills 2009; Alton 2009; and Boll 2011: 87-–9, who refers to Hunter 2008 for a basic discussion of archetypes.

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reading experience offers less clearly defined intertextual references rather than a network of culturally preconfigured tropes.3 One striking example of this is Rowling’s indebtedness to Western epic. Even though common epic genre features have been localised and discussed, the way in which the Harry Potter series—consciously or unconsciously—feeds on two of the most influential epic works of European literature, Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, has so far only been touched upon very marginally.4 The two poets have formed our notions of good and bad in the afterlife, of what Hell and its inhabitants look like to such an extent that we tend to accept certain features as given, such as topographical details, character traits or outer appearance. These tropes of the portrayal of evil have become part of our cultural discourse and also reverberate in the Harry Potter series. My suggestion is that the implementation of these tropes makes the portrayal of Voldemort and his supporters so convincing that we accept them as a serious threat to the hero and the community he represents. What’s more, the many intricate connections between Harry and his nemesis, the blurring of the traditionally clear-cut boundary between good and bad, entice the reader to reflect about the importance and precariousness of choices in life. This paper strives to uncover some striking features of the foundational works by Dante and Milton that can be traced in the Harry Potter series and cover a whole range of topics: from setting and character constellations to imagery, lexical choices, narratological features and underlying teleological beliefs. Our perception, understanding and explanation of the nature and quality of evil have been vitally influenced by the works of the two grandmasters of European epic, Dante and Milton. My aim is not to prove whether and how well J.K. Rowling knew or even consciously used the Divina Commedia or Paradise Lost (as she read French and Classics at Exeter University, it is rather unlikely that she did not gain knowledge of them). My aim is to outline interdiscursive elements and thus show how Dante and Milton have breathed life into abstract concepts and given evil a face and a history with such a powerful visionary quality that it has entered the collective iconology of Western culture. Rowling’s way of conjuring up these familiar features and then giving them a twist deserves our recognition. 3

On this notion of intertext, see Neumann & Nünning 2006: 6. Milton is explicitly mentioned only in Wolosky 2010 and Pharr 2011: 17. Dante, to my knowledge, is sketchily mentioned only by Wolosky; the concept of contrapasso is discussed by Pepetone 2012 with reference to various other children’s books, but not Harry Potter.

4

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Epic Topography and Cast An initial look at the setting of the Harry Potter series already highlights the intricate combination of fairy tale, mythology and classical to Late Medieval literature and gothic fiction.5 A look at the details, however, shows many astonishing parallels to the setting in Paradise Lost and the Divina Commedia. The charming medieval flair of the school is created by the Gothic architecture of Hogwarts, described as “a vast castle with many turrets and towers” (Philosopher’s Stone, 83), which calls to mind the description of “Empyreal Heav’n”: “With Opal Tow’rs and Battlements adorn’d” (Paradise Lost, II: 10496). In Harry Potter, the house ghosts from centuries past, coats of arms and shining armour, as well as the students’ robes and even the banquets call to mind Arthurian legends and other chansons de geste but can also be related to Milton’s descriptions of Satan and his army, which are equally imbued in a medieval atmosphere, with Arthurian armoury and coloured banners. The “Ten thousand Banners rise into the Air / With Orient Colours waving” from Paradise Lost (I: 545–6) can be directly compared to “ . . . the Great Hall was . . . decked out in the Slytherin colours of green and silver . . . A huge banner . . . covered the wall” (Philosopher’s Stone, 220). Apart from these topographical features used to create an atmosphere reminiscent of Gothic adventure novels and Arthurian tales, there are two further architectural spaces of the Harry Potter series which are more specifically connoted with supporters of the antagonist, Lord Voldemort: Malfoy Manor and Grimmaud Place. Their rich and symbolic decorations, such as doorknockers, chandeliers or candelabras in the form of serpents (Order of the Phoenix, 58–60; see also Deathly Hallows, 9–10), seem to directly refer to the serpentine inhabitants of Milton’s Pandemonium. In contrast, the grounds of Hogwarts and everyday school-life mod cons (offered by the house elves) bring to mind prelapsarian Paradise. Connections to Dante’s topographical divisions can also be drawn, as pupils need to ascend a tower to get to the master’s office (a heaven or safe haven of sorts) and descend to the dungeons to the Potions classrooms, an art traditionally connected with evil. Beneath the dungeons lie even more mysterious and threatening spaces that call to mind the underworld, as I will detail below. Choices and responsible decision-making being one of the recurring topics of the series, the topographical layout of the school 5 6

See also Granger 2009: 91–8. All further references are to the 1989 edition of Paradise Lost.

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already hints to the permeability of boundaries, with pupils descending and returning, with revolving staircases, and rooms changing their interior in accordance with individual needs (the Room of Requirement). Various scenes and settings seem to be directly inspired from Dante. The most obvious topographical reference is the Forbidden Forest, an inhospitable wood full of frightening and deadly creatures, which Harry has to enter several times. In the first adventure, he encounters Voldemort here, who in Philosopher’s Stone is still a hooded, indefinable creature “like some stalking beast,” drinking the blood of unicorns and merely characterised by the “slithering sound” he makes (Philosopher’s Stone, 187). The forest is a narrative and iconographic trope of epics found as early as Gilgamesh––its dark and broody atmosphere is also conjured up in Beowulf––but in the Divina Commedia it features most prominently, as the “selva oscura” (Divina Commedia, 1.27) constitutes the initial surrounding where the autodiegetic narrator Dante meets his future guide, Virgil. In Harry Potter, as in its predecessors, the forest is used to symbolise the hero’s lack of orientation. The Forbidden Forest also serves as a place of initiation in the hero’s maturation process, since it is a space where he is called to challenge and overcome danger and evil: in the last volume, Harry has to come here again for the final showdown, to face his enemy and inevitable death. This death, however, frees him from the influence of Voldemort, and he can return to life healed and delivered from all evil influences. Parallels can be drawn here to the forest described in Dante’s Purgatorio, which equally symbolises a form of purification.8 Rowling uses and adapts descriptive features familiar from Western classical culture to fill her fictional world with authentic life––one need only consider her Bowtruckles, little stick-like creatures that dwell in trees, and compare them to Gustave Doré’s illustrations of trees with anthropomorphic features from Dante’s Inferno, which in turn go back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A more striking example is featured in the Philosopher’s Stone: in order to save the stone that offers eternal life from being stolen, Harry and his friends have to pass a three-headed ferocious monster dog to descend into the virtual “Underworld”.9 Fluffy, as he is called here, is a blatant copy of Cerberus; indeed, gamekeeper Hagrid “bought him off a Greek chappie” (Philosopher’s Stone, 141). Fluffy has “rolling, mad eyes; three noses, twitching and quivering . . . ; three 7

All further references are to the 1989 edition of La Divina Commedia. Christoph Lehner was so kind to share this insight. 9 Incidentally, the coveted stone, which gives eternal life to its possessor, is also already mentioned in Paradise Lost: “That stone, or like to that which here below / Philosopher’s in vain so long have sought” – Paradise Lost 3.600–1. 8

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drooling mouths, saliva hanging in slippery ropes from yellowish fangs” and lets out “thunderous growls” (Philosopher’s Stone, 119). Anyone wishing to pass him must play a song––a playful allusion to the Orpheus myth, which is featured in both pretexts analysed here. In the Divina Commedia, Cerberus is described as a ferocious, greedy, red-eyed drooling dog with claws that sever its victims (just like Fluffy, who injures Professor Snape in that way) but shows little taste for music (Divina Commedia, VI: 13–33). Milton, in contrast, draws a connection between his versions of Cerberus and evil witchcraft: “A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d / With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung / A hideous Peal” (Paradise Lost, II: 654-6). Milton’s diabolical dogs are the creatures of Sin, half-woman half-serpent (Paradise Lost, II: 650–3), who is described as a “snaky sorceress” (Paradise Lost, II: 724), an image whereby the semantic connection of evil and snakes is again established and which is featured equally prominently in the Harry Potter series, as will be detailed below. The commonalities shown so far can be traced to a rich culture of storytelling with a variety of sources from Classical Antiquity and Christian Middle Ages overlapping. Interestingly, as the complexity of the plot and allusions in Harry Potter increases from one volume to the next, so do the references to Dante. The function of the mentor figure Dumbledore can be seen as a parallel to Virgil, Dante’s “guida” (Divina Commedia, I: 113) and “maestro” (Divina Commedia, II: 140), who guides and warns, advises and sometimes merely accompanies the main protagonist to allow him to make his own conclusions from the impressions he gets.10 In the final meeting between Dumbledore and Harry, after his first “death”, Harry wakes up in a dream version of King’s Cross Station. As Pharr has pointed out, this space bears clear references to Limbo, which again tightens the connections between Harry Potter and the Divina Commedia, where protagonist and mentor first meet in Limbo.11 Both mentors share similar values: Virgil in the Commedia stresses the importance of wisdom, love and virtue early on (Divina Commedia, I: 104)—values which are also constantly promoted by the headmaster of Hogwarts:

10

As Christoph Singer has kindly pointed out, a similar address can also be found when Sin approaches Satan in Book II of Paradise Lost: “Thou art my Father, thou my Author, thou / My being gav’st me; whom should I obey…” (II: 864–5) 11 See Pharr 2011: 21.

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Chapter Ten Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open. (Goblet of Fire, 627).

The concept of the main protagonist being initiated by his mentor shows the most striking resemblances to La Divina Commedia in Halfblood Prince, when Dumbledore takes Harry to a cave to find a Horcrux.12 These resemblances include the way he advises Harry to stay close and follow, the descriptions of how they proceed through an arch and into “total darkness” (Halfblood Prince, 523), the vast black lake set in an indistinguishably high cavern (ibid., 524), the narrow rim of rock on which they proceed haltingly, the tiny boat which carries them across, and finally the bodies of the undead Inferi floating beneath the surface (Halfblood Prince, 529) who eventually try to drag Harry down. All these recall Dante and Vergil’s progress through the Inferno. Indeed, the description of this scene especially calls to mind Canto VIII, where Dante and Virgil cross the River Styx in the boat of Flegias, and Dante encounters Filippo Argenti coming up from the waters and trying to drag him down (Divina Commedia, VIII: 40: “Allora stese al legne ambo le mani” and 43: “Lo collo poi con le braccia mi cinse”). In Rowling’s words, this threatening atmosphere is described as follows: “…white heads and hands were emerging from the dark water, men and women and children with sunken, sightless eyes were moving towards the rock: an army of the dead rising from the black water.” (Halfblood Prince, 537–8). These rich and complex details might be one of the reasons why the Harry Potter series has become equally successful with young and adult readers. The intertextual web of allusions and cultural cross-references offers an intense and rewarding reading experience that goes beyond mere plotlines and character portrayals, and even plays with the experienced reader’s knowledge of various cultural pretexts. One need only consider the fight between the hero and Grendel’s mother in Beowulf, to return to the above example. Grendel’s name alone not only bears striking resemblance to Dumbledore’s former enemy Grindelwald, she lives in an equally gruesome, partly submerged cave into which the protagonist must venture.

12

A Horcrux is an object that holds parts of Voldemort’s splintered soul. Pharr 2011: 18 compares the Dante protagonist to Harry, as both figures are able to learn.

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Intertext and Context: Antagonists When looking more closely at the representation of the nemesis in the Harry Potter series, interesting similarities especially between Rowling’s and Milton’s works come to the fore. Just as Paradise Lost is both a story about Lucifer’s as well as Adam and Eve’s Fall, and thus contains two main plotlines, we could also say that the Harry Potter saga is a “reversible” double epic. Two stories unfold centring on two singular protagonists. The “official” version, with Harry as hero and Voldemort as the antagonist, contains narrative features that are in line with classical epics: the series portrays the development and quest of “aristocratic” Harry, initially the archetypal Innocent and “lost prince”13 who, on his mission to save the worlds of wizards and Muggles alike, finds friends, mentors and supporters, makes enemies, faces a variety of challenges, learns about love, responsibility, self-control and the complexities of making choices, and eventually has to face the most existential decision: to sacrifice himself for the good of wizard- and mankind. However, the Voldemort plot, with its strong doppelgänger motif, also contains many of the basic elements of epics: it features a neglected orphan on a mission to change society, fighting alone and gathering an army of supporters. As in Paradise Lost and many classical epics, a prophecy triggers the action, which features extensive battles and sieges and ends in defeat caused by betrayal. It is in this second version of the epic plot, the one that focuses on the Dark Side, where we can best see the influence of Milton. His innovative creative force impacted all later conceptions of Satan as Archangel, Prince of Devils and Serpent-Tempter. This becomes especially apparent when we search the Bible for original descriptions of Satan—even Dante’s Satan as yet lacks the individuality and depth of Milton’s.14 Thanks to the English poet, the claw-footed beast is now a more subtle danger, a complex character whose threat becomes more intense due to his ambivalence. Rowling, too, allows her readers an unusual insight into the mind of the malicious Voldemort that uncovers astonishing similarities to Milton’s creation of evil incarnate.15 The description of Voldemort’s physical appearance, his character and

13

See Boll 2011: 89. See Carey 1989: 162. 15 Satan etymologically means ‘adversary’ or ‘enemy’ – see Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Ed. Ivor H. Evans, 1981: 995. 14

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motivation, his relationship to Dumbledore and the way he organises his troops show fascinating parallels to Milton’s Satan.16 In line with characteristic traits of epic, the plot in both Paradise Lost and Harry Potter starts in medias res; the first––positive––stage (Lucifer as preferred angel; Tom Riddle as head boy of Hogwarts) is not shown directly but alluded to or fleetingly recalled in analepses by various characters. Anderson (1994, 9) stresses how Milton’s Satan, in his search for autonomy and power, undergoes increasing moral and physical degeneration––a feature which we can also detect in Voldemort: initially, both Lucifer and Tom Marvolo Riddle, as Voldemort is called before he gains power and renames himself, are handsome. Their moral disintegration at first does not show in the outer appearance, but their looks increasingly reflect the fallen state of their souls, to the extent that neither are at first recognised: the Cherubs fail to detect Satan because his looks have changed so dramatically––“thou resembl’st / now thy sin and place of doom obscure and foul” (Paradise Lost, IV: 839–40) and Voldemort, too, has such a changed countenance that his followers doubt at first if it is really him. Immediately after their first defeat, both have to inhabit small animals, such as toads. This is the first stage, eventually leading to their final dramatic and unrecognisable disfigurement and dehumanisation. We can even see related imagery in Milton and Rowling when the former’s “Wrapt in mist / of midnight vapour” (Paradise Lost, IX: 158–9, italics added) features again in the latter’s work as “See what I have become? Mere shadow and vapour” (Philosopher’s Stone, 213, italics added).17 Although both lose their attractive outer appearance and spiritual goodness, they always retain full control of their consciousness and pursue their goals with increasing intensity.18 To come closer to their female victims Eve and Ginny, both disguise themselves as “trustworthy” characters: Satan appears in form of a cherub in Paradise Lost as “the false dissembler unperceived” (III: 681); Voldemort surfaces inside a teacher in Philosopher’s Stone and as a former schoolboy in Chamber of Secrets. The way in which Voldemort tries to use Harry as a weapon against Dumbledore, the only wizard he can accept as equal, also recalls Paradise Lost. His means of “whispering to the innocent” by way of first manipulating Ginny in The Secret Chamber and later entering Harry’s thoughts can be seen as similar to the way Satan speaks to Eve in her 16

See Carey 1989 and Anderson 1994 for the innovative aspects of Milton’s creation of Satan. 17 See also Duriez’ 2009 analysis, esp. 189. 18 With a view to Satan only, see Carey 1989: 162.

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sleep. In both cases, stress is put on their voice as a means of charming and controlling others; both are eloquent and can speak to and in the language of snakes. A fine example of Voldemort’s eloquence is given in chapter 33 of The Goblet of Fire, when Voldemort has just regained his human shape and has gathered his followers around him. He addresses his henchmen, whom he accuses of lacking loyalty, in a series of rhetorical questions and answers: . . . I ask myself . . . why did this band of wizards never come to the aid of their master, to whom they swore eternal loyalty? . . . And I answer myself, … they must have believed me broken . . . And then I ask myself, but how could they have believed I would not rise again? They, who knew the steps I took, long ago, to guard myself against mortal death? They, who had seen proofs of the immensity of my power, in the times when I was mightier than any wizard living? And I answer myself, perhaps they believed a stillgreater power could exist . . . (Goblet of Fire, 562)19

Milton, too, already gives proof of Satan’s oratory powers in the first book (Paradise Lost, I: 81, 97 et passim), where his bold words show his being unrepentant, full of disdain and possessing an equal sense of injured merit: All is not lost; the unconquerable Will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield / And what is else not to be overcome? / That Glory never shall his wrath or might / Extort from me. (Paradise Lost, 1.106–1120).

Rowling seems to be using the images created by Milton to bring to life her evil characters. As in Paradise Lost, all actions referring to Voldemort unfold in the dark of night—darkness evidently having a metaphorical function as the physical representation of an internal process, of the antagonists’ inner Hell and “spiritual death”.21 Voldemort sports the red eyes Milton gave his Satan (“cruel his eye” Paradise Lost, I: 602 and “carbuncle his eye” IX: 500)—a warning sign considering his soul—and also has the physical traces of the serpent which Milton’s Satan has to bear 19 Further proof of Voldemort’s eloquence is given throughout the series, for example in the way he flatters others to reach his goals (detailed below), or when he suggests the killing of Tonks via a reference to pruning in Deathly Hallows, 17. 20 See also 1.527–9: “ . . . he his wonted pride / Soon recollecting, with high words, that bore / Semblance of worth, not substance . . .”. 21 Anderson 1994: 10. Parallels can also be seen here to the brooding, gloomy atmosphere of Beowulf.

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(once a year), having chosen the shape of this animal when he approached Eve. Rowling’s description of Voldemort follows this closely: when Harry in the first volume eventually faces his nemesis, the as yet bodiless Voldemort is introduced with a focus on his serpentine features: the face “was chalk white with glaring red eyes and slits for nostrils, like a snake” (Philosopher’s Stone, 212).22 The snake imagery is not reserved to the outer appearance but also includes the sounds produced by the enemy, which again can be traced back to Milton: in Rowling’s world, Harry shares with Voldemort the exceptional ability of communicating with serpents. Voldemort’s “soft voice seemed to hiss on even after his mouth had stopped moving” (Deathly Hallows, 15) while Milton’s Satan “hiss for hiss return’d with forked tongue” (Paradise Lost, 10.518). Even Rowling’s depiction of the serpent Nagini, Voldemort’s pet companion (the name itself being a reference to the Naga, snake deities in Sanskrit mythology) shows similarities to Milton’s imagery: in both descriptions, the snake is lurking in the background, constantly moving in coils and circles and seeming to float in the air. The wording in Paradise Lost: “ . . . on his rear, Circular base of rising folds, that tow’r’d / Fold above fold a surging Maze, his Head / Crested aloft, . . . Amid his circling Spires, that on the grass Floated redundant . . .” (Paradise Lost, 9.497-503, italics added) is partly picked up in Rowling’s text: “Behind his head, still swirling and coiling, the great snake Nagini floated in her glittering, charmed cage, like a monstrous halo.” (Deathly Hallows, 563, italics added). Further parallels abound with respect to the iconography of Satan. For instance, Milton created an early paragon sorcerer: Satan carries a spear that looks like a wand, and later is described as holding a silver wand (Paradise Lost, 1.292-4; 3.644) and planning to use “cure or charm . . . [to] render Hell / More tolerable” (Paradise Lost, 2.459-60). His followers, too, use “pleasing sorcery” to “charm / pain for a while or anguish” (Paradise Lost, 2.566-7). Milton thus established an association of sorcery with the Prince of Hell, which is picked up again in Rowling’s creation, both concerning the outer appearance and especially the character traits of the two villains, as will be discussed below. Interestingly, both Voldemort and Satan are also described as thieves: as a young boy in the orphanage, Tom Riddle steals the toys of the other children and later he steals objects which he wishes to turn into Horcruxes; Satan, in turn, is depicted by Milton as “this first grand Thief” (Paradise Lost, 4.292). 22

See also the “flat face . . . whiter than a skull, with wide, livid scarlet eyes, a nose as flat as a snake’s, with slits for nostrils” in Goblet of Fire, 558.

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“There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.” (Philosopher’s Stone, 211). These words by Professor Quirrell, the first outspoken follower of Voldemort to be introduced to the readers, show his master’s relentless craving for power—with the eventual goal to conquer death and secure immortality as a state of eternal power and domination.23 Indeed, in the Harry Potter series, it is the thirst for power that seems to explain the origins of Voldemort’s evil nature; an archetypal feature of satanic figures.24 He subjugates and mercilessly destroys those who stand in his way—power being the means to set himself beyond others, to no longer comply with society’s rules, to prioritise his own wishes and desires, and thereby suppress others. Like Milton’s Satan (and many epic heroes), Voldemort is resourceful, unswerving, a strategic thinker who prefers to “operate alone” (Halfblood Prince, 469). Both characters are rebels (in Paradise Lost he is described as “rebellious head” III: 86) who hate their fathers or any authority figures (like Dumbledore), and refuse to accept any superimposed order. It is the same unwillingness to acknowledge the son of God’s superiority that drives Lucifer to rebellion (see Paradise Lost, 5.660-860). Both characters are motivated by hurt pride, anger and a thirst for revenge, a trait they share with archetypal epic hero Achilles. Voldemort uses his father’s corpse to come back to life and comments: ”I revenged myself upon him, that fool who gave me his name.” (Goblet of Fire: 561). References to Satan’s thirst for revenge and his pride abound throughout Paradise Lost but are stressed especially at the beginning: Th’infernal Serpent; … whose guile Stirr’d up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv’d The Mother of Mankind, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring To set himself in Glory above his Peers, He trusted to have equal’d the most High, If he oppos’d, and with ambitious aim Against the Throne and Monarchy of God Rais’d impious War in Heav’n and Battle proud With vain attempt. (Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.34–44). 23

See Goblet of Fire 566: “I have gone further than anybody along the path that leads to immortality. You know my goal – to conquer death.” Furthermore, the new statue erected after Voldemort has taken over the Ministry is given the caption, ‘Magic is Might’ (Deathly Hallows: 198). 24 Seelinger Trites even posits that “all of the characters in the book (Philosopher’s Stone) are obsessed with power” 2001: 474. See also Wolosky 2010: 135.

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Both lay great importance by the aspect of nobility, are obsessed with breed, titles and rank. Satan, “Prince of Hell” (Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.871), proud of being “self-begot, self-rais’d” (Paradise Lost, 5.860-1) and unwilling to consort with angels of a lesser rank, is mirrored in the way Tom Marvolo Riddle creates a new identity as Lord Voldemort and direct descendant of the mighty Salazar Slytherin (see Chamber of Secrets, 337). Back in power, the would-be aristocrat chooses to settle in Lucius Malfoy’s stately manor house (in Deathly Hallows). Indeed, the parallels between Rowling’s character and Milton’s continue with respect to the way they charm, trick and manipulate others: Riddle can persuade the Hufflepuff ghost to tell him where the diadem is; he knows Slughorn’s passion for important people; he operationalizes Helena Ravenclaw’s envy and Hepzibah Smith’s vanity; he knows how to tempt people and he can even read their mind via Legilimency, just like Satan can read Eve’s mind.25 Satan whispers to Eve to “raise . . . distemeper’d, discontented thoughts, / Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires” (Paradise Lost, 4.807–08) while Tom Riddle feeds on the soul of young Ginny when she pours her heart out by writing into his diary. He thrives on her deepest fears and secrets, grows powerful through her, induces her to write threatening messages on the wall and eventually makes her open the chamber of secrets, thus endangering the entire school (see Chamber of Secrets, 333). This form of influencing an innocent female shows many parallels to how Satan tempted Eve. Recognisable by his unusually high, cold voice, Voldemort does not speak much, but in the scene where he takes shape again and summons his followers in Goblet of Fire, we can again trace striking parallels to Satan: their leader qualities are reflected in their rhetorical powers, cunning plans for the future, courage, as well as their skilful warfare. “The Dementors will join us . . . they are our natural allies . . . we will recall the banished giants . . . I shall have all my devoted servants returned to me, and an army of creatures whom all fear” (Goblet of Fire, 564). Both hold persuasive speeches to rally their troops, promise fame and glory, and use language to spread fear and exercise control over people. As Sirius Black explains to Harry, “In the old days he had huge numbers at his command: witches and wizards he’d bullied or bewitched into following him, his faithful Death Eaters, a great variety of Dark creatures.” (Order of the Phoenix, 88).26 Couffignal points out that this way of “using, abusing and misusing the

25

For parallels between Harry and Voldemort, see Wolosky 2010: 117f. Goblet of Fire, 457: “. . . he can control people so that they do terrible things without being able to stop themselves.” 26

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spoken word” is a typical feature of the satanic deceiver as serpent.27 Wolosky, too, highlights the parallels of the scene when Voldemort gathers his followers around him with Milton: “The opening chapter of Book 7 recalls Milton’s scenes of Hell, with Satan presiding over the Fallen Angels in a fellowship of envy, fear, and competitive anxiety.” (Wolosky 2010, 212). This scene is set in Malfoy Manor and shows the cruel, tyrannical and despotic character of Voldemort, who is quite evidently feared by his followers28 and creates an atmosphere of mutual envy in them.29 Both Satan and Voldemort promise power and independence but offer only suppression. The relationship between Voldemort and the Death Eaters is one of master and servants, and reminiscent of medieval fiefdom; they fall to their knees, kiss the hem of his robes, address him as master (Goblet of Fire, 561) and lord (Deathly Hallows, 12). Like the fallen angels in Paradise Lost, Voldemort’s direct followers—alongside their allies, werewolves, giants and Dementors—embody fraud, lust and violence, they are portrayed as obsessed and inhuman, which also shows in the deterioration of their looks: “though Spirits of purest light, / Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.” (6.660-1). This recalls the character Bellatrix Lestrange, who used to be a beauty but in Order of the Phoenix (691 and 706) is described as a gaunt and skull-like fanatic. The Death Eaters eventually even sound like the fallen angels: they “let out low hisses” (Order of the Phoenix, 691). This scene is reminiscent of Satan’s triumphant speech in Book X: “So having said, awhile he stood, expecting / Their universal shout and high applause / To fill his ear, when contrary he hears / On all sides, from innumerable tongues / A dismal universal hiss” (Paradise Lost, X: 504–8). Voldemort is only interested in people’s usefulness; unlike Milton’s Satan, he does not show any empathy.30 Instead, he objectifies others and denies them autonomy, which can best be exemplified by the Dark Mark: a tattoo-style branding that each Death Eater wears on his arm. A further symptomatic feature of Voldemort’s system of objectification can be seen in the Unforgivable Curses: Imperius exerts full control over others;

27

Couffignal 1996: 401 See Deathly Hallows 13–17, where they are described as afraid and terrified. 29 As in Deathly Hallows, 16, where the group is described as jeering when Voldemort makes Bellatrix Lestrange and Narcissa Malfoy look ridiculous. 30 See Pharr 2011: 13. Though the reader learns a lot about his personal background and can thus understand his despair, he is not shown to doubt his moves, as Satan is. Yet, both are motivated mainly by hurt pride. 28

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Cruciatus is a means of physical torture; and Avada Kedavra, the killing curse, denies the basic human right to live. The most striking feature concerning the way that Rowling brings to life her evil main character is the way she offers the reader various means to learn about what turned the villain into a merciless monster.31 Background information on Tom Riddle is given in analepses, by Harry being invited to share various memories of other characters, which make the past come to life unfiltered and give Harry (and the reader) an understanding of what Voldemort is like and how he became what he is. We are offered opinions and memories of others—minor characters at first, but increasingly memories of important protagonists such as Dumbledore and Snape. These insights offered by figures from the past can be related both to Dante’s encounters with the sinners in Hell telling him their stories, and to Raphael giving Adam and Eve the background story of Lucifer in Paradise Lost.

The Psychology of Evil In the later novels of the series, when the complexity and ambivalence of many characters increases, Harry and the reader are offered direct access to the inner workings of evil, which further highlights the many disquieting parallels between Harry and his “evil twin” Voldemort. The two are emotionally connected through Harry’s lightening-shaped scar, a form of branding that allows––or forces––Harry to acknowledge the proximity of Voldemort, and later on he can even use it to learn about his enemy’s emotional states and read his thoughts. Interestingly, Milton’s Satan himself has a similar scar: “his face / Deep scars of Thunder had intrench’d” (Paradise Lost, 1.600). This physical connection between Harry, Voldemort and Milton’s Satan is especially interesting because it shows how Rowling blurs the dividing lines between good and bad to add complexity to her stories and recall the overall issue of choices. From the beginning, through his scar, Harry can feel whenever Voldemort experiences emotional extremes, but he suffers from these experiences and wishes them to cease. In the later volumes, the mental bond between the two grows and at times Harry is so fascinated and repulsed at the same time that he intentionally seeks this contact. The intensity of Harry’s visions and dreams increases to a point where he is (inside) Voldemort and 31 See the very inspiring passages in Wolosky 2010: 113–4 on how Harry begins to share the thoughts of Voldemort and 119 et passim on the increasing bonds between the two.

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Nagini and can see through their eyes, hear him speak or cry, and experiences impulses of viciousness and aggression at first hand—even towards Dumbledore. This way of estranging Harry and Dumbledore recalls the way Satan causes a rift between God and Adam. It also gives the young reader an authentic experience of the lures of evil and makes them realise that choosing to remain on the ‘good’ side is not an easy task. Harry has to learn to shield his thoughts (a magic art called Occlumency) to remain uncorrupted from Voldemort’s manipulative designs, but it is a difficult struggle as the battle has to be fought inside him and Harry is increasingly fascinated by the ability to delve into the mind of the most evil and power-seeking being in his world. This internal battle is also reflected on the level of discourse: the reader is immersed in passages of character focalisation without being offered any detachment by a third-person omniscient narrative voice. This technique of letting Harry experience without any filter what happens within Voldemort allows us an introspection into the soul of evil the intensity of which can only be compared to Milton’s portrayal of Satan, especially in the beginning of Book IV (30-113), when Satan is torn between justifying and criticising his plans to take revenge on God by corrupting the newly created Adam and Eve. Like Satan, Voldemort is shown to suffer from extreme moods and to tend towards self-deception. One might indeed call Voldemort the modern avatar of Milton’s Satan. In both works, the narrative is a powerful means to influence the perceptions and sympathies of the reader, and the emotional involvement of Harry underlines the challenges of making the right choices. A closer look at the moral and ethical issues discussed in the Harry Potter series allows us a new understanding of the vital impact of Milton’s and Dante’s literary creations. This becomes most obvious when we consider Dante’s elaboration of the medieval concept of contrapasso, by which every sin was provided a tailor-made punishment. Rowling seems to resort to this concept by using doubling effects and ironic twists so that the antagonist’s gravest sins necessarily bring about his downfall. There is a convincing logic in this medieval vision of poetic justice: Voldemort’s ultimate goal and treacherous weak spot is his desire for eternal life. However, by creating Horcruxes and drinking unicorn blood to “conquer death” (Goblet of Fire, 566), he curses his own life and destroys his soul. His fear of death leads him to commit acts which make him less human, but more deathlike. This seems to directly reflect the famous Miltonic quote, “Myself am Hell” (4.20), in turn a reference and enrichment of the Bible passage “But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all

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they that hate me love death” (Book of Proverbs, 8:36).32 Furthermore, in making Harry a Horcrux and using his blood to take human shape again, Voldemort creates a double bond between them and thus unwittingly grants immortality to the person he most wishes to kill.33 His sinful actions and goals are thus directly reverted and eventually used against him. Another ironic twist concerns the aspects of love and loyalty. Voldemort not only fails to grasp the significance of the sacrifice of Harry’s mother, which has created a protective shield for Harry; in the showdown scene of the final volume, Narcissa Malfoy betrays Voldemort to save her son Draco. Voldemort, an arch-traitor in line with Dante’s Satan, is himself double-crossed by various people who choose love over loyalty—alongside Narcissa, the most notorious example is Severus Snape, allegedly loyal servant of Voldemort but driven to change sides when Voldemort kills his puppy love, Lily Potter, Harry’s mother. The contrapasso concept also seems to come to full effect in Voldemort’s desire to possess—objects and people, as a means to increase his power. He is obsessed with the mythical Elder Wand, as he expects its possession to make him undefeatable. But being the wand’s master does not mean that you have to own it. In fact, Harry is its master, as he defeated the wand’s previous owner, and so Voldemort’s final Killing Curse, performed with the Elder Wand against Harry, backfires, leading to Voldemort killing himself in the attempt to gain immortality. Dante’s legacy has informed our understanding of poetic justice—the idea that sinners do not suffer in Hell together, but are faced with individual retribution. This form of offering a very specific sense of closure is elaborated very intricately in Rowling’s works, where the tiniest details eventually fall into place. One example is xenophobic and cruel Dolores Umbridge, a person who destroys all innocence and is finally abducted by the creatures she most loathes, namely unicorns, the personification of innocence. Two guiding principles can be discerned in Dante, Milton and the Harry Potter series that invite a deeper reflection on the side of the reader and that are recurrent motifs of classical epic poetry: the aspect of free will and making choices; and the importance of one’s individual past and heritage.34 In every one of Inferno’s circles, Dante meets suffering contemporaries who are yearning to tell him their story and share their past. In Paradise Lost, it is the background information on Lucifer before 32

Quoted from The King James Version of The Holy Bible, Cambridge University Press: 573. For Milton’s usage of this passage, see Anderson 1994: 13. 33 See also Pharr 2011: 9: “Voldemort dies by longing too much for life”. 34 On the importance of the past in epics see also Merchant 1971: 25.

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the Fall and how his personality affects his actions, how he consciously chooses to do evil despite himself, that make Satan such a fascinating figure.35 In Harry Potter, understanding the past is the key to vanquishing the wicked, to understanding why and how “he-who-must-not-be-named” made his way and gained such power.36 Like Milton, and unlike Dante, who offers us first-hand accounts of the sinners’ experiences but famously shows very little compassion except for the lovers Paolo and Francesca, in Canto V, Rowling establishes evil as something multifaceted, and as a point of view of someone who has consciously chosen this path.37 The concept of free will and the influence of fate in Paradise Lost have given rise to many scholarly debates.38 Indeed, both Milton and Rowling (though the latter possibly unconsciously) use St Augustine’s concept of evil as a willing refutation of original good and a commitment to sin.39 How can we explain and accept the existence of evil? Both Augustine and Milton, in his Christian Doctrine,40 point out that the potential for evil and the cause of sin lie in man’s free will. Thus, evil is a corruption of good but cannot exist of itself—it is rather a perversion or form of deprivation. And Dante’s contrapasso, too, is not just to be understood as “a form of divine revenge, but rather as the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul”.41 Rowling uses this idea of self-determination for her three main protagonists: Harry, Tom Riddle (aka Voldemort) and Severus Snape share a common background and character traits but develop differently because of the choices and allegiances they make.42 A glance at minor evil characters shows what makes them so convincing and threatening, be it Dolores Umbridge, Barty Crouch or Bellatrix Lestrange: it is their 35

Carey 1989, 172: “. . . Satan became evil of his own free will . . .”. See also Patterson 2008. 36 McEvoy stresses that the childhood experiences of neglect seem to explain why Tom Riddle developed the way he did; Rowling thus “complicates our understanding of his evil” (2011: 215). 37 See Wolosky 2010. This ambivalence is also one of the factors that make Snape such an interesting character, indeed, maybe the true dramatic hero of the series. 38 See, Carey 1989, Anderson 1994: 6; Steadman 1957 and 1976. 39 Wolosky, too, sees a parallel between Augustine’s Earthly City and the Death Eaters: 2010: 191. 40 See Anderson 1994: 6 et passim for Milton and Duriez 2009: 187 et passim for Rowling. 41 Peter Brand & Lino Pertile, The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, 1999: 63–4. 42 On choices and morality in Harry Potter, see also McEvoy 2011: 207 and Pharr 2011: 12.

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willingness to embrace evil.43 What’s more, there are several characters on the “good side”—mentors to Harry, even—who are equally ambivalent: passionate and defiant Sirius Black; Remus Lupin, the werewolf who cannot fully trust himself; Harry’s father, who turns out to have been a school bully; and even Dumbledore, with his power-thirsty past. All of these characters make Harry (and the reader) realise that we all carry some darkness within our souls.44 As in Milton’s masterpiece, evil in Harry Potter is slightly ambivalent: it is both loathsome and yet understandable, it has been given human qualities. Once we learn about the lack of parental care little Tom Riddle has had to endure, his conscious decision to opt for ruthless power-seeking becomes comprehensible, though never pardonable: he simply does not know love and its force, and so he chooses against it. Rowling, like her two famous predecessors, stresses the importance of every individual’s choice for or against evil. In the words of Dumbledore, “. . . it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” (Goblet of Fire, 615). This battle between the two extremes, as in many a classic epic, could be said to be used in the Harry Potter series to initiate the young readers into what life is really like: a constant challenge, a tug-of-war between contesting desires and notions. Yet, the apparently clear dichotomy breaks up to reveal how the characters are torn between the two poles, and this is what makes the works analysed here so continuously fascinating: they challenge our desire for clear resolutions. With this paper, in a way I wished to pay my respects to the literary scope and qualities of J.K. Rowling as well as children’s literature in general, which, in referring to the cornerstones of our culture, literature and philosophy, often carry in them much more profound knowledge and networks than the inattentive reader might at first suspect. The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost still are vital pretexts for our civilisation; they have culturally preconfigured common notions of good and evil, have breathed life into abstract concepts, and their powerful visionary qualities have impacted our collective iconology to such an extent that we cannot help but to associate Satan with pride, treachery, cruelty and a serpent with more distinct features than the original biblical Leviathan. Good must win, but Bad must be powerful and alluring enough for the fight to become an existential one. It is the inner struggle of the dark side within us, the lust for power, knowledge, control and influence, against our yearning for justice, goodness, friendship and humanity on the other hand, this struggle of the soul, which embeds the Harry Potter series in the literary tradition 43 44

Pharr 2011: 12 also stresses “the human ability to give in to evil by choice”. See also Boll 2011: 95.

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of the psychomachia. Artists and readers alike have always responded more emotionally to the Inferno than Purgatorio and Paradiso, and ever since Dryden, Milton’s Satan has often been seen as the “true” hero of the work because of his vitality and the way we are invited to understand his motivation.45 The Harry Potter series would not be so successful without the vivid representation of the evil antagonist and how it impacts the young hero. Rowling has managed to operationalize our familiarity with the cultural discourse so that we willingly embrace the importance of loyalty and the dangers of power, so that we accept her imagery, iconology, symbolism and underlying moral dimensions unquestioningly. The Harry Potter series hence is a proof of how much the visions and concepts created by Dante and Milton are part of our culture, even in the twenty-first century.

Works Cited Alton, Anne Hiebert. 2009. “Playing the Genre Game. Generic Fusions of the Harry Potter Series.” In Heilman 2009, 199-23. Anatol, Giselle, ed. 2003. Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays. Westport: Praeger. —, ed. 2009. Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays. Westport: Praeger. Anderson, Gene Michael. 1994. “Into the Heart of Hell: The Creation of Satan in Paradise Lost.” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 20 (2): 516. Baggett, David, Shawn E. Klein, eds. 2004. Harry Potter and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court. Berndt, Katrin, Lena Steveker, eds. 2011. Heroism in the Harry Potter Series. Aldershot: Ashgate. Boll, Julia. “Harry Potter’s Archetypal Journey.” In Berndt 2011, 85-104. Brand, Peter, Lino Pertile, 1999. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Carey, John. 1989. “Milton’s Satan.” In The Cambridge Companion to Milton, edited by Dennis Danielson, 160-74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

45

On Dryden and other eighteenth-century readers, see Carey 1989. Merchant, too, stresses “ . . . the uneasy suspicion that the character of Satan is far greater than it should be” and quotes Blake, who describes Milton as unknowingly being “of the Devil’s party” 1971: 58-9.

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Colebatch, Hal G. P. 2003. Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter and Social Conflict. Christchurch: Cybereditions. Couffignal, Robert. 1996. “Eden. The Source of the Myth.” In Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. Edited by Pierre Brunel, 389-406. London and New York: Routledge. Dante Alighieri. 1989. La Divina Commedia. Edited by Fredi Chiappelli. Milan: Mursia. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Edited by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press. Cambridge University Press: 1967. Dickerson, Matthew, David O’Hara. 2006. From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. Duriez, Colin. 2009. “Voldemort, Death Eaters, Dementors, and the Dark Arts: A Contemporary Theology of Spiritual Perversion in the Harry Potter Stories.” In The Lure of the Dark Side: Satan and Western Demonology in Popular Culture. Edited by Christopher Partridge, Eric Christianson, 182-95. London: Equinox. Evans, Ivor H., ed. 1981. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. London: Cassell. Granger, John. 2009. Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures. New York: Berkeley Books. Heilman, Elizabeth, ed. 2003. Harry Potter’s World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. —, ed. 2009. Critical Perspectives on Harry. New York: Routledge. Hunter, A. G. 2008. Stories We Need to Know: Reading Your Life Path in Literature. Findhorn: Findhorn Press, 2008. Jung, Carl G. 1959. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. McEvoy, Kathleen. 2011. “Heroism at the Margins.” In Berndt 2011, 20723. Merchant, Paul. 1971. The Epic. London: Methuen & Co. Mills, Alice. 2009. “Harry Potter and the Horrors of the Oresteia.” In Heilman 2009, 243-55. Milton, John. 2006. Paradise Lost. Illustrations by Gustave Doré. Royston: Eagle Editions. —. 1989. Paradise Lost. Edited by Christopher Ricks. London: Penguin Classics. Morris, Thomas V., Matt Morris. 2005. Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way. Chicago/LaSalle: Open Court. Neumann, Birgit, Ansgar Nünning. 2006. “Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität: Grundbegriffe und Forschungsansätze zur Kontextualisierung

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von Literatur.” In Kulturelles Wissen und Intertextualität. Theoriekonzeptionen und Fallstudien zur Kontextualisierung von Literatur. Edited by Marion Gymnich, Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, 3-28. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Paolucci, Anne. 1964. “Dante’s Satan and Milton’s ‘Byronic Hero.’” Italica 41 (2): 139-49. Patterson, Annabel. 2008. “Milton and the Problems of Evil: A Preemptive Modernism.” In Uncircumscribed Mind. Reading Milton Deeply. Edited by Charles Durham, Kristina Pruitt, 25-43. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP. Pepetone, Gregory G. 2012. Hogwarts and All. Gothic Perspectives on Children’s Literature. New York: Peter Lang. Pharr, Mary. 2004. “In Medias Res. Harry Potter as a Hero-in-Progress.” In Whited 2004, 53-64. —. “A Paradox: The Harry Potter Series as Both Epic and Postmodern” In Berndt 2011: 9-24. Rowling, Joanne K. 1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury. —. 1998. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury. —. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. London: Bloomsbury. —. 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury. Seelinger Trites, Roberta. 2001. “The Harry Potter Novels as a Test Case for Adolescent Literature.” Style 35 (3): 472-85. Smilie, Ethan. 2013. “Satan’s Unconquerable Will and Milton’s Use of Dantean Contrapasso in Paradise Lost.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 65 (2): 91-102. Steadman, John M. 1957. “Satan’s Metamorphoses and the Heroic Convention of the Ignoble Disguise.” Modern Language Review 52: 81-5. —. 1976. “The Idea of Satan as the Hero of ‘Paradise Lost.’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120 (4): 253-94. Whited, Lana, ed. 2004. The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspective on a Literary Phenomenon. Columbia: U of Missouri P. Wolosky, Shira. 2010. The Riddles of Harry Potter. Palgrave Macmillan.



CONTRIBUTORS

Christoph Ehland is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. He has published Picaresque Perspectives —Exiled Identites (2003) and co-edited Mobility in Literature and Culture, 1500-1900 (2012). His forthcoming publications include The Writer’s Radiance: Image, Mind and Body of the Writer: Literary Culture in England and Scotland after 1623. Elizabeth Gilbert is a lecturer at the English Department of Cologne University, where she teaches literary and cultural studies, specialising in 19th- and 20th-century novels and children's / young adult fiction. Having read Italian, French and English studies and written her doctoral thesis on Italian Renaissance poetry, she often includes comparatistic elements in her studies. She has published on various Italian renaissance poets and contemporary English and American literature. She is the author of Luigi Alamanni – Politik und Poesie. Von Machiavelli zu Franz I. (2005). Nick Havely is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, specializing in medieval literature and Anglo-Italian literary connections. His publications include: Chaucer’s Boccaccio (1980); Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (1998); Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the ‘Commedia’ (2004); Dante (Blackwell Guides to Literature) (2007). He recently published a book-length study of Dante’s British Public. (Oxford UP). Zachary Kell read English at University College London, receiving First Class Honours. He was awarded the UCL Hobbes Prize for his dissertation investigating the intertextual relationship between Islamic literature and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He is the recipient of a Major Scholarship, Major Exhibition, and Duke of Edinburgh Entrance Award from the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple to pursue a career in law. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2015 by the Inner Temple.



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Contributors

Christoph Lehner studied English and Romance languages, history of art and intercultural studies in Regensburg, Pisa, Florence and at Queens College, Cambridge. His main interests of research are the Early Modern Drama as well as the European reception of Dante Alighieri and Niccolò Machiavelli. He currently works as a lecturer for Italian at Regensburg University and as a secondary school teacher and has recently finished his PhD thesis entitled Depicting Dante – Allegory, Authority and Authenticity in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Art. Alison E. Martin completed her B.A. in Modern Languages and her Ph.D. in German at the University of Cambridge and has an M.A. in Modern Dutch Studies from UCL. She holds a Habilitation in English and Comparative Literature from the Martin-Luther-Universität HalleWittenberg (Germany). Her main research interests and publications lie in book history, translation studies, scientific writing, travel literature, and European literary and cultural relations in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. She is the author of Moving Scenes: The Aesthetics of German Travel Writing on England, 1783 - 1830 (Legenda, 2008); her second book focuses on the translation and reception of Alexander von Humboldt's travel writing in nineteenth-century Britain. She is currently working at the University of Reading (GB). Eliza Richter studied English and History at the University of Paderborn and the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) with a focus on early modern history and English literature. In 2012, she completed her state examination in Paderborn and was accepted as a PhD student at the University of Münster. She is part of the ‘Europa-Kolleg’ which focuses on literary constructions of European and national identities. Currently, she is working on her PhD thesis: “A Maritime Europe?– The Sea and Collective Identities in Early Modern English Travel Literature (15701642)”. Andrew Sanders is professor at the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He has published Dickens and the Spririt of the Age (1999), The Short Oxford History of English Literature (2000), Authors in Context: Charles Dickens. In 2013 Yale University Press released In the Olden Time: Victorians and the British Past.



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Christoph Singer is an assistant professor in the Department of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. In 2012 he finished his dissertation on literary representations of shorelines as liminal spaces (Sea Change: The Shore from Shakespeare to Banville. Amsterdam: Brill, 2014). In 2015 he published an anthology entitled Transitions In Middlebrow Writing, 1880-1930. (Ed. Kate Macdonald, Houndmills: Palgrave 2015). Other research interests include spatial theory and Early Modern culture and Literature. Anne-Julia Zwierlein holds the Chair of English Literature and Culture at the University of Regensburg. She has published widely on English literature and culture from the early modern period to the present; among her publications are the monographs Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667-1837 (2001) and Physiology and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Formation (2009), as well as (co-)edited volumes on interiority (2002), Jacobean city comedy (Plotting Early Modern London, 2004), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2005), Gender and Creation: Surveying Gendered Myths of Creativity, Authority, and Authorship (2010), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in NineteenthCentury Culture (2013), and Gender and Disease in Literary and Medical Cultures (forthcoming 2014).