Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton 9780691209128

Citation preview

POET OF R E VOLU TION

POET OF REVOLUTION THE MAKING OF JOHN MILTON

• NICHOL AS McDOWELL

PR INCETON UNI V ER SIT Y PR ESS PR INCETON & OX FOR D

Copyright (c) 2020 Princeton University Press Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved ISBN 9780691154695 ISBN (e-­book) 978209128 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941718 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Ben Tate and Josh Drake Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden Text Design: Leslie Flis Jacket/Cover Design: Lorraine Doneker Production: Danielle Amatucci Publicity: Katie Lewis and Alyssa Sanford Copyeditor: Tash Siddiqui Jacket/Cover Credit: Portrait of a young man identified as John Milton in the collection of Christ’s College, Cambridge, attributed to Peter Lely or Mary Beale. By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge. This book has been composed in Arno Pro text with Trajan Pro and Gotham display Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

. . . the childhood shews the man, As morning shews the day. Be famous then By wisdom[.] Joh n M i lton, Pa r a dise R ega i n e d (1671)

In reading [Milton’s] works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shows the strength of his genius: the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. W i l li a m H a zlitt, ‘On Sh a k e spe a r e a n d M i lton ’ (1818)

Let us never forget Milton, the first defender of regicide. Fr e der ick Enge l s, T h e Nort h er n Sta r (18 Dece m ber 1847)

One of the typical features of Dante’s personality, which qualifies him as an ‘intellectual’ in the modern sense of the word, is his endless reflection on what he is doing, both as an author and as a man. M a rco Sa n tagata, Da n te: T h e Story of H is Li fe (2016)

C on t e n t s

•

List of Illustrations  xi Acknowledgements  xiii Note on Texts and Abbreviations  xv Introduction: Two University Scenes

1

Part I: London and St Paul’s School, 1608–­2 5 1. Londiniensis

23

‘Chief of Cities’ The ABC of Salvation ‘Excellent Father’ Humanism and Puritanism

23 27 31 35

2. Pure Chaste Eloquence

45

The Grammar of Things Blotterature That Sublime Art

45 50 56

3. The Pursuit of Universal Learning Eloquence and Erudition Accelerated Humanism

66 66 73

Part II: Cambridge and Christ’s College, 1625–­9  4. Philology and Philosophy

81

‘Whip’t Him’ ‘Vehement Study and Emulation’ vii

81 89

viii  c o n t e n t s

‘Blind Illiteracy’ ‘New Rotten Sophistrie’ 5. Beginning as a Poet Fatal Vespers ‘That Little Swimming Isle’ The Nature of a Composition Satire and Libel 6. Heroes and Daemons

97 103 108 108 114 117 123 131

Miscellany Poet A Monument More Permanent Living with the Daemons Domina

131 135 143 156

7. The Poetics of Play and Devotion

159

‘His Hand Unstained’ Melancholicus ‘A Synchronism of Prophecies’ ‘The Lars, and Lemures Moan’

159 164 172 178

Part III: Cambridge and Hammersmith, 1629–­3 5 8. Laudian Poet?187 ‘Tenet of the Apocalyptical Beast’187 ‘Arminianized under his Tuition’192 Mystics in Hammersmith197 ‘Above the Years He Had When He Wrote It’ 201 Water and Wine, Tears and Blood206 9. In Search of Patronage212 ‘Pluto’s Helmet’212 Genius of the Wood 221

con t e n ts 

ix

‘Notorious Whores’ Some Other Circe 10. Many Are the Shapes of Things Daemonic Pagan Virtue ‘How Charming is Divine Philosophy!’ Apollo’s Lute The Beauty and The Bacchae

224 229 237 237 243 249 253

Part IV: Horton and Italy, 1635–­9  11. The Circle of Studies Identity and Belief in 1636 ‘Subdivisions of Vice and Virtue’ ‘Censored by the Inquisitor’ A True Poem Wotton, Hales, and Eton College 12. Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’ Two Sorts of Shepherd ‘Bacchic Howlings’ Digression and Desire 13. Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’ ‘Run Amarillis Run’ Index Expurgatorius Genius of the Shore 14. Come un Virtuoso In Circe’s Court ‘Flattery and Fustian’ Non Angli, Sed Angeli Be Our Daemon

263 263 270 276 283 286 293 293 298 303 311 311 317 327 332 332 337 344 348

x  c o n t e n t s

Part V: London and Aldersgate Str eet, 1639–­4 2 15. Becoming a Polemicist The Method of History ‘Brittish of the North Parts’ ‘Tearing of Hoods and Cowles’ Ancients and Moderns 16. The Poetics of Polemic ‘Struggle of Contrarieties’ A Calvinist Suit of Armour ‘Inquisitorious and Tyrannical Duncery’ Ignorance of the Beautiful Epilogue: Towards Regicide and Epic

Notes 421 Index  463

357 357 361 366 373 382 382 389 394 400 410

L i s t of I l lu s t r at ions

•

1. The 1660 proclamation by Charles II for the calling in and suppressing of two books by John Milton4 2. Milton’s transcription of the Prologue from a quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet in his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Courtesy of the Rare Book Department, Free Library of Philadelphia.17 3. An early seventeenth-century view of St Paul’s Cathedral and the surrounding area in London. 25 4. John Milton at the age of ten. After Cornelius Janssen (1618). National Portrait Gallery, London.41 5. Engraving of Christ’s College, from David Loggan, Cantabrigia illustrata (Cambridge, 1690). Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.87 6. Opening page of Milton’s first Prolusion, in Joannis Miltonii Angli, epistolarum familiarium (1674). Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter.93 7. Portrait of a young man identified as John Milton (c. 1629). By an unknown artist. National Portrait Gallery, London.160 8. Draft of Milton’s 1633 letter to a friend, in the Milton manuscript, R. 3. 4, Trinity College, Cambridge, p. 6. © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.214 9. Title-­page of Poems of John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645)223 10. ‘The Daemon sings or says’, final page of the draft of A Maske, in the Milton manuscript, R. 3. 4, Trinity College, Cambridge, p. 29. © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.239 11. Anonymous title-­page of A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (1637). The British Library, C.34.d.46.254 12. Indexes of John Milton’s commonplace book. The British Library, Add. MS 36354.275 13. On the prohibition of books, in John Milton’s commonplace book. The British Library, Add. MS 36354.282 xi

xii  l i s t o f i l l u s t r a t ion s

14. Draft of ‘Lycidas’, in the Milton manuscript, R. 3. 4, Trinity College, Cambridge, p. 31. © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.294 15. Drafts for dramas, in the Milton manuscript, R. 3. 4, Trinity College, Cambridge, pp. 40–­1. © The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.363 16. Title-­page of [ John Milton], Of Reformation (1641). By permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge.375

Ac k now l e d g e m e n t s

•

This book took (considerably) longer than it was supposed to take, and my primary thanks are to my editors at Princeton University Press for their patience: first Al Bertrand, who commissioned the book, and then Ben Tate, who waited for it. Thanks also to others who worked on the book in production, in particular Debbie Tegarden and Tash Siddiqui. The book’s intellectual origins lie in the invitation of Paul Stevens to speak at the Canada Milton Seminar at the University of Toronto in 2010, which was a key moment in developing my thinking about the young Milton. More recently I am grateful to Rachael Hammersley for asking me to contribute to an ‘Intellectual Biographies Workshop’ at Newcastle University in 2017, which enabled me to discuss methodological issues along with others working on biographical studies of early modern figures; and to Sarah Mortimer, whose invitation to speak at the ‘Religion in the British Isles, 1400–­1770’ seminar at Oxford in the same year presented my arguments to salutary interdisciplinary interrogation. For particular suggestions or bits of help over the years, even though they might have forgotten they ever gave them, I thank Sharon Achinstein, Niall Allsopp, Claire Bourne, Hannah Crawforth, Karen Edwards, Tobias Gregory, Zoe Hawkins, Ariel Hessayon, Edward Jones, Tom Keymer, Sarah Knight, Colin Lahive, Rhodri Lewis, Jason McElligott, Jeff Miller, Joe Moshenska, Henry Power, Jason Scott-­Warren, George Southcombe, and Blair Worden. I may not agree with all the conclusions of Gordon Campbell and Tom Corns in their 2008 biography but it is a major work of scholarship that has shaped my own arguments, and they have both always been generous to me and engaged with my arguments in the open-­minded spirit in which they are intended. I owe much of my continued enthusiasm for Milton to discussion and debate with several generations of lively undergraduates at the University of Exeter and also with recent doctoral students, including Anthony Bromley, Philippa Earle, Tessa Parslow, and, in particular, Esther van Raamsdonk, who got me thinking about Milton and European culture

xiv  a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s

in different ways. The three readers for Princeton University Press, who revealed themselves to be William Poole, David Quint, and Paul Stevens, provided wise and scrupulous reports; David Quint subsequently directed me towards some important further reading. I have convivially discussed these matters for many years now with Will Poole, whose own scholarship on Milton and others sets the highest bar. This book would almost certainly not exist had I not had the good fortune to be introduced to Milton’s prose by Nigel Smith over the course of my first term as a Masters student twenty-­five years ago, which transformed the Milton I thought I knew from undergraduate study. My parents have picked up several volumes on Milton from second-­hand bookshops for me over the years, and they all came in useful in some way. Finally, I must acknowledge the support and optimism of Sally Faulkner as well as the tolerance of our sons, Rowan and Cameron, for all the times I told them I was ‘working on my book’. St. Leonard’s, Exeter December 2019

No t e on T e x t s a n d A bbr e v i at ions

•

In the notes the place of publication is London unless otherwise stated. All references to Milton’s shorter poems, and to their translations, are to the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton. Volume III: The Shorter Poems, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski and Estelle Haan (Oxford, 2012; corrected impression, 2014), unless otherwise stated, and are incorporated into the text by line numbers. All references to Paradise Lost are to the 1674 edition and are incorporated into the text by book and line numbers; all references to Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes are to the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton. Volume II, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford, 2008), and are incorporated by book and line numbers. All references to Milton’s printed prose works are to the first editions unless otherwise stated; references to translations of printed prose and to editions of manuscript writings are specified in the notes.

Abbreviations Campbell, Milton Chronology Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (Basingstoke, 1997) Campbell and Corns, John Milton Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford, 2008) CELM Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts, 1450–­1700, comp. Peter Beal (https://celm-ms.org.uk) Complete Prose Works Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. in 10 (New Haven, CT, 1953–­82) Complete Shorter Poems Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (Harlow, 1997) Early Lives  Early Lives of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (1932) Fletcher, Intellectual Development Harris F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols. (Urbana, IL, 1956–­61) Lewalski, Life Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 2000; rev. edn., 2002) Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols. Life Records  (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949–­58) xv

xvi  n o t e o n t e x t s a n d a b b r e v i a t ion s McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton (Oxford, 2009) ODNB  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford Milton Complete Works of John Milton, gen. eds. Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell (Oxford, 2008–­)

POET OF R E VOLU TION

INTRODUCTION

•

Two University Scenes

Two university scenes, half a century apart. First, Cambridge in the summer of 1632. John Milton supplicated for his Master of Arts degree on 3 July, at the age of twenty-­three, after seven years of study. To be awarded the degree, he had to declare in writing, as he had done previously to obtain the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1629, his subscription to the liturgy and doctrines of the established Church of England and acknowledgement that the reigning monarch, Charles I, was ‘the King’s Majesty under God . . . the only Supream Governour of this Realm, and of all other his Highness Dominions and Countries, as well in all Spiritual or Ecclesiastical Things or Causes, as Temporal’.1 It was this requirement that meant Roman Catholics, such as John Donne in an earlier generation, could study at university but not graduate. Since his arrival at Cambridge at the beginning of 1625, Milton had tried his hand, with varying degrees of success, at most of the various forms of poetry marking specific occasions in which a student with literary ambitions would have been expected to excel, mainly in Latin, the official language of the university, but also in the vernacular: satirical epigrams to mark the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot; funeral elegies for noted ecclesiastical and university figures; verses for formal university exercises and college entertainments; and devotional poems linked to ceremonial feast days. He had in fact already written two thirds of the poems that he would collect in his first volume of verse, Poems . . . Both English and Latin, at the end of 1645. Milton was evidently known within his college, Christ’s, as an able Latinist, for he had ghost-­written Latin verse for Fellows of Christ’s to recite at important occasions, possibly including the 1

2 i n t r o du c t i on

visit of the French ambassador in September 1629.2 But that reputation may not have stretched much beyond the college, as he did not appear in any of the printed university anthologies of verse of the years 1625–32, and he certainly did not leave Cambridge with the level of renown of such contemporaries as Richard Crashaw (1612/13–1648), whose collection of Latin devotional verse, Epigrammatum Sacrorum liber (A Book of Sacred Epigrams), would be given the honour of publication by the University Press on Crashaw’s BA graduation in 1634. Second, the Schools quadrangle of the Bodleian Library in Oxford in the summer of 1683. In the aftermath of the foiling of the so-­called Rye House plot to assassinate Charles II and his brother, James, Duke of York, the Convocation of the University of Oxford met on Saturday, 21 July—the day on which Lord William Russell was executed for his alleged involvement in the plot—and issued a ‘Judgment and Decree’, printed at the Sheldonian Theatre. It included the writings of Milton among its list of ‘pernicious books’ containing ‘certain Propositions . . . repugnant to the holy Scriptures, Decrees of Councils, Writings of the Fathers, the Faith and Profession of the Primitive Church: and also destructive of the Kingly Government, the safety of his Majestie’s Person, the Public Peace, the Laws of Nature, and bonds of humane Society’. The Convocation forbade any member of the university from ‘reading the said Books, under the penalties in the Statutes exprest’, and ordered them to hand in such books ‘to be publicly burnt, by the hand of our Marshal in the court of our Scholes’. Though it was nine years after Milton’s death, the decree specifically cited Milton for advancing two propositions: ‘That if lawful Governors become Tyrants, or govern otherwise then by the laws of God and man they ought to do, they forfeit the right they had unto their Government’, and that ‘King Charles the first was lawfully put to death, and his murtherers were the blessed instruments of Gods glory in their Generation’.3 The decree did not specify which of Milton’s works were forbidden; presumably the books in question were his prose defences of the execution of Charles I published in English in 1649–50 and in Latin in 1651, the arguments of which correlate broadly with the propositions ascribed to him in the decree.

t wo u n i v er sit y sce n e s  3

Two of these defences—Eikonoklastes (1649), in English, and the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (Defence of the English People, 1651), in Latin—had previously been the subject of a proclamation by Charles II for their confiscation and public burning in London, Oxford, and Cambridge in August 1660, three months after the Stuart monarchy was restored after an absence of over eleven years (although signed by Charles as ‘given in the Twelfth Year of our Reign’), for containing ‘sundry Treasonable Passages against Us and Our Government, and most Impious endeavors to justifie the horrid and unmatchable Murther of Our late Dear Father, of Glorious Memory’.4 The effect of this earlier proclamation is indicated by an entry for the Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio in the Donors’ Register of the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which has been struck through and a marginal note inserted to explain that the book was ‘burnt by ye K[ing]’s p[ro]clamat[ion]’. The force of the 1683 Oxford decree was felt by James Parkinson, who in September 1683 was ejected from his Fellowship at Lincoln College for ‘holding, maintaining and defending some unwarrantable and seditious opinions’: one of the specific charges against Parkinson was that he ‘commended to some of his pupils Milton as an excellent book and an antidote against Sir Robert Filmer, whom [Parkinson] calls “too high a Tory” ’.5 The ‘excellent book’ in question was likely either the 1651 Defensio or Milton’s first vernacular defence of the execution of Charles I, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), published within two weeks of the regicide, which secured Milton his position as Latin Secretary and, in effect, chief propagandist for the new republican government—a position that Milton retained throughout the decade of kingless rule of the 1650s. Filmer, renowned for his defence of the divine right of kings, had in his Observations Concerning the Original of Government (1652) specifically attacked the political arguments advanced by Milton in both the Tenure and the Defensio. The 1683 decree came sixteen years after the publication of the first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667. It is probably unlikely that Oxford students, facing punishment for being found with unspecified books by ‘Milton’, would have have handed in their copies of Paradise Lost, or of

Figure 1. The 1660 proclamation by Charles II for the calling in and suppressing of two books by John Milton

t wo u n i v er sit y sce n e s  5

the 1671 Poems containing Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Yet readers of Paradise Lost in the months after its initial publication had perceived the principles of Milton’s political writings in his epic poem. One of the earliest readers who has left his reactions to the epic to posterity, Sir John Hobart, observed at the beginning of 1668, less than six months after the publication of the first edition, that ‘moderne cr[i] ticks . . . condemne [Milton] for being guilty (in this booke as well as others)’. Despite expressing his own admiration for the epic, Hobart called Milton a ‘criminall and obsolete person’— ‘criminal’ because of his support for the regicide and ‘obsolete’ in the sense of embodying an earlier and more barbarous age of civil war and king-­killing.6 Another early reader, John Beale, thought in December 1669 that the epic showed how Milton ‘holds to his old Principle’, citing the lines that describe the biblical king Nimrod as the original of all the tyrants that will follow: . . . till one shall rise Of proud ambitious heart, who not content With fair equalitie, fraternal state, Will arrogate Dominion undeserv’d Over his brethren, and quite dispossess Concord and law of Nature from the Earth, Hunting (and Men not Beasts shall be his game) With Warr and hostile snare such as refuse Subjection to his Empire tyrannous[.] (12. 25–32) Beale, an Anglican cleric and early member of the Royal Society, even suggested in writing to his friend John Evelyn that the subversive political message of Paradise Lost justified the imposition of stricter censorship laws at a moment when he was concerned that arguments for greater toleration of religious dissent would lead to renewed civil disorder. Beale was prompted to comment again on the politics of Paradise Lost at the end of 1670: while Beale admired Milton’s literary facility, he also ‘hath great faults in his Paradyce Lost in his plea for our Original right’. The occasion for Beale’s further reflections was the appearance of Milton’s History of Britain (1670), on which Milton had begun work in the late 1640s, and of the 1671 Poems. ‘Milton is abroad againe’, Beale

6  i n t r o du c t i on

noted, ‘in Prose, & in Verse, Epick and Dramatick’, as if a powerful and dangerous creature was on the loose.7 The question of whether ‘it is lawful for a private man, having an inward motion from God, to kill a Tyrant’, another of the pernicious propositions listed in the 1683 decree, is dramatically raised, after all, by the climactic episode of Samson Agonistes: Samson is impelled by ‘[s]ome rouzing motions in me’ (line 1382) to tear down the temple of his captors, killing both himself and scores of the Philistines whom he regards as having enslaved his people, the Israelites. The early responses to Paradise Lost of contemporary readers such as Hobart and Beale in unpublished correspondence have only been recovered comparatively recently, and they underline the extent to which Milton’s reputation as a poet was overshadowed in his own lifetime, and for some years after his death, by his notoriety as a prose controversialist and defender of regicide. This was emphatically the case before the publication of Paradise Lost. Literary scholars are today proud to call themselves ‘Miltonists’, but the first use of the term is found in a polemical poem attached to Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’s Electra, published less than three months after the execution of Charles I. Wase lamented in imagery of divorce and adultery the demand of the post-­ regicide government that all men take an oath of allegiance to the new regime. The name ‘John Milton’ had first become publicly infamous for prose arguments that Milton had published in 1643–5 for the religious and legal sanction of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility between a husband and wife. By the time that Wase published his translation of Sophocles in 1649, Milton had also become a salaried propagandist for a government which had violently divorced a nation from its monarch. He is given his own divorcing sect, the ‘Miltonists’, who have ushered in this brave new world of religious, political, and moral disorder: While like the froward Miltonist, We our old Nuptiall knot untwist: And with the hands, late faith did joyn, This Bill of plain Divorce must now signe. Here their New Kingdom must commence

t wo u n i v er sit y sce n e s  7

And Sinne conspire with Conscience.8 It is telling that when the leading royalist Edward Hyde, the future Earl of Clarendon, mentioned in a letter sent from exile in Jersey in 1647 that he had been reading Milton, the material in question was not the display of early poetic and linguistic virtuosity that Milton had so proudly displayed in his 1645 Poems but the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (first edition, 1643), Milton’s first and most incendiary prose argument for a reform of the divorce laws. Even those who showed some immediate appreciation of Milton’s 1645 Poems regarded the volume through the lens of Milton’s activities as a polemicist. Peter Gunning included the 1645 Poems in the collection of books that he sent in March 1647 from London to his patron Christopher Hatton, first Baron Hatton, exiled in Paris after the end of the First Civil War. Two years before Milton first defended the regicide, Gunning felt he had to qualify his recommendation of Milton’s verse in the light of the poet’s political reputation: ‘though the Gent hath not yet learned [tha]t le[ss]on to his prince, of the prince of poets’. Gunning then quotes in Greek a line voiced by Odysseus in Homer’s Iliad (2. 204–5), a commonplace that was beloved of royalists: ‘Let us obey that king, that Jove has set here in his place’, as it was translated in Elizabethan England.9 Gunning presumably had in mind the series of aggressive prose polemics calling for the abolition of the episcopal Church of England that Milton issued in 1641–2; although it is conceivable that he was also thinking of ‘Lycidas’, Milton’s elegy for his Cambridge contemporary Edward Young, first published in 1638, that he repackaged in 1645 with a new headnote as a prophecy of the ‘ruin of our corrupted Clergy then in their height’.10 Milton’s anti-­ episcopal polemics were evidently interpreted by some readers as implicit challenges to the political status quo several years before Milton actually challenged the legality and authority of Stuart monarchy. There was nothing in either Milton’s life or writing when he left Cambridge at twenty-­three, however, to indicate that by the age of forty he would have launched violent attacks in print upon the Church to whose doctrines he had subscribed on that July graduation day; been condemned as a heretic and libertine for his views on divorce; defended the

8 i n t r o du c t i on

public execution of the king to whom he had sworn allegiance; and become the chief literary spokesman for England’s first (and so far only) republican government. Milton, having become completely blind in the early 1650s, had to hide for his life in London with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660: the royal proclamation of 1660 refers to Milton having ‘fled’ and ‘obscured’ himself to evade ‘Legal Tryal’ and ‘condigne punishment’ for his ‘Treason and Offfences’. His imprisonment and release before finally completing the great English epic poem that he had long promised to write is a familiar story that has often been told. The story of how Milton came to write polemical prose during the English civil wars and eventually defend the execution of Charles I—the single most significant historical event in seventeenth-­century Britain and Ireland, and one of the most significant in all of British history—remains fragmentary and contested, to the extent that recent biographies have advanced flatly contradictory narratives of Milton’s intellectual and political formation. This stark division in accounts of Milton’s early biography mirrors long-­standing historiographical disputes over whether pre–civil war England was characterized by widespread consensus or by deep-­ lying conflict. A ‘criminall and obsolete person’: how and why did John Milton, the obscure occasional poet who took an oath pledging his allegiance to the episcopal Church of England and the Stuart monarch in Cambridge in 1632, and who mainly employed himself during the 1640s as a private tutor, become the infamous defender of regicide and propagandist for the republican governments of the 1650s whose books were burned for their capacity to ‘to lead to Rebellion, murther of Princes, and Atheism itself ’?11 How did Milton’s intellectual and political development relate to, or come into tension with, his profound sense of poetic vocation? How do the biography and the poetry speak to each other in this earlier period of his life? It is the principal aim of this book to offer answers to these questions. It offers a biography of the mind of the minor poet who became notorious as a prose polemicist and apologist for king-­killers before he became renowned as the writer of the greatest narrative poem in English.

t wo u n i v er sit y sce n e s  9

Attempts to write the life of Milton have been central to the development of English literary biography from Samuel Johnson’s ‘Life of Milton’ (1779) to David Masson’s epic, seven-­volume Life of John Milton: Narrated in Connexion with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of His Time (1858–80). Yet for all this rich history of Miltonic biography, the two most significant biographies of Milton in the twenty-­first century offer diametrically opposed portraits of his political and religious allegiances before his first venture into polemical prose writing as civil war broke out in England in 1641–2. Barbara Lewalski’s The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (2000) is predicated on the assumption that ‘at every stage [of his life, Milton] took up a reformist and oppositional stance which prepared him for the choice he would ultimately make: to defend the regicide and undertake to model anew the English church and state’.12 Lewalski’s statement may be unusually totalizing—note she writes ‘at every stage’—but it epitomizes the dominant approach of biographically and historically oriented study of Milton during the twentieth century. The mid-­twentieth-­century work of North American scholars, pre-­eminently A.S.P. Woodhouse’s Milton, Puritanism and Liberty (1935), D. M. Wolfe’s Milton in the Puritan Revolution, and Arthur Barker’s Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, both published in 1941 in the midst of the Second World War, had apparently decisively categorized Milton’s religious politics as ‘Puritan’. There may have been some discussion about how radical a Puritan he was, and to what extent we should follow Christopher Hill, who in Milton and the English Revolution (1977) explained the more heterodox aspects of Milton’s theology by placing him on the spectrum of Puritan belief closer to what Hill called the ‘third culture’ of popular religious radicalism; but Milton was definitively a Puritan nonetheless, and at the forefront of what was once called the ‘Puritan Revolution’ in the mid-­seventeenth century.13 Lewalski’s Life of John Milton is the most pure and comprehensive version of this understanding of Milton, in which the early life is always read retrospectively in the light of Milton’s involvement in the regicide and in which he is always already on the path to becoming a fully weaponized Puritan revolutionary.

10  i n t r o du c t i on

A major challenge to these assumptions was posed by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns in John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (2008), the weightiest and most innovative of the several biographies published in the quatercentenary year of Milton’s birth. Campbell and Corns maintain that not only was Milton not a Puritan reformist before the late 1630s, he was in fact a ‘Laudian’—a category synonymous with everything to which Puritans were supposed to be opposed. After being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, William Laud became the key figure in the religious disputes that played a vital role in the outbreak of civil war and the downfall of Charles I. During his ‘Personal Rule’ without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, Charles backed Laud’s promotion across England of church services characterized by the increased prominence of set prayer, more elaborate clerical and sacramental ceremony, and the reintroduction of devotional objects and church ornamentation. Laud’s execution in 1645 is testament to the blame that Parliamentarians ascribed to his influence and policies for the conflict. According to Campbell and Corns, before the civil wars ‘Milton had been a contented Laudian both in his personal loyalties and in his theology’.14 Not just someone who conformed to the statutes of the Caroline Church of England, as he did when he graduated from Cambridge in 1629 and 1632, but an actual supporter of Laudian values, and a ‘contented’ one at that. Taken out of context, the claim sounded like a joke, or some sort of counter-­factual thought experiment—what if the famous Puritan Milton, who wrote polemically and ferociously against episcopacy from at least 1641 and was the most strident defender of the regicide, had actually previously been a supporter of conservative, establishment values in both church and state? Campbell and Corns are entirely serious, however, in their claim that until at least the composition of ‘Lycidas’ at the end of 1637, with its explosive moment of anti-­clerical polemic— and they are not too sure even about ‘Lycidas’—Milton should be characterized as an ideological conservative: a fully fledged supporter of Laudian values, who came from a Laudian background. Their argument rests both on archival evidence relating to Milton’s family and contextualized interpretation of the early poetic work at Cambridge and in the two years immediately

t w o u n i v e r s i t y s c e n e s   11

after he left the university, in particular the Latin funeral elegies, the devotional poetry, and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle (or Comus, as it has become known), performed in 1634. This new biographical narrative creates another rather obvious problem: if Milton was in 1634 writing a masque, that Campbell and Corns describe as a ‘complex and thorough expression’ of Laudian theology and ‘Laudian style’, how is it that by 1641 Milton was writing violently anti-­episcopal prose polemic?15 Campbell and Corns offer no concerted explanation of why Milton not only changed his religious and political beliefs but apparently reversed them. The virtue of the narrative of Milton as constantly emerging Puritan revolutionary, such as we find in Lewalski’s biography, is that it at least offers a consistent, comprehensible intellectual development, while the account by Campbell and Corns necessarily entails some sort of sharp break from, or profound disillusionment with, the Laudian regime that Milton had previously been ‘contented’ to support. The problem that their biography leaves us with is how to explain this profound ideological volte-­face. Campbell and Corns prefer not to speculate with any confidence or in any real depth on the process of what they term Milton’s ‘radicalization’ between the later 1630s and 1641, and the result is a crucial gap in their portrait of Milton’s intellectual development. Their narrative of Milton’s life is avowedly shaped by the so-­called ‘revisionist’ historiography of the late 1980s and 1990s of early Stuart Britain, which called into question long-­standing historical accounts of a polarized society and politics in the period leading up to the civil wars. Their authorities are those historians who have emphasized the persistence of widespread consensus in pre-­war England rather than long-­term conflict, and they argue that the implications of such revisionist histories for our understanding of religious and political identities in early Stuart society have not hitherto been fully appreciated by literary scholars. Consequently, the life of Milton portrayed by Campbell and Corns also invites the chief and obvious criticism that has been made of that revisionist approach: how does a state supposedly characterized more by agreement than division then descend into a decade-­long civil war that killed a greater percentage of the English population than the First World War,

12 i n t r o du c t i on

with likely worse rates of death in Scotland and Ireland?16 In the specific case of Milton, how exactly does a supposedly conservative and conformist young man become a leading defender of regicide, republicanism, and (forms of) religious toleration within little more than a decade? The chapters which follow weigh these competing versions of Milton’s youth and find them both wanting. The aspects of Milton’s upbringing and education that have long been regarded as evidence of the intellectual formation of an oppositional Puritan need to be understood within the context of a less polarized society in which being ‘Puritan’ did not necessarily entail religious non-­conformism or heterodox belief. At the same time, the new claim for the Laudian theology and poetic idiom of the young Milton, which in effect shifts his place on the religious spectrum of early Stuart England from one extreme to the other, does not stand up to a recovery of the academic conventions and values of Caroline Cambridge. The moments in Milton’s life and writing prior to the later 1630s that have been claimed both for non-­conformist Puritanism and ultra-­conformist Laudianism have in fact less to do with ideology than with Milton’s intense engagement with humanist ideals of learning and poetic eloquence. A consistency can be found in Milton’s religious and political development between the 1620s and 1640s that is sensitive to his personality as an aspiring poet as well as his changing historical contexts; but it is to be found less in denominational labels and theological doctrines than in the educational, cultural, and literary principles which shaped his view of the world and of the place of the poet in it from an early age. Milton is fulsome about the power of poetry and his own poetic ambition in the early prose attacks on the English bishops, most strikingly in the extraordinary promise of 1642 that he would go on to write the great national epic of the English-­speaking peoples—a promise conditional not only on his own commitment and endeavour but, crucially, on ‘the Land ha[ving] once infranchis’d her self from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery, no free and splendid wit can flourish’.17 Milton understood poetry to be a vital aspect of the larger national culture of learning and ‘wit’—an im-

t w o u n i v e r s i t y s c e n e s   13

portant term for this study and one that in the seventeenth century had a larger meaning than it does now, encompassing both intellectual ingenuity (in the Latin, ingenium) and the mental and perceptual qualities required to advance learning of all kinds.18 The conviction that ‘wit’ can only flourish when it is free, and that it can only be free when a nation has rid itself of the ‘tyrannical duncery’ of a persecutory clergy, finds its most eloquent and memorable expression in Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s powerful argument for the free circulation of knowledge and ideas—which is also, and not coincidentally, acknowledged as his most ‘poetic’ piece of prose. This same conviction drives the escalating political radicalism of Milton’s thought in the 1640s. In short, Milton’s peculiar intellectual development originates in his poetic ambition, even if his ideas grew into something larger than even that in his arguments for free speech, religious toleration, and political liberty. Hence the central role in my argument of ‘Lycidas’, Milton’s greatest early work, in which contemporary external events become explicitly a part of the poetry for the first time. Milton’s political development is shaped by his evolving understanding of the ways in which ‘tyranny’—defined initially in ecclesiastical and clerical terms but which grows to encompass political organization— retards the intellectual and cultural progress of a nation. This understanding was shaped not only by historical experience of the unprecedented political turbulence of mid-­seventeenth-­century Britain, but by the interaction between that experience and his intellectual life. Milton’s period of intensive and almost entirely orthodox reading in political and religious history in the mid-­1630s, the record of some of which survives in the notebook that was rediscovered in 1874, revealed to him how clerical censorship and heresy-­hunting had suppressed intellectual and literary life in other countries. Milton regarded the cultural decline of Italy under the Counter-­Reformation and Inquisition from the glory days of Dante and Petrarch, two of his pre-­eminent post-­classical models of the poetic career, as the starkest instance of this process. His tour of Italy in 1638–9 confirmed the lesson of his reading: that in nations where ‘this kind of inquisition tyrannizes’, as he put it in Areopagitica, learning is brought into a ‘servil condition’ and the ‘glory’ of ‘wits’ is ‘dampt’.19 It

14  i n t r o du c t i on

was such an ‘inquisitorious’ process of clerical encroachment on civil power that Milton began to perceive in the policies of the episcopal Church of England under Archbishop Laud in the late 1630s and which led him first to enter the world of controversial prose in the early 1640s. It was his identification of this same tyrannical ambition in the Presbyterians whom he had initially supported in their opposition to episcopacy that provoked several of his satirical sonnets of the mid-­1640s and led him to turn to explicitly political prose writing in the defence of regicide at the beginning of 1649. The chronological narrative of this volume, intended as the first of a two-­volume account of the complete life, follows Milton up to his early thirties, from his early education through his university life to his emergence as a polemical prose writer in 1641–2. It concludes in 1642, with the last of his five prose works attacking the episcopal polity of the Church of England and at the point of his (initially) failed first marriage. This period covers the composition of almost all the poems that would be included in his first volume of verse at the end of 1645, including the ‘Nativity Ode’, ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, and ‘Lycidas’. These early poems have been claimed for ‘Puritanism’ or for ‘Laudianism’, for ‘radical’ or ‘conservative’ varieties of Protestant belief, but what will become apparent in the chapters which follow is the degree to which the poetic imagination of the young Milton was fired by by Platonic and Neoplatonic notions of the δαίμων, or daemon—a winged soul or spiritualized being, intermediate between man and God, empowered to convey divine knowledge from the heavenly to the earthly realm. The pagan notion of the ‘positional ambiguity of the daemon as a being situated between the human and the divine’ was linked in ancient Greek thought to how the gods distributed their favours to humans and the divine forces which shaped an individual’s fate.20 Any reader of Milton is soon struck by his almost overwhelming awareness of his divine gifts as a poet and of the intensity with which he felt it was his duty to justify the giving of those gifts by writing an epic poem for his nation. A rebirth of creative fascination with the daemonic is more usually associated with European Romanticism—with Goethe, Shelley, and Coleridge.21 Yet daemons are everywhere in early Milton,

t w o u n i v e r s i t y s c e n e s   15

and his fascination with the potential to become daemonic through bodily acts of will—primarily, for Milton, strenuous study and sexual abstinence as a precondition of extraordinary artistic achievement— sheds more light on his poetic representation of the relationship between vocation, moral action, and divine reward than theological disputes over election and free will between Puritan and Laudian, even if it remains opaque how metaphorically and not literally he thought about the possibility of attaining such a daemonic nature. The fascination with Platonic perfectionism and ideas of the daemonic in the early work is exemplary of how different the young Milton portrayed in this book can look from the alien and austere Old Testament figure we associate with Paradise Lost and the final poems, who represented his blindness and persecution by the Restoration authorities as testimony to his prophetic powers. That elder Milton, who can appear understandably forbidding to many modern readers, is a persona that he himself began to cultivate in the early prose works of 1641–2, and it has roots in the ideal of the scholar-­poet as dedicated to painful intellectual exertion with which he was obsessed from an early age and that he inherited from leading Renaissance humanists. But the young Milton was, of course, much less sure of himself and his writing at university shows him experimenting with a range of occasional poetic genres in various languages, mainly Latin and English, and in the modes that were popular among his successful contemporaries. It can be difficult to distinguish between Milton’s own personality and the conventional personae of the genres in which he was writing, but the social life of the young Milton emerges in his early poems, university exercises, and letters—or at least those that he chose to preserve; much of this writing is in Latin, and his close friendships were with those whom he felt he could communicate more openly because he respected their knowledge and intellectual abilities. Milton was not particularly successful as a university poet, even if we probably now read more of his university verse than that of any other writer from the period. The 1645 Poems, which comprises nearly all of the poetry that is discussed in this book, can seem oddly divided between the younger, more insecure and often more vibrant Milton, defined by his institutional

16  i n t r o du c t i on

contexts, and the aloof persona of the prophetic poet that he would project in Paradise Lost. On the one hand, the 1645 Poems is stuffed with poems of praise and recommendations from scholars, poets, and musicians, especially those Milton encountered in his tour of Italy in 1638–9, and many of the poems were written for particular occasions; on the other, the volume is characterized by an insistent effort to remove poems from their original contexts and grant them an air of permanence. Hence his tendency to extract his Latin elegies and his sonnets, in English and Italian, from their occasions and chronology and instead put them in a numbered sequence. The persistent revision of his poetry that is evident in the surviving notebook of his literary drafts, the so-­ called Trinity manuscript, is testament to his desire to reshape his early work into an image of himself as a poet who would transcend his own moment. The addition in 1645 of the headnote to ‘Lycidas’, turning an elegy for a Cambridge contemporary into a prophecy of civil war, is the most striking instance of how Milton had begun to refashion himself as a prophetic and political writer. In focusing so closely on Milton’s intellectual and literary formation in the 1620s and 1630s, I have been able to draw upon the several archival discoveries that have been made even since Campbell and Corns published their biography in 2008. With the ever greater access to the records of libraries and archives by digitization, there will doubtless be further discoveries that will continue to alter how we regard Milton’s life and work. In the very week that the text of this book was submitted to the publisher, it was convincingly claimed that a copy of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare now in the Free Library of Philadelphia once belonged to Milton, on the basis of extensive textual annotation and emendation in his hand, dating from both before and after his travels to Italy in 1638–9.22 This sensational find—which might reasonably be described as the copy of the works of the greatest dramatic poet in English that belonged to the greatest non-­dramatic poet in English—shows Milton to have treated Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven, in the same way that he treated a writer such as Euripides: as a canonical author deserving of the most scrupulous textual attention. He inserted, for example, the prologue from a quarto edition of Romeo and Juliet that

t w o u n i v e r s i t y s c e n e s   17

Figure 2. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet transcribed by Milton in his copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

was missing from the text in the Folio, probably at some point in the early to mid-­1630s. This same scholarly method of textual collation is evident in the small number of extant books that we know to have belonged to him, including copies of Euripides and Boccaccio’s life of Dante that he was likely annotating around the same time as his Shakespeare. That Milton paid the same attention to a book of vernacular drama by a near-­contemporary Englishman confirms the unusual ardour (for his time) of his admiration for Shakespeare, on whom he wrote one of his best-­known early poems, but also reflects his confidence that modern English writers could aspire to the status of the greatest writers of antiquity and the Italian Renaissance—that he himself might rival Virgil and Dante as an epic poet.23

18 i n t r o du c t i on

This is a book, then, about the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost but would first justify the killing of a king. I seek to combine literary criticism with biography, political narrative, and intellectual history in a manner that can do justice both to what Hazlitt called the ‘weight’ of Milton’s ‘intellectual obligations’ and to the revolutionary force of Milton’s writing and thought. While my approach includes elements of psychological speculation, I am interested in the details of Milton’s personal life primarily for what they might tell us about his poetic and intellectual development in relation to the ideological and cultural issues of his age: in this respect, my method more resembles that of intellectual biography than traditional literary or personal biography.24 Can one speak of the intellectual biography of a poet? Milton assuredly qualifies as an ‘intellectual’ in the sense that Marco Santagata has recently applied the term to Dante for ‘his endless reflection on what he is doing, both as an author and as a man’.25 But if we define ‘intellectual biography’ as the history of the development of an individual mind, then in the case of a poet it must surely either become a critical biography, an exercise in literary interpretation, or remain a bare record of the educational curricula to which the poet was exposed and the books that he likely read, along the lines of Harris Fletcher’s massive, two-­volume Intellectual Development of John Milton (1956– 61)—which still only got as far as his graduation from Cambridge in 1632! In a study of the origins of intellectual biography, it has been suggested that it is best defined not as a distinct genre but as ‘something approaching a style, less a kind of biography than a quality found in certain works’.26 This notion of intellectual biography as a ‘style’ or ‘quality’ of inquiry, rather than an individual ‘kind’ of writing, is a helpful way to think about writing the intellectual life of a poet. Milton’s life must always finally be written as literary or critical biography, but his poetic development can be approached from the perspective of the education, the reading, the society, and the intellectual experiences which shaped his mind. Reassuringly, some of the first intellectual biographies recognizable as such by their style of inquiry included not only lives of poets, but a life of Milton himself. Samuel Johnson’s life of Milton is one of the full-

t w o u n i v e r s i t y s c e n e s   19

est of his Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81), as well as one of his spikiest and most critical, and has exerted an influence on all subsequent study of Milton greater than probably any other work. Johnson sought to give some account of what he called Milton’s ‘intellectual operations’ and followed a chronological structure that incorporated sayings of the author and sayings about him, while the biographical narrative is characterized by Johnson’s own interpretations and criticisms of Milton’s poetry—and personality. For Johnson, the appalling thing about Milton was the political consequence of his character: ‘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.’27 The chapters which follow tell a different story.

Pa r t I •

London and St Paul’s School, 1608–25

CHAPTER 1

•

Londiniensis

‘Chief of Cities’ The family into which John Milton was born in London in December 1608 had been been split by the religious divisions of the English Reformation. Milton’s grandfather, Richard Milton of Stanton St John, Oxfordshire, refused to recognize the Protestant faith finally established by the rule of Elizabeth I from 1558, after the turbulent five-­year reign of Mary I had briefly returned the state religion to Roman Catholicism. Richard Milton was excommunicated from the Church of England on 11 May 1582, a penalty applied in the aftermath of the harsher legal measures introduced against Catholics in 1581—eleven missionary priests were executed in 1582 as the government cracked down amid anxiety over a European Catholic enterprise against England by France and Spain.1 Nearly twenty years later, Richard Milton still kept to the old faith, despite the various legal and social disadvantages of being Roman Catholic in Elizabeth England: in 1601 he was convicted of recusancy, of refusing to attend Church of England services, and was fined the large sum of sixty pounds for three months of non-­attendance.2 It seems that the excommunication was accompanied by a crisis in family relations that ended in Richard disinheriting his son John for his conversion to Protestantism (Richard, ‘a zealous Papist’, supposedly ‘found a Bible in English in his [son’s] chamber’).3 Around 1582–3, John Milton (1562– 1647), father of the poet, moved to London in search of employment and was apprenticed as a scrivener, producing and copying legal papers; this career also encompassed work as a notary and, most lucratively, 23

24  c h a p t e r 1

money-­lending at interest. John Milton senior was admitted to the profession’s guild, the Company of Scriveners, in 1599. Around the same time he married Sara Jeffrey, daughter of a merchant tailor. Milton the poet was their second surviving child, after his sister, Anne; he would be followed by a brother, Christopher. It was presumably an advantageous marriage combined with his status as a ‘freeman’ of the Company of Scriveners which enabled John Milton senior to rent office space and accommodation in the prosperous inner city parish of All Hallows Bread Street. According to Thomas Dekker in 1607, ‘our worthiest Citizens . . . goe into Milk-­street, Bread-­ street, Lime-­street, S. mary Axe, or the most priviest places where they keep their residence’.4 Milton the poet grew up in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, the largest building in the city. John Donne (1572–1631), who had also been born in Bread Street (and had given up the Roman Catholicism of his family during the 1590s in search of a career), was the Dean of St Paul’s from 1621. Other than the terms he spent at university in Cambridge between 1625 and 1632 and the fifteen months on tour in Italy in 1638–9, Milton would live in, or within twenty miles of, London for his entire life, from his birth in 1608, five years after the accession of James I, to his death in 1674, fourteen years into the reign of James’s grandson, Charles II. During the course of Milton’s lifetime, London doubled in size to become Europe’s largest city—its first metropolis— with nearly half a million people in the city and its increasingly sprawling suburbs.5 The spectacular expansion of London and the exponential growth in metropolitan litigation created opportunities for a capable scrivener; as well as, of course, for a shrewd money-­lender. According to Milton’s nephew Edward Phillips (b. 1630, d. in or after 1696), John Milton senior ‘managed his Grand Affair of this World with such Prudence and Diligence, that by the assistance of Divine Providence favouring his honest endeavours, he gained a competent Estate, whereby he was enabled to make a handsom Provision both for the Education and Maintenance’ of his three children. Milton’s father is described as an ‘Honest, Worthy, and Substantial Citizen of London’.6 There may be an element of defensiveness here, given that the association of scriveners with usury led to stereotypical representations of

l o n di n i e n s i s  

25

Figure 3. An early 17th-century view of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the surrounding area in London.

their mercenary behaviour. The Character of a London Scrivener (1667) represents the scrivener as someone who ‘plays the Bawd, prostitutes the same Title to all comers’. There are records of legal cases brought against debtors by Milton’s father in Chancery that do not portray him, at least to modern eyes, in a particularly flattering light.7 Phillips rather emphasizes Milton senior’s status as ‘citizen’, a term which up to the nineteenth century referred not merely to someone from the city but more specifically to a ‘freeman’ of the city, a householder who was formally enfranchised to an urban corporation (in this case the Company of Scriveners). A freeman assumed various duties and responsibilities, such as attendance of all Company meetings, in return for certain benefits, such as social standing and practical support from within a close-­ knit community. The terms of Edward Phillips’s praise, emphasizing the prudence and honesty of Milton’s father, invoke core values of the tradition of civic association among the citizens and freemen of London and the other ‘incorporated’ urban centres that mushroomed across England between 1540 and 1640. ‘Prudence’ was considered a key virtue of the citizen, denoting the application of wisdom and circumspection to worldly affairs and an ability to restrain passionate impulse in favour of rational and (crucially) profitable calculation. Such ideals of civic virtue, as defined by personal

26  c h a p t e r 1

behaviour and social transactions in urban life, were put into practice through the participatory structures of the corporations—Milton senior held various offices in the Scriveners Company, including that of Steward in 1625—and of local government. The theory of urban citizenship behind these ideals was also embedded in the minds of men who had been educated at the grammar schools established throughout the cities and towns of England during the sixteenth century. The institution to which Milton was sent by his father, St Paul’s School, founded in 1509, provided the model for these grammar schools. Schoolboys who were trained at grammar school in the humanist curriculum imbibed the ancient Roman connection between the freedom of the citizen, the performance of civic virtue, and the public good of the city-­ state that animated works foundational to humanist education in early modern England, such as Cicero’s De officiis (On Obligations). Cicero’s prudentia is a rendering in Latin of the Greek phronesis, ‘practical wisdom’, while Ciceronian honestas has the sense of honour in public conduct and in transactions with others. In combining them, John Milton senior is presented as the ideal Ciceronian citizen.8 The son of a freeman was entitled to citizenship by patrimony but Milton did not, as far as we know, participate in the commercial and civic life of London—although he did follow his father in making money from lending money at interest—nor take up his entitlement to freedom of the city.9 Yet he was a product of both the social and educational contexts that developed with, and facilitated the growth of, civic culture and ideas of virtuous citizenship among the ‘middling sort’ of people in London and the other urban centres of early modern England—a section of society which historians have taken to range from literate yeoman and tradesmen to university-­educated clergy, doctors, and lawyers.10 Several of the most renowned poets of the era emerged from comparable social and educational backgrounds in the cities and towns of England, even if their family circumstances were never as comfortable as those in which Milton grew up: Shakespeare in Stratford; Marlowe in Canterbury; Ben Jonson in London; and Andrew Marvell in Hull. Shakespeare and Jonson did not go on to university, while Marlowe, Milton and Marvell did; but each was ‘an archetypal product of

l o n di n i e n s i s  

27

the early modern grammar school system: a clever, middling, urban beneficiary of a humanist education’.11 From his youth, Milton showed a sense of pride in his native city, and represented it in terms of the great cities of classical antiquity. The ‘chief of all cities’ (caput urbium, a traditional epithet for ancient Rome) is how the 22-­year-­old Milton described London when commencing a Latin oration to his fellow Cambridge students, contrasting (rather conventionally) the delights that the city offered with the dry scholarly routine of Cambridge. While in Italy he presented himself as alumnus ille Londini (‘that foster-­child of London’), and the Latin half of his first collection of verse, Poems . . . Both English and Latin (1645), which is prefaced by encomia from Italian men of letters to emphasize the international acclaim accorded his Latin verse, is declared the work of Ioannis Miltoni Londiniensis: not John Milton, Englishman, but Londoner.12 If he did not follow his father in playing a part in the ordinary civic life of London, he would go on to fulfil what he believed to be a crucial public role in Whitehall, the administrative centre of the city and the nation, in his post as Latin Secretary to the various post-­regicide governments of the 1650s.

The ABC of Salvation The rector of the parish church of All Hallows from 1611 was Richard Stock (1568/9–1626), who had worked in the parish since 1604 and whose ‘pious care and diligence in the religious instruction and education of those that are under his private charge, children and others’, was noted by Thomas Gataker (1574–1654) in a funeral sermon for his friend.13 Stock’s publications and extant sermons are notable for their Calvinism and their zealous anti-­Catholicism but also for their commitment to the Church of England and its institutions. It is now widely accepted that the Calvinist theology of double predestination—according to which the few were predestined to salvation before birth and the great majority to damnation, with free will and earthly works deemed irrelevant to grace—was the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Church of England from the reign of Elizabeth I until several years after the accession of Charles I in 1625. ‘Puritan’ in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods

28  c h a p t e r 1

was used as a term of abuse for those few who pressed for a transformation from an episcopalian church government, presided over by archbishops chosen by the monarch, to a Presbyterian form distinguished by a more local organization of church structures, led by a national assembly that was self-­governing and separated from monarchical and state authority; or, more ambiguously, to denote the most zealous Calvinists, who were distinguished by their zeal rather than their Calvinism. These ‘hotter type of Protestants’ sought reform from within the established Church.14 Such moderate or ‘conformable’ Puritan clergy as Stock and Gataker, who was rector of a parish in Rotherhithe, Surrey, were intensely alert to the threat posed by the Church of Rome and to the potential consequences of any laxity of Protestant discipline within the Church of England. At the same time, they subscribed to the Elizabethan episcopal church settlement and conformed to the articles and policies, or at least what they deemed to be the important ones, of the established ecclesiastical authority: their prime concern was with Protestant unity against the perceived pan-­European Catholic threat rather than wholesale renovation of the episcopal structure of the Church of England, as desired by Presbyterians and more radical, separatist Puritans. Conformable Puritans such as Stock and Gataker shared with respected Jacobean divines such as John Donne a conception of devotional practice as centred above all upon ‘the Word’: upon the lay reading of Scripture, and upon the clerical exposition of Scripture in sermons. We can get a flavour of the kind of sermon that Milton could have heard in All Hallows Bread Street, a church that seated around 250, from the printed text of Stock’s 1606 sermon to commemorate the first anniversary of the failure of the Gunpowder Plot. Roman Catholics are condemned as ‘the greatest enemies of the kingdome of Christ; the grossest idolaters of all the kingdomes of the world, and the most pestilent enemies of this kingdome and state’. The state should apply whatever penalties were necessary to eliminate the threat of popery, from ‘confiscation of goods, to imprisonment, banishment, or death it selfe, according to the qualitie of their offences’.15 But this zealous rhetoric of anti-­popery, widespread in the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot

l o n di n i e n s i s  

29

of 1605, should not be confused with alienation from the established Church. Stock and his circle of clerical associates in and around London were part of the broad Calvinist consensus of the Jacobean Church, even if they had misgivings about certain aspects of ecclesiastical policy or did not regard all aspects of official doctrine as essential to their conformity.16 Stock was likely involved in assisting the Milton family with organizing the early education of their son, given John Milton senior became a leading parishioner in the church of All Hallows Bread Street and Stock’s reputation for ensuring the ‘religious instruction and education’ of children in his parish. Milton tells us in 1642 that he was educated in his youth by ‘sundry masters and teachers both at home and at the schools’, while the early life of Milton by his friend Cyriack Skinner (1627–1700) states that Milton’s father ensured that ‘his eldest Son had his institution to learning both under public, and private Masters’.17 It is unknown whether Milton attended petty school, where children from the age of about six were taught to read and write in English; there are in fact no extant documentary records of Milton’s life between his baptism in All Hallows on 20 December 1608 and his admission to Christ’s College, Cambridge, on 12 February 1625, other than his signature to witness his elder sister Anne’s marriage in 1623.18 In the absence of such records, we can nonetheless reconstruct central moments in Milton’s educational experience before he went to university by considering the sorts of pedagogic texts that he would have encountered and the modes of instruction that he would have experienced. Stock himself may have taught Milton, for parish ministers often participated in teaching the rudiments of vernacular literacy because of the close connection of language instruction with catechizing. But Milton would have gone through the same form of instruction whether he was taught at petty school in the parish or at home. The first educational text that Milton would have encountered was an ABC in the form of a broadsheet pasted on a wooden bat, covered with a transparent piece of horn. Hence the ABC was known as, among other things, the ‘hornbook’. The ABC in early modern England became virtually a rite of orthodox religious instruction through the regally

30  c h a p t e r 1

a­ uthorized issue of the ABC with Catechism at Elizabeth I’s accession, which differed from earlier primers by being cast in question and answer form. The alphabet was followed by the Creed, the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and, from 1604, the sacraments; it has been estimated that by the early seventeenth century there were around half a million copies of the ABC and Catechism in circulation in a population of about four million.19 Literacy was taught through rote memorization and oral recitation, and learning to read meant learning the basic tenets of Protestant Christian orthodoxy: vernacular literacy was acquired through a process of religious indoctrination. Mastery of the catechism that was memorized with the ABC was supposed to precede confirmation, which in turn preceded first communion and incorporation into the body of the Church. Even the most basic form of the ABC, the hornbook, began with the sign of the cross, despite this being a remnant of Catholic practice—hence the ABC came to be known as ‘Christ’s Cross Row’, or ‘Criss-­cross’—and concluded with: ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. So be it.’ Children were introduced to the doctrine of the Trinity even as they learnt the basic structure of language. The Trinity was a doctrine that Milton would later reject as he developed his own personal theology, set out in his De Doctrina Christiana (Of Christian Doctrine), the large Latin work that he compiled during the 1650s and which remained unpublished until 1825. Central to his objection, as for most anti-­trinitarian theologians and religious radicals, was the simple textual point that the doctrine of the Trinity relied upon a biblical verse, 1 John 5: 7, the so-­called ‘Johannine Comma’ (‘for there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one’), which was not authentic and had been inserted into the original biblical texts in late antiquity.20 Throughout his writing career Milton emphasized the crucial role of education in shaping the civil, religious, and cultural values of an individual and of a nation: he practised as a private tutor for much of his life after his return from Italy in 1639, and published various theoretical and practical pedagogic works, from his treatise on the ideal academy, Of Education (1644), to the texts of grammar and logic that he issued in the final years of his

l o n di n i e n s i s  

31

life. The social and ideological power of education that Milton recognized throughout his writings—in 1644 he described ‘the reforming of Education’ as ‘one of the greatest and noblest designes, that can be thought of, and for the want whereof this nation perishes’—is apparent in the simple example of how English children were indoctrinated in the Trinity in the very act of imbibing their mother tongue at the age of six or seven.21 For the nation to unlearn what Milton came to regard as the theological error of the Trinity would have required reform at the most fundamental level of educational instruction.

‘Excellent Father’ After learning their English letters, boys generally either left school around the age of eight or went to grammar school to begin instruction in Latin grammar. Milton attended St Paul’s School, not far from his home in Bread Street, before he went to Cambridge in 1625, but it remains unclear whether he started at St Paul’s as early as 1617 or as late as 1621. A later date is possible given Milton’s references to being taught at home ‘by sundry masters’, although he could have received extra tuition while also attending St Paul’s. This simultaneous tuition is suggested by the phrasing in the long autobiographical account in his 1654 Latin prose work, Defensio Secunda . . . pro Populo Anglicano (Second Defence of the English People), where Milton tells us that his ‘father took care that I should be instructed daily both in school and under other masters at home’.22 It was this employment of tutors, either before he went to St Paul’s or while he was there, or both, that distinguished Milton’s early education from that of writers who came from similar social backgrounds among the urban ‘middling sort’ but whose families had not achieved the success in business and investment of Milton’s father. In his Latin poem Ad Patrem, undated but included in the 1645 Poems and likely written between leaving Cambridge in 1632 and the trip to Italy in 1638—similarities of phrasing with the vernacular lyric ‘Il Penseroso’, usually dated to 1631, suggest the earlier date—Milton thanks his father for ensuring that he was introduced not only to Latin and Greek but also to French, Italian, and Hebrew:

32  c h a p t e r 1

tuo pater optime sumptu Cùm mihi Romuleæ patuit facundia linguæ, Et Latii veneres, & quæ Jovis ora decebant Grandia magniloquis elata vocabula Graiis, Addere suasisti quos jactat Gallia flores, Et quam degeneri novus Italus ore loquelam Fundit, Barbaricos testatus voce tumultus, Quæque Palæstinus loquitur mysteria vates. (lines 78–85) [Excellent father, when at your expense there became accessible to me the eloquence of the language of Romulus, the charms of Latin and the exalted words of the grandiloquent Greeks—words which would befit the mighty lips of Jupiter—you persuaded me to add the flowers of which France boasts and the speech which the modern Italian pours from his degenerate mouth, his voice bearing witness to the barbarian invasions, and the mysteries which the prophet of Palestine utters.]23 John Milton senior (pater optime) is at once the ideal father who has properly brought up his son and the ideal educator who has properly instructed his charge; the ‘expense’ is both in term of his effort and his literal financial outlay. Indeed the poem repeatedly plays on monetary terms to emphasize how Milton senior’s success in business has facilitated the poet’s own decision not to take that route and instead to pursue learning and the poetic career: ‘Sed tamen hæc nostros ostendit pagina census, / Et quod habemus opum chartâ numeravimus istâ’ (lines 12–13; ‘Still this page displays my resources, and what wealth I do possess I have enumerated upon this piece of paper’). Census (‘resources’) is a financial term denoting the wealth possessed by a Roman citizen, and Milton’s father has invested his citizen’s wealth to ensure that the poet’s ‘cultivated mind should grow even richer’ (line 73). As Milton’s father made his money from the interest on his investments, so Milton offers his poem as a substantial return on the money invested in his intellectual cultivation. The processes of usury are here sublimed into those of poetic technique.

l o n di n i e n s i s  

33

Milton’s father might ‘pretend to hate the gentle Muses’, but his actions indicate otherwise: he did not ‘instruct’ his son to follow in his footsteps in seeking out ways of ‘storing up money’; nor did he ‘drag [him] off to law or our nation’s poorly guarded legal systems’ (lines 67–72). The pointed rejection of a career in the law is likely intended to recall similar moments in autobiographical and biographical accounts of several of the ancient and modern poets with whom Milton sought to identify himself throughout his life: Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto. In the Tristia—an autobiographical poem with which, as we shall see, Milton was deeply familiar—Ovid contrasts his brother’s pursuit of the law with his own preference for poetry; in the final elegy of the first book of the Amores, Ovid opposes the eternal fame granted by poetic achievement to the transient success of a legal career. As Milton later noted, Petrarch left his study of the law as soon his parents were no longer responsible for him. Ariosto, the sixteenth-­century Italian poet, had initially been forced unwillingly into the law by his unlettered father: Milton’s father has behaved in precisely the converse manner.24 Moreover, his father is not merely a philistine businessman who has acted as a patron of the arts in the education of his poet-­son, while knowing nothing of them himself: ‘you yourself are accomplished in matching one thousand tones to suitable rhythms, and are skilled in adapting your tuneful voice to a thousand melodies’ (lines 56–60). John Milton senior was a minor but active composer who contributed musical settings to various published works including a popular collection of madrigals by Sir William Leighton in honour of Elizabeth I, The Triumphs of Oriana (1601), and Thomas Ravenscroft’s metrical psalter, The Whole Booke of Psalmes (1621). Edward Phillips, noting that Milton’s father ‘gained the Reputation of a considerable Master in this most charming of all the Liberal Sciences’, emphasizes that this love of, and skill in, music meant that he never made ‘himself wholly a Slave to the World’ of commerce.25 Important contemporary composers including Alphonso Ferrabosco and Orlando Gibbons also contributed to Leighton’s collection, while the names alongside whom Milton senior appeared in The Whole Booke of Psalmes included Thomas Tallis and John Dowland, as well as Thomas Tomkins, brother of John Tomkins, the

34  c h a p t e r 1

organist of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1619. That carmen means both poem and song, and Orpheus is the archetypal classical figure of both poet and singer, allows Milton to present himself in Ad Patrem as united with his father not only ‘by the bonds of affection and blood’ but by ‘kindred arts and related interests’. Indeed Apollo, Roman god both of poetry and music, has ‘given one set of gifts to me, the other set of gifts to my parent and we, father and son, are in possession of a divided god’ (lines 63–6). The unspoken implication here is that there would be no split between this generation of father and son as there had been so bitterly between Milton senior and his father: indeed the otherwise surprisingly dismissive reference to the ‘degenerate’ Italian emphasizes the harmonious anti-­Romanism of father and son as well as their shared interest in the ‘Liberal Sciences’. Milton himself apparently ‘had a delicate tuneable voice, an excellent ear, could play on the Organ, and bear a part in vocal and instrumental Musick’—talents that were presumably encouraged by his father and participation in his father’s musical gatherings. The earliest English poems to be included by Milton in his 1645 Poems—‘don by the Author at fifteen yeers old’, according to the headnote—are metrical versions of Psalms 114 and 136, the latter designed for a musical setting and perhaps originating from collaborations at home with Milton senior.26 The relationship between poetry and music—between the ‘Sphere-­borne harmonious sisters, Voice, and Verse’, as Milton puts in the lyric ‘At A Solemn Music’ (1631?; line 2)—is a theme that he would revisit in various literary contexts, and it is one that seems to have had special resonance for him by evoking his harmonious relationship with his father. His father’s involvement in the world of professional musicianship in Jacobean London also offered something more tangible to a budding poet: social connections to musicians and the theatre that developed into aristocratic patronage relations. Milton’s association with the court musician Henry Lawes (1595–1662) presumably began through his father’s participation in the musical community of the city. It was Lawes, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal and music tutor to the children of Sir John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, with whom Milton collaborated in 1632 on the masque Arcades, for Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, the Egerton family matriarch, and in 1634 on A Maske

l o n di n i e n s i s  

35

presented at Ludlow Castle, to mark Egerton’s investiture as Lord President of Wales. It may also have been his father’s business links with the cultural life of London that led to Milton’s first published poem, the (anonymous) tribute to Shakespeare in the 1632 Second Shakespeare Folio. In 1620 Milton senior became one of the trustees who managed the share of Richard Burbage in Blackfriars playhouse after Burbage’s death. Blackfriars was the indoor theatre where Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, had performed since 1608 and Burbage had been one of the company’s star actors. This connection may explain why an unknown Cambridge MA student was given the opportunity to compose a poem for the collected works of one of England’s most celebrated dramatists.27

Humanism and Puritanism The only one of the private tutors employed by Milton senior whom we can identify with certainty is Thomas Young (c. 1587–1655).28 A Scotsman educated at St Andrews and the son of a Presbyterian minister, sometime after 1611 Young became an assistant to Thomas Gataker in Rotherhithe. The most likely scenario is that Gataker introduced Young to Stock, who then recommended him to Milton’s father, who employed Young to teach Milton between the ages of about eight and eleven, from 1617 to 1620, at which point Milton entered the fifth of the eight forms of St Paul’s School. By 1620 Young had taken the post of chaplain to the English Merchant Adventurers in Hamburg, and Young was still in Hamburg when in the spring of 1627 Milton addressed to him a Latin verse letter, Ad Thomiam Junium praeceptorum suum (To Thomas Young, his tutor). This poem was included in the Elegiarum Liber, or Book of Elegies, when it was published in the Latin part of the 1645 Poems because it is written elegiac couplets, a verse form synonymous with the Roman example of Ovid. In the (Latin) letter of 26 March 1627 with which the poem was enclosed, Milton refers to receiving Young’s gift of a Hebrew bible.29 The verse letter is also a gift in return, specifically for the gift of the bible but more abstractly for the gift of education, just as Ad Patrem is presented as a reciprocal gift in return for the ‘expense’ incurred by Milton’s father in ensuring the best tuition for his son. In

36  c h a p t e r 1

the literary culture of early modern Europe, poems to friends, relations, and patrons could serve as gifts in exchange for more obviously material assistance or acts of friendship and affection.30 Milton wrote a series of verse letters and sonnets, for the most part in the 1625–55 period, that can be described as ‘gift-­poems’ in that they either accompany gifts or are presented as gifts in themselves. As Milton and his father are ‘in possession of a divided god’, so Young is ‘more than one half of my soul’; with his absence overseas, the poet is ‘compelled to live a half-­life’ (lines 19–20). If what sounds affecting and sincere in addressing a father sounds somewhat overwrought in addressing a former tutor, the intense emotional register is a vital component of the affective design conventionally expected of familiar letters and verse letters in humanist neo-­Latin culture. It is found even more intensely but equally conventionally in Milton’s letters and poems to his school-­friend Charles Diodati. Humanist handbooks on letter-­ writing, such as Erasmus’s De conscribiendis epistolis (1534), emphasized that familiar letters were a highly crafted form of communication and should be composed so as to ‘convey passionate feeling, to create bonds of friendship, and to make the absent loved one (or intellectual kindred spirit) vividly present’.31 It is clear that Milton regarded Young with great affection and respect and sought to turn his gift-­poem into a pyro­ technic display of the Latin eloquence and literary reading that Young had encouraged in him. The multiple classical allusions that cram the poem are in this instance most obviously to the discussion of friends as two halves of one being in Plato’s Symposium (189d–193e) and Horace’s invocation of Virgil as the other half of his soul (Odes 1.3.8). The image of companions as two halves of one soul would be recalled by Milton when he cast the pre-­fallen relationship between Adam and Eve in the idealized terms of classical friendship in Paradise Lost: ‘Part of my Soul I seek thee, and thee claim / My other half ’ (4. 487–8; Eve to Adam).32 It was, declares Milton, with Young ‘leading the way that I first traversed the Aonian retreats and the hallowed greenery of the twin-­peaked summit, and drained the Pierian waters and by Clio’s favour I besprinkled my joyous lips three times with Castalian wine’ (lines 29–32). The imagery of baptism is fused with the symbolic places of poetic inspiration in classical myth (Mount Helicon, home of the Muses, and the twin-­

l o n di n i e n s i s  

37

peaked Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses), conveying Young’s initiation of his charge in the transformative knowledge of classical literature through Latin language-­learning. The verse letter performs the mastery of Latin poetics that Young instilled in Milton by imitating the poetic form of the Ovidian elegy and through repeated allusions to Ovid’s verse letters in his Tristia, sent from his exile in Tomis on the Black Sea to a young female poet, Perilla. Milton adopts the role of the young poet addressing Young in his ‘exile’ in Hamburg, so that Young takes on the persona of Ovid even though it is Milton who is writing the verse letters.33 The model is particularly appropriate not merely because of Young’s location but because Ovid’s Tristia was likely the first work of Latin poetry that Milton would have studied. Although the records of St Paul’s School were lost in the Great Fire of 1666, an extant description of the curriculum throughout the eight forms, dating from the later seventeenth century, lists the Tristia as the initial work of poetry that the children would encounter—in the third form, having in the first form worked only with Latin grammar and in the second read the moral maxims of Cato’s Distichs and the Fables of Aesop. In the fourth form, the boys would move on to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Epistulae ex Ponto, another set of exilic verses. This sequence is confirmed by other contemporary accounts of the grammar school curriculum, and it can be presumed that Milton followed something like it under his home tutors if he did not enter St Paul’s until the upper school.34 Indeed translation, prosodic analysis and imitation of the Tristia, also known as De Tristibus, preceded the boys’ first formal efforts at versification in English, according to Charles Hoole, writing in 1637: Their afternoon Lessons on Mondayes and Wednesdayes, for the first halfe year (at least) may be in Ovids little book de tristibus, wherein they may proceed by six or eight verses at a Lesson; which they should first repeat memoriter as perfectly as they can possibly, because the very repetition of the verses, and much more the having of them by heart, will imprint a lively pattern of Hexameters and Pentameters in their minds, and furnish them with many good Authorities. 2. Let them construe verbatim, and if their Lesson be harder then ordinary, let them write it down construed.

38  c h a p t e r 1

3. Let them parse every word most accurately, according to the Gramatical order. 4. Let them tell you what Tropes and figures they finde in it, and give you their Definitions. 5. Let them scan every verse, and after they have told you what feet it hath in it, and of what syllables they consist, let them give the Rule of the quantity of each syllable, why it is long or short; the scanning and proving verses, being the main end of reading this Authour, should more then any thing be insisted upon, whilst they read it. And now it will be requisite to try what inclination your young Scholars have towards Poetry: you may therefore let them learn to compose English verses[.]35 As Hoole’s account illustrates, the composition of poetry was taught as a part of grammar, specifically pronunciation, because classical poetic metre is formed from the length, or quantity, of syllables. The pronunciation of Latin syllables varies according to the quantity of their vowel sounds, and in Latin verse the quantity of each vowel should be in accord with the pattern of vowel sounds that makes up the metrical line. Hence Milton’s otherwise rather mystifying concern with pronunciation when discussing the teaching of Latin grammar to boys at the very beginning of the ideal curriculum that he would later set out in Of Education: For their studies, First they should begin with the chief and necessary rules of some good Grammar, either that now us’d, or any better: and while this is doing, their speech is to be fashion’d to a distinct and cleer pronuntiation, as neer as may be to the Italian, especially in the vowels. For we Englishmen being farre northerly, doe not open our mouthes in the cold air, wide enough to grace a Southern tongue; but are observ’d by all other nations to speak exceeding close and inward: So that to smatter Latin with an English mouth, is as ill a hearing as law French.36 The extract in Hoole sheds some light on the pedagogical experiences which lie behind Milton’s later statements that he had come ‘from a

l o n di n i e n s i s  

39

careful education to be inur’d and season’d betimes with the best and elegantest authors of the learned tongues, and thereto brought an eare that could measure a just cadence and scan without articulating’; and, more famously, that when he was taught ‘both at home and at the schools, it was found that whether ought was impos’d me by them that had the overlooking, or betak’n to of my own choise in English, or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the stile by certain vital signes it had, was likely to live’.37 The conventions of humanist textual exchange encouraged the invention of the appropriate form and content of address, and the Latin Ovidian elegy for Young, playing upon the themes as well as imitating the elegiac couplets of the exile poems in the Tristia, is perfectly fitted to the addressee by evoking the shared experiences of poet and tutor and by recalling the boyhood educational contexts in which Milton began to write poetry, in English as well as Latin. The many allusions to Latin and Greek literature in Elegia quarta, as it is entitled in the 1645 Poems, suggest that Young played a key role in introducing Milton to both languages; Young’s later gift to his former pupil of a Hebrew bible hints at his initiation of Milton in that language as well. In John Brinsley’s Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar Schoole (1612), which takes the form of a dialogue between the schoolmasters ‘Philoponus’ and ‘Spodeus’, it is made clear that the point of teaching Greek and Hebrew is to enable familiarity with the Bible in its original languages: ‘schollers may be able to proceed, to reade the Greeke of the New Testament, and the Hebrew of the old, first into Latine, or English exactly, out of the bare text, that is, into their owne words againe: and thus to give the reason of every word, why it must be so, and to be able to proceed thus of themselves in the Universitie’.38 The close association of instruction in Greek and Hebrew with biblical scholarship raises the question of whether Young had any influence on the formation of Milton’s religious views, either when Milton was under his tuition or later. It has been presumed that it is Young to whom John Aubrey refers in his notes towards a life of Milton— ‘his schoolmaster was a puritan in Essex, who cutt his haire short’—as there is evidence to connect Young to a parish in Essex, as well as Gataker’s Rotherhithe parish, at this time. The short hair, stereotypically associated with Puritans, seems though

40  c h a p t e r 1

to belong to Milton rather than Young, as Aubrey writes this note interlined with another that refers to the portrait of a short-­haired Milton done when he was ten and already ‘then a poet’.39 Young’s alma mater of St Andrew’s had been at the centre of the Calvinist reformation of the intellectual life of the Scottish universities attempted by Andrew Melville, leader of the Kirk from the 1570s until his imprisonment in the Tower of London by James VI and I in 1607 for opposing the introduction into Scotland of an episcopate—an action against which Young’s own father was also vocal in his opposition. Yet by the time Young ­matriculated at St Andrew’s in 1602, the effort to establish a thorough-­ going Calvinist reform of the curriculum had dissipated and Melville and the more zealous Presbyterians had been marginalized by moderate supporters of royal government of the Kirk and the universities.40 Regardless of Young’s Presbyterian background in Scotland, there is no evidence that he was at odds with the Church of England at this time or that his period in Hamburg was anything other than a career move within that church—his position as chaplain to the English Merchant Adventurers was an established office of the Church of England. After he returned from Hamburg, he took up a church living in Suffolk in 1628 that he continued to hold undisturbed during the 1630s; he was never deprived of this living or cited for nonconformity by the ecclesiastical authorities. The references to Young’s ‘exile’ in Hamburg in Milton’s elegy have been assumed to imply that Young had been forced to leave for the continent because of his Puritan convictions; but, as we have seen, the notion of exile from the ‘fatherland, unsympathetic parent’ (line 87; patria dura parens), is rather a self-­consciously Ovidian trope, an aspect of the poet’s highly literary and highly appropriate expression of concern and affection for a Latin tutor whom he honoured ‘as a father’, as Milton put it in the letter accompanying the elegy (though to whom he had not previously written for three years).41 Milton does though represent Young as surrounded and imperilled by the battles of what is now known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) between Protestant and Roman Catholic states in continental Europe: ‘For wandering Rumour, the true messenger, alas, of evil, reports that wars are coming to a head in regions neighbouring upon you and that you and your city

l o n di n i e n s i s  

41

Figure 4. John Milton at the age of 10, after the 1618 portrait ascribed to Cornelius Janssen.

are surrounded by aggressive soldiers and that Saxon leaders have now got their weapons in readiness’ (lines 71–4). The refusal of James I to become involved in the European wars was subject to vociferous criticism by radical Puritan polemicists, and the subsequent failure of the Caroline regime to assist beleaguered continental Protestants would become a recurrent theme of Milton’s attack on the character and reign of Charles I. There is a moment in the elegy when Young is compared to the Old Testament prophet Elijah, who was chased out of Israel after warning King Ahab and his queen Jezebel that their idolatry would bring providential catastrophe upon the nation. In his political prose defending the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton would identify the dead king with Ahab. Yet any political reading of the poem to Young ignores its tone of high literariness and rides roughshed over its decorum.42 Milton does not even depict the conflict in Europe

42  c h a p t e r 1

in terms of confessional difference between Protestant and Catholic. The portrayal of Young as surrounded by the violence of the Thirty Years’ War rather allows Milton in the final part of the poem, in a progression which will become characteristic of his poetry, to incorporate the Ovidian persona that he has carefully and appropriately ascribed to his former tutor into a scriptural and prophetic one that is more appropriate for the Protestant cleric abroad. The poet reassures Young that he has a protector more powerful than Augustus, the emperor who possessed the power to recall Ovid from his exile, for Young will be ‘safe beneath the shining shield of God; he will be your protector’ (lines 111–12). As with Richard Stock, Young can best be classified, at least at the time that he taught Milton, as a ‘conformable’ Puritan who did not see any conflict between his commitment to Protestant unity and his allegiance to the episcopal Church of England. It was this commitment which was key to ensuring the allegiance of such moderate Puritans, or Calvinist episcopalians, whose fears that division within the English Church and polity would leave the nation open to the infiltration of Roman Catholicism trumped their disagreement with aspects of ecclesiastical and royal policy. Young may have gone to Hamburg in part out of a desire to assist the international Protestant cause as well as to find a better living. He preached while in Hamburg before the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, who had been deposed as king of Bohemia by the imperial Catholic forces and whose lack of aid from James I, his father-­ in-­law, was a particular matter of dismay among some in England. But in the 1620s such ideals of ‘supranational confessionalism’ could co-­exist in the minds of conformable divines with the sometimes ‘conflicting forces of nationalist pragmatism’.43 However, and importantly, Young’s later biography does exemplify the increasing alienation of such previously conforming Puritans from the Church of England, particularly after William Laud (1573–1645) was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Charles I in 1633. It was this appointment which finally put an end to the Calvinist consensus that had characterized the Jacobean Church of England. Laud’s representation of the sort of zealous anti-­Catholic and Calvinist views long held

l o n di n i e n s i s  

43

by men such as Stock and Young as inherently extremist and subversive, and concomitant promotion of ceremonialism and the sacramental role of the clergy over preaching and lay Biblicism, seems to have pushed Young, as with other Puritans who had previously been content to remain within the compass of the established Church, into Presbyterian activism.44 By the later 1630s Young had become an important member of oppositional Presbyterian clerical networks in London, and it is very likely that it was Milton’s continuing contact with Young that led to Milton’s first (anonymous) appearance in print as a prose polemicist against episcopacy in 1641, when he provided the postscript to a work issued by a collective of four Puritan clerics, including Young, which attacked the Laudian claim for the unique spiritual authority of bishops. It was Young who introduced Milton as a young boy to the glories of classical poetics, and it was probably under Young’s eye that Milton first composed verse in Latin, perhaps also in English; two decades later Young likely played a pivotal role in getting Milton involved in public religious controversy, and thus in launching his career as a vernacular prose polemicist. Young’s importance was above all as an example to the young Milton, from his earliest educational experiences, of how fascination with, and immersion in, classical literature—including and especially poets such as Ovid, notorious for their sexual frankness—could be combined with godly Protestant sensibilities, without any strain of contradiction or shadow of moral censure. The sort of moderate and learned godly milieu that the young Milton would have encountered in the company of ‘conformable’ Puritans such as Young and Gataker is glimpsed in Gataker’s life-­long efforts to uncover parallels between the Bible and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-­century Roman emperor, culminating in his celebrated 1652 annotated edition of the Meditations, published by Cambridge University Press. Gataker was ‘a man famous among the English for his erudition’, as Meric Casaubon put it in 1643.45 The early association with, and Latin poem to, Young are not, moreover, evidence that Milton was close to oppositional or radical Puritan circles as early as the 1620s. The appointment of Young as Milton’s tutor, or one of his tutors, does not betray any opposition to the established Church

44  c h a p t e r 1

on the part of John Milton senior, about whom there is nothing to suggest that he was anything other than, as Harris Fletcher described him many years ago, ‘a conservative, respected, well-­to-­do parishioner’.46 Young was not opposed to the episcopal Church of England before the Laudian renovation of the mid-­1630s but an unprotesting employee of it; rather it was the Laudian reform of the Church, supported and promoted by Charles I, in the direction of what moderate Puritans regarded as quasi-­Catholic doctrine and practice that turned men such as Young into explicitly oppositional Presbyterians. This redefinition of what constituted religious orthodoxy under Laud and the Caroline Church is, as we shall in later chapters, key to understanding aspects of the growth of Milton’s own discontent with the direction of ecclesiastical and royal policy from 1636–7, even if Milton’s concerns were to be less about the rise of anti-­Calvinist theology and ceremonial devotional practice in England than of quasi-­Catholic state censorship and repression. There is no indication that Milton and Young remained in contact after 1642, and it seems likely that the fast-­moving shifts of allegiance that characterized the early 1640s took their toll on the relationship. Young became a member of the Westminster Assembly of Presbyterian divines from 1642, the body that became the central target of Milton’s polemical ire after the hostile reception of his writings on divorce led him to renounce his earlier support for the Presbyterian cause. Scorn for the narrow philistinism and hypocrisy of Presbyterian clerics, and of Scottish Presbyterians in particular, is the most consistent element of Milton’s writing, both in poetry and prose, between 1644 and 1649, after he came to the conclusion that Presbyterian church government would be as inimical to freedom of thought as the episcopal rule that it sought to replace. It is an irony—and perhaps, on a personal level, it was a cause for sorrow—that it was in the company of one of the tribe of Scottish Presbyterians whom he would later so excoriate for their ignorance that Milton had ‘first traversed the Aonian retreats’ of classical poetry, and so first begun to tune the ‘adventurous song’ that would ‘soar / Above the Aonian mount’ in Paradise Lost (1. 13–15).

CHAPTER 2

•

Pure Chaste Eloquence

The Grammar of Things If Milton was tutored privately until the age of about twelve by Thomas Young and other tutors, he would have been already highly competent in Latin, with perhaps some knowledge of Greek and possibly (considering Young’s interests) the rudiments of Hebrew, when he entered the upper school (forms five to eight) of St Paul’s School. Greek was not formally taught until the fifth form, and Hebrew until the eighth and final form.1 His comment in Of Education in 1644 presumably reflects his own experience of the rapid progress that he had made in the classical languages: ‘Hence appear the many mistakes which have made learning generally so unpleasing and so unsuccesfull; first we do amisse to spend seven or eight yeers meerly scraping together so much miserable Latin, and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise in one yeer.’ According to John Aubrey’s notes on Milton’s life, when Milton took on his nephews Edward and John Phillips as his pupils in the early 1640s, ‘in a years time [he] made them capable of interpeting a Latin author at sight’.2 Whether he learned Latin grammar at home or at school, the basic text that Milton would have initially used was one that was bound up with the foundation and ethos of St Paul’s School—Lily’s Grammar. Also known as the Regia grammatica and the Authorized Grammar, it was initially designed in the early years of the sixteenth century by William Lily, the first High Master of St Paul’s, and John Colet (1467– 1519), the founder of the school, on the advice of the great Dutch humanist, Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1467–1536). Based on Roman practice 45

46  c h a p t e r 2

for teaching Greek, Lily’s grammar was designed to replace medieval grammars that equipped students for the interpretation of theology and canon law: to prepare boys ‘to think like Ovid and Cicero, rather than St. Thomas Aquinas’.3 ‘Lily’s Grammar’, as it was revised by a group of scholars under Henry VIII’s order, was decreed the standard Latin grammar by the king in 1540 and technically, despite the appearance of other grammars in the seventeenth century—including Milton’s own Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, published in 1669 but probably compiled in the 1640s for teaching his own pupils—it remained exclusively sanctioned by the state until the mid-­eighteenth century. The text as authorized by royal injunction consisted of two parts, ‘A Short Introduction of Grammar’, covering (in the vernacular) the eight ‘parts of speech’ and the rules of concord, and ‘Brevissima institutio sen ratio grammatices’, which dealt with (in Latin) the gender of nouns, the conjugation of verbs and the rules of versification.4 As boys spent their first four years at school learning intensively Latin language, Lily’s Grammar can be considered the foundational text of the intellectual culture of early modern England.5 The textual apparatus, linguistic exercises, and striking typographical design of the Grammar, with its long brackets encasing parcels of declensions and moods, were imprinted on the mind of any formally educated man in this period: the ubiquity and recognizability of the terms of grammar learning in Lily is illustrated by their (often parodic) presence in several Shakespeare plays.6 In Ludus Literarius, Brinsley simply assumes that the schoolmaster will teach Latin grammar by ‘Lillies Rules’, while Milton’s ideal college in Of Education would encompass ‘those general studies which take up all our time from Lilly to the commencing, as they term it, Master of Arts’; although when he advises that boys should ‘begin with the chief and necessary rules of some good Grammar, either that now us’d, or any better’, his final qualification is somewhat more innovative than it might appear to the modern reader.7 The authorized issue in Tudor and Stuart England of books for public and private educational use, such as Lily’s Grammar and Alexander Nowell’s Latin catechism, also used in grammar schools for language learning, was ‘part of the settlement by which Crown and Church to-

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   47

gether ruled the country’. The educational statutes of 1604 state that: ‘No man shall teach either in Publicke schoole, or private house, but such as shall be allowed by the Bishop of the Diocese . . . they shall teach the Grammar set forth by King HENRY the eight . . . and none other.’ In the 1624 edition masters are instructed ‘not to teach youth and scholars with any other Grammar, than with the English Introduction hereafter . . . upon paine of our indignation and as you will answer to the contrary’.8 During the mid-­seventeenth century, use of Lily was ensured by the visitations of the bishops to grammar schools, although it seems that it was only in periods of political and religious tension that the use of the authorized textbooks became a matter for censure and enforcement. One of the articles of visitation issued in 1640 by William Juxon, Bishop of London, in an attempt to enforce religious conformity in the city as civil war loomed, enquired: ‘Doth (the master) teach them any other grammar than that which was set forth by K. Henry VIII and hath since continued?’9 Milton’s own familiarity with Lily’s Grammar may be evident in a Latin prose ‘theme’, a short composition on a moral topic, and two Latin poems, all on the topic of the benefits of getting up early and the perils of oversleeping. (The pieces were not discovered until 1874, on a single page inscribed with Milton’s name but not seemingly in his hand, and their attribution remains uncertain.10) In Lily, a proverb on early rising is used to illustrate how ‘the Infinitive mode of a verb . . . may be the nominative case to the verb: as Diluculo surgere, saluberrimum est, To arise betime in the morning, is the most holsome thing in the worlde’.11 This was known well enough for Shakespeare to expect some in his audience to recognize it in the drunken moral lessons of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night (c. 1602): ‘Not to be abed before midnight is to be up betimes. Diluculo surgere, thou knowest’ (2. 3. 1–2). Boys were expected to compose Latin themes on moral topics, incorporating appropriate aspects of the eloquence that they had encountered in the best Roman authors, by the time they reached sixth form. Theme composition was designed as an exercise in copia, or the infinite variety of expression that Erasmus presented as the basic structural principle of eloquence in the hugely influential rhetorical textbook, De Copia (Of Variety; 1512), that he originally wrote for Colet to use at

48  c h a p t e r 2

St Paul’s, and that Colet cited as a set text in his 1518 statutes for the school. The two poems that have been ascribed to Milton are likely verse paraphrases of the prose theme, written on a commonplace topic, or sententia, taken from Lily. This exercise of paraphrase—turning themes in Latin prose into poetry and vice versa, or turning of a poem on a particular topic into different metres—was advocated by Erasmus and widely practised in the early modern grammar school.12 It has been suggested that Milton’s development of his own grammar in the early 1640s may have been a response to the association of Latin language instruction, in the form of Lily’s ‘Royal Grammar’, with monarchical and episcopal power.13 He was more likely motivated by practical and pedagogical considerations than ideological zeal, for Lily enshrined humanist principles regarding the social and moral power of language that informed Milton’s own education and that he adopted with an intensity unusual even for a period characterized by singular devotion to the study of language and literature. In De ratione studii (On the Method of Study; 1511), an account of a model curriculum that developed out of correspondence between Erasmus and Colet, Erasmus hailed the ‘new grammar’, as exemplified by Niccolo Perotti’s Rudimenta Grammatices (1473). Perotti defined grammar as the art of speaking and writing well: he advised that instruction in grammar be taught through the example of the best authors and poets, since reading these authors teaches by observation and imitation. Erasmus followed Perotti in defining grammar as the appreciation and imitation of authors and of literary style, rather than in terms of philosophical inquiry into the ontological origins of language as a reflection of the nature of reality (‘speculative grammar’). The latter was associated with scholasticism—the humanists’ pejorative term for the application of logical method derived from Aristotle to theological study in the medieval schools and universities, and which they ridiculed as little more than empty verbosity and pointless wrangling over subtleties and abstractions. The early humanists shifted emphasis from Aristotelian dialectic to philology as a method of investigation, redefining grammar to encompass rhetoric, poetry, history, and parts of moral philosophy—the studia humanitatis. Grammar was thus an ‘iconoclastic’ term for Erasmus, for the reform of grammar

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   49

learning could facilitate a reform of both educational practice and the medieval, scholastic order of the disciplines, with logic downgraded in the traditional trivium (logic, rhetoric, grammar) to the status of handmaiden to the eloquence instilled by the arts of grammar and rhetoric. Erasmus followed the fifteenth-­century humanists Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola in representing logic less as a technical language of demonstrative reason than as a practical, though still essential, part of the art of discourse—as the skill of finding (inventio) and arranging (dispositio) credible arguments on any given topic, which can then be delivered in an appropriately persuasive style (elocutio).14 Crucially, this reformation of grammar learning could also advance Christian understanding: Latin and Greek grammar were to be mastered above all as a means to the more detailed knowledge of Scripture.15 The humanist definition of grammar as the art of speaking and writing well, attained through the example, observation, and imitation of the best authors, was the one in which Milton was immersed at St Paul’s, a school founded to put into practice Erasmian method, and to whose original curriculum Erasmus was an advisor and contributor. The Erasmian educational theory which shaped early modern English educational practice was defined above all by the reading and imitation of Latin and Greek literature. As Roger Ascham put it in The Scholemaster, a guide to teaching Latin which first appeared in print in 1570 and which has endured as the classic vernacular statement of Elizabethan humanism: ‘For without doubte, Grammatica it selfe, is sooner and surer learned by examples of good authors, than by naked rewles of Grammarians.’16 When Milton came to defend his character in An Apology Against a Pamphlet in 1642, he did so in the terms that had shaped his time at St Paul’s, invoking the theme of early rising and the constant study of ‘good authors’: ‘Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home, not sleeping, or concocting the surfets of an irregular feast, but up, and stirring . . . to reade good Authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have his full draught.’17 De ratione studii is often echoed in Milton’s own remarks on educational reform: the complaint about too many years being wasted on grammatical instruction in Of Education recalls Erasmus’s disapproval of ‘the approach

50  c h a p t e r 2

found among run of the mill grammarians who spend several years inculcating such rules in their pupils’. Indeed, Milton’s comment that the boys in his ideal academy would use Lily’s Grammar or ‘any better’ echoes the statutes of St Paul’s School as they were originally composed by Colet in 1518, in which Colet stipulates the learning of Latin grammar ‘after the accidence that I madee or sum other yf eny be better’.18 When Alexander Gil the younger, Milton’s closest friend from his time at St Paul’s School and headmaster of the School from 1635 to 1641, made his will in 1644, he was careful to stipulate that his copy of Lily’s Grammar, with additions in his hand, should go to St Paul’s, along with his three volumes of the densely detailed commentary on Virgil by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Luis de la Cerda, published from 1608 to 1617. Lily’s Grammar notably ‘preserves the central position that Virgil had long occupied in late antique and medieval grammars’: boys are reminded in its discussion of comparative adjectives, for instance, that ‘Virgilius Poëtarum doctissimus’ (‘Virgil is the most learned of poets’). The only entry for any poet, or indeed any named authority, in the grammar’s Latin–English glossary is ‘Virgilius, poëta. A Poets name’.19

Blotterature Colet articulated this new vision of the central place of philology in a true Christian education to packed lecture halls in Oxford in 1496, after he had returned from a tour of Italy. The Divinity Lectures had traditionally been commentaries on medieval ‘schoolmen’ such as Peter Lombard or Duns Scotus, but Colet’s lectures on St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians instead cited the early Church Fathers, such as Jerome and Lactantius; the Renaissance Italian Neoplatonists, such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) and Pico della Mirandola (1463–94); and classical authors, such as Cicero, Suetonius, and Virgil. In the statutes of St Paul’s, he applied the educational principles set out by Erasmus in De ratione studii. Colet was strident in his insistence that only ‘pure’, classical Latin will be taught in his school, among which he included the early Church Fathers, and not the ‘filthy’ medieval Latin of scholasticism:

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   51

All barbary all corrupcion all laten adulterate which ignorant blynde folis brought into this world and with the same hath distyaned and poysened the olde laten spech and the varay Romayne tong which in the tyme of Tully [Cicero] and Salust and Virgill and Terence was usid, whiche also seint Jerome and seint Ambrose and seint Austen and many hooly doctors learnyd in theyr tymes. I say that ffylthynesse and all such all such abusyon which the later blynde worlde brought in which more ratheyr may be callid blotterature thenne litterature I utterly abbynish and Exclude . . . and charge the Maisters that they teche all way that is the best and instruct the chyldren in greke and Redying laten in Redying unto them suych auctours that hathe with wisdome joyned the pure chaste eloquence.20 The statutes of St Paul’s exemplify how ‘for humanists both on the continent and in England[,] language exerted the authority of a moral force’.21 The striking coinage ‘blotterature’ embodies the polemical representation, conventional in humanist discourse from Petrarch (1304– 74) onwards, of medieval scholastic practice as a dark blight on the history of learning, when literary culture and eloquence were lacking; or, in Erasmus’s more polemical view in works such as Antibarbarorum liber (The Antibarbarians; 1520), were actually suppressed by the Church.22 The identification of classical Latin authors—the philosopher and orator Cicero, the historian Sallust, the poet Virgil and the playwright Terence, but also the early Church Fathers, Augustine, Ambrose and Jerome—with ‘pure chaste eloquence’ invokes the key humanist belief that an education in language and literature was also an education in Christian morality. (In the curriculum likely followed by Milton in the upper school of St Paul’s, Virgil, Cicero, and Sallust were studied in forms five to seven, while Terence’s Comedies had been read in the third form.23) The eloquent orator must be a good man, as the first-­century Roman rhetorician Quintilian bluntly states it in the Institutio oratoria, one of the key pedagogical texts of Renaissance humanism: ‘the orator then, whom I am concerned to form, shall be the orator as defined by Cato, “a good man, skilled in speaking” [vir bonus dicendi peritus]’.24 Or as Milton himself would put it in 1642: ‘how he should be truly eloquent

52  c h a p t e r 2

who is not withall a good man, I see not’.25 In The Scholemaster, Ascham offered a stirring defence of the humanist position that a facility in the classical languages was the embodiment of a virtuous character, in society as in an individual: Ye know not, what hurt ye do to learning, that care not for wordes, but for matter, and so make a devorse betwixt the tong and the hart. For marke all aiges: looke upon the whole course of both the Greeke and Latin tonge, and ye shall surelie finde, that, whan apte and good wordes began to be neglected, and properties of those two tonges to be confounded, than also began, ill deedes to spring . . . right iudgement of all thinges to be perverted, and so vertue with learning is contemned, and studie left of.26 That an education in Latin grammar and literature was also intended in humanist theory and practice to be an education in manners and morality is clear from the Latin verses composed by Lily for inclusion in his grammar. Between the vernacular and Latin parts of the grammar was the Carmen de moribus, or ‘moral verses’, which was ‘construed in the first or second form and memorized by the little boys and read aloud’. This verse meditation enshrined the humanist philosophy that a literary education should teach ‘both pure Latin and clean morals’.27 By repeatedly reading aloud and construing—analysing grammatically and putting into English—the Carmen de moribus, the pupils instructed themselves to (as a contemporary prose translation has it) ‘be mindful that thou speakest in Latin and avoid barbarous words, as things very dangerous’, and to regard their tongue as ‘the gateway of life and of death too’.28 The founding principle of St Paul’s School, which continued to inform all aspects of its ethos and curriculum in Milton’s time, was that the reading and imitation of the best classical poets, orators, and historians cultivated eloquence, and eloquence in turn cultivated morality, civility, and community; and, conversely, the neglect of these authors would foster not only inarticulacy but ignorance and barbarism. The dichotomy between eloquence and barbarism was fundamental to another key Roman text of humanist educational theory, Cicero’s De oratore (On the Orator). For Cicero, the perfect orator embodied the high-

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   53

est level of human nature, or humanitas, because he had devoted himself to cultivating those abilities of reason and speech, ratio and oratio, which distinguish man from beast and which had enabled man to create community and society; and which, when practised to the higher levels, distinguish some men from the multitude: For the one point in which we have our very greatest advantage over the brute creation is that we hold converse one with another, and can reproduce our thought in word. Who therefore would not rightly admire this faculty, and deem it his duty to exert himself to the utmost in this field, that by so doing he may surpass men themselves in that particular respect wherein chiefly men are superior to animals? Or as Ben Jonson (1572–1637), educated at Westminster, a London school comparable to St Paul’s, pithily put it: ‘Speech is the only benefit man hath to express his excellency above other creatures. It is the instrument of society.’29 The distinction between those who have acquired greater humanity through their intensive education in classical literature and those who remain mired in barbarous speech and bestial behaviour was written into the very rules of pedagogy at St Paul’s, as laid down in the Carmen de moribus: Whereof none is so foolish, or so barbarous in speech, whom as an author the barbarous multitude alloweth not [i.e. will not find acceptable]. If thou wilt rightly know the laws of grammar, if thou desirest to learn to speak very eloquently in thy speech, see thou learnest the most famous writings of ancient men and the authors which the better sort of Latinists teacheth. Sometimes Virgil wisheth to embrace thee, sometimes Terence himself, sometimes withal the work of Cicero wisheth thee. Hence, by improving their command of Latin, the boys improved their moral character and capacity to contribute to society: the discipline instilled by intensive study of the language and style of pagan literature was offered as a path to Christian manners, even if the sometimes irreligious and libertine content was to be held at a distance. (In De ratione

54  c h a p t e r 2

studii, for instance, Erasmus recommends, of the Roman dramatists, Terence, who for ‘pure, terse Latinity has no rival’, and also some ‘carefully chosen plays of Plautus—the less obscene ones’.30) The Carmen de moribus was followed in Lily’s text by the Christiani hominis institutio, a catechism written in Latin hexameters, again composed by Erasmus specifically for St Paul’s at Colet’s request, while Nowell’s catechism, studied in both Latin and Greek as the boys moved up through the school, promised that ‘youth might at once with one labour learn the truth of religion and the pureness of the Latin tongue together’. Although the Erasmian catechism pre-­dated the Reformation, the theological precepts transmitted by Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral for much of Elizabeth’s reign, were characterized by a moderate Calvinism of the sort that was orthodox doctrine in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England: the elect were, in Thomas Norton’s 1570 translation, ‘predestined to this so great a felicity, before the foundations of the world were laid, whereof they have a witness within them in their soul, the spirit of Christ’.31 As Milton came to reject the doctrine of the Trinity enshrined in the catechism with the ABC that was designed to help children learn the vernacular, so he would develop by the early 1640s, if not earlier, a theological position distinct from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination that Jacobean boys imbibed with their Latin language studies. The grammar school boys were thought to enrich their native language as well as their Latin eloquence through constant practice in translation, exemplified by exercises such as the double translation system, influentially advocated by Ascham in The Scholemaster. This is Ascham on how Cicero’s prose should be double translated: The childe must take a paper booke, and sitting in some place, where no man shall prompt him, by him self, let him translate into Englishe his former lesson. Then shewing it to his master, let the master take from him his Latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, then let the childe translate his own Englishe into the Latine againe, an other paper booke. When the child bringeth it, turned into Latin, the master must compare it with Tullies book, and lay them both together.32

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   55

This exercise cultivated both translation from classical Latin into English and from English into neo-­Latin—‘neo-­Latin’ signifying Latin works composed in a classical style from the fourteenth century onwards—and the boys in the upper school similarly translated from Greek or (in their final year) Hebrew into English, then into Latin. The attraction of double translation for Tudor humanist theorists, who envisaged the development of a vernacular literary culture that could bear comparison with that of the Romans and Greeks, was its classicizing effect on English as well as its improvement of the Latin spoken and written by Englishmen. Such practice fostered primarily English–Latin bilingualism, but also developed multilingualism. Milton’s 1645 Poems display his ability to write verse in four languages (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and translate from a fifth (Hebrew).33 There is a Greek epigram in the 1645 Poems, with the Latin title Philosophus ad regem, which is another example of a moral theme put into verse, probably done towards the end of Milton’s school career, perhaps when he was in the eighth and final form at St Paul’s and had been translating out of, and into, Greek for several years. The extant poems that we can be sure date from Milton’s schooldays include the two metrical translations into English from the Psalms, ‘done by the Author at fifteen years old’, according to the headnote in 1645, when Milton would have been in the eighth form of St Paul’s and studying Hebrew: they illustrate how the same pedagogical techniques were applied to Scripture by the older boys as to classical literature. A comparable exercise to double translation, but focused solely on poetry, was the ‘turning of verses’, in which a Latin poem was reworked ‘into a Latin equivalent, substituting alternative words and phrases which preserve the metre and form of the original, or applying the subject matter to another, frequently contemporary, topic’.34 Apologus De Rustico et Hero, ‘Fable of the Peasant and the Landlord’, first published in the expanded 1673 edition of the 1645 Poems, is likely an example of Milton ‘turning’ neo-­Latin verses by the Italian poet Mantuan (1447– 1516) into a new neo-­Latin poem, again at the end of his school career. Milton’s English version of Horace, Odes 1. 5, the ‘Ode to Pyrrha’, which is ‘Rendered almost word for word without Rhyme according to the

56  c h a p t e r 2

Latin measure, as near as the Language will permit’, as the 1673 headnote has it, shows how ‘turning of verses’ developed Milton’s expertise in preserving Latinate vocabulary and syntax in vernacular verse.35 The translation of the ‘Ode to Pyrrha’ was also first published in 1673, and Milton was careful to publish the original Latin text alongside his ‘metaphrase’—the term (metaphrasis) employed by Ascham to denote such word-­for-­word translation—to show precisely how well he had ‘turned’ the Latin poem into an English one. That Milton kept some of his school exercises and deemed several worthy of publication, not only in 1645, in his first collection, but in 1673, at the every end of his career, indicates his pride in their quality, or at least his belief that readers would be interested in how his later style developed out of his juvenilia. It is perhaps more difficult for modern readers to appreciate the extent to which, in terms of the Erasmian principles which imbued the ethos of St Paul’s School, Milton would have deemed the display of his capacity at an early age to master the ‘pure chaste eloquence’ of classical Latin, exemplified in such exercises as the consummate metaphrase of the Horatian Ode, as a youthful assertion not only of his humanist civility but of his Christian morality.

That Sublime Art Milton’s care in pointing out that his version of the ‘Ode to Pyrrha’ is done ‘without Rhyme according to the Latin measure’ would have reminded knowledgeable readers in 1673 of the blank verse and Latinate English of Paradise Lost, published six years earlier and again in 1668 with a note defending his use of unrhymed verse as a recovery of the practice of the ancients: ‘The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age’.36 But it would more generally have recalled the pedagogical method recommended by Tudor humanists such as Ascham, who warned against the use of rhyme in metaphrase and defended the ability of English to reproduce classical metre, or ‘measure’, in iambic, unrhymed verse. In The Scholemaster, he

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   57

‘turned’ a line of Homer into Latin and English in quantitative metre ‘for their sake, that have lust to see, how our English tong, in avoidyng barbarous ryming, may as well receive, right quantitie of sillables, and trewe order of versifiyng . . . as either Greke or Latin, if a cunning man haue it in handling’. Condemning rhyme as a ‘barbarous and rude’ custom inherited in European cultures from the Goths after their sack of Rome, Ascham also insists that, though classical hexameters sound clumsy in English, ‘our English tong will receiue carmen Iambicum as naturallie, as either Greke or Latin’. Ascham’s belief that the barbarity of English poetry could be corrected through acts of intellectual and artistic will, in the same way that Virgil and Horace had civilized classical Latin, offered Elizabethan writers a ‘model of choice and imitation’ that they could follow in their attempts to develop an English literary language and culture that might possess the cultural authority to stand comparison with ancient Greece and Rome; and, to a lesser extent, Renaissance Italy. For Ascham, the ‘Italian tonge’ was, ‘next the Greeke and Latin tonge’, the one ‘I like and love above all other’.37 While Ascham’s central purpose in exercises such as double translation was to instil ‘pure chaste eloquence’ in classical Latin into English schoolboys, his vision of a classicized English brought about through intensive training in Greek and Latin poetry signalled an increasing interest in the claims of the vernacular in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, to the point that Brinsley, in his Ludus Literarius, is explicit in advocating Latin translation exercises as a technique to ensure boys ‘come to proprietie, choise and puritie as well in our English as in the Latine’.38 In the culture of learning developed in St Paul’s School by the High Master in Milton’s time, Alexander Gil (1565–1635), the intensive study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew in the Erasmian tradition upon which the school was established seems to have co-­existed with a commitment to the national vernacular as a literary language which might attain something like the status of the classics. This co-­existence is unsurprising given that Erasmus articulated with unprecedented clarity the fundamental humanist principle that translation (translatio) should foster creative, as opposed to slavish, imitation of the classics (imitatio), which in turn should stimulate the desire to create something that might

58  c h a p t e r 2

bear comparison in its own right with the original model (aemulatio). This understanding of classical imitation as the foundation for competitive aemulatio had informed claims for the literary stature of an Italian language (or at least the Tuscan of Petrarch and Boccaccio) regulated by Ciceronian rules of style in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della Volgar Lingua (Discourse on the vulgar tongue; 1525), and for the potential grandeur of a French vernacular in Joachim Du Bellay’s La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (Defence and illustration of the French language; 1549).39 Gil himself had published one of the first comprehensive English grammars, Logonomia Anglica (1619). Composed in Latin, Gil’s grammar lent the learning of English an academic respectability approaching that of the classics, while citing English authors for examples of rhetorical figures. Following the fashion set by Francis Meres, who included in his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598) a ‘comparative discourse of our English poets with the Greeke, Latine, and Italian poets’, Gil created a canon of recent English writers by identifying them with the greatest writers of antiquity. He quotes in particular and at length from Edmund Spenser to illustrate tropes, with extensive extracts from The Faerie Queene (1590–6), and calls him Homerus noster, ‘our Homer’; but also from Sir Philip Sidney, who is ‘our Anacreon’, the Greek lyric poet, presumably on account of Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella (first printed 1591), although Gil actually quotes from Sidney’s prose romance, the Arcadia (first published 1593). Other recent English writers whom Gil quotes include Samuel Daniel, who is ‘our Lucan’; Sir John Harington, ‘our Martial’; Spenser, ‘our Homer’; and George Wither, ‘our Juvenal’.40 Milton might have noted that no English writer is given, however, the prized epithet of ‘our Virgil’, the greatest of Roman epic poets. Gil, who taught the boys in the upper forms, evidently encouraged a conviction among his pupils that intensive training in classical verse could also develop their capacity to write English poetry, and that English poetry, as exemplified by its late Elizabethan flowering in the 1590s, had the potential, like the Italian of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to be discussed in terms that had conventionally been reserved for Greek and Latin. But facility with, and eloquence in, Latin remained the es-

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   59

sential underpinning of any expressive technique in English. The environment and curriculum at St Paul’s intensified the fascination and increased the ardour for classical poetics engendered by Milton’s first encounters with Ovidian poetry under the tutelage of Thomas Young. That he shared the intensity of this engagement with at least some of his contemporaries at St Paul’s is evident in his friendships with Charles Diodati (1609/10–38) and Gil’s son, also Alexander (1597–1644).41 Milton’s sense of the importance of these three men—Young, Diodati, Gil—to his intellectual and literary development is indicated by the fact that they are the only correspondents before 1638 included in his Epistolarum Familiarium (Familiar Letters), published at the end of his life in 1674. The friendship with Diodati must have developed quickly if Milton only started at St Paul’s in 1620–1, for Diodati, though slightly younger, had left the school for Oxford by early 1622, at the age of twelve or thirteen, while Milton did not matriculate at Cambridge until early 1625, aged sixteen. However, it is possible that the boys already knew each other, for Diodati grew up in Cheapside, not far from Bread Street, among a small but prosperous community of expatriate Protestant Italians. The evidence of the friendship between Milton and Diodati, or at least the evidence that Milton later chose to preserve through publication, dates from the period after Milton had started at Cambridge and consists of poems and letters, all in either Greek, Latin or Italian, in a display of the abilities instilled by the multilingual pedagogic environment in which the boys had become friends. It seems likely that whoever tutored Milton in Italian came from this Cheapside community.42 Milton shows himself to have reached a high level of mastery in the language by late 1629, when he likely wrote a sequence of six love poems (five sonnets and a one-­stanza canzone, a lyric form related to the madrigal). Milton’s fascination with Italian love poetry at this time is indicated by his purchase in December 1629 of a copy of Giovanni Della Casa’s Rime e Prose (Venice, 1563). This collection of sonnets and love lyrics is one of the few books that survives from Milton’s extensive library: currently there are only seven volumes, comprising nine titles, that are widely accepted as having passed through his hands. Other than the Milton family Bible, they are all literary texts in

60  c h a p t e r 2

Latin, Greek, and Italian—although that number can now be increased to eight and to include a vernacular literary text with the identification of his copy of the Shakespeare First Folio.43 The copy of Della Casa is bound between copies of Dante’s L’Amoroso Convivio (Venice, 1529), a mixture of verse and prose in which Dante uses the forms of love poetry to celebrate Lady Philosophy, and Benedetto Varchi’s collection of sonnets, I Sonetti (Venice, 1555), both of which have Miltonic markings but not the inscription of ownership on the Della Casa volume.44 Modern languages did not have any status as official academic disciplines, but by the early seventeenth century they were increasingly seen as a qualification of a gentleman, useful for travel, polite conversation and, potentially, state service: extra-­curricular, private tuition was consequently increasingly available at Oxford and Cambridge, provided by expatriate native speakers. In the light, however, of Milton’s comments in Ad Patrem, it is likely that he began to learn Italian, as well as French, with private tutors in London before he went to, or while he was at, St Paul’s. An example of a contemporary at Oxford is instructive. William Trumbull came up to Magdalen College in 1623 already with some French and the intention to improve it, encouraged by his father, the prominent diplomat Sir William Trumbull: by 1624 Trumbull had engaged a young Frenchman to converse with, and by this time was also learning Italian and Spanish, though only as recreation and ‘not as a distraction from Latin and Greek’.45 In Of Education, Milton indeed refers to the pupils in his ideal academy having ‘easily learnt at any odde hour the Italian tongue’. He makes no reference to the need to study any other European vernacular, despite his own facility in French and possible knowledge of some Spanish; he would later try to learn at least a bit of German or Dutch (known as ‘Low German’).46 Students with scholarly ambitions did also seek to acquire European vernaculars ‘in order to gain access to a growing body of religious and philosophical literature that was being published in the vernacular’. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583– 1648), for example, sought to make himself ‘a citizen of the world’ by teaching himself French, Italian, and Spanish, ‘without any master or teacher’ and ‘by the helpe of some bookes in Lattaine or English translated into those idiums and the dictionaryes of those several languages’.47

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   61

But if Milton possessed a good degree of fluency in French and Italian by the time he went up to Cambridge, and continued to develop his skill in European vernaculars while he was at university, he would nonetheless have been relatively unusual among his peers from non-­aristocratic backgrounds. According to Of Education, the acquisition of Italian in their spare time will enable students specifically to develop their understanding of ‘that sublime art’ of poetics: reading ‘the Italian commentaries of [Ludovico] Castelvetro, [Torquato] Tasso, [Giacomo] Mazzoni and others’ would ‘shew them, what Religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of Poetry both in divine and humane things’.48 Milton had a characteristic English humanist sense of Italian as having been, at least in the period before Counter-­Reformation took hold in the later sixteenth century, the chief literary vernacular of post-­classical Europe, and thus as exemplifying the level to which English poets should aspire. This ‘specifically literary interest’ among the British in learning Italian can be traced back at least to William Thomas’s Dictionary for the Better Understanding of Boccace, Petrarcha and Dante, attached to his Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar (1550); teachers of Italian tended to use the same double translation method employed to teach Latin in the schools, but substituted Petrarch for Cicero as the core author.49 That Milton associated his learning of Italian both with his relationship with Diodati and with his access to a rich poetic heritage is clear from the opening address of the Italian sonnet that is entitled Sonnet IV in the 1645 Poems: Diodati, I’ll tell you something astonishing. You know how stubbornly I’ve scorned love, And mocked its snares, and how I’ve Laughed? Well now the thing Has impaled me: I’m brought low. Not By golden tresses or rosy cheeks but A foreign ideal beauty has my heart. (lines 1–7) The address to Diodati makes clear that Milton’s sequence of lyrics in Italian is part of a continuing, playful poetic dialogue between two young men. Milton is showing off his facility in the Petrarchan sonnet

62  c h a p t e r 2

as he had earlier shown off his facility in Ovidian elegy in his Latin verse letters to Diodati, entitled Elegia prima and Elegia sexta in the 1645 Poems and likely composed in 1626 and 1629 respectively. In Elegia prima, an invocation of the sights and sounds of Caroline London in springtime, Milton represents the ‘girls’ of the city as outdoing all the nymphs of classical myth in their radiant beauty: ‘The foremost glory is owing to the maidens of Britain; let it be sufficient that you, foreign women, can come next . . . Not so numerous are the stars sparkling above [London] in the clear sky . . . as are the girls, a remarkable throng, striking in their golden beauty’ (lines 71–2, 77, 79–80). The Latin and Italian poems form an extended sequence: the speaker of the Italian sonnet addressed to Diodati seems to recall his earlier claim for the superiority of the ‘golden tresses’ of English girls and now admits that they are in turn outdone by the ‘brilliant blackness burning’ in the eyes of an Italian beauty (line 9). As the poet puts it in the third of the Italian sonnets: ‘I swap Thames’ beauty for that of Arno’, and he does so in terms of language as well as images of ideal female beauty (Sonnet III, line 9). If Milton’s friendship with Diodati was one motivation in his learning of Italian, it was Latin in which Milton wrote not only the verse letters to Diodati but also his extant correspondence with him from 1637, as well as the Epitaphium Damonis, his funeral elegy for his friend, who died in 1638 at the age of twenty-­nine. The two extant letters from Diodati to Milton, on the other hand, are in ancient Greek and usually dated to 1626–30. What is most striking about the relationship with Diodati is its deeply self-­conscious literariness, as befits a friendship formed at the exemplary humanist institution of St Paul’s. As with Thomas Young, but to a greater extent, Milton continued a relationship with Diodati after they became physically separated that was constituted by acts of textual gift-­exchange. Elegia prima, seemingly written soon after Milton went up to Cambridge, bears comparison with the poem to Young in its playing with the imagery of exile in Ovid’s Tristia, that entry-­level text of Latin verse which, as schoolboys, both Milton and Diodati had repeatedly rendered into English, and then back into Latin again. Milton represents his Easter vacation from Cambridge as an inversion of Ovid’s

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   63

exile from Rome: where Ovid yearned to return to the cultured life of Rome from the barren wastes of Tomis, the speaker of Elegia prima relishes his ‘exile’ from the ‘droning’ world of the university to a pleasure-­filled, springtime London, his ‘sweet native land’, with its distractions of the passion-­filled theatre and ‘bands of virgins passing by’, displaying ‘their quivering locks of hair—the golden nets which deceitful Love spreads’ (lines 10, 52, 60, 90). Elegia prima exemplifies how these young men refracted their experience of the world, at least in communication with each other, through the motifs of classical poetry in which they had been saturated at St Paul’s: Caroline London is understood through, and represented in terms of, their reading about Ovid’s Augustan Rome. These poems also illustrate how the culture of imitatio and aemulatio imbibed at St Paul’s shaped their friendship—imitation and emulation not only of the work of the ancients and the great Renaissance Italian poets, but of each other. Diodati wrote Latin poetry, appearing in an Oxford University anthology of funeral elegies for the great antiquary William Camden in 1624, and Milton clearly valued Diodati’s judgement, as well as regarding him as a correspondent who was worthy of exchanging work in progress. Elegia sexta is preceded by a headnote explaining that it is a reply to a letter from Diodati enclosing some verses and requesting that ‘his poems should be excused if they were less good than usual’ because he has been socializing with his friends in the country. This implies a regular exchange of verses, and Milton concluded his verse letter with reference to the composition of his first major English poem, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, likely written in December 1629. He intended to send the ‘Nativity Ode’ to Diodati along, perhaps, with the poems in Italian, depending on whether we interpret ‘native’ to refer to Diodati’s native language: ‘There await you too some strains composed upon native pipes. When I recite them to you, you will serve as my adjudicator’ (lines 89–90). The first joke in Elegia sexta is an allusion yet again to the Ovidian work that was emblematic of their bond of having both been initiated into Latin poetics at the same school: ‘Would you like to know in a poem how I return love and cherish you? . . . my love is neither confined by the tight constraints of metre, nor,

64  c h a p t e r 2

sound as it is, does it have recourse to limping feet’ (lines 5, 7–8). The joke is taken from the Tristia: Ovid’s elegiac metre ‘limps’ because it is composed of alternating hexameters and pentameters, the latter being one foot shorter.50 Milton similarly regarded Alexander Gil the younger as a worthy ‘adjudicator’ of his poetry, though the relationship with Gil, who was eleven years older, was never as close as with Diodati. Gil returned from Oxford to St Paul’s in 1622, soon after Milton entered the school, to teach the lower forms. Gil was better known as a Latin and Greek poet than Diodati, and some of this verse was collected in his volume Parerga sive Poetici Conatus Alexandri ab Alexandro Gil Londinensis (1632)—as Milton would do thirteen years later, Gil advertised his first volume of poems as the work of a Londoner and, as Milton would also do, includes a line from Virgil’s Eclogues as an epigraph on the title-­page. The three letters to Gil that Milton published in 1674 are all in in Latin. The letter dated 20 May 1628 in the 1674 edition is seemingly an error for 20 May 1630, for it was prompted by the receipt of Gil’s Latin poem In Sylvam-­ Ducis, which celebrates an episode in the Thirty Years’ War: the capture by Protestant forces led by Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange, of the city of ’s-­Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands in September 1629. Milton praises extravagantly Gil’s poem as ‘redolent throughout with true poetic majesty and a Virgilian genius’. In the letter dated 4 December 1634, Milton declares that the Greek epithalamium that he has recently received from Gil has prompted him to compose in Greek himself once again, for the first time since school—he enclosed this effort, a Greek translation of Psalm 114 that is included in the 1645 Poems, with his reply to Gil. As with Diodati, the exchange of poetry between Milton and Gil was evidently a regular activity. In the second extant letter, sent from Cambridge on 2 July 1628, Milton praises Gil’s capacity as ‘a judge of Poetry in general and the most honest judge of mine’, and wishes that he could renew their ‘constant conversation’, which always left Milton feeling as if he had ‘been to some Market of Learning’ (‘plane quasi ad Emporium quondam Eruditionis profectus’). Gil is represented as an example of erudition to be praised—Milton addresses him as vir eru-

p u r e c h a s t e e l o qu e n c e   65

dite—in contrast to the example of Milton’s fellow Cambridge students, whom he damns as ‘almost completely unskilled and unlearned’.51 The language of this letter suggests that the intensity of literary and linguistic learning at St Paul’s left some Old Paulines with a (probably justified) sense of entitlement by the time they arrived at university. The education at a school like St Paul’s in Milton’s time was ‘premised on the ultimate ability of the student to think, converse, and compose in Latin, as well as grounding him in the literary, philological, and philosophical doctrines of Roman culture’. One of the unforeseen consequences of the high level of humanist education in some grammar schools in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England was that the universities were unprepared for students so intensively and expertly grounded in classical languages and literature. As Samuel Woodford (1636–1700), who graduated with a BA from Oxford in 1657 (and who went on to become a noted religious poet in the 1660s and 1670s), observed: ‘coming pretty ripe from Paul’s School, I was too good to learn, and was so proud as to think myself almost as good as my tutor’.52 As we shall see, it may have been such pride in the levels of his own literary learning that initially got Milton into trouble with his tutors at Cambridge.

CHAPTER 3

•

The Pursuit of Universal Learning

Eloquence and Erudition Milton liked to present himself as one of the last great examples of a culture of strenuous learning in Europe that reached its height in the first half of the seventeenth century. Before continuing with the narrative of Milton’s intellectual development at Cambridge, it is important to get a sense of this culture and how it shaped Milton’s view of himself and his world. In an autobiographical apology in his Latin polemical work of 1654, the Defensio Secunda, Milton connected his life-­long pursuit of erudition with his blindness, which became total in the early 1650s: ‘My father destined me in early childhood for the study of literature [humaniorum literarum studiis], for which I had so keen an appetite that from my twelfth year scarcely ever did I leave my studies for my bed before the hour of midnight. This was the first cause of injury to my eyes, whose natural weakness was augmented by frequent headaches.’ No physical discomfort could slacken what he calls his ‘assault upon knowledge’—learning is conceived of in terms of tireless, violent effort. Milton was defending in the Defensio Secunda his virtuous and learned character against personal polemical attack, and so there is, as always in his frequent autobiographical reflections and asides, an element of retrospective self-­fashioning as a man of godly morality and devout dedication; he had similarly defended his pristine moral character in a vernacular prose polemic of 1642 with reference to ‘the wearisome labours 66

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   67

and studious watchings, wherein I have spent and tir’d out almost a whole youth’.1 We are almost entirely dependent upon Milton for information about what Milton did and was like in the 1620s and 1630s, for his early biographers tend merely to paraphrase his own autobiographical comments about this period; while the writings that survive from his youth are, almost without exception, those that he chose to preserve in print, and so tend to exemplify his own retrospective self-­presentation as an aspiring and serious-­minded scholar and poet.2 Milton’s accounts of his early ‘studious watchings’ are reminiscent of the autobiographical sketch (done in the third person) of the celebrated Italian humanist and paradigm of the uomo universale, or ‘universal man’, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72): neglecting everything else, he devoted himself entirely to the study of letters . . . after so many nightly vigils and such great constancy, he fell gravely ill from the exertion of his studies . . . when he tried to read the power of his vision seemed to fail . . . in his lust for learning [he] consumed himself by working late at night.3 Milton wants us to identify him with the humanist ideal of the universal man. But there is nonetheless little reason to doubt that Milton did indeed dedicate himself to the pursuit of erudition from a young age, in the manner recommended by the classical and Renaissance humanist authorities whose dicta shaped his educational experience both at school and university, as they shaped the experience of other learned men of his generation, not only in England and Britain but throughout Europe. In Ad Patrem, Milton acknowledges that it has been through the material intervention of his father that he has been given the opportunity ‘of knowing about everything that exists—in the sky, or on mother earth beneath the sky, or in the air that streams between them, or hidden beneath the waves’.4 The apprehension of the world of learning which animates Ad Patrem is articulated in more grounded terms in the verse epistle addressed by Ben Jonson to John Selden (1584–1654), renowned in the seventeenth century for the vast range of his learning.

68  c h a p t e r 3

Stand forth my object, then, you that have been Ever at home: yet, have all countries seen: And like a compass keeping one foot still Upon your centre, do your circle fill Of general knowledge; watched men, manners too, Heard what times past have said, seen what ours do[.]5 In praising Selden for his ‘general knowledge’, Jonson presents him as exemplifying the ideal of the ‘general scholar’, one who recognizes the interconnectedness of knowledge and the consequent necessity of seeking to master it in all its diverse forms. Selden’s almost exact contemporary John Hales (1584–1656), sometime Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford and tutor at Eton College for nearly forty years, was another much admired example of a scholar who pursued this daunting goal of general learning, spending his years ‘turn[ing] over . . . all writers, profane, ecclesiastical, & divine, all counsels, fathers, & histories of the church’, to the extent that he became known as a walking ‘compendium of colleges and libraries’, according to his Eton colleague Sir Henry Wotton.6 The ideal of general learning and the difficulty of attaining it were encapsulated in a sermon at Cambridge by Isaac Barrow (1630–77), who proceeded from the Regius Chair of Greek to become the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge: And if to get a competent knowledge about a few things, or to be reasonably skilful in any sort of learning, be difficult, how much industry doth it require to be well seen in many, or to have waded through the vast compass of learning, in no part whereof a scholar may conveniently or handsomely be ignorant; seeing there is such a connection of things, and dependence of notions, that one part of learning doth confer light to another, that a man can hardly well understand anything without knowing divers other things; that he will be a lame scholar, who hath not an insight into many kinds of knowledge; that he can hardly be a good scholar, who is not a general one.7 An exemplar of the general scholar at Milton’s own Cambridge college was Joseph Mede (1586–1638; sometimes Mead), a figure who sheds

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   69

some light on Milton’s intellectual formation at Cambridge and to whom we will return on several occasions in this book. Mede was renowned throughout Europe for his ability to make humanist scholarship serve divinity in his application of biblical prophecies to history, Clavis Apocalyptica (1627)—published while Milton’s was an undergraduate at Christ’s—and whose life and works offer ‘a unique revelation of the range of learning possible for a seventeenth-­century scholar’. John Worthington, who edited Mede’s works and correspondence after his death, asserted Mede’s renown as ‘an acute logician, an accurate philosopher, a skilful mathematician, a great philologer, and an excellent anatomist’. Milton, who became an acquaintance of John Hales and an ardent admirer of John Selden, whom he called ‘the chief of learned men reputed in this land’, thought of himself as another protagonist in this great quest for encyclopaedic knowledge.8 Whether he ever really lived up to the example of learning set by men such as Mede, Hales, and Selden is another matter. The ideal of general learning was derived from the classical and particularly Roman example of the complete training required of the perfect orator. Cicero, in dedicating the first book of De oratore to his brother Quintus, insisted, against Quintus’s position that skill in oratory derives from natural wit (ingenium), that ‘eloquence is rather dependent upon the trained skill [artes] of highly educated men [and] the refinements of learning’. As Cicero then put it, giving the speaker Crassus what seem to have been his own views on oratory: ‘no man can be an orator complete in all points of merit, who has not attained a knowledge of all the important subjects and arts. For it is from knowledge that oratory must derive its beauty and fullness, and unless there is such knowledge, well-­grasped and comprehended by the speaker, there must be something empty and almost childish in the utterance.’ The conclusion is that ‘the orator must be accomplished in every kind of discourse and in every department of culture’. This latter phrase, in omni genere sermonis, in omni parte humanitatis, echoed down Renaissance humanist educational theory, even though the dialogue form of De oratore enabled Cicero to subject persistently the possibility of such an achievement to sceptical critique. In the Institutio oratoria, the most influential work of the Roman rhetorical tradition after De oratore, Quintilian repeated

70  c h a p t e r 3

Cicero’s insistence that not only must the true student of oratory encompass all areas of language and literature, but should then go on to attempt every category of intellectual knowledge: Nor is it sufficient to have read the poets only; every kind of writer must be carefully studied, not merely for the subject matter, but for the vocabulary ; for words often acquire authority from their use by a particular author. Nor can such training be regarded as complete if it stop short of music, for the teacher of literature has to speak of metre and rhythm: nor again if he be ignorant of astronomy, can he understand the poets; for they, to mention no further points, frequently give their indications of time by reference to the rising and setting of the stars. Ignorance of philosophy is an equal drawback, since there are numerous passages in almost every poem based on the most intricate questions of natural philosophy, while among the Greeks we have Empedocles and among our own poets Varro and Lucretius, all of whom have expounded their philosophies in verse. ‘It is by such studies’, states Quintilian, that ‘the course of education [orbis doctrinae] described by the Greeks as enkyklios paideia or general education will be brought to its full completion’.9 The currency of such arguments in early modern England is evident from the fact that Quintilian and the oratorical works of Cicero were the set texts stipulated by the Cambridge University statutes of 1570 for the study of rhetoric in the first year of the four-­year BA degree.10 Sixteenth-­century glosses on Cicero followed Quintilian by explaining the concept of humanitas in terms of the Greek notion of the ‘circle of learning’—the usual early modern translation of enkyklios paideia and an origin recalled by Jonson in his image of Selden as a compass who fills his ‘circle’ with ‘general knowledge’. Cicero’s Pro Archia poeta (On Behalf of Archias the Poet), an oration praising the value of poets and poetry that was rediscovered in a monastery in Liège by Petrarch in 1333, became a key text in the development of early humanist thought for its connection of ‘studies of humanity and letters’ (studia humanitatis ac litterarum) with the flourishing of ‘humane’ nature. The Petrarchan conception of humanitas in terms of erudition—a level of being that is ex-

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   71

plicitly limited to the capacity of very few men—is encapsulated by Philip Beroaldus in his 1517 commentary on the oration: ‘This worde Humanitas, doth not signifye benevolence towardes all men, as thinketh the vulgar folke, but what we call Erudition and training-­up in all good artes, or Paideia, as the Grekes saye. So, it is that they who trulie seek out & cherish these studies of humanitie [studia humanitatis] are the most humayne men. Varro saith that the more humayne man is to be taken as suche on accompt of his erudition and training-­up in gentle studies.’11 Through the influence of the Petrarchan interpretation of the Pro Archia poeta, it became a commonplace of Italian Renaissance thought to ascribe to the poet the same general education required of the orator. So while Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) accepted that some individuals are born ‘with the gifts of poetic fervour’, he insisted, citing Cicero’s recovered oration, that no matter how ‘deeply the poetic impulse stirs the mind to which it is granted, it very rarely accomplishes anything commendable if the instruments by which its concepts are to be wrought out are wanting’. Even if a man ‘writes in his mother tongue admirably, and indeed has performed each of the various duties of poetry as such; yet over over and above this, it is necessary to know at least the principles of the other Liberal Arts, both moral and natural . . . to behold the monuments and relics of the ancients, to have in one’s memory the histories of the nations, and to be familiar with the geography of various lands, of seas, rivers, and mountains’. ‘Nothing proceeds from this poetic fervour’, emphasizes Boccaccio, ‘except what is wrought out by art’.12 The influence of this view in England is clear in The Book Named the Governor (1531) by Thomas Elyot (c. 1490–1546), a standard vernacular authority on education throughout the sixteenth century: ‘in an oratour is required to be a heap of all maner of lernynge: whiche of some is called the worlde of science: of other the circle of doctrine, which is in one worde of greke Encyclopedia: therfore at this day may be founden but a very few oratours’. In Elyot’s treatise, as in Cicero’s Pro Archia poeta, rhetoric and poetry are treated as interlinked arts which cultivate oratio, and excellence in both the practice and interpretation of poetry similarly depends upon general learning: ‘no man be an excellent poet

72  c h a p t e r 3

nor oratour unlasse he have parte of all other doctrine . . . no man can apprehende the very delectation that is in the leesson of noble poetes unlasse he have radde very moche and in divers autours of divers lernynges’.13 Elyot follows the Roman tradition of linguistic and rhetorical education, as revived at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Erasmus and his circle among the northern European humanists, in his stipulation that the ‘order of learning’ must begin with mastery of grammar, Greek as well as Latin, followed by immersive study in eloquence, taught above all through the example of the best poetry, and pre-­ eminently the encyclopaedic form of Homeric and Virgilian epic. After which, at the age of about fourteen, the young student would be ready for training in dialectic and rhetoric, followed by cosmography and history and, finally, moral philosophy. From Homer, advised Elyot, ‘as from a fountaine proceded all eloquence and lernyng’; while ‘none one autour serveth to so diuers witts as doth Virgile . . . [he] giveth to a childe, if he wyll take it, every thinge apte for his witte and capacitie: wherfore he is in the ordre of lernyng to be preferred before any other autor latine’. If, as the ancients believed, poetry is the form in which ‘all wysdome was supposed to be therin included’, then epic is the ultimate compendium of knowledge. From the classical epics, ‘all Arts’, in the words of the Elizabethan translator of Homer, George Chapman, can be ‘deduced, confirmed or illustrated’.14 Homer and Virgil were to be preferred because their poetic fluency and beauty derived from, and conveyed, encyclopaedic learning; it was not enough for a poet to be merely aesthetically pleasing. In his Poetices libri septem (Seven Books of Poetics), Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) maintained that epic poetry was the highest of all the genres and that Virgil was supreme among epic poets; and that the true poet (and critic) was the philosopher, not the ‘grammarian’ who dealt only in the minutiae derived from specialist disciplinary study.15 As Latin was the language in which schoolboys were immersed in their formal education, Virgil, as the greatest of Latin poets, ‘exercised an extraordinary hold in conceptions of the cultural work of poetry’ as a method of promoting learning and virtue. Virgilian poetry was represented as ‘a pattern for total knowledge’.16 As the Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey (1552/

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   73

3–1631) noted of two of the most significant English poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Lydgate: ‘Other commend Chawcer, & Lidgate for their witt, pleasant veine, varietie of poetical discourse, & all humanitie: I specially note their Astronomie, philosophie, & other parts of profound or cunning art. It is not sufficient for poets to be superficial humanists: but they must be exquisite artists, & curious universall schollers.’ All of this was still being echoed by John Dryden in his literary criticism at the end of the seventeenth century: ‘in an epic poet, one who is worthy of that name, besides an universal genius is required universal learning, together with all those qualities and acquisitions which I have named above, and as many more as I have through haste or negligence omitted’.17 It was apparently Harvey who in the late 1570s first used in English the term ‘polyhistor’ to denote such a ‘curious universal scholar’. Anthony Grafton has encapsulated the culture of the polyhistor in early modern Europe: ‘if the polyhistors bewilder any modern scholar by the breadth of their interests, almost all of their intellectual activities nonetheless fall within a well-­defined area . . . humanism and encyclopedism, eloquence and erudition—these were the pursuits that the polyhistors made their own’.18 Eloquence and erudition: these were the pursuits that animated the young Milton in the 1620s and 1630s, as he sought to acquire the polyhistorical learning that was required, so he had read and so he had been taught, of the exquisite—and even more so of the epic—poet.

Accelerated Humanism When Milton arrived in Paris at the beginning of his tour of France and Italy in 1638, the only person that he ‘ardently desired to meet’ in the city was the exiled Dutch jurist, theologian, and poet, Hugo Grotius (1583– 1645). It has been speculated by biographers that this desire was due to Grotius’s (allegedly) anti-­monarchical politics or his anti-­Calvinist theology—the latter was indirectly the cause of his exile from the Dutch republic—but Milton himself simply referred to how keen he was to meet that ‘most erudite man’ (viro eruditissimo), which is also how Cicero refers to the poet Archia. Earlier, in the Doctrine and Discipline of

74  c h a p t e r 3

Divorce in 1643–4, he cited Grotius as ‘a man of generall learning’.19 Grotius was a famous intellectual prodigy, who ‘at 8 years old made [Latin] verses, and performed his public exercises in Philosophy’. Such famous examples of youthful precocity doubtless influence the description in John Aubrey’s biographical notes, gleaned from Milton’s family soon after his death, of Milton as already ‘a Poet’ by the age of ten—the age at which Milton first had his portrait painted. The desire to live up to such examples helps to explain why Milton included his age at the time of composition with many of the pieces collected in his 1645 Poems, starting with the ‘Paraphrase on Psalm 114’ and rendering of Psalm 136, both ‘don by the Author at fifteen years old’. Samuel Johnson, his most sceptical early biographer, observed that Milton likely based his representation of his early precocity on the autobiographical example of humanist polymaths, such as Angelo Poliziano (1454–94): ‘[Milton] himself by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity’.20 Beyond his massive expertise in law, theology, textual criticism, and literature, Grotius edited collections such as Dissertationes de studiis instituendis (Amsterdam, 1645), comprised of works by various hands advising students on method of study. One of the texts included by Grotius is a bibliography of political thought by Gabriel Naudé (1600–53), in which Naudé reveals his exemplary ‘polyhistor’ to be the late sixteenth-­century French humanist Jean Bodin (c. 1530–96), ‘who vanquished the difficulties of almost all languages and sciences, built the theatre of nature on new principles, and systematized the kinds, laws, institutions, secrets, virtues, and vices of all the world’s past and present kingdoms’.21 As we have seen, the polyhistor expected to have to suffer for his privileged insight. Meric Casaubon (1599–1671), who composed a manuscript describing and defending the principles of general learning, echoes Milton in his account of the physical effects of his attempt to become a general scholar: that which I call GENERALL LEARNING . . . having had some kind of apprehension of it in my youth, more then every bodie hath, (my

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   75

Father was wont to say Pauci sunt, qui capiunt magnitudinem Literarum:) that pretends, or aspires to learning; I did entertaine those thoughts of it with great admiration, and as earnest longing, soe that it hath broken my sleepe many tymes, and made mee forgett my meat, to the prejudice of my health.22 The dictum ascribed here by Meric to his father, the renowned Genevan classical scholar Isaac Casaubon—‘those who comprehend the magnitude of learning are few’—points to the intellectual exclusivity that was an important aspect of the classical and humanist fascination with general learning as the highest form of humanitas. Yet Meric Casaubon’s comment underlines also how the difficulty of approaching the ideal of general learning led to an acute sense of inadequacy as well as superiority. Even in 1642, having spent seven years completing Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees at Cambridge and then another five years back living with his parents, engaged in intensive further study of general knowledge—‘I devoted myself entirely to the study of Greek and Latin writers, completely at leisure, not, however, without sometimes exchanging the country for the city, either to purchase books or to become acquainted with some new discovery in mathematics or music’—Milton thought of himself as having ‘not yet completed to my minde the full circle of my private studies’.23 The term ‘circle’ indicates how these studies were informed by the ideal of the encyclopedia. In the Latin oration, or ‘prolusion’ as Milton called it, on the topic of the ‘defence of knowledge’ that he delivered in front of his tutors and fellow students in the chapel of Christ’s College, possibly in the autumn term of 1631 as he approached completion of his MA, Milton berated his peers for their physical timidity in their approach to learning: ‘We allow ourselves to be outdone by laborers and husbandmen in working after dark and before dawn . . . Though we aspire to the highest and best of human conditions we can endure neither hard work nor yet the reproach of idleness . . . It is a shameful admission that we neglect to cultivate our minds out of consideration for our bodies, whose health all should be ready to impair if thereby their minds might gain the more’.24 Even taking account of the fact that such orations were formal rhetorical exercises

76  c h a p t e r 3

r­ equired of the students and designed primarily to impress the audience with their eloquence and rhetorical force, and so did not necessarily express the views of the speaker, the charge has a personal edge which must have had some in the audience feeling uncomfortable. When Milton went into print in 1644 to outline his own blueprint for the ideal academy, which would encompass the education of boys from the age when they started learning Latin grammar to the end of the BA degree, he presented a curriculum that aspired to the encyclopaedic, although it also encompassed some of the practical, applied disciplines as well as the core studia humanitiatis of (Latin) grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, modern languages (to be picked up in spare moments), mathematics, geography, medicine, architecture, military strategics, astronomy and meterology, among other topics. Milton admitted in conclusion, with what looks like serious understatement to modern eyes, that ‘this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher; but will require sinews almost equall to those which Homer gave Ulysses’. Yet his nephew Edward Phillips, whom Milton tutored along with his younger brother John and several others boys during the 1640s, testifies to his uncle’s efforts to apply just such a prodigious training in ‘general knowledge’ to his pupils between the ages of ten and sixteen. In Of Education Milton conceives of the ideal teacher as possessing the ability to bring students to ‘willing obedience, enflamed with the study of learning, and the admiration of vertue’. Phillips, observing that ‘by teaching [Milton] in some measure increased his own knowledge, having the reading of all these Authors as it were by Proxy’, somewhat ruefully testifies to his own failure to receive this training with ‘the same Acuteness of Wit and Apprehension, the same Industry, Alacrity, Thirst after Knowledge, as the Instructor was indued with’!25 Milton’s ambitious educational plans are not out of step with humanist letters of advice on studies, a genre to which Of Education, addressed to the educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, properly belongs. Grotius, for example, recommended in a letter of advice included in Dissertationes de studiis instituendis that the would-­be diplomat needs to master not only all the literary and rhetorical arts, but logic, physics, and theol-

t h e p u r s u i t o f u n i v e r s a l l e a r n i n g   77

ogy as well.26 Perhaps the most celebrated letter of advice on studies appears in a semi-­parodic context, offered by Rabelais’s gluttonous, bibulous giant Gargantua to his son Pantagruel: ‘learn the Languages perfectly’ (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic) and have ‘no history wich thou shalt not have ready in thy memory’; ‘as for Astronomy, study all the rules thereof . . . in matter of the knowledge of the works of Nature, I would have thee study that exactly, and that there be no sea, river nor fountain, of which thou do not know the fishes, all the fowles the aire’. Gargantua’s letter is sent from ‘Utopia’, and the goal of encyclopaedic knowledge is frequently treated with implicit irony in humanist pedagogic works even as it is held out as an ideal for both teacher and student. For Erasmus in De ratione studii, a true education in humanitas is at times simply identified with school training in the seven ‘liberal arts’ (comprising the traditional trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic and the subsequent quadrivium of music, mathematics, astronomy, and geometry), and at others it is represented ‘as a sum of all existing writing, primary among which [Erasmus] placed the categories of scripture and the classics’. This latter encyclopaedic vision is described in ‘extravagant terms which also constantly undercut themselves with niggling bathos’.27 Nevertheless, the humanist ideal of general knowledge clearly gripped the imagination of scholars throughout early modern Europe, and some pursued encyclopaedic learning with seriousness and determination. Milton was among them, and there is little sign of irony in his attitudes towards the pursuit of erudition; although we shall see in subsequent chapters that at times he took short-­cuts to learning, these were common enough practice at the time. The daunting curriculum set out in Of Education and Milton’s implementation of it in his own teaching have been aptly described as the work of an ‘accelerated humanist’.28 The various poetic experiments and student exercises that Milton chose to preserve from his time at school and at Cambridge exhibit such an accelerated pursuit of the humanist ideal of the complete orator–poet. Milton’s character and career, as a writer of both poetry and prose, were profoundly influenced by the educational and cultural ideals of humanitas, in which he was intensively trained by private tutors and then at

78  c h a p t e r 3

grammar school and university. Milton exemplifies the success of a humanist programme that sought to instil in students an ‘emotional commitment to antiquity and its repository of useful knowledge, which illuminated the human condition and guided behaviour’.29 The following chapters will show how the pursuit of humanist erudition was a key concern of his life up to the point in 1639 when, aged thirty, he returned from a fourteen-­month tour of Italy to an England sliding into civil war. His dedication to the cause of liberty after 1640 was motivated less by ‘benevolence towardes all men’ than by a conviction that humanitas, of which poetry was both an embodiment and a key constituent, could only be pursued under religious and civil conditions that enabled freedom of thought and the advancement of learning.

Pa r t I I •

Cambridge and Christ’s College, 1625–9

CHAPTER 4

•

Philology and Philosophy

‘Whip’t Him’ One of the more infamous claims about Milton’s time at Christ’s College, Cambridge, to which he was admitted in February 1625, at the age of sixteen, is that during his first or second year he was rusticated—temporarily expelled—after an altercation with his tutor, William Chappell (1582–1649). This claim has been based in part on overly literal readings of the Ovidian imagery of exile in Elegia prima, just as similar imagery of exile in the Latin elegy to Thomas Young has been overinterpreted as politically and religiously charged.1 The conclusion of the poem, in which Milton tells Diodati that he is preparing to leave London for Cambridge ‘as soon as possible’ to ‘avoid the infamous halls of faithless Circe’—the seductive goddess who turns Odysseus’s men into beasts in Homer’s Odyssey, and a commonplace personification of sensual temptation in humanist thought—as well as the light-­hearted tone of the poem as a whole, hardly indicate that he has been forced out of Cambridge in disgrace (lines 85–7).2 Nonetheless he does profess his aversion to returning to ‘the threats of a strict master’ (line 15), and this has been read as a specific reference to Chappell in the light of the comments of Milton’s brother Christopher to John Aubrey: ‘His 1st Tutor there [Cambridge] was Mr Chapell, from whom receiving some unkindnesse, he was afterwards (though it seemed [counter to] ye rules of ye Coll:) transferred to the Tuition of one Mr Tovell [Nathaniel Tovey]’. Such an episode would have been regarded with some gravity given the close relationship between a tutor and his pupil, as outlined in James 81

82  c h a p t e r 4

Duport’s rules for ‘Pupills and Schollers’ at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the mid-­seventeenth century: ‘Honour & respect your Tutor & esteem him loco Parentis. Go to your Tutor as to your Oracle upon all occasions, for advice & direction, as also for resolution of any doubt, scruple or difficulty in Religion or Learning’.3 The College tutor was usually engaged directly by the student’s parents, who entrusted the moral and religious welfare, as well as the intellectual training, of their son to him; the tutor’s chamber was ideally an intimate space in which students prayed, rehearsed sermons, disputed, and answered questions. In Milton’s time at Christ’s, Joseph Mede gave daily lectures to his pupils in his chamber, as well as private instruction, and he would then see each one again individually every evening to check on their progress. Yet the relationship between Milton and Chappell may even have ended in violence: above ‘unkindnesse’, Aubrey has later added: ‘whip’t him’. Samuel Johnson thought this experience must have had a profound effect on Milton’s character: ‘I am ashamed to relate what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either university that suffered the publick indignity of corporal correction.’4 Flogging was a conventional practice at grammar school, where Milton would certainly have experienced it: indeed both Alexander Gil and his son were notorious floggers, with Alexander the younger losing the position of High Master of St Paul’s, to which he had succeeded his father in 1635, after being charged with excessive severity towards two boys. A causal relationship between bodily punishment and the acquisition of Latin grammar became axiomatic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: despite objections by Erasmus and leading English humanists such as Roger Ascham—who maintained that ‘love is better than feare, gentlenes better than beating, to bring up a childe rightlie in learnynge’—physical pain was widely deemed necessary not only to regulate pedagogical orthodoxy but to correct the faults inculcated in the vernacular world of the commonalty (the ‘mother tongue’) and prepare boys for the harsh, male world of power and public office to which Latin literacy provided access.5 The endemic violence of education is evident in numerous school statutes of the period and in works such as the much reprinted A short dictionarie

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   83

in Latine and English, verie profitable for young beginners (1553), in which the following are listed as essential vocabulary for the scholar: ‘A rod to doe correction with; to beate; to be beated; A Palmer to beate or strike scholars in the hande’. The birch or ferula, a rod or ruler designed for beating the hand, became emblematic of learning Latin grammar: in the frontispiece to the 1631 printed text of the university play Pedantius, a Latin comedy popular in seventeenth-­century Cambridge, the figure of Pedantius, a grammar teacher or paedagogus, is pictured prominently holding a birch. The Jacobean schoolmaster John Brinsley describes in some detail in his fictional dialogue between two tutors, Ludus Literarius, the range of punishments to be administered to boys in an effort to ‘beate the Latine into their heads also, to helpe to prepare them to speake and parse in latine’. Although one of Brinsley’s interlocutors advises the use of ‘the rodde very sparingly, but onely in greater faults, and on the principall offenders for example and terrour’, he also presents the birch as sanctified by God as an earthly instrument of correction: ‘[God] hath sanctified the rod and correction, to cure the evils of [the boys’] conditions, to drive out that folly which is bound up in their hearts, to save their soules from hell, and to give them wisdome; so it is to be used as Gods instrument to these purposes. To spare them in these cases is to hate them.’6 Aubrey reports that Milton’s first wife, Mary Powell, heard Milton beating his nephews, Edward and John Phillips, until they wept when they were his pupils in the early 1640s (and cites this as one of the reasons why she left Milton weeks after their marriage in 1642 to return to her parents).7 Given the institutionalized relationship between grammar school education and the physical disciplining of boys, Milton’s treatment of his pupils should hardly surprise us (and nor, despite her presumable inexperience of the male world of Latin literacy, should it have surprised Mary Milton).8 It is notable, however, that when Milton employs metaphors of corporal punishment in his writing, it is to object to the treatment of men as though they were still schoolboys. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, first published in 1643 followed by an expanded second edition in 1644, he condemns laws which ‘chastise [men] in mature age with a

84  c h a p t e r 4

boyish rod of correction’. In Areopagitica, he compares Parliament’s 1643 licensing law, under which a work had to be approved by an official committee before publication, to the elementary discipline of the rod: ‘What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school, if we have only scapt the ferular, to come under the fescu [a small stick for pointing at the letters when teaching children to read] of an Imprimatur? If serious and elaborat writings, as if they were no more then the theam of a Grammar lad under his Pedagogue must not be utter’d without the cursory eyes of a . . . licenser[?]’.9 Flogging was an experience that boys supposedly left behind after they had mastered Latin grammar, which was understood as a marker of admission to full manhood—all teaching and academic exercises at the university were in Latin, and the students were expected to converse in Latin (or Greek, if they could)—and students over eighteen were usually regarded as exempt from beating: hence whipping was still prescribed in the 1624 foundational statutes of Pembroke College, Oxford, but only for boys under eighteen. Milton did not reach that age until nearly the end of his second year at Christ’s, so Chappell—who at thirty-­six was older and more experienced than most college tutors in the period, the majority of whom were under thirty—may have felt he was within his rights to employ corporal punishment.10 Nonetheless the embarrassment suffered from being whipped by one’s tutor is suggested by a scene in Thomas Middleton’s comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611). A dim Cambridge student, Tim, has returned to the family home in Cheapside, where his mother declares: ‘You’ll never lin [learn] till I make your tutor whip you; / You know how I served you once at the free-­school / In Paul’s church-­yard’. It turns out Tim has also been a pupil at St Paul’s School. In horror at the prospect, Tim exclaims: O monstrous absurdity! Ne’er was the like in Cambridge since my time; Life, whip a bachelor! You’d be laughed at soundly; Let not my tutor hear you! ’Twould be a jest Through the whole university.11

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   85

In his later life, Milton evidently identified the rod metaphorically both with ‘boyish’ intellectual immaturity and the attempt to control the rational thought of educated men. One major influence on Milton’s thinking on the matter of maturity, and which would be key for his later political thought, was Aristotle’s stipulation in the Nicomachean Ethics, a set text on the Cambridge BA for the study of moral philosophy, that animals and children act in line with their nature and appetites, while adult humans act, or should act, through rational choice, or what Aristotle calls proairesis.12 If Chappell really did whip Milton, and it led to the unusual and technically prohibited event of transfer to another tutor, the cause of the quarrel was less likely to be Milton’s religious disagreement with Chappell, who had become well known for his aversion to Calvinist doctrine—as we shall see in later chapters, there is little to suggest that Milton was much interested in theological dispute during his time at Cambridge—than the degree of pride in his grammar-­school learning that made his fellow Old Pauline Samuel Woodford think himself ‘almost as good as my tutor’.13 Such a sense of superiority seems to have been relatively common among those who had been educated at the best of the grammar schools. Philip Henry, who took his MA from Oxford in 1652, confessed that ‘coming from Westminster School, his attainments in school-­learning were beyond what generally others had that came from other schools; so that he was tempted to think there was no need for him to study much, because it was so easy to him to keep pace with others’.14 There is no sign that Milton might have relaxed in his studies on arriving in Cambridge to find he possessed a superior level of learning to his fellow students; but we shall see that he did express, both in public and private, his disappointment at the commitment of those fellow students to their studies. It may have been the case that Milton found the first year of his curriculum at Christ’s to be a retreading of ground that he already covered at St Paul’s. According to the university statutes of 1570, still in force in 1625, the first year of the BA was to be devoted to classical rhetoric—to teaching students how to write and speak Latin persuasively and to employ tropes and figures to ornament their style—with the set texts des-

86  c h a p t e r 4

ignated as Cicero’s writings on oratory and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. Cicero and Quintilian were already the principal authorities for study of the ars rhetorica in the grammar schools, where the final years were devoted to rhetoric and sometimes known simply as the rhetoric classes.15 The second and third years of the university degree were to be assigned to the study of logic, with the fourth concentrating on moral and natural philosophy. Yet it is clear from the example of the curriculum followed by Joseph Mede at Christ’s that tutors in different colleges followed their own preferences. Mede’s surviving account books show that he preferred to start his students on logic, having them concentrate in particular in their first year on the Systema Logicae (1600) of the prolific German textbook writer Bartholomew Keckermann, although he also introduced them to Aristotle’s daunting Organon.16 Clement Barksdale, who took his MA in 1632, the same year as Milton, suggests how the pride of the best grammar school pupils, so intensively trained in the arts of language and literature, could lead them to shun the less attractive discipline of logic: Some of us, though we come rich in learning from the grammar school, prove but mean fellows in the school of philosophy: whether it be, because in confidence and pride of our forwardnesse above others, we neglect our studies here, or because our fine poetry and oratory steals us away from the more rough and crabbed study of logick.17 In Of Education in 1644, Milton would criticize the old errour of universities not yet well recover’d from the Scholastick grosnesse of barbarous ages, that in stead of beginning with Arts most easie . . . they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of Logick & metaphysicks . . . having but newly left those Grammatick flats & shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction’.18 Chappell’s particular area of expertise was Ramist logic, in which he had been instructed by his own tutor at Christ’s, William Ames. The

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   87

Figure 5. Engraving of Christ’s College, from David Loggan, Cantabrigia illustrata (Cambridge, 1690).

approach to logical analysis developed by the French Calvinist Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus; 1515–72) sought to reform the ‘scholastic’ Aristotelian method into a simplified, unified approach to knowledge which treated all texts, whether classical poetry or the Bible, as a systematic argument which can be reduced to its constituent parts through a series of divisions and dichotomous logical statements. One of the distinctive features of Ramist method was the visualization of this method of bifurcation through a series of bracketed dichotomies revealing the relation of the terms of any ‘matter’. Part of the attraction of Ramist method, with which Christ’s had been particularly associated in the heyday of Ramism at the end of the sixteenth century, was its anti-­ scholastic, anti-­Aristotelian iconoclasm—its claims to practicality and its hostility to the sort of ‘intellective abstractions’ that Milton criticizes

88  c h a p t e r 4

in Of Education. It was partly for this iconoclastic approach that the works of Ramus, a French Huguenot killed in the St Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, were preferred by Puritan educationalists: the Presbyterian Andrew Melville, for example, sought to replace Aristotelian texts of logic and rhetoric with Ramist ones in his attempt to reform the curriculum of St Andrew’s along more Calvinist lines in the late sixteenth century.19 The influence of Ramism on Milton, at least after 1640, can be measured in his own Ars Logicae (Art of Logic; first published 1672), which is based upon the 1601 edition of, and commentary upon, Ramus’s Dialecticae Institutiones (1543) by another Christ’s Fellow, George Downham. It can also be seen in the organization, and important elements of the content, of the De Doctrina Christiana, a work indebted to Ames’s Ramist-­based theological treatise of 1629, Medulla Theologiae (The Marrow of Theology): the proof of several of Milton’s more unorthodox theological conclusions in the De Doctrina Christiana is demonstrated through the Ramist method of dividing fundamental categories into their particular parts, even though by the time Milton was compiling the De Doctrina in the 1650s, Ramist method was widely regarded as outdated. In Of Education, for all his criticism of introducing pupils straight out of grammar school to ‘intellective abstractions’, Milton recommends that instruction in logic should precede that in rhetoric and poetics— although importantly his ideal curriculum is distinguished by his advice that intensive study of all three of these disciplines is delayed until the final years, when the student is between eighteen and twenty-­one and has fully mastered Latin and other languages. Milton perhaps only came to appreciate the centrality of logic and utility of Ramist dialectic as he grew into intellectual maturity. In his first year at Cambridge he may have provoked Chappell with his pride in the level of linguistic attainment that he had already reached, or by being less interested in logic, ‘philosophy’, and Ramist method than in reading classical literature for its poetic imagery and figures of speech. When John Potenger arrived at Oxford in 1664, he decided to acquire ‘just logick and philosophy enough to dispute in [his] turn in the hall, for [he] was addicted most to poetry and making of declamations, two exercises [he] desired to

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   89

excell in’.20 As we shall see in the rest of this chapter and in the next, Milton proved himself to excel both in poetry and the making of declamations during his time at Cambridge.

‘Vehement Study and Emulation’ Milton’s alleged rustication and his dismissive references to his experience of university education in his post-­1640 prose have encouraged the assumption that he was unhappy and unpopular at Cambridge. Yet Aubrey also reports just above the note about the incident with Chappell that Milton ‘was a very hard student in the University, & p[er]formed all his exercises there wth very good Applause’, and this observation is found in all the early accounts of Milton’s life. The Latin prose ‘exercises’ that he collected for publication with his familiar letters in 1674 are records of oral performances in front of his tutors and fellow students in his college and the wider university, and they offer testimony to his success in the conventional academic genres of Caroline Cambridge. These seven preserved exercises, dating from Milton’s time as both an undergraduate and MA student and published over forty years after they were performed, engage with topics that were likely assigned rather than freely chosen, and they were originally oral performances designed to amuse and elicit admiration with their wit and word-­play; yet they also convey, with notable consistency, the intensity of Milton’s investment in the humanist conviction of the mutually constitutive relationship between erudition, eloquence, poetry, and moral virtue. Such public exercises exemplified the close connection between education and emulation (aemulatio) in humanist pedagogic method.21 In Institutio oratoria, a set text for the study of rhetoric at Cambridge, Quintilian insisted that competitive exercises such as disputations (disputationes) and orations (declamationes) performed in a group context would encourage the student orator ‘first to imitate and then to surpass’ his peers: He will derive equal profit from hearing the indolence of a comrade rebuked or his industry commended. Such praise will incite him to

90  c h a p t e r 4

emulation, he will think it a disgrace to be outdone by his contemporaries and a distinction to surpass his seniors. All such incentives provide a valuable stimulus, and though ambition may be a fault in itself, it is often the mother of virtue. (1. 2. 22) This culture of linguistic and intellectual display and performance had been developed at grammar school through the composition and oral performance of Latin prose orations on classical topics, or ‘themes’, and continued into higher education, with candidates for the BA being required to deliver public orations and to appear in public disputations in both the Public Schools and their College, twice as Opponents and twice as Respondents. The Respondent had the onerous task of defending a proposition put forward for debate, while the Opponent had to raise objections to it. After presenting his prepared case, the Respondent had to face the objections of three Opponents and, ‘mustering as much ex tempore Latin as possible, to reiterate their arguments and dispose of them one by one in proper syllogistic style’.22 Obadiah Walker, writing after the Restoration, extolled the virtues of such oral public performances, ‘whether popularly, by orations & speeches, wherein [students] are frequently exercised, or convincingly to learned Men, by their continual Disputations . . . which comprehendeth . . . public and open Argumentation pro & con’. The form of the disputation is educative, Walker insisted, because it ‘puts [Respondents] upon a continued stretch of their wits to defend a case, it makes them quick in replies, intentive upon their subject: where the Opponent useth all means to drive his Adversary from his hold’.23 The speeches that Milton published as Prolusions IV and V in 1674 are from such disputations, held respectively in Christ’s College and the University Schools, in which he acted as Respondent. Another one of his seven Cambridge exercises that Milton chose to preserve and publish in 1674, as Prolusion VI, was an oration, performed as ‘Father’ or master of ceremonies, to a so-­called ‘salting’ at Christ’s. This was a form of festive student entertainment that parodied the conventions of the oral exercises and had developed into a rite of initiation for freshmen, intended to test their capacity for witty argument. In Anthony Wood’s

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   91

account of an Oxford ‘salting’ (a pun on the Latin sales or wit) that he witnessed in 1648, the freshmen were brought into the college hall where ‘they were to speak their speech with an audible voice to the company; which if well done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup of cawdle [spiced wine or ale] and no salted drinke; if indifferently, some cawdle and some salted drink; but if dull, nothing was given to him but salted drink or salt put in college beer, with tucks to boot’.24 The ‘salting’ sounds here relaxed enough in its atmosphere, if open to bullying and with an undercurrent of violence: ‘tucks’ involved trying to draw blood from the dull speaker’s chin through pressing with sharp fingernails. The headnote in 1674 boasts that this show-­piece was performed ‘in the summer vacation, in Christ’s College but to the customary audience of almost all the undergraduate population of Cambridge’. The bawdy, learned wit, the mixture of high and low, and parody of the curriculum that was expected in such performances is evident in Milton’s insistence that anyone in his audience who fails to laugh out loud at his jokes will have eaten so much at the preceding feast that he ‘might express some gastric riddles, not from his Sphinx but from his sphincter; his Posterior Anal-­y tics’—the Posterior Analytics being a part of Aristotle’s great work on logic, the Organon.25 The purpose of competitive oral performances in Latin was to instil a dread of disgrace and humiliation as well as the desire for fame and pre-­eminence. The unusually full account of the Cambridge curriculum attributed to Richard Holdsworth (1590–1649), who became Master of Emmanuel College, cautions that the intensive study of Latin language and rhetoric must be continued throughout a university career, for without that knowledge ‘all the other learning though never so eminent, is in a manner voide and useless; without those you will be baffled in your disputes, disgraced and vilified in public examinations, laught at in speeches and orations. You will never dare to appear in any act of credit in the university’. According to John Brinsley, student exercises ‘constantly observed, together with that strife and contention by adversaries, must needs provoke to a vehement study and emulation, unlesse in such who are of a very servile nature’.26 When Milton chose to publish his student disputations and orations, he called them ‘prolusions’ from

92  c h a p t e r 4

the term prolusio, which strictly denotes only the preliminary speech in an oration. It is likely that he had in mind Cicero’s account of prolusio in De oratore, which emphasizes the combative and competitive context in which such orations were expected to be delivered: ‘the preliminary passage (prolusio) must not be like the skirmishing of Samnite gladiators, who before a fight brandish their spears which they are not going to make any use of in the actual encounter, but must be of such a character as to enable the combatants to employ in the real encounter the very ideas which they have made play with in the introduction’.27 ‘Vehement study and emulation’, to borrow Brinsley’s evocative phrase, was thus expected of those students who would succeed—or emerge victorious—in the educational system at school and university, an expectation that derived from the classical and humanist notion that learning and character were shaped by aemulatio, by ‘an assiduous striving to equal or excel another in anything’. Erasmus, for example, believed that clever boys had a natural ‘eagerness to conquer’ and that competition might encourage achievement where the teacher’s exhortation would fail.28 Milton’s fondness for the aggressive prolusio is clear from the opening of the college oration published as Prolusion I in 1674, almost certainly dating from his undergraduate years, on the comically unpressing question of whether ‘Day or Night is Most Excellent’. He declares at the outset of his oration that he is ‘obliged to negate the first and most important duty of an orator’, which is immediately to secure the goodwill of his audience (the technique known as captatio benevolentiae, considered by Cicero to be key to effective oratory); rather he confronts them: ‘[W]hat good will can I expect from you when in as great an assembly as this I recognize almost every face within eyeshot as unfriendly to me? I seem to have come to play an orator’s part before an utterly unsympathetic audience. Such are the quarrels that the competitive spirit engenders even in colleges.’29 Milton’s competitive innovations in formal rhetoric and his facility in writing Latin for public performance seem to have gained him a reputation, at least within his college. The invitation to act as the ‘Father’ in the Christ’s ‘salting’ may have come in the summer vacation of 1628, or it may have come towards the end of his time at Cambridge, in July

Figure 6. Opening page of Milton’s first Prolusion, in Joannis Miltonii Angli, epistolarum familiarium (1674).

94  c h a p t e r 4

1631—the dating remains uncertain. Milton himself discloses that he was a last-­minute replacement in the role of ‘Father’.30 But certainly even when he was an undergraduate, Milton was being asked to provide Latin verses for use by Fellows of the college. In his letter of 2 July 1628 to Alexander Gil, Milton enclosed a printed copy of verses and disclosed that ‘a certain Fellow of our House, who was going to act as a Respondent in the Philosophical Disputation at this Academic Assembly, entrusted to my Puerility the Verses which annual custom requires to be written on these questions’. These ‘act verses’ comprised a synopsis, printed and distributed to the audience, of the argument delivered orally by the Respondent in a disputation. The occasion for which Milton, then a fourth-­year undergraduate, wrote these verses was the Commencement of 1 July, the ‘greatest and grandest of all the Cambridge rituals’; the Fellow in question may have been Robert Gell (who in 1663 would marry Milton to his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull).31 That Milton’s ghost-­written act verses of 1628—which were likely his first printed poems—were deemed a success is suggested by the recent discovery that two poems that he included in his first collection of 1645, entitled Naturam non pati senium (‘That Nature does not suffer decay’) and De Idea Platonica (‘On the Platonic ideal form’) were also distributed as act verses. They may have been written for the philosophical disputation staged in the Public School rooms at Cambridge on 24 September 1629, in honour of the visiting French ambassador Charles l’Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf, and Henry Rich, Earl of Holland, recently appointed Chancellor of the University by King Charles after the sensational assassination of the previous encumbant, the Duke of Buckingham. The verses would have accompanied the orations delivered as Respondent by a young Fellow of Christ’s, John Forster. If Milton did write the verses for this event, he was probably not even allowed to attend it, as those below the status of MA were not allowed in and he had yet to begin his MA degree. Forster must have been sure that Milton would do a good job, as a good deal was at stake for him: the visits of royalty and court dignitaries were tense occasions for the university, and considerable time and money was spent on organizing appropriate ceremony and entertainment. Three years later, the suicide of the Cam-

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   95

bridge Vice-­Chancellor, Henry Butt, was widely blamed on the disapproval of the visiting King Charles and the royal party of the comedy that Butt organized for their entertainment in Trinity College’s great hall. In the event, Forster seems to have performed well enough at the disputation to impress his peers. Joseph Mede, who was presumably one of the few in the audience who may have known that Milton had written the act verses, reported the following week on ‘an Act at the Schooles well performed’.32 Milton’s abilities as a Latin poet were evidently prized by the academic hierarchy at Christ’s, given the importance of the two occasions for which he wrote act verses (and there may have been others). The invitation to act as ‘Father’ in the Christ’s salting would have given Milton legitimate hope of advancement within the university. Among his contemporaries, Thomas Randolph (1605–35) of Trinity College had acted as Father to a salting in his College in 1627 and then gone on to perform the similar role of ‘Prevaricator’, or licensed satirist of proceedings, at the University Commencement in the summer of 1632, by which stage he was a major Fellow of his college. Randolph, perhaps the most renowned young poet and dramatist at Cambridge during Milton’s time, had already been admitted a minor Fellow of Trinity in 1629 on the grounds that he was a person ‘of those extraordinary parts of wit and learning . . . that scarce an age doth bring forth a better or the like’. The similar motifs and jokes of Milton’s own salting suggest his close attention to Randolph’s earlier performance.33 A perhaps more anxiety-­inducing example of success within his own college was John Cleveland (c. 1613–58), who matriculated at Christ’s in September 1627, two and a half years after Milton. It was Cleveland who was chosen not only to compose but also deliver the Latin speech of welcome to the French ambassador and the Chancellor when they visited Christ’s the day after the disputation in the Schools at which Milton’s act verses may have been used; Cleveland would go on to act as Father not merely to the college revels but to those of the whole university at the Commencement ceremony.34 In 1632, the year Milton left Cambridge, Cleveland was admitted to a Fellowship at St. John’s, and by 1635 he was University Reader in Rhetoric, although the outbreak of the civil wars put an end to his academic career: before that, though, Cleveland and Milton

96  c h a p t e r 4

appeared together in the Cambridge volume of elegies for Edward King, Justa Edouardo King, Naufrago (1638). Cleveland would go on to become one of the most skilful of the royalist poets and polemicists, and his much-­circulated satirical and political verse would influence the style of Milton’s own satirical sonnets of the mid-­1640s. It was not the case, of course, that the sort of dedication to scholarship and fervour for competitive academic exercises demanded in pedagogical treatises, and seemingly displayed by Milton, were embraced by all students. During the early seventeenth century at Christ’s, the ‘sizars’, or poorer scholars who paid their way through university by acting as servants—Milton’s future friend Andrew Marvell (1621–78) was a sizar at Trinity College—became increasingly outnumbered by ‘pensioners’, who paid fees and were usually the sons of the better-­off. These pensioners included Milton and his younger brother Christopher, the sons of a successful London citizen. In 1627–8, when Milton was in his third year at Christ’s, thirty-­four undergraduates were admitted as pensioners compared with nine sizars, even though the college had been originally founded to provide an education for poor scholars. Pensioners were more likely to leave university without finishing their degree—Christopher Milton spent only five terms at Christ’s before leaving to study law at the Middle Temple. There were also increasing numbers of ‘Fellow-­commoners’, sons of the gentry or nobility who ate with the Fellows and often brought their own servants; they did not usually intend to take a degree and at some colleges were, according to one contemporary commentator, able to ‘chuse whether they would be obliged to the public scholastick exercises of the house’. That even the most serious tutors regarded themselves as catering for the all-­round education of a ‘gentleman’ is suggested by the fact the two books recommended most frequently to his students at Christ’s by Joseph Mede were conduct books on good manners, deportment, and practical civility: Henry Peacham’s The Compleat Gentleman (1622) and Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo, first published in 1558 and translated into English under various titles, including The Refin’d Courtier (1663).35 Most students did, however, complete the four years of the BA degree and most did so with the

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   97

intention of entering the Church: of the fifteen other students admitted to Christ’s in the same half-­year as Milton, eight became clergymen.36

‘Blind Illiteracy’ Milton was apparently dismissive of the level of learning attained by these fellow students before they started studying theology (which was not usually taught in the BA course) in preparation for the ministry. In the letter to Gil of 2 July 1628, by which time Milton was halfway through his fourth and final year of the BA degree, he complains: There is really hardly anyone among us, as far as I know, who, almost completely unskilled and unlearned [rudis & profanus] in Philology and Philosophy alike, does not flutter off to Theology unfledged, quite content to touch that also most lightly, learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever and patching it with worn-­out pieces from various sources—a practice carried far enough to make one fear that the priestly Ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our Clergy.37 The deficiencies of Milton’s fellow students lie in both ‘philology’, the intensive study of languages and literatures, and ‘philosophy’, which here probably stands for the remaining branches of learning, in particular logic, beside the principal disciplines which were conventionally taken to comprise the studia humantitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy).38 The private criticism of his fellow students in the letter to Gil is repeated in the representation of the majority of his college audience in the first Prolusion, using the same image of their speech as a flimsy patchwork lazily stitched together from various authorities: ‘Strip them of their patches that they have begged from our most modern authors and—by the Eternal—you will find them as empty as a bean pod’.39 But in Milton’s letter to Gil this dichotomy between Milton’s erudite friend and rude fellow students assumes a significance which is greater than the personal: the inadequacy of clerical learning threatens to have national consequences by returning the

98  c h a p t e r 4

­ nglish clergy to a condition of ‘Ignorance’ (Ignorantia), personified to E emphasize its monstrous nature. The condition to which Milton thought the country risked being returned by such neglect is similarly depicted in the public context of the college oration published as Prolusion VII, on the topic ‘Learning brings more blessings to Men than Ignorance’ (Beatiores reddit homines ars quam ignorantia), and probably performed in late 1630 or 1631. The neglect of true learning threatens the religious as well as the intellectual condition of the whole of Europe, returning it to the state of ‘a few hundred years ago’, when blind illiteracy had penetrated and entrenched itself everywhere, nothing was heard in the schools but the absurd doctrines of drivelling monks, and that profane and hideous monster, Ignorance [prophanum & informe monstrum, Ignorantia], assumed the gown and lorded it on our empty platforms and pulpits and in our deserted professorial chairs. Then Piety went in mourning, and Religion sickened and flagged.40 The consequence of allowing ‘blind illiteracy’ to ‘entrench’ itself once more among the university-­trained clergy will be a return to the ‘dark age’ of scholasticism and this will lead, ultimately, to a reversal of the Reformation. In the oration that he delivered in the Public Schools and published as Prolusion III, ‘Against Scholastic Philosophy’, Milton opposed the profitable and pleasurable study of poetry, rhetoric, and history (in that order) to the ‘futile and barren controversies’ of scholasticism, ‘born in the caves of monks’, where the ‘sound of Apollo’s lyre never reaches’. While what exactly was taught at Oxford and Cambridge in the early modern period remains a matter of some debate, it has become increasingly clear that the humanist study of language and literature was central to the curricula, in contrast to previously accepted scholarly claims for a continuing concentration on scholastic philosophy in the first half of the seventeenth century. Milton’s attack on scholastic method in his Prolusions is thus less likely to reflect the main focus of the curriculum at the time as to be invoking conventional and crowd-­

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   99

pleasing tropes of anti-­scholastic rhetoric, commonplace in humanist educational theory. Such comic deployment of scholastic convention is evident in the English verses that Milton (unconventionally) added to the sixth Prolusion, or ‘salting’, in which he humorously compares his college ‘Sons’, the freshmen, to the ten ‘Predicaments’ or categoriae of Aristotle, addressing the eldest son as ‘Substance’. In the oratio of Prolusion VI, he cites Erasmus’s ‘most ingenious’ satire on scholastic ‘duncery’ in the Moriae Encomium (1511; The Praise of Folly), signalling his allegiance to the key works of the early humanist tradition.41 At the same time, the residual presence of scholastic subject matter in Milton’s Cambridge is seen in the evident familiarity of his audiences with scholastic terminology and from the set topics of his disputation speeches, published as Prolusions IV and V—‘In the destruction of any substance there can be no resolution into first matter’ and ‘Partial forms are not found in an animal besides its whole form’. In Of Education, as we have seen, Milton would later attack the English universities for their persistence in teaching ‘Scholastick grosnesse’, which discourages students from true learning and makes them hasten ‘either to an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous Divinity’. While scholastic tradition did not dominate the Cambridge curriculum in the way that Milton polemically claims in Of Education, there are nonetheless anticipations of this later attack in the letter to Gil and Prolusion VII.42 The phrase in Milton’s seventh Prolusion that has been translated above as ‘blind illiteracy’ is caecus inertia, more literally blind ‘artlessness’, with the sense also of crudeness, laziness, and impotence. Milton uses the same term, iners, in Ad Patrem when describing to his father how his education in languages and poetry has made him one of the learned elite, who shall no longer ‘mingle, a figure obscure, with the witless populace, but my footsteps will avoid eyes profane’ (‘Jamque nec obscurus populo miscebor inerti, / Vitabuntque oculos vestigia nostra profanos’). Profanos here has the sense not merely of ‘profane’ but also of both ‘uninitiated’ in and ‘contemptuous of ’ sacred matters—the same term is used of Milton’s fellow Cambridge students who enter the clergy

100  c h a p t e r 4

with insufficient culture (rudis et profanus) in the personal letter to Gil and to describe the ‘monster, Ignorance’, in the seventh Prolusion.43 Milton thus distinguished in Ad Patrem his own refinement of learning and eloquence from the condition of the ‘brainless mob’ (to adopt another possible rendering of caecus inertia) by employing the same terms in which he had earlier condemned the prospect of clerical ignorance at Cambridge in both private letter and public oration. The Latin rudis has the sense of ‘unwrought, unformed, inexperienced’, and by extension ‘uneducated, unlearned; ignorant; lacking in knowledge or book learning’. In the early modern period ‘rude’ thus also had connotations of unformed and shapeless matter—and so rudis is close to iners—and, by political analogy, was used to describe the mass of the people that requires ordering and government, as in the ‘rude mis­ govern’d hands’ of Shakespeare’s Richard II (5. 2. 5) and ‘ragged multitude / Of hinds and peasants, rude and merciless’ in Henry IV, part 2 (4. 4. 32–3). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the ‘bookmen’ are determined to be ‘singuled’ or distinguished from the ‘rude multitude’ of the ‘unlettered’ (5. 1. 81–90).44 In describing his fellow Cambridge students as rudis et profanus, Milton seeks to distinguish himself and his friend Gil from those men who are uncultivated by learning and indeed are contemptuous of it. In praising Gil’s ability to judge poetry, in contrast to the ignorant opinions of his peers at university, he echoes Cicero’s appeal in Pro Archia poeta to the ‘most refined gentlemen’ (humanissimi homines) to recognize the sanctity of poetry: ‘Then, gentlemen of the jury, let this, the poet’s reputation, be holy in the eyes of such refined gentlemen as yourselves, a name to which no barbarism has ever done violence. The rocks and wildernesses make answer to his voice; oft times by his song ferocious beasts are swayed and brought to a standstill: and are we, who have been instructed in the best teachings, not to be affected by the poet’s voice?’ The influence of Cicero’s praise for the sanctity of poetry on Milton is apparent in a digression in the first Prolusion, with little relevance to his given topic, on how poets created society by settling ‘men in fixed habitations who had been wandering like wild beasts in the forests and on the mountains, and because they founded states and by their divine

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   101

inspiration were the first to teach all the arts of which we are the heirs today—thanks to their presentation in the alluring disguise of poetry’.45 Those who possess the refinement to appreciate poetry are defined in opposition to beasts (bestiae) and barbarians (barbaria). Cicero emphasized, both in De oratore and also in De officiis (Of Duties), one of the key humanist works of moral philosophy and a standard text for study in the upper forms of the early modern grammar school, that humanitas should be conceived of in terms of a scale of potentiality rather than as a given nature: humanitas can increase, or indeed regress back towards the level of the bestial, dependent on the extent to which intellectual and verbal skills are honed; and these skills are at their most refined in rhetoric and poetry.46 The term barbarus was inherited by the Romans from the Greeks, who used barbaros as an antonym of citizen and to denote a foreigner whose speech sounded like babbling to Greek ears: a close association in the Greek mind between intelligible speech and reason made it possible to take the view that ‘those who were devoid of logos [meaning both discourse and reason] in one sense might also be devoid of it in another . . . the Greeks’ failure to recognize the barbaroi amounted, in effect, to a denial of their humanity’.47 In Of Education, Milton laments the ‘ill habit’ that students develop at English universities of ‘wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom’ through being forced to ‘compose Theams, verses, and Orations’—precisely those various academic exercises in which Milton apparently excelled— before having mastered their grammar. They thus become ‘deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements.’48 In Greek thought, the barbarian was further identified with what Aristotle called the ‘natural slave’, defined as one who lacked the rational power to master his or her own passions and therefore had to be ruled by those who possessed a greater capacity for reason, manifest in the level of their (Greek) language skills. In the Politics, Aristotle simply assumes that ‘barbaroi and slaves are by nature one’. The distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘manual’ arts in Roman philosophy was also derived from the Greeks: Aristotle distinguishes between ‘arts mechanical’, which involve bodily actions performed in the service of others, and so are ‘menial and servile’, and the ‘liberal arts quite proper for a freeman

102  c h a p t e r 4

to acquire’. The instruction in the ‘liberal arts’ that defined humanitas was thus the sort of intellectual knowledge that the Romans believed could be obtained only by liberi, or ‘freemen’—those who were not slaves (servi), in the sense of being under the power of someone else.49 Liberi was conventionally rendered as ‘gentlemen’ in early modern English: in 1580 William Harrison defined an English gentleman as, among other things, one who ‘abideth in the university, giving his mind to his booke, or professeth physicke and the liberall sciences’. As late as Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, ‘liberal’ was defined (negatively) at once in terms of birth and intellectual capacity: ‘Not mean; not low in birth; not low in mind’. Hence John Marston’s scorn in an imitation of Roman verse satire for ‘each Mechanick slave / Each dunghill peasant’; or the categorization of the artisan players as ‘rude mechanicals’ in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.50 The cultivation of humanitas was dependent upon personal and civic liberty in Greek and Roman thought, on the condition of not being enslaved, and this fundamental distinction at the heart of the classical tradition between those who live in liberty and those who live in servitude, measured in their intellectual attainment and breadth of thought rather than their social status and material wealth, would be of vital importance to Milton’s political development during the civil wars. Milton invokes, then, a nexus of associations in his Cambridge letters and exercises that were commonplace in classical and humanist conceptions of the relationships between language, learning, human nature, and the social order; but what is notable about Milton’s designation of rudis et profanus is that it encompasses fellow university students who would all have had some sense of themselves as ‘gentlemen’ due to their university studies, and in some cases, such as the Fellow-­commoners, would certainly have had a better claim to have been born into ‘gentle’ status than Milton himself. The implication is that their ‘rudeness’ reduces them not only to a lower intellectual level but to a lower social and moral level—even to the level of the slave. Milton’s student works and correspondence, immersed in the cloistered exercises of the college and university, show him to conceive of profession of the liberal arts in terms of the Ciceronian scale of humanitas, according to which men

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   103

could become more or less ‘free’ depending on their own intellectual progress and virtuous ability to subordinate their bestial passions to their reason—even if the initial opportunity of accumulating humanitas had, in institutions such as Christ’s, increasingly come to depend upon social background. (The room for alternative, or competing, perspectives on the matter of what constituted gentility is evident in Harrison’s reference, in his chapter ‘Of Universities’, to gentlemen as ‘those whome their race and bloud, or at the least their vertues[,] doo make noble and knowne’.51)

‘New Rotten Sophistrie’ In the opening of Prolusion I, Milton applied the classical language of social distinction between the elite educated in liberal knowledge and the ‘brainless mob’ to make a merely intellectual distinction between those of his auditors in Christ’s College who agreed with his arguments and those who did not: ‘I see here and there a few whose expressions silently but by no means uncertainly indicate how friendly their wishes are. I should rather have their approval—however few they be—than that of countless legions of ignorant fellows who have no mind, no reasoning faculties, no sound judgment.’52 These ignorant listeners are reduced to the bestial, likened to frogs who are unable even to croak in response. In the context of a college exercise, this berating of the audience was likely appreciated as part of the rhetorical performance. Yet collegial jokiness seems harder to argue for in the considerably more complex and lengthy oration published as Prolusion VII, in which he tackles a topic in which he is intellectually and morally invested. Here the Ciceronian notion of a scale of humanitas is extended to the nation and the continent, warning of the ultimate consequence of clerical rudeness as a return to a medieval dark age of enslavement to that ‘profane and hideous monster, Ignorance’. In the second chapter, we saw how this association of a barbarous anti-­intellectualism with the spirit that dominated medieval Europe was conventional in humanist thought, and written into the Erasmian statutes of St Paul’s School, which distinguish emphatically between those who have acquired greater humanitas

104  c h a p t e r 4

through their intensive liberal education in the studia humanitatis and the ‘rude multitude’ who remain ‘barbarous in speech’ and bestial behaviour. In his dialogue The Antibarbarians, Erasmus excoriates the ‘army of yokels’ who despise ‘the humanities’ as like ‘ravening wild beasts’; far more dangerous, however, are the scholastics who apply the wrong method to the ‘best authors’, and by so doing ‘have managed to confuse, corrupt and overturn everything with their futile efforts . . . It is like someone trying to wipe a speck of dust off a purple robe with hands smeared with ordure’. What happened between Colet and Lily and the Elizabethan educational theorists such as Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham who shaped later sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century attitudes to learning was the confessionalization of humanist educational philosophy, wrought by the English Reformation. The Renaissance humanist representation, stretching back to Petrarch and cultivated by Erasmus, of the medieval period as a ‘dark age’ in which the light of classical culture languished, and was almost extinguished by scholasticism, naturally lent itself to polemical attack on the Roman Catholic Church as having suppressed and corrupted learning in the interests of preserving its own tyrannical rule.53 Ascham’s depiction of the state of university and clerical learning under the medieval Church in the second book of The Scholemaster— ostensibly a guide to ‘the ready way to the Latin tong’—exemplifies the assumptions of Protestant humanism that inform the student Milton’s sense of how a decline in educational standards at the universities will presage a return to the rule of ‘priestly Ignorance’. Ascham recounts how his own Cambridge college, St. John’s, had fostered humanist learning in the aftermath of the English Reformation, and how several of the prominent Fellows of St. John’s in the 1530s and 1540s, pre-­eminently Sir John Cheke, who had been Ascham’s tutor and also tutor to the Protestant King Edward VI, and Sir Thomas Smith, had promoted the study of classical languages and literatures to the point where they flourished ‘in Cambridge, as ever they did in Grece and in Italie’. Everything changed in 1553, however, when Edward VI died and Mary I ascended the throne, turning England back to Roman Catholicism. According to

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   105

Ascham, some of the Catholics who held rank under Mary intruded ignorant priests into Fellowship, who wore the external trappings of the clergy and exploited the material benefits of an academic position, but were empty of godly learning: [They] did labor to perswade, that ignorance was better than knowledge, which they ment, not for the laitie onelie, but also for the greatest rable of their spiritualtie, what other pretense openlie so ever they made: and therefore did som of them at Cambrige (whom I will not name openlie,) cause hedge priestes fette oute of the contrie, to be made fellowes in the universitie: saying, in their talke privilie, and declaring by their deedes openlie, that he was, felow good enough for their tyme, if he could were a gowne and a tipet [a ceremonial scarf worn by clergy] cumlie, and have hys crowne shorne faire and roundlie, and could turne his Portesse [book of prayers or hymns] and pie readilie[.] The ‘frute of this seade’ was at once a decay in Christian doctrine and discipline, and a regression in humanist learning, with the barbarisms of medieval scholasticism, or ‘sophistrie’, restored to pedagogical practice: Verely, judgement in doctrine was wholy altered: order in discipline very sore changed: the love of good learning, began sodenly to wax cold: the knowledge of the tonges (in spite of some that therein had florished) was manifestly contemned: and so, ye way of right studie purposely perverted: the choice of good authors of mallice confownded. Olde sophistrie (I say not well) not olde, but that new rotten sophistrie began to beard and sholder logicke in her owne tong: yea, I know, that heades were cast together, and counsell devised, that Duns [Scotus], with all the rable of barbarous questionistes, should have dispossessed of their place and rowmes, Aristotle, Plato, Tullie, and Demosthenes[.]54 The fate of Cheke himself was exemplary for Ascham of how learning had suffered under the tyrannical rule of Mary: after leaving England

106  c h a p t e r 4

when Mary came to the throne, Cheke had been seized by the Spanish on the continent in 1556, committed to the Tower of London, and eventually submitted to recantation and conversion through fear of execution. He died the following year, not living to see the restoration of Protestantism to England. Ascham is typical of Tudor Protestant humanism in his vehement conviction that the ‘way of right studie’—in other words, the Erasmian philosophy that biblical knowledge will be increased through the intensive grammatical study of Latin and Greek authors—can only flourish when it is fostered by a godly state; and, for Ascham, the reverse proposition is just as true: the Protestant Church and the godly state are buttressed by the flourishing of learning and eloquence. Ascham emphasizes this mutually constitutive relationship between learning, eloquence, and right doctrine, whether in philosophy or religion, at the beginning of his account of the importance of imitatio, the imitation of good literary models, in developing the eloquence of students: ‘For all soch Authors, as be fullest of good matter and right judgement in doctrine, be likewise alwayes, most proper in wordes, most apte in sentence, most plaine and pure in uttering the same.And contrariwise, in those two tonges [Latin and Greek], all writers, either in Religion, or any sect of Philosophie, who so ever be founde fonde in judgement of matter, be commonlie found as rude in uttering their mynde’. In Ascham’s historical account of the rise and fall of Cambridge learning, all the miseries of the Marian reign ‘had their end 16 Novemb. 1558’, when Mary I died and Elizabeth I ascended to the throne, since when ‘there be in Cambridge againe, many goodly plantes . . . which are like to grow to mightie great timber, to the honor of learning, and great good of their contrie’.55 The Cambridge correspondence and exercises that Milton chose to preserve, particularly the fuller, more impassioned Prolusion VII, offer a glimpse into the student Milton’s understanding of the integral relationships in a nation state between learning and religion. This understanding was shaped by post-­Reformation humanist versions of English and European history such as Ascham offers in The Scholemaster, and

p h i l o l o g y a n d p h i l o s op h y   107

their accounts of the waxing and waning of learning in relation to the religious government of a nation. The subtitle given to Prolusion VII in the 1674 printed text—‘In Sacario habita pro Arte. Oratio’—reveals the defence of knowledge was performed in the College chapel, and implicitly asserts the place of learning in religion. Some sixteen years later, Milton would deliver an apostrophe to the ‘Soul of Sir John Cheke’ in one of his satirical sonnets, contrasting in its final lines his own age with that of Cheke, which ‘Hated not Learning wors than Toad or Asp; / When thou taught’st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek’.56 During the later 1640s, Milton would regard the return to ‘priestly Ignorance’ among the Protestant clergy that he had warned about in fairly conventional terms in Caroline Cambridge as having become a reality, and one that might require a political revolution to alter.

CHAPTER 5

•

Beginning as a Poet

Fatal Vespers King James I died on 27 March 1625, some six weeks after Milton was admitted to Christ’s College. Cambridge produced an anthology of Latin and Greek verse, Cantabrigiensium Dolor et Solamen, to mark the death of the monarch and the accession of his son, Charles. As a first-­ year undergraduate, at a college with little representation in the volume—King’s College men contributed sixteen poems to the anthology, compared to only two from Christ’s—Milton would hardly have expected to feature, regardless of how lofty a sense of his poetic facility he might already have developed. (Although he might have observed that the precocious Thomas Randolph, who had matriculated at Trinity College less than year earlier, contributed a longish Latin poem to the Cambridge anthology later in 1625 for the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.) The closest Milton got to writing an epitaph for James are four Latin epigrams—pointed, witty verses that in ancient Greece and Rome were originally inscribed on tombs—between four and twelve lines in length, all entitled In Proditionem Bombardicam (On the Gunpowder Plot), and grouped in the 1645 Poems with a fifth epigram on the topic of gunpowder itself, In Inventorum Bombardae (On the Inventor of Gunpowder); and the 226-­line In Quintum Novembris (On the Fifth of November), which turned out to be the longest Latin poem that Milton would ever write. Milton’s topic in these poems is James’s escape from assassination near the beginning of his reign, when the conspiracy of a group of Roman Catholics to blow up king and Parliament was 108

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   109

foiled on 5 November 1605. In Quintum Novembris was probably written in Cambridge in the autumn of 1626 to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot—the headnote in the 1645 Poems informs us that the poet was Anno aetatis 17, a phrase which is usually used in the volume to mean his age at the time of composition—and it can reasonably be presumed, given that the epigrams seem to prepare the way for the much fuller treatment of the same topic in In Quintum Novembris, that they were composed around the same time. The previous autumn is less likely, for soon after Milton arrived in Cambridge, the university had to shut down due to plague and did not reopen fully until December of 1625. The pressure of James’s recent death is felt: the poet addresses the ghost of Guy Fawkes, the explosives expert in the Catholic cell, who is represented as the personification of the apocalyptic ‘Beast’ of Roman Catholicism, and declares that ‘James has now gone to join the starry brotherhood, at a ripe old age, without the help of you or your infernal gunpowder’ (lines 5–6).1 All four epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot play on the supposed irony that the conspirators sought to blow James up to heaven even while their Pope condemned him to hell; but only this one (placed second of the four in the 1645 Poems), makes explicit reference to James having died. In the first of the epigrams, Milton jokes about about Fawkes’s ‘perverse sense of devotion’ (line 4) in attempting to effect the king’s apotheosis, or ascension to semi-­divinity, in the manner of the prophet Elijah, who was swept up to heaven in a fiery chariot before he could die (2 Kings 2: 11). As Milton puts it in the fourth and briefest of the four epigrams, Rome now wants to ‘elevate [ James] all the way up to the god above’ (line 4). Images of apotheosis were associated with biblical figures such as Elijah but also with Roman emperors, who from Augustus to Constantine were depicted after their death as ascending to the gods on a giant eagle or in a chariot.2 Jacobean poets and artists had commonly identified James’s reign with that of Augustus, a period in Rome’s history marked by comparative peace after a bloody civil war, the patronage of great writers such as Virgil, and, crucially, the birth of Christ. The opening of In Quintum Novembris adopts this conventional representation of James as rex pacificus, the ‘peace-­bearing’

110  c h a p t e r 5

(line 5) monarch who brought unity and stability to Britain by joining the crown of England with that of his native Scotland. Milton celebrates James in terms of his peaceful reign, union of the English and Scottish crowns, and final apotheosis in the style of the Roman emperors—anticipating exactly the themes of three large canvases painted by Rubens, the Flemish Baroque painter, on the commission of Charles I, and installed on the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1636 (where they remain today). The epigrams also reveal Milton to have been reading James’s own works of religious controversy, specifically the king’s justification of the Oath of Allegiance, which was required of all his subjects in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. Milton refers in the third of the epigrams to how James, in the ‘Premonition’ prefixed to the second edition of his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance in 1609, had ‘made fun of the fire that purges the soul and without which the celestial dwelling is impossible’ (lines 1–2)—a reference to the Roman Catholic doctrine, rejected and ridiculed by Protestants, that the souls of the dead undergo purification in the fires of Purgatory before being sped to heaven by the prayers, offerings, and donations of friends and relatives. James’s ‘Premonition’ was primarily a response to the arguments against the Oath of Allegiance advanced by the formidable Jesuit cardinal, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621): James mocks ‘Purgatorie and all the trash depending thereupon . . . Bellarmine cannot find any grounds for it in all the Scriptures . . . as for me, I am sure there is a Heaven and a Hell, proemium et poena [reward and punishment], of the Elect and reprobate’.3 The controversy initiated an array of English Protestant attacks on Bellarmine, as well as a fashion among learned Englishmen interested in theological controversy of compiling commonplace books, or notebooks of quotations and references culled from reading and stored for later use, that were organized according to standard categories of polemical response to Bellarmine. There is some evidence from cross-­references in his extant commonplace book that Milton himself compiled such a theological notebook during the 1630s, which is now lost; if so, his undergraduate reading of James’s anti-­Bellarmine works would have laid its foundations and perhaps even initiated its composition.4 The logic un-

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   111

derlying the Protestant abolition of Purgatory would eventually lead Milton beyond Lutheran and Calvinist orthodoxy to one of his more significant and unusual theological conclusions—that the soul is completely unified with the body and thus dies with it. Indeed young Milton’s fascination with apotheosis, with bodily ascension to the heavens—a theme that we will find repeatedly in the early poetry, both secular and devotional—may already hint at a dissatisfaction with orthodox Protestant ideas of the separation at death between the material body and an immaterial, immortal soul.5 The focus of these Gunpowder Plot poems is finally less on the recently departed James, however, than on the demonic threat of Roman Catholicism. In Quintum Novembris features the first appearance of the Miltonic Satan, envious at the sight of a peaceful, fertile Jacobean England, and enraged that the English people are ‘worshipping the holy divinity of the true God’ (lines 33–4). The depiction anticipates Satan’s first view of Eden and Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost (‘but much more envy seis’d / At sight of all this World beheld so faire’; 3. 553–4). Satan disguises himself as St Francis, with ‘a cowl hung from his tonsured head’ (lines 82–3), and comes to the Pope in the night, planting the idea of the Gunpowder Plot in his mind—as Satan will come to Eve in a dream in Paradise Lost—promising that the catastrophe will cause ‘the Marian age [to] return at last to that region’ (line 127; Sæcula sic illic tandem Mariana redibunt). A distinguishing feature of neo-­Latin verse is the drawing of historical and cultural equivalence between the classical and the contemporary Christian world: the triple pun in the Latin here is that the success of the plot will herald a return to the Catholic England of Mary I and thus also of worship of the Virgin Mary, and that this reign will also be like a return to the notoriously harsh and bloody rule of Gaius Marius, Roman consul of the second century BC. Milton’s Gunpowder Plot poems are indebted to the satirical, anti-­ clerical neo-­Latin poetry of James I’s own childhood tutor, the great Scottish humanist and (in his later life) Calvinist George Buchanan (1506–82). Buchanan’s Somnium (A Dream), first published in 1566, has St Francis appear at the foot of the sleeping poet’s bed, ‘a holy habit in his hands, the hood with a cord’, enticing him to join a Franciscan order

112  c h a p t e r 5

whose members, the poet objects in response, ‘cheat, flatter, and prevaricate as occasion prompts’ (lines 7, 23). Buchanan’s Franciscanus (The Franciscan; first published 1566) offers a thousand lines of eloquent ridicule of ‘the monkish mind, inflamed by greed’: the Franciscan order is characterized by its ability to deceive and seduce through the performance of godliness, leading ‘astray the stupid people with the show of piety’ (lines 14, 53). The corrupt uses to which the notion of Purgatory are put are a particular target for Buchanan, who repeatedly represents the monks as hypocrites whose outward piety and humble dress conceal a rapacious desire for material gain: Let the flames burst forth from the mouth of Purgatory, Their heat unendurable, except that they do not burn forever, But may be put out by prayers, and quenched by holy water, Diminished by indulgences, alleviated by masses. This is a rich field, the tillage of our holy Father. (lines 642–6) Milton’s lament in his 1628 letter to Alexander Gil that his fellow students were entering the ministry with ‘learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever[,] and patching it with worn-­out pieces from various sources’, echoes the anti-­clericalism of Buchanan, who has his Franciscan friar boast: And there is no need to study the nonsense of grammar, Or spend time in the gloomy schools. Just choose a few snippets From books by the ancient authors, three periods of Cicero, As many verses of Virgil, or half an ode by Horace. Have these ready as seasonings for every sermon[.]6 Buchanan’s poetry is animated by the same polemical connection between the dominance of Roman Catholic clericalism and the decline and abuse of classical learning that structures the thought of post-­ Reformation humanists such as Ascham. In composing In Quintum Novembris, Milton was likely also trying to imitate the Latin style and theme of a contemporary: his friend Gil, with whom, as we have seen, he exchanged Greek and Latin poems and whom he hailed for his erudition and ability to judge poetry. When

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   113

scores of Catholic worshippers died in a collapsed secret chapel in the French ambassador’s residence in Blackfriars, close to St Paul’s, on 26 October 1623—Milton was fourteen at the time—Gil had celebrated the catastrophe as providential revenge for the Gunpowder Plot in his poem In Ruinam Cameræ Papisticæ (c. 1623; first published, 1632). Gil was far from extreme in doing so: the event was widely interpreted in England as providential, and pamphlets were still being published about it as late as 1657, namely Samuel Clarke’s The Fatal Vespers: A True and Full Narrative of that Signal Judgement of God upon the Papists, by the Fall of the House in Black Friers, London, Upon Their Fifth of November, 1623. (The episode was deemed ‘their Fifth of November’ because 26 October in England equated to 5 November in the Gregorian calendar used in Rome; Gil is quick to point this out in his poem.) There are hints that Milton was inspired by Gil’s poem. For instance, the same pun on the reign of Mary / Marius is found in Gil’s poem (Marianque precantes redire sæcula; line 8), closely followed, as in In Quintum Novembris, by the assumption that Catholic saints and feast days are equivalent to the polytheistic rituals in worship of pagan deities: Milton’s Satan commands the Pope to ‘welcome the support of the gods and goddesses and all those divinities that are celebrated in your feast-­days’ (lines 129–30), while Gil’s poem opens with Rome, immediately identified as the Antichrist, invoking its gods (Dios) and praying to its divinities (numina).7 Gil was likely one of the readers whom Milton had in mind for In Quintum Novembris, and there is reason to think Milton’s early verse may have been read by contemporaries alongside Gil’s poems: an English translation of Gil’s In Ruinam Cameræ Papisticæ by an unknown hand is found in a large manuscript verse miscellany, belonging to the great antiquary Elias Ashmole (1617–92), that also contains an early variant of the lyric that Milton called ‘On Time’ in the 1645 Poems, but which is entitled ‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’ in the Ashmole manuscript, a title closer to the one that Milton originally gave the poem in his own manuscript draft.8 The manuscript translation of Gil’s poem is notable for its striking comparison of the Blackfriars episode with Samson’s collapsing of the Philistine temple in Judges 16: ‘Thus when Philistines griev’d Gods Israël / The house of Dagon on a suddaine fell, / Suddaine

114  c h a p t e r 5

destruction did them all surprize / That scoff ’t at matchles Samsons miseries’. Gil’s poetic representation of the supposedly providential destruction of the Blackfriars chapel may have lingered long in Milton’s memory.9

‘That Little Swimming Isle’ In Quintum Novembris and the Gunpowder Plot epigrams should also be connected to wider, institutional traditions of composing poetry: the composition of Latin epigrams on the subject of the foiled Gunpowder Plot seems to have been a set exercise in the grammar schools and universities, encouraged by official government and church commemorations of the event.10 Sermons of thanksgiving were delivered at public pulpits such as Paul’s Cross, outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and at St. Mary’s, the University Church in Cambridge. Milton would have heard the sermons at Paul’s Cross in his youth, which were characterized by their vitriol towards Roman Catholicism as much as their giving of thanks for the deliverance of James: as we saw in Chapter 1, Richard Stock, rector of the Bread Street parish in which Milton grew up, delivered the first anniversary sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1606, in which he preached a ‘national warning’ on the dangers of popery and called on James to impose harsher measures against Catholics in England.11 Colleges such as Christ’s had their own celebrations, and Milton may well have performed his Gunpowder poems in front of his fellow students, just as he performed before them the various exercises of oration and declamation required of a student. There is some evidence of Gunpowder Plot celebrations at Oxford and Cambridge including oral performance of Latin poetry composed for the occasion. One of the extant English poems of John Cleveland, Milton’s fellow Christ’s student, is entitled ‘On the Pouder Plot’ and refers to the topic of the poem as ‘This Annuall subject’ (line 15).12 As we saw in the last chapter, Milton’s success as a writer of ‘acts verses’ had brought him to the attention of the college hierarchy, and the successful composition of Latin poetry offered a route to reputation and preferment in the college. The composition of epigrams on sacred themes was a standard practice in Caroline

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   115

Cambridge: satirical epigrams such as Milton’s Gunpowder poems, which seized on aspects of Catholic devotion or theology, were in effect parodic inversions of the sacred epigram. In Quintum Novembris also derives from a Cambridge tradition of neo-­Latin ‘brief epic’ on the topic of the Gunpowder Plot, although most of the examples date from comparatively early in James’s reign. The most prominent example of a brief epic on the plot, Phineas Fletcher’s Locustae, was printed in Cambridge in 1627, along with an English paraphrase, The Apollyonists; but manuscripts of the Latin poem were being circulated by Fletcher as early as 1612, while he was a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.13 The genre is characterized by a combination of parodic epic language satirizing the failure of the Gunpowder Plot with a tone of genuine epic grandeur in proclaiming James as a second Augustus. Milton’s combination of anti-­Catholic satire and elevated Virgilian imagery likely has one source in Fletcher’s Locustae / Apollyonists, which he would have to have seen in manuscript if the 1626 date of In Quintum Novembris is correct. The Locustae begins with Satan rousing the ‘counsel’ of devils in Hell to rise up against England and its Protestant king, who is presented as fighting the demonic forces of papistry with his pen rather than his spear: That little swimming Isle above the rest, Spight of our spight, and all our plots, remaines And growes in happines: but late our nest, Where wee and Rome, and blood, and all our traines, Monks, Nuns, dead, and live idols, safe did rest: Now there (next th’ Oath of God) that Wrastler raignes, Who fills the land and world with peace, his speare Is but a pen, with which he downe doth beare Blind Ignoraunce, false gods, and superstitious feare. As in Milton’s seventh Prolusion, ‘blind Ignorance’ presides over a nation under Roman Catholic rule. The Locustae and its English version are an under-­appreciated influence on both the opening books of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, itself a version of brief epic, especially Milton’s depiction of a Satan who declares it ‘Better to reign in Hell,

116  c h a p t e r 5

then serve in Heav’n’ (1. 263). The general sentiment is a commonplace, expressed by Julius Caesar in Plutarch’s Lives—‘I had rather be the first man among these fellows [in a barbarian village] than the second man in Rome’, as John Dryden has it in his 1683 translation—but Milton reverses the phrasing of Fletcher’s narrator, who scoffs at ‘rebellious Spirits’, who ‘Change God for Satan, heaven’s for hells Sov’raigne: / O let him serve in hell, who scornes in heaven to raigne!’14 Richard Stock may have called on James to do even more to root out Catholic treason in his 1606 Paul’s Cross sermon, but James himself had maintained in his ‘Premonition’ that ‘Rome is the Seat of the Antichrist’, to the great aggravation of Bellarmine. Once again, zealous anti-­papal rhetoric can evidently not be identified with Puritan opposition to the Church of England in the Jacobean period, but with mainstream, institutional sentiment, whether in the court, the Church, or the universities. In his ‘Premonition’, James voices what would become the common polemical identification during his reign of radical Puritans who wanted to get rid of episcopacy with Catholics who wanted to get rid of the Protestant Church. The two apparently opposed factions in fact desired the same outcome: That Bishops ought to be in the Church, I ever maintained it, as an Apostolike institution, and so the ordinance of GOD; contrary to the Puritanes, and likewise to Bellarmine; who denies that Bishops have their Jurisdiction immediatly from God. (But it is no wonder he takes the Puritanes part, since Jesuits are nothing but Puritan-­Papists).15 It was in great part the shared rhetoric of anti-­Catholicism that kept ‘conformable Puritans’ such as Stock, who supported the episcopal structure of the Church of England and who repeatedly attacked Bellarmine in his sermons, in alliance with the spokesmen of Jacobean ecclesiastical orthodoxy, such as Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), one of the most prominent court preachers and Bishop of Winchester from 1618. Andrewes delivered a series of Gunpowder Plot sermons before James that can at times sound very like Milton’s gunpowder epigrams in their imagery of demonic, hellfire conspiracy: ‘Blow them up, they shall not, but blow themselves downe they shall; downe, after Coreh, the

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   117

same way he went: Even to their owne place, with Coreh, and Judas, to the bottome of hell’.16 Indeed before the posthumous publication in 1629 of his selected sermons, Andrewes’s best-­known works were his defences of James against Bellarmine, Tortura Torti (1609) and Responsio ad apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini (1610). There is thus no ideological contradiction, or even obvious tension, in the fact that Milton also composed in autumn 1626, around the time that he likely wrote In Quintum Novembris, a Latin funeral elegy for Andrewes, In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis (On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester), labelled Elegia tertia in the 1645 Poems. In the opening lines of Milton’s elegy, the poet laments the passing of Protestant ‘heroes’ who have recently been killed in battle against the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Empire in the Thirty Years’ War, before insisting that the death of Andrewes has caused him even more anguish: the implication is that Andrewes’s intellectual struggle with Counter-­Reformation champions such as Bellarmine ranks alongside, and even above, the feats of those who have given their lives in the violent struggle against international Catholic domination. At his death in September 1626, Andrewes epitomized the learned Jacobean response to the intellectual challenge of Counter-­Reformation thought—although that reputation would be altered with the rise of Laudianism over the next decade.

The Nature of a Composition Immediately after the death of Lancelot Andrewes, Charles I gave William Laud the crucial post of Dean of the Royal Chapel that had been held by Andrewes and promised him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. Laud had come to regard zealous anti-­Catholic and Calvinist views as extremist and subversive, and he had recently represented Puritanism as inherently non-­conformable—as a threat to ecclesiastical and civil government, the fortunes of which were for Laud inextricably linked. In a sermon before Charles and the court in Whitehall in July 1626, Laud warned of the danger to the monarchy posed by those who sought further godly reform of the Church and ‘would faine know all the secrets of Predestination’. He equated the Puritans’ curiosity about ‘God’s cause’

118  c h a p t e r 5

with a similarly sacrilegious attitude toward the divine authority of the king: ‘And here Kings may learne if they will, I am sure ’tis fit they should, That those Men which are sacrilegious against God and his Church, are for the very Neigbour-­hood of the sinne, the likeliest men to offer violence, to the Honour of Princes first, and their Persons after’.17 Laud and his friends in the Durham House group, a circle of bishops and theologians who became increasingly influential at court in the 1620s and who emphasized ceremonialism and the role of the clergy over preaching and lay Biblicism, were in turn stigmatized as ‘Arminians’—after the Dutch theologian Jacob Arminius (1560–1609), who, against the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, emphasized the universality of the Atonement and the capacity of the human will to reject grace. On the basis of a royal proclamation of June 1626 prohibiting the public discussion of ‘innovations’ in religion, discussion of predestinarian teaching was banned from the Cambridge Commencement ceremony; and a further royal proclamation in January 1629 more explicitly prohibited preaching and publishing about predestination.18 English Arminianism was represented by Puritans as no better than closet Catholicism, and their fears about pro-­Catholic sympathies in the Caroline court, stoked by Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France in 1625, were further fuelled by Laud’s growing prominence. After he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Laud would become the key figure in the religious disputes that played a vital role in the outbreak of civil war and the downfall of Charles I. During his ‘Personal Rule’ without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, the king fully backed the Laudian promotion across England of church services characterized by the increased prominence of set prayer, more elaborate clerical and sacramental ceremony, and the reintroduction of devotional objects and church ornamentation.19 Laud edited Andrewes’s sermons for publication in 1629 as part of his effort to claim an impeccable intellectual heritage for anti-­Calvinist doctrine within the Church of England. Andrewes may have been more circumspect and less public in his criticism of predestination and Puritan zeal, but ‘Laud and his circle regarded him as an intellectual father figure’.20 The Jacobean religious consensus, into which Milton’s Gunpowder poems and elegy for Andrewes smoothly

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   119

fit, was fractured and eventually broken by the accession of Charles I and the rise of Laudianism after 1626, as anti-­Puritan polemic increasingly encompassed those who had previously regarded themselves as conformable to the episcopal Church of England, and anti-­Catholic polemic increasingly came to be viewed by the episcopal hierarchy of the Church as seditious rather than unifying, and thus in need of suppression. The change in official preferences is indicated by the fact we know of only one Gunpowder Plot sermon preached at Paul’s Cross after John Donne’s 1622 sermon on the topic: as one historian has observed, commemoration of 5 November ‘began to lose its unifying character’ in Caroline England, as ‘railing against’ Catholics became a practice officially banned from the pulpit.21 A good example close to home for Milton of how tastes had altered by the early 1630s is the fate that befell the biblical scholarship of Joseph Mede, the most prominent of the Christ’s Fellows in Milton’s time at the college. Mede’s most famous work was Clavis Apocalyptica (1627), in which he outlined his method for interpreting the mysteries and chronology of the Book of Revelation, by which he claimed to demonstrate the course of human history that would culminate in the millennium, the thousand-­year rule of Christ on earth. Mede took a keen interest in the progress of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, which he regarded as a key stage in millenarian history: throughout the 1620s he transmitted foreign military news that he received in manuscript letters from intelligencers in London, such as the Prussian émigré Samuel Hartlib— to whom Milton would dedicate Of Education in 1644—to friends and patrons among the country gentry, referring to himself as ‘novellante’, or news writer. He also collected scribal copies of political prophecies emanating from continental Europe, such as a prophecy of Protestant victory over the Habsburg cause that was allegedly discovered inside a clock in a Prague library in 1621.22 After the second edition of Clavis Apocalyptica appeared in 1632, Mede felt prevented from publishing any further work on scriptural exegesis because the identification of Rome and the papacy with Antichrist and the Beast of Revelation that was fundamental to his exegetical method was regarded as inflammatory by Laud’s ecclesiastical establishment. Despite Mede’s scholarly

120  c h a p t e r 5

standing, his refusal to renounce ‘the Tenet of the Apocalyptical Beast’ prevented him, as he acknowledged privately in 1635, from rising in the Caroline Church.23 Yet Mede was by no means a Puritan, even of the conformable variety: he certainly never followed the radical Puritan and sectarian practice of extending the identification of Antichrist from Rome to the Church of England. He had obtained his Fellowship at Christ’s through the support of Lancelot Andrewes; if Milton was aware of this, his Latin elegy for Andrewes might have been designed to impress the most renowned scholar at his college. Mede’s ecclesiastical and theological sympathies appear in fact to have been ceremonial and Arminian, as were those of his close friend at Christ’s and Milton’s first tutor, William Chappell, whose career would be promoted under Laud, first as Dean of Cashel in Ireland from 1633 and then Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1634.24 The case of Mede offers a prime example of how anti-­ Catholic language, argument, and scholarship that had been uncontroversial and even career-­enhancing in the world of the Jacobean Church and universities became stigmatized as ‘Puritan’, subversive, and career-­ threatening in Caroline England. Laud received the good news about his promotion in September 1626 from his close ally George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), to whom Laud acted as chaplain and who maintained with the accession of Charles the status of chief royal favourite to which he had risen in the Jacobean court. Buckingham was the focus of discontent, both religious and political, with the Caroline court in its early years — a discontent that culminated in his murder by a disillusioned soldier in 1628. Milton could hardly not have been aware of the controversy surrounding Buckingham in the aftermath of the death of James, for it had a direct impact upon Cambridge. In May 1626, in the aftermath of wild allegations that Buckingham had even been involved in poisoning James as part of a Spanish and Catholic plot, Parliament had sought to have Buckingham impeached on charges of corruption. Charles responded by dissolving Parliament and helping to ensure Buckingham was installed as the new Chancellor of Cambridge.25 Milton wrote a Latin funeral elegy for the previous Vice-­Chancellor, John Gostlin, who died on 21 October 1626, which is packed with Ho-

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   121

meric and Ovidian references and imagery. This is another in a series of heavily classicized Latin funeral elegies for prominent figures in the university and Church establishment that Milton composed in the final months of 1626: aside from those for Andrewes and Gostlin, there were also poems for Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely and formerly Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, who died on 5 October 1626 (In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis) and Richard Ridding, who in the office of Esquire Beadle at Cambridge fulfilled certain duties on ceremonial occasions, such as carrying the Vice-­Chancellor’s mace, and who died on 26 September 1626 (In Obitum Praeconis Academici Cantabrigiensis; entitled Elegia secunda in the 1645 Poems). Evidently Milton threw himself into practise of the genre of the Latin funeral elegy in this brief, intense period of poetic activity—the subjects of these four elegies died within less than four weeks of each other—and it is likely that he performed these pieces before fellow students and Fellows in Christ’s, perhaps at memorial services in the chapel. Alexander Gil composed a Latin funeral elegy for a bishop who died in May 1626, Arthur Lake: as with Felton and Andrewes, Lake was involved with the translation of the King James Bible, the great literary testament to the Protestant consensus fostered under James I.26 As with In Quintum Novembris, Milton may again have been responding to the poetic example of his friend, Gil. If In Quintum Novembris and the Gunpowder epigrams were also composed at this time, the autumn and winter of 1626 was one of unprecedented productivity for Milton as he experimented with, and displayed, his talents as a neo-­Latin poet. He may well have believed that this practice in the art of composing in different forms and genres was what was expected of a student after the intensely literary nature of his education at St Paul’s. But poetry also played a central role in the study of language and literature at the seventeenth-­century university, and those who acquired a reputation for excellence in the art of poetry were admired by their peers. As the Oxford tutor Thomas Heyward observed later in the century, the business of university students in their first year ‘is to learn to think well, and to express our thoughts to others, so as to communicate to them the very ideas, judgments and reasons we have within ourselves, whenever we discourse or write. In other words ’tis to

122  c h a p t e r 5

understand the nature of a composition in generall.’ This understanding was required in order ‘to frame distinct notions’ as well as ‘a theme, a declamation, an oration, an epistle, a character, a dialogue, a discourse or treatise’; or, in poetry, ‘an epigram, a satyr, an ode, whether Sapphyick, Alcaick, or Pindarick, an epistolary poem . . . a pastorall, and an epick poem’. Obadiah Walker advised that a university student must ‘understand and practise (though not much, except he have a considerable dexterity in it) poetry; without which no man can be a perfect orator’: by the latter half of his second year at Christ’s, Milton was displaying this ‘considerable dexterity’ in a range of poetic genres.27 Milton’s activity as a neo-­Latin poet during his undergraduate years from 1625 to 1629 was first and foremost demonstrative, both to himself and to his peers, in college and among a few trusted friends such as Diodati and Gil, of his facility of composition in different genres: satirical epigram, Ovidian elegy, funeral elegy, verse letter, ‘brief ’ epic. There is very little to sustain the influential claim that this collegiate writing ‘bears an overt or covert political charge—vehemently anti-­Catholic, anti-­Laudian, critical of Stuart religious repression, supportive of Protestant militancy in Europe, prophetic—a politics that aligns him with reformist and oppositional views.’28 This is to read the vernacular prose polemicist of the early 1640s back into the undergraduate Latin poet of the later 1620s—a teenager who was above all interested, as the burst of funeral elegies at the end of 1626 exemplifies, in experimenting with different poetic forms and conventions. It is also to ignore that fact that anti-­Catholicism and a generalized support for the Protestant cause against the Holy Roman Empire in Europe were characteristic values of the religious consensus of the Jacobean era, which encompassed ‘conformable’ Puritans such as Richard Stock and Thomas Young as well as a millenarian scholar with Arminian leanings such as Joseph Mede and, for much of the time, a bishop who was only later claimed by the Laudians for Arminian ceremonialism, Lancelot Andrewes. It might be the case that Milton’s particular interest in Gunpowder Plot poetry in 1626, and somewhat anachronistic deployment of the Virgilian tropes of Jacobean panegyric, given James was dead and Charles had ascended to the throne, convey an implicit anxiety that any relaxation of vigilance in the

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   123

new Caroline era could allow the re-­emergence of such Catholic plots to overthrow Protestant rule. The publication of Fletcher’s Locustae in 1627 after it had circulated for over fifteen years in manuscript may be seen as a sign of growing concern over such episodes as Charles’s marriage to a Catholic, the continuing influence of Buckingham on the new king, and the rising prominence of Laud, with his antipathy towards ‘Puritans’ of all stripes and desire to push anti-­Catholic rhetoric out of public discourse. The falling-­off of Gunpowder Plot sermons from the mid-­1620s onwards indicates how the climate changed with the rise of Laud’s influence in the Church and court. Yet comparison of Milton’s satirical Latin epigrams with the sort of vernacular satirical verse that was circulating in manuscript in Caroline Cambridge is instructive with regard to any claim for the political charge of Milton’s student writing.

Satire and Libel A host of vernacular libels and satires on Buckingham and his relationship with the Stuart kings circulated anonymously in manuscript in the 1620s. ‘The Five Senses’, probably written in 1623, illustrates how Buckingham was seen to personify a popish influence in the court that manifested itself in undeserved favouritism, fiscal corruption and moral laxity, in particular disordered sexuality. It was widely believed that the close relationship Buckingham had formed with James I had a sexual element, and the author of ‘The Five Senses’ prays that God will save ‘My Soveraigne from a Ganimede / Whose whoreish breath hath power to lead / His excellence which way it list’ (lines 59–61).29 Sodomy is linked with judicial corruption as the poet calls on the heavens to blesse my King From such a bribe as may with drawe His thoughts from equitie, and lawe From such a smooth, and beardlesse chinn As may provoke, or tempt to sinn[.] (lines 40–3) The infiltration of popery is the root cause of these other sins and is placed at the centre of the poem, where James is warned away

124  c h a p t e r 5

From the cand[i]ed poyson’d baites Of Jesuites and their deceipts Italian Sallets, Romish druggs The milke of Babells proud whore duggs[.] (lines 31–4) The reader with literary or court connections could recognize in the very form of the poem a reference to Buckingham’s centrality in the extravagant, expensive theatrical performances for which the Jacobean court had become known. ‘The Five Senses’ is based on a song from Ben Jonson’s masque The Gypsies Metamorphosed, written for Buckingham’s entertainment of James in 1621 and featuring Buckingham and his friends dressed as thieving gypsies who are transformed into impeccably loyal (and impeccably well-­dressed) courtiers. One anti-­Buckingham satire of 1621, ‘When Charles, hath got the Spanish Gearle’, associates the patronage of the lavish Whitehall masques composed by Jonson and staged by Inigo Jones with the indifference of the court to its waste of the nation’s wealth: When the Banquetting howse is finishd quite then Jones Sir Inigo we will call & Poetts Ben brave maskes shall write & a Parlament shall pay for all[.]30 The patronage of court masques continued under Charles and attacks on the theatrical culture of the Caroline court as an embodiment of its moral and spiritual corruption would become a motif of Puritan polemic in the 1630s, most notoriously in William Prynne’s Histrio-­Mastix (1633), which condemned female actors as little better than whores at a time when Henrietta Maria herself was in rehearsal for a new masque performance. (The court or private aristocratic entertainments were the only venues in pre-­1660 England in which women were allowed to take part in dramatic performance.) Prynne was tried on a charge of treason and was sentenced to have his ears cropped: the episode, to which we shall return in later chapters, illustrates how the sort of criticism of court culture that had previously been found only in manuscript verse satire increasingly became in the 1630s the stuff of printed prose polemic, even

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   125

if Prynne’s complaints are closer in form to the sermon and retain little of the university wit that characterizes the manuscript libels. ‘The Five Senses’ contains the motifs common to many of the libels on Buckingham but it has been deemed a particularly significant example because of its focus upon the person of the king rather than merely upon Buckingham or other courtiers.31 That this significance was recognized by contemporaries is made clear by an episode that must surely have made an impact on Milton, but which has attracted comparatively little interest in accounts of his life. When Alexander Gil was drinking in an Oxford tavern on 1 September 1628—a couple of months after Milton had written to him complaining about the poor learning of his fellow students going into clerical careers—he drank the health of John Felton, who had assassinated the Duke of Buckingham the previous week. Two days later, while drinking in the cellar of Trinity College, Oxford, Gil made derogatory comments about both the new king, Charles, and his father, James. Gil’s behaviour was reported to Laud, who by this time was Bishop of London, and on 4 November Gil was arrested at St Paul’s School and imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster. The rooms in Trinity College of Gil’s friend, William Pickering, were searched and incriminating ‘libels and letters’ belonging to Gil were found, including a copy of ‘The Five Senses’.32 (It is intriguing to think that correspondence from Milton might have been among the letters confiscated by the state.) Gil was examined by Laud, and on 6 November the Court of Star Chamber, the official organ of censorship in early modern England, sentenced Gil to be degraded from the ministry, dismissed from his ushership at St Paul’s, deprived of his university degrees, fined two thousands pounds, to lose one ear in the pillory at Westminster and the other in Oxford, and to imprisoned in the Fleet prison. Gil escaped the penalty of mutilation on the petition of his father, before finally receiving a royal pardon on 30 November 1630. Although it has been assumed that Gil must thus have remained in prison for a full two years—which would mean that Milton was writing to a man in prison when he wrote to him on 20 May 1630—Gil states in a letter addressed to Laud on 23 November 1629 that ‘the best of kings’ has ‘released me from prison’ after ‘fifteen months of distress’ (although

126  c h a p t e r 5

fifteen months would go back to the initial offence in September 1628 rather than his sentencing in November).33 Milton was surely aware of this underground satirical verse culture of the later 1620s: as the discovery of the libels among Gil’s papers in an Oxford college indicates, the universities were the most important centres for the transmission of manuscript libels, and the mock epitaph was both a feature of the neo-­Latin anti-­papal satire that influenced Milton’s Gunpowder epigrams and the most common form employed in the vernacular verse libels of the 1620s. The comic reference in Prolusion VI, the Christ’s ‘salting’, to the infamous and humiliating failure of Buckingham’s military expedition in 1627 to the Isle of Rhé off the west coast of France, in an attempt to relieve the besieged Huguenots of La Rochelle, indicates Milton’s sense of the sort of anti-­Buckingham humour that would find favour with his varsity audience: ‘I should send you all off so nicely pickled that you would be as sick of salt water as were those soldiers of ours who lately managed to escape from the Island of Rhé.’ The retreat from Rhé was a popular topic of the anti-­Buckingham libels circulating in manuscript, such as ‘Upon the Duke Buckingham his opposition to the Parliament’: O Admirall! since thou camst back againe more base from Rhee, then Cecill did from Spaine Since thou hast bin againe receaved at Court beyond thy owne conceite beyond Reporte. Since thou hast guilt of all the bloud Rhee spent must thou still live to breake a Parliament!34 The unfolding events in Europe were of much interest to important figures in Christ’s: in one of his regular letters reporting the recent news of the European wars to Sir Martin Stuteville, Mede lamented on December 1627 the lack of reliable news about ‘this shameful overthrow’, the ‘disaster at Rhee’. One 1626 verse libel, ‘The Kinge and his wyfe the Parliament’, is comparable to Milton’s epigrams in its representation of Buckingham as an instrument of Satan, even worse than the sulphuric Guy Fawkes in the popish dangers he poses to the state:

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   127

An art sprunge from a blacker seed, then that which he powred in that weed Whom we call Guido Faux: Who if he fiered had his vessell, of Sulphure standeinge on beare tressell, in his sepulchrall walkes: Could not have soe disperst our state, Nor opened Spayne soe wyde a gate, as hath his gracelesse grace[.]35 Yet the differences are as striking as the similarities: the manuscript libel applies the language and imagery of Gunpowder Plot epigrams to mockery of the most prominent courtier in the new reign of Charles I; while Milton’s Latin epigrams, if it were not for their awareness of the recent death of James I, could feasibly have been composed fifteen years earlier, with their allusions to James’s 1609 ‘Premonition’ and debate with Bellarmine. At the same time, it would also be an error to regard the composition and possession of anti-­court manuscript libels as a barometer of later radicalism. The authorship of the notorious ‘The Five Senses’, found in Gil’s papers, has been ascribed to William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), the leading Scottish poet of the time, best known for recording his literary conversations with Jonson. Drummond can hardly be described as a Puritan radical: he wrote verses to welcome Charles I on the king’s visit to Scotland in 1633, and during the conflicts of the later 1630s and 1640s Drummond was constant in his anti-­ Presbyterianism and loyalty to the crown.36 It remains possible that Gil himself was the author of ‘The Five Senses’, although the evidence for his authorship rests upon only the discovery of a copy of a much copied poem in his papers and the apparent lack of any denial on his part during the proceedings against him that he was indeed the author. The many surviving manuscript copies of ‘The Five Senses’—more than fifty copies are extant—show it to have been much in circulation in Caroline Oxford and Cambridge, found in the poetic miscellanies of men such as William Sancroft (1617–93), a student and then Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and later, after the Restoration, Archbishop of

128  c h a p t e r 5

Canterbury.37 Gil’s collection of his Latin poems in 1632, Parerga, is dedicated to Charles I and includes not only poems on the death of James I and the accession of Charles, but a panegyric addressed to Laud. He wrote at least five letters to Laud between 23 November 1929 and 20 September 1633, beseeching Laud in oleaginous terms to act as his patron, and one to the king himself on 26 December 1631, the same date as his fourth letter to Laud. Gil refers to having sent Charles a copy of his recent poem on the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, communicated to the king by the poet and courtier Thomas Carew, and offers to compose in the ‘honour of my own prince, to whom I owe my life and health, some Caroloïdes, in imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid’.38 Doubtless the protestations of loyalty are in some measure expatiatory after Gil’s recent imprisonment, but later poems that Gil put into print reinforce his loyalty to the crown as civil war broke out: they include an elegy for the Earl of Strafford, beheaded by Parliament in 1641, and congratulatory verses to Charles on his return from Scotland in late 1641.39 Gil died in 1642, so we cannot know which side he would have taken in the civil wars: these 1641 verses indicate he would probably not have agreed with the aggressively anti-­episcopal and pro-­Scottish polemic that his friend Milton unleashed in his prose work Of Reformation in the same year. As we have seen, however, Gil’s 1632 collection dedicated to Charles also includes his poem on the collapse of the Blackfriars chapel and In Sylvam-­Ducis, the poem celebrating the taking of the Dutch city of ’s-­Hertogenbosch by Protestant forces in 1629, the Virgilian qualities of which Milton expressed such admiration in his letter of May 1630. In his letter to Gil thanking him for the poem, Milton might be read as expressing his support for the entry of England into the Thirty Years’ War, although the sentiment is hardly transparent: ‘But, as we hear you sing the prosperous successes of the Allies in so sonorous and triumphal a strain, how great a poet we shall hope to have in you if by chance our own affairs, turning at last more fortunate, should demand your congratulatory verses!’40 In 1632 Gil published his Latin poem on the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden and great Protestant military hero of the Thirty Years’ War: dedicated to Charles, the poem was swiftly published in an English translation by William Hawkins,

b e g i n n i n g a s a p o e t   129

who was an MA student at Christ’s when Milton arrived in 1625.41 The pagan celebrations of Polish Jesuits—who apparently commemorated a recent military victory by burning pictures of Luther, Calvin, and other Reformers—are mocked as a prelude to their providential destruction by Adolphus, in a manner similar to Gil’s poem on the ‘fatal vespers’ in Blackfriars: Now triumph, Popelings, Bonfyres make, & Feasts, Drinke, dance & be as mad as Baachus Priests; Let thy grave mens pictures bee your games, And making up your sports, then burn in flames. But feare, lest that true Thunderers just ire Send forth fyre from heav’n to mingle with your fyre.42 Evidently Gil, seeking to reassure Charles and Laud of his loyalty after his commuted punishment, perceived no tension in dedicating verse to them in 1632 which can be characterized as vehemently anti-­Catholic and supportive of Protestant militancy in Europe. Milton’s 1626 Gunpowder poems might be read as (very) implicit warnings that the Catholic threat to the English state, so vividly embodied for the English by Guy Fawkes, was at risk of again becoming urgent in the early years of the reign of Charles I; but even highly explicit, aggressive verse libels of the 1620s, which identified the Caroline court as a source of crypto-­Catholic corruption in the nation, should not be taken as evidence of anti-­monarchical sentiment. The ear-­cropped William Prynne, after all, would go on to condemn the regicide as an illegal and irreligious act—by which stage he had become one of the figures in public life whom Milton most detested. Nonetheless, the themes of the manuscript libels on Buckingham in the 1620s—courtly corruption, popery, and extravagance—became a staple of Parliamentarian propaganda of the 1640s and shape the polemical strategies of Milton’s prose polemics: the association of theatricality and the moral corruption at the heart of Caroline culture and society is an important element of his anti-­episcopal prose and is central to his attack on the reign of Charles in the post-­regicide writing. Moreover, what happened to Gil in 1628 offered a brutal example of how the state could intervene to repress

130  c h a p t e r 5

poetry and persecute the poet. During the 1630s, Milton would increasingly identify such persecutory conditions with forms of Roman Catholic rule as he read about the decline of intellectual and literary culture in Counter-­Reformation Italy. While Puritan activists such as William Prynne were increasingly subject to persecution and public punishment under Laudian rule after 1633, the experience of his friend Gil five years earlier was a more personal encounter for Milton with the potential consequences of state censorship, and one that can only have made him aware, perhaps for the first time, of the political dangers that poets could potentially face.

CHAPTER 6

•

Heroes and Daemons

Miscellany Poet In the Lent term of 1629, after four years of study, Milton supplicated for his BA degree, a condition of which was signed affirmation of allegiance to the monarch and the fundamental tenets, known as the Thirty-­Nine Articles, of the Church of England. Among Milton’s contemporaries at Christ’s, over half proceeded to the MA and remained for another three years.1 The MA degree was a markedly freer experience than the BA: it was expected that the student would now work independently of a tutor and without daily supervision, and initially work towards completion of the studies that he had been unable to complete during the BA. The Cambridge statutes by Milton’s time had dispensed with residency requirements, on the grounds ‘that a man once grounded so far in learning as to deserve a bachelorship in arts is sufficiently furnished to proceed in study himself ’. The Cambridge tutor Richard Holdsworth, for example, expected the graduated student to complete his reading of the Greek poets and pursue the historians Xenophon, Herodotus, and Thucydides, and the biographer of philosophers, Diogenes Laertius. The independent study expected of the MA student was ‘justified on the grounds that formal schooling represented only a part of the actual educational process, which was expected to last a lifetime’. As one student who matriculated in 1668 recalled: ‘being a bachelour of arts, I was free from the government of a tutor, and wholly left to my own management and freedom, as far as was consistent with the college and university discipline’. He ‘spent most of [his] time in reading books’.2 131

132  c h a p t e r 6

Milton undoubtedly spent much of his time in reading books, but he also spent it in writing poetry, and increasingly in English. Milton could thus now move more or less at will between Cambridge and the family home in Bread Street. Milton’s parents moved to Hammersmith, then a village on the outskirts of London, at some point before 30 April 1631, when Milton’s father was assessed for payment of Poor Relief; but probably not before the latter half of 1630, as John Milton senior is not listed in any prior records.3 The character of Hammersmith in this period will be considered in the next chapter; it will suffice to note here that Milton may thus have been living in the comparatively rural location of Hammersmith during another, and particularly devastating, period of plague which closed the university between spring and autumn 1630. Movement between Cambridge and London was facilitated by the university carrier Thomas Hobson, who both hired out horses to students and offered weekly transport to and from London in his wagon. Milton composed two verse epitaphs in English on this famous Cambridge character, who was eighty-­six when he died at the beginning of 1631. The conceit of the poems is that it must have been Hobson’s enforced rest due to the outbreak of plague which did for him. The second of the epitaphs as they were published in the 1645 Poems makes characteristic play with the vocabulary of Aristotelian natural philosophy familiar to Milton’s peers. It also employs the kind of paradoxical word-­play and deliberately strained images that are a feature of his Latin prolusions, but which also have something in common with the vernacular poetic tradition of what we now call ‘metaphysical’ wit, popular in England in the aftermath of Donne, who himself died a couple of months later, in March 1631: Time numbers motion, yet (without a crime ’Gainst old truth) motion numbered out his time; And like an old engine moved with wheel and weight, His principles being ceased, he ended straight [ . . . ] Yet (strange to think) his wain was increase: His letters are delivered all and gone, Only remains his superscription.4

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   133

The notion of time as the ‘number of motion’ comes from Aristotle’s Physics (4. 11-­12). The pun here is that ‘wain’ means ‘waggon’ as well as decrease, while ‘superscription’ denotes both the address on a letter and the epitaph on a grave. The originary link of epitaph and epigram with inscription, and thus with the physical occasion of a poem, is important to much of Milton’s university verse, from the Latin epigrams to these vernacular lyrics. The rituals of university life likely encouraged this sense of poems as physical objects to be fixed in specific locations and viewed by peers: for the public disputations that comprised part of the examinations for the BA, in which students had to appear twice as Opponents and twice as Respondents, the subjects for debate were fixed to the door of the Schools three days before the disputation was to take place. The Hobson poems may not repay much sustained attention in themselves, but the evidence of their scribal circulation indicates both that they were his most popular university poems among his peers and that Milton participated in the student culture, particularly vibrant in the first half of the seventeenth century, of collecting verse in commonplace books or manuscript miscellanies. Epigrams, epitaphs, jests, and other brief, pointed verse forms that could be quickly copied and transmitted were particularly sought out by the compilers of such miscellanies. The second of the Hobson poems, ‘Here lyeth one who did most truly prove’, appears (anonymously) in verse miscellanies associated with both Oxford and Cambridge, compiled in the period 1634–43, and its first appearance in print was (also anonymously) in the printed verse miscellany A Banquet of Jests (London, 1640). The first poem, ‘Here lies old Hobson’, appears (anonymously) in a verse miscellany compiled by Inns of Court men in the 1630s, where it appears beside a poem by Milton’s Cambridge contemporary, Thomas Randolph—who offered Milton, as we have seen, one prominent role model of the successful university poet.5 The manuscript copies of the Hobson poems indicate that Milton originally circulated certain of his poems in manuscript form within Cambridge, and possibly Oxford and the Inns of Court as well; the inclusion of the second Hobson poem in the 1640 printed miscellany seems unlikely to have been authorized by Milton, and indicates that eventually the poems circulated beyond his control. However the

134  c h a p t e r 6

publication may have had something to do with Milton’s social life when he moved to London in 1640 and apparently dropped ‘into the society of some young sparks of his acquaintance, the chief whereof were Mr Alphry and Mr Miller, two Gentlemen of Gray’s-­Inn, the Beaus of those times’. 6 Mr Alphry and Mr Miller remained to be identified, but such participation in student scribal exchange shows once more that, while he may have privately expressed in letters his disappointment with the commitment to learning of his peers, Milton’s later representation of himself in his prose works as bitterly at odds with a Cambridge cultural life that he regarded as degenerate has little basis in the evidence from his time there. The Hobson poems are not the only examples from this period of Milton pursuing paths to preferment and reputation through scribal circulation. ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’—Jane Paulet, a Roman Catholic who died in childbirth in April 1631—seems to have been written for a planned volume of university elegies that never made it to print. (The poet offers ‘some flowers, and some bays, / For thy hearse to strew the ways, / Sent thee from the banks of Came’; lines 57–9.) A version of the elegy, which has six variant lines and is dated precisely to the Marchioness’s death, is found in a manuscript verse miscellany dating from the early 1630s which contains other elegies for Paulet, as well as work by poets associated with Christ Church, Oxford, one of the most flourishing centres of scribal poetic exchange in the period.7 This variant text, which notes Milton’s college affiliation in ascribing it to ‘Jo Milton of Chr: Coll Cambr.’, appears to be an authentic early draft that Milton allowed to circulate, presumably in the hope of attracting admiration or patronage: there is no evidence that he had any link with Paulet or her husband, the fifth Marquis of Winchester, who were close to Charles and Henrietta Maria. Ben Jonson’s fine elegy for Paulet, with its haunting opening lines (‘What gentle ghost, besprent with April dew, / Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew, / And beckoning woos me, from the fatal tree / To pluck a garland for herself or me?’), circulated scribally, and Milton may be testing himself against Jonson’s example: the poem is one of Milton’s most notably Jonsonian pieces, both in terms of prosody and its ‘respectful but self-­serving celebration of aristocracy’.8

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   135

The acquisition of both reputation and preferment was the key motivation for poets who involved themselves in the culture of poetic exchange and transmission in the universities and the Inns of Court, even if the verse collected in the miscellanies is most often unascribed.9 Milton’s experiments with a ‘metaphysical’ lyric mode in English also seem to have been circulated in university circles and to have attracted the attention of the compilers of verse miscellanies. The popularity of his poems in a more metaphysical style is unsurprising given the ubiquity of Donne’s poetry in manuscript miscellanies. The version of Milton’s lyric ‘On Time’ (1631?), which appears (unattributed) in Elias Ashmole’s verse miscellany, likely circulated before it appeared in print in 1645, for its title in the manuscript—‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’—is, as mentioned in Chapter 5, close to the title that Milton originally gave the poem in the manuscript notebook of drafts that he probably began around 1632 (‘. . . set on a clock case’), later scored through. This scribal version of ‘On Time’ concludes with variant lines which advertise the debt to Donne by echoing the conclusion of Donne’s tenth Holy Sonnet, ‘Death be not proud’: Shall heape our dayes with everlastinge store When death and Chance, and thou O tyme shalbee noe more[.] Compare Donne’s final lines: One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.10 Whether or not these variant lines, which show craft and literary knowledge, are the work of Milton or a particularly creative scribe who rewrote this part of the poem, they were designed to appeal to readers who knew their Donne.11

A Monument More Permanent That Milton also developed connections during this period to literary networks beyond the universities is evident in his first printed poem (or at least first printed poem in a commercial publication, if his act verses

136  c h a p t e r 6

were distributed as printed hand-­outs for the Cambridge ceremonies). ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare’ appeared in the commendatory poems for the 1632 Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, but was later retitled ‘On Shakespear. 1630’ for the 1645 Poems. It must thus have been written while he was still at Cambridge, although perhaps in the period when the University was closed due to plague. As we saw in Chapter 1, the surprising inclusion of the unpublished MA student Milton in this comparatively prestigious (and expensive) book—although the poem appears anonymously—could have something to do with his father’s connections to the Blackfriars theatre, and more generally to the cultural world of Caroline London. It may also reflect the reception of Milton’s poetic performances at Cambridge and the vernacular verse that he scribally circulated. The epitaph on Shakespeare shows the young Milton weighing up the various resources of the English poetic tradition. The tribute is obviously indebted to Jonson’s elegy from the 1623 First Folio, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author William Shakespeare’, which is also included in the 1632 Folio, adopting the same metre of rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter and expanding upon its invocation of the description by Horace, Jonson’s favourite classical examplar of the poet, of his Odes as ‘a monument more lasting than bronze’ (monumentum aere perennius): ‘Thou art a monument without a tomb, / And art alive still while thy book doth live / And we have wits to read, and praise to give’ (lines 22–4). Milton’s Shakespeare ‘Hast built thyself a live-­long monument’ in the form of his plays (line 8). Milton also follows Jonson in making the tension between art and nature part of his topic, although Milton somewhat simplifies Jonson’s extended meditation on the matter (‘Yet I must not give nature all: thy art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part’; lines 55–6), into a simple opposition between a lumbering, ‘slow-­ endeavouring art’ and the natural ‘flow’ of Shakespeare’s ‘easy numbers’ (lines 9–10). But while the poem is ‘on’ Shakespeare and imitates Jonson, it employs Spenserian diction, or at least pseudo-­Spenserian archaism, in the phrase ‘star-­ypointing pyramid’. (While the use of ‘y-­‘ prefix is common in Edmund Spenser’s poetry, he never uses it before a present participle; some variant copies of the Second Folio, however, do have ‘ypointed pyramid’.12)

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   137

The most complex couplet in the epitaph also needs to be read through a Spenserian lens. Milton’s attitude towards Shakespeare has been the subject of considerable scholarly debate, in part motivated by Milton’s aggressive identification of theatricality with monarchical tyranny in Eikonoklastes in 1649, and his specific charge that Charles I had spent more time reading Shakespeare than the Bible. It has been influentially argued that lines 13–14—‘Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving, / Dost make us marble with too much conceiving’—subvert the performance of epitaphic praise and disclose Milton’s suspicion, though perhaps not yet fully conscious, of Shakespearean ‘fancy’ as a notion of natural poetic creativity divorced from divine authorization (‘sweetest Shakespear fancies childe’, as Milton has it in ‘L’Allegro’ (line 133) likely written around the same time as ‘On Shakespeare’). In reading Shakespeare’s book, his words are written on our heart and our imagination is overpowered by his, turning us into memorial statues to his art; but such ‘a condition of arrest or paralysis is everywhere morally suspect in Milton’s poetry’.13 The recent identification of Milton’s copy of the First Folio, with the careful annotations likely dating for the most part from the early 1640s, should prompt a reconsideration of arguments for Milton’s suspicion of the Shakespearean dramatic imagination. The presence of Shakespeare in Milton’s political prose, in particular The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, suggests less a politically motivated rejection of Shakespeare as a royalist author than an appreciation of Shakespearean versions of British history as offering vivid lessons in the nature and consequences of tyranny.14 The alleged Miltonic opposition in the epitaph on Shakespeare between a secular Shakespearean ‘fancy’ and a divinely authorized inspiration fades in the light of a likely source for these lines in Spenser’s ‘Hymn of Heavenly Beauty’, published in Four Hymnes (1596), specifically its description of those deemed worthy to contemplate the face of Sapience, enthroned in Heaven: None thereof worthy be, but those whom she Vouchsafeth to her presence to receive, And letteth them her lovely face to see, Whereof such wondrous pleasures they conceive,

138  c h a p t e r 6

And sweet contentment, that it doth bereave Their soul of sense, through infinite delight, And them transport from flesh into the spright.15 The memory of Spenser suggests that, in reading Shakespeare’s book rightly, we can glimpse on earth the wondrous face of heavenly wisdom and this can be a transformational spiritual, as well as intellectual, experience.16 The ‘deepe Impression’ (line 12) that the Folio makes on the hearts of Shakespeare’s readers transforms them into his living monument, or rather a multitude of monuments, as each reader becomes a memorial to the affective power of Shakespeare’s words. The Folio is represented as analogous to the New Testament eikon, a Greek term used to describe ‘Christ, who is the image of God’ (2 Corinthians 4: 4), when Paul explains how the converted who find God within their hearts are transformed into the living image of Christ. The status of eikon within the hearts of the English people would later be claimed by Charles I in the posthumously published Eikon Basilike (1649), the supposed record of the late king’s thoughts on his trial that appeared immediately after the regicide, and the claim would be bitterly contested by Milton in Eikonoklastes. In the 1630 poem, the wonder provoked by Shakespeare’s literary art seems genuinely to work on its readers in the manner of Christian revelation in Scripture. The epitaph for Shakespeare displays Milton’s growing confidence in his powers as an English poet. The controlled imitation of Jonson’s elegy for Shakespeare, incorporating a Spenserian reading of Shakespeare’s achievement, is in stark contrast to the explicit solicitation of Jonson’s patronage that Thomas Randolph sought around the same time, with manuscript poems such as ‘A Gratulatory to Mr Ben Johnson for his Adopting of him to be his Son’ and ‘An Eclogue to his Worthy Father Mr Ben Johnson’. Milton had reason to be wary of Jonson from the experience of Alexander Gil the elder, who was mocked by Jonson in the play Time Vindicated (1623) for teaching his St Paul’s pupils, of whom Milton was one at the time, the satirical poetry of George Wither, with whom Jonson was engaged in a literary quarrel. There appears subsequently to have been something of a family feud, for Gil the younger

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   139

circulated a libel in 1632 mocking Jonson’s career after school as an apprentice bricklayer (‘And better canst derect to capp a chimney, / Than to converse with Clio or Polihimny’). Jonson’s muscular response was focused on the punishment of ‘infamous Gill’, as he called him, at the hands of the state for his libel on Buckingham and the king: ‘A rogue by statute, censur’d to be whip’t, / Cropt, branded, slit, neck stocked, Go you are stript’.17 Milton would himself become involved in vicious, personalized invective in his political prose, in particular in his Latin political works of the 1650s; he had grown up in an educational and literary culture in which such ad hominem attacks were familiar fare. The attack on Gil was, however, one of Jonson’s final poetic blasts after having been paralyzed by a stroke in 1628. Jonson’s period of domination of the literary scene at court and in London, which endured since the early years of James I’s rule, was clearly over by the time Milton left Cambridge in 1632. The period from 1628–9 onwards was one of increasing meditation for Milton on the English poetic tradition as he experimented with vernacular poetic forms, a freedom presumably granted by the lack of directed study on the MA degree. His earliest surviving English poem that is not a translation is probably another funeral elegy, ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, said by his nephew Edward Phillips to have been written for the daughter of his sister Anne, who died in January 1628, at the age of two. It remained unpublished until the 1673 Poems, which indicates that Milton regarded it as juvenilia that did not make the cut in 1645. The poem is full of echoes of Shakespearean poetry and drama—Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, most prominently, the pseudo-­Shakespearean poetry anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim—while the archaic diction and metrical form are Spenserian; or at least in the style of the Cambridge poet Phineas Fletcher and his adaptation of the nine-­line Spenserian stanza, with its final, twelve-­ syllable alexandrine, into a seven-­line ‘rime royal’ stanza with a concluding alexandrine. Fletcher had used precisely this form in his elegy for Sir Anthony Irby in 1610; although that poem was not printed until 1633, it is a further indication that Milton likely knew the poems of Giles and Phineas Fletcher in manuscript at Cambridge. The early years of his MA

140  c h a p t e r 6

were a period in which Milton was evidently thinking about and experimenting with national vernaculars, and not only in English: the purchase of the Rime e Prose of Giovanni Della Casa in December 1629 and the likely composition of the canzone and five sonnets in Italian during this period show his interest in the rise of Italian as a poetic language. His close attention to the example of Della Casa, who introduced metrical and syntactical innovations to the sonnet form, is evident from the fact that he transcribed in his copy of the 1563 edition another Della Casa sonnet only included in the 1623 edition—a typical instance of how Milton liked to operate as a reader, comparing different editions of the same works and copying variant text from one edition into the other. He does the same in his copy of Euripides, for example, purchased in 1634, and in the copy of the Shakespeare First Folio that has now been identified as having passed through his hands in the 1630s and 1640s. Milton was not only writing in the Italian language but incorporating Italian prosodic forms into English composition, and into devotional as well as profane love poetry: the religious lyric ‘Upon the Circumcision’, likely written in 1630–32, reproduces the the stanza form of Petrarch’s 137-­line prayer to the Virgin, ‘Vergin bella, che di sol vestita’ (‘Beautiful virgin, clothed with the sun’), the recantation of the poet’s profane love for Laura which concludes his Canzoniere. ‘On Time’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’ are both indebted formally to the Italian madrigal, cultivated by Petrarch and then later Torquato Tasso (1544–95) and Giambattista Marino (1569–1625): less formally strict than the canzone and consisting of a single stanza of irregular line, the madrigal in Italian has something of the sonorous, lofty qualities of an ode but also builds to an epigrammatic, witty close, and was consequently of interest to those writing in a metaphysical mode. The original title of ‘On Time’ tells us that it was conceived as an inscription for a clock-­case, while ‘At a Solemn Musick’ consists of a bravura twenty-­line opening sentence, followed by a four-­ line, epigrammatic coda. The conclusion of both ‘On Time’ and ‘At a Solemn Musick’ with an alexandrine introduces a Spenserian note, as though to underline the English Protestant ethos of both Italian-­ influenced lyrics: in ‘On Time’, the final alexandrine, ‘Triumphing over

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   141

Death and Chance and thee O Time’, replaces the Donne-­indebted couplet of the earlier version of the lyric that was apparently in manuscript circulation. The alexandrine in ‘At a Solemn Musick’ similarly encapsulates the timelessness of salvation (‘To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light’).18 Milton’s habits of composition at this time are illustrated by the various drafts of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, much crossed-­ through and altered, that are preserved in his poetic notebook from the 1630s (‘endless morn of light’ was at different stages ‘ever endlesse light’, ‘uneclipsed light’ and ‘where day dwells without light’). Milton’s extant copy of Della Casa is bound with Dante’s L’Amoroso Convivio and there are signs of Dante’s Divine Comedy informing Milton’s imagery. The key theme of ‘At a Solemn Musick’—that the celestial harmonies could be heard on earth until ‘disproportioned sin’ (line 19) disrupted human capacity to hear them—may be derived from Dante’s Purgatorio, although the sentiment was commonplace; while in the conclusion to the ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’, Jane Paulet is placed, as with Dante’s Beatrice in Paradiso, with the saints in heaven alongside Rachel, Jacob’s wife (lines 71–2; Genesis 35: 16–19).19 In his reading of Italian poets and practice of verse in the Italian language and English verse which incorporates Italian forms, Milton appears to have been studying how English might follow the example of Italian by growing into a national vernacular for poetry fit to stand comparison with Latin and Greek. His schoolmaster Alexander Gil the elder had, as we have seen, taught original English poetry as though there were equivalent writers in the vernacular for the great classical figures, and had even proclaimed in Logonomia Anglica in 1619 (in Latin) that ‘it would indeed be desirable to unify the speech of all peoples in one vocabulary; and were human ingenuity to attempt this, certainly no more suitable language than English could be found’.20 The English sonnet entitled Sonnet I in 1645, ‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray’, follows the Petrarchan form of two quatrains and two tercets that Milton also adopts in his Italian sonnets, numbered II–VI in 1645. The opening line echoes that of a canzone in the Rime (Venice, 1564) of Pietro Bembo, champion of the literary eminence of the Tuscan language, ‘O rosignuol, che’n queste verdi fronde’ (‘O nightingale, who in these

142  c h a p t e r 6

green branches’). The poet is drawn to Italian example in a poem that becomes less interested in the ‘amorous power’ (line 8) of the nightingale than in song; and, at the Italianate turn from octet to sestet (‘Now timely sing’), he seeks to call into existence the maturity of vernacular style that will enable him to become a worthy rival to the great Italian poets that he imitates: Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate Foretell my hopeles doom in som Grove ny: As thou from yeer to yeer hast sung too late For my relief; yet hadst no reason why: Whether the Muse, or Love call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I. (lines 9–14) Timeliness was key to early modern ideas of just and proper conduct, informed by classical precepts such as Plato’s association of virtuous action with the well-­chosen occasion, or kairos, and Cicero’s praise of opportunitas, the seizing of the opportune moment, in his handbook of moral philosophy, De officiis. Choosing the right moment to speak, and in a manner appropriate to the occasion, was also a core principle of classical rhetoric.21 Anxiety over timeliness, a theme that Milton would have encountered in Shakespeare’s Sonnets—there are Shakespearean echoes in Sonnet I, such as ‘close the eye of Day’ (line 5), which recalls Shakespeare’s ‘eye of heaven shines’ (Sonnet 18) and ‘at the sun’s eye’ (Sonnet 25)— would become typical of several of the later English sonnets. The anxiety reaches an apparent crisis-­point in ‘Lycidas’, which indeed opens with a fourteen-­line verse paragraph that resembles but disrupts the Petrarchan pattern.22 As in the university exercises and letters, the figure of the eloquent speaker in Sonnet I is encompassed by the threat from ‘rudeness’, from the inarticulate and the uncultivated, here in the form of the cuckoo. This will become a familiar trope of Miltonic self-­ characterization. The nightingale as symbol of the poet’s song finally becomes explicit in the opening of Book 3 of Paradise Lost, where Milton’s blindness heightens its appropriateness:

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   143

Then feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful Bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid Tunes her nocturnal Note. (3. 37–40) The image of the poet as nightingale, song attuned by the promptings of the heavens, recalls the Latin oration on the theme of the ‘Music of the Spheres’ that Milton delivered to the Public Schools, likely in his postgraduate years: ‘Why, it is quite credible that the lark herself soars up into the clouds at dawn and that the nightingale passes the night in solitary trilling in order to harmonize their songs with that heavenly music to which they studiously listen.’23 Milton’s sense of himself as a solitary singer seeking to harmonize his song with heavenly music begins to emerge from his experiments with English verse in 1628–9.

Living with the Daemons The English verses beginning ‘Hail native language’ that Milton wrote for the College ‘salting’ over which he presided, whether in 1628 or 1631, were first published independently of the Latin prose of Prolusion VI in the 1673 Poems under the title ‘At a Vacation Exercise in the College’. They have often been taken as some sort of public announcement to his college peers of his new commitment to vernacular poetry and even to the career of poet. The verses begin: Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, And mad’st imperfect words with childish tripps, Half unpronounc’t, slide through my infant-­lipps, Driving dum silence from the portal dore, Where he had mutely sate two years before: Here I salute thee and thy pardon ask, That now I use thee in my latter task[.] (lines 1–8) It may be that Milton looked back on the verses as such an announcement when he decided to publish them in 1673, but, when placed back

144  c h a p t e r 6

in their original performative context of the salting, it is harder to take some of the lines with a straight face. Several approach doggerel, in keeping with the self-­mocking comedy of the occasion, with Milton still in his role of the Aristotelian Absolute Being: ‘I have some naked thoughts that rove about / And loudly knock to have their passage out’ (lines 23–4). Thomas Randolph had shifted into English verse, also rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, to conclude his salting in 1627, so Milton may be following a set structure (although Milton does not follow Randolph in having Latin verses precede the English).24 Yet the tone does become more elevated as Milton’s address to his ‘native language’ turns into a supplication that he may in future be granted ‘some graver subject’ to celebrate: ‘Such where the deep transported mind may soare / Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore / Look in, and see each blissful deity’ (lines 33–5). Inspiration is envisaged as apotheosis, with the poet soaring to receive, ecstatically, insights into the celestial affairs of the classical gods. The vision recalls the experience of apotheosis that Milton ascribed to the voice of the deceased Nicholas Felton, Bishop of Ely, in 1626: in blessedness amid winged soldiers [I] am borne aloft to the stars, just as once the old prophet was snatched up to heaven, driving a chariot of fire . . . I flew past the globe of the gleaming sun . . . I am carried through the ranks of wandering stars, through the expanses of the Milky Way; often I marvelled at my newly acquired speed until I reached the resplendent entrance of Olympus. (‘In obitum Præsulis Eliensis’, lines 47–50, 55, 59–63) As with King James in the Latin epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot, where the plotters attempt a sort of forced apotheosis on the king by blowing him up the heavens, Felton is compared to the prophet Elijah. However, the cosmic flight that the dead Felton recounts is predominantly imagined in classical terms and as an ascent to ever greater revelations of knowledge of the workings of the universe. The most striking moment in the funeral elegy for Lancelot Andrewes is when the sleeping poet has a vision of the bishop translated from his body into a

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   145

‘semi-­divine soul’ (line 30; semidea anima): ‘Lo and behold, suddenly the bishop of Winchester is standing before me: a star-­like radiance shone in his gleaming countenance; a white vestment flowed down to his gilded ankles; a white headband had girded his divine head’ (lines 53–6). The gilded or golden ankles of Lancelot Andrewes in the third Elegy have puzzled commentators, who have usually passed over them in silence or read them as golden slippers or golden feet. But, peculiar as they are on a dead bishop, these gilded ankles derive from Milton’s immersion in classical, and here particularly Greek, philology. In one of the most important ancient Greek lexicons, the second-­century Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, we are told that: ‘Bowls with a boss in the middle are called βαλανειόμφαλοι, circular-­bottomed, from their shape, χρυσόμφαλοι, gold-­bottomed, from the material, like Sappho’s χρυσαστράγαλοι, with golden ankles’. The Onomasticon, a ten-­book collection of Attic words arranged by topic, was widely accessible in Caroline Cambridge; Christ’s College library has the edition published in Frankfurt in 1608 (although the date of acquisition by the College is not given).25 Milton used Pollux for the translation into Greek of Psalm 114 that he sent to Alexander Gil, and it was likely one model for the Greek lexicon that Milton himself, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, compiled during the 1640s (but which, if it survives, has yet to be discovered).26 While Pollux is only interested in lexicography and not the literary context from which his words are taken, the possibility that a fragment of Sappho’s poetry, in which female ankles are treated with erotic fascination, may be the source of Bishop Andrewes’ golden ankles adds to the seemingly inappropriate tone that the elegy occasionally but insistently strikes. This tone is most provocative in the final line, ‘May dreams such as this often befall me’ (line 68; ‘Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi’), which is derived from the poet’s description in Ovid’s Amores of an afternoon spent with his mistress Corinna. The final lines of Ovid’s poem as rendered by Christopher Marlowe should be sufficient to convey the nature of Milton’s source:

146  c h a p t e r 6

What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me. How smooth a belly under her waist saw I, How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh? To leave the rest, all liked me passing well, I clinged her naked body, down she fell, Judge you the rest, being tired she bade me kiss; Jove send me more such afternoons as this.27 Ovidian elegy is transferred to Christian funeral elegy but without losing its erotic energies, which are rather redirected ‘towards a moment of creative and poetic rapture’.28 The audacious tonal oddity of the transfer underlines the extent to which a poem such as the elegy for Andrewes was an opportunity for Milton to experiment with, and display his powers over, the Latin language and poetic tradition. Milton’s early fascination with apotheosis and cosmic flight, which reappears in different forms in later poems, derives in part from fifteenth-­ century Florentine Neoplatonism and its guiding notion that intellectual endeavour could propel the human soul towards divinity. In the celebrated oration of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) on the dignity of man, God tells man that: We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, more freely and more honourably the moulder and maker of yourself, you may fashion yourself in whatever form you shall prefer. You shall be able to descend among the lower forms of being, which are brute beasts; you shall be able to be reborn out of the judgment of your own soul into the higher beings, which are divine. Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) declared that the soul of man lives the life of the heroes when it investigates natural things; the life of the daemons, when it speculates on mathematics; the life of the angels, when it inquires into the divine mysteries; the life of God, when it does everything for God’s sake . . . What else does the soul seek ex-

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   147

cept to know all things through the intellect and to enjoy them all through the will? . . . our soul by means of the intellect and will, those twin Platonic wings, flies towards God, since by means of them it flies towards all things.29 Similar ardour for knowledge infuses the vision of the ascent of the scholarly spirit to divine truth that Milton places at the centre of his seventh and likely latest Prolusion, in defence of knowledge: How much it means to grasp all the principles of the heavens and their stars, all the movements and disturbances of the atmosphere . . . How much it means to get an insight into . . . the nature and the sensory experience of every living creature . . . and—finally—into the divine powers and faculties of the spirit, and whatever knowledge may be accessible to us about the beings that are called household gods [lares] and genii and daemons . . . So, at last, gentlemen, when the cycle of universal learning has been completed, still the spirit will be restless in our dark imprisonment here, and it will rove about until the bounds of creation itself no longer limit the divine magnificence of its quest . . . a man who is in possession of the stronghold of wisdom . . . will seem to have the stars under his control and dominion . . . Mother Nature herself has surrendered to him. It is as if some god had abdicated the government of the world and committed its justice, laws, and administration to him as a ruler.30 This Platonic ideal of the intellectual ascent of the soul, rising above the stars and beyond the ‘life of the daemons’ who inhabit the elements, is exquisitely expressed in ‘Il Penseroso’ (1631?), a poem to which we shall soon return. The constant study of the solitary scholar will ultimately enable his mind to unsphear The spirit of Plato to unfold What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold The immortal mind that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshly nook:

148  c h a p t e r 6

And of those Dæmons that are found In fire, air, flood, or under ground, Whose power hath a true consent With Planet, or with Element. (lines 88–96) The rather commonplace nature of these Neoplatonic ideas of the Italian Renaissance by Milton’s time has perhaps obscured just how vitally they nonetheless shaped his sense of himself as an aspiring ‘universal scholar’ and poet. Milton never fully left behind this early conviction of the capacity of human beings to make themselves more divine through the attainment of virtuous knowledge. (That virtue is knowledge is the key moral principle of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, and the Socratic ethos will suffuse Milton’s most concerted exercise in ethical argument, Areopagitica). This capacity for ascent into a more purely spiritually refined existence is fundamental to the order of creation described in Paradise Lost, while the cosmic journey of Satan in pursuit of his ambition to dominate the Earth and dethrone God replays the Neoplatonic vision of self-­deification in a parodic key. It was not unusual, as we have seen, for young men in early seventeenth-­century Europe to be gripped by passionate excitement at the idea of attaining universal insight into the nature of things through scholarly endeavour. John Hall of Durham (1627–56), who would go on to work alongside Milton in the press office of the English Commonwealth and Protectorate, addressed a poem to John Pawson, his tutor at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in which he imagines Pawson leading him on a fantastic pilgrimage in the pursuit of knowledge. The poem moves with dizzying speed from a total comprehension of the internal secrets of nature, to a panoramic contemplation of the globe, with its natural beauties and ruins of ancient kingdoms, to a rapturous Platonic ascent to the heavens and the mysteries of angelic existence: Come, let us run And give the world a girdle with the sun, For so we shall Take a full view of this enamalled ball Both where it may be seen

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   149

Clad in a constant green, And where it lies, Crusted with ice; Where’t swells with mountains, and shrinks down to vales; Where it permits the usurping sea To rove with liberty, Where it pants with drought, and of all liquor fails. [ . . . ] But objects here Cloy in the very taste; O, let us tear A passage through That fleeting vault above; there may we know Some rosy brethren stray To a set battalia, And others scout Still round about, Fix’d in their courses, and uncertain too; But clammy matter doth deny A clear discovery, Which those that are inhabitants, may solely know.31 There are evident similarities between Hall’s ode to his Cambridge tutor and the imagery of apotheosis in Milton’s Latin elegies for Felton and Andrewes, both notable as recent Cambridge men of learning. The appeal of this sort of invocation of the rapture of learning in a homosocial environment to educated young men is suggested by the parodic echoes of Hall’s poem that have been found in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1647– 52?), the famous love lyric of Milton’s future friend and (like Hall) future colleague in the Cromwellian civil service, Andrew Marvell.32 In Prolusion VII, learning is presented as the way to master time and understand timeliness, matters of emergent anxiety in Milton’s sonnet on the nightingale (and indeed the real subject of fascination in Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’): learning enables us ‘to take our flight over all the history and regions of the world . . . This is the way to live in all epochs of history, Gentlemen, and to be a contemporary of time itself.

150  c h a p t e r 6

And while we are looking forward to the future glory of our name, this will also be the way to extend life backward from the womb and to extort from unwilling Fate a kind of immortality’.33 Milton was evidently fascinated at this point in his life with the idea of the man whose pre-­eminent humanitas makes him more than human—the magnitude of whose learning gives him god-­like insight. He would have found comparable notions to those of the Florentine Neoplatonic philosophers in the familiar source of Cicero’s De officiis and its account of the ‘magnanimous spirit’, or ‘great soul’. The magnus animus, or vir sapiens, as Cicero calls him in De oratore, emphasizing the degree of learning required of the ideal orator (perfectus orator), is the individual who distinguishes himself from his peers by the almost superhuman extent of his achievements and the glory which they bring to his community or commonwealth (res publica).34 Milton invokes the Ciceronian magnus animus and vir sapiens in the seventh Prolusion when he presents to his audience an image of the single man of heroic learning and virtue who can lead the community away from temptation and corruption through force of persuasion and example: The fact is, Gentlemen, that though some few outstanding scholars may have been corrupted by the bad morals of their country and the vulgarity of ignorant men, yet the illiterate masses have often been held to their duty by the efforts of a single learned and wise man [unius perdocti & prudentis viri industria]. Indeed a single family or a single individual, if he possesses knowledge and discretion [vir unus arte & sapientia præditus], may seem as if he were a gift of God endowed with power to make a whole nation virtuous.35 The Ciceronian idea of the heroic actions on behalf of his commonwealth of the single man possessed of superior wisdom, eloquence, and magnanimity—the capacity to subordinate his baser passions to the rational understanding that the good of the individual depends upon that of the community—would become increasingly important to Milton after he entered public controversy, and in particular during his role as a public servant of the republican governments of the 1650s.

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   151

All grammar school boys would have read in De officiis about how the magnus animus is comparable to the ancient heros, a demigod capable of superhuman feats in defence of his patria, or homeland, and whose tomb is venerated as a shrine. Milton includes among ‘the rewards of study’ in Prolusion VII becoming ‘the oracle of many peoples’ and having ‘one’s home become a shrine’. This is not to say, however, that Milton’s comparison of the man of extraordinary erudition with ‘heroes’ and ‘daemons’ in Prolusion VII would have been entirely uncontroversial among his audience in the college chapel at Christ’s. Joseph Mede had written, possibly shortly before Milton matriculated in 1625, a brief treatise that was not published until 1641, two years after Mede’s death, as The Apostasy of the Latter Times . . . or, the Gentiles’ Theology of Daemons i.e. inferiour divine powers, supposed to be mediatours between God and man: revived in the latter times amongst Christians in worshipping of angels, deifying and invocating of saints, adoring and templing of reliques, bowing downe to images, worshipping of crosses, &c. Mede’s text evidently circulated in manuscript long before it was printed: the editor of the printed text, William Twisse, states that ‘[m]any yeers agoe I was acquainted with it, by the Authors own hand: For such was his scholasticall ingenuity; I found him most free in communicating his studies’. This work arises out of Mede’s interest in interpreting world history as a narrative of the approaching millennium of Christ’s rule. He argues that the beginning of the ‘latter times’, the end days of the earth as prophesied in 1 Timothy 4—‘Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils’—have been heralded by the Roman Catholic veneration of saints and angels, which constitute a revival of the ‘Gentiles’ idolatrous Theology of Daemons’. Mede explains that by ‘daemons’—in Greek, ‘daimōn’, and the term used in the Septuagint Bible to translate the Hebrew for ‘idol’—he means ‘an inferior sort of deified powers [acting] as mediators and agents between the sovereign gods and mortal men’.36 These beings encompass in the Greek tradition the category of heroes and are what the Romans called genii, the guarding spirits of people and places, and also lares, or the ‘household gods’ with which Milton equates ‘genii and daemons’ in Prolusion VII. Mede,

152  c h a p t e r 6

c­ iting Hesiod, Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius, distinguishes between two types of daemons in the Greco-­Roman tradition: ‘deified souls of worthy men after death’, who rise to the ranks of heroes, then daemons, ‘and after that, if they deserved well, to a more sublime degree’; and a higher form of daemon, which is not a human raised to the status of spirit but a species of being that is created semi-­divine. These two forms of daemon correspond respectively to ‘those which with us are called saints’ and ‘that sort of spiritual powers which we call angels’.37 As a student, Milton equated the decline of learning in English society with the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, and he made this equation in Prolusion VII; but in this Prolusion he did not follow Mede, renowned for his erudition, in identifying pagan theories of the daemonic with latter-­day Catholic idolatry. The one notable exception in the treatment of daemons in the early writing is the 1629 devotional poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, in which, as we shall see in the next chapter, Milton does portray the scattering of the Roman spirits, including the lares, in a manner that speaks to Mede’s connection of pagan and Catholic idolatry. For the most part in the late 1620s and early 1630s, Milton’s thought is characterized by a fusion of Ciceronian notions of the perfectus orator and magnus animus with ancient Greek, particularly Platonic, ideas of the daemon and Florentine, Neoplatonic visions of self-­deification through knowledge. The result of this mixture of philosophical influences is a conception of the truly learned and eloquent individual as one who can realize an insight into the nature of things in the manner of the ancient heroes who made their nation virtuous through their great feats. The references in this period to Orpheus, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, and Plato show him to be a believer—at least on an imaginative if not a theological level—in the supposed line of heathen philosophers, the prisci theologi, who obtained insights into the nature of the one true God prior to the advent of Christ, either through revelations from observing the book of nature or via the writings of Moses and the prophets. Mede’s good friend Thomas Jackson (1579–1640), who became President of Corpus Christ College, Oxford, in 1630, was the most intellectually powerful and controversial proponent of this Neoplatonic philosophy before Henry More, who matriculated at Christ’s in Milton’s final year at the College. Jackson was

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   153

clear that the writings of the prisci theologi offered access to the power of the demiurge, the creative power behind all things in the Platonic tradition: Now such as were well read in Plato or Trismegist, or would be willing to read them, could not be ignorant of an eternall logos which they called the sonne of the eternall minde or essence. And this logos the word or image of the eternall minde was not in their apprehension meerly notionall or representative only but demiourgos a Word or reason (or however we expresse it) truly operative, the invisible cause or maker of all things visible. Such ideas were academically respectable, if controversial: Jackson was taken to task by Twisse, the Calvinist editor of Mede, who responded that if the truth of a non-­scriptural statement was sufficient to give it the status of one in the Scriptures, then Plutarch’s Moralia must be as worthy a guide as the Bible.38 Milton’s academic exercises and poems from this period represent the poet—who must, according to humanist theory, work to master universal learning to attain the highest level of eloquence in epic verse— as one who can achieve the status of an intermediary spirit between heaven and earth, and become a kind of Christian daemon channelling inspired song. Milton’s poetry in this period is full of daemons and genii, from the elemental daemons and ‘unseen Genius of the Wood’ of ‘Il Penseroso’ (line 154), to the roles of the Genius and the Attendant Spirit in the dramatic entertainments that he wrote for aristocratic occasions after completing his MA, Arcades (1633) and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle (1634). These latter figures are closer to the second, higher type of daemon described by Mede, whereas the semi-­divine souls (semidea anima) of Felton and Andrewes are the first type, ‘deified souls of worthy men after death’. The young Milton’s fascination with the idea of daemons, whether as ‘deified souls’ or sky-­born mediators between the divine and the human, and of the true poet as potentially a type of daemon, metaphorical or otherwise, helps to explain the prevalence in his poetic imagination of representations of the celestial—the several attempts to evoke the glorious beauty and epic scale of the heavens which of course reach their zenith in Paradise Lost. He repeatedly

154  c h a p t e r 6

r­ eturns in his early writing, both Latin and English, to the Pythagorean and Platonic notion of the music of the spheres, according to which the revolution of the planets traces in perfect musical harmonies a divine pattern of wisdom and power that is nothing less than the keynote of creation. In his oration on the topic in the University Schools in Prolusion II, he reminds his listeners that ‘Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony—unless he was a genius or a denizen of the sky who perhaps was sent down by some ordinance of the gods to imbue the minds of men with divine knowledge and to recall them to righteousness’. Pythagoras, in other words, may have been a higher kind of daemon who took human form. The Cambridge oration may have been on a set topic, but it was one which enflamed Milton’s poetic imagination. ‘At a Solemn Musick’ transfers the pagan music of the spheres to a Christian heaven as the poet prays that the earthly music to which he is listening might rise to the heights of the celestial harmonies: And to our high-­raised phantasy present, That undisturbed song of pure concent, Ay sung before the sapphire-­coloured throne To him that sits thereon With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee, Where the bright seraphim in burning row Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow, And the cherubic host in thousand choirs Touch their immortal harps of golden wires, With those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms, Hymns devout and holy Psalms Singing everlastingly [.] (lines 5–16) The imagery here is biblical—the sapphire throne is from Ezekiel (1: 26) and the ‘just Spirits’ from Revelation (14: 3–4)—but with that shift from pagan to Christian comes the acknowledgement of original sin characteristic of a Protestant sensibility: That we on Earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer with that melodious noise;

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   155

As once we did, till disproportion’d sin Jarr’d against nature’s chime, and with harsh din Broke the fair musick that all creatures made To their great Lord. (lines 17–22) The notebook of literary ideas and poetic drafts that Milton began after he left Cambridge, now known as the Trinity manuscript, shows Milton to have worried over this section of the poem, and the printed version of 1645 incorporates significant revisions that he may have made several years after the initial draft of the poem around 1631–3. There are two heavily corrected versions, followed by a rewrite of lines 17–28 only, and a final fair copy. In the initial draft, lines 18–19 read: ‘by leaving out those harsh chromatick jarres / of sin that all our musick marres’. The second draft replaces ‘chromatick’ with ‘ill-­sounding’ and makes sin ‘clamorous’, but the sense remains that the disharmony of sin is something that can be overcome by the human capacity to respond to heaven’s example. In the rewriting of lines 17–28 only, which is more or less retained in the final fair copy and printed text, line 19 now firmly puts that human agency in a pre-­lapsarian past: ‘as once we could, till disportion’d Sin / jarr’d against natures chime’. ‘Could’ is emended to ‘did’ in these latter drafts and in the text of the 1645 Poems, emphasizing that there will be no return of this agency: original sin has become an unalterable condition that locks the human will, not something that can be conquered by that will. The redraftings of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, which may have been done over a number of years, ‘record a steadily darkening sense of the effects of the Fall. What in the first draft was our present choice is replaced by the last with Adam’s irrevocably preterite act’.39 The initial drafts are written with the optimistic sense of man’s retained capacity to comprehend the divine that is also found in the second Prolusion, where the example of Pythagoras offers hope that it might be possible for a mortal of superlative moral purity to hear again the music of the spheres: ‘If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras’ was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars.’40 Although the dating of Milton’s various revisions of ‘At a Solemn Musick’ remains uncertain, their ‘darkening sense of the

156  c h a p t e r 6

effects of the Fall’ may be taken as emblematic of the movement of Milton’s mind and art over the course of his life. The enraptured, Platonic, and daemonic young Milton portrayed in this chapter could hardly be more different from the agonized Puritan of long-­standing biographical tradition; but that may be a consequence of previous biographers looking through the lens of Paradise Lost and from the perspective of the later Milton, who checked his early pagan energies with an increasingly sharp sense of human fallenness. That sense was always a component of Milton’s poetic thought, as the discussion of his ‘Nativity Ode’ in the next chapter will show, but it is played in a minor key in the early writing—and it is never entirely clear if it encompasses Milton himself.

Domina Given how often this imagery of daemonic insight into celestial harmony is found in the early Milton, we should probably take reasonably seriously the vision in the English verses of Prolusion VI of the vernacular poet’s ‘deep transported mind’, soaring ‘[a]bove the wheeling poles’ of the ten spheres of the Ptolemaic universe to hear the heavenly harmonies of Apollo’s ‘golden wires’ (line 38)—the same phrase used in ‘At a Solemn Musick’ to describe the ‘immortal harps’ of ‘the Cherubick host’ in a Christian heaven (lines 12–13)—and then bringing this music back to earth in the form of epic song. Milton’s example of such a singer of epic in ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ is the Homeric bard Demodocus, who makes Odysseus weep ‘with his melodious harmonie’ and holds the souls of his audience ‘[i]n willing chains and sweet captivity’ as he recounts the events of the Iliad—just as Shakespeare’s works, according to Milton’s epitaph, put his readers into an ecstatic trance, in the original Greek sense of ek stasis, of drawing the soul outside of the motionless body (lines 51–2). In the second of the drafts of ‘At a Solemn Musick’, the poet calls on the music to which he listens to work in this same way as Shakespeare’s poetry, to ‘snatch us from earth a while / us of our selves’; in ‘Il Penseroso’, the nun who personifies contemplative Melancholy is ‘held in holy passion’ and urged to ‘[f]orget thyself to Marble’ (lines 41–2). The nightingale appropriately makes its first Miltonic ap-

h e r o e s a n d da e m o n s   157

pearance in the second Prolusion, passing ‘the night in solitary trilling in order to harmonize [its song] with that heavenly music to which they studiously listen’.41 In Ad Patrem, where the facility of Milton’s father with music finds its perfect accompaniment in his son’s poetic talents, father and son are imagined walking ‘through heaven’s regions with golden crowns, uniting our sweet songs to the pleasant sounds of the lyre, songs with which the stars and the vaults of the twin hemispheres will resound’ (lines 32–4). The playful, joco-­serio context of the ‘salting’ should not be forgotten and, given that Mede may well have been in attendance at both the salting and Milton’s delivery of what became the seventh Prolusion, both performed in Christ’s, we might assume that Milton expected some of his audience, primarily Mede himself, to recognize and even take some umbrage at the very open exaltation of the daemonic and vision of a kind of self-­deification. Mede’s interests in, and apocalyptic theories about, daemons must have been known in Christ’s during Milton’s time there: Prolusions VI and VII may thus have been more knowingly provocative in their subject matter than has been assumed, especially given Mede’s view that Roman Catholic idolatry was a re­ incarnation of pagan daemon worship. Milton celebrates the beauty and wonder of what Mede condemns as pagan and idolatrous, and expresses his own desire—and the speaker of these ‘exercises’ cannot be separated from Milton himself, even though he is performing a conventional role, especially in the salting—to become daemonic through the acquisition of knowledge and the practice of poetry. In ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’, Milton could take advantage of the licence afforded to him in his role as ‘Father’ of the revels to push what he knew to be a controversial notion of the universal scholar and the epic poet as possessing the potential to transform themselves, while still alive, into daemonic figures of the second order: to turn themselves into, as Lancelot Andrewes is described in the third Elegy, semidea anima, a semi-­divine soul (line 30). In the Latin oration of the salting, Milton had already taken advantage of the playful format to joke self-­deprecatingly about his apparently well-­known ambition among his peers to become a poetic hero, while

158  c h a p t e r 6

at the same time asserting this very ambition in the English verses which follow it. He calls attention to the irony that though ‘some of late have called me “the Lady” (domina)’, he is now acting as the ‘Father’ of the new students in delivering their traditional induction speech. Whether or not the nick-­name of ‘the Lady’ initially came about because ‘his complexion [was] exceeding faire’, as reported by John Aubrey, or because of his perceived effeminacy, as many modern commentators have preferred to assume, one reason why Milton may have been happy enough to appropriate the label was its associations with the greatest poet of Latin antiquity.42 According to Aelius Donatus’s fourth-­century life of Virgil, familiar to early modern schoolboys as it was commonly prefixed to editions of the poet, the young Virgil’s exemplary moral conduct led to him being called Parthenias, ‘maidenish’ or virginal. Milton goes on to suggest that he has attracted the epithet of ‘the Lady’ because ‘I never showed my virility in the way these brothellers do’—presumably at this point he gestured, with more or less seriousness, depending on how he regarded some of his peers, to a particular section of the audience.43 ‘At a Vacation Exercise in the College’, as Milton later to chose to call the English verses of his sixth Prolusion, was a display of his literary ambition to his fellow students, who, if ‘the Lady’ nickname does indeed derive from Donatus, were all too aware of that ambition. It was also a piece of institutional, occasional verse that Milton deemed interesting enough to include, detached from the Latin prose that originally prefaced it, in his 1673 Poems. He chose to do so because it contributed to his self-­mythologizing as an English Virgil, offering evidence of his quest from an early age to imitate the careers of the great poets of antiquity and post-­classical Europe by writing elevated verse in his mother tongue. That self-­mythologizing appears to have been not merely retrospective, but on-­going at least from his time at Cambridge. The explanation of the persistence of ‘the Lady’ nick-­name as an aspect of Milton’s youthful self-­fashioning as a Virgilian poet of epic, who might mediate between his nation and heaven, is persuasive because his early preoccupation with the preservation of his chastity was increasingly bound up with his sense of poetic vocation.

CHAPTER 7

•

The Poetics of Play and Devotion

‘His Hand Unstained’ After beginning his MA studies in Michaelmas Term 1629, Milton’s imagination seems to have increasingly become under the sway of an image of the epic poet as a man who must not only master universal learning, but his own carnal appetites and desires, if he is to become a mediator between heaven and earth. If the true poet is to become attuned to the music of the spheres, become daemonic, then he must possess a heart ‘as pure, as chaste, as snowy’ as the Pythagoras invoked in the second Prolusion. It is hard to be sure how much this conception of the poetic vocation as an alternative priesthood, with fastidious requirements of fleshly restraint, is a self-­dramatizing role to which Milton light-­heartedly plays up in his correspondence with friends and interactions with peers at Christ’s—young Milton as the latter-­day Domina who must rise above the petty indulgences of those without his vast, Virgilian ambition. There is, as we shall see, an element of this playfulness in exchanges with his friend Charles Diodati over the different kinds of lifestyle a poet might adopt. At the same time, the equation of higher insight and poetic ambition with moral purity, and particularly with the sexually unsullied body, is a notable feature of the poetry after 1629. In poetic terms, this equation manifests itself in some askance looks at the Ovidian elegiac tradition that had so influenced Milton’s Latin poetry in his undergraduate years—to the point where he had even alluded to well-­known moments 159

160  c h a p t e r 7

Figure 7. Portrait of a young man identified as John Milton, by an unknown artist (c. 1629).

of Ovidian erotic play in the funeral elegy for Lancelot Andrewes—and which had been translated into English by authors such as Christopher Marlowe and John Donne. Among his contemporaries, the Ovidian style had been cultivated by various of those who styled themselves as ‘sons’ of Ben Jonson, including Thomas Randolph, one of whose most popular poems circulating in manuscript at the time Milton began his MA was ‘On 6 Cambridge Maids bathing themselves by Queen’s Coll: Jun. 15th. 1629’.1 In early modern England Ovid’s works were ‘at the centre of debates on erotic desire, debates on poetry itself, and, especially debates on the relation between desire and the imagination’.2 There is a self-­conscious distancing by Milton of his poetic ambitions from the Ovidian erotic tradition and its vernacular off-­shoots after 1629, even while the engagement with that tradition is incorporated into the texture of major works of the 1630s, including the Maske and ‘Lycidas’ and, eventually, into the arrangement of the 1645 Poems. This structuring element in Milton’s verse from 1629, both Latin and English,

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   161

is not simply a Christian subordination of the pagan ethos, however, for Milton’s very notion of the poet as a type of priest derives from pagan, Virgilian example. The recantation of love elegy as a youthful indiscretion was a conventional gesture of the poet who wished to represent himself as having left behind childish things as he progressed up the hierarchy of poetic genres, following the route of the Virgilian cursus, literally ‘running track’ and metaphorically the course of the competitive literary career. Virgil’s career offered a vocational pattern to the poet of ascent from lyric through pastoral and georgic to the most complex and encyclopaedic genre of epic.3 In Elegia sexta, the Latin verse letter addressed to Diodati and composed just after Christmas 1629, Milton makes a distinction between the sociable, festive, sensually indulgent life of the poet of lyric and love elegy and the obscure, frugal, self-­denying existence required of the prophetic poet or vates, the term Virgil used of himself in the Aeneid (7. 47) and which Virgil associates with Apollo, the god of poetry, and his priests (e.g. 3. 245–52). ‘Song loves Baachus, and Baachus loves songs’, Milton knowingly informs Diodati, and he goes on to display his mastery of the elegiac form that he has outgrown by describing a dance where ‘girls’ eyes and girls’ fingers playing will make Thalia dart into your breast and take command of it’ (lines 14, 47–8). Thalia is the muse of lyric poetry in Horace’s Hymn to Apollo (Odes, 4. 6) but the Roman spirit presiding over this elegiac tradition is Ovid, who could not write good verse during his exile on the Black Sea because ‘they did not have banquets or cultivate the vine there’ (lines 19–20), and from whom Milton takes his invocation of the ‘Thracian lyre’ (line 37; Ovid, Amores, 2. 11. 32) and of Erato, muse of love poetry (line 51; Ovid, Ars Amatoria, 2. 16). In this display of his control of Ovidian style, Milton recalls the earlier verse letter to Diodati, published in 1645 as Elegia prima, but also the most sensual of his Latin elegies, Elegia quinta and Elegia septima—the latter likely composed in summer 1628 and so chronologically prior to Elegia sexta, despite the order in which they were printed in 1645. In Elegia quinta, headed ‘On the arrival of Spring at the age of 20’, ‘the wanton Earth breathes her amorous desires, and all her children haste

162  c h a p t e r 7

to follow her example’ (lines 95–6), and the poet is given privileged insight into the sexual adventures of the Roman gods such as Faunus, spotted pursuing a nymph who ‘as she runs is anxious to be overtaken’ (lines 129–30). In Elegia septima, written ‘in his nineteenth year’, the speaker admits his ‘whole being was aflame’ after Cupid made him fall instantly in love with a girl whom he saw fleetingly in a crowd in London, and the poem is full of references to the force and ubiquity of sexual desire in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But while poets like Diodati who stick to experimenting with love elegy ‘can get drunk on old wine as often as they like’, the poet who writes about wars, ‘pious heroes and semi-­divine commanders’ (‘Heroasque pios, semideosque duces’), and ‘a heaven ruled over by Jove’ must ‘drink soberly from a pure spring’, ‘his youth must be chaste and free from crime, his morals strict and his hand unstained’ (‘Additur huic scelerisque vacans, & casta juventus, / Et rigidi mores, & sine labe manus’; lines 53–4, 55–6, 62–4). The phrase sine labe manus has been interpreted as a prohibition even of masturbation from the regime of the aspiring epic poet.4 This poet of sacred and epic song is rather an Apollonian ‘priest’ (sacerdos) who, ‘bathed in holy water and gleaming in . . . holy sacrament’, is in direct contact with the divine. Such sacral imagery of the poet is similarly found in Ad Patrem, where the power of poetry is associated with sacrificial ceremonies of the ancient priests who tended the pagan oracles: ‘It is with poetry that the sacrificing priest composes before the ceremonial altars, whether he is lying low a bull tossing its gilded horns or whether in his prophetic skill he is consulting destiny buried in the reeking entrails and seeking out Fate within the warm innards’ (lines 24–9). In Elegia sexta, Milton does not explicitly identify himself with this type of the Apollonian priestly poet, whose ‘innermost heart and mouth are full of Jove’, but he turns directly to discussion of his recently composed poem ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, which ‘the first light of the dawn brought’ to him on Christmas Day 1629 and which he encloses with his verse letter to Diodati (lines 65–6, 78). The implication in Elegia sexta is that a virginal, priestly life has been a precondition of Milton’s inspired achievement in ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, the devotional ode that he would later choose to place at the head of his

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   163

1645 Poems. But the life described in Elegia sexta is not that of the Christian ascetic, whether of Catholic or Protestant varieties, but of the devotee of Apollo whose physical and intellectual dedication to articulating a poetry of cosmic praise turns him daemonic, into an instrument of communication between the heavens and the earth such as is imagined in Ad Patrem, where Milton represents himself—in images of the heavenly flight and semi-­divinity of the true poet that we have seen to be pervasive in his early writing—as a ‘fiery spirit [spiritus] which whirls around the hurtling spheres’ and ‘flies among the starry choirs’, singing ‘an indescribable song’ (inenarrabile carmen; lines 35–7). This inenarrabile carmen invokes the Christian context of the heavenly song prophesied in Revelation 14: 2–3, the apprehension of which is limited to those who have remained virgins on earth: ‘I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps. And they sung as it were a new song before the throne . . . no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women: for they are virgins.’ This biblical prophecy of privileged access for male virgins to the divine truths in celestial song seems to have assumed particular resonance for Milton. The idea of song that is indescribable or ‘unexpressive’ in normal human terms recurs in key poems of the later 1630s, beginning with ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, where the ranks of the angels unite ‘in loud and solemn quire, / With unexpressive notes to heaven’s new-­born heir’ (lines 115–16); the later funeral elegies for Edward King and Diodati also feature, as we shall see, the association of the post-­ mortem understanding of this ‘unexpressive’ song with virginal purity on earth. Yet the jocular tone and sociable and familial contexts in which these elevated notions of the poet are proposed in Elegia sexta should not be forgotten, and they relieve some of the pomposity that might otherwise accumulate in rendering this visionary self-­image. In Diodati’s two extant letters to Milton, composed in Greek and undated—though usually assigned to the period before Diodati matriculated at the Calvinist Academy in Geneva in April 1630, and more precisely to the years between his departure for Geneva and his MA graduation from Oxford in

164  c h a p t e r 7

July 1628—he adopts a merry, carefree epistolary persona that he juxtaposes with the stiff and scholarly one that he ascribes to his friend. The first letter urges Milton ‘to cheer up’ and ‘put on a holiday mood’ in advance of their planned excursion together, which has been delayed by the stormy weather, ‘before you turn your mind to other things, despairing of sunshine and recreation’. Diodati looks forward to their walk in which the ‘air, sun, river, trees, birds, and earth and men will laugh and (I mean no offence) dance with us as we make holiday’. In the second letter Diodati writes from the country and again wishes his friend would join him among the flowers and birds leave aside his ‘poring over books and papers all day and all night without excuse’. He urges Milton to ‘live, laugh, make the most of Youth and the hours as they pass; and stop studying the activities and recreations and indolences of the sages of old, wearying yourself out in the process’—although he ends by cautioning that such play should not lapse into the laxity of Sardanapalus, the Assyrian king who in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics personifies sexual abandon.5 In the first letter there seems to be some teasing about Milton’s ability or inclination to dance, and the concluding reference in the second letter emphasizes, in the comic extremity of its contrast, the fastidiousness of Milton’s character. One wonders if, with Diodati’s early death in 1638, Milton lost the one person whom he would allow to get away with pricking the bombast of his intellectual and literary pretensions.

Melancholicus The companion poems ‘L’Allegro’ (the joyful, merry man) and ‘Il Penseroso’ (the melancholy, pensive man) bring to vernacular poetic life aspects of the personalities that Milton and Diodati had liked to adopt and ascribe to each other in their affectionate, playful, and archly literate Greek prose and Latin verse correspondence. Milton’s choice of Italian titles suggests Diodati may have been in his mind as an ideal reader. There is reason to think that the poems were written in the period between Elegia sexta and completion of the MA in the summer of 1632. They do not appear in his notebook of literary ideas, the Trinity manu-

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   165

script, which he began after he left Cambridge. While there is no evidence of scribal circulation of ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ before they were published in the 1645 Poems, a likely model for Milton were two lyrics that were extremely popular among compilers of manuscript verse miscellanies in the universities in the early 1630s. ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ was originally a song in the The Nice Valour, a Jacobean play (c. 1622) first printed in the 1647 edition of the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, but most recently ascribed to Thomas Middleton.6 The song appears in an unusually large number of verse miscellanies associated with Oxford and Cambridge in the Caroline period, under various titles including ‘Upon Melancholy’, ‘Song in the Praise of Melancholy’, ‘In Laudem Melancholie’, and ‘Melancholicus’. In several of these extant university miscellanies, the song is copied alongside ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’, by William Strode (1601?–45), a prolific poet at the heart of the scribal verse culture of Caroline Oxford—he was Canon of Christ Church and held the university position of Public Orator—who specialized in such ‘answer poems’.7 The song and Strode’s answer, which probably dates from the late 1620s, appear beside each other in a manuscript miscellany associated with Oxford that includes nine poems by Milton’s Cambridge contemporary Thomas Randolph— another illustration of Randolph’s great popularity—and that appears to have been completed by 1634–5; the earliest date for a manuscript in which both poems are transcribed on successive pages is another Oxford miscellany from around 1630.8 There are also extant university miscellanies compiled in the mid-­seventeenth century in which ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ is transcribed in a column faced on the right by another, unattributed answer poem, which begins ‘Come all my deare delights’, or ‘Come, come all you deere delights’, to form a diptych. One of these latter manuscripts is the miscellany compiled by Elias Ashmole that includes the early version of Milton’s ‘On Time’, headed ‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’.9 ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ and ‘Come all my deare delights’ are copied line-­for-­line into the manuscript, both in Ashmole’s hand, four pages after Milton’s poem. ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ may not themselves have been part of the scribal poetic culture of the universities, but one element in their

166  c h a p t e r 7

composition was likely the familiarity of Milton (and Diodati) with the mode of companion and answer poems that characterized this culture. ‘Hence, all you vain delights’ made ‘a spectacular entry into the culture of manuscript transmission and publication’ in the Caroline universities: ‘few lines . . . can have engaged seventeenth-­century minds so actively and vigorously’.10 The song itself was first printed in 1635 in the peculiar, anonymous compilation A Description of the King and Queene of Faeries, indicating an association of such verse with the fairy world invoked in ‘L’Allegro’, which refers to ‘Faery Mab’ and the ‘drudging Goblin’ Robin Goodfellow and has a particular debt, among numerous Shakespearean echoes, to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (lines 102, 105). The opening line of ‘Il Penseroso’, ‘Hence, vain deluding joys’, would immediately have reminded a reader familiar with the lyrics popular in the Caroline universities of ‘Hence, all you vain delights’, or ‘Melancholicus’, as one copyist entitled it. The latter comprises only 19 lines compared to the 176 of ‘Il Penseroso’, which is evidently a poem of a quite different degree of linguistic, metrical, and intellectual complexity; yet its personification of melancholy bears some comparison with Milton’s ‘pensive nun’, whom the poet encounters with ‘rapt soul sitting in thine eyes’ and calls on to ‘[f]orget they self to Marble, till / With a sad Leaden downward cast / Thou fix them on the earth as fast’ (lines 41–3): Welcome, folded Arms and fixed eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that’s fastened to the ground, A tongue chain’d up without a sound.11 The two poems have here in common a metre of tetrameter couplets and, while the rhyme scheme of ‘Melancholicus’ is varied, it juxtaposes blocks of lines including octosyllabics and heptasyllabics, the ‘eights and sevens’ that Milton employed to great effect in his companion poems.12 ‘Melancholicus’ dreams of Fountaine heads, and pathless Groves, Places which pale passion loves,

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   167

Moonlight walkes, when all the fowles Are warmly hous’d, save Bats and Owles; A mid-­night Bell, a parting groane, These are the sounds we feed upon; Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley, Nothing’s so daintie sweet as lovely melancholy. (lines 12–19) It is a similar world for which ‘Il Penseroso’ yearns, where he can walk unseen On the dry smooth-­shaven Green To behold the wandring Moon, Riding neer her highest noon, Like one that had bin led astray Through the Heav’ns wide pathles way; [ . . . ] Where glowing Embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom, Far from all resort of mirth, Save the Cricket on the hearth, Or the Belmans drousie charm To bless the dores from nightly harm: Or let my Lamp, at midnight hour, Be seen in some high lonely Towr, Where I may oft outwatch the Bear, With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear The spirit of Plato[.] (lines 65–70, 79–89). What is distinctive about the melancholy of ‘Il Penseroso’ is its connection with the personal illumination derived from scholarly contemplation. This is the ‘pleasing fit of melancholy’ in which the Attendant Spirit would later describe being ‘wrapt’ in Milton’s 1634 Maske as he prepared to ‘[m]editate my rural minstrelsy’ (lines 546–7). The connection of this sort of melancholy with poetic creativity is suggested by the echo of Virgil’s musam meditari (Eclogues 1. 2), ‘to be occupied with the muse’. The ‘high lonely tower’ at the centre of ‘Il Penseroso’ is a site

168  c h a p t e r 7

identified with the spiritual apotheosis of the scholar-­poet in Platonic language familiar from Milton’s Cambridge writing, with devotion to contemplation and study obtaining privileged insight into the elemental worlds of ‘those Daemons that are found / In fire, air, flood, or under ground (lines 93–4). Melancholy is not merely a condition of mind to be experienced in and of itself, as in ‘Melancholicus’, but a Hermetic process of spiritual and intellectual refinement that the scholar-­poet must undergo out of desire to ‘attain / To somthing like Prophetic strain’ (lines 173–4). ‘Il Penseroso’ is in this respect not really an ‘answer’ to ‘L’Allegro’ at all, but offers a creatively inspired version of melancholy that is quite different from the condition that ‘L’Allegro’ seeks to dispel. Strode’s eighteen-­line answer to ‘Melancholicus’, ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’, has less in common with ‘L’Allegro’, although it is also written in tetrameter couplets (but for the concluding couplet) and offers a catalogue of pleasures brought by the poet’s returning joys: Returne my joys and hither bring A heart not taught to speak but sing, A jolly spleen, an inward feast, A causeless laugh without a jest[.]13 Strode’s lyric, as with ‘L’Allegro’, does not so much argue for the superiority of mirth as describe its qualities. Those attuned to the literary culture of the Caroline universities would again have recognized the poetic fashion with which ‘L’Allegro’ was aligned. Those who had seen Thomas Randolph’s Cambridge comedy Aristippus, or The Jovial Philosopher (published 1630) might also, when they read the description of the goddess Euphrosyne as a ‘a daughter fair, / So bucksom, blith, and debonair’ (lines 23–4), have recalled the wise words of Randolph’s philosopher: ‘A bowl of wine is wondrous boon cheer, / To make one blithe, buxom, and deboneer’ (18). Strode was a poet who actively encouraged textual variety in the scribal circulation and reception of his work, and he issued his ‘Opposition to Melancholy’ in different versions, restraining the invocations of joy in later revisions and moderating the opposition to pensiveness: he altered the penultimate line, for instance, from ‘Then

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   169

take no Care but only to be jolly’ to ‘Now take no Care but to be wisely jolly’.14 The generation of different forms of answer poem in this culture of scribal exchange and imitation is illustrated by the anonymous ‘Come all my deare delights’, which relishes the sexual pleasures that are conspicuously absent from both Strode’s lyric and ‘L’Allegro’: Come all my deare delights As pleasing as the Nights Consum’d in Bacchus drenches [ . . . ] A wench that’s prostrate on the ground A Tongue that yields a pleasing sound, Maiden heads, & deedes of love [ . . . ] Theis are our free Delights.15 The sleazy libertinism celebrated in this version of ‘Come all my deare delights’ draws attention to the purpose of erotic play and persuasion to which the sort of lyric language in ‘L’Allegro’ was usually put. The debt of Milton’s companion poems to Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (composed before 1593) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s sceptical response, ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (composed before 1600), is evident in their form as catalogues of pastoral delights but is also more explicitly signalled in their opening and concluding lines. The conclusion of ‘L’Allegro’—‘These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth with thee, I mean to live’ (lines 151–2)—echoes the conclusion of ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, better known as ‘Come live with me, and be my love’: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me, and be my love’ (lines 23–4). One of the most popular of Elizabethan lyrics, it was printed, followed by Raleigh’s response, in the collection England’s Helicon (1600) and prompted further answers from John Donne, among others. In Marlowe’s lyric, the speaker offers his love ‘all the pleasures’ of a wholly sensual life, while in ‘L’Allegro’ the speaker will live with Mirth on the condition that she can give him such pleasures. Earlier the speaker in ‘L’Allegro’ had asked

170  c h a p t e r 7

Mirth to ‘admit me of thy crue / To live with her [Liberty], and live with thee, / In unreproved pleasures free’ (lines 37–40). This imitates the opening lines of ‘The Passionate Shepherd’—‘Come live with me, and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove’ (lines 1–2)—with the verb ‘prove’ cleverly turned into the condition of being ‘unreproved’, or ‘unblamed’. Even Milton’s slight, ten-­line vernacular lyric ‘Song. On May Morning’, likely written in the same 1628–9 period as the fifth and seventh elegies and included in the 1645 Poems, hails May for inspiring ‘Mirth and youth, and warm desire’ (line 6). But the pleasures celebrated by ‘L’Allegro’ are pretty much unreprovable compared to the pleasures Marlowe’s shepherd wants to offer his nymph. The comparative lack of sexuality in ‘L’Allegro’ suggests Milton’s reconsideration by the early 1630s of Ovidian poetic formulae—it was Marlowe who was the first to translate Ovid’s Amores into English—in his own experiments with vernacular pastoral. Marlowe’s pastoral love lyric is again present in the concluding couplet of ‘Il Penseroso’ (‘These pleasures Melancholy give, / And I with thee will choose to live’; lines 175–6) but the echo now seems more obviously ironic. Melancholy is a ‘sage and holy’ goddess, inspiring ‘great Bards’ who ‘In sage and solemn tunes have sung, / Of Turneys and of Trophies hung’—likely a reference to the chivalric epic verse of Spenser, whom Milton would later describe in Areopagitica as the ‘sage and serious’ poet (lines 11, 116–17).16 ‘Il Penseroso’ hails Melancholy as the ‘pensive Nun, devout and pure, / Sober, steadfast, and demure’, and looks to the opposite of what Marlowe’s speaker offers: a life of virginal retirement in ‘the studious Cloysters pale’ and ‘the peacefull hermitage’ (lines 31–2, 156, 168). The sincerity with which Milton advocates a Roman Catholic mode of celibacy must be open to question, and just before the appearance of Melancholy personified as a nun, Milton invents a genealogy for Melancholy from the incestuous union of Saturn and Vesta (anticipating the origins of Death in Paradise Lost from the union between Satan and his daughter Sin). Yet celibacy was also a requirement of a university career, which Milton may still have had in mind as a possibility; moreover, the nun in ‘Il Penseroso’ is, as Northrop Frye once observed, ‘less explicitly Christian than a vestal or pagan

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   171

saint . . . like the ideal poet in the Sixth Elegy’.17 We would do better to think of Marlowe’s description, ironic though it is, of Hero in Hero and Leander as a ‘nun’, or virgin priestess, in the temple of Venus than of this figure signalling Milton’s Laudian affection for ‘medieval contemplative monasticism’.18 Plutarch in the Moralia, as translated by Philemon Holland in 1603, refers to ‘the vestall virgins or nunnes votaries at Rome’ and to how ‘in the citie of Ephesus every one of those maidens vowed to the service of Diana, was at the beginning called Melliere, which is as much to say, as a Novice to be a priestresse hereafter’. The attraction of cloistered devotional life in ‘Il Penseroso’ appears to lie in its isolation from pastoral sexuality as much as the ‘ecstasies’ brought on by devotional music and intellectual solitude at the end of the poem. Chastity is the not the same thing as celibacy, and ‘virginity’ was sometimes defined by Protestants as chastity within marriage in the period: Eve is described as possessing ‘Virgin Majestie’ in her marital debates with Adam in the ninth book of Paradise Lost (9. 270).19 Nonetheless there is little room for doubt when it comes to nuns, cloisters, and hermitages, whether Christian or classical, that what is being invoked is celibacy; and such sexual abstinence is apparently a requirement in ‘Il Penseroso’, as it is in the Cambridge Prolusions, of the priestly poet who would seek spiritual apotheosis through scholarship and contemplation. ‘Melancholicus’ always appeared in Caroline poetic miscellanies before Strode’s ‘Opposite to Melancholy’ or ‘Come all my deare delights’; ‘Il Penseroso’ rather follows ‘L’Allegro’ in the 1645 Poems, but Milton’s sequence is not comparable to Raleigh’s negative response to the attempted persuasion of Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ in England’s Helicon. The rejection of sexuality in ‘Il Penseroso’ cannot be opposed to a tradition of eroticized pastoral celebrated in ‘L’Allegro’: Milton is not writing an ode of sexual persuasion to a mistress, as in the Marlovian catalogue of delights, but addressing an allegorical goddess. The companion poems should not be categorized as prescriptive, demanding a moral choice from readers: their subject is rather the difference between modes of poetic inspiration. The desire of ‘L’Allegro’ to go to the dramatic comedies of Ben Jonson and ‘sweetest Shakespear fancies child’ is hardly insincere or offered for moral judgement (line 133); but

172  c h a p t e r 7

the ‘Gorgeous Tragedy / in Sceptr’d Pall’ which stages the epic material of the ‘tale of Troy’ in ‘Il Penseroso’ is nonetheless of a higher generic degree, with tragedy the dramatic equivalent of epic in the ranking of the genres (lines 98–9, 100). If there is a hierarchy written into the poems, it is not a moral one but the generic hierarchy familiar from the Virgilian cursus. Yet the contrast that is playfully but intently explained to Diodati in Elegia sexta between the behaviour required of the would­be epic poet and the poet content to practise lyric and love elegy is replayed in ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’. This poetic difference, light-­ hearted as it is in its articulation to Diodati, is treated in Elegia sexta as self-­descriptive for the poet ambitious of sacred and epic song, for whom the distinction is one of moral and intellectual, as well as generic, degree. But resistance to such sensual distraction is the burden only of those who aspire to the ‘prophetic strain’, with its pun on the arduous moral and physical effort required: Milton is not expecting anyone else to make this commitment. Lyric and elegy are associated in Elegia sexta with ‘the sirens’ song’ and ‘Circe’s hall’, but Milton has no qualms about recommending that his dearest friend Diodati continue to give himself to wine, song, and love poetry; and Milton is still writing in elegiac form even as he looks to ascend to a higher mode. It is telling, however, that the language of ‘L’Allegro’ will be restored to its original context of the carpe diem love lyric when it is given to the supernatural tempter Comus, offspring of Bacchus and Circe, in Milton’s 1634 Maske.

‘A Synchronism of Prophecies’ ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ show Milton taking vernacular modes of verse that were popular in the scribal cultures of exchange in the universities and the Inns of Court in Caroline England and shaping them into more complex displays of poetic skill, exploring in the process personal concerns with the character of the poet and the status of various poetic genres. For all the claim of divine inspiration implied in the reference to the origins of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ in the verse letter to Diodati, Milton’s first extended experiment with a vernacular form

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   173

of devotional poetry also shares a range of motifs and images with the nativity poetry of his Caroline contemporaries. Milton opens his ‘Nativity Ode’ by signalling the longer vernacular tradition of Protestant poetics with which he wants his poem to be associated. In the opening four stanzas, which act as a proem to the main ‘Hymn’ and in which the poet invokes the ‘heavenly muse’ to assist him in composing a gift for Christ on his birthday, Milton recalls the stanzaic form of Edmund Spenser’s Hymn of Heavenly Beauty (1596)—an important influence, as we have seen, in ‘On Shakespeare’—by reproducing Spenser’s seven-­line rhyme royal scheme in that poem; but, as he had previously done in ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, Milton substitutes a twelve-­ syllable alexandrine for the final decasyllabic line in the manner of the famous stanzaic form of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The Spenserian attributes of Cambridge devotional verse were exemplified by Giles Fletcher’s brief epic, Christs Victorie, published in Cambridge in 1610 and dedicated to the then Master of Trinity College, Thomas Nevile. Christs Victorie is prefaced by a defence of the legitimacy of employing ‘prophane Poetrie to deale with divine and heavenly matters’, which cites Spenser’s example, and its opening stanzas bear close comparison with those of Milton’s ‘Ode’: The birth of him that no beginning knewe, Yet gives beginning to all that are borne, And how the Infinite farre greater grewe, By growing lesse, and how the rising Morne, That shot from heav’n, did backe to heaven retourne, The obsequies of him that could not die, And death of life, ende of eternitie, How worthily he died, that died unworthily; How God, and Man did both embrace each other, Met in one person, heav’n, and earth did kiss, And how a Virgin did become a Mother, And bare that Sonne, who the worlds Father is, And Maker of his mother, and how Bliss

174  c h a p t e r 7

Descended from the bosome of the High, To cloath himselfe in naked miserie, Sayling at length to heav’n, in earth, triumphantly, Is the first flame, wherewith my whiter Muse Doth burne in heavenly love, such love to tell.20 While there is no obvious or direct allusion to Fletcher’s popular poem in the ‘Ode’, the language and movement of Milton’s first sixteen lines have much in common with it: This is the Month, and this the happy morn Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King, Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release, And with his Father work us a perpetual peace. That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable, And that far-­beaming blaze of Majesty, Wherwith he wont at Heav’ns high Councel-­Table,  To sit the midst of Trinal Unity, He laid aside; and here with us to be, Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day, And chose with us a darksome House of mortal Clay. Say Heav’nly Muse, shall not thy sacred vein Afford a present to the Infant God? (lines 1–16) In Fletcher’s fourth stanza, described in the margin as his ‘Invocation, for the better handling of it’, the poet similarly makes an apostrophe to the heavenly muse: ‘Say, what might be the cause that Mercie heaves / The dust of sinne above th’ industrious skie; / And lets it not to dust, and ashes flie?’ It has even been proposed, with some exaggeration, that stanza 82 of Christs Victorie ‘may have suggested to Milton the whole plan of his ode’:

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   175

The Angells caroll’d lowd their song of peace, The cursed Oracles wear strucken dumb, To see their Sheapheard, the poore Sheapheards press, To see their King, the Kingly Sophies come, And them to guide unto his Masters home, A Starre comes dauncing up the orient, That springs for joye over the strawy tent, Whear gold, to make their Prince a crowne, they all present.21 However, we do not need to look back to the Jacobean era—nor to an Italian model such as Tasso’s ‘Nel giorno della Natività’ (1621), although Milton may well have known it, given his interest in Italian at the time—to find a host of devotional poems that share the images and idiom of the ‘Nativity Ode’. It was a conventional practice in Caroline Cambridge to ask students to write devotional verses in Latin and Greek on Sundays and to mark selected feast days and the liturgical seasons of the Church of England, and such verses could be posted up or performed in the college for general appreciation and judgement. The terms of Richard Crashaw’s scholarship at Pembroke College, where he matriculated in 1631, included the stipulation ‘[t]o make verses . . . Latin as many Greeks of [th]e same matter at Circumcision, Epiphany, Purification, Annunciation, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sun[day], All S[ain]ts, Good Friday . . . Written w[i]th theire owne hand, set on [th]e skreene before dinner’.22 Crashaw’s divine epigrams in Latin written in fulfilment of his scholarship were greatly admired by his contemporaries as exemplars of their kind: they were recommended by tutors to their students and issued by the University Press in 1634 as Epigrammata Sacra. As with Milton, Crashaw was asked to contribute Latin ‘act verses’ to summarize the argument of the Respondent in formal disputations held in his college.23 But there is no evidence that Milton’s devotional verse was held in anywhere near the same esteem as that of Crashaw. Two other, briefer English devotional lyrics by Milton that likely date from 1630–32, ‘Upon the Circumcision’ and ‘The Passion’, were probably composed as part of a series on church festivals. It seems possible that

176  c h a p t e r 7

they were originally composed in Latin and Milton then translated them into the vernacular in the conventional humanist method of composition and imitation across languages. (We might compare Andrew Marvell’s ‘On A Drop of Dew’, a devotional poem that seems to have been derived from his Latin poem, Ros.) The metre and rhyme scheme of ‘The Passion’ are those of the introductory stanzas of the ‘Nativity Ode’, and Milton refers to the earlier poem in the first stanza: Ere-­while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth, Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring, And joyous news of heaven’ly Infants birth, My muse with Angels did divide to sing[.] (lines 1–4) There is no evidence that the ‘Nativity Ode’ circulated in manuscript before it was printed but some evidence of how the poem was seen from within Cambridge is the transcription of the ‘Ode’ from the 1645 Poems by William Sancroft, a student and then Fellow of Emmanuel College from 1633–51, into a manuscript miscellany alongside religious verse by Crashaw and other nativity poems, including William Cartwright’s ‘On the Nativity’, placed immediately before Milton’s poem.24 Thomas Philipot, who matriculated at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1634, placed two devotional lyrics next to each other in his 1646 Poems, ‘On the Nativitie of our Saviour’ and ‘On Christ’s Passion’, that were likely from his time at Cambridge. (A few pages earlier in the volume are verses entitled ‘A thankfull acknowledgement to those Benefactours that contributed to the re-­edifying of Clare-­Hall in Cambridge’.) They bear comparison with Milton’s poems on the same topics and suggest a shared vernacular, as well as Latin, idiom in the devotional verse of Caroline Cambridge: Now Truths great Oracle it selfe was come,  The Faithlesse Oracles were strucken dumb.  No marvell if the Shepherds ran to see  Him, that should everie Shepherds Shepherd bee[.]25 Two aspects of Milton’s ‘Nativity Ode’ mark it out from other devotional verse on the topic in the 1620s and 1630s: its extended account of the cessation of the oracles and the departure of the pagan gods, which

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   177

tends to be treated in a line or two in other nativity poems of the period, and its fascination with the apocalyptic collapsing of time in the fusion of the birth and second coming of Christ. Both these aspects of the poem can be related to the intellectual interests of Joseph Mede. As we have seen, Mede had published in 1627 his influential Clavis Apocalyptica, in which he proposed a new method of applying the Book of Revelation to an interpretation of human history. The work was an astonishing display of Mede’s facility in general learning, demonstrating that knowledge of languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and ‘Chaldee’ or Aramaic), history, and mathematics were all ‘vital preliminaries to divinity’.26 Instead of attempting to impose a linear narrative on apocalyptic history, he argued the prophecies in Revelation should be grouped together in ‘synchronisms’: ‘By a Synchronism of prophecies I meane, when the things therein designed to run along in the same time; as if thou shouldst call it an agreement in time or age: because prophecies of things fall out in the same time run on in time together, or Synchronize’. While Mede made explicit in the expanded 1632 edition of Clavis Apocalyptica that his scheme identified the overthrow of Antichrist with the fall of the Roman Catholic Church, the ‘Apostatical Kingdom’, or ‘the Whore’s Beast’, he also insisted that the sounding of the seventh trumpet prophesied in Revelation 8 and which inaugurates the millennium—the thousand-­year reign of Christ and his saints that constitutes the final phase of human history—was some time in the future. No date was specified for the beginning of the millennium, which was repeatedly said to be ‘yet to come’.27 The Clavis Apocalyptica was greeted with European-­wide interest and acclaim and gave Mede a high scholarly profile in Cambridge.28 Milton’s idea of the millennium is more musical than visual: it is conceived as a recovery of the music of the spheres, the inenarrabile carmen or ‘angelic symphony’ that was lost to human ears with the Fall, and that so fascinated the young Milton as an articulation of regained paradise: ‘Ring out, ye crystal spheres, / Once bless our human ears’ (lines 125– 6). The power of this heavenly song turns human time into something resembling Mede’s idea of ‘synchronism’, in which past, present, and future ‘run along in the same time’:

178  c h a p t e r 7

For if such holy Song Enwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, [ . . . ] And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. (lines 133–5, 139–40) The ‘Ode’ celebrates the birth of Christ as setting in train the historical process that will lead to the Last Judgment—‘When at the world’s last session, / The dreadfull Judge in middle Air shall spread his throne’ (lines 163–4)—but Milton follows Mede in his clear insistence that the sounding of the seventh trumpet, what Milton calls the ‘wakefull trump of doom’ (line 156), is ‘yet to come’: ‘But wisest Fate says no, / This must not yet be so’ (lines 149–50). Linear time continues on earth, even if the birth of Christ has set an eventual end-­point to its progress, and the poet’s images of the ‘melodious time’ of the millennium remain temporally bounded, ‘tedious’ or dilatory visions of an undated but certain future: ‘Time is our tedious Song should here have an ending’ (line 239). The song must end now, but time continues for the foreseeable future.

‘The Lars, and Lemures Moan’ As we saw in the previous chapter, in Apostasy of the Latter Times, likely composed by 1624 but first published in 1641—the same year that Parliament sponsored an English translation of Clavis Apocalyptica and two years after Mede’s death—Mede presented the idolatrous Roman Catholic veneration of angels, saints, and relics as a latter-­day manifestation of the ancient Roman worship of ‘daemons’: he set out to show ‘the deifying and worshipping of Saints and Angels, with other parts of their Idolatry . . . to be as lively an image of the doctrine of Daemons as could possibly be expressed’.29 We also saw the young Milton’s recurring attraction to the idea of the scholar-­poet assuming the role ascribed to

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   179

heroes and daemons, who were thought to act ‘as mediatours and agents betweene the Soveraigne Gods and mortall men’, as Mede puts it. In what was probably his final Cambridge prolusion in 1631, Milton presented, mostly unironically, the personal reward of attaining universal knowledge as a kind of semi-­deification as an oracle or daemon, with insight into the supernatural realms obtained from perfect knowledge of the natural world. Mede, sitting in the audience of Christ’s chapel for the prolusion, would likely not have been impressed by this MA student’s delight in images of the daemonic that he had recently equated with Catholic idolatry. But if Milton had earlier showed Mede a copy of ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, as he may well have done if he was seeking to impress the most famous of the Christ’s dons with his skill in devotional poetics, Mede would found much that would speak directly to his own confessional studies in comparative religion. The poem is distinguished from contemporary nativity odes by its lengthy account of the expulsion from earth of those oracles and tutelary deities with which Mede associated pagan daemon worship. If Milton’s notion of the priestly poet in Elegia sexta is derived from descriptions of the Apollonian priest in Virgil, in the ‘Nativity Ode’ it is specifically the Apollonian priest who is bereft of inspiration when the birth of Christ silences the famous Oracle at Delphi: The Oracles are dumm, No voice or hideous humm Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine, With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance, or breathed spell, Inspires the pale-­ey’d Priest from the prophetic cell. (lines 173–80) The language inverts the seemingly positive image of the melancholy scholar in his ‘mossy cell / Where I may sit and rightly spell’ at the end of ‘Il Penseroso’, striving to attain ‘something like prophetic strain’ (lines

180  c h a p t e r 7

169, 174). And while ‘Il Penseroso’ yearned for the company of ‘those daemons’ in the elements and of the ‘unseen genius of the wood’ (lines 93, 154), the ‘Ode’ explicitly imagines the genii and lares, the Roman deities of place and household that Mede connects with both pagan daemons and Catholic idols, departing the earth at the birth of Christ. The tone of the lines in which the Greek and Roman spirits depart is, as has often been observed, less triumphalist than wistful, certainly compared to the scattering of the false gods of the Old Testament and their rituals of human sacrifice which follows: The lonely mountains o’re, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; From haunted spring and dale Edged with poplar pale, The parting Genius is with sighing sent, With flowre-­inwov’n tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. In consecrated Earth, And on the holy Hearth, The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint, In Urns, and Altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill Marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat. (lines 181–96) The lares, one of the names that Mede tells us the Romans gave to ‘deified soules of men after death’, are here paired with the lemures, malevolent spirits not given proper burial rites. However, the nymphs with their ‘flowre-­inwov’n tresses’—an early instance of a recurring fascination with tangled female hair as a synecdoche of temptation in Milton—are portrayed rather more sympathetically than in Mede’s account

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   181

of the Pythia, the high-­priestesses of the temple of Apollo who served as the mouthpiece of the Oracle of Delphi: The She-­Priests and Prophetesses of the Gentiles, when they served their Idols; as their Pythiae, Bacchae or Maenades, and the like . . . used, when they uttered their Oracles, or celebrated rites and sacrifices to their Gods, to put themselves into a wild and extatical guise, having their faces discovered, their hair disshevelled and hanging about their ears.30 The ‘tangled thickets’ in which Milton’s nymphs mourn is both a negative counter-­image of their ‘flowre-­inwov’n tresses’ and an objective correlative of the temptation to sexual abandon that the pagan ethic can offer: the Maenads and the Bacchae, the crazed female devotees of Dionysius or Bacchus, will become an embodiment of threatening sexuality in the Maske and ‘Lycidas’. Mede derives a good deal of his material in the Apostasy from Plutarch’s ‘On the Cessation of the Oracles’, an essay included in Plutarch’s Moralia, a commonplace textbook in humanist education, recommended by Milton in Of Education.31 Although it is habitually claimed that Milton relied on the demonology in the 1629 second edition of John Selden’s De diis Syris (1617) for the false Jewish, Syrian, and Egyptian gods listed towards the end of the ‘Ode’ (and for the catalogue of demons in the first book of Paradise Lost)—Baalim, Ashtaroth, Hammon, Thammuz, Moloch, Isis, Orus, Anubis, Osiris—he would also have known Plutarch’s famous essay on ‘On Isis and Osiris’ in the Moralia, a myth which inspires some of Milton’s most striking prose writing in Areopagitica. Plutarch writes of how he sides ‘with them who thinke that the things which be written of Typhon, Osiris, and Isis, were no accidents or passions incident to gods or to men; but rather to some great Daemons: of which minde were Pythagoras, Plato, Xenocrates, and Chrysippus’.32 Moreover Mede’s Apostasy gives an account of how Baal, or in the Chaldee Dialect, Bel (for all is one) was the first King of Babel after Nimrod, and the first (as is written) that ever was deified

182  c h a p t e r 7

and reputed a God after death; whence afterward they called all other Daemons Baalim . . . and here note a wonderfull mystery, that old Babel, the first pattern in the world of ambitious Dominion, was also the Foundresse of Idols.33 The connection between tyranny, idolatry, and demonology would become a key structuring principle of Milton’s polemical prose and also of Michael’s account of post-­lapsarian human history in the twelfth book of Paradise Lost, in which Nimrod will be the first to ‘arrogate Dominion undeserv’d / Over his brethren’, and whose ‘Empire tyrannous’ embodied by the Tower of Babel provides the foundation for the many subsequent nations ‘[b]red up in Idol-­worship’ (12. 27–8, 115). The ‘Nativity Ode’ incorporates classical poetic models, in particular the choral ode to the birth of Apollo in Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris— Euripides is an authority to whom Milton will increasingly turn during the 1640s in matters of moral and philosophical, as well as literary, complexity—but it does so in the fashion in which another of its classical models, Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, with its vision of the birth of a wondrous child who will restore Saturn’s golden age, was commonly interpreted as a prophecy of Christ’s nativity. Dante had placed particular significance on Eclogue 4 as exemplary of the Christian allegory that could be found in Virgil’s poetry.34 The infant Christ assumes the role of Apollo in the twenty-­fifth stanza of the ‘Ode’ by expelling Typhon, who in Greek myth was related to Python, the snake-­like monster killed by the infant Apollo when he took control of Delphi. Again the temporal process is less straightforwardly linear than illustrative of Mede’s method of the ‘synchronism of prophecies’, but applied to Greek poetry as much as Scripture: Milton ‘inverts and runs backward the stories of the Homeric and Euripidean hymns to Apollo, in which the god killed the monsters at Delphi before instituting his oracle: here Apollo leaves his shrine before the Christ child overcomes Typhon with the rest of the damned crew’.35 Classical, pagan poetics is a type or pre-­figuration of the Christian revelation that simultaneously runs alongside it rather than an impure, anti-­Christian element which needs to be expelled. The

t h e p o e t i c s o f p l a y a n d de v o t ion   183

seventh trumpet has not yet sounded, as Mede cautioned, and history has not ended: pagan wisdom cannot yet be done without and the ‘Ode’ formally enacts that dependence. Something like this application of ‘synchronism’ to pagan as well as scriptural sources will become the structuring aesthetic of Paradise Lost, with difficult and equivocal effects for the reader. The controversial religious views of the Neoplatonist friend of Mede, the Oxford don Thomas Jackson, again shed some light on Milton’s complex perspective in the ‘Ode’ on the relation between Christian truth and pagan knowledge. In a discussion of how divine truth can be revealed in pagan myth, Jackson cites Plutarch’s opinion that the oracles ceased because of ‘the absence of his daemoniacall spirits, which by his Philosophie might dye or flit from place to place, either exiled by others more potent, or upon some other dislike’. Jackson then suggests that ‘Plutarchs relation of his daemoniacall spirits mourning for great Pans death’ at the time of the crucifixion is ‘so strange’ that it ‘will not permit me to doubt, but that under the knowne name of Pan was intimated the great Shepheard of our soules, that had then layd downe his life for his flocke’. The identification of Christ with Pan was a Renaissance commonplace—in Spenser’s Shepherdes Calender (1579), Christ is called ‘great Pan’, and the line is glossed with reference to Plutarch’s essay on the oracles—so the ‘mighty Pan’ (line 89) of Milton’s ‘Ode’ is more likely to derive from Spenser than from a theological treatise such as Jackson’s twelve volumes of commentaries upon the Creed. But Jackson’s conclusion that even ‘this base and counterfeit resolution of these Heathens coyning, beares a lively image (for the exact proportion) of the divine truth, charactred out unto us in Scripture’ gets us close to Milton’s perspective on classical knowledge in the ‘Ode’ and indeed throughout much of his writing: divine truth can be revealed, as Jackson puts it, in the ‘untruths of poetical fables’. The pagan oracles were God’s revelation to the Greeks and Romans, ‘crumbs to fall unto them from his children’s table’. Virgil’s fourth Eclogue begins by announcing the last age of the Cumaean Sibyl, the Oracle at Cumae, and the beginning of a new golden age with the birth of a child to whom all of nature will

184  c h a p t e r 7

do homage. Virgil might have thought the prophecy was of the birth of the emperor Augustus, but, for Jackson, he was really recording the Word of God and offers Christian readers: a clearer view of many divine mysteries recorded by sacred writers, concerning our Saviours eternall generation, incarnation, nativity and propagation of his Kingdome; then wee can hope to approach unto by the perplexed Labyrinths of many moderne Interpreters, of divers Schoolemen, or by any tradition of the ancient Hebrewes as now they are extant.36 The oft-­made claim that the ‘Ode’ is the beginning of Milton’s own, long struggle with the place of pagan art and ethics in his Christian poetics—that the ‘Ode’ is, in John Carey’s powerful if mixed metaphors, ‘a piece of mind-­cleansing’ that ‘amputates the pagan half of his poetic life’—misplaces a linear structure on both the poem and Milton’s career.37 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ was written, as were all Milton’s student poems, to compete with the efforts of other poets in the crowded generic field of nativity odes; and, as with many of his student poems, Milton adapted the generic template to aspects of his own personality and to areas of peculiar fascination to him: here the music of the spheres, millenarian time, the pagan gods and daemons. On this occasion he also incorporates elements of thinking about the millennium and pagan idolatry that students and Fellows at his college would have recognized as topics on which the venerable Mede had spoken and written with great erudition. There is no linear progression in Milton’s writing and thought in the Cambridge years so much as a series of experiments in poetic genres: for if Milton did hope to impress Mede with his devotional verse, then the prolusion that he likely performed in the College chapel about eighteen months later in autumn 1631, as well as the lyric ‘Il Penseroso’ from around the same time, show an intellectual enchantment with, not an expulsion of, notions of the daemonic apotheosis of the true poet.

Pa r t I I I •

Cambridge and Hammersmith, 1629–35

CHAPTER 8

•

Laudian Poet?

‘Tenet of the Apocalyptical Beast’ The Calvinist minister William Twisse was elected the first prolocutor, or chairman, of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, the council of clerics assembled in 1643 to decide what structure should replace the collapsed structures of the Church of England. In the same year he contributed the preface to the English translation of his friend Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica that had been approved by order of Parliament in 1641. In the mood of apocalyptic fervour which enveloped England with the outbreak of civil war, Mede’s scholarly meditations of the 1620s on biblical prophecies and their application to history evidently spoke to the millenarian preoccupations of some aligned with the Parliamentary–Puritan cause.1 Twisse had earlier contributed the preface to Mede’s Apostasy of the Latter Times, in which his praise for Mede’s scholarship and character was momentarily tempered by the confession that there ‘there hath been some difference between us about ceremonies, as about the lawfulnesse of bowing towards the Altar, and about the holinesse of Churches, whereof he was as zealous as his Lord of Canterbury, or rather more; for he held it unlawfull to pull downe Churches, they being places separated for Gods use’.2 Twisse suggests his friend Mede was in tune with the greater emphasis on ceremonialism and the material form of the church in the mode of devotion advocated by Archbishop Laud and the supporters of ‘Laudianism’ during the 1630s. 187

188  c h a p t e r 8

The increasing imposition of such ceremony and ritual on the Church of England after Laud’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 provoked previously conformable Puritans, such as Twisse, to regard the Laudian reforms as a deliberate attempt to return the Church to Roman Catholic practices. Yet ‘some were too forward in censuring Master Mede, as complying with the times in this’, observes Twisse, who maintained Mede had held these same opinions about the spiritual importance of altars and church buildings for more than two decades before ‘that last Sermon of his, whereat divers took great offence’.3 Twisse may have had in mind the sermons published in 1637 and 1638 on the topics of The Name Altar, or Thysiasterion, Anciently Given to the Holy Table, and Churches, that is, Appropriate Places for Christian Worship both in and ever since the Apostles times. In the preface to the former Mede was at pains to point out that ‘this Discourse was a private Exercise, delivered in a Colledge Chappel, above two full years since, and so before the present controversie about that subject, whereof it treats, was commenced by any publick writing: and therefore not to be suspected to ayme at, or to have relation to any mans opinion or person since interested therein’.4 Yet the latter work, Churches, hardly avoids public commitment in the religious controversy raging about Laudian reforms of the Church in 1638 by being dedicated to Laud himself. It is notable that the two works by Mede to which Twisse put his name in the early 1640s are concerned with the anti-­Christian idolatry of Roman Catholicism. The question of whether or not Mede can, or should be, classified as ‘Calvinist’, ‘Puritan’, ‘Arminian’, or ‘Laudian’, and at what points in his life, is pertinent to the question of Milton’s own early religious identity because of the surprising but forceful claims in recent biography and criticism that Milton himself ‘had been a contented Laudian both in his personal loyalties and in his theology’ before the civil wars, and that some of his poetry displays ‘a formal, ritualistic expression of devotion, in harmony with new [i.e. Laudian] modes of worship that were becoming dominant in the Church’.5 The argument for Milton’s Laudian allegiance and style rests on biographical and archival evidence to do with Milton’s family and time at Cambridge and contextualized

l a u di a n p o e t ?   189

interpretation of the Latin funeral elegies, the devotional poetry, and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle. The first piece of the biographical jigsaw assembled in the case for the young Milton’s Laudianism is the choice of university tutor and college made by John Milton senior for his elder son. Parents could have a good deal of control over the choice of tutor for their sons, depending on their wealth and connections, and would unsurprisingly seek advice about the qualities of a tutor and the reputation of a college: ‘choice of tutor was agreed to be of almost paramount importance, for his role had become a crucial one, overseeing his student’s instruction, finances, religious observance, and general conduct and deportment’. For those parents who ‘knew of a suitable man this was likely to be the determining factor in their choice of college and hall’, although it could also be the case that the parents chose a particular college and then asked its head to select an appropriate tutor. The religious complexion of a college could be one important factor in the decision for some parents.6 The choice that Milton’s father made for his son is held to be significant by Campbell and Corns in their 2008 biography because ‘Chappell and [Christ’s] most illustrious scholar, Joseph Mede, belonged with the Arminians and ceremonialists’. As we saw in Chapter 4, the relationship between Chappell and Milton quickly deteriorated, for reasons that remain a matter of speculation—perhaps due to Milton’s alleged whipping at the hands of Chappell—and Milton left Cambridge for a period before being assigned to another tutor: such cases of a breakdown in the crucial tutor– student relationship and reassignment to a new tutor were comparatively rare but not unknown.7 The dispute between Milton and Chappell was unlikely to have been over religious issues, however, because Milton’s new tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, was to be deprived of his clerical living in 1646 on charges of being ‘too ceremonious’ and introducing Laudian innovations into his parish church in Leicester. Tovey may have come recommended to Milton senior by Charles Diodati’s father, Theodore, who had acted as a private tutor to James I’s daughter, Elizabeth, alongside Lord John Harrington, to whom Nathaniel Tovey’s father was chaplain. The change of tutor is thus taken by Campbell and Corns to have ‘nevertheless ensured a continuity of Arminian

190  c h a p t e r 8

and ceremonialist influence, which presumably satisfied a significant criterion as John Milton senior made his choice’.8 John Milton senior had earlier made the choice of the Scottish cleric Thomas Young to tutor his son privately; but by the late 1630s Young was a significant figure in the Puritan opposition to the Laudian Church. A choice of ‘ceremonialist’ university tutors must consequently indicate a break on Milton senior’s part with his earlier religious preferences. But, as we saw in Chapter 1, the choice of Young should not be taken as a sign that Milton senior was sympathetic to oppositional Puritanism: in the period when Young was tutoring Milton in Jacobean London, Young is best identified as a conformable Puritan—as is Richard Stock, the rector of the parish church in All Hallows where Milton grew up and who may have taught him to read and write. Milton was moved to write the Latin verse letter to Young that became Elegia quarta not out of shared oppositional religious politics, but out of gratitude for Young’s role in introducing him to Latin poetry. It was only from the mid-­1630s onwards, when Laudian policies were being imposed nationally, that many previously conformable Puritans, such as Young, became alienated from the Church of England. The case of Joseph Mede equally reveals the complexity of the changing religious context in the Caroline period, and the difficulties involved in ascribing to an intellectual such as Mede—or to a young student poet such as Milton, who wrote nothing explicitly before 1641 about his views on matters of religious doctrine and discipline—a stable religious identity such as ‘Laudian’. In Mede’s extensive correspondence with his Puritan friend Twisse, first published in the posthumous 1664 Works, Mede claims, in a letter dated April 1637, that his learned discourses on the place of altars, the Eucharist, and the material fabric of the church in devotional practice were not propaganda for Laud but intended as a response to those who would push Laudian policy towards crypto-­Catholic extremes: he refers to the ‘dangerous grounds [on which] some defended these things, namely such as would in time inferre the lawfulness of Image-­Worship; I thought good therefore in more private Discourses to set them upon safer Premises and prevent such an Evil’. In the same letter, Mede complains that his famous millenarian studies had led to charges that he had ‘too much addiction and tenderness to the Puritan faction; which is a

l a u di a n p o e t ?   191

crime here, if it be once fastened upon a man’. This was a complaint that Mede had earlier made in a letter to Twisse dated May 1635, in which he suggests that his erudite apologies for the validity of church ceremonies would ordinarily have attracted the patronage of Laud and ‘would have made another man a Dean or Prebend or something else ere this. But the point of the Pope’s being Antichrist, as a dead fly, marred the saviour of that ointment.’9 One of the key divisions that opened up between Laudian and Puritan in Caroline England was their attitude towards the Book of Revelation and the identification of Rome with the Beast of the Apocalypse: whereas the apocalyptic rhetoric of perpetual conflict with Rome had been a broadly common language in in the Jacobean Church, the Laudian party was distinguished by its rejection of this language and of the traditional Puritan identification of the Pope with the Antichrist.10 Mede observed to Twisse that those who believe his discourses on ceremony and the material form of the church show him to have ‘made the bent of the Times the rule of my opinions’ are mistaken, as, ‘if I did so, I should quickly renounce my Tenet of the Apocalyptical Beast’. Though Mede did not recant the arguments that he had made in the Clavis Apocalyptica, and expanded in the second edition of 1632 his discussion of their application to the Roman Catholic Church, he did not publish any further work on his elaborate readings of Revelation after Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury. Mede recognized that he would have faced official censure if he had tried to publish in 1635 the work that in 1627 had been greeted with European-­wide acclaim for its learning: ‘the Times, when my thoughts were exercised in those Speculations I spake of, were times of better awe than now they are; which preserved me from that immoderation which I see divers now run into, whether out of ignorance or some other distemper I cannot tell’.11 Mede presents himself in both his published work and private correspondence as a moderate, interested above all in the advancement of Protestant scholarship and somewhat above the usual academic and clerical jockeying for preferment and place. There is likely an element of disingenuousness here, even though the letters were not published until after his death in 1638, but his concern in his correspondence from 1634–5 onwards about being branded a Puritan by the Laudians for his apocalypticism and a Laudian by the Puritans for his ceremonialism

192  c h a p t e r 8

illustrates how religious views that could co-­habit without great friction in the late 1620s had come to seem contradictory in the increasingly polarized context of the Personal Rule of Charles and the dominance of Laud and his supporters in the Church. Mede’s letters after 1634 are full of references to the new atmosphere of suspicion and self-­censorship in Cambridge under the Laudian Church: in June 1635 he wrote to Twisse of how his scholarly ‘disposition is not fit for the warres’; ‘publick avouching’ of positions contrary to Laudian orthodoxy is to be avoided ‘for feare of incurring such dangerous prejudice by an over-­potent opposition’. One historian has concluded that Mede was one of those conformist divines in the 1630s who ‘offered conditional support at a time when it was simply imprudent to express open dissent from Laudian positions’.12

‘Arminianized under his Tuition’ When Milton’s father was making the choice of Christ’s for his son in 1624–5, James I was still on the throne and Mede, though yet to publish the Clavis Apocalyptica, was renowned for his status as a general scholar: if anything, his work on Revelation and millenarian history during Milton’s time at Christ’s associated Mede with Puritan attitudes, as he later recognized, even if his sympathies in matters of devotional practice were evidently towards a moderate ceremonialism. On the question of theology, Mede never committed himself, either in print or private correspondence: his most recent biographer advises that Mede’s ‘caution and discretion has made it difficult to determine conclusively his position’ on the issues of predestination and free will that divided Calvinists from those whom they condemned as ‘Arminians’. The evidence does seem to point to Mede’s aversion to zealous Calvinism: he refers with some sarcasm in a letter to Samuel Hartlib in February 1635 to ‘[o]ne Dr. a great Calvinist for the points of Predestination’, who scorned the proposals of Hartlib’s friend John Dury for an agreement among the Protestant factions of Europe on fundamental articles of belief as something that might ‘give advantage to the Arminian party, whereunto he is a great opposite’. John Worthington, who edited Mede’s works, stated that

l a u di a n p o e t ?   193

Mede deliberately avoided giving his views on the issue of predestination in public but that be became agitated when he observ’d some to contend with an unmeasureable confidence and bitter zeal for that black Doctrine of Absolute Reprobation; upon which occasion he could not forbear to tell some of his Friends, That it was an Opinion he could never digest, being herein much of Dr. Jackson’s mind, That generally the Pro­pugners of such Tenets were men resolved in their Affections of Love and Hatred, both of which they exercis’d constantly and violently, and according to their own Tempers made a judgment of God and his Decrees.13 The ‘Dr Jackson’ to whom Worthington refers here is Thomas Jackson, who combined Neoplatonic arguments for the insights of the pagans into divine truth with a rejection of Calvinist predestination. For Jackson, ‘the harmony or mixture of contingency with necessity’ was a defining element of God’s power; every possibility is predetermined, but man can choose among them: ‘unto every cogitation possible unto man or agent he hath everlastingly decreed a proportionate end; to every antecedent possible a correspondent consequent’. Mede’s correspondent Twisse connected Jackson’s Neoplatonism with his rejection of the decree of absolute election, a position that he declared to ‘impugn the sovereignty of God’ and to be ‘not an haires breadth different, either from the Arminian heresie of late, or from the Pelagian heresie’.14 Jackson’s writings brought him to the attention of Laud, through whose influence he obtained the position of President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and then the clerical living of Whitney, outside Oxford. Like Mede, Jackson died before the outbreak of civil war, in 1640; but his name was produced as evidence of Laud’s own Arminianism at Laud’s trial in 1644. As the Presbyterian William Prynne reported in 1646—by which time Prynne had become the subject of Milton’s polemical animus due to his condemnation of Milton’s divorce writings— Laud was accused of the patronage of ‘Arminians, and persons popishly affected, in the Universities’ including ‘Master Jackson and others in Oxford . . . and Master Chapple in Ireland’. ‘Master Chapple’ is the man who was Milton’s first tutor at Christ’s, whom Prynne described as ‘the

194  c h a p t e r 8

most notorious seducing Arminian in the whole University of Cambridge’, who ‘leavened all his Pupils and any hopeful Schollers with Arminianisme’. Prynne employs the term ‘Arminian’ as virtually a synonym for Catholic, as became common in Puritan polemic of the 1640s; but, as the case of Mede shows, a moderate ceremonialism and an ‘Arminian’ scepticism about Calvinist theology could be combined with the apocalyptic anti-­Catholicism that became conventionally ascribed to Puritans. Chappell was certainly the beneficiary of Laud’s patronage, becoming Dean of Cashel in Ireland in 1633 before being appointed Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1634, where he was tasked with turning the institution into a model of Laudian conformity and became involved in a series of disputes with Calvinist opponents such as James Ussher, who had been alerted by a correspondent in Cambridge as early as 1619 that Chappell had Arminian tendencies.15 Yet Chappell’s religious allegiances before the 1630s are ‘the subject of varying interpretations’, as one historian has put it, and he seems to have been more known for his Puritanism during the Jacobean period; what is clearer is his reputation in the 1620s as an unusually acute scholar and fine tutor: he ‘had a great name in the University of Cambridge for a great scholler . . . No one Tutor in our memory bred more and better Pupils, so exact his care in their Education’.16 These are the words of the royalist divine Thomas Fuller, but they are echoed in a life of the Puritan cleric John Hierron, who matriculated at Christ’s in May 1625, just three months after Milton, and was also put under Chappell’s tuition. Given a tutor and his students co-­habited in the tutor’s chamber until well into the mid-­seventeenth century, Milton and Hierron presumably lived together in Chappell’s chamber in 1625-­6. But their experiences of their tutor seem to have been rather different: [Hierron] had a high veneration [for Chappell] to the day of his death and never mentioned him without honour, as being a Learned, Painful, Careful Tutor, and very faithful to his Trust, and constant Expounder of Scripture in his Chamber at Night when his Pupils came to Prayer, shewing them the Logick of their Bibles; which Mr. Hieron alwayes accounted very advantageous and beneficial. On the

l a u di a n p o e t ?   195

Lords-­days Sermons were repeated, and an account taken of his Pupils, how they spent that day. And if any of them walked disorderly, and persisted under Admonitions, he would acquaint their Friends, and send them home; resolving to keep none, who answered not the ends of their being sent thither.17 Chappell here sounds less like a seducer to Arminianism than a model godly tutor, overseeing the spiritual education and orderly behaviour of his pupils and teaching them to apply the Ramist style of logical analysis to Scripture, an expertise for which he was known in the university, and which forms the basis for the method of systematic theology that Milton would employ in De Doctrina Christiana in the 1650s. The celebrated Hebraist John Lightfoot was another who apparently flourished ‘under the Tuition of the very learned and pious Mr William Chappell’ after matriculating at Christ’s in 1617. Mede, according to his biographer Worthington, greatly valued his friendship with Chappell, who was ‘esteem’d a rich Magazine of Rational Learning’.18 When Milton’s father was making a choice about where to send his son and who would tutor him, Mede’s renown as an outstanding general scholar skilled in biblical interpretation and active participant in pan-­ European intellectual exchange among Protestants, and Chappell’s reputation as a ‘Learned, Painful, Careful Tutor’ who was expert in reformed modes of logic, were more likely key factors than an association with ceremonialism and Laudianism that only came to the fore after Laud was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. There is more evidence that Milton senior was concerned with the intellectual substance and seriousness of his son’s education than with issues of devotional practice and theological differences over predestination that only became the subject of more open conflict in the later ‘times of immoderation’, as Mede put it, of the mid-­1630s, as the Laudians sought to impose their policies across the national Church. Nonetheless, the aversion to Calvinist zeal for the ‘black Doctrine of Absolute Reprobation’ that was seemingly shared by Mede, Chappell, and Tovey—though we know little of Tovey’s religious preferences before he was deprived of his position for his ceremonialism in 1646—does offer a context for the

196  c h a p t e r 8

origins of Milton’s own theology of free will. This is articulated explicitly for the first time in Areopagitica in 1644 and is woven into the poetic fabric of Paradise Lost: even when God proclaims that some are ‘Elect above the rest’ (3. 184), the implication is that election to salvation is universal, even if a few are more elect than others.19 There is in fact no firm evidence that Milton ever held to the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination (though we would hardly expect to see it as a topic of his experiments in various established genres of Latin and vernacular verse), despite his support for Presbyterian arguments against episcopacy in 1641–2—a support that he quickly renounced when Presbyterians condemned his arguments in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) as heretical. Defending himself in An Apology Against a Pamphlet in 1642 against the accusation that he was ‘vomited’ out of Cambridge after leading ‘an inordinate and riotous youth’, Milton asserted the more than ordinary favour and respect which I found above any of my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of that College wherein I spent some years . . . as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me . . . And to those ingenuous and friendly men who were ever the countenancers of virtuous and hopeful wits, I wish the best and happiest things that friends in absence wish one to another.’20 In the absence of any such letters having been discovered, this claim has tended to be treated as hyperbole, or as defensiveness about not being offered a Fellowship, and it seems hardly likely to have been true of Chappell; but in the case of Mede it may have some substance. Mede would likely have been impressed by Milton’s performances in composing a Latin funeral elegy for Andrewes, Mede’s former patron—though perhaps not with the image of Andrewes as daemonic, as semidea anima—and a devotional poem in the form of the ‘Nativity Ode’ that responded to Mede’s own interests in millenarian time and the pagan oracles—even if Milton’s fascination with becoming daemonic in the last of his formal orations in Christ’s chapel might have provoked Mede’s

l a u di a n p o e t ?   197

concern about this talented student’s trajectory. Milton would surely have wanted to impress Mede, who in Milton’s time at Christ’s in 1625– 32 was, as we have seen, renowned as a scholar of impressive general learning, with a network of correspondents and admirers across the European republic of letters. Mede combined the Puritan language of apocalyptic anti-­Catholicism with theological scepticism of the rigidities of Calvinism while remaining aloof from what he regarded as the ‘immoderation’ and tendency to ‘Image-­Worship’ of the more zealous Laudians.21

Mystics in Hammersmith The argument for Milton’s early Laudianism also rests upon the comparatively recent archival discovery that John Milton senior had moved the family from Bread Street to Hammersmith by 30 April 1631; previously the earliest date that the Milton family could be placed in Hammer­smith had been September 1632.22 It was thus presumably to Hammersmith that Milton retired after taking his MA in July 1632 (although, given the lack of residency requirements for MA students, he had probably been spending considerable time there earlier). The family continued to live there until at least January 1635, and possibly until May 1636, before moving further out west into the country, to the village of Horton in what is now Berkshire. Hammersmith at this time was a small village on the main thoroughfare from central London to Windsor and the west of England, surrounded by fields and pasture; by the 1620s it was becoming increasingly popular with ‘wealthy citizens’ as a summer retreat.23 As Milton’s father signed the audit of the parish account books for 1632, he must have served as either a justice of the peace or a warden at the Hammersmith chapel of ease, which had been built the previous year because of the inconvenient distance to the parish church in Fulham.24 This chapel of ease was consecrated by Laud, in his role as Bishop of London, on 7 June 1631. ‘The timing of the move’ to Hammersmith, Campbell and Corns write, ‘implies that the attraction of Hammersmith for Milton’s father was the opening of a Laudian chapel that accorded with his ecclesiastical preferences’. Another recent biographer states that

198  c h a p t e r 8

‘John’s father’s involvement with the chapel of ease suggest that the Miltons . . . were comfortable within the mainstream of Laudian Church of England practice’.25 The unproven assumption that Milton’s father was a Laudian has been adopted as a key to explaining facts about Milton’s own early life and religious allegiance. This is a large leap of an argument that might be tested by looking at who else lived in Hammersmith at the time and was involved in the building of the chapel. Edmund Sheffield, first Earl of Mulgrave (1565–1646), lived in Butterwick House, situated nearly opposite the Hammersmith chapel: it was Sheffield who owned the land and petitioned Laud for a chapel to be built on it in December 1629, and who was then instrumental in raising 242 pounds through local subscriptions towards the estimated 2000-­ pound building costs.26 He was known both in Britain and abroad for his zealous anti-­Catholic activities, having rooted out recusants, priests, and foreign agents in Yorkshire as James I’s president of the Council of the North. His chaplain had been William Crashaw, a noted (though conformable) Puritan controversialist (and father of the poet Richard), and Sheffield was the dedicatee of a number of significant Puritan and Calvinist works. Sheffield was a staunch supporter of Parliament during the Civil War, suffering the occupation of his northern estates by royalist forces, and his grandson, also Edmund, was a member of the Commonwealth’s Council of State. Moreover, during the 1620s and 1630s Sheffield senior was associated with John Everard (1584?–1640/1), a notorious preacher who was often in trouble with the authorities. Everard, despite holding the esteemed academic title of Doctor of Divinity from Cambridge, was linked to radical Puritan and sectarian circles and was ‘the dominant figure influencing London separatism’ in the 1630s.27 According to Everard’s testimony when put on trial by the Court of High Commission in 1638–9, charged with promoting heretical books and ideas, Sheffield commissioned Everard, who lived and preached in Fulham and the surrounding area, to transcribe and translate continental alchemical works and to have copied for him Everard’s translation of the influential mystical text, the Theologia Germanica. Sheffield’s interest in, and patronage of, alchemical, mystical, and perfectionist writing associated with radical Puritan circles is evident in the dedication to him in 1646 of an English translation of a work by a German Lutheran mys-

l a u di a n p o e t ?   199

tic, Jacob Arndt. The translator dedicated the work to Sheffield because as ‘Lord President of the North, for the space of sixteen years’, he had held ‘the Bucklers against the Espaniolized undermining Jesuits of the North’, discovering ‘the continuall undermining practices of the hellish Locusts, still seeking the subversion of Religion, Lawes, and Liberty of the Subject, to bring this Kingdome into the thraldome of Pope and Spaniard’.28 It seems unlikely, then, Sheffield helped build the Hammersmith chapel, in which he was also buried in 1646, in order that he could worship in the new ceremonial and sacramental style of the Laudians, or because he supported a movement towards forms of devotion that, for the vigorously anti-­Catholic circles with whom he had long associated, was equivalent to a return to popish rule. An early nineteenth-­century historian of Hammersmith reports that when the chapel of ease was first built—it was knocked down and replaced by a larger building in the late nineteenth century— ‘the resident gentry seem to have vied with each other in the embellishment of it in various ways: the pew doors were curiously ornamented with heraldic and other carvings, some of which still remain; the windows were enriched with painted glass and armorial bearings, and the ceiling and walls were painted with appropriate devices’.29 But it was possible both to advocate the material ornamentation of a church—the ‘beauty of holiness’—and be a vigorous opponent of the wider Laudian programme. A prime example is John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, who had the chapel of Lincoln College, Oxford, built in such lavish and colourful style in 1629–30 that it might be regarded as ‘the beau ideal of a Laudian chapel’; except that Williams was a confirmed and vociferous Calvinist, who was continually in dispute with Laud and in trouble with the king for his defence of Puritan activity, and was finally imprisoned in the Tower from 1637 until the House of Lords forced the king to release him three years later.30 The example of Williams is a corrective to the assumption that the kind of aesthetic pleasure in the material form of a church building that is expressed in ‘Il Penseroso’—‘the high embowed Roof ’ and ‘storied Windows richly dight’ which cast ‘a dimm religious light’ (lines 157–60)—must necessarily be written from a Laudian perspective, especially given the Neoplatonic and Hermetic, rather than explicitly

200  c h a p t e r 8

Christian, values of that lyric. Certainly a figure such as Sheffield fits better into the sort of conformable Puritan circles to which Richard Stock and Thomas Young also belonged in Jacobean England than into a Caroline Laudian milieu, even if by 1631 that Jacobean anti-­Catholic consensus was beginning to unravel under the Personal Rule of Charles I and a figure such as Sheffield was looking beyond orthodox Calvinist sources of spiritual guidance towards texts and ideas associated with mysticism and prophetic illumination as well as strong anti-­papal sentiment. Milton senior might as plausibly have moved to Hammersmith to be around godly elder statesmen like Sheffield, seemingly on the fringes of an increasingly radical Puritan milieu, as to seek out a supposedly Laudian centre of worship. Milton the poet presumably attended services in the Hammersmith chapel of ease when he was at home in the early 1630s; but he could also have heard John Everard’s preaching in and around Kensington and Fulham. Given the interests in Neoplatonic perfectionism evident in his student poems and exercises, Milton might have been intrigued by Everard’s use of the Corpus Hermeticum, the ancient Greek works ascribed to an Egyptian priest, Hermes Trismegistus, and regarded by the Florentine Neoplatonists, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, as prisca theologica, pagan prophesies of the coming of Christ. Everard was accused at his trial in 1638–9 of holding that Hermes Trismegistus was a better guide to the doctrine of the Trinity than Moses, and in the freer air of 1649 he published an English translation of the so-­called Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus, which Ficino had first put into Latin in 1471.31 While the great Huguenot scholar Isaac Casaubon had demonstrated in 1614 that the pre-­Christian dating of the writings ascribed to Hermes was spurious, Casaubon’s scholarship took some while to take effect.32 As the fascination of Thomas Jackson, the Oxford Platonist and client of Laud, with such texts and ideas shows, these are interests that could cut across the categories of ‘Laudian’ and ‘Puritan’. A further connection between the mystical world of Everard in Caroline west London and Milton’s student world in Cambridge is Robert Gell, who was a Fellow of Christ’s from 1623 to 1638 and who was prob-

l a u di a n p o e t ?   201

ably the Fellow for whom Milton wrote Latin act verses to deliver at the Cambridge Commencement ceremony in July 1628. Gell’s later writings display his interest in Neoplatonic philosophy and mystical divinity and he is regarded, along with Mede, as an important influence on Henry More, who was Gell’s pupil at Christ’s from 1631. Gell thus helped to plant the seeds of the distinctive fusion of millenarianism, Neoplatonism, and free will theology that characterizes ‘the circle of post-­ Calvinist thinkers’ associated with More during the 1650s, the so-­called Cambridge Platonists. Gell also became ‘one of civil war London’s more notorious perfectionist preachers’, with antinomian radicals coming to his sermons to take notes; although he stayed out of trouble with the authorities and by the Restoration was the respectable rector of St Mary Aldermary, London—where he would have married Milton to his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, in 1663.33 The neat picture of a young Milton conforming to the Laudian environments of Christ’s College and Caroline Hammersmith changes into something rather more messy and idiosyncratic when viewed from these alternative perspectives, which present certain continuities rather than sharp disjunction in Milton’s intellectual development.

‘Above the Years He Had When He Wrote It’ The arguments that the young Milton was a supporter of Laudian values in poetry highlight the ‘Baroque’, Counter-­Reformation qualities of the Latin funeral elegies on Lancelot Andrewes and Nicholas Felton, particularly their fascination with apotheosis, which was a feature of Counter-­Reformation art, and the ritualistic expression of the devotional verse composed at Cambridge, especially ‘The Passion’ and ‘Upon the Circumcision’. The encounter with the shining, astral image of Andrewes as semidea anima in Elegia tertia seems to have more to do with Milton’s fascination with the pagan notion that the souls of great men are translated into daemons after death. With regards to the second argument, one way to test the validity of the ascription of a Laudian idiom to Milton’s devotional lyrics is through comparison with other Cambridge poets and the kind of devotional verse that they were writing,

202  c h a p t e r 8

both in Latin and in the vernacular, in the early 1630s. ‘The Passion’ must have been composed after December 1629, as the opening lines apparently refer to ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’; it seems likely that Milton wrote a series of poems to mark church festivals in the university tradition in 1629–32, including the ‘Nativity Ode’ and ‘Upon the Circumcision’: if so, then ‘The Passion’ may date from Easter 1630 and ‘Upon the Circumcision’ from January 1631, as the Feast of the Circumcision fell on 1 January. It has been claimed that the composition of poems celebrating the festivals of the liturgical year was characteristic of ‘the Laudian style’ in the 1630s but, as we have seen, the practice was a standard one in seventeenth-­century Cambridge, required of a student such as Richard Crashaw to fulfil the requirements of his scholarship.34 Milton chose to include all three of these poems in both the 1645 and 1673 Poems; but after eight stanzas of ‘The Passion’, a note was added, presumably by the poet: ‘This Subject the Author finding to be above his yeers he had when he wrote it, and nothing satisfi’d with what was begun, left it unfinisht’. This note has been of more critical interest than the poem that it pronounces inadequate. Why bother to include the poem if he didn’t even think it worth finishing? One answer to this is that it is part of his more general design in the 1645 Poems to represent himself in terms of a Virgilian ‘rising poet’, experimenting and mastering lyric genres in preparation for the career as the national poet of epic. Except ‘The Passion’ does not, by the poet’s own admission, display mastery of its chosen idiom. In the third stanza Milton comes closest to focusing on the bloody body of the crucified Christ: He sov’ran Priest stooping his regall head That dropt with odorous oil down his fair eyes, Poor fleshly Tabernacle entered, His starry front low-­rooft beneath the skies’ O what a Mask was there, what a disguise! Yet more; the stroke of death he must abide, Then lies more meekly down fast by his Brethrens side. (lines 15–21)

l a u di a n p o e t ?   203

Commentators have tended to compare such clunky images—‘fleshly Tabernacle’, ‘starry front low-­rooft’—unfavourably with the flowing depiction of the scene in Crashaw, exemplified by the opening of ‘Upon the body of Our Bl[essed]. Lord, Naked and bloody’, first published in the 1646 collection Steps to the Temple: They have left thee naked LORD, O that they had This garment too I would they had deny’d. Thee with thyself they have too richly clad, Opening the purple wardrobe in thy side.35 There is a notable lack of red, crimson, and purple in Milton’s devotional poems—an apparent reluctance to think about the blood that in such poetry is a key motif as the material form of both Christ’s tragic human sacrifice and God’s saving grace, as well as a linguistic embodiment of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Poems on the circumcision represent it as the first letting of Jesus’s blood and so as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion, and consequently of the transcendence of the legalisms of the Mosaic law by the Christian covenant of faith and love. Milton is conventional in theme and tone in ‘Upon the Circumcision’: O more exceeding love or law more just? Just law indeed, but more exceeding love! [ . . . ] And that great Cov’nant which we still transgress Intirely satisf ’d, And the full wrath beside Of vengeful Justice bore for our excess, And deals obedience first with wounding smart This day, but O ere long Huge pangs and strong Will pierce more neer his heart. (lines 15–16, 21–28) But again this is rather wane and colourless in comparison with the vivid, challenging imagery of Crashaw in ‘Himme for the Circumcision day of our Lord’:

204  c h a p t e r 8

All the purple pride of Laces, The crimson curtaines of thy bed; Guild thee not with so sweet graces; Nor sets thee in so rich a red. [ . . . ] Bid the golden god the Sunne, Burnisht in his glorious beames: Put all his red eyed rubies on, These Rubies shall put out his eyes. (lines 5–8, 13–16) There is a superficial resemblance here to an image towards the end of the ‘Nativity Ode’: So when the Sun in bed, Curtain’d with cloudy red, Pillows his chin upon an Orient wave (lines 229–31) But the resemblance only highlights the differences, in that Milton transfers the redness of Christ’s blood to nature, and indeed to the insubstantiality of the clouds, while Crashaw conveys the rich materiality of the crucifixion through the ornamentation of laces, curtains, and rubies. Crashaw converted to Roman Catholicism by the time of his early death in exile in 1648; he had left for the continent when Cambridge was occupied by the Parliamentary Army in 1643. Phrases such as ‘the purple wardrobe in thy side’ and the ‘crimson curtaines of thy bed’ display an intensely bodily engagement with the physical suffering of Christ which has been seen as ‘utterly alien to Milton’s religious sensibility, and that of his Anglican contemporaries’ because the ‘English Protestant tradition is reluctant to look so closely or think and feel so deeply about the physical suffering of Christ’.36 The problem with this distinction between ‘Anglican’ and ‘Catholic’ poetic sensibilities is that the great majority of Crashaw’s vernacular poems are renderings and expansions of the Latin devotional epigrams that were published in Cambridge in 1634, when Crashaw was unquestionably a conforming member of the Church of England, if progressively of the Laudian variety: having come

l a u di a n p o e t ?   205

up to Pembroke College in 1631, he was elected in 1635 to a Fellowship at Peterhouse, the college then at the heart of the Laudian movement under the Mastership of John Cosin.37 The Baroque mode in which Crashaw excelled and Milton stuttered was a conventional idiom of devotional poetics in Caroline Cambridge and cannot confidently be said to have any intrinsic relation to a later attachment to Laudian doctrine or discipline. The fashionable nature of the mode in which Milton was trying to write in ‘The Passion’ and ‘Upon the Circumcision’ is illuminated by two comparative case studies of Cambridge devotional poets in Crashaw and John Saltmarsh who were more applauded for their poetic skill in Cambridge in the early and mid-­1630s than Milton; and if in Crashaw we have a poet whose early devotional verse seems to indicate and anticipate his Laudian and eventually Catholic allegiances, in Saltmarsh we have a figure who was more radical more quickly than Milton in the 1640s in terms of both his theology and politics. Crashaw’s verse is best known, as the examples already quoted exemplify, for its use of sensuous, erotic, and unsettling—some have said grotesque—imagery to convey the loving relationship between Christ and man. The physicality of the descriptions of Christ’s crucifixion is conventionally associated with theories of sacred poetics that Crashaw derived from his reading of Jesuit and counter-­Reformation writers.38 A fine example of Crashaw’s extravagant play with the spiritual significance of the physical ravages suffered by Christ’s body is ‘On the Wounds of our Crucified Christ’, which is a vernacular rendering of one of the neo-­Latin epigrams, ‘In vulnera pendentis Domini’, which appeared in Crashaw’s first collection, the university volume Epigrammata Sacra: O these wakeful wounds of thine! Are they Mouthes? Or are they eyes? Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne, Each bleeding part some one supplies. Lo! A mouth, whose full-­bloom’d lips At too deare a rate are roses. Lo! A blood-­shot! that weepes And many a cruel teare discloses.

206  c h a p t e r 8

O thou that on this foot hast laid Many a kisse, and many a Teare, Now thou shal’t have all repaid, Whatso’ere thy charges were. This foot hath got a Mouth and lippes, To pay the sweet summe of thy kisses: To pay thy Teares, an Eye that weeps In stead of Teares such Gems as this is. The difference onely this appears, (Nor can the change offend) The debt is paid in Ruby-­Teares, Which thou in Pearles did’st lend. The constantly shifting images of blood and water, kisses and tears, rubies and pearls, invoke transubstantiation and sacramental ceremony. The ruby tears are Christ’s blood, the pearls are the tears of the penitent poet; the wounds of Christ on his nailed foot become metaphorical mouths and eyes. Such imagery is difficult to comprehend on a visual, as opposed to an emotional, level, just as the Incarnation and Passion, and their repetition in Eucharistic ritual, defy rational comprehension. The use of paradox and antithesis conveys the resolution of the seeming opposites of law and mercy, the ‘type’ of the Old Testament and the ‘anti-­type’ of the Gospel, through the saving grace of Christ’s blood. Milton attempts a similar technique in ‘Upon the Circumcision’: ‘O more exceeding love or law more just? / Just law indeed, but more exceeding love!’ (lines 15–16). But again the blood has been drained from Milton’s efforts at ritualistic devotional lyricism.

Water and Wine, Tears and Blood The vernacular expansions of the neo-­Latin epigrams in Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple tend to increase the physicality of the imagery, consistent with ‘Laudian ideas on the use of physically exaggerated and explicit

l a u di a n p o e t ?   207

imagery in describing sacred events.’39 But if ‘physically exaggerated and explicit’ imagery of the suffering body of Christ became associated with Laudian aesthetics in the later 1630s and 1640s, in the earlier 1630s Crashaw’s neo-­Latin epigrams served as a study in eloquence even for those who were unquestionably of Puritan sympathies, as is evident from the diary of Thomas Dugard, the headmaster of Warwick School in the 1630s. Dugard’s star pupil was Abiezer Coppe, who was to become in 1649 the most notorious of the so-­called ‘Ranters’, antinomian radicals alleged to subvert the divine economy of sin, heaven, and hell through the committing of acts commonly thought to be sinful to demonstrate their release from moral and religious law. In his entries for 1634 Dugard records the fifteen-­year-­old Coppe coming round to his house after dinner for extra lessons in Latin and Greek—a salutary reminder that the stereotypical image in the civil wars of the self-­proclaimed prophet as ignorant ‘tub preacher’ often has little basis in reality. Among the texts that Coppe read to Dugard was Crashaw’s Epigrammata Sacra.40 Dugard’s diary for the period 1632–42 leaves an account of the Puritan circle in which Dugard mixed, revolving around Lord Brooke’s hospitality at Warwick Castle, revealing him to have been part of a ‘ “Parliamentary–Puritan connection”, a broad circle of the godly that comprised minor provincial figures and prominent national politicians, and which helped to create the challenge to Charles I’s personal rule’.41 However Dugard’s Puritanism evidently did not stop him from enjoying Crashaw’s epigrams and using them as a study in neo-­Latin eloquence, despite the intense and sensuous liturgical imagery that characterizes many of the poems and Crashaw’s praise, in the prose address to the reader that prefaces the Epigrammata, of the Jesuit writers who provided him with a model of sacred eloquence. Other political and religious radicals were writing poetry in the style of Crashaw in the 1640s. John Saltmarsh (d. 1647) was apparently the first person to suggest publicly, in sermon and in print in 1643, that it would be in the nation’s interest to depose Charles I: he implied that the death of one family, the Stuarts, would be preferable to the deaths of tens of thousands on the battlefield. The MP and future regicide Henry Marten was ejected from the Commons and imprisoned for defending

208  c h a p t e r 8

Saltmarsh’s sentiments.42 Saltmarsh became a chaplain in the New Model Army and a proponent of the doctrine of ‘free grace’, according to which those who experience the revelation of the free grace purchased by Christ’s death are released absolutely from the bondage of external laws and are perfected on earth, regardless of works. In 1643 Saltmarsh was also including such verses as ‘A Divine Rapture upon the Covenant’ in prose works in support of the Solemn League and Covenant, the agreement drawn up between the English and Scottish Parliaments in their conflict with the king: See here a chain of Pearls and watery dew Wept from the side of God for you, See here a chain of Rubies from each wound, Let down in Purple to the ground: Come tye your Pearls with ours, to make one Ring, And thread them on our golden string[.]43 The imagery here is virtually identical to that of Crashaw’s ‘On the wounds of our Crucified Christ’: incongruous, paradoxical images of tears and pearls, rubies and bloody wounds, beauty and pain strung together in an elaborate, Baroque style. It is less surprising that Saltmarsh writes about Christ and grace like Crashaw when we consider Saltmarsh’s career in Cambridge in the 1630s. Saltmarsh had himself been a neo-­Latin poet of some standing. He matriculated in 1627, two years after Milton; in 1636, to mark his graduation as Master of Arts from Magdalene College, the Cambridge University Press published Saltmarsh’s Poemata Sacra Latine et Anglice Scripti, a collection of sacred epigrams in both Latin and the vernacular dedicated to, among others, the Master of Magdalene and Sir Thomas and Lady Metham, recusant gentry in Saltmarsh’s native Yorkshire. The language and imagery of Saltmarsh’s ‘A Divine Rapture upon the Covenant’ is evidently indebted to that of his neo-­Latin epigrams, such as ‘Aquas Mutatis in Sanguinem’, which are characterized by the same dizzyingly metamorphosing imagery of water, wine, tears, and blood.44 Erotic and aestheticized images of Christ’s flowing blood and of drinking and feasting on Christ’s wounds that are typical of the

l a u di a n p o e t ?   209

‘Baroque’ poetic mode are a recurring feature of Saltmarsh’s Cambridge epigrams: Yet while thou bind’st my wounds up, oh I see Thine fresh and bleeding, yawning more than mine. Lord let thy wounds lie open to me: To heal my wounds I’le lay them close to me.45 The common devotional poetics practiced by Crashaw and Saltmarsh, despite the very different directions that they took in their religious beliefs, derives from the shared experience of Counter-­Reformation texts on sacred eloquence that were apparently recommended reading for Cambridge undergraduates. One of the fullest surviving accounts of the curriculum, ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, probably dating from the 1620s or early 1630s and attributed to Richard Holds­ worth, recommends rhetorical textbooks by Jesuits, specifically Nicolas Caussin’s De Eloquentia Sacrae et Humanae (1619) and Famianus Strada’s Prolusiones Academicae, Oratoriae, Historicae, Poeticae (1617), which was even reprinted in Oxford in 1631 by the University Press.46 In the university context, Holdsworth was certainly not, like Crashaw, a Laudian outrider; from 1637 he was Master of Emmanuel, where the chapel was never formally consecrated and which was a generally Puritan institution in the first half of the seventeenth century. His recommendation of Jesuit books on sacred eloquence reveals that the study of Counter-­ Reformation texts in Cambridge was certainly not confined to Laudian circles. Counter-­Reformation eloquence was part, then, of orthodox academic culture, and even, it seems, orthodox Puritan culture, in early Stuart England. Milton’s composition of the poems on the Passion and the Circumcision cannot be said confidently to show either his taste or distaste for Laudian values in the early 1630s: the lyrics are rather his efforts to compose in the devotional mode fashionable in his university at the time. But if the ‘Nativity Ode’ successfully shows Milton writing devotional poetry in the style of his contemporaries and even trumping them, ‘The Passion’ shows him trying to repeat the feat and failing to do so: there is no sense of the poet finding an individual voice as he does in the ‘Ode’.

210  c h a p t e r 8

Indeed where the ‘Nativity Ode’ celebrates the muscular power of the Christ-­child in the spectacular expulsion and punishment of the pagan gods, ‘The Passion’ sees Milton uncharacteristically renouncing epic pretensions, distinguishing his own quiet, ‘soft’ lines from the heroic 1535 Christiad of Marco Vida of Cremona: Loud o’re the rest Cremona’s Trump doth sound; Me softer airs befit, and softer strings Of Lute or Viol still, more apt for mournful things. (lines 26–8) (Milton may well be invoking his own musical experiences and preferences in this metaphor, because the music that he heard and played while growing up with his father was the older style, or prima practica, of domestic consort music, played on organ, viol, and lute, as opposed to the more dramatic, powerful style of the seconda practica, played on trumpet and harpsichord.47) The comparative examples of Crashaw and Saltmarsh thus warn against any confident reading of the student Milton as either an opponent or a supporter of Laudian values in poetry. However his success with the ‘Nativity Ode’ and comparative failure with ‘The Passion’ may indeed give us some indication of the future development of his religious sensibility and theological preferences. A common interpretation of ‘The Passion’ is that it reveals ‘Milton’s difficulties with the crucifixion as a subject’.48 This is to read backwards from the anti-­ trinitarianism of the mature Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana to find a naturally heterodox thinker already uncomfortable with orthodox Protestant Christology; but the failure to write convincing Passion poetry in the style fashionable when he was a student does raise the possibility of the young Milton already feeling emotionally and theologically uncomfortable with images of the bodily pain of the crucified Christ—and with the rituals of devotion that recreated or commemorated, depending on one’s doctrinal position, that event. The question of Milton’s attitude to custom and formalism in poetics, as in institutional religion, is also raised by the comparative failure of ‘The Passion’. The sense of a form-­bound inauthenticity that we find in ‘The Passion’, and that Milton also seemingly found in his failed lyric, is

l a u di a n p o e t ?   211

most strangely conveyed in the final lines before the poet abandons his effort: Or should I thence hurried on viewles wing, Take up a weeping on the Mountains wilde, The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring Would soon unboosom all thir Echoes milde, And I (for grief is easily beguild) Might think th’ infection of my sorrows loud, Had got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud. (lines 50–6) The image alludes to the story of Ixion in Pindar’s Pythian Odes 2: Ixion thought he was ravishing Hera, but Zeus put a raincloud in her place: Ixion thus begot a race of centaurs. The references to Echo and Ixion’s cloud are recalled in strikingly negative images in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In the opening lines of the address to Parliament and the Westminster Assembly in the second edition of 1644, Milton writes of ‘Custome being but a meer face, as Echo is a meere voice, rests not in her unaccomplishment, until by secret inclination she accorporat her selfe with error . . . Hence it is, that Error supports Custome, Custome count’nances Error.’ ‘Uncaccomplishment’ is an apt summation of Milton’s own description of ‘The Passion’ in the note that was included in both the 1645 and 1673 Poems. Milton later writes in Tetrachordon (1645), one of his prose responses to the critics of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, of how Jupiter gave to Ixion ‘a cloud instead of Juno, giving him a monstrous issue by her, the breed of Centaurs, a neglected and unloved race, the fruits of a delusive marriage’.49 The odd choice of image at the end of ‘The Passion’, when read in the light of these later metaphors of insubstantiality in the divorce tracts, suggests Milton’s realization that he is merely trying to write according to the fashionable or customary mode and so failing to attain an original and genuine voice: he becomes aware that he is deluding himself if he thinks the lyric to be the substantial issue of poetic genius.

CHAPTER 9

•

In Pursuit of Patronage

‘Pluto’s Helmet’ Milton graduated as Master of Arts in July 1632, having once more subscribed to the articles of the Church of England and acknowledged the supreme authority of King Charles. His younger brother Christopher had matriculated at Christ’s for the BA in 1631, and was placed, as his brother had been, under the supervision of Nathaniel Tovey—evidently John Milton senior must have been satisfied with Tovey’s performance as his elder son’s tutor. But Christopher left Christ’s at the same time as his elder brother, without a degree, as was often the case with sons of well-­off families; in September Christopher was admitted to the Inner Temple of the Inns of Court to prepare for a career in the law. John, on the other hand, returned to the family home to pursue further study. He offered his own account of this period in 1654 in the Defensio Secunda: Of my own accord [I] retired to my father’s house, whither I was accompanied by the regrets of most of the Fellows of the college, who showed me no common marks of friendship and esteem. On my father’s estate, where he had determined to pass the remainder of his days, I enjoyed an interval of uninterrupted leisure, which I entirely devoted to the perusal of the Greek and Latin classics; although I occasionally visited the metropolis, either for the sake of purchasing books, or of learning something new in mathematics or music, in which I, at that time, found a source of pleasure and amusement. In this manner I spent five years till my mother’s death.1 212

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   213

The reference to John Milton senior retiring to his estate for the ‘remainder of his days’ suggests Milton is thinking here of the rural village of Horton, to which the Milton family moved sometime between January 1635 and May 1636. But it was to Hammersmith that Milton returned in the summer of 1632, and it was there that he spent the first three years of his ‘interval of uninterrupted leisure’. It has been proposed that Milton pursued his own private course of study at home with the intention of taking the Baccalaureate of Divinity (BD), for which Cambridge MAs could supplicate after seven years and for which there were no residency requirements. The numbers of BD degrees awarded in the 1620s and 1630s was historically high, so the further degree would have been an obvious option.2 The claim is given some substance by the intensive reading in church history and the patristic era that is evident from his surviving commonplace book, although this commonplace book only seems to have been begun in 1637 and so the reading likely dates from the Horton period. The issue of whether or not Milton intended to enter the clergy in the 1630s is complicated by the polemical context of his own comments in The Reason of Church-­government (1642) on the difficult labours of the Church, to whose service by the intentions of my parents and friends I was destin’d of a child, and in mine own resolutions, till comming to some maturity of years and perceaving what tyranny had invaded the Church, that he would take Orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withall . . . I thought it better to prefer a blamelesse silence before the sacred office of speaking bought, and begun with servitude and forswearing.3 The memorable declaration a few lines later that he was ‘Church-­outed by the Prelats’ enabled Milton to invoke his own experience as proof of the damage done to the Church of England by the tyranny of Laudian episcopacy. Yet the testimony to a blocked clerical vocation in the polemical prose of the early 1640s is not borne out by the evidence of his thinking about his career in the letter to an unnamed friend that probably dates from soon after he left Cambridge.

214  c h a p t e r 9

Figure 8. Draft of Milton’s 1633 letter to a friend, with the sonnet ‘How soon hath time’, in the Milton manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Milton twice drafted this letter, probably around the beginning of 1633, as he enclosed with the letter a sonnet, ‘How soon hath time’, that was composed ‘some while since’ and which refers to his ‘three and twentieth year’ (December 1631–December 1632) having already passed. This ‘letter to a friend’ is Milton’s most significant personal letter in English: though he never put it into print, and neither draft is a fair copy, the complicated, convoluted sentences and extensive revisions show him thinking very hard about how to explain and represent his choice to continue his private studies rather than enter the Church. The fact

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   215

that two, heavily corrected copies exist in the Trinity manuscript, alongside his poetic drafts, suggests already a certain degree of careful crafting of the representation of his career, even in personal correspondence. The letter makes no reference whatsoever to the external world of religious politics. Milton’s concern is with the personal pursuit of learning—its selfishness, its painful costs, its ultimate goodness. The identity of the intended recipient is unknown but the most likely candidate is his former private tutor, Thomas Young.4 The addressee is someone whom Milton has often seen, and who has acted as a mentor to him; they have met the day before, when the friend questioned his choice not to enter the clergy and begin to do God’s work in the world: ‘Beside that in sundry other respects I must acknowledge me to profit by you whenever wee meet, you are often to me, & were yesterday especially, as a good watchman to admonish that the howres of the night passe on (for so I call my life, as yet obscure & unserviceable to mankind) & that the day with me is at hand wherein Christ commands all to Labour while there is light.’5 Milton offers his sceptical friend a justification of what he calls his ‘tardie moving’ towards a career in public life. The biblical allusions here (to Isaiah 21: 11–12, Matthew 25: 1–13, and John 9: 4) and throughout the letter, combined with its contemplation of the costs and virtues of learning, which invokes the Ciceronian distinction between negotium (engagement with the public world) and otium (leisured retirement), suggest he is addressing Young, a respected Calvinist minister who also introduced Milton as a young boy to classical literature—with the caveat that Milton’s other extant letters to Young are in Latin. The drafts that survive may have formed the basis for a letter translated into Latin that he sent to Young, but which is no longer extant. ‘You said’, Milton recalls, ‘that too much love of Learning is in fault, & that I have given up my selfe to dreame away my Yeares in the arms of studious retirement like Endymion with the Moone.’ The switch from biblical allusions to a reference to Greek myth—a reference ascribed to the correspondent—mirrors the preference for secular learning over Christian vocation that the correspondent has criticized. An embrace in the arms of a lover is transposed to a personified ‘studious retirement’,

216  c h a p t e r 9

anticipating the concern less with the disregard of religious vocation than with the neglect of a sexual, marital relationship. This anxiety emerges at the level of metaphors of impotence and castration before it is voiced explicitly, in Milton’s slightly shrill admission that in the pursuit of learning ‘a man cutts himselfe off from all action, & becomes the most helplesse, pusillanimous & unweapon’d creature in the world, the most unfit & unable to do that which all mortals most aspire to[,] either to defend & be usefull to his freinds, or to offend his enimies’. Even while lamenting the effects of dedication to learning on a man’s potency in the world, Milton’s mind is on Greek literature. One of the books that Milton bought during the period in Hammersmith—and one of the small number of books that survive which can be shown to have belonged to him—was the two-­volume edition of Euripides published by Paulus Stephanus in Geneva in 1602. Milton bought his copy in 1634 and initially annotated the two volumes over the next four years, returning to them again after his European tour in 1638–9. His prior familiarity with Euripides is evident in the incorporation in the ‘Nativity Ode’ of the choral ode to Apollo from Euripides’s Iphigenia in Tauris—the passage is marked in Milton’s copy of Stephanus—and in the letter he echoes lines spoken by the heroine in Euripides’s Medea to convey his anxiety about what he is not: Let no one think me a weak foe, feeble-­spirited, A stay-­at-­home, but rather just the opposite, One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends; For the lives of such persons are most remembered.6 It seems incongruous to recall the voice of the spurned, child-­killing wife Medea in articulating the conflicted emotions of a young, unmarried scholar, and the echo perhaps does indicate something of Milton’s sense of emasculation; but Euripides will become a key literary resource for Milton in his thinking during the 1640s about the negotiation between private ethics and participation in public life, and between the worlds of domestic and civil politics.7 He goes on to argue that the dedication to learning requires the effort of suppressing ‘a much more potent inclination inbred which about this tyme of a man’s life sollicits most,

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   217

the desire of house & family of his owne’. The rather miserable image of the ‘helpless’ and ‘unweaponed’ scholar exhibits the strain exerted by the identification of the scholarly life with the suppression of sexuality: the rule of celibacy was obligatory for Fellows of Oxford and Cambridge (and remained so until the nineteenth century), but the freedom of ministers in the Protestant Church to marry was a key difference with the Roman Catholic Church. Milton seems to have regarded himself as continuing to pursue the institutional academic life, both in terms of the direction of his study and his celibate life, but from outside the institution. Milton answers the charge of his correspondent by arguing that if he was acting out of a ‘meere love of Learning’, with no higher objective, it would have to stem from ‘a principle bad, good, or naturall’: if out of a ‘bad’ principle, then he would surely be more motivated by ‘Gaine, pride, & ambition’; if out of a ‘natural’ principle, then he would desire more a ‘house and family’ but also ‘honour & repute, & immortall fame seated in the breast of every true scholar’. The path that Milton has taken, however, is compared (in a phrase that is only in the second draft but is then crossed out) to wearing ‘Pluto’s helmet’—in classical myth, a helmet that turns the wearer invisible. At this point, Milton’s argument would logically conclude with an account of the desire that should motivate him more than a love of learning that derives even from a ‘good’ principle. But rather the love of learning, as ‘it is the pursuit of something good’—tellingly revised in the second draft from the conditional construction, ‘if this love of learning be the pursuit of something good’—is identified with ‘the supreme good known and presented’: with, in other words, the good as a manifestation of God’s will.8 The love of learning is suddenly no longer a threat to the doing of God’s work; rather not to pursue this course would be to disobey the command in the Gospel against the hiding of the talents (Matthew 25 and Luke 19). This is a parable to which Milton would repeatedly return in his writing. Here the parable is interpreted, with no little distortion of its apparent meaning, as counselling not to take ‘thought of being late, so it give advantage to be more fit’: Milton’s continued obscurity is in fact an investment of the talents, exemplifying ‘due and timely

218  c h a p t e r 9

obedience’. This kind of counterintuitive reading of the Bible, in which passages are made to yield a meaning and validate an argument which is apparently almost the opposite of what they seem to say, will become characteristic of Milton’s treatment of Scripture in the writings on divorce. At this point in the letter, Milton declares that he is beginning to ‘doe that which I excuse myselfe for not doing[,] preach & not preach’, and he offers instead a poem—‘my nightward thoughts some while since (because they come in altogether not unfitly) made up in a Petrarchan stanza’—which he had also discussed the previous day with his addressee. (The addressee’s interest in discussing poetry again suggests it is Young, to whom Milton had previously addressed poems.) The shift from prose explication to poetic expression of feeling is significant, because the letter does not leave the reader with any sense that Milton envisages the investment in learning for which he apologizes as a necessary perquisite for a career as a parish priest. As we saw in Chapter 3, it was a commonplace of classical and Renaissance thought that, as Julius Caesar Scaliger put it, ‘in an epic poet, one who is worthy of that name, besides an universal genius is required universal learning’. When Milton refers to having not yet completed the ‘full circle of my private studies’ in The Reason of Church-­government, it comes as a prelude to the account of his long-­standing ambitions to write the greatest epic poem in English, which he had come to believe he could accomplish ‘by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn’d with strong propensity of nature’. While Milton then presents the epic poet as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7), he is careful to insist that ‘to this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affaires’.9 The ‘circle’ of private studies that Milton set out to complete after he left Cambridge was undertaken in pursuit of the universal learning that every authority advised was required of the epic poet and that Milton had invoked in rapturous terms in academic exercises at Cambridge, notably the vernacular verses of ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ and the Latin prose of the seventh Prolusion.

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   219

The sonnet that he copied into the letter to his friend, ‘How soon hath time’, is a Petrarchan sonnet but it continues the obsession with time and timeliness that is characteristic of Shakespeare’s sonnets and is first evident in Milton’s sonnet, ‘O Nightingale’: Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arriv’d so near, And inward ripenes doth much less appear, That som more timely-­happy spirits indu’th. (lines 5–8) The odd compound adjective ‘timely-­happy’ should, in the context of a meditation on the decision about whether to commence a clerical career after the end of university life, refer to undergraduate contemporaries such as Robert Pory and John Hierron, who entered the Church after graduation, as did the majority of the BA students in Milton’s year at Christ’s. But it has more usually been taken as a reference to other writers who were making a name for themselves. ‘But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th’ (line 4) may allude to the appearance in 1633 of Poetical Blossomes, a volume of poems by the precocious fifteen-­year-­ old schoolboy, Abraham Cowley (1618–67); the frontispiece image of Cowley in Poetical Blossomes is the only example of a portrait of a living poet to appear in a small-­format (as opposed to folio) volume prior to Milton’s own 1645 Poems.10 A more likely suspect to be in Milton’s thoughts was Thomas Randolph, the Cambridge contemporary and acolyte of Ben Jonson who was renowned within the university for his academic prowess and literary talent, and had also begun to forge a career in the world of print and London commercial drama. By early 1633 Randolph’s poems were widely circulated in manuscript, he had published several dramatic works, and his most recent play, The Jealous Lovers, had been performed to acclaim before King Charles and Henrietta Maria on a royal visit to Cambridge in spring 1632—while Milton was still working towards his MA—and printed by the University Press in the same year. Already a minor Fellow of Trinity College by the time Milton received his BA in 1629, having matriculated only a year earlier than Milton, he was elected a major Fellow five days after the royal performance of The

220  c h a p t e r 9

Jealous Lovers. Randolph offered an example of a Cambridge contemporary who had already achieved both academic success and literary reputation. While there were prominent recent examples of ministers who had combined their clerical careers with writing verse—pre-­ eminently George Herbert, who died in March 1633—their poetry tended to be put into print posthumously (as was the case with Herbert’s The Temple, 1633) and this was not a route that Milton seems to have considered. In the two to three years after leaving Cambridge, Milton rather pursued a career path that had more in common with the example of the professional, or at least semi-­professional, writer set by Ben Jonson, and by those such as Randolph who aspired to be ‘sons’ of Ben, by composing dramatic entertainments in response to aristocratic patronage. When Sir Henry Wotton, Provost of Eton College, responded in April 1638 to Milton’s gift of a copy of A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, he disclosed that he in fact already had a copy but had not known it was by Milton because his copy was bound ‘in the very close of the late R’s Poems, printed at Oxford’, in a volume given to Wotton by (confusingly) ‘our common friend Mr. R’.11 The ‘late R.’ must be Randolph, who had come to an early end with his death in 1635 from smallpox, after several years of apparently dissolute living: his Poems, which included two plays with separate title-­pages—a model that Milton’s 1645 Poems would follow with the inclusion of the Maske—appeared in early 1638. The second of these two plays, Amyntas, was ‘a pastorall acted before the King and Queene at Whitehall’ in 1631. The text of Milton’s Maske that was bound with Randolph’s Poems, and that would have immediately followed Amyntas in Wotton’s copy, must have been the one published without Milton’s name at the beginning of 1638 (though dated 1637). That Randolph’s poems and plays and Milton’s anonymous Maske were bound together, either by a bookseller or ‘Mr. R’, and that a reader as sophisticated as Wotton, who had long been resident ambassador to Venice under James I, had apparently not noticed the join, suggests that Milton’s Maske could look to contemporaries very much like other occasional dramatic entertainments of the time by university wits. The 1637 text even came with an aristocratic dedication by Henry Lawes, Milton’s musical collaborator on the Maske and a frequent presence in

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   221

court and occasional entertainments in the 1620s and 1630s. That such likeness between the pastoral dramas of Randolph and Milton was perceived by well-­informed contemporaries questions the confident categorization of Milton’s longest and most ambitious work to date as ‘a reformed masque’, designed as a moral and political critique of the very Caroline culture that fostered the masque form.12

Genius of the Wood Milton’s commitment to a poetic, rather than clerical, career on leaving Cambridge for Hammersmith is suggested by his beginning at this time the series of drafts of poems that were first gathered and bound in the eighteenth century, together with papers outlining possible literary projects and the drafts of the ‘letter to a friend’. The Trinity manuscript is ‘the single most important autograph poetical manuscript of the seventeenth century still to survive’.13 The manuscript—which appears to comprise two separate sheaves—cannot be dated exactly but the consensus is that it was begun in 1632–3 and stretches to around 1658, with the material from after 1652, when Milton went fully blind, copied by amanuenses.14 The first draft in the manuscript is headed ‘Part of a Maske’, with the title later added by Milton: ‘Arcades: Part of an Entertainment at’. The location in which the masque or entertainment took place is not included, but a note at the beginning of the text of Arcades printed in the 1645 Poems describes it as staged for a private family occasion at Harefield in Middlesex, the home of Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby. ‘[S]ome noble persons of her family’ took part in the entertainment, probably including several of her grandchildren, three of whom later performed in Milton’s Maske. Dressed ‘in pastoral habit’ and singing the first of three songs in Arcades, they approached the Countess, who was seated on a ‘state’, or raised chair, which was where the king would sit in masques and entertainments performed at the early Stuart court. As they ‘come forward, the Genius of the wood appears’, and addresses them in a substantial speech: they have come from ‘famous Arcady’ or Arcadia, the mythical pastoral golden world, to visit the new and superior Arcadia created at Harefield under the wise guardianship of the Countess. They are bid to approach ‘her glittering state’ and kiss

222  c h a p t e r 9

the hem of her skirt, before two more songs are sung to celebrate this ‘rural queen / All Arcadia hath not seen.’ (lines 81, 94–5) There may yet again be a playful echo of Marlowe’s well-­known pastoral love lyric, ‘Come live with me’—something of a refrain in Milton’s early vernacular verse, but always in non-­erotic contexts—in the invitation of the final song to ‘Bring your flocks, and live with us’, in the new Arcadia (line 103). The entertainment, of which Milton’s ‘part’ seems to be the first, took place at some point between summer 1632 and summer 1634, with the most comprehensive argument having been made for August 1632, although the countess’s seventy-­fifth birthday, on 4 May 1634, offers a plausible occasion. Lady Alice had herself performed in celebrated masques at the Jacobean court, such as Ben Jonsons’s Masque of Blackness (1605), and Edmund Spenser, among other notable poets, had dedicated poems to her: by writing in her honour, Milton was placing himself in a recent tradition of aristocratic literary patronage.15 Milton’s commission may have come directly from the countess, but it is unclear how the little-­known Cambridge MA would have come to her notice; most likely is that Milton was approached or recommended by the musician Henry Lawes (1596–1662), who had been employed since at least 1627 by the countess’s son-­in-­law, John Egerton, Earl of Bridgewater, as music tutor to his daughters. How Milton and Lawes first came to know each other is again a matter for speculation, but John Milton senior was, as we have seen, well-­connected in the musical world of Caroline London. Lawes composed the music for Milton’s Maske and performed the role of the Attendant Spirit, and it is assumed by his biographers that he also composed the music for Arcades and played the similar role of the Genius of the Wood; although no music for Arcades survives, that is the case for a good deal of Lawes’s music for occasional events such as masques in the 1630s.16 Milton’s friendship with Lawes endured into the later 1640s—or at least Milton sought to renew it at this time—as is evident from the sonnet, ‘To My Friend Mr Henry Lawes’, that he composed at the beginning of 1646 and sent with to Lawes with a copy of the 1645 Poems, the title-­page of which informs the reader that the ‘Songs were set in Musick by Mr Henry Lawes Gentleman of the Kings Chapel, and one of his Majesties Private Musick’.17

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   223

Figure 9. Title-page of Poems of John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645).

The role played by the friendship with Lawes in Milton’s early life and writing career has tended to be underestimated, in part because it connects Milton to a social context that fits uneasily with the notion of a revolutionary in the making. Lawes had been a salaried member of the Chapel Royal since 1626 and of the King’s Music, the inner circle of musicians who played in the monarch’s apartments, since 1631. He was involved during the 1630s in the composition and performance of music for court entertainments and masques by, among others, Thomas Carew, James Shirley, and William Davenant, who became poet laureate after Jonson’s death in 1636, and was well known for his settings of lyrics by court poets including Carew, Shirley, Davenant, Edmund Waller, Sir John Suckling, William Cartwright, Robert Herrick, and Richard Lovelace. This is a roll-­call of the writers who have become known to posterity as ‘Cavalier poets’ for their involvement in the Caroline court and association with the royalist cause (though Carew and Suckling

224  c h a p t e r 9

were dead by 1642), and Lawes’s most recent biographer calls him the ‘Cavalier songwriter’. Arcades connects Milton to a new social context, a world of courtly performance and cultural patronage in aristocratic estates, some distance from the humble life of a parish minister to which he had been urged by Thomas Young. Yet the piece, slight as it is, also displays Milton’s continuing fascination with the Platonic themes of the music of the spheres, only to be heard by those who are restored to perfection but which offer a pattern for earthly verse and song, and the daemons or genii that mediate between the gods and mortal men. The ‘unseen Genius of the Wood’ whom the poet invokes to breathe ‘sweet musick’ in ‘Il Penseroso’ appears in Arcades (lines 151, 154). This figure corresponds to Mede’s second, higher type of daemon, created semi-­divine rather than raised to that status and which, according to Mede, corresponds to ‘that sort of spiritual powers which we call angels’.18 The Genius acts as the guardian spirit of Harefield, but after his job of preserving the natural environment of the estate is done for the day, ‘then listen I / To the celestial Sirens harmony, / That sit upon the nine enfolded Sphears’ (lines 62–4). As in Ad Patrem, ‘At a Solemn Musick’ and the ‘Nativity Ode’, this is the music described by Plato in the Republic (10. 616–17) and ‘which none can hear / Of human mould with grosse unpurged ear’ (lines 72–3). The Genius accepts that his ‘inferior hand or voice’ is not able to ‘hit’ such celestial harmonies; but Milton’s verse and Lawes’s musical setting—‘the skill of lesser gods’, as the Genius describes his song—evidently bring fallen man some degree closer to the perfection that has been lost through sin, and that is also perceptible in the virtue of the Countess and the beauty of her estate (lines 77–9).

‘Notorious Whores’ The Attendant Spirit in A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle was played by Lawes, whose music for the performance survives: John Egerton, the Earl of Bridgewater, was evidently sufficiently impressed by the Lawes– Milton collaboration on staging Arcades for his mother-­in-­law, whether it had taken place in 1632 or more recently, to commission them to com-

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   225

pose a more elaborate entertainment for his occasion of state. Milton was evidently still seeking, or at least open to the prospect of, aristocratic literary patronage. While some of Egerton’s children doubtless participated in the part of Arcades that Milton wrote, this time he created extended speaking roles for three of Egerton’s children: fifteen-­ year-­old Alice, eleven-­year-­old John, and nine-­year-­old Thomas. It is probable that Milton did not make the considerable journey—and was not invited, given that, unlike Lawes, he was not a family servant—to see his Maske performed on Michaelmas night (29 September) 1634. The occasion was a celebration of Egerton’s first visitation to Ludlow Castle, the seat of the Welsh court, as holder of the offices to which he had been appointed in 1631 of President of the Council of Wales and Lord Lieutenant of the Welsh and border counties. Milton could never have seen a masque performed at the Stuart court, and his familiarity with the form must thus have largely depended on reading scribal or printed texts; although, after his brother Christopher entered the Middle Temple, he would have had opportunities to witness the masques that were a feature of Christmas festivals at the Inns of Court. He would also have been familiar with the incorporation of the form into late Shakespeare, especially The Tempest. In a letter to Charles Diodati in late 1637, to which we shall return, his comment that he was thinking of moving ‘into some one of the Inns of Court’ out of a desire for more companionship suggests some familiarity with the culture of the Inns.19 The most spectacular example of a masque performance outside the Caroline court had occurred earlier in February 1634, when Bulstrode Whitlocke, MP and treasurer of the Middle Temple—and someone, as a member of the Commonwealth’s Council of State, for whom Milton would work after the regicide—commissioned James Shirley to write The Triumph of Peace. A masque performed on a uniquely grand scale, the hundreds of participants and performers moved in procession down the Strand to Whitehall, where Charles and Henrietta Maria were waiting; the royal couple were so impressed, they took the unusual step of ordering the masque to be repeated ten days later. Inigo Jones, who had collaborated with Jonson on numerous court masques, provided the visual designs while William Lawes, the brother of Henry who was later

226  c h a p t e r 9

killed fighting for the king in 1645, was commissioned to write the music; Henry participated as a singer and musician. The recent example of The Triumph of Peace, which Milton might well have gone to see on the Strand, also underlined how growing discontent with the Personal Rule of the King and the rise of Laudian religion was politicizing court culture. The Inns of Court had arranged the masque as an apology to the queen for the remarks made by one of its members, William Prynne, in his anti-­theatrical polemic, Histrio-­Mastix: the Players Scourge (1633). There he had condemned female actors as ‘notorious whores’ and women as ‘whorishly impudent, as to act, to speake publikely on a Stage’, at a time when Henrietta Maria and her ladies-­in-­ waiting were in rehearsal for their performance in Walter Montague’s pastoral drama, The Shepherd’s Paradise, in which the queen had a speaking role.20 Prynne was imprisoned and eventually tried on the charge of seditious libel soon after The Triumph of Peace was performed: he was stripped of his Oxford degrees, sentenced to life imprisonment, and to have his ears cropped. Whereas Milton’s old friend Alexander Gil— with whom Milton was still in contact and to whom he sent his Greek translation of Psalm XIV two months after the performance of the Maske—had narrowly avoided losing his ears in 1628 on the charge of possessing manuscript libels on the king and Buckingham, Prynne suffered for putting his opinions into print in the context of an increasingly polarized culture, even if his comments could only be taken as no more than an indirect attack on the queen. Copies of his book were burned by the hangman in front of Prynne as he stood in the pillory waiting for his bodily punishment: his first ear was cropped in Westminster on 7 May 1634, and the other three days later in Cheapside. Prynne would languish in gaol for the rest of the 1630s but would continue to write and illicitly publish polemics against the ungodly religion and culture of the court. Milton thus wrote a major, complicated speaking part for the fifteen-­ year-­old Alice Egerton at a moment when objections to the participation of women in such entertainments had become a matter of cultural-­ political controversy and associated with Puritan agitation (although Prynne himself opposed at great length the equation of anti-­theatricalism

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   227

with ‘Puritanism’, a term that he rejected as a polemical category). The assumption that Milton, given his later attacks on Caroline court culture in his polemical prose, must have set out to reform a genre that he regarded as an artistic manifestation of the ungodliness of the Caroline court neglects the significance, in the aftermath of the Prynne affair, of giving a speaking part to a female actor—indeed to a young unmarried virgin. For a ‘Puritan’ commentator such as Prynne, the role of the Lady in Milton’s Maske would have offered a provocative intensification of the immorality of court theatre, not an antidote to it. It has been thought by some that Milton chose to put Alice Egerton in this role because her father had asked him to compose a work that would assert the chaste morality of the family and the marital suitability of Alice in the aftermath of the so-­called Castlehaven scandal, a sensational episode in which the Countess of Bridgewater’s brother-­in-­law had been tried and executed in 1631 on the charge of (among other things) being an accessory to the rape of his wife and stepdaughter.21 But, given the more recent cause célèbre of Prynne’s trial and punishment for charging female actors with being ‘notorious whores’, giving Alice such a prominent role in a masque about threatened virginity would seem an odd way to go about distancing the family from controversy. Milton’s dependence on reading for his understanding of the genre of the masque, at least as it was performed in court, may help to explain the much greater emphasis on dramatic dialogue in the Maske compared to other versions of the form. The masque was in essence a courtly ritual that was intended to display the magnificence and power of the Stuart monarchy and to testify to its wisdom and virtue. It was defined above all by its visual and musical complexity—its scenery, costumes, and choreography—although the nature of the genre became a matter for debate in the long-­running quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones over whether it was the poetry or the ‘painting and carpentry’, as Jonson put it in in his ‘Expostulation with Inigo Jones’ in 1631, which constituted the ‘soul’ of a masque.22 ( Jonson’s argument that the masque without the poet’s intellectual design was a visually sumptuous but morally empty shell would be appropriated by Milton in Eikonoklastes after the regicide and turned against Caroline court culture as a whole.)

228  c h a p t e r 9

Characterization tended to be allegorical and the plot, such as it was, strongly moralistic: the structure of the form as it had developed by the early 1630s conventionally involved an induction, followed by the antimasque or threat to moral order, a threat which is then dissolved or banished in the masque; this restoration of order is celebrated by the revels, with extended singing and dancing, and the production closed with an epilogue. The audience at Ludlow Castle on 29 September 1634 would have seen something that looked very like the masques that they had previously seen and in which they had participated at court: Milton’s Maske has a divine messenger; a mythological landscape; an antimasque with actors dancing in animal heads; three stage sets as the action moved from the dark wood, to the Circean court of Comus, to the real world of Ludlow; music and songs by the king’s best-­known musician, Lawes; and a deus ex machina, in the form of Sabrina, to resolve the chaos into a harmony embodied by final dances of the masquers and by the presiding presence of the new President of the Council of Wales, enthroned in his seat of state. The children have come to Ludlow ‘to attend their Father’s state, / and new-­entrusted Scepter’, as the Arcadians travelled to Harefield to honour the Dowager Countess (lines 35–6). There was even, if Milton’s stage directions in the Trinity manuscript were followed, rigging for actors to fly across the sets. Milton’s Maske follows the conventional structure, then, but the antimasque / masque sections meld into one long section that is much closer to drama in the complexity of its dialogue and characterization. One possible model is William Browne’s Inner Temple Masque, which was performed in 1615 but for which there is evidence of manuscript circulation in both the Inns of Court and Caroline Cambridge around 1630.23 Browne’s masque focuses on the relationship between Circe and Odysseus, adding new elements to the story in The Odyssey. Circe has used the power of the Sirens to shipwreck Odysseus and bring him to her and, although the masque has an opening antimasque featuring men whose heads Circe has transformed into those of monsters, the piece then becomes a dramatic debate between the two characters as Circe offers eloquent justifications of her actions in an effort to persuade Od-

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   229

ysseus of her love. Browne’s work, which clearly owes a debt to Plutarch’s debate in the Moralia between Odysseus and Circe, ‘That Brute Beasts Have Use of Reason’, is notable for the absence of a courtly presence to which it refers outside the performance space—no member of the royal family attended its performance—but also for its emphasis on dramatic rather than ritualistic elements of performance: its lead participants are characters rather than allegorical abstractions.24 Milton similarly adds to Homeric myth by inventing his own genealogy for Comus, whom he makes the child of Circe and Bacchus, and Comus’s memory of the singing of ‘[m]y Mother Circe with the Sirens three’ suggests the influence of Browne’s invention of a relationship between Circe and the Sirens (line 253). Milton must have known also Ben Jonson’s 1618 court masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, in which the future Charles I had danced at court for the first time. Jonson includes a character called Comus who represents unrestrained indulgence, although this Comus is more of a Rabelaisian belly-­god than Milton’s demonic tempter, and his resistance is easily overcome, as is usually the case with the protagonist of the antimasque. Milton pointedly refuses Jonson’s reconciliation of virtue and pleasure by having Comus escape.

Some Other Circe Yet when the Attendant Spirit in the induction asks the audience, ‘Who knows not Circe / The daughter of the sun?’, the allusion must be to the much more recent court masque Tempe Restored, written by Aurelian Townshend, designed by Inigo Jones and performed on Shrove Tuesday 1632 (and published soon afterwards). Lawes was likely the composer of the music and Alice Egerton had participated in the performance, as one of Harmony’s ‘Influences’, alongside her elder sister Katherine, who was one of the ‘stars’ of Divine Beauty—a role fulfilled by Queen Henrietta Maria herself. The masque portrays Circe as having seduced a nameless young man, whom she made drink from her ‘enchanted cup’ and then transformed into a lion by touching him with her ‘golden wand’; when she later ‘retransformed him into his former shape’, he ran

230  c h a p t e r 9

away. In her anger Circe commands all her ‘voluntary beasts’—those men who have willingly given themselves to her subjection and are ‘but halfe transformed into beasts’—to invade the Vale of Tempe, celebrated in Greek myth as the haunt of the Muses. Harmony and her ‘Influences’ prepare the way for Divine Beauty and her fourteen stars—the queen and her ladies—to come down and restore order to Tempe. The scene is then shifted to ‘a shady wood’, where Circe voluntarily hands over her ‘golden rod’ to the goddess Minerva, in the presence both of Jove and Cupid. In the commentary on the printed text, Townshend makes clear the Platonic meaning of the allegory: ‘that Corporeall Beauty, consisting in simetry, colour, and certaine unexpressable Graces, shining in the Queenes Maiestie, may draw us to the contemplation of the Beauty of the soule, unto which it hath Analogy’.25 The most striking feature of the complicated staging of Tempe Restored is the fact that Circe was played by a woman, one ‘Madame Coniack’, about whom Thomas Randolph penned a popular poem that praised the beauty of her voice (and contrasted it with the deformity of her face) and that circulated in scribal form as (among other titles) ‘Upon the French Woman . . . that sings in masques at Court’.26 The Homeric character of Circe was traditionally allegorized in Christian commentary as bodily appetite and sensual temptation, and Odysseus’s men, transformed into swine by drinking from her cup, as the debased condition of the human soul when desire or passion rules over reason. Consequently Circe often stood for a personification of the alluring but corrupt materialism of Roman Catholic ritual in Protestant polemic; in Ascham’s The Scholemaster, Circe repeatedly personifies the seductive charms of Catholic Italy that the sober Protestant traveller must resist: ‘Some Circe shall make him, of a plain Englishman, a right Italian’.27 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given Henrietta Maria’s Catholicism, Circe is treated in Tempe Restored with unusual sympathy, and the unprecedented casting of a female and (presumably) French Catholic actor to play such a role registers that unconventionality. In his explanation of the allegory, Townshend presents his Circe as a figure not of demonic sensual temptation but of the Platonic desire to obtain the good through the beautiful:

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   231

Circe here signifies desire in generall, the which hath power on all living Creatures, and beeing mixt of the Divine and Sensible, hath divers effects, Leading some to Vertue, and others to Vice . . . The description of her person, of extraordinary Beauty, and sweetnesse of her voyce, shewes that desire is moved either by sight or hearing, to love Vertue, or the contrary, and the Beautifull aspect of her inchaunted Palace, glistering with gold, and Precious Ornaments, that desire cannot bee moved without apparance of Beauty, either true of false.28 Circe’s surrender of her golden wand to Divine Beauty thus represents the power of the monarchy to control the desire of its subjects and entice them to virtue through their attraction to its beauty. Tempe Restored exemplifies the efforts of Henrietta Maria to project an image in the early 1630s of the royal marriage and court in terms of a Platonic ideal of chaste love: in its emphasis on ritual display and female beauty as a path to divine virtue, this ‘cult of chastity’, as it has been described, extended the Laudian notion of the ‘beauty of holiness’ into the theatrical culture of the court.29 This courtly flavour of Neoplatonism derived less from the Florentine humanists such as Ficino—and certainly it had little or nothing to do with the direct interpretation of Plato—than from the literary vogue in Paris for Honoré D’Urfé’s pastoral romance Astrée, published in six parts from 1607 to 1627. The queen’s enthusiasm for the depiction of Platonic love in pastoral romance led her to participate with her ladies in Montague’s bespoke entertainment The Shepherd’s Paradise in 1633 and later in the year to resurrect for court performance John Fletcher’s early Jacobean play, The Faithful Shepherdess.30 The verbal and structural similarities of Milton’s Maske to Fletcher’s play have been noted since the late eighteenth century, while Randolph’s Amyntas, performed at court two years earlier, illustrates how writers in search of royal patronage had sought to cater to the tastes of the queen by incorporating pastoral and romance motifs into their dramatic entertainments. But it is Randolph’s earlier entertainment The Muses Looking-­Glass, a series of debates staged before the king in 1630 and which circulated widely in manuscript under the title ‘The Masque of Vices’ before it was put into print in the 1638 Poems,

232  c h a p t e r 9

which seems to have provided Milton with some fine speeches of libertine objection to Platonic love with which to furnish the arguments of Comus against the Lady’s defence of chastity: Nature has been bountifull  To provide pleasures, and shall we be niggards  At plenteous boards? He’s a discourteous guest  That will observe a dyet at a feast.  When nature thought the earth alone too little  To find us meat, and therefore stor’d the ayr  With winged creatures, not contented yet,  She made the water fruitfull to delight us.  [ . . . ] Did she do this to have us eat with temperance?  Or when she gave so many different Odors  Of spices, unguents, and all sorts of flowers,  She cry’d not—stop your noses [ . . . ] or when she plac’d us here,  Here in a Paradice, where such pleasing prospects,  So many ravishing colours entice the eye,  Was it to have us wink? when she bestow’d  So powerfull faces, such commanding beauties  On many glorious Nymphs, was it to say  Be chaste and continent? Not to enjoy  All pleasures, and at full, were to make nature  Guilty of that she ne’re was guilty of,  A vanity in her works.31  Comus’s rhetorically superabundant declamation of over fifty lines against virginity is often very close to this and it is not surprising that Wotton, having read The Muses Looking-­Glass and Amyntas, presumed Randolph had also written Milton’s Maske: Wherefore did Nature powre her bounties forth, With a such full and unwithdrawing hand,

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   233

Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks, Thronging the Seas with spawn innumerable, But all to please, and sate the curious taste? [ . . . ] Beauty is natures coyn, must not be hoorded, But must be currant, and the good thereof Consists in mutual and partak’n bliss, Unsavoury in th’injoyment of it self[.] [ . . . ] Beauty is natures brag; and must be shown In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities Where most may wonder at the workmanship[.] (lines 710–14, 739–42, 745–7) In his opening speech, Comus is notably given the language of ‘L’Allegro’—‘Come, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastic toe’ (‘L’Allegro’, lines 33–4) becomes a call to Bacchic rites, ‘Com, knit hands, and beat the ground, / In a light fantastick round’ (lines 143–4) —but that language is now placed in the conventional carpe diem context that is conspicuously absent from ‘L’Allegro’, for all its echoes of Marlowe. Milton gives Comus the cup, wand, and bestial ‘rout’ of followers that his mother Circe commands in Tempe Restored, and he gives Comus the carpe diem rhetoric of Randolph’s personifications of vice. The Lady inherits the real and powerful female voice that Townshend had given to a Circe who ‘signifies desire in general’; but while desire for virtue and vice is mixed in the figure of Townshend’s Circe, it is split in the Maske between the Lady and Comus. In this respect Townshend is closer in his representation of the Circean power of transformation to early modern commentaries on Homeric myth, such as Natale Conti’s popular Mythologiae (1567), according to which ‘the name Circe is derived from the word for mixing . . . because there can be no births unless those things called elements are mixed together . . . Therefore the birth and admixture which is part of the reproductive process of natural bodies was rightly called Circe, daughter of the Sun and of Ocean’s daughter.’32 The assimilation of Circe into the Stuart court at the end of Tempe

234  c h a p t e r 9

Restored becomes, in Townshend’s allegory, emblematic of the reproductive fertility of the chaste royal marriage. The Maske was evidently the product of reading in recent masques and dramatic entertainments in the Caroline court, as well as some knowledge of earlier Jacobean works by Jonson, Fletcher, and others. In working to his brief to write an entertainment for a state occasion in 1634, Milton worked with genres—masque and pastoral romance— that were then in fashion at the Caroline court; he developed a plot that had obvious associations with the queen’s cult of chaste female beauty; and, at a time when the participation of the queen and other women at court in dramatic entertainments was a topic of intense religious and cultural controversy, he gave the lead speaking role to a fifteen-­year-­old female courtier who had previously danced on stage with the queen in a court masque. Milton’s masque ‘is not so much a critique of court culture, then, as an appropriation and amplification’.33 The striking final lines—‘Or if Vertue feeble were / Heav’n itself would stoop to her’ (lines 1021–2)—even echo the description in Tempe Restored of Henrietta Maria’s descent to earth to save the Vale of Tempe from Circe: When Divine Beautie, will vouchsafe to stoope,  And move to Earth: ’tis fit the Heavenly Spheres,  Should be her Musicke: And the Starrie Troope,  Shine round about her, like the Crowne she weares.34 Claims that the Maske stages a criticism of the Caroline court’s ‘ethos of sensuality and corrupt ritual’ have little evidence to go on in the text itself other than some very conventional remarks made by the Lady after she has first encountered Comus about how ‘honest-­offer’d courtesie’ is ‘sooner found in lowly sheds / With smoaky rafters, than in tapstry Halls / And Courts of Princes’ (lines 322–5).35 Stronger anti-­court sentiment could be found in most Jacobean tragedies; indeed we need only look to a court masque in which Henry Lawes and the two Egerton boys who played the Brothers had all participated in February 1634, Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum, to find a much more provocative and satirical anatomy of Caroline court values. Momus, god of ridicule, threat-

i n p u r s u i t o f pa t r o n a g e   235

ens to reveal the libertine activity behind the Platonic veil of the court by peering into ‘all the privy lodgings, behind hangings, doors, curtains, through keyholes, chinks, windows, about all venereal lobbies, sconces, or redoubts’.36 While the name Comus would have recalled Carew’s Momus in the minds of the audience, the voice of Momus is more akin to that of the manuscript libels and satires that circulated in Buckingham’s time but that became less prevalent in the 1630s as printed criticism by ‘Puritans’ such as Prynne became the focus of official suppression. Momus anticipates Milton’s Comus in that both are personifications of antimasque who become part of the main masque, and both escape the final resolution into order, if in contrasting fashion: where Comus is chased away, although still in possession of his wand, Momus merely wanders off-­stage in a manner more akin to a licensed court jester— Carew held, after all, the position of sewer-­in-­ordinary to the king, and so really did have access to the royal ‘privy lodgings’. After being commissioned to write an entertainment for a state occasion, Milton did not set out to reform according to ‘Puritan’ religious principles a genre that he regarded as a manifestation of a corrupt court culture—although in his post-­regicide polemic he would represent the Caroline masque as exactly that—but to do what he had done repeatedly in his writing career up to this point: experiment in a genre by imitating its fashionable conventions and then seek to outdo contemporaries by pushing the form beyond those conventions. The ‘Nativity Ode’, ‘L’Allegro’, and ‘Il Penseroso’ are earlier vernacular examples of his success; ‘The Passion’ offers an example of comparative failure. It is in great part Milton’s literary ambition that makes reading the Maske a different experience from reading other examples of the genre. The court masque was originally a Jonsonian genre but Milton’s dramatic characterization and style are Shakespearean. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest are echoed most often, while the Lady’s independent and courageous voice in dramatic debate is reminiscent of Rosalind in the wood in As You Like It (c. 1599): courtly interest in Rosalind’s character is suggested by Charles I’s annotations on the table of contents of his copy of the 1632 Shakespeare Folio, in which the King renamed As You Like it as ‘Rosalind’.37

236  c h a p t e r 9

The language of the Maske and its thematic emphasis on moral trial have, as has been much discussed, more in common with the Protestant poetics of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–1607), even as Milton eschews formalized Spenserian allegory—although the characters of Comus and the Lady come close to personification of moral values. Yet while the devilish tempters to lust of The Faerie Queene are obvious allegories of Catholic idolatry, there is only the hint of an association of Comus with the foreign Catholic threat in the reference to his having grown up ‘[r]oaving the Celtick, and Iberian fields’ (line 60). Nonetheless, Milton’s later transprosal of the Lady’s praise of the ‘sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity’ to his own tribute in Areopagitica to ‘our sage and serious Poet Spencer, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas’, is revealing of the Spenserian colouring of the trial of the Lady’s chastity by supernatural powers (lines 786–7).38 The escape of Comus with his wand and transformative magic intact qualifies the sense of resolution that some in the audience who were involved in Tempe Restored might have expected, having watched in that masque Circe hand over her wand, and thus her power to engender transformative desire, to Charles and Henrietta Maria. Comus’s liberty to tempt again in the future suggests a Spenserian concept of personal moral virtue—embodied in the Maske, as in the opening books of The Faerie Queene, by chastity—as continually being tested by insidious forces; although there was no royal couple at Ludlow to effect such a complete resolution of conflict as occurs in Tempe Restored.

CHAPTER 10

•

Many are the Shapes of Things Daemonic

Pagan Virtue As a result of the Brothers failing to capture Comus and his wand, the Lady of the Maske remains frozen to her chair and her ultimate rescue depends on the intervention of the nymph Sabrina, the genius or guardian spirit of the river Severn and ‘a virgin pure’ who fulfils the role of deus ex machina that Queen Henrietta Maria had performed in Tempe Restored. The story of Sabrina’s death is recounted by Spenser in the second book of the Faerie Queene—she was drowned by the jealous first wife of her stepfather, Locraine, son of Brutus, the mythical founder of Britain, though Milton turns her death into suicide—and the Attendant Spirit tells the Brothers he learned about her from the old shepherd– poet Meliboeus, one of the characters in Virgil’s first Eclogue and almost certainly meant to stand here for Spenser. In the view of those who would argue for the Laudianism of the young Milton, Sabrina represents the Laudian conception of devotional ceremony and sacramental ritual as material expressions of grace. Sabrina’s triple sprinkling of her river water on the Lady to free her from the peculiar ‘gumms of glutenous heat’ that hold her fast in Comus’s seat, evidently meant to invoke baptism and the Trinity, is thus regarded as ‘an elegant display of the beauty of holiness’ (line 917). The Attendant Spirit, meanwhile, ‘has some of the characteristics of grace, as conceptualized in Arminian soteriology’. In sum, the Maske is held to constitute the ‘most complex and thorough 237

238  c h a p t e r 10

expression of Laudian Arminianism and Laudian style within the Milton oeuvre, and indeed, the high-­water mark of his indulgence of such beliefs and values’.1 If the Maske is not a Puritan critique of court culture, must it then be an example of Laudian art, in tune not only with the theatrical fashions of the Caroline court but with the high ceremonialism and anti-­Calvinist theology increasingly promoted by the Caroline Church after 1633? The philosophical and theological underpinnings of the Maske are of a different intellectual order to the courtly Neoplatonism of a work such as Tempe Restored, and they exhibit Milton’s continuing imaginative fascination with the daemon spirits of Hellenic culture and their mediating role between heaven and earth as a figure for the task of the true poet. The Maske is written in a classical and mythological register, as most court masques were, but that convention should not distract us from recognizing that its theological framework is not really Christian at all, at least in its origins. The Maske is extant in several different scribal and printed versions, and Milton evidently continued to work on the text after the 1634 performance. The draft of the Maske in the Trinity manuscript shows four different stages of revision, with many additions and alterations; what appears to be the second stage of revision is closest to the manuscript copy that the Earl of Bridgewater, or someone in his family, had drawn up by an unknown professional scribe, probably soon after the performance. The third stage of revision in the Trinity manuscript was the basis of the 1637 text, in fact published at the beginning of 1638, under the auspices of Henry Lawes, although there are also additions not in the manuscript. The text in the 1645 Poems is close to the 1637 text, incorporating minor revisions made in the fourth stage of the Trinity manuscript.2 In both the Trinity and Bridgewater manuscripts, the character played by Lawes and first called the Attendant Spirit in the printed text of 1637 is instead described as ‘a Guardian spirit, or Daemon’. The Daemon’s long opening speech to the audience, the induction to the Maske, is indebted to two essays by Plutarch, ‘Of the Face Appearing in the Round of the Moone’ and ‘Of the Daemon or Familiar Spirit of Socrates’, as Philemon Holland translated the titles in his popular 1603 edition of the Moralia. Plutarch’s Moralia was recommended by Milton

Figure 10. ‘The Daemon sings or says’, final page of the draft of ‘A Maske’, in the Milton manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge.

240  c h a p t e r 10

for the introductory study of moral philosophy in Of Education and it was a commonplace text of the early modern curriculum, useful for learning Greek as well as studying classical moral philosophy.3 The Daemon’s description of where he has come from reworks Plutarch’s account of what Timarchus, a disciple of Socrates, saw when his soul, liberated from his body, was guided into the upper air by a daemon: ‘a number of starres leaping up and downe about this huge and deepe gulfe . . . These be (quoth he) the daemons, that you see, though you know them not’. The home of the souls who have become daemonic is ‘a middle region betweene the earth and the Moone’, ‘in the mildest region of the aire, which they call the meddowes of Pluto’.4 Compare the opening of the Maske: Before the starry threshold of Joves court My mansion is, where those immortal shapes Of bright aëreal Spirits live insphear’d In Regions milde of calm and serene Ayr. (lines 1–4) In the Daemon’s epilogue to the Maske, after the end of the revels, he announces he now must fly to ‘those happy climes that ly / Where day never shuts his eye, / Up in the broad fields of the sky’, where ‘eternal Summer dwels’ and the flowers are drenched ‘with Elysian dew’ (lines 977–9, 988, 996). There he is able to ‘run / Quickly to the green earths end’ and ‘soar as soon / To the corners of the Moon’ (lines 1013–14, 1016–17). According to Plutarch, daemons descend ‘to preserve the good in perils’ and then fly ‘to the tract of the Moone lying toward heaven [that] they call the Elysian field’; this is a place where ‘the shadow endeth and goeth no father, that is called the limit and end of the earth’ (1182–3). In Paradise Lost, the poet suggests that ‘[t]ranslated Saints, or middle Spirits’, who are ‘betwixt th’ Angelical and Human kinde’, are ‘more likely’ to live on ‘those argent Fields’ of the moon: Milton’s early interest in the moon as the home of daemons suggests this speculation may be sincere, despite it preceding the sharp anti-­ Catholic satire on Purgatory in the Limbo of Fools episode in the third book (3. 460–2). The Daemon outlines in his induction a theology of transformation from mortal human existence into eternal spiritual life achieved through

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   241

virtuous behaviour, assisted if necessary by daemonic intervention: most on earth are ‘Unmindful of the crown that Vertue gives / After this mortal change, to her true Servants / Amongst the enthron’d gods on Sainted seats’ (lines 9–11); for such souls the Daemon would ‘not soil these pure Ambrosial weeds, / With the rank vapours of this Sin-­worn mould’ (lines 16–17). Yet ‘som there be that by due steps aspire / To lay their just hands on that Golden Key / That ope’s the Palace of Eternity: / To such my errand is’ (lines 12–15). In Plutarch those who have ‘come to be Daemons’ did so through ‘the vertue of their soules’; consequently they despise not utterly the affaires, the speeches and studies of those that be here, but being favorable unto them who in their good endevors aspire to the same end that they have atteined to, yea, and after a sort, banding and siding with them, do incite and exhort them to vertue, especially when they see them neere unto the ends of their hopes, and ready in maner to touch the same (1221). Plutarch offers a striking analogy to explain how daemons only save those who are capable of being saved: For this divine power of Daemons, will not sort and be acquainted with every man indifferently, but like as they who stand upon the shore, can do no other good unto them who swim farre within the sea, and a great way from the land, but looke upon them and say nothing; but to such as are neere to the sea side, they runne, and for their sakes, wading a little into the sea, helpe both with hand and voice, and so save them from drowning (1222). The Son of God assumed a human body to save sinners, but daemons only descend to the ‘sin-­worn mould’ of earth to help those who are actively virtuous. For the Calvinist or Arminian (or indeed Catholic), grace is a precondition of merit or good works, not the other way around: the Calvinist denies that good works can obtain grace, which is irresistibly given to the elect; the Arminian maintains that man can accept or resist the grace that was freely given to all by the Atonement. Arminius himself insisted that man could achieve nothing towards his salvation without

242  c h a p t e r 10

divine assistance. In the Platonic theology from which the opening speech of the Maske is derived, however, it is simply through the force of virtuous behaviour that one obtains daemonic assistance: a soul who ‘straineth all her might and maine, with much swet to get forth and ascend up: to it God envieth not her owne proper Daemon and familiar spirit to be assistant’ (2122). The Maske closes with a repetition of the message with which the Daemon had opened the performance. Only virtuous actions will raise a soul to the spirit world of the daemons, and the daemons will descend to help those who strive to act virtuously: Mortals that would follow me, Love vertue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to clime Higher than the Spheary chime; Or if Vertue feeble were, Heav’n itself would stoop to her. (lines 1018–23) The final lines of the Maske may have reminded the audience in Ludlow of Queen Henrietta Maria in Tempe Restored, but they also raise the question of whether the Daemon and Sabrina should be identified with Christian grace or as aspects of the Platonic philosophy of virtue that underpins the Maske—or with both, in an instance of the Platonic syncretism to which the young Milton was so attracted. The Daemon’s lessons in how to obtain eternal life which book-­end the masque suggest that we should be prepared to take at face value the pronouncements of the Elder Brother about virginity, though they have often been mocked as unrealistic bombast. According to the Elder Brother, reassuring his younger sibling, their sister will remain intact because ‘through the sacred rayes of Chastity, / No savage fierce, Bandite, or mountaneer / Will dare to soyl her Virgin purity’ (lines 425–7); when a soul is found ‘sincerely’ chaste, she is assisted by angels, who drive ‘off each thing of sin and guilt’ and converse with her in dream and visions, teaching heavenly knowledge ‘that no gross ear can hear’ (lines 454, 456, 458). This conversation with spirits casts ‘a beam on th’outward shape, / The unpolluted temple of the mind / And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence, / Till all be made immortal’ (lines 460–3). The

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   243

reverse is true of those who give in to ‘leud and lavish act of sin’: their soul becomes more bodily, more material and bestial, ‘grows clotted by contagion, / Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose / The divine property of her first being’ (lines 465, 467–9). In Plutarch, those who are transformed into daemons ‘are such as shewed not upon the earth their beastly, grosse and savage brutishnesse’ (1220); rather they are such as be mounted aloft, and are there most surely bestowed, first as victorious, stand round about adorned with garlands, and those made of the wings of Eustathia, that is to saie, Constancie: because in their life time here upon earth, they had bridled and restreined the unreasonable and passible part of the soule, and made it subject and obedient to the bridle of reason. Secondly, they resemble in sight, the raies of the Sunne. Thirdly, the soule thus ascended on high, is there confirmed and fortified by the pure aire about the Moone, where it doth gather strength and solidity, like as iron and steele by their tincture become hard. For that which hitherto was loose, rare and spongeous, groweth close, compact and firme, yea, and becommeth shining and transparent[.] (1182–3) The Lady echoes her brother in pronouncing the ‘Sun-­clad power of Chastity’ to be a ‘sublime notion, and high mystery’ that Comus, who hurls his ‘dazling Spells into the spungy air’, ‘hast nor Eare nor Soul to apprehend’ (lines 154, 782, 784–5). The other spirit in the Maske, Sabrina, has been transformed into a genius loci through just such a display of ‘Constancie’. Milton turned the story of her death into suicide rather than murder, despite the status of suicide as a mortal sin or divine punishment in Christianity, which has the effect of emphasizing the active role of will in obtaining eternal life: Sabrina, the Daemon tells us, ‘[c] ommended her fair innocence to the flood’ and ‘underwent a quick immortal change’ (lines 831, 841).

‘How Charming is Divine Philosophy!’ The Elder Brother prefaces his speech on the angelic protection of those who are chaste, and the eventual transformation of the chaste body into

244  c h a p t e r 10

spirit, by invoking ‘Antiquity from the old Schools of Greece / To testifie the arms of Chastity’ (lines 439–40). The Second Brother exclaims in response to his sibling’s long declamation: ‘How charming is divine Philosophy!’ (line 476) This comment has again sometimes been thought sarcastic, but the Elder Brother is outlining a Platonic metaphysics of virtue entirely in line with what the Daemon / Attendant Spirit has already told us and will tell us again in his epilogue. As the Elder Brother states himself, the ‘divine philosophy’ that he describes to his younger sibling is really the Platonic philosophy of the ancient Greeks, and it is shown to be true: the Lady and her brothers strain for virtue and the Daemon is ‘dispatcht for their defence, and guard’ (line 42). Comus, on the other hand, is a daemon who has turned demonic: Plutarch recounts how some daemons ‘suffer themselves to slide and fall into mortall bodies againe, where they lead an obscure and darke life, like unto a smoaky vapour’ (1327). The Maske presents us with both types of daemon, divided in terms of the elements as well as their behaviour: the Daemon and Sabrina are spirits of air and water, Comus and his followers belong to fire and earth.5 Plutarch on several occasions cites Bacchus as an example of a fallen daemon, explaining that such ‘powerful and tyrannical daemons’ demand ‘some humane soule clad and compassed within a body, to be given unto them, and yet not able to fulfil their lust by the body’ because they yearn for the purely spiritual beauty they can no longer experience (1330, 1333). The ‘festivall solemnities and sacrifices’ held by followers of Bacchus, ‘when sometimes they use to eat raw flesh, and teare humane bodies piece-­meale; or otherwhile to fast and knocke their brests; and in many places utter most filthy and beastly words during the sacrifices’, are interpreted as projections of the frustration of the fallen daemons, who are unable to find bodily satisfaction of their own lust (1329). Plutarch cites Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae in his account of the ritual behaviour of these followers of Bacchus, and Comus’s opening speech is in the dithyrambic form—a dithyramb being an irregular Greek choral ode in honour of Bacchus, a form that Euripides often employs but to which he makes explicit reference only in The Bacchae.6 Comus’s attraction to the Lady is stirred not immediately by her physi-

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   245

cal beauty but by her song, which signifies that ‘somthing holy lodges in that breast / And with these raptures moves the vocal air / To testifie his hidd’n residence’: his attraction is to the divine purity of the soul, and the mortal body in which the soul is compassed is only a means to try and possess ‘that somthing holy’ (lines 246–8). Comus’s desire to corrupt the body that expresses in its grace ‘something holy’ anticipates Satan’s reaction to his first sight of Adam and Eve in the fourth book of Paradise Lost, and the unsatisfiable lust of the fallen daemon is memorably described by Satan as the condition of the fallen angels, who experience ‘fierce desire, / Among our other torments not the least, / Still unfulfill’d with pain of longing pines’ (4. 509–11). The transformation of the mortal flesh into immortal spirit depends upon virtuous action on earth and it is those who strive for virtue, such as the Lady and her brothers, who attract divine assistance in the form of daemons and genii. But in what, exactly, does that virtue consist in the Maske? Temperance and chastity or virginity and sexual abstinence? The terms ‘chastity’ and ‘virginity’ are used apparently interchangeably: in his speech about how the chaste body, or ‘unpolluted temple of the mind’, can sublime to spirit, the Elder Brother refers to both ‘true virginity’ and ‘saintly chastity’ within a few lines as the means to achieve this transformation; while the Lady, who even redefines Faith, Hope, and Charity as Faith, Hope, and Chastity, invokes in the course of her response to Comus’s great speech about nature both the ‘Sun-­clad power of Chastity’ and the ‘sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity’, as well as ‘the holy dictate of spare Temperance’ (lines 768, 783, 787–8). It may be the case that Milton has the Platonic concept sophrosyne in mind, sometimes translated as ‘chastity’ or ‘temperance’ but used variously in Euripidean tragedy to signify the control of sexual passion (in Hippolytus), female chastity (in Heracleides), and religious holiness (in the Bacchae).7 But in describing this process of spiritualization through virtue, the Elder Brother cites Diana and Minerva as examples of the ‘unconquered virgin’ and, for all that a chaste husband or wife might sometimes be called a ‘virgin’ in marriage in this period, the speeches seems to depend on an equation of chastity with virginity rather than with fidelity in marriage. The Lady is of course a virgin, but the teenage actor, Alice

246  c h a p t e r 10

Egerton, was of marriageable age: it is this marital destiny from which Comus tries to seduce her in his insistence that ‘[i]t is for homely features to keep home’ and ‘teize the huswifes wooll’ (lines 749, 752). In fact the text of the Maske in the Bridgewater manuscript, which we can reasonably assume to be closest to the text as it was staged in Ludlow on 29 September 1634, makes surprisingly little reference to virginity in comparison with the 1637 printed version. The speech that Comus makes against ‘that same vaunted name Virginity’ in lines 738–56, which we have seen to imitate a carpe diem speech in Randolph’s Muses Looking-­ Glass, is missing from the Bridgewater text, as is the second part of the Lady’s response (lines 781–800; these lines are also absent from any stage of the Trinity manuscript): consequently the Lady’s invocation of temperance was part of Alice Egerton’s performance, but not the invocation of the ‘sublime notion, and high mystery’ of virginity. The only references to virginity in the Bridgewater text are in the Elder Brother’s speech and in the description of Sabrina. Alice Egerton was neither faced by a libertine attack on the ‘vaunted name Virginity’ nor asked to make a defence of the ‘doctrine of Virginity’, but engaged with Comus in a straightforward disputation about temperance. When Milton wrote for performance in front of Bridgewater and his family, with the earl’s daughter in the lead role, he was apparently sensitive to the contradiction inherent in having a young woman who was destined soon to make an aristocratic marital match into a type of vestal virgin, permanently dedicated, like the nun who personifies Melancholy in ‘Il Penseroso’, to sexual abstinence and spiritual contemplation. When Milton came to revise the Maske for publication, however, and no longer had to concern himself with the family context of the original commission, he restored and added lines to turn virginity into the key topic of debate between Comus and the Lady, creating the philosophical contradictions between abstinence and temperance that have been the subject of much critical discussion of the work.8 Indeed the Lady assumes a philosophical and poetic persona in the printed text that is largely absent from the performance text but which has something in common with the figure of the scholar-­poet that is familiar in Milton’s early writing, both in verse and in his university

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   247

exercises. When the Lady hears the sound of the Bacchic rites of Comus’s ‘rout’ in the dark wood, she tells of how, in lines omitted from the Bridgewater manuscript, a ‘thousand fantasies / Begin to throng into my memory / Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire’ (lines 205–7). But such thoughts are unable to ‘astound / The virtuous mind’; and besides, ‘the Supreme Good’ would ‘send a glistring Guardian if need were / To keep my life and honour unassail’d’ (lines 210–11, 219–20). The height of optimism about the nature of man in Florentine Neoplatonism was Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), in which Pico, drawing on Hermetic sources, has God tell Adam that man has an indeterminate nature: he has been created capable of lowering himself to ‘the lowest ranks, which are those of the brutes’ or rising to the immortal level of the angels through the autonomous exercise of his will. Pico conflates the Homeric myths of Circe and Calypso to represent the ‘illusions of the fantasy, as of Calypso’: the fantasy arouses man ‘by its specious allurements’ and sets him on the path to becoming ever more bestial. Pico states that if ‘you see a philosopher distinguishing the qualities of things with right reason, you will revere him as a heavenly, not an earthly, being’. In her capacity to sort rationally between the seductive ‘illusions of the fantasy’ and the true ‘qualities of things’, the Lady is given the attributes of such a Piconian philosopher.9 In the 1637 text, the celestial harmonies of the Lady’s song and the Daemon’s pipe—the latter part played, of course, by the famous musician and singer Lawes—are both described in terms of the power of the archetypal poet–singer Orpheus to control nature with his song. The Lady finally cows Comus in argument when she vows, in lines again missing from both the Trinity and Bridgewater manuscripts, to ‘kindle my rapt spirits / To such a flame of sacred vehemence, / That dumb things would be mov’d to sympathize, / And the brute Earth would lend her nerves, and shake’ (lines 796–8). There is certainly an echo here of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost—‘there came a sound from heaven as of a mighty rushing wind’ (Acts 2: 2)—but this is also the Orpheus described by Virgil in the Georgics and named by Milton in Ad Patrem as the personification of poetic power, who ‘held streams spellbound and gave ears to the oak-­trees and moved lifeless phantoms to tears’ (lines

248  c h a p t e r 10

53–5). For the Florentine Neoplatonists such as Ficino, who in 1462 translated the so-­called ‘Orphic Hymns’, Orpheus was one of the prisci theologi, those virtuous pagans such as Plato who preceded Christ but had access to divine truths and the secrets of creation. Milton would recommend the Hellenistic hymns ascribed to Orpheus at the head of his set reading in Of Education in Greek poetry, and in the first Prolusion he had shown his knowledge of what ‘Orpheus says poetically and very truly in his Hymn to the goddess Aurora’.10 In Elegia sexta, Orpheus is cited by Milton as an archetype of the poet as both Apollonian priest and prophetic seer, sacerdos and vates: ‘when he tamed wild beasts among lonely caves’ with his song, he led a life ‘chaste and free from crime, his morals strict and his hand unstained’. Orpheus is then immediately compared to Ulysses, whom Homer guided ‘through Circe’s hall, where men were turned to monsters’ (lines 70, 74). Orpheus was married in classical myth to Eurydice; but, as Ovid recounted, after he lost Eurydice to the underworld, Orpheus renounced the company of women and it was in revenge for this vow of abstinence that he was torn apart by the Thracian Bacchantes whose sexual invitations he had rejected. The fate of the Ovidian Orpheus at the hands of the followers of Bacchus hangs over the Lady’s rejection of Comus’s attempts at seduction when she is identified with Orphic song in the 1637 text.11 The heavenly knowledge that is expressed in Orphic song is identified in Milton’s early writings with the music of the spheres—the ‘sphery chime’ to which the Daemon refers in his final lines in the Maske—that only the perfected few can hear and that the ‘rout’, such as Comus and his Bacchic slaves to sensuality, have ‘nor Eare nor Soul to apprehend’. It is these celestial harmonies that Milton repeatedly envisages the scholar-­poet rising, daemon-­like, to apprehend and then convey back to earth in his verse. In Ad Patrem, father and son, musician and poet are united—as Lawes and Milton are united in the performance of the Maske—as they ‘proceed through heaven’s regions with golden crowns, uniting our sweet songs to the pleasant sounds of the lyre, songs with which the stars and the vaults of the twin hemispheres will resound’. And it is here they encounter daemons and their carmen inenarrabile: ‘the fiery spirit which encircles the swift spheres is itself now also sing-

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   249

ing amid the starry choirs an immortal melody and an inexpressible song’ (line 35–7). The ambition to become daemonic is for Milton an expression of literary ambition, as is evident in ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, in which Milton declares to his Cambridge peers his aspiration to write verse ‘[s]uch were the deep transported mind may soar / Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore / Look in’ (lines 33–5). In revising the Maske between 1634 and 1637, Milton projected aspects of the Platonic philosopher, the Orphic poet, and the Apollonian priest—figures with whom he identified his own poetic ambitions elsewhere in his poetry of the early 1630s and whom he associated, implicitly or explicitly, with a life of sexual abstinence—on to the rather different figure of the Lady, the youthful chastity of whom, as she was played by Alice Egerton, was supposed to be soon transformed into an authorized sexual relationship within marriage.12

Apollo’s Lute When the Second Brother declares that ‘divine philosophy’ is ‘musical as is Apollo’s lute’ (line 478), he makes a connection between the Platonic theology of virtue that his Elder Brother has just outlined, with the elision of chastity and virginity at its heart, and the supernatural verbal power of the Orphic poet: this was a connection that energized the mind and poetic art of the young Milton. The Maske is Milton’s most complex and thorough expression not of Laudian Arminianism but of the Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy that held sway over his poetic imagination and metaphysical vision in his late teens and twenties. The Maske was performed on Michaelmas, the Feast of Michael and All Angels, but Milton hardly needed that excuse to pursue his fascination with daemons and the process of becoming daemonic. The Neoplatonism of the Maske is not the Neoplatonism that the Caroline court derived via the French salons, in which the focus is on the beauty of the queen and her court and on the ideal, chaste marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria as an earthly manifestation of divine ideals. Aspects of the theology of the Maske can nonetheless look like intellectual variations on Laudian thinking: as we have seen, Thomas Jackson, charged with being

250  c h a p t e r 10

a notorious Arminian and promoted by Laud, combined his deep Neoplatonism and fascination with virtuous pagans as prisci theologi with a rejection of Calvinist predestination. The theology of the Maske is unquestionably non-­Calvinist—although it is hard to imagine what a genuinely Calvinist masque might look like—but it is heterodox even in relation to Arminianism, in that it is built upon a moral philosophy of virtue and merit rather than a Christian doctrine of prevenient grace.13 Milton appears to be working out a personal theological and ethical framework that derives certainly from his reading of Greek Platonic and Neoplatonic literature, probably the Florentine Neoplatonism of Ficino and Pico, and possibly the Hermetic corpus, either directly or through the discussion of the Hermetica in the Neoplatonists and the Church Fathers such as Lactantius, who was on the curriculum at St Paul’s and who is recorded on several occasions in Milton’s surviving commonplace book for this thoughts on moral philosophy.14 Milton never cites Ficino or Pico or Greek Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, but then Henry More, the most prominent of the so-­called Cambridge Platonists in the 1640s and 1650s, rarely cites these figures despite being profoundly influenced by them. More (1614–87), who was Milton’s contemporary at Christ’s in 1631–2 and was tutored by Mede, disclosed that it was in a period of spiritual and intellectual crisis from around 1636–40 that he turned to the ‘Platonick Writers’, ‘Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus himself, Mercurius Trismegistus; and the Mystical Divines’.15 (The appeal of Milton’s own imagery of celestial harmonies to Neoplatonist thinkers among Milton’s contemporaries is indicated by the transcription of the first seven lines of ‘At a Solemn Musick’ made by the Cambridge Neoplatonist Peter Sterry in a manuscript miscellany, probably soon after the publication of the 1645 Poems.16) The Fall and indeed the Incarnation and Atonement are simply left out of Pico’s creation story in his Oration on the Dignity of Man—in stark contrast to the Lutheran and Calvinist insistence that human nature is totally corrupted by sin and salvation is entirely dependent upon redemption through Christ.17 Yet Pico refrains from including the capacity for virtue in his account of what differentiates man from the rest of

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   251

creation, presumably because it would raise the issue of man’s equal capacity to act unvirtuously. If divine assistance is shown to be essential in the Maske in the form of the Daemon and Sabrina, Plutarch’s account of how daemons only assist those whom they recognize as truly striving for virtue goes some way to resolving what has been called ‘the fundamental ideological contradiction’ in the Maske between ‘the indispensable role of divine grace’ and ‘the efficacy of individual human effort’.18 Plutarch’s account of daemonic operation offered Milton a pagan account of the powers of virtue that could be harmonized with the Christian insistence that salvation must depend upon divine assistance—so avoiding the heresy of Pelagianism, which held that divine aid was unnecessary to make the choices that lead to salvation—but without requiring a specifically Christian grace as an essential precondition of virtue. The charge of Pelagianism was indeed often made by Calvinists against those accused of being Arminians: William Twisse identified ‘Pelagian acknowledgements . . . under every hedge’ in Thomas Jackson’s theology, a consequence of his having drunk so deep of the ‘Aegyptian learning’ of Hermes, ‘through Plato and Plotinus’. So reliant was Jackson on ancient philosophy for his ‘Christian’ theology, declares Twisse, that he has even replaced the Bible as his authority with ‘Plutarchs Morals’.19 While Sabrina’s release of the Lady from Comus’s chair is clearly associated with baptism, the sacral, ceremonial images in the work, as in Elegia sexta and ‘Il Penseroso’, are less of Christian devotional ritual than of the scholar-­poet as Piconian philosopher, Apollonian priest, and astral daemon. (‘The Passion’ and ‘Upon the Circumcision’ indeed suggest Milton’s relative discomfort with ritual and sacrament as poetic topics.) The herb ‘haemony’ that the Daemon gives the two Brothers to protect them when they enter Comus’s lair, which clearly recalls the ‘moly’ plant that Odysseus is given by Hermes to protect himself from Circe’s magic, was interpreted by Coleridge on etymological grounds as representing the ‘blood-­wine of the sacrament’, an interpretation widely adopted in scholarship; but in fact the etymological derivation is more likely to be from the same root as daemon, ‘knowing’, and epis-

252  c h a p t e r 10

temon, ‘wise’. Haemony signifies the divine philosophy that the Daemon brings from the heavens, not the saving blood of Christ or Eucharistic ceremony.20 Milton’s version of religion in the Maske is derived from Greek literature and philosophy and provides a vision of the cosmos that places the scholar-­poet at its centre as a sacral or daemonic mediating force between the celestial harmonies of the divine and the ‘barbarous dissonance’ on earth, where there is a constant struggle between flesh and spirit, passion and reason, ugliness and beauty. His early writing about religion is driven by a vision of the many qualities required of, and possessed by, such an Orphic figure rather than by engagement in contemporary controversies of doctrine and discipline dividing Puritan from Laudian, about which he says almost nothing before he becomes a prose polemicist in 1641—and even then, as we shall see, he tends to refrain from commenting on doctrinal issues. This silence should not be surprising, given that before 1641 Milton only writes lyric and occasional poetry, aside from the various prose exercises that were required of him at university, and we should expect such poetry to be shaped by generic convention and tradition rather than complex contemporary matters of religious doctrine and discipline. But again the silencing of the oracles and the banishing of the pagan daemons in the ‘Ode Upon Christ’s Nativity’ at the end of 1629 looks less like the turning-­point in Milton’s attitude towards the relationship between classicism and Christianity that is has usually been taken to be, and more like the outlier in an early body of work in which pagan or non-­biblical values and philosophies shaped his notions of Christian soteriology. The Maske is the high-­water mark of what might be called Milton’s Platonic syncretism; but its angelic and demonic daemons will return as a vital element in the epic frame of Paradise Lost. The various Platonic accounts of the progressive transformation of flesh into spirit through virtuous action in the Maske anticipate the ontological hierarchy that the angel Raphael outlines to Adam in the fifth book of Paradise Lost, even if in the intervening years Milton had come to refute the archetypal Platonic dualism of body and spirit and to regard the entire universe as ‘one first matter all’, as a continuum of more or less refined matter derived from God:

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   253

Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice Here or in Heavenly Paradises dwell If ye be found obedient, and retain Unalterably firm his love entire Whose progeny you are. (5. 472, 497–503) The process of becoming angelic outlined by Raphael is the outcome of a lifetime of obedience: as Satan’s temptation of Eve with the prospect of becoming god-­like through knowledge then so fatally reveals, acts of disobedience push human beings down into earthy mortality and a bestial subordination to bodily desires. Milton’s God is clear, however, that ‘[m]an shall not quite be lost, but saved who will, / Yet not of will in him but grace in me / Freely vouchsafed’ (3. 173–5). In the earlier theological drama of the Maske, divine grace appears rather to be attendant upon human will.

The Beauty and The Bacchae The perception that the pagan metaphysical and moral framework of the Maske might provoke some unease among readers perhaps played a part in Milton’s surprising decision not to put his name to the 1637 edition—his first commercially printed work. In his dedication of the printed text to John, Viscount Brackley, who had played the Elder Brother, Lawes refers to the Maske as ‘not openly acknowledge’d by the Author’. Brackley, still only fourteen, may well have forgotten who wrote the work, if he had ever known: almost certainly he had never met Milton. But Lawes was evidently under instruction not to name Milton, and there is perhaps a sense of his exasperation about this insistence on anonymity: ‘yet it is a legitimate off-­spring, so lovely, and so much desired, that the often Copying of it hath tir’d my Pen to give my severall friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the publike view’.21 If the Maske did circulate in manuscript, as Lawes claims, no copies have survived other than the copy of the performance text that

Figure 11. Anonymous title-page of A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (1637).

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   255

Bridgewater had drawn up. Other reasons for Milton’s reticence to have his name put to the publication of an aristocratic commission in 1637–8 will be considered in later chapters; but when Milton wrote (in Latin) to Charles Diodati on 23 November 1637, both his ambition to launch a poetic career and his fascination with the wisdom to be accessed through Greek literature were undimmed. Diodati had returned to England, after several years in the early 1630s studying theology in Geneva, but to follow his father Theodore into a medical career rather than to enter the clergy. Milton makes several references in the letter to Diodati’s new life as a doctor in Chester, in the north-­west of England, and it seems Diodati has enquired in his last letter as to what Milton ‘is thinking of ’ and what he is doing; but no reference is made to a clerical career for either of them. Rather Milton discloses his vision of ‘an immortality of fame’ and of how he has been ‘growing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tentative wings’. That fame is to be obtained through poetic achievement is implied in the image: the hoof-­print of Pegasus created Hippocrene, the spring of poetic inspiration on Mount Helicon. In the 1633 letter to a friend, Milton had written with some tentativeness of the ‘desire of honour and repute, and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar’; but that has given way, for all the jocular tone that Milton always adopted in addressing himself to Diodati, to more confident and lofty visions. Beauty and wisdom are personified by Diodati; hence Milton’s love for his friend: For though I do not know what else God may have decreed for me, this certainly is true: He has instilled into me, if anyone, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not so diligently is Ceres, according to the Fables, said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as I seek for this idea of the beautiful, as if for some glorious image throughout all the shapes and forms of things (“for many are the shapes of things divine”); day and night I search and follow its lead eagerly as if by certain clear traces. Whence it happens that if I find anywhere one who, despising the warped judgement of public, dares to feel and speak and be that which the greatest wisdom throughout all ages has

256  c h a p t e r 10

taught to be the best, I shall cling to him immediately from a kind of necessity.22 The unattributed quotation here, which Milton obviously expected Diodati to recognize, is voiced by the Chorus at the close of Euripides’s Bacchae (although similar statements are made at the end of Alcestis, Helen, Medea, and Andromache, so it would have been well known to any student of Greek drama). The phrase is always translated in discussions of Milton as ‘things divine’; the literal translation is ‘many are the shapes of the daemonic’ (πολλαὶ μορφαὶ τῶν δαιμονίων). Milton keeps the quotation in the original Greek in his Latin letter, and he also uses Greek to render ‘vehement love of the beautiful’ and ‘this idea of the beautiful’. The lines in Euripides from which the phrase is taken are indeed apposite for a letter in which Milton expresses his ambition for poetic immortality, but also accepts that he is still unsure of what he is capable of achieving: ‘Many are the forms of divine things [the daemonic], and the gods bring to pass many things unexpectedly; what is expected has not been accomplished, but the god has found out a means for doing things unthought of.’23 Milton and Diodati had corresponded in Greek when they were students and the language seems to have functioned for them, as it had done for the early humanist circles of Erasmus and Thomas More, as ‘the language of dialogue, of civilized philosophical debate constructed as play’.24 While he quotes Euripides, Milton’s search for the ‘idea of the beautiful’ invokes the conversation in Plato’s Symposium that Socrates recounts having had with the prophetess Diotama about the nature of Eros, or Love. Diotama instructs Socrates that Love is ‘a great spirit [daemon] and like all spirits he is the intermediate between the divine and the mortal’. As ‘Love is of the beautiful’, and ‘wisdom is a most beautiful thing’, therefore ‘Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom’. Milton’s ‘love of the beautiful’ is an expression of his soul’s desire for knowledge, and ultimately of the absolute wisdom of the spiritual realm to which the daemons soar: the beauty that he sees in Diodati’s spirit is the same beauty that he finds in poetry and scholarship, which can lead him towards higher forms of insight. In his com-

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   257

mentary on the Symposium of 1484, Ficino had developed a Christian allegory of Diotama’s account of the ‘ladder of love’ in terms of an ascension ‘from body to soul, from this to Angelic Mind, and from this to God’: such an ascension to daemonic / angelic status is evidently similar to the progressive spiritual transformation through virtuous action described in the speeches of the Attendant Spirit and the Elder Brother in the Maske.25 Yet there is little sign of a Christian allegory in Milton’s letter; compared to the religious anxieties of the 1633 letter to (probably) Thomas Young, Milton’s address to Diodati is unashamedly Hellenic.26 The Platonic philosophy that animates the letter and its striking quotation from Euripides indicate that Milton continued to regard pagan writings as repositories of wisdom as well as beauty, which could convey the true nature of things in the way that the Neoplatonists believed the virtuous pagans, the prisci theologi, had anticipated and understood divine truths, either through encounters with the Hebraic tradition or through the light of nature available to all men, with or without the knowledge of Christ. Nathaniel Culverwell (bap. 1619, d. 1651), who was also educated at St Paul’s under Alexander Gil the elder and was associated with Henry More and the circle of Cambridge Neoplatonists in the 1640s, made a stirring argument for the Christian virtue inscribed in certain pagan writings in An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, published posthumously in 1652: This Law never paints its face, it never changes its colour, it does not put on one Aspect at Athens and another face at Rome, but looks upon all Nations & persons with an impartial eye, it shines upon all ages and times, and conditions, with a perpetual light . . . Thus you see that the Heathen, not only had this Νόμος γραπτὸς [written law] upon them; but also they themselves took special notice of it, and the more refined sort amongst them, could discourse very admirably about it[.]27 It has been suggested that Milton adds the line from the Bacchae ‘as though to explain or justify this pursuit of beauty . . . the Euripidean parenthesis seems to be responding to the obvious Protestant objection

258  c h a p t e r 10

that the divine manifests itself to us only in Scripture’.28 Yet it seems contradictory for Milton to seek to pre-­empt any objection that the pursuit of beauty is an un-­Christian, or at least un-­Protestant, way of approaching the divine by invoking an ancient Greek tragedian: the citation of Euripides hardly makes a convincing case for the Christian authority of non-­Christian poetry. The allusion to the Bacchae is surely not defensive at all but reveals how the young Milton was as willing to perceive the shape of the divine—or the daemonic—in the wisdom and beauty of Euripidean poetry as much as in the scriptural text. The allusion to the Bacchae was made in a private letter to a close school-­friend. In the mid-­1640s, as Milton shifted from his support of a Presbyterian orthodoxy grounded in scriptural authority, he would turn publicly to quotations from Euripidean drama to preface key moments of provocative, against-­the-­grain argument on the topics of free speech and divorce in Areopagitica and Tetrachordon. The use of Euripides as a storehouse of moral sententiae was conventional enough in contemporary educational practice: in the 1630s commonplace books of Milton’s contemporary Sir William Drake, for example, we find ‘Sententia ex Euripe Traged.’ listed as a category.29 What is unconventional in Milton—and the letter to Diodati is an anticipation of this—is how Euripidean dramatic verse can be given equal or even superior moral and theological authority to biblical texts, or at least to the interpretation of biblical texts. The concentration with which Milton read Euripides in the 1630s is evident in his annotated copy of the two-­volume Stephanus edition that he purchased in 1634, presumably on one of the book-­ buying trips to London—probably to the many bookstalls in St Paul’s Churchyard—to which he refers making in this period in the Defensio Secunda. He seems to have annotated the two volumes between 1634 and his trip to Italy in 1638 and then returned to them again sometime after his return in 1639 to add further textual emendations (a dozen of which have become part of the received text through their incorporation by a later owner of Milton’s volumes, Joshua Barnes, into his 1694 edition of Euripides).30 ‘I consider this to be more correct and elegant’, is a typical marginal correction in Milton’s copy, as he ‘systematically introduces rectius and elegantius, more correct and elegant, as if they

m a n y a r e t h e s h a p e s o f t h i n g s da e m on ic   259

were analytic categories emerging from his own interpretation, bearing witness to his critical judgement’.31 Milton must have purchased many books in the period in which he lived with his parents in Hammersmith, in particular, given its proximity to the bookstalls of London: in his letter to Alexander Gil the younger in late 1634, he wrote that Gil should soon expect to meet him ‘at the Bookseller’s in London’, while a letter to Diodati in late 1637 from Horton, where the Milton family moved in 1635–6, implies they both know several booksellers personally.32 Yet only a small number of books survive that can be ascribed with certainty to Milton’s library, all purchased in the 1629–38 period when he was studying for his MA and then pursuing his private course of studies at the family homes: in December 1629 he bought Della Casa’s Rime e Prose (Venice, 1563), bound between copies of L’Amoroso Convivio di Dante (Venice, 1529) and I Sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi (Venice, 1555), both with Miltonic markings; in 1631, Aratus’s Phœnomena (Paris, 1559); in 1634, the two-­ volume Euripides edition (Geneva, 1602) and Lycophron’s Alexandra (Geneva, 1601); in 1636, Dio Chrysostom’s Orationes LXXX, in parallel Greek–Latin edition; in 1637, Heraclides of Pontus’s Allegoriæ in Homeri Fabulas de Diis; and, probably but not certainly in 1637–8, Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante (Rome, 1544). The Boccaccio volume was only discovered in 2014; other books have been ascribed to Milton over the years but the ascription has subsequently shown to be spurious.33 These are the only extant books that we can say for sure passed through Milton’s hands, other than the 1612 copy of the King James Version of the Bible which belonged to Milton’s family and has autograph entries recording family births and deaths.34 To this handful of books can now be added the recently identified Shakespeare First Folio, the handwriting in which indicates that it was in Milton’s possession by the early 1630s, even if the majority of annotations date from after his return from Italy in 1639. Of the surviving books purchased in 1629–38, only Boccaccio’s life of Dante is cited in Milton’s single surviving commonplace book, which was probably begun in late 1637. Some sense of his reading at precisely that moment can be gauged in the concluding section of the

260  c h a p t e r 10

23 November 1637 letter to Diodati, which moves rather briskly from the lofty Hellenism of the allusions to the Symposium and Euripides to the everyday routine of his ‘continued reading’ in more recent Greek and Italian history: ‘I have brought the affairs of the Greeks to the time when they ceased to be the Greeks. I have been occupied for a long time by the obscure history of the Italians under the Longobards, Franks, and Germans, to the time when liberty was granted them by Rudolph, King of Germany. From there it will be better to read separately about what each State did by its own effort.’ The letter ends with Milton asking Diodati to send him ‘Giustiniani, Historian of the Veneti’—Bernando Giustiniani’s De origine urbis Venetiarum (first published 1492)—as soon as he can. The reading in Italian history may have been preparation for his tour of Italy, on which he embarked the following May; but the reading excerpted in Milton’s extant commonplace book—which may have been done well before the commonplace book was begun in 1637–8 and then later recorded in it—is dominated by ecclesiastical and political history. He was now in the sixth year of private study since leaving Cambridge and he had not in fact written a poem that survives since the Maske other than the translation of Psalm 114 into Greek hexameters that he sent to Gil the younger at the end of 1634. The Pegasus of his poetic ambition was indeed taking some time to grow its wings. The ‘obscure history of the Italians’ might seem distant from the gleaming images of the poet in daemonic, astral flight that are everywhere in Milton’s early work; but we have seen how the pursuit of erudition was widely regarded in Renaissance Europe as a vital part of the formation of an epic poet. The years of scholarship in Horton in 1636–8 were key to Milton’s understanding of the growing crisis in religious and political life in Britain in the late 1630s and the threat that crisis might pose to the kind of poetic ambitions that had motivated those years of study. This reading also provided a ready-­made arsenal of knowledge when he entered the public world of polemical print in the 1640s.

Pa r t I V •

Horton and Italy, 1635–9

CHAPTER 11

•

The Circle of Studies

Identity and Belief in 1636 In the first of the two extant Latin letters that Milton sent to Diodati in November 1637, he wrote of how ‘my temperament allows no delay, no rest, no anxiety—or at least thought—about scarcely anything to distract me, until I attain my object and complete some great period, as it were, of my studies’.1 Milton seemingly did have a point in mind at which the order of studies that he had undertaken since he left Cambridge would be completed and the ‘object’ of this course of self-­directed education—the universal learning required of the epic poet—would be attained. The survival of one of his commonplace books allows us to reconstruct some of the reading that he undertook in the period in which he lived with his family in the small village of Horton, near Windsor: this was a move less than twenty miles west of Hammersmith. They likely moved to Horton between January 1635 and May 1636, when Milton’s father retired fully from his career as a scrivener, although no certain evidence now remains of their presence there until 3 April 1637, when the death of Milton’s mother, Sarah, was entered in the Parish Register.2 Before examining aspects of that reading and what it might disclose about Milton’s intellectual development in the period between moving to Horton and the tour of Italy that he undertook in 1638–9, it is worth pausing to consider a question that has not often been asked— why Milton did not build upon the success of Arcades and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle in 1633–4 to pursue further aristocratic literary patronage? 263

264  c h a p t e r 11

Milton’s more successful contemporary Thomas Randolph, for whose work a reader as erudite as Henry Wotton mistook the Maske in 1638, had gone from being showered with praise and honours for his scholarship at Cambridge, where he had also become one of the most popular of manuscript poets, to having his entertainments and plays staged to acclaim at court and published by the University Press. Yet since Milton had left Cambridge in 1632, Randolph’s star had fallen rapidly, apparently due to excessive drinking, and his fate was a salutary example: he had lost his finger in a tavern brawl and then his Fellowship at Trinity, a situation about which he supposedly complained directly to the king; by 1635 he was dead, aged thirty, ending his life as an obscure tutor in his native Northamptonshire.3 We have seen how Milton’s university verse is closely connected to networks of scribal exchange and collection, and how much it responds, in a variety of modes, to the generic conventions in fashion in the universities. At the same time, there is nothing in Milton’s lofty public pronouncements of his Virgilian poetic ambition to suggest he would have been happy to be known as the author of smutty vernacular lyrics that were popular in undergraduate circles, such as Randolph’s ‘On sixe Cambridge lasses Bathinge themselfes by queenes colledge on the 25th of June at night and espied by a scholer’; or satisfied with a sub-­Jonsonian career as a writer of aristocratic and court entertainments—although with Jonson increasingly frail after suffering a stroke in 1628, there was a gap to be filled as the effective poet laureate of the Caroline court. Milton’s reluctance to put his name to the text of the Maske that Henry Lawes had printed at the beginning of 1638 may signal a general concern about exposing his apprentice work in print—his only previous public appearance in print, the epitaph for Shakespeare in the 1632 Folio, was also anonymous—or more specifically about having his name identified with the ephemeral form of the courtly entertainment. When the Maske was republished in the 1645 Poems, after all, it was as part of a major body of work that advertised its diverse range of poetic modes in a Virgilian trajectory towards epic. Whether or not the epigraph from Virgil’s Eclogues (2. 58–9) on the title-­page of the 1637 Maske was chosen by Milton or Lawes, it conveys the author’s diffidence about allowing

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   265

his work to appear in print: ‘Eheu quid volui misero mihi / floribus austrum / Perditus’ (‘Alas! What have I meant to do to my hapless self? Lost as I am, I have let in the south wind to my flowers’). The move to Horton in 1635–6 was a move further away from the network of scholars and poets in London and the universities, but it also enabled Milton to dedicate himself to completing—if such a thing were ever really practically possible—the circle of studies that all Renaissance authorities insisted was required of the would-­be epic poet. The rector of the Horton church in the period was Edward Goodall, a Cambridge graduate who was a decade older than Milton and who hardly fits very comfortably into the argument for the Laudian devotional preferences of Milton’s family. Goodall had been an assistant to the Puritan cleric Thomas Gataker in Rotherhithe—it was Gataker who had preached the funeral sermon for Richard Stock, rector of the parish of All Hallows where Milton had grown up, and Milton’s tutor Thomas Young had also been Gataker’s assistant. Gataker—who, like Young, combined the ‘qualities of the contemporary godly preacher [and] the dedicated humanist scholar’—re-­emerged into public life in 1637 after a period of silence lasting nearly a decade with the publication of his collected sermons, at a moment when previously conformable Puritan clergy were becoming openly critical of the Laudian regime. Gataker went on to play, as did Young, a prominent role in the Westminster Assembly of Divines tasked with establishing a Puritan alternative to the Church of England in 1643–5. In August 1637 Goodall was cited in the report of an episcopal visitation for not adhering to the prescribed readings from the Book of Common Prayer or wearing the proper vestments while performing Sunday service: such visitations had become a key mechanism in the efforts of the Laudian Church to ensure religious conformity.4 As we shall see in the next chapter, Milton’s family were also caught up in this visitation. Goodall’s association with Puritan networks returns us to the question of how Milton’s religious allegiances and sympathies can best be characterized up to the move to Horton in 1636. Milton had been taught and tutored by conformable Puritan clerics—Stock and Young—as a schoolboy; he had been taught and tutored at Christ’s College by

266  c h a p t e r 11

men—Chappell and Tovey—who became the recipients of Laud’s patronage; his best friends were a schoolteacher, Gil the younger, who had suffered imprisonment and faced the threat of mutilation by the Caroline state for circulating satires and libels, and a doctor, Diodati, who came from a family with a notable history of involvement in European Calvinist networks and who had spent several years studying theology at a Calvinist academy in Geneva. In Hammersmith, Milton had attended a chapel-­at-­ease consecrated by Laud but supported and funded by a nobleman—Edmund Sheffield—long renowned for his anti-­ Catholicism and who pursued a controversial interest in European mystical literature that came to the notice of the Laudian authorities. Milton himself had written strongly anti-­Catholic verse as a student (In Quintum Novembris) but also devotional lyrics which have features in common with the Counter-­Reformation style admired in Caroline Cambridge (‘The Passion’; ‘Upon the Circumcision’). His most ambitious literary work to date, the Maske, dramatized a soteriology which bears some resemblance to the provocative blend of Neoplatonism and Arminianism developed by the Laudian intellectual and Oxford academic Thomas Jackson; yet the theology of the Maske is founded in a Platonic philosophy of virtue that does not seem to require the doctrine of justification by grace central to orthodox Christian doctrine. One possible reason why a solution cannot be found to the question of the young Milton’s religion in either doctrine or discipline, in theology or ecclesiological allegiance, is that it was only in the years following Laud’s appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, and the subsequent rolling out of a Laudian programme intended to enforce a liturgical and ceremonial conformity which alienated previous conformable Puritans, that these religious divisions began to widen and the broad Jacobean consensus finally began to break apart. The opposing denominations of Puritan and Laudian, Calvinist and Arminian, into which we try to divide the Protestant religion in early Stuart England simply have less traction before the ideological polarization of the latter half of the 1630s, and it may thus be more historically precise to think in terms of how individuals from the same intellectual contexts as Milton developed personal versions and combinations of theological belief and de-

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   267

votional practice. Joseph Mede offers, as we have seen, an example of someone whom Milton would certainly have known who resists being categorized as one thing or the other: an intellectual renowned throughout Europe for his scholarship who combined a strong, millenarian anti-­ Catholicism with distaste for the harder forms of Calvinist predestinarianism; who made public in the mid-­1630s views on devotional practice that he had long held and that appealed to Laudian ceremonialists, yet in his private correspondence lamented what he regarded as the growing authoritarianism and intolerance in the Laudian party. Milton’s religion would be better understood in the late 1620s and early 1630s in terms of such an individual, or idiosyncratic, combination of belief and ideas; but, as Mede discovered, there was ever decreasing space for such freedom of thought amid the increasing religious and political divisions after 1633. Another way of approaching the problem is to look to what can be said about Milton’s consistent commitments in this period; and the one constant in Milton’s life up to the outbreak of civil war was his dedication to an elevated humanist ideal of poetry and of the poet, and to scholarship in the service of that ideal. The early work often exhibits an Orphic sense of poetry as a form of natural theology that resembles notions in Florentine Neoplatonism about the access of the prisci theologi, including Orpheus and Plato, to divine truths in nature before Christ and long before the establishment of an institutional Christian priesthood. The true poet can mediate, as a daemon can, between earthly mortality and the divine wisdom articulated in the heavenly music of the spheres: the beautiful patterns of divine wisdom may be traced in Euripides as well as the Bible. The Euripidean motto in the letter to Diodati, ‘many are the shapes of things daemonic’, may have been adopted by a man still (just) in his twenties, but the mature Milton continued to turn to Greek poetry to resolve key points of theological and ethical difficulty. In the theological treatise that he began in the 1650s, the De Doctrina Christiana, he employs pagan quotation—unconventional in the genre of Protestant systematic theology in which he was working—to clinch his arguments on issues of great controversy. To crown his position in the fourth chapter of the treatise that those who

268  c h a p t e r 11

hold to a doctrine of predestination lay the blame on upon God for deeds which are freely committed by men, he cites two passages from Homer by which the Calvinist argument for predestination is ‘superbly confuted’, the second of which takes the words of Zeus near the beginning of the Odyssey (cited in Greek and then translated into Latin) for those of God: ‘Look you now, how ready mortals are to blame the gods. It is from us, they say, that evils come, but they even of themselves, through their own blind folly, have sorrows beyond that which is ordained.’5 The claim for the existence of a pre-­Christian ancient wisdom could carry seriously heterodox implications: the former monk Giordano Bruno had argued that the prisca theologia of ancient religions, which he identified with natural knowledge, the practice of virtue, and the exercise of right reason, had been corrupted by the priesthood and ecclesiastical institutions of Christianity. An obvious implication of such arguments was that divine knowledge could be found in pre-­Christian texts other than the Old Testament. Bruno had been put on trial by the Inquisition in Venice and eventually burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum, in which the Egerton boys had participated a few months before they took part in Milton’s Maske, was in part based on Bruno’s Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast): a work dominated by Hermetic philosophy, it was published in London in 1584 in a two-­year period when Bruno found refuge in England, and is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney.6 For deists and freethinkers at the end of the seventeenth century, ideas of the prisca theologia offered intellectual and historical support for a natural religion that was independent of the Bible and institutional religion: the Irish deist John Toland, whose 1698 life of Milton is the foundational text of biographical accounts of Milton’s consistent religious and political radicalism, was involved in circulating manuscripts on Bruno’s life and thought and in the publication of the first English translation of Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante in 1713.7 Milton never mentions Bruno, although his citation of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619; Latin and English translations, 1620) in his commonplace book shows his keen interest both in Venetian affairs and Counter-­Reformation cen-

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   269

sorship; but we know at least one clandestine continental manuscript, Jean Bodin’s Colloquium Heptalomeres (Colloquium of the Seven, c. 1588-­93), passed through Milton’s hands. This dialogue between seven representatives of different religious views was considered heterodox for the statements put into the mouth of one of the interlocutors about the laws of nature as sufficient for salvation, and from the mid-­ seventeenth century onwards the work became increasingly associated with arguments subversive of Christian doctrine. We know of Milton’s possession of this manuscript only because a German letter of 1662 refers to (the now blind) Milton having sent it to someone unnamed; Milton most likely obtained a copy, perhaps as early as 1641, through Samuel Hartlib, the correspondent of Joseph Mede who was also a key figure in a European network of intellectual exchange, and to whom Milton would dedicate Of Education.8 The chance reference to Milton’s possession of Bodin’s notorious work in letter is a reminder of how much further Milton’s reading might extend beyond what is registered in the commonplace book or cited in the printed prose. This is to take us some way from Milton in 1636–7, although not so far from aspects of the anti-­clerical arguments for the free circulation of knowledge in Areopagitica some eight years later. For all the seeming other-­worldliness of Milton’s notions of the Orphic poet and daemonic spirits, the prose works of 1641–2 illustrate how he increasingly combined this vision of the poet with an awareness that he had imbibed from his intensive humanist education of the historical relations between the social and religious institutions of a nation and its spiritual and cultural flourishing. The polemical outburst of St Peter in ‘Lycidas’, written at the end of 1637, anticipates in poetry this combination in the prose. As we saw in Chapter 4, Tudor humanists such as Roger Ascham applied Erasmus’s arguments about the mutually constitutive relationship between education, religion, and society to English history to argue for the decline of literature and learning under Roman Catholic rule, both in the medieval ‘dark age’ and under Mary Tudor’s short reign. St Paul’s School had been explicitly founded on Erasmian philosophy but Milton also would also have continued his Erasmian education at Cambridge: as extensive analysis of student notebooks and commonplace

270  c h a p t e r 11

books has shown, the humanist ‘literature of analysis, criticism and prescription, indebted to the Scriptures and the classics’, and ‘characterized by a dual focus on moral reform and institutional restructuring’, continued to be a staple of university study into the middle of the seventeenth century. Mede, for instance, required his students at Christ’s to read the works of Erasmus and Ascham.9 The methodical working through European history that is evinced by Milton’s surviving commonplace book and the letter to Diodati indicates how the years of private reading designed to develop levels of general learning sufficient for a national poet led him to historical examples of how great writers and their works had suffered at the hands of tyrannous political and religious institutions. As religious and cultural politics in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland became ever more polarized, Milton’s intellectual life began to interact with his experience of the historical events taking place around him in Laudian England.

‘Subdivisions of Vice and Virtue’ Readers have always taken notes about what they read, but it was Erasmus who properly established the early modern practice of keeping books in which to enter notes under a set of pre-­conceived topics—loci communes, or commonplaces. Such books were considered an aid to memory and a resource for future composition, providing the student with a wealth of interesting or stylish observations stored under a categorical structure that could be applied to a speech or letter on any subject. In De Copia, Erasmus advises that ‘you provide yourself first with a full list of subjects. These will consist partly of the main types and subdivisions of vice and virtue, partly of the things of most prominence in human affairs’; consequently, ‘whatever you come across in any author, particularly if it is rather striking, you will be able to note down immediately in the proper place, be it an anecdote or a fable or an illustrative example or a strange incident or a maxim or a witty remark’. The commonplace book is a memory aid but one emphatically designed for practical application: it ‘has the double advantage of fixing what you have read more firmly in your mind, and getting you into the habit of

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   271

using the riches supplied by your reading’.10 By the time that Milton entered St Paul’s School, the commonplace book ‘constituted the primary intellectual tool for organizing knowledge and thought among the intelligentsia’.11 It tended to be a messier affair, however, than might be suggested by Erasmus’s advice that the pre-­conceived system of loci communes should precede the reading: the advice given by John Hales, a teacher at Eton College renowned for his learning—and whom, as we shall see, Milton seems to have known during the period that he lived in Horton—better reflects the state of most surviving manuscript commonplace books: ‘note in your Books such things as you like: going on continually without any respect unto order’. Hales recommended duplicating the topics in an A-­Z index for ease of locating them, which is what Milton does in the extant example of his commonplace practice; although Milton ensured a greater order than is seen in many contemporary examples of the genre by retaining Erasmian topical subdivisions as his organizing structure of the notes rather than simply resorting to an alphabetical system throughout. Hales gives this advice about commonplacing in his ‘Method of Reading Profane History’, probably composed around 1630. He advised the student of history that authors were to be arranged ‘according to the times, wherein the things they writ were acted’, and then the order of reading should match the order of events, ‘the succession and order of time and reading being the same’. This is what Milton’s letter to Diodati shows him to be doing in his study of Greek and Italian history. The thing to derive from reading histories, according to Hales, was above all ‘moral, or statical observations, for common life and practice’: the ‘Moralia’, as Hales calls these observations, can be extracted from the events and conduct of public and political life but also, he was keen to emphasize, from ‘domestick and private actions’.12 In privileging the moral education offered by history, Hales’s method was in line with conventional humanist attitudes to the discipline: history was thought to offer examples of moral philosophy in action and models of behaviour for imitation or avoidance.13 Hales’s method of reading history is helpful for considering Milton’s surviving commonplace book because, while it is dominated by notes taken from ecclesiastical and political

272  c h a p t e r 11

histories, its subject is moral philosophy. It is divided into three parts or indices labelled ethicus, economicus, and politicus, the three subdivisions of the study of moral philosophy in the Renaissance as derived from Aristotle: ‘ethics’ is concerned with general principles of moral behaviour, while ‘economics’ is concerned with particular examples relating to ‘domestic or private actions’, and ‘politics’ with particular examples relating to the state and public life.14 The material collected in Milton’s commonplace book is precisely correlated, then, to the academic categories which structured the study of moral, or ‘practical’, philosophy, and consequently we should not expect to find evidence of his reading in other categories—theology, the law, poetry, natural philosophy—except as he felt it pertained to the three divisions of moral philosophy. This explains the lack of biblical and classical references, and the comparative lack of literary citations. It is likely that Milton kept other commonplace books pertaining to other disciplinary categories. The extant commonplace book contains cross-­references to a lost ‘Index Theologicus’, which appears to have been organized according to the polemical headings that had become standard for commonplace books that dealt with points of controversy between the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches, and that were derived from the attacks on Reformed religion by James I’s great Jesuit opponent in theological disputation, Cardinal Bellarmine: we have seen that Milton was familiar with James’s anti-­ Bellarmine writings.15 One of Mede’s favourite textbook authors for his undergraduate readings lists at Christ’s, the prolific German scholar Bartholomew Keckermann (1572–1608), issued a large work on the study of applied ‘practical’ philosophy, advocating the commonplace division of moral philosophy into the same subdivisions used by Milton and including a tabular overview of the commonplaces of history as exemplary of moral philosophy in practice. Keckermann emphasized that his treatise was intended to serve as a handbook for students preparing for careers in public life, and moral philosophy as a subject was intended to inform action in domestic and political life.16 This is certainly how Milton would come to use his commonplace book in the 1640s, when he relied upon it heavily in his polemical prose. In 1636–8, in the period before he went on his tour

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   273

of Italy and could only have foreseen dimly his career as a polemicist amid civil war, the commonplace book served as preparation for the public career of epic poet—a requirement for which, as authorities from Cicero to Scaliger asserted, was universal learning. He continued to use the manuscript into the mid-­1660s, although after his blindness from 1652 the notes are of course in the hands of amanuenses and become much less frequent. Milton makes his notes in Latin, Greek, English, French, and Italian, depending on the language of the book in question, with Latin the language used to structure the manuscript into its various divisions and headings. The notes are curt, consisting mostly of single sentences, and often include page or chapter numbers to direct him back to the book for the full context of the reference. The chronology of the notes is not certain but palaeographical evidence and the order of the manuscript have enabled a reasonably secure reconstruction of the sequence in which Milton recorded his ‘moral observations’. If, as William Poole has convincingly argued in his recent edition of the text, Milton did not take this commonplace book with him on the tour of Italy, then the first group of entries date from before April 1638. The headings for this group of entries include under ‘Index Ethicus’, ‘Avarice’, ‘Suicide’, ‘Curiosity’, and ‘Of Lying’; under ‘Index Oeconomicus’, ‘Of Food’, ‘Of External Appearance’, ‘Marriage’, and ‘Of Educating the Free-­Born’; and under ‘Index Politicus’, ‘Commonwealth’, ‘King’, and ‘Nobility’. His notes in this first phase show Milton to have been engaged in study of the Church Fathers, including Cyprian, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr, and ecclesiastical history of the patristic era, including Eusebius, Socrates Scholasticus, and Sulpicius Severus, and some Byzantine history. This is the sort of material that would be expected of someone studying for the Baccalaureate in Divinity, and thus might be considered as evidence that Milton was still pursuing independently an established programme of study. The appeal to the authority of the Church Fathers in matters of ecclesiastical tradition and biblical interpretation had also become characteristic of Laudian arguments in the 1630s.17 Mede’s published works of the mid-­1630s on the history of the altar and the material fabric of the church that were admired in Laudian circles are in great part scholarly explorations of patristic church history. Yet Mede’s

274  c h a p t e r 11

knowledge of patristics and ecclesiastical history also illustrates how study in these areas was considered a conventional stage in the advanced arts curriculum, and a necessary qualification of the universal scholar. John Hales was admired as such a scholar who ‘had turned over . . . all writers profane, ecclesiastical, and divine, all councels, fathers and histories of the church’. Hales had been ordained, but had since 1619 lived the life of ‘Mr Hales of Eton’, a teaching position that he had obtained in part because of the scholarly work he had done on Sir Henry Savile’s great edition of the Church Father, Chrysostom, published at Eton in eight volumes in 1610–12. Hales, for all his command of the Fathers and ‘histories of the church’, was unusually sceptical of appeals to Christian antiquity as the basis for religious practice, which he rejected as ‘deceitfull formes of shifting the account and reason of our Faith and Religion from our selves, and casting it upon the back of others’.18 A similar approach will characterize Milton’s use of patristic authority in the polemical prose of the early 1640s—the Fathers are quoted only to be cast aside as erroneous or insufficient. The encounter with the Fathers and ecclesiastical history was thus an accepted part of advanced scholarship: Patrick Young, the librarian of the Royal Library from 1612 and likely a relative of Thomas Young, had not taken holy orders but was renowned throughout Europe for his patristic and biblical scholarship. He may have taught Milton at around the same time as his kinsman, as we saw in Chapter 2. Milton presented to Patrick Young a bound collection of ten of his prose works up to 1645 (apart, oddly, from Of Education), which suggests at the least a particular respect for his learned opinion.19 We also know from Milton’s letter to Diodati that Milton was reading methodically in civil as well as ecclesiastical ­history, and that not all of his reading provided notes that he deemed suitable for a commonplace book in moral philosophy: the history of Venice by Giustiniani that he requests from Diodati, for instance, is not cited in the commonplace book. The first phase of notes includes, however, reading in Italian literature: Dante, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Ariosto. The ten-­year period from Milton’s return from Italy in July 1639 to his employment by the Commonwealth’s Council of State in March 1649 is when the commonplace book was used most heavily, particularly the

Figure 12. Indexes of John Milton’s commonplace book, British Library.

276  c h a p t e r 11

early 1640s when Milton was tutoring his nephews, Edward and John Phillips, and other boys from more aristocratic backgrounds. During this period he particularly concentrated on English and British history (Bede, William of Malmesbury, Stow, Holinshed, Speed, and Camden) and further continental historiography, such as Joannes Sleidan on the history of the Reformation (in Latin); Paolo Sarpi on the history of the Council of Trent (in Italian); Francesco Guicciardini on the history of Italy (in Italian); Bernard de Girard, Seigneur de Haillan, on the history of France (in French); and Jacques-­Auguste de Thou (Thuanus), on the ‘history of his time’, from 1546 to 1607 (in Latin). There is also a wider spread of reading of poetry and fiction in English—Gower, Chaucer, and Sidney—and miscellaneous works by English authors including Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland (1596); Samuel Purchas’s vast 1625 collection of travel narratives, Purchas his Pilgrimes; Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614); and John Selden’s works on natural law, De Jure Naturali et Gentium (1640), and Jewish marriage law, Uxor Ebraica (1646). The key work on Roman law, Justinian’s Institutes, is another important resource in the commonplace book after 1640. Machiavelli’s Discorsi is the most eye-­catching of the entries recorded by amanuenses in the 1650s, although Machiavelli’s Dell’Arte della Guerra (The Art of War) had previously been cited twice by Milton in his own hand. Of the three subdivisions of the manuscript, the greatest addition after 1640 is to the ‘Index Politicus’, to which are added categories including ‘Tyrannus’, ‘Rex Angliae’, and ‘Libertas’.

‘Censored by the Inquisitor’ Milton often relied heavily in the polemical prose of the 1640s on the notes stored in his commonplace book: his first defence of the regicide, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which was written in possibly little more than a week, draws on at least twenty-­five entries in the ‘Index Politicus’ and at times stitches together these entries into continuous prose, at some cost to coherence of argument.20 This reliance raises the question of whether Milton’s reading in the late 1630s and early 1640s shows him to have ‘been engaged in the central ideas of his regicide tract

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   277

for a long time’, or whether he simply used his commonplace book in moral philosophy as such commonplace books were meant to be used—as a storehouse of useful references ready to be applied to any discourse in public life.21 The evidence is skewed by the likelihood that other commonplace books have been lost and the one that survives deals with ecclesiastical and civil history; yet in the same period as Milton was making his notes, the wealthy Buckinghamshire gentleman Sir William Drake (1606–69) made notes from several of the same authors as Milton in his commonplace books (Machiavelli, Guicciardini, de Thou, Girard) and read these authors ‘to become a keen advocate of monarchical authority’.22 It seems more likely, then, that Milton followed a reasonably conventional course of historical and political reading for learned men in Caroline England, not necessarily with any clear ideological agenda at the time, and this reading could later be practically applied to different, and indeed opposed, political arguments. However, certain early entries in the commonplace book show Milton thinking about theological, political, and poetic matters in the late 1630s in ways that become characteristic of both his prose and later poetry. The opening entry in the ‘Index Ethicus’ of the commonplace book, under the topic ‘Malum Morale’, or ‘Moral evil’, is from Tertullian, De Spectaculis (On Shows) and likely dates from before April 1638; the next entry is from Lactantius, De Ira Dei (On the Anger of God), probably from shortly after he returned from Italy in 1639. Both notes show Milton’s reading in patristic sources in the later 1630s to focus on a conception of good and evil as inextricably bound up with each other, and within a theological argument for free will: In moral evil much good may be mixed, and that with singular craft; ‘no one mingles venom with gall or hellebore, but with seasoned, fine-­tasting dishes; thus whatever deadly dish the devil cooks up, he steeps it with things most pleasing to God’, etc. Tertullian, On Shows, p. 102 in Rigaltius’s edition. Why does God permit evil? ‘So that reason may correspond to virtue.’ For virtue is made known, is illustrated, and is exercised by evil, as Lactantius argues [in Divine Institutes,] book 5, chapter 7, that

278  c h a p t e r 11

reason and prudence might have something by which they may discipline themselves in choosing good things and fleeing evil things. Lactantius, On the Anger of God, chapter 13 – however much these arguments fail to satisfy.23 Despite the doubt introduced by the afterthought to the note from ­Lactantius—and it is unclear whether the arguments fail to satisfy ­Milton, who is unsure about them, or others who fail to appreciate them—both notes from these Church Fathers emphasize the indivisibility of good and evil and the role of discrimination in moral choice in ways that echo the dramatic action of the Maske. The Lady’s virtue is proven by her refutation of Comus’s arguments for sexual fruition as merely part of the beautiful principles of fertility in nature: the enchanted cup of Comus is recalled in the culinary metaphor that Milton finds in Tertullian for the good taste or capacity for discrimination that, according to Lactantius, is required in making the virtuous choice. (The passage in Tertullian is actually on the pernicious moral effects on an audience of dramatic spectacle, so the action of the Maske is also a refutation of the wider argument from which Milton extracts his moral observation.) The notes also anticipate the key ethical claims of Areopagitica: that ‘[g]ood and evill, we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably’, but that nonetheless ‘reason is but choosing’ between truth and falsehood, good and evil.24 Areopagitica is Milton’s first public defence of a free will theology, grounded in a moral philosophy of virtuous and rational choice, but the opening notes in the commonplace book confirm what the dramatic action of the Maske already suggests: that Areopagitica does not signify the transition in Milton’s soteriological position from Calvinism predestination to free will but rather a public formulation of long-­held beliefs. The next topic in the commonplace book, ‘De viro bono’ (Of the good man) begins with another entry from Lactantius and then one from Chrysostom, again dated to around 1639, which recalls the transition from body to daemonic or angelic spirit through virtuous choice described in the speeches of the Attendant Spirit and the Elder Brother: ‘The good man in some sense seems to surpass even the angels, and that because he, wrapped in a

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   279

feeble and mortal body, wrestling always with his desires, nevertheless aspires to live his life like those in heaven. [Chrysostom,] Homily on Genesis 12, near the end.]’.25 One of the earlier notes in the ‘Index Politicus’—before April 1638— under the topic of ‘Rex’ (King), refers to Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante (Life of Dante), composed in the 1350s and first published in Venice in 1477 as part of an edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy and then as a free-­standing work in 1544: That regal authority is not derived from the Pope, Dante the Florentine wrote in the book titled On Monarchy, which book Cardinal del Poggetto had burnt as a heretical text, as Boccaccio avouches in The Life of Dante in the first edition, for all mention of this incident in the subsequent edition was censored by the inquisitor.26 Milton’s copy of the 1544 edition, published in Rome, with annotations in his hand and the section he cites in this note marked, has recently been identified in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the volume had indeed earlier belonged to Sir Thomas Bodley.27 What both his note in the commonplace book and his annotations on this copy reveal is that Milton carefully collated the 1544 edition with the later, censored text in Vita nuova con xv canzoni e la vita di esso Dante da Giovanni Boccaccio (Florence, 1576), which cuts Boccaccio’s discussion of how Dante’s De Monarchia (On Monarchy; composed c. 1312?) was condemned to be burned as heretical after its arguments for a balanced relationship between secular and religious authority were used, several years after Dante’s death, against the Papacy. This 1576 book carries the inquisitorial imprimatur, to which Milton refers in his note. Given that Milton is seemingly the first English reader to show knowledge of Boccaccio’s Vita at all, the collation of the 1544 edition against the later, censored text represents ‘an act of considerable textual application’.28 The attention to the detailed bibliographical and textual effects of Catholic censorship on Italian vernacular literature is evident elsewhere in Milton’s reading and writing in 1637–41. His knowledge of the inquisitorial censorship of three of Petrarch’s sonnets critical of the corruption of the papal court at Avignon—the so-­called ‘Babylon’ sonnets, which were put on the Index by Rome in 1559, ordered to be excised from

280  c h a p t e r 11

existing editions of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and excluded from any new printed editions—is evident in the 1641 prose work Of Reformation, where Milton quotes (in English) from the nineteenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, refers to the twentieth of Paradiso, and then quotes (in English) from one of the political sonnets by Petrarch, who ‘seconds him [i.e. Dante] in the same mind in his 108. Sonnet which is wip’t out by the Inquisitor in some Editions; speaking of the Roman Antichrist as meerely bred up by Constantine’, the first Christian Roman emperor. Petrarch is not cited in the commonplace book and it is unclear which edition of Petrarch that Milton used, but interest in Petrarch’s ‘Babylon’ sonnets in Caroline Cambridge is evident in Joseph Mede’s transcription of one of the sonnets in a commonplace book, in an English translation that he found in a popular Dutch attack on Catholic corruption, The Beehive of the Romish Church, first published in English in 1579.29 In the first phase of his notes in the commonplace book in 1637–8, Milton cites Dante on six occasions and was evidently reading him in part for his anti-­clericalism. In the ‘Index Ethicus’, under the topic of ‘Avaritia’ (Avarice), for example, he records how ‘Dante, Canto 7 of the Inferno, aptly censures the avarice of the clergy’, and includes a cross-­reference to a topic in the lost ‘Index Theologicus’, ‘vide de bonis Ecclesiasticis’ (‘see On ecclesiastical goods’). Milton has nothing but praise for the pre-­Reformation poets Dante and Petrarch in both his private and public writing. In a 1647 letter to his Florentine friend Carlo Dati, whom he had met on his travels in Italy, he advised Dati that his Latin poems, which he enclosed with the letter, might ‘be unpleasing to your ears because of those words spoken rather sharply on some pages against the Roman Pope’—he is probably thinking of In Quintum Novembris and the epigrams on the Gunpowder Plot. Milton begs ‘that same indulgence of freedom of speech which, as you know, you have been used to granting in the past with singular kindness—I do not mean to your Dante and Petrarch in this case, but to me’.30 But Milton knew from his reading and research that the works of both Dante and Petrarch had suffered from papal repression. Both offered a model of the national vernacular poet and, in the case of Dante, of the epic poet; and both Dante and Petrarch were claimed for proto-­

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   281

Protestantism because of their criticism of corruption in the Church and the papal censorship of their works. Milton’s appropriation of Dante and Petrarch for anti-­Catholic polemic was hardly eccentric: in Act and Monuments, one of the foundational texts of English Protestant culture, John Foxe recounted Dante’s attacks on the Papacy and the Roman Church and added, with reference to De Monarchia, that ‘Certaine of his writinges be extant abroad, wherein he proveth the Pope not to be above the Emperour, nor to haue any right or jurisdiction in the empyre’. Foxe also wrote that Petrarch ‘in his workes and his Italian meter speakyng of Rome: calleth it the whore of Babylon, the schole and mother of errour, the temple of heresie, the nest of traychery growyng and increasing by the oppressing of others’. Foxe was following very closely Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Catalogus testium Veritatis (1556), a chronologically ordered anthology of texts that purports to show the continuity of anti-­papal polemic from St Peter to the sixteenth century and an important influence on Spenser and other English Reformation poets. 31 Milton used pre-­Reformation poetry that attacked the Catholic Church in much the same way as Christian scholars interpreted pagan texts such as Virgil’s Eclogue 4 as prophecies of the coming of Christ: as anticipations or prophesies of the coming of Reformation. Yet the key difference is that by 1641 Milton was turning this literature against the Protestant bishops of the Church of England as having themselves become embodiments of the Roman Catholic spirit of censorship and persecution. Milton’s fascination with the topic of religious censorship and the Index of Prohibited Books is evident in the commonplace book, where he gathers a list of entries to do with the prohibition of books and makes one of thirteen references to the Historia del Concilio Tridentina (History of the Council of Trent), a deeply critical account by the Venetian scholar and statesman Paolo Sarpi of the proceedings of the Council of Trent, convened by the Catholic Church from 1545 to 1563 to develop the policies of the Counter-­Reformation.32 Sarpi’s critique of the abuses of clerical power and defence of the Venetian republic to govern its church was considered so potentially incendiary that the work was smuggled out of Venice in instalments and first published (in Italian) in

282  c h a p t e r 11

Figure 13. On the prohibition of books, in John Milton’s commonplace book, British Library.

England in 1619 under a pseudonym. Milton’s entries have been dated to 1643 because Sarpi is cited in the second, 1644 edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce but not the 1643 edition; yet Milton’s first refers to ‘Padre Paolo the great Venetian Antagonist of the Pope’ in Of Reformation, in warning that the same clerical usurpation of political power recorded by Sarpi in Counter-­Reformation Italy was occurring in episcopal England; and there other suggestions that by 1641 Milton knew Sarpi’s Historia and also his Historia della Sacra Inquisitione (The History

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   283

of the Inquisition), in the English translation of 1639, although that work is not cited in the commonplace book.33 Certainly Milton was carefully reading in Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Sarpi and other writers about the effects of religious censorship on Italian literature and culture, both before and after his tour of Italy. The impact of that reading and textual study is evident in the arguments against episcopal tyranny in 1641–2 and helps to form the fundamental claim of Areopagitica: in nations where ‘inquisition tyrannizes’, learning is brought into a ‘servil condition’ and the ‘glory’ of ‘wits’ is ‘dampt’— Milton’s prime example being not a poet but the imprisoned Galileo, whom he claimed in Areopagitica to have visited.34 It was a commonplace of English Protestant humanism, imbued as it was with a strongly Erasmian sense of the mutually constitutive relationships between religion, the social order, and education, that the Catholic rule of Marian England had seen English letters and scholarship decline. The notes in the commonplace book—reflected, as we shall see in the next chapter, in aspects of ‘Lycidas’—suggest that what Milton found in humanists such as Ascham about the repressive climate in Marian England and writers such as Boccaccio and Sarpi about the papal domination of Italy is what he had come to fear was happening in Laudian England by the later 1630s: a popish encroachment of clerical upon civil power that would suppress wit, learning, and poetry, as well as the truth of the Scriptures that such humanist learning was intended to serve.

A True Poem In two Latin poems that Milton wrote in 1638–9, Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis, he expressed his ambition to write an epic poem about early British history, including King Arthur, and in the latter poem he suggests this epic should be in the vernacular. The conditions of Catholic religious censorship that he recorded in his commonplace book and that he then charged the Laudian Church as reintroducing to England in his early prose were not conditions that his reading led him to believe would enable such poetic ambition to flourish. Milton likely sought out

284  c h a p t e r 11

Boccaccio’s life of Dante initially because it was the biography of one of the greatest post-­classical poets, as he sought out biographies of other poets—he later also recorded a note from a 1635 life of Petrarch.35 The Vita di Dante offered a portrait of a poet facing tensions between his vocation and the external pressures of the public world. The events surrounding the condemnation of the De Monarchia as heretical illustrated the dangers for the poet of speaking out on matters of politics and religion, even if the condemnation occurred after Dante’s death; the sixteenth-­century expurgation of Boccaccio’s own later account of the condemnation was a further demonstration of how the Catholic Church had continually interfered in the life and work of poets. Boccaccio includes a chapter in the Vita in which he reproaches the Florentines for exiling Dante for the last twenty years of his life because of political tensions within the city, detailing ‘his domestic and political cares, his miserable exile’.36 Milton would also have found much else in Boccaccio’s Vita that both reflected and probably helped to shape his ideal of the poet, just as he had in Donatus’s life of Virgil, which itself provided a model for Boccaccio. In 1642 in Apology Against a Pamphlet, Milton declares that he modelled his idea of how the poet should live on the examples of ‘the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura’—Dante and Petrarch. What he knew of their lives ‘confirmed [him] in this opinion, that he would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem, that is, a composition, and pattern, of the best and honourablest things’.37 The principle that the good poet should be a good man was a humanist commonplace but Milton connects the dictum in particular with the two Italian poets about whose lives he read in the late 1630s and early 1640s. In Boccaccio’s Vita, Milton found the familiar Renaissance model of the arduous scholar, straining to master all forms of learning in private, but in preparation for the public career of national poet: Dante ‘gave up his entire boyhood . . . to the continual study of the liberal arts . . . with a praiseworthy desire of fame’; he subordinated his bodily needs to the ambition of universal knowledge, working ‘without regard for heat or cold, vigils or fasts, or any other bodily discomfort’.38

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   285

The humanist sense of poetry as the discipline that requires the mastery of all others is a recurrent theme in Boccaccio’s account of Dante’s continual study. Boccaccio emphasizes that the disciplines to which Milton devoted his reading in the extant commonplace book are crucial to a full understanding of poetry: ‘the intent of the poet cannot be wholly understood without history and moral and natural philosophy’; hence Dante ‘strove to learn history by himself and philosophy under various masters’. Dante attained such a level of knowledge that ‘some always called him poet, others philosopher, and many theologian’. In two chapters Boccaccio digresses from his account of Dante to consider how poetry is, in effect, a higher form of religious teaching and the poet a higher kind of theologian. The ancient, pagan poets show us ‘the results of virtues and vices, and what we should flee and what we should follow, in order that we may attain by virtuous action to that end which they, although they did not know properly the true God, believed our highest welfare’. Boccaccio concludes that ‘theology and poetry may be said to be almost one thing when the subject is the same; and I say further that theology is nothing else than the poetry of God’. Yet the office of poet is, at least implicitly, held to be of a rarer and greater nature than that of a minister. If the ‘prelates, preachers, priests’ are one type of ‘shepherds of the soul’ who are supposed to ‘feed the souls of the living with the word of God’, ‘the other’ are those who, ‘by their great learning, either through reading what others have written or writing anew that which would appear to them to have been omitted or not clearly explained, teach the minds and intellects of their hearers and readers’.39 Dante’s vernacular epic, the Divine Comedy, shows him to have become ‘this sort of shepherd’. Milton could hardly have found a more ringing endorsement of his decision to dedicate himself to the private reading in moral philosophy, history, and theology required of the true poet rather than enter the clergy or continue to pursue at university the advanced studies that ultimately led to the qualification of Doctor of Divinity. Boccaccio also spends some time in considering ‘why the [Divine] Comedy is written in the Vulgar Tongue’, and explains that Dante rightly

286  c h a p t e r 11

chose to compose his epic in the vernacular rather than Latin so that it could be understood by the ‘unlettered’ as well as the ‘lettered’; moreover ‘if he wrote in the vulgar tongue he would accomplish something that had never been done before’, rather than striving to compete with Virgil in his own language. Milton would even have found confirmation of the connection between chastity and the life of the true poet that had informed his own self-­representation, both in his public Cambridge exercises and his private poetic exchange with Diodati. Boccaccio recounted at length Dante’s love for the doomed Beatrice and then his unhappy marriage, and concluded that the philosophical poet, as someone apart from the rest of society, should refrain from marriage altogether: ‘let philosophers leave [marriage] to rich and foolish, to nobles, and to peasants, and let them take their delight with philosophy, a much better bride than any’.40 Dante’s achievements were in spite of his weakness for earthly love and his many ‘domestic’ cares: the man ambitious to become a true poet is advised to follow a life of celibacy.

Wotton, Hales, and Eton College Where did Milton obtain the many books that he read during his period living in Horton? He evidently bought some, the great majority of which are no longer known to us, and amassed a considerable library of his own. It has also been plausibly suggested that Edward Goodall would have recommended to Milton that he use the library that had been established in Langley Marsh, two miles from Horton, by Sir John Kedermister in 1613 for the benefit of the local clergy—although few of the editions of titles that Milton cites in his commonplace book are the same as the editions of those titles in the Kedermister Library, so Milton may have then acquired his own editions of works he initially consulted there.41 Another possibility is the library of Eton College, about five miles from Horton, and with a collection probably four times as large as the three hundred volumes in the Kedermister library, although the library was for the private use of the Fellows of the College. The letter dated 13 April 1638 from Sir Henry Wotton (1568–1639), Provost of Eton since 1624, that prefaces the 1637–8 printed edition of the Maske reveals

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   287

that Milton had been to see Wotton to ask his advice about travelling in Italy, which Wotton describes as ‘the first taste of your acquaintance’. Wotton tells Milton that he did not know he was staying ‘in these parts’ until he was informed afterwards ‘by Mr. H.’, and that if he had known, he would have invited Milton ‘joyntly with your said learned Friend, at a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together som good Authors of the antient time: Among which, I observed you to have been familiar’.42 The ‘learned’ Mr. H. is most likely John Hales, previously Regius Professor of Greek and renowned, as we have seen, for the range of his learning both in philosophy and philology. Hales was also known for having amassed one of the finest private libraries in England: a shelf-­list of a library dating from around 1624, consisting of some 750 titles, is likely to be that of Hales’s own library.43 Hales’s advice on reading history and making a commonplace book exhibit his own immersion in books, libraries, and scholarship: like Mede at Christ’s, Hales was an English example of the ideal of the general scholar that Milton sought to imitate in attaining the universal knowledge that he believed necessary to furnish his poetic ambitions: his friend Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, called Hales ‘one of the greatest scholars in Europe’. Hales’s ‘appeal to younger men . . . was derived partly from his belonging to a heroic age of scholarship’.44 If Milton visited Hales in his chambers at Eton, he may also have had access to Hales’s private library, which around 1624 was strong in patristics, ecclesiastical history, and classical literature, as well as what was known as ‘polemical divinity’, debates between Reformed and Roman Catholic theologians over doctrine. Hales was an associate of Sir Thomas Bodley (1545–1613) and preached Bodley’s funeral oration at Oxford—might it have been through Hales that Milton came to be in possession of Bodley’s copy of Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante? It could also have been through Hales that Milton knew John Rouse (1574–1652), Bodley’s librarian at Oxford, to whom Milton addressed a Latin poem in 1646 when presenting the Bodleian with a (replacement) copy of his 1645 Poems; Rouse is the mostly likely candidate to be ‘our common Friend Mr. R’ whom Wotton reports in his letter to Milton as having given him the copy of Randolph’s Poems (published

288  c h a p t e r 11

in Oxford) bound with the 1637–8 edition of the Maske. Oxford was over thirty miles from Horton, but Milton may have occasionally used the Bodleian: Anthony Wood makes the otherwise unsubstantiated claim that Milton incorporated his MA at Oxford in 1635–6, a recognition of his academic status which would have allowed him to pursue further study there.45 Wotton and Hales had led interesting lives in European affairs before making Eton their home, aspects of which can be related to Milton’s reading in the commonplace book. It was in his role as James I’s ambassador to the Venetian republic in 1616–19—the second period in which he had held that position—that Wotton had smuggled instalments of Sarpi’s Historia del Concilio Tridentino in diplomatic bags carried out of Venice to London, where it was published with an aggressively anti-­ Catholic dedication to James I by Marco Antonio de Dominis, a (temporary) Catholic convert to the Church of England.46 In his role as chaplain to Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador to The Hague, Hales had reported on proceedings at the Synod of Dort in 1618–19—the congress called by the Dutch Reformed Church to settle the bitter doctrinal disputes between Calvinists and Arminians—in a series of letters to Carleton that were later posthumously published in Hales’s Golden Remaines (1659). It was attending the Synod of Dort that led Hales, according to the editor of his works, to ‘bid John Calvin goodnight’. This oft-­quoted phrase was ascribed to him after his death, and his extant writings do not engage explicitly with Calvinist doctrine.47 However, in the mid-­1630s Hales had become associated with the friends that gathered for religious and philosophical conversation at Great Tew in Oxfordshire, seat of Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland. The circle at Great Tew encompassed various theological positions but was known for its scepticism of claims to certainty in theological matters, an emphasis on reason and probability in religious disputes, and an attraction towards Arminianism, particularly as formulated by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, who had been exiled to Paris after the Synod of Dort for his views. The circle regarded itself as following in an Erasmian tradition which emphasized the common beliefs that united Christian denominations and advocated broad toleration in matters of theological disagreement, promoting the role of reason and scholarship in biblical interpretation and

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   289

the individual moral responsibility entailed by free will. The major intellectual presence at Great Tew was William Chillingworth, who had been at Trinity College, Oxford, at the same time as Charles Diodati and seems to have arranged for Diodati to join him in contributing to the university’s volume of elegies in 1624 for the celebrated historian William Camden.48 While always opposed to predestination, Chillingworth also became anxious that Laudianism was placing too much emphasis on clerical ritual at the expense of the personal encounter with the Bible that was at the heart of Protestantism. In The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation, published in Oxford in 1638 and the most influential work to emerge from the circle, Chillingworth assumed both the infallibility of the Bible and the fallibility of human interpretation. Chillingworth rejected the Catholic argument that only the Roman Church can rule authoritatively on the meaning of the Scriptures in the absence of certainty; instead he insisted upon the place of reasonable supposition and probability based upon historical scholarship, textual comparison, and linguistic expertise— what Chillingworth called ‘moral certainty’. Chillingworth emphasized the element of doubt surrounding all doctrinal readings of Scripture given the post-­apostolic cessation of direct divine revelation, but only to assert the fundamental beliefs common to all Christian confessional identities—beliefs that were accessible to human reason through Scripture. It was on this basis that he argued for a comprehensive national church which would encompass all those who subscribed to the common fundamentals of Christianity, including Catholics.49 Hales was close to Chillingworth and anticipates aspects of the argument of The Religion of Protestants in his much slighter Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, written around 1636 and first published anonymously in 1642—without Hales’s consent, so it evidently circulated in manuscript. Hales opens the Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks by declaring that ‘Heresie and Schisme as they are commonly used, are two Theologicall scar crows, with which they, who uphold a party in Religion, use to fright away such, as making enquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it, if it appeare either erronious or suspitious’. Hales argued that points of doctrinal controversy—he cited ‘that late

290  c h a p t e r 11

famous Controversy in Holland, De Pradestinatione & auxiliis’—that are based on uncertain interpretation of Scripture should never become the basis of requirements in public worship, for such an imposition of doubtful doctrines and ceremonies creates schism and religious conflict (‘not he that separates, but he that occasions the separation is the Schismatick’). The argument seems to have been aimed at Laudian discipline as much as Calvinist doctrine, and Hales took repeated shots at ‘the danger of our appeale to Antiquity, for resolution in controverted points of Faith’. Hales was indeed called before Laud in 1638 to account for his views: Laud was impressed enough by Hales’s apology for his position to award him a preferment in Windsor. In fact Hales had been saying similar things about reason and the moral responsibility of individual choice in his sermons at Eton for some years: his sermon on Galatians 6: 7, ‘Be not deceived’, emphasized that each individual must exercise the ‘faculty of reason which is in every one of you, even in the meanest’, and by doing so ‘bring all things to the true test: to know the reasons, try the authorities’. You must ‘thoroughly sift and try all things’, advised Hales, or ‘you put off the care of your faith and religion from yourselves on other men sundry ways’.50 Hales and Chillingworth represent a strand of tolerationist English Protestant thought that developed in the mid-­1630s and that was anti-­ Calvinist in its theological doctrine but also sceptical of Laudian clericalism and ceremonial discipline. In these respects, and in his celebrated general learning, Hales might be compared with Mede. Hales’s sermon on Galatians 6: 7 anticipates the language of Areopagitica, with its dramatic vision of the people of London ‘fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement’, and provocative assertion that a ‘man may be a heretick in the truth . . . if he beleeve things only because his Pastor sayes so’—although Chillingworth went further than Milton ever would in proposing a comprehension of Catholics in a state founded on the fundamental truths common to all Christian denominations.51 Chillingworth, Hales, and others in the Great Tew circle were charged by Presbyterian opponents with promoting Socinian heresy, according to which human reason was allegedly given pre-­eminence over the revealed Word of God as a rule of faith. Socinian-

t h e c i r c l e o f s t u di e s   291

ism, which originated in Italy and developed in Poland, was characterized by a ‘strongly ethical interpretation of Christianity’, in which men were saved (or not) by their freely chosen actions, and a ‘refusal to accept that Christ had atoned for men’s sins and . . . to see him as a divine redeemer figure’.52 The Eton shelf-­list that probably details Hales’s private library around 1624 does indeed include a very unusual number of Socinian books and anti-­Socinian responses, as well as many by Grotius, the favourite Arminian intellectual of the circle. The Maske proposes just such a ‘strongly ethical interpretation’ of salvation, as we have seen, while Milton’s later explicit rejection of the Trinity in De Doctrina Christiana has long been linked with exposure to Socinian ideas—a link given some substance by Milton’s decision in his role of official licenser of books under the Commonwealth to approve for publication in 1652 an English translation of the Racovian Catechism, the most important of the Socinian texts. When Milton was called upon by Parliament, which condemned all copies of the Catechism to be burned, to explain his decision to license the work, he apparently defended his actions by appealing to the principles of Areopagitica.53 Hales denied adhering to the Socinian doctrine of the Trinity, but he was clearly interested in Socinian principles and aspects of his own arguments about reason, intellectual freedom, and toleration echo the Socinian texts that he apparently had in his library. The evidence for Milton’s link with Hales is slight and it would be overly speculative to build too grand a narrative of intellectual influence on Wotton’s passing reference to Milton’s ‘learned friend’, ‘Mr. H.’; but the link does offer a glimpse into an intellectual milieu into which Milton fits better in 1636–8 than either that of oppositional Puritanism or Laudian clericalism. Wotton had been a close friend of John Donne and his own verse circulated in manuscript in the universities and the Inns of Court. Hales was known for his poetic judgement as well as his scholarly qualities, and Milton could agree with him on Shakespeare’s pre-­eminence: Dryden recounts in his Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668) how ‘Mr. Hales of Eaton [would] say, That there was no subject of which any Poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better treated of in Shakespeare’. The ideas about the virtuous exercise of reason, personal

292  c h a p t e r 11

responsibility for belief, the ethical importance of choice, and the free circulation of knowledge which animate Areopagitica, and which are latent in the earlier prose, are also the ideas that formed the basis for the conversation in which Hales engaged with Chillingworth, Falkland, and others in the Great Tew circle in the mid-­1630s. Yet Hales and Chillingworth eventually sided with Laud and the royalist cause when war broke out. Hales lost the clerical living that Laud had given him in 1642 and then his position at Eton in 1650 when he failed to subscribe to the oath of allegiance required by the Commonwealth government. In response to the Scots’ declaration of support for Parliament in 1643, not long before his death at the beginning of the following year, Chillingworth attacked the Presbyterians in terms that anticipate Milton’s own anti-­Presbyterian polemic from Areopagitica onwards, scorning their aim as ‘not the enjoying of liberty of your own confession, but tyranny over other men’s’.54 Izaak Walton planned to compose a short life of Hales to go with his biographies of Richard Hooker, George Herbert, John Donne, and Henry Wotton—if he had completed it, Hales would have become part of the intellectual heritage of Restoration Anglicanism that Walton sought, and to a great extent successfully managed, to create in his Lives (1670).55 Milton moved in a different direction with his initial support for the Presbyterian cause in 1641–2; yet the circles he moved in, or sought to move in, during the 1630s suggest that he could easily have followed intellectuals such as Hales and Chillingworth and sided with the status quo, for all their concerns about the divisions created by an increasingly authoritarian Laudian Church. But Milton had an ambition that these men never had. ‘Lycidas’, composed at the end of 1637, articulates Milton’s developing anxiety that the accomplishment of great feats of learning and literature in a nation must be inextricably linked to whether or not that nation is subject to the intellectual tyranny of clerical rule.

CHAPTER 12

•

Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’

Two Sorts of Shepherd The draft of ‘Lycidas’ in the Trinity manuscript is dated November 1637, which is the same month that Milton wrote to Charles Diodati and told him that he had been ‘[g]rowing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings.’ Presumably Milton had the composition of ‘Lycidas’ in mind, as he had written no other poetry that survives in the previous three years, with the possible exception of the additions to the Maske for its publication at the beginning of 1638. The tone of the letter as a whole is not anxious, however, and if Milton never quite adopts the tone of youthful jocularity that characterized the earlier correspondence with Diodati, he still likes to live up to an image of himself as ‘Il Penseroso’, secluded in his scholarly cell in Horton (‘Where I am now, as you know, I live in obscurity and very cramped quarters’), pursuing his historical studies, and in constant pursuit of the Platonic ‘idea of the beautiful’ found in ‘the greatest wisdom throughout all ages’.1 He does not, however, mention he has been writing ‘Lycidas’, which must have distracted him from his regimen of study in the preceding weeks. The invitation to Milton to contribute to a Cambridge collection of elegies for Edward King (1612–37), a Fellow of Christ’s College who had died the previous August in a shipwreck in the Irish sea, at the age of twenty-­five, has sometimes been thought surprising because Milton had left the university more than five years earlier. Yet Milton had a reputation for his poetic and literary abilities in his time at Christ’s, both in Latin and the vernacular, and there is evidence 293

294  c h a p t e r 12

Figure 14. Draft of ‘Lycidas’, in the Milton manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge.

of some limited scribal circulation of several of his poems. The charge of insincerity has been aimed at ‘Lycidas’, at least since Samuel Johnson’s memorable excoriation of the poem (‘where is leisure for fiction, there is little grief ’), but there is no reason to doubt Milton’s description of King as his ‘learned Friend’ in the headnote added to the draft in the Trinity manuscript, which is included in the printed texts of ‘Lycidas’ in the 1645 and 1673 Poems, even if there is no other solid evidence of the friendship.2

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   295

King had matriculated at Christ’s in 1626, along with his brother Roger, and both were placed under the tutelage of William Chappell, at about the time that Milton had fallen out with him. Unusually King was appointed to a Fellowship of Christ’s in 1630, the same year as he took his BA and at the age of only eighteen: while the appointment was imposed by royal mandate and seemingly a result of King’s well-­connected family background, King was appointed as the College’s ‘Graecus lector’ in 1636 and the contributors to Justa Eduardo King naufrago are agreed on his learning, particularly in Greek.3 Henry More, who was studying for his MA at Christ’s in 1637, wrote his elegy in Greek as a tribute to King’s facility in the language; one of the vernacular elegies, by Samson Briggs, a Fellow of King’s College, presents King as ‘One whome the Muses courted: rigg’d and fraught / With Arts and Tongues too fully, when he sought / To crosse the seas, was overwhelm’d’. In one of Clement Paman’s two elegies, which for some reason were not included in the printed volume, the death of King is declared to be worse for learning than if the Vatican library had been burned down or the Frankfurt book fair flooded.4 Other than their elegies for King, Briggs and Paman are known almost entirely as poets through a Cambridge verse miscellany compiled by Henry Soame, who matriculated at Cambridge in 1646, where they appear alongside Richard Crashaw, John Cleveland, and Henry Wotton, among others.5 Briggs and Paman had an identity as poets primarily as part of a circle of university wits in the mid-­1630s, and the elegies collected in Justa Eduardo King naufrago brought that circle into print. Milton was no longer part of such Cambridge literary communities, but his presence in the volume indicates he was still known to them and that ‘Lycidas’ in its original context of publication should in part be understood as speaking to such communities. King ‘knew / Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme’, according to ‘Lycidas’ (lines 10–11). This has again usually been assumed to be an empty compliment, but by 1637 King had appeared in print as a poet on many more occasions than Milton, whose only two commercially printed works had been anonymous (the epitaph on Shakespeare in 1632 and the 1637 edition of the Maske). Ten Latin poems by King are

296  c h a p t e r 12

extant, nine of which were included in the anthologies of verse that it had become a convention for the universities to issue to mark royal occasions: seven poems mark the births of the children of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, and two others celebrate Charles’s recovery from smallpox in 1632 and his safe return from Scotland in 1633. The remaining example of King’s verse is a commendatory poem for the 1633 printed text of the Latin play Odium Senile by the Cambridge dramatist Peter Hausted, whose literary reputation was in tatters after the poor reception of his anti-­Puritan comedy The Rival Friends during the royal visitation to Cambridge in 1632—the event that supposedly led to the suicide of the Vice-­Chancellor. But if King had appeared more often in print as a poet, Milton had written in a far greater variety of genres at Cambridge, in both English and Latin. In Justa Eduardo King naufrago, printed by the University Press, Milton appeared alongside others who had been connected to Christ’s during Milton’s time there, and who must have known something of the poetic abilities and ambitions (or pretensions) of the ‘Lady’ of Christ’s. These included More, who matriculated in 1631 and began composing Spenserian poems about Platonic philosophy in the late 1630s, and Cleveland, who was admitted to Christ’s in 1627 and by 1637 had become a Fellow of St John’s College. Despite being known for his facility in Latin, Cleveland contributed two vernacular elegies to Justa Eduardo King naufrago: the volume, as with Milton’s 1645 Poems, is divided into English and Latin (and Greek) parts, with separate title-­pages. Milton presumably chose to compose his elegy in the vernacular when he could have written in Latin, the language in which he would compose his elegy for Charles Diodati two years later. Another notable Cambridge poet in the English part of the collection is Joseph Beaumont (1616–99), who in 1636 had become a Fellow of Peterhouse, the centre of Cambridge Laudianism, at the same time as his close friend Richard Crashaw. More, Cleveland, and Beaumont appear with an initial for their first name and their full surname but ‘Lycidas’ is signed merely ‘J. M.’. Milton still remained reticent about owning his work in print, and in fact the first time that any of Milton’s poems appeared in print under his full name was in the 1645 Poems. It was as a writer of prose that ‘John Milton’ first appeared in public.

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   297

Milton recalls the college life that he had shared with King through echoes in ‘Lycidas’ of the second part of ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’. The ‘Predicaments’ in Milton’s comic skit on the terms of Aristotelian logic were performed by fellow students, and the verses pun on the names of identifiable contemporaries at Christ’s. Hence the catalogue of rivers which closes the poetic part of the entertainment, which begins ‘Rivers arise’, likely alludes to one or both of the brothers at the college at the time, George and Nizell Rivers.6 Milton as ‘Ens’, or ‘father of the Predicaments his tens sons’, declares that the eldest son, Substance, ‘shall Reign as King’. The part is likely to have been played by Edward King, rather than his brother Roger, for Milton refracts the playful language of the college entertainment through the lament of funeral elegy. In ‘At a Vacation Exercise’, Milton as ‘Ens’ describes how fairies ‘[s]trew all their blessings on [Substance’s] sleeping Head’ (line 64) and ‘peace shall lull him in her flow’ry lap’ (line 83); in ‘Lycidas’, the poet calls on the valleys, ‘[o]n whose fresh lap the swart Star sparely looks’, to ‘strew the Laureat Herse where Lycid lies’ (lines 138, 151). The description of ‘Substance’ as one who must continually impose order on the other Predicaments and so shall ‘live in strife, and at his door / Devouring war shall never cease to roar’ (lines 85–6), even seems to be recalled in the apocalyptic warning of St Peter in ‘Lycidas’ that ‘the grim Woolf with privy paw / Daily devours apace, and nothing sed / But that the two-­handed engine at the door / Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more’ (lines 128–31). ‘Lycidas’, as the final poem in a Cambridge anthology, plays in a different key poetic images that Milton had used in his light-­hearted Cambridge academic exercises six years earlier. Characters who appear in the elegy also invite identification as figures from the time that Milton and King spent at Christ’s, where they were ‘nurst upon the self-­same hill’ (line 23). Milton adopts an association between Cambridge and Mount Parnassus, home of poetry and learning in Greek myth, that had become popular among students through the trilogy of vernacular university plays performed at St John’s College in 1598–1601, Pilgrimage to Parnassus and, in two parts, the Return from Parnassus. The Parnassus plays were important in establishing in Cambridge ‘a distinct literary phenomenon of academic pastoral, offering

298  c h a p t e r 12

student writers a set of conventions for representing the university as a site of retreat’.7 In depicting their time together as a pastoral idyll, the poet recalls how he and Lycidas would play ‘Rural ditties’ together on the ‘oaten flute’ and how ‘old Damaetas loved to hear our song’. It has been plausibly proposed that ‘old Damaetas’ is Joseph Mede.8 It is the aged river-­god Camus, personifying the river Cam, who concludes the train of mourning figures—other than the ‘pilot of the Galilean lake’, St Peter—for the loss of Lycidas. Milton took the occasion of composing an elegy for his ‘learned friend’ King to recall an idyllic intellectual life in Caroline Cambridge; but does so to contrast that past—however idealized—with the contemporary reality of growing schism in the nation’s religious life, for which King’s dismembered body becomes emblematic. Boccaccio, in his life of Dante that Milton was closely reading in 1637, had distinguished between ‘two sorts’ of the ‘shepherds of the soul’: the ‘prelates, preachers, priests’ who should ‘feed the souls of the living with the Word of God’, and those extraordinary scholar-­poets like Dante who use their ‘great learning’ to write ‘anew that which appears to them to have been omitted’, and in doing so ‘teach the minds and intellects of their hearers and readers’.9 In comparing the uncut edition of Boccaccio’s account of the suppression of Dante’s treatise on the proper relationship between secular and religious authority with the edition censored by the Inquisition, Milton had encountered a double illustration in different centuries of the impact of ecclesiastical oppression on intellectual and literary culture. In ‘Lycidas’ the poet considers in two digressions from his main elegiac purpose how the early death of King / Lycidas and the corrupt behaviour of England’s prelates embody different but linked threats to his ambition to become that second and much rarer sort of shepherd, the great Dantean scholar-­poet whose words can shape the ‘minds and intellects’ of his readers.

‘Bacchic Howlings’ When Milton turns from the idealized past of leisured academic play in Christ’s to the reality of King’s violent death in lines 37–8—‘But O the

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   299

heavy change, now thou art gon, / Now thou art gon, and never must return!’—he invokes the helplessness of the archetype of poetic power, Orpheus, before the frustrated desires of the Thracian Baccantes whose sexual invitations he had rejected: Had ye bin there—for what could that have don? What could the Muse her self that Orpheus bore, The Muse her self, for her inchanting son Whom Universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His goary visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore? (lines 57–63) This is not the powerful Orpheus of Ad Patrem and elsewhere in Milton’s early writing, who can control nature with his song and has access to the divine truths embodied in nature; the Orpheus of ‘Lycidas’ has been drowned out and become the pathetic figure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose music is drowned out by ‘Bacchic howlings’ and whose ‘words had no effect’ on the scorned women: ‘Dead to all reverence, they tore him apart and, through those lips to which rocks had listened, which wild beasts had understood, his last breath slipped away and vanished in the wind’.10 These Ovidian images of the live dismemberment of the archetypal chaste poet by the forces of uncontrolled passion, an enactment of the Dionysian sacrificial ritual of sparagmos, haunted the background of the Maske in the form of Comus’s Bacchic rituals and the Lady’s Orphic associations.11 The poet later imagines how Lycidas’s bones are ‘hurld’ perhaps ‘beyond the stormy Hebrides’, denying him the formal burial rites for which Milton’s poem compensates (lines 155–6). As a Fellow of Christ’s, King had turned away from the world of marriage and active sexuality to live in the world of scholarship and devotion. The anxious thought that those who subordinate their lower desires to the higher calling of service to learning and poetry are as likely to die young as those who indulge themselves—indeed that in doing so they might actually be provoking the vengeance of malign forces— prompts the first digression in ‘Lycidas’:

300  c h a p t e r 12

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care To tend the homely slight Shepherds trade, And strictly meditate the thankles Muse, Were it not better don as others use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair? Fame is the spurre that the clear spirit doth raise (That last infirmity of Noble mind) To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes; But the fair Guerdon when we hope to find, And think to burst out into sudden blaze, Comes the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, And slits the thin-­spun life. (lines 64–76) These lines have been received as the most intensely personal in the poem because they return to topics of timeliness, the cost of the life of ‘studious retirement’, and risk of the unfulfilled poetic career that concerned Milton in the 1633 ‘letter to a friend’ and its accompanying sonnet, and that he would later air publicly in the prose of The Reason of Church-­government in 1642. It might fairly be objected to such a biographical reading of the poem that it would hardly have been apparent to Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ by ‘J. M.’ in 1638; and yet Milton’s Virgilian ambitions were known to his contemporaries at Christ’s, as we know from his nickname of the ‘Lady’, to which Milton had himself drawn attention in his public academic orations at the college and that he seems to have encouraged because of its Virgilian associations. Moreover, educated early moderns were saturated in Latin poetry, in particular Virgil and Ovid, from such an early age and to such an extent that other contributors to the anthology for King—skilled poets in Greek, Latin, and English such as Cleveland, Beaumont, More, Briggs, and Paman—would have been alert to the ways in which ‘Lycidas’ is a poem which is constantly allusive to other poems, mostly to classical, neo-­Latin, and vernacular pastoral. These many allusions—a mode of poetic repetition signalled by the opening phrase, ‘Yet once more’—serve to elevate the death of the relatively obscure King into

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   301

an archetypal event and to lend symbolic resonance to the self-­analysis of the poet.12 ‘[M]editate the thankles muse’ alludes to musam meditaris in the opening of Virgil’s first Eclogue, but Virgil’s Tityrus is quite content to be singing of his love for Amaryllis: Beneath the Shade which Beechen Boughs diffuse,  You Tityrus entertain your Silvan Muse:  Round the wide World in Banishment we rome,  Forc’d from our pleasing Fields and Native Home:  While stretch’d at Ease you sing your happy loves:  And Amarillis fills the shady Groves.13  Amaryllis and Neaera, who is also a shepherdess in the Eclogues, were adopted as generic names in classical and Renaissance pastoral, both in neo-­Latin and the vernacular: Milton’s striking image of the ‘tangles of Neaera’s hair’ recalls the classical ‘nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets’, with their ‘flower-­inwoven tresses’, who are expelled from earth with the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’ (lines 197–8). ‘Beuteous Amaryllis’ has a speaking part in Randolph’s Amyntas, his pastoral drama acted before the Caroline court in 1632, as a shepherdess who ‘may make a Bride worthy the proudest shepheard / In all Sicilia’.14 What has been called the ‘amatory dimension’ of ‘Lycidas’ tends to be overlooked given its generic identity as a funeral elegy, although at the beginning of the poem Milton’s shepherd plucks the myrtle leaves, the emblem of Venus, as well as the laurel of Apollo and the ivy of Bacchus. Milton also makes sustained allusion to Virgil’s tenth eclogue (itself derived from the first Idyl of Theocritus), in which the shepherd–poet Gallus laments his betrayal by the unfaithful Lycoris as he nears death from a broken heart.15 In Elegia sexta the type of poetic career is for Milton connected in an essential way with the lifestyle of the poet, and ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’ catalogue the different forms of poetic inspiration required of the elegiac and epic poets, even if ‘L’Allegro’ is curiously sexless. By invoking the names of Amaryllis and Neaera, Milton raises the question not only of the alternative, sexually active lifestyle that he might have led and might still lead, but of the alternative career

302  c h a p t e r 12

path that he might have pursued as a different type of poet, a poet of amatory lyric and erotic elegy. The anxiety provoked by King’s apparently undeserved death initially forces a reconsideration of the temptation to ease, both poetic and bodily, signified by the names Amaryllis and Neaera. It is the prospect of fame, the poet then maintains, which girds him ‘To scorn delights, and live laborious dayes’. The line inverts the concluding invitation of Marlowe’s pastoral lyric, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, also echoed in the final lines of L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me and be my love’. The structure of the passage, however, recalls the speech of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, in Edmund Spenser’s Teares of the Muses (1591): ‘What bootes it then to . . . strive in vertue others to excel; / If none should yeeld him his deserved meed, / Due praise, that is the spur of doing well?’ (lines 445, 452–4). ‘Fair Guerdon’ is a distinctively Spenserian archaic phrase for ‘reward’—‘That glorie does to them for guerdon grant’—and Spenser provided Milton with the English Protestant example of a poet who had followed the Virgilian cursus from pastoral in The Shepherdes Calender to vernacular Christian epic in The Faerie Queene.16 It has been argued that Marlowe consciously adopted the model of Ovid’s ‘counter-­ Virgilian’ literary career—love elegy in his translations of Ovid’s Amores, tragic drama, and erotic ‘minor epic’ in the deeply Ovidian Hero and Leander (1593; first published 1598)—in reaction to, and critique of, Spenser’s Virgilian pretensions to the title of Elizabethan England’s national and imperial poet.17 Whether or not such grand intentions can be plausibly ascribed to Marlowe, the notion of an ‘elegiac anti-­career’, defined against the Virgilian model of a linear career trajectory towards national epic, was associated in the Renaissance with Ovid—it is to be found, for instance, in Boccaccio’s representation of his erotic prose narratives in the Decameron (c. 1353). The terms of the first digression in ‘Lycidas’ suggest that Milton could think about his career path in opposing Ovidian and Virgilian terms, translated into vernacular literary history as Marlovian and Spenserian.18 The echoes of Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ in the companion poems and ‘Lycidas’ suggest that when Milton thought of Marlowe in

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   303

the early verse, he thought of carpe diem poetics and the expression of an Epicurean, materialist philosophy of pleasure. Marlowe’s association with Epicurean values was of course not confined to his works: Milton would have known something of the various godly accounts of Marlowe’s sensational early death, in a bar brawl in Deptford at the age of twenty-­nine, as a providential punishment for his libertine life. Edmund Rudierde, in his chapter on ‘Epicures and Atheists’ in The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath (1618), emphasized Marlowe’s learned origins as ‘a Cambridge Scholler’ but was concerned to turn the episode of his violent early death into a warning specifically to ‘braine-­sicke and prophane Poets and Players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities’. Yet fellow poets tended to distinguish the poetry from the life. In the first part of the Return from Parnassus, the Cambridge audience heard that Marlowe was happy in his buskin[e]d muse, Alas unhappy in his life and end. Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, Wit sent from heaven but vices sent from hell.19 In the lives of Virgil by Donatus and Dante by Boccaccio, Milton found recommendations of the virtues of sexual temperance, even celibacy, for the aspiring epic poet. The abbreviated life of Marlowe offered a counter-­Virgilian example both in terms of moral character and poetic career. Randolph was an example of a Cambridge contemporary who had made a name for himself, lived a supposedly libertine life, and wrote a range of amatory verse, before dying young in 1635. The chaste academic life led by King had brought him no better fate and considerably less renown. The ‘blind Fury’ had cut him down regardless.

Digression and Desire Milton’s strange, terrifying image of the ‘blind Fury with th’abhorred shears’ may owe a debt to Hero and Leander, Marlowe’s version of the most famous classical episode of the drowning of a young man. The story of Hero and Leander was encountered by all Renaissance schoolboys in their study of Ovid’s Heroides, a standard text on which students

304  c h a p t e r 12

practised their imitative skills and which includes verse epistles addressed by the doomed lovers to each other. There are ironic echoes of Hero’s flimsy resistance to Leander’s efforts at seduction in Marlowe’s poem in the Lady’s rebuttals of Comus in the Maske, while Marlowe’s depiction of Hero later ‘supplied Milton with some felicitous raw materials’ for the treatment of Eve’s nakedness in Paradise Lost.20 The allusion in ‘Lycidas’ is not though to Marlowe’s main narrative, which (whether by design or due it being left unfinished) portrays the consensually surrendered virginity of the lovers rather than their subsequent deaths, but to the mythopoeic digression which follows the first section of the poem. Marlowe’s dislikeable narrator asks us to give him our full attention as he explains the origins of the enmity between the Fates and Cupid. Mercury was once enflamed with desire for a beautiful ‘country maid’. As ‘All women are ambitious naturally’, this maid demanded that Mercury steal her a ‘draught of flowing nectar’ from Jove’s cup before she would submit (lines 428, 432).21 The lust-­driven Mercury agreed and was expelled from heaven by Jove for his transgression. Cupid, sympathetic to Mercury and his desire, then wounded ‘those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, / I mean the adamantine Destinies’ — the three sisters who turn, according to Plato, the adamant spindle of Necessity around which the universe is wrapped (lines 443–4). In thrall to their desire for Mercury, the Fates offered him the deadly fatal knife That shears the slender threads of human life; At his fair feathered feet the engines laid, Which th’earth from ugly Chaos’ den upweighed. (lines 447–50) As all editors point out, Milton’s ‘blind Fury’ who holds the shears which cut the thread of life is not a Fury at all but Atropos, one of the three Fates; and neither Atropos nor the Furies are blind. In ‘Lycidas’ the blindness of Fortuna and the bloodlust of the Furies, born in Greek myth from the blood that fell to the earth when Cronus castrated his father Uranus, are merged with the figure of Atropos and her whirling (perhaps castrating) shears to conjure a terrifying image of unstoppable and seemingly indiscriminate violence. It hardly seems to be a slip on

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   305

Milton’s part, given that in the ‘Epitaph for the Marchioness of Winchester’ (1631) Milton writes of how, when Jane Paulet died soon after giving birth to a stillborn child, ‘Atropos for Lucina came / And with remorseless cruelty / Spoiled both fruit and tree’ (lines 28–30). In Arcades, the ‘Genius of the Wood’ refers to ‘those that hold the vital shears, / And turn the adamantine spindle round, / On which the fate of gods and men is wound’ (lines 65–7). Milton doubtless recalls in ‘abhorred shears’ his own ‘vital shears’ in Arcades. Yet the image in Arcades is static and unthreatening, and lacks the alliterative slice of Marlowe’s line (‘shears . . . slender’), echoed in ‘Lycidas’ (‘shears . . . slits’), while Marlowe’s ‘slender threads’ are compressed into Milton’s ‘thin-­ spun’. The ‘engines’ that are offered to Mercury—the pillars that prevent the earth from falling into the abyss of Chaos—may provide yet another perspective on the notorious crux in the second digression in ‘Lycidas’, the nature of the apocalyptic ‘engine at the door’ invoked by St Peter. Marlowe’s Mercury refuses the ‘deadly fatal knife’, with which, presumably, he could kill Jove, but asks the Fates ‘that Jove, usurper of his father’s seat, / Might presently be banisht into hell, / And aged Saturn in Olympus dwell’ (lines 452–4). The request is granted and ‘Murder, rape, warre, lust, and trechery, / Were with Jove clos’d in Stigian empery’ (lines 457–8). But this renewed golden age is short-­lived, for Mercury did despise The love of th’ everlasting Destinies. They seeing it, both Love and him abhor’d. And Jupiter unto his place restored. (lines 461–4) This myth of Mercury and the country maid is Marlowe’s invention. He imitated the structure of the Spanish poet Boscán’s Leandro (1543), which takes the form of a triptych with a digressive centrepiece. English readers of the late sixteenth century who used Boscán as a study in eloquence were particularly interested in his invented mythopoeic digression explaining why Aeolus, god of the winds, would not hear Leander’s prayers. This interest suggests that humanist readers such as Marlowe and Milton were trained to pay particular ­attention to, and to emulate,

306  c h a p t e r 12

set-­piece moments of rhetorical elaboration and digression in a poem, whether classical, neo-­classical, or vernacular.22 Such a model of humanist imitation may explain why the digressions in ‘Lycidas’ are so poetically powerful, as opposed to the weaker claim that Milton was more interested in analysing his own state of mind than lamenting the death of Edward King. A provenance for lines 75–6 of ‘Lycidas’ in Marlowe’s invented myth is fitting given Milton’s anxiety at this point about the obscurity of the scholar-­poet who devotes his life to the cultivation of learning and virtue. For the narrator’s digression in Hero and Leander becomes as much an explanation of the lowliness of scholars as of the pain of lovers. Mercury is the Roman Hermes, god of orators and wits, learning and scholarship, and symbolic of the ‘mercurial’ human intellect—an identity that Marlowe emphasizes by using the names Mercury and Hermes interchangeably. There are long-­term consequences of the sexual behaviour of Mercury / Hermes for the status of the ‘Muses’ sons’ in society: And but that Learning, in despite of Fate, Will mount aloft, and enter heaven gate, And to the seat of Jove itself advance, Hermes had slept in hell with Ignorance. Yet as a punishment they added this, That he and Poverty should always kiss. And to this day is every scholar poor; Gross gold from then runs headlong to the boor. Likewise the angry Sisters, thus deluded, To venge themselves on Hermes, have concluded That Midas’ brood shall sit in Honour’s chair, To which the Muses’ sons are only heir: And fruitful wits that in aspiring are Shall discontent run into regions far. (lines 465–78) If Learning finally takes its rightful place in heaven, ‘in despite of Fate’, the scholar still languishes in an earthly condition of material deprivation and social exclusion, his virtue unrecognized by the powerful:

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   307

And few great lords in virtuous deeds shall joy, But be surprised with every garish toy, And still enrich the lofty servile clown, Who with encroaching guile keeps learning down. (lines 479–82) Marlowe’s digression begins as an erotic pastoral narrative and ends as a mythic explanation of society’s disregard for wit, learning, and poetry: of why the ‘shepherd’s trade’ is ‘slighted’. Marlowe’s complaint against a society in which true humanist virtue goes unrecognized and unrewarded was well known in Cambridge and extracted from the erotic narrative of which it was a part. There are paraphrases of Marlowe’s complaint in the opening scenes of the Pilgrimage to Parnassus, when Consiliodorus advises the two new Cambridge students about to commence the BA, Philomusus and Studioso, about the material disadvantages of the scholarly life: There may you scorne each Mydas of this age, Each earthlie peasant and each drossie clowne [ . . . ] Though I foreknewe that gold runns to the boore, He be a schollar, though I live but poore. [ . . . ] They will be poore ere their last dying daye, Learninge and povertie will ever kiss. (lines 54–5, 63–4, 75–6) By the end of the play, Studioso echoes this early advice: ‘Yea, Midas brood fore eare must honoured be, / Wile Phoebus followers live in Miserie’ (lines 1579–80). The Parnassus plays are full of in-­jokes and literary allusions and became, as we have seen, a touchstone of Cambridge literary culture. The plays follow two undergraduates who set out on their intellectual ‘pilgrimage’ to complete the BA degree full of lofty dreams of the universal learning and poetic power to which they will attain through their study; however they end up bitter and disillusioned, working as shepherds in Kent who, rather than singing the joys of the real pastoral life, lament the deprivations they have endured in failed

308  c h a p t e r 12

pursuit of the scholarly ideal. The representation of the academic and literary life in terms of pastoral retreat is ironically literalized as the dreams of Parnassus dissolve into a rather more prosaic reality: ‘Weel chant our woes upon an oaten reede / Whiles bleating flock upon their supper feede’ (lines 2157–8). Given Marlowe’s inset narrative had been used to articulate the failure of humanist ambition in the well-­known Parnassus plays, Milton could have expected discerning Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ to recognize the echoes of Marlowe’s digression on the origins of the hardships faced by scholars and poets in his own digression on the ‘thankles Muse’. An aspect of the art of ‘Lycidas’ is to give the impression of agonized internal struggle and debate occurring in the moment of writing; but, in a similar movement to the sonnet ‘How soon hath time’, these passages are retrospectively written from a position of assurance: the poet’s mind is already made up about the virtue of scorning delights in favour of ‘laborious dayes’ in study.23 The sentence of social inferiority pronounced on the Muses’ sons in Hero and Leander is finally a consequence of the destructive erotic desire both of Mercury and the Fates: the digression acts as a commentary on the portrayal of unrestrained desire in the main narrative. If the drowning of Edward King made Milton remember the fate of Leander, Milton looked to Marlowe’s pastoral digression and its exemplary potential rather than the main erotic narrative of Hero and Leander, with its comic lack of moral closure. A similar pattern can be observed in Milton’s insistent allusions to Virgil’s tenth eclogue, despite the apparent incongruity of its amatory subject-­matter. Virgil’s Gallus concludes his death-­bed lament by affirming the ultimate sovereignty of profane love: ‘In hell, and earth, and seas, and heaven above, / Love conquers all; and we must yield to Love’. In contemporary commentary, however, this eclogue was read as ‘a warning, not an affirmation’.24 According to the Jacobean schoolmaster John Brinsley, when Virgil asks, ‘What lawns or woods withheld you from his aid, / Ye nymphs, when Gallus was to love betrayed [?]’ (lines 13–14), echoed in Milton’s ‘Where were ye Nymphs when the remorseless deep / Closed o’ere the head of your lov’d Lycidas?’ (lines 50–1), he ‘accuseth the Muses that they were so careless of Gallus, to let him so to leave his studies

l o v e a n d de a t h i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   309

and to perish in such unbeseeming love’. Gallus could have found relief from his love sickness, according to Brinsley’s marginal commentary, ‘by giving his mind to the studie of Poetrie’. Brinsley takes this reading from continental Reformation authorities that Milton would more likely have known, Ramus and Philip Melanchthon.25 While ostensibly questioning in the first digression of ‘Lycidas’ the point of the life devoted to chaste virtue and promiscuous learning—the life he had been leading since leaving Cambridge—Milton incorporates poetic models that oppose, or were read as opposing, the pursuit of learning and poetry to the distracting and destructive power of erotic desire. In Virgil’s tenth eclogue Phoebus Apollo, Roman god of poetry and music (and prophecy), interrupts Gallus’s lament to scold him for making the false Lycoris his only care when she cares nothing for him. In ‘Lycidas’ it turns out that Apollo has been listening to the poet’s lament about the ‘thankles Muse’ and interrupts line 76 to dispel the image of the ‘blind Fury’ and her ‘abhorred shears’: But not the praise, Phoebus repli’d, and touch’d my trembling ears; Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, Nor in the glistering foil Set off to th’world, nor in broad rumour lies, But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes, And perfet witnes of all-­judging Jove; As he pronounces lastly on each deed, Of so much fame in Heav’n expect thy meed. (lines 76–84) Apollo’s intervention would seem designed to allay the anxiety raised by the thought that King’s violent early death shows his chaste and ‘clear’ life, his ‘strain’ in the cause of learning, to have been for nothing—perhaps also any anxiety raised by the memory of poets such as Marlowe and Randolph, who had obtained poetic fame in a short and supposedly godless existence. The poet looks forward to judgement in the afterlife and is reassured by Apollo that the virtuous life, no matter if it ends early and bloodily and obscure, will receive eternal reward. The conclusion of the first digression thus anticipates the Christian

310  c h a p t e r 12

apotheosis of Lycidas, beginning ‘Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more’ (line 165). Yet Apollo’s plucking of the poet’s ears to remind him that true fame is only found in heaven alludes to Virgil’s sixth eclogue, in which Apollo actually advises the poet against moving too hastily from pastoral to heroic and epic verse: But when I try’d her tender Voice, too young;  And fighting Kings, and bloody Battels sung,  Apollo check’d my Pride; and bade me feed  My fatning Flocks, nor dare beyond the Reed.26  Or as Milton put it to Diodati in the same month that he completed ‘Lycidas’: ‘my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings’. Once more the allusion works to confirm the correctness of the poet’s dedication to ‘laborious dayes’ in preparation for future earthly fame as an epic poet, even as the surface movement of the poem appears to put the legitimacy of such ambition in doubt and elevate instead the rewards in heaven.

CHAPTER 13

•

Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’

‘Run Amarillis Run’ The second digression in ‘Lycidas’, St Peter’s attack on clerical corruption, is not really the disruption of pastoral generic decorum that the poet suggests when he refers to St Peter as the ‘dread voice’ that shrinks the streams of pastoral lyricism (line 132). As Thomas Warton first recognized in his eighteenth-­century commentary, the anti-­clerical complaint of ‘Lycidas’ is indebted to the example of the May eclogue in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, in which the zealous shepherd Piers attacks his rival Palinode, the ‘false shepherd . . . under whom’, as Milton himself put it in his anti-­episcopal prose work Animadversions (1641), ‘the Poet lively personates our Prelates, whose whole life is a recantation of their pastorall vow, and whose profession to forsake the World, as they use the matter, boggs them deeper into the world: those our admired Spenser inveighs against, not without some presage of these reforming times’.1 Milton then quotes accurately twenty-­eight lines from the May eclogue, including the warning that ‘under colour of Shepheards some while / There crept in wolves full of fraud and guile / That often devour’d theire owne Sheep’. Spenser perhaps echoes a well-­ known pun on ‘bishop’, as found John Foxe’s account in the Actes and Monuments of a Protestant martyr who told his persecutors that they had ‘become rather bite-­sheeps than true bishops’.2 Milton had been paying attention to the anti-­clerical moments in the poets whom he most hoped to emulate, as well as to the moments in their life and writing where they had suffered clerical persecution: 311

312  c h a p t e r 13

among the entries that can be dated to 1637–9 in the commonplace book, Milton recorded ‘Dante, Canto 7 of the Inferno’, where he ‘aptly censures the avarice of the clergy’. The memorable image in ‘Lycidas’ of the ‘hungry sheep’ ‘swoll’n with wind, and the rank mist they draw’ (lines 125–6) is probably indebted to Beatrice’s denunciation of corrupt and equivocating priests in Canto 29 of Dante’s Paradiso: ‘So the poor sheep that know nothing eat dross, / Return from pasture fed on wind’ (lines 106–7).3 In tracing the history of clerical abuses back to the first Christian emperor Constantine in Of Reformation, Milton would later translate into blank verse several lines from Canto 19 of Inferno: Ah Constantine! of how much ill was cause, Not thy conversion, but those rich domains That the first wealthy pope receiv’d of thee!4 In the Inferno, Dante is hugged by Virgil for this impassioned attack on clerics who have made their ‘god of silver and gold’ and betrayed the message of St Peter (line 112). Poetic resources for the anti-­clerical digression in ‘Lycidas’ can be traced to the commonplace book in moral philosophy; the same resources furnish the polemical prose of the anti-­ episcopal writings some three years later. ‘Lycidas’ was turned into an explicit ‘presage of these reforming times’ in the second part of the headnote added in the 1645 Poems, presumably by Milton—this addition to the headnote is not in the Trinity manuscript, but his authorship is suggested by its retention in the 1673 Poems—which claims ‘Lycidas’ as evidence both of the burgeoning powers of the poet as prophetic vates and as a response to a public as much as a personal moment: ‘And by occasion fortels the ruine of our corrupted Clergy then in their height.’ Yet St Peter has ‘Mitr’d locks’ (line 112) and the 1638 poem does not show Milton to have yet abandoned episcopacy: rather the clerics who are arraigned for their inadequacies and corruption have failed to live up to the example of the original bishop. Given the conformist character of the other contributors to the collection in memory of Edward King— Samson Briggs was killed fighting for the royalist army in 1644; John Cleveland quickly became one of the royalist party’s most prominent

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   313

polemicists; Clement Paman served as chaplain to Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Strafford, who was executed by Parliament in 1641; and Joseph Beaumont was at the heart of Cambridge Laudianism when he contributed his elegy on King—it seems unlikely that whoever compiled the anthology (most likely the Christ’s Fellow John Alsop, who was King’s executor) read anything incendiary in the religious politics of Milton’s contribution. That Milton found his poetic models of pastoral anti-­clerical complaint in Dante and Spenser also indicates the reasonably conventional nature of the sentiments. One of Randolph’s popular poems in scribal circulation in the 1630s, and included in his 1638 Poems, was ‘An Eglogue occasion’d by two Doctors disputing upon predestination’, although it also circulated under the title ‘A divine Pastorall Eglogue’. The shepherds Tityrus and Alexis argue and finally insult each other over Alexis’s insistence that the black lamb should be condemned and the white one saved, even though they both come from the same mother; Thyrsis then interjects and declares that their bickering will cause them to neglect the welfare of all the lambs: Fie, Shepheards fie! while you these strifes begin,  Here creepes the woolfe; and there the fox gets in.  To your vaine piping on so deepe a reed  The Lambkins listen, but forget to feed.5  The tone here is hardly that of ‘dread’, as St Peter’s voice is described in ‘Lycidas’, but Randolph’s pastoral language is obviously similar. The specific message, however, is in line with the various royal edicts issued against discussion of predestination by Charles I and enforced by Laud, and which played a part in fomenting political conflict. Laud himself was as concerned at this time about disputation in divinity in the universities giving fuel to the machinations of lurking Jesuits as seditious Puritans: in September 1637 he asked the Oxford Vice-­Chancellor to pay more attention to printing at Oxford because a Jesuit controversalist named Edward Knott was paying to read proof sheets before publication, and a few months earlier Laud had expressed concerns to John Prideaux, the Regius Professor of Divinity, that William Chillingworth was writing works that were not sufficiently aggressive against Rome.6

314  c h a p t e r 13

Thyrsis goes on though in Randolph’s poem to outline a very non-­ Calvinist image of Christ’s blood flowing freely over all the pastoral characters who seek it out: Through his pearc’d side, through which a speare was sent,  A torrent of all flowing Balsame went.  Run Amarillis run: one drop from thence  Cures thy sad soule, and drives all anguish hence.7  Yet while Randolph’s Thyrsis objects to the playing of ‘so deepe a reed’ as doctrinal dispute over predestination, the poet in ‘Lycidas’ laments the clerical playing on ‘scrannel Pipes of wretched straw’, to produce ‘lean and flashy songs’. The scorn here for the lack of intellectual depth displayed by the English clergy recalls the comments that Milton made to Gil the younger in his 1628 letter from Cambridge, in which Milton decried his fellow students who, ‘almost completely unskilled and unlearned in Philology and Philosophy alike’, ‘flutter off to Theology unfledged, quite content to touch that also most lightly, learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue by any method whatever and patching it with worn-­out pieces from various sources’. This is a practice, Milton darkly adds, that makes him fear ‘the priestly Ignorance’ of the periods under Catholic rule ‘may gradually attack our Clergy’.8 It was an anxiety that Milton aired in Christ’s in the context of the public oration later published as Prolusion VII, when he warned that the neglect of learning in the universities risked returning England to the pre-­ Reformation age when ‘nothing was heard in the schools but the absurd doctrines of drivelling monks’. St Peter’s complaint in ‘Lycidas’ put into print for the first time concerns that had long bothered Milton about the standard of the clergy entering the Church of England and the possible consequences of their intellectual inadequacy for the Protestant nation: the restoration of Roman Catholic rule not by external invasion but from within, represented by ‘the grim Woolf with privy paw’ (line 128). However, there are also signs of a turn away at the level of poetic language from devotional tastes in a Cambridge that had become increasingly under the sway of the Laudian Church since Milton had left

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   315

in 1632. Several of the contributors to the collection for King apply the Baroque techniques of the Passion poetry that had been fashionable in Cambridge to their elegies, most notably Milton’s contemporary John Cleveland, whose elegy for King begins: I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize His artificial grief that scans his eyes; Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I Confine them to the Muses’ rosary? I am no poet here; my pen’s the spout Where the rain-­water of my eyes runs out, In pity of that name, whose fate we see Thus copied out in grief ’s hydrography.9 The imagery here is stretched to the point that it can look comically bathetic to modern eyes, however much we might enjoy Cleveland’s final couplet: ‘And that our tears shall seem the Irish seas / We floating Islands, living Hebrides’. We can compare Milton’s own rather hyperbolic images of tears as script in ‘The Passion’: My sorrows are too dark for day to know: The leaves should all be black wheron I write, And letters where my tears have washt a wannish white [ . . . ] For sure so well instructed are my tears, That they would fitly fall in order’d Characters. (lines 33–5, 48–9) Cleveland drives to the verge of parody the idiom of the Baroque Passion poetry at which Milton had tried his hand at Cambridge and found not to his talent and seemingly also not to his taste. In the final section of ‘Lycidas’, at least before the third-­person coda, we are roused from our mourning by ‘Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more, / For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead’ (lines 165–6). This clarion call feels like a response to all the elegies that have gone before, which dwell on the grief and tears of King’s friends and colleagues. Finally the Miltonic poet will not cry for the lost watery corpse

316  c h a p t e r 13

of ‘Lycidas’ but celebrate his eternal life in heaven: ‘With Nectar pure his oozy Lock’s he laves’ (line 175). Specifically red nectar is used in the Aeneid, 19. 38, to keep the corpse of Patrocles from decaying; the red nectar in the hair of Lycidas perhaps replaces the bloody locks of Christ familiar from the Baroque ‘poetry of tears’ tradition. But Milton also raises pastoral directness and plainness over the ‘poetry of tears’ and its elaborate Baroque contortions as we find them in the epigrams of Crashaw on the dying Christ and in Cleveland’s elegy for King. In ‘The Passion’ that refusal was made essentially on technical poetic grounds; but when we get to ‘Lycidas’ it seems driven by something more—a rejection of a devotional style that had by 1637 became identified with the Laudian values of Peterhouse men such as Beaumont and Crashaw, including its by now characteristic poetics of catachresis, or exaggerated comparison. ‘Blind mouths!’: this famous exclamation of St Peter was given its definitive explication by John Ruskin in 1865, who explained that the ‘blind mouths’ are the antithesis of ‘bishop’, one who sees, and ‘pastor’, one who feeds. But Ruskin’s account of etymological irony does not quite account for the disorientating effect that the phrase has on readers, who are struck by a surreal image rather than a linguistic pun. For images of ‘blind mouths’ in the ‘poetry of tears’ tradition we could look back to Crashaw’s uncomfortable images in the opening stanza of ‘On the Wounds of our Crucified Christ’ of Christ’s bleeding wounds as at once eyes and mouths: O these wakeful wounds of thine! Are they Mouthes? Or are they eyes? Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne, Each bleeding part some one supplies. Milton could not have read Crashaw’s vernacular rendering of this poem in 1637; but he could have read its Latin original in the 1634 Epigrammata sacra. The image of the ‘blind mouths’ of ‘Lycidas’—the most aggressive moment in the poem—associates the intellectual and spiritual decline of the English clergy with the Baroque poetics that made a poet’s name in Caroline Cambridge. We can now see how the first digression of ‘Lycidas’, in which Milton considers and discounts the at-

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   317

tractions of a poetic career built on flashy lyrics, and the second digression, St Peter’s attack on the Laudian clergy, are thematically as well as structurally linked. As J. M. French put it many years ago: ‘Amaryllis has metamorphosed into ecclesiastical sinecure but the principle is the same.’10

Index Expurgatorious The other powerful and somewhat abstract image in St Peter’s complaint is that of the ‘two-­handed engine at the door’, the precise meaning of which has been one of the most discussed cruxes in English poetry.11 The most likely meaning is the most obvious: the two-­edged sword of Revelation (1: 16, 19: 15), commonly associated with the Word of God. As we have seen, Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica of 1628 had been received throughout Europe as an intellectually weighty explanation of human history as culminating in the defeat of the Antichrist in the form of the Pope. Mede’s understanding of the scene of Final Judgement described in Matthew 25: 32–3, as conveyed to his Calvinist friend Twisse in 1636, helps to explain the two-­handed nature of the ‘engine’ of judgement in ‘Lycidas’: when our Blessed Saviour shall sit upon his Throne of Royalty to judge the world; I conceive a Figure to be in that expression of placing the Sheep on his right hand and the Goats on the left, borrowed from the custome of the Jews in their Tribunals, to place such as were absolved on the right hand, where stood the Scribe who took the Votes for Absolution; and those who were to receive the sentence of Condemnation, on the left hand, where stood the Scribe who took the Votes for Condemnation.12 Mede goes on to underline his own conviction that the Day of Judgement is to be interpreted symbolically and will in fact last for the entire thousand-­year reign of Christ on earth, before Christ cedes his kingdom to God. Mede’s identification of apocalypse and millennium and idea of two judgements are key elements of his millenarian theory of history in the Clavis Apocalyptica, where he also supposed that Christ will

318  c h a p t e r 13

destroy his enemies by fire at the Last Judgement. In the account of the Second Coming in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton would follow Mede’s ‘synchronizing’ of the Last Judgement with the millennial kingdom of Christ.13 The readers of ‘Lycidas’ in Christ’s in 1638—including Mede himself, although he would die the following year—would surely have had little difficulty in identifying the apocalyptic provenance of Milton’s ‘two-­handed engine’. The familiarity of the imagery to Cambridge readers might seem to lend substance to the recent arguments that there ‘is nothing recognizably Puritan in the poem’s attack on ecclesiastical failures’ and that St Peter’s diatribe articulates a position of ‘moderate conservatism’ in religious politics that is in line with the policies of Archbishop Laud himself.14 Yet we have seen how Mede himself published nothing more on the topic of millenarianism that had made him famous after Laud became Archbishop of Canterbury, and how Laudianism came to be defined during the 1630s in part by the stigmatizing of apocalyptic ideas as characteristic of a schismatic Puritanism and in need, like discussion of predestination, of suppression. In Mede’s private correspondence in the mid-­1630s, he refers acidly to the new culture of ‘immoderation’ that would no longer tolerate his ‘Speculations’ about millenarian history and how ‘publick avouching’ of positions contrary to Laudian orthodoxy is to be avoided ‘for feare of incurring such dangerous prejudice by an over-­potent opposition’.15 The religious politics of the second digression in ‘Lycidas’ are also to be differentiated from Milton’s own earlier university exercises in anti-­Catholic poetics, most notably In Quintum Novembris, for in ‘Lycidas’ the conventional rhetoric of anti-­popish complaint is turned against the bishops of the Church of England. The ascription of Catholic forms of corruption to the Laudian Church was characteristic of the increasingly militant polemic of previously conformist Puritans, such as Milton’s friend and former tutor, Thomas Young. In 1636 Young had composed a work, Dies Dominica, that intervened in one of the issues that came to define the increasingly bitter religious divisions of Charles I’s Personal Rule: the observance of the Sabbath. In 1633 Charles had reissued the Book of Sports, James I’s official licence of Sunday sports and holiday recreations that had first been is-

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   319

sued in 1618, when it was aimed at constraining the regional activism against Sunday recreations of ‘Puritans and Precisians’, who henceforth had to ‘conform themselves or to leave the country, according to the laws of our kingdom and the canons of our Church’. Those who did not conform to this declaration were both ‘Contemners of our authority and adversaries of our Church’.16 While the Book of Sports was in one sense itself a sabbatarian document which commanded the attendance of services on a Sunday and decreed that games could be played after the service by those who attended, James’s aggressive preface and postscript, retained by Charles in the 1633 declaration, nonetheless identified strict Sunday observance with Puritanism, Puritanism with non-­ conformity to the established Church, and non-­conformity with seditious behaviour towards monarch and state. The 1618 Book of Sports had disturbed the largely consensual religious politics of Jacobean England and its reissue became a focus of dissension during the Personal Rule, particularly in the years 1635–7, which witnessed ‘an explosion of printed works discussing, opposing and defending the religious policies of Archbishop Laud’.17 In 1636 Peter Heylin, the most prominent defender of Laudian policy and polemicist against Presbyterianism in these years, issued his History of the Sabbath, in which he falsely represented the notion of a morally binding Sabbath as a Puritan invention, warning that the Puritans’ opposition to Sunday sports indicated their desire to impose Judaism on the English people. In the same year the Presbyterian activists Henry Burton and William Prynne (still languishing in prison since 1634) published four works rebutting anti-­sabbatarian polemic, including A Divine Tragedy Lately Acted, in which the cleric Burton listed examples of God’s judgements on the English in the years since Charles had reissued the Book of Sports. The promotion of Sunday sports was for Burton and Prynne only one aspect of the popish emphasis on ritualism fostered by the Laudian Church. Young’s Dies Dominica was presumably intended as a contribution to this controversy in 1636 but Young wrote in Latin rather than the vernacular to signal the scholarly credentials of his historical account of how ‘the observation of the Lord’s Day was from the Apostles’, including a ‘Table of the Fathers, and other Writers, out of whom this

320  c h a p t e r 13

Narration is described’, that even cites the publication details of the specific editions consulted. Young interestingly defends his use of non-­ biblical sources in terms that are echoed in Milton’s entry in his commonplace book before April 1638 on ‘whether it be allowed to devote one’s attention to profane writers’, in which he cites the church historians Socrates Scholasticus, Eusebius, and Theoderet. Young cites Jerome in countering the objection that ‘I ascribe more to Antiquity than Truth: for that I leave to the Papists: but I am determined with St. Hierom, to read the Antients, try all things, hold fast what is good, and not recede from the faith of the Catholick Church. I run not unweaponed, that is, deprived of spiritual knowledge, revealed in Gods Word, to the Antients.’18 Nonetheless Young adopts a polemical tone even while avoiding any direct reference to contemporary controversy, condemning those who would violate the Lord’s Day with festivals and recreations ‘in this deplorable state of the church’ as ‘bewitched with the malignant spirit of Popery’. He refers to how ‘the victory in this our age inclineth to the enemies’ and how ‘we have sought unsuccessfully these twenty years, against the enemies of our liberty, that have roared in the Churches of God’. The popish enemy is not defined as an external threat and the lines of division are rather within the English Church and state. Young recounts the story of how the sixth-­century king of Burgundy, Guntram, had ‘reproved the Bishops which fed not with Gospel Doctrines the people committed to them, who, by their profligate manners stirred up the wrath of a revenging God against him: to prevent which evil for the future, it was ordained in a Council, That the Lords day should be kept religiously’.19 Young’s Dies Dominica should ‘be printed shortly’, according to a note made by the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib in his diary in 1636; Hartlib had evidently seen a scribal copy, as he describes it as ‘an excellent Tract’.20 Yet it was not finally published until 1639, and even then under a pseudonym (‘Theophilus Philo-­kuriaces’, or ‘Theophilus Lover-­of-­ kirks’), and with no printer or place of publication on the title-­page. The delay in publication was most likely due to the alarm of Young and any potential printers at the consequences for others who had become involved in the increasingly high-­stakes debate over Sabbath observation.

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   321

Religious dissent had been recategorized as political subversion by the Caroline government: on 14 June 1637, Prynne, Burton, and John Bastwick, a doctor whose various pamphlets of 1637 had identified the English bishops with the Beast of Revelation and thus with the Antichrist of Rome, were sentenced by Star Chamber to have their ears cut off, to be fined five thousand pounds, and to be imprisoned for life. Prynne, who had of course already had his ears cropped and been in prison for three years, was also branded on the cheeks with the letters ‘S. L.’ for ‘seditious libeller’, although Prynne appropriated the stigmatization to suggest that the letters stood for ‘stigmata laudis’, literally meaning ‘signs of praise’ but punning on ‘signs of Laud’. Milton’s friend Alexander Gil had narrowly escaped the same fate in 1628 for his possession of satirical libels in manuscript about Buckingham: the trial and persecution of Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne—who embodied the educated classes as a cleric, a doctor, and a lawyer—for seditious libel over such matters as Sabbath observation graphically demonstrated how the full force of the state was now behind the imposition of Laudian orthodoxy. How interested was Milton in 1636–7 in the matters of religious doctrine that had provoked previously conformist Puritans such as Young to join with long-­standing Presbyterian agitators such as Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick to attack the episcopal structure of the Church of England? As we shall see in Chapter 15, even in his first major anti-­ prelatical prose work, Of Reformation, Milton displays little interest in the doctrinal debates between Episcopalians, Laudian and otherwise, and Presbyterians. The fundamental debate between Presbyterian and Episcopalian boiled down to philology, as Bastwick makes clear in one of his 1637 pamphlets: ‘the words Presbyter & Bishop . . . in holy Scripture, though diverse in sound, signifie one and the same thing’.21 The Presbyterians argued that two Greek words in the text of the New Testament, episcopos (bishop) and presbuteros (elder), signified the same rank of cleric; Episcopalians argued that they were distinct, episcopoi referring to members of a senior rank to the presbuteroi. But the political consequences of this apparently minor philological–historical dispute were grave: that the bishops’ claims to derive their authority directly from Christ and the Apostles were false and that the exclusive power

322  c h a p t e r 13

held by the bishops in Church and state was thus illegitimate, and should be replaced by the Presbyterian system based on parish churches overseen by a hierarchy of church courts, consisting of elected ministers and lay elders. Bastwick, who referred to the Pope as the ‘Bishop of Rome’, mocked what he alleged was Laud’s argument against him in the court of Star Chamber: But last of all came forth the Prelat of Canterbury, who with, a frontlesse boldnes avouched his Episcopall Autority & preeminency over his brethren to be onely from God, very much blaming Calvin for his factious Spirit, saying: That their Ecclesiasticall Autority & the power they exercised, was from Christ Jesus, and produced Timothy and Titus to prove the same assertion and that Bishops were before Christian Kings, and they held the Crownes of Kings upon their heads; For, no Bishop no King, & those that would have no Bishops, sought to overthrow all Government. We know from his commonplace book entries that Milton was interested in 1636–7 in ecclesiastical censorship and the persecution of writers in other times and other countries—the missing ‘Index Theologicus’ likely had a heading ‘Episcopi’ under which further examples would have been gathered—and that he displayed a typically humanist interest in the effects of clerical usurpation of political power upon the intellectual and spiritual climate of a nation.22 The decline of English learning under the brief Catholic reign of Queen Mary had been a refrain of Protestant humanists such as Roger Ascham. While the satirical libels that circulated in the universities when Milton was a student remained in scribal form, and were consequently largely tolerated by the authorities, the Puritan activists of the later 1630s sought to put their criticism of the Church and court into print. Bastwick’s pamphlets had to be published abroad and John Lilburne, the future Leveller leader, was later whipped and imprisoned in April 1638 for his role in getting the Letany of John Bastwicke published in Leiden—a punishment that he represented as that of a Protestant martyr by the ‘beast’ of a popish Laudian episcopacy in The Christian Mans Triall (March 1638) and A Worke of the Beast (April 1638). The court of Star Chamber issued a decree ‘con-

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   323

cerning Printing’ on 11 July 1637 reasserting the system of licensing of books: No Person or Persons whatsoever shall presume to Print or cause to be Printed, either in the Parts beyond the Seas, or in this Realm, or other his Majesty’s Dominions, any Seditious, Schismatical, or offensive Books or Pamphlets, to the scandal of Religion, or the Church, or the Government, or Governors of the Church and State, or Common-­wealth, or of any Corporation, or particular Person or Persons whatsoever, nor shall import any such Book or Books, nor sell or dipose of them[.] The decree also stipulated that nothing could be published that had not first been licensed and entered in the Stationers’ Register, the record book maintained by the Stationers’ Company of London. The power of licensing works even of philosophy and poetry, as well as divinity, was reaffirmed as the task of Laud and the episcopal hierarchy: all books ‘whether of Divinity, Physick, Philosophy, Poetry, or whatsoever shall be allowed by the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, or Bishop of London for the time being’.23 In Canterburies Doome, published to justify the execution of Laud in 1645, Prynne made much of the Laudian regime’s application of what he regarded as popish policies of censorship under this 1637 decree, including a lengthy ‘English Index Expurgatorious’ of censored books: having given you this large account of what popish doctrines and positions both [Laud] himselfe, his Chaplaines, Agents, printed, authorized to corrupt the peoples judgement; we shall next present you with a large English Index Expurgatorius, of what passages he and they expunged out of sundry English Writers, tendered them to license, before they could passe the Presse; which will most clearly discover his and their Jesuiticall practises, confederacies and designes to introduce the whole body of Popery among us with little or no opposition.24 By the time that Prynne published this complaint against Laudian censorship, Milton had come to regard him as a rank hypocrite: in 1644

324  c h a p t e r 13

Prynne cited Milton’s writings on divorce as illustrative of the need to suppress the ‘late dangerous increase of many Anabaptisticall, Antinomian, Hereticall, Atheisticall opinions’ through the imposition of Presbyterian Church government.25 In ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’, one of the three satirical sonnets that he composed in 1646–7 on the hostile Presbyterian reaction to his ideas on divorce, Milton reminded the Presbyterians that they themselves were imitating both the Inquisition of Rome and the persecutory regime under which they suffered under Laudian rule in seeking to force the consciences of the English people: But we do hope to find out all your tricks, Your plots and packing worse than those of Trent, That so the Parliament May with their wholesom and preventive Shears Clip your phylacteries, though bauk your Ears. (lines 13–17) The Westminster Assembly, dominated by Presbyterian clergy, is deemed ‘worse’ than the Counter-­Reformation Council of Trent, whose repressive policies were detailed by Paolo Sarpi in his history of the Council, while the reference to Presbyterian ears invokes the infamous punishments meted out to Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne in 1637. The version of the sonnet quoted above is the printed text of 1673, in which Milton emphasizes that Parliament will subdue the Presbyterians but not physically persecute them, so distinguishing its rule from the religious tyrannies of the past. However in line 17 of the first draft of the sonnet in the Trinity manuscript, later scored out, Milton looked forward to other Presbyterian clerics suffering the same punishment as Prynne had twice received in the 1630s: ‘Cropp ye as close as marginall P[rynne’]s eares’.26 The rhyme of ‘shears’ and ‘ears’ echoes that in ‘Lycidas’ of the ‘abhorred shears’ of the ‘blind Fury’ with the ‘trembling ears’ of the poet (lines 75, 77). The self-­echo in the sonnet suggests a link in Milton’s mind between the shears coming to cut short the poet’s time in ‘Lycidas’ and the state persecution meted out on Prynne’s ears earlier in 1637.27

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   325

The threats to the poet’s envisaged ascent in ‘Lycidas’ to the composition of heroic and epic verse are seemingly not only internal—the temptation to ease represented by Amaryllis and Neaera; the anxiety about both prematurity and belatedness—but external, in the form of a religious and political culture of censorship and persecution. Milton’s collation of censored and uncensored copies of Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante offered a material example, after all, of the cutting away by the clerical state of episodes in literature, history, and ideas. Prynne’s loss of what remained of his ears in June 1637, after they had initially been cropped for his comments about female performers in theatrical entertainments, may even have had a bearing on Milton’s reluctance to put his name to the published text of the Maske at the end of that year. To appear in print as the author of an aristocratic masque, the lead role of which had been performed by a fifteen-­year-­old girl, was implicitly to take a side in the culture wars that had become part of the sharpening religious divisions in England. Milton and his family had also had recent experience of Laudian efforts to enforce conformity of spatial organization and devotional practice in parish churches through episcopal visitations. These visitations were intended most notably to confirm that communion tables were removed to the east end of churches, enclosing them with rails, and that parishioners were required to receive the sacrament while kneeling before these newly restored ‘altars’. Pewing arrangements were another aspect of the Laudian reorganization of the material space of the parish church: the position of pews in the church was reflective of social hierarchy in the parish, but the Laudian reforms tended to disrupt this organization of seating by changing the position of the communion table. One of the arguments made for placing the communion table against the east wall and railing it in was to change seating arrangements that, in the words of the pro-­Laudian Bishop of Bath and Wells, William Piers, in 1634, allowed ‘the People to sit above Gods Table’.28 As we saw in the previous chapter, the visitation by the archdeacon of the diocese of Lincoln to Horton parish church on 8 August 1637 led to the rector, Edward Goodall, being cited for partial non-­conformity in his preaching practice. The visitation also resulted in the Milton family’s pew being

326  c h a p t e r 13

ordered lowered, having been declared ‘to[o] high’, while the tombstone of Milton’s mother, Sarah, was cited for ‘being laid the wrong waye’, or not facing east. The orders were at least partially followed by Goodall and the Milton family: on 21 February 1638, the church court records noted that ‘mr Goodall hath cutt his seate and so hath mr Milton’; however the tombstone of Sarah Milton remains to this day facing west rather than the altar.29 It may seem unlikely that such seemingly minor issues of parish church organization could play a significant part in shaping Milton’s intellectual attitudes towards the Laudian Church, but pews were ‘more than simply a piece of church furniture’ in seventeenth-­century England: ‘To those who sat in them pews represented a piece of personal property and a stake in the local community, to some a marker of their wealth, political status, and property, to others a fragment of one’s own identity and lineage.’30 The Milton family would have been one of the more wealthy and notable families in Horton in 1637, and the order to lower their pew may have caused Milton and his father some offence; it also seems psychologically plausible that the requirement to reposition his recently deceased mother’s tombstone may have disturbed Milton, and that the visitation thus constituted a particularly personal encounter with a Caroline episcopal order that appeared to him to be increasingly despotic in its demands for conformity. In his polemical history of how episcopal power has subjected monarchs in Of Reformation, Milton recounts how, when the Emperor Theodosius sought to do public penance before the altar for his sins, having been excommunicated by Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, ‘a bold Archdeacon comes in the Bishops name, and chaces him from within the railes telling him peremptorily that the place wherein he stood, was for none but Priests to enter, or to touch’.31 The scornful allusion here is to the Laudian visitations of the 1630s, and the Horton visitation was performed by an archdeacon coming in the bishop’s name to pronounce on the proper organization of sacred space in the church. The passage suggests the Horton episode may have lingered in Milton’s memory as a personal encounter with the tyrannous behaviour of the Laudian Church.

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   327

St Peter’s apocalyptic attack on episcopal inadequacy and corruption in ‘Lycidas’, for all the conventionality of its pastoral anti-­clericalism, does suggest Milton’s emerging sense in late 1637 that Laudian England would not offer a context in which the great intellectual and poetic feats for which he had prepared through years of arduous study could be attempted and achieved. This sense was shaped by a combination of factors in 1636–8: his reading, as partially recorded in his surviving commonplace book, about the effects of censorship, persecution, and the branding of books as heretical in other cultures and periods, particularly Renaissance and Counter-­Reformation Italy; public events such as the persecution of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, which bloodily embodied the sharp religious and cultural divisions in the country, and the decrees of Star Chamber on licensing and control of the circulation of books; private experiences such as the episcopal visitation of the Horton parish church, which gave personal shape to Laud’s national drive to impose religious conformity; and perhaps conversation with his former tutor Young, a man for whose learning and spiritual integrity he had great respect and who, though still outwardly conformable, was now increasingly involved in Puritan opposition to the policies of a Laudian Church that had redefined the boundaries of religious orthodoxy in matters of both doctrine and discipline. If Boccaccio’s first sort of the ‘shepherd of the soul’, the prelates and the clerics, were not fulfilling their vocation to nourish spiritually their flock, then neither could the second sort, the Dantean scholar-­poet, fulfil his vocation and write the vernacular epic that would instruct his nation.

Genius of the Shore The final section of ‘Lycidas’, after the ‘dread voice’ of St Peter has died away, reasserts the magnitude of that poetic ambition, and the final rewards of the studious dedication and abstinence required to achieve that ambition (line 132). The darker side of pagan ritual had earlier overshadowed ‘Lycidas’ in the images of sparagmos, applied to Orpheus, Lycidas, and, potentially, the poet himself; in the final section of the

328  c h a p t e r 13

poem, the poet looks to the sacrifice of Christ, which has purchased eternal life for the virtuous and virginal King: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves Where other groves, and other streams along, With Nectar pure his oozy Lock’s he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptiall Song, In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet Societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. (lines 172–81) A series of allusions to Revelation emphasize the release both from mourning and from the cyclic movements of pagan naturalism into the linear narrative of apocalypse. ‘[O]ther groves, and other streams’ alludes to the tree of life (7: 17) and ‘living fountains of waters’ (12: 2), while the ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’, which echoes the ‘unexpressive notes’ of the angelic choir greeting the birth of Christ in the ‘Nativity Ode’ (line 116), invokes the ‘marriage of the Lamb’ (19: 7). King’s earthly virtue has been rewarded with marriage to Christ, with whom he shall reside eternally in the heavenly paradise where there ‘shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain’ (21: 4). The ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’ that Lycidas hears in heaven also invokes the reward of virginity in Revelation 14: 3–4: ‘no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth. These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. These were redeemed from among men, being the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb.’32 In the revisions that he made to the Maske in the version published at the beginning of 1638, Milton heightened the identification of virginity with the virtuous transformation of flesh into spirit, and the closing section of ‘Lycidas’ further suggests the hold of that identification over his mind in 1637. The idea of the daemonic also continues to hold sway

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   329

over his poetic imagination: Lycidas / King is transformed into the ‘the genius of the shore’, a tutelary spirit who guards the Cornish coastline along the Irish Sea (line 183). One of Erasmus’s dialogues in his enormously popular Colloquies (1518) that might have come to Milton’s mind in contemplating King’s death in a shipwreck was Naufragium, or ‘Shipwreck’, which mocked the superstitious invocation of saints by recounting how most of the men on a sinking ship drowned because they spent their time making vows to the Virgin Mary and various saints that were thought to protect the sea rather than trying to save themselves.33 Yet the young Milton’s fascination with the notion of becoming daemonic through virtuous and studious earthly existence suggests that the transformation of Lycidas into a ‘genius of the shore’ was not simply a poetic flourish but an aspect of Milton’s personal soteriology of virtue. ‘Lycidas’ begins ‘Yet once more’, with the poet locked in a cycle of recurrence that is finally broken by ‘smite no more’ and ‘weep no more’, echoing not only Revelation but the description of apocalyptic judgement by St Paul in Epistle to the Hebrews, 12: 25–7: ‘For if they escaped not who refuse him that spake on earth, much more shall we not escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven: Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken.’ The Epicurean randomness of King’s death in the first digression, which causes the poet such (apparent) anxiety, has been qualified in the digressions and finally replaced in the apotheosis passage by the Christian economy of eternal reward and punishment. The movement which ‘Lycidas’ works through from pagan and pastoral cycles of death and rebirth to apocalyptic linearity informs the remarkable final eight lines, and their sudden introduction of a third-­person narrator into what the reader has assumed to be a first-­person poem: Thus sang the uncouth Swain to th’Okes and rills, While the still morn went out with Sandals grey, He touch’d the tender stops of various quills, With eager thought warbling his Dorick lay:

330  c h a p t e r 13

And now the Sun had stretch’d out all the hills, And now was dropped into the Western bay; At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew. To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new. (lines 186–93) The celestial rebirth of Lycidas finds a parallel in the sense here of the poet leaving behind the lyric self who sang the pastoral elegy; but if the movement of the poem becomes abruptly teleologic, the process is as much Virgilian as apocalyptic in the renewed echoes of Virgil’s tenth and final eclogue and its own concluding lines: My muses, here your sacred raptures end: The verse was what I owed my suffering friend. [ . . . ] Now let us rise; for hoarseness oft invades The singer’s voice, who sings beneath the shades. From juniper unwholesome dews distil, That blast the sooty corn, the withering herbage kill: Away, my goats, away! For you have browsed your fill.34 The debt to the conclusion of Virgil’s last eclogue is combined with the adoption of ottava rima, the stanzaic form of the great Italian epic romances, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, and of their Elizabethan translations by John Harington and Edward Fairfax—a regularity always threatened but never quite obtained earlier in ‘Lycidas’, which in its metrical swells and billows seems to take literally John Cleveland’s insistence in Justa Edouardo King naufrago that ‘The sea’s too rough for verse; who rhymes upon’t / With Xerxes strives to fetter th’Hellespont’. The metrical disruptions of the poem prior to the final eight lines are variations on the complex patterns of the Italian canzone, which Milton had been practising both in Italian (‘Canzone’) and English (‘At a Solemn Musick’).35 In their sudden regularity the final eight lines look forward to the next step on the Virgilian cursus: Milton would declare in print within four years that he sought to follow Ariosto’s example in becoming ‘an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the

w r i t i n g a n d s o c i e t y i n ‘ ly c i da s ’   331

mother dialect’. There is a recollection also of the opening of ‘E. K.’s preface to The Shepheardes Calender, announcing Spenser as ‘this our new Poete, who for that he is uncouthe (as said Chaucer) is unkist, and unknown to most men, is regarded but of few. But I doubt not, so soone as his name shall come into the knowledg[e] of men, and his worthines be sounded in the tromp of fame, but that he shall be not only kiste, but also beloved of all, embraced of the most, and wondred at of the best.’36 The fusing of apocalyptic historical process and the poet’s Virgilian literary progress in the conclusion to ‘Lycidas’ underlines, retrospectively, the inadequacy of Apollo’s resolution of the first digression, at least for Milton—that fame is only truly found in heaven rather than in earthly achievement. The Virgilian and Spenserian career model ‘foregrounds the poet’s public role in the multi-­sphered life of the nation’.37 In this respect St Peter’s attack on clerical corruption represents the birth of Milton’s career as a public writer; or at least that is how Milton wanted his readers to view it when he added the headnote in the 1645 Poems that turned the funeral elegy into a response to a public as well as personal moment. It has been wittily observed by Christopher Ricks that ‘many of the original readers in 1638 are unlikely even to have known who “J. M.” was, let alone to have been on the look-­out for Personal Column announcements hidden in the poem’.38 And indeed some Cambridge readers of ‘Lycidas’ by ‘J. M.’ who had not known Milton at Christ’s would have been more likely to appreciate the allusion to the popular digression on the lowliness of scholars in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander than any claims to a personal poetic trajectory. But sophisticated readers who had known Milton as a student, such as Mede, More, and Cleveland, would have recognized the Virgilian pretensions of the ‘Lady’ of Christ’s, even if they may have been surprised by the aggressive and apocalyptic anti-­clericalism in his poem after a year of mounting ideological tension in England.

CHAPTER 14

•

Come un Virtuoso

In Circe’s Court Although our knowledge of the matter is still surprisingly sketchy, it is becoming clearer that ‘educational travel on the continent following a fairly well-­established itinerary had become a convention of upper-­class English travel by the end of the 1630s’, with France, Italy, and Switzerland the prime destinations. Such travel was not associated only with the cultivation of gentlemen: academics had long sought to travel on humanistic grounds, and were sometimes encouraged by their colleges. An example from the late 1630s is Daniel Vivian, a Fellow of New College, Oxford, who in 1636 was given a leave of absence for a year by his college to travel on the continent. The Caroline ‘boom’ in ‘educational and cultural tourism’ not only continued into the civil war decades, but was to some extent even encouraged by the outbreak of the war. Men who went abroad in the 1640s were not necessarily going into exile, it has been suggested, so much as ‘strategically absenting themselves’ from the conflict by engaging in a ‘well-­established educational convention’.1 Given the increasingly tense and polarized religious and political situation in England, Milton’s decision to leave for a fifteen-­month tour of the continent in May 1638 might well be seen as such a case of strategic absence. At the same time the letter in November 1637 to Diodati expressed his frustration with living in Horton in ‘obscurity and cramped quarters’ and without companionship, and loftily proclaimed his desire to purse the beauty of the divine (or the daemonic) in all its various forms. The 332

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   333

letter also outlines his on-­going and rigorous course of study in the history of the Italian states. Given his friendship with the Diodati family of Italian Protestant émigrés, the facility with the language evident in his Italian sonnets, his reading in the Italian vernacular poets—Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Tasso; also Della Casa and Varchi, copies of whose verse he had owned since 1629—and of course his deep engagement with the language and literature of classical Rome, the desire to travel to Italy was likely prompted mostly by personal fascination. But the decision to go in the spring of 1638 may have been spurred by the worsening public context not only in England, but throughout the three kingdoms. The Scottish Presbyterians had rejected in 1637 the attempt by Charles and Laud to impose a new liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer on the country and in February 1638 had issued the National Covenant, by which they bound themselves to maintain, by military force if necessary, the reformed religion as it was practised in the country. These events would lead to the expulsion of the Scottish bishops by the end of the year and subsequently the first ‘Bishops’ War’ in May 1639, when Charles led an army to the border but then agreed to refer all the disputed issues back for discussion in the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk. Milton returned to England in the late summer of 1639, soon after this agreement; known as the Pacification of Berwick, it was widely perceived as a humiliation for the king and his forces.2 At least since the Romantics, there has been a tendency to picture Milton’s tour of Italy as a transformational experience that gave him ‘a new confidence and direction’ in his poetic vocation after his enthusiastic reception by European intellectuals and Italian men of letters— Wordsworth self-­consciously followed in Milton’s footsteps in his travels in Italy.3 To a great extent this image of the Italian tour relies on Milton’s own account of his travels in the polemical contexts of the Defensio Secunda in 1654, where he is defending his own character in Latin to a learned European audience, although his extant correspondence with some of these figures and surviving documentary records of his time in Italy tend to confirm his own account. The curious lines that he scribbled on the back of the letter from Henry Lawes that enclosed his passport—‘Fix here, ye overdated spheres / That wing the

334  c h a p t e r 1 4

restless foot of time’—suggest eagerness to embark on a trip that would belatedly see an advancement of his poetic ambitions. ‘Overdated’, a word not previously recorded, has the sense less that the spheres are ‘antiquated, out of date’, as John Carey suggests, than that they are later than they should have been. If the lines register the debt to Lawes, who has enabled Milton to embark on the journey which he thought ‘might end his apprenticeship and make him an artist of European stature’, they are also ‘precipitated by alarm that, as he begins another preparation, he might already have missed his time’.4 It is not so often acknowledged that Milton’s retrospective account of his tour in the Defensio Secunda is as concerned with its dangers as its delights. When Milton visited Naples, his host, Giovanni Batista Manso (1561–?1647), ‘gravely apologised because although he had especially wished to show me many more attentions, he would not do so in that city, since I was unwilling to be circumspect in regard to religion’. As Milton was about to return to Rome, some merchants warned ‘that they had learned through letters of plots laid against me by the English Jesuits, should I return to Rome, because of the freedom with which I had spoken about religion’. He nonetheless did go back to Rome and ‘for almost two months, in the very stronghold of the Pope, if anyone attacked the orthodox religion, I openly, as before, defended it’. Milton sought of course to represent himself in retrospect as an implacable and fearless proponent of the Protestant truth, surrounded by its enemies; but also as one who had maintained his chastity in the face of constant temptation: ‘in all these places, where so much licence exists, I lived free and untouched by the slightest sin or reproach, reflecting constantly that although I might hide from the gaze of men, I could not elude the sight of God’.5 In the Defensio Secunda Milton was responding in print to the charge made by Pierre Du Moulin in 1652 that he had fled to Italy after being thrown out of Cambridge for sexual libertinism; but even private documents dating from the period exhibit satisfaction in having maintained his virtue on the tour. It might seem melodramatic to identify this chaste Milton, retaining his virginity against the blandishments of foreign libertines, with his own theatrical creation, the Lady lost in the wood—if Milton hadn’t

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   335

done so himself. He wrote the final lines of his Maske—‘Or if Virtue feeble were, / Heaven itself would stoop to her’—in the visitors’ album of Camillo Cerdogni in Geneva on 10 June 1639, along with a motto adapted from Horace’s Epistulae: ‘Caelum non animu[m] muto du[m] trans mare curro’ (I change my sky but not my mind when I cross the sea).6 The Neapolitan Protestant Cerdogni was a religious refugee in Calvinist Geneva: the line from Horace marks Milton’s own recent, arduous journey across the Pennine Alps on his journey back to England and proclaims him morally and spiritually untainted by his travels in the heartland of Catholicism. The lines from the Maske invoke the Neoplatonic soteriology dramatized in that work, in which grace is dependent on virtue rather than the reverse: divine grace will respond to, and assist, those who display consistent virtue, such as Milton evidently believed himself to have displayed in his travels through Italy. Milton’s travels to France and Italy are interestingly paralleled in the life of a man whom Milton would later come to know when he was employed by the Commonwealth government, and whom he may have first encountered on the continent in 1638. John Cook (bap. 1608, d. 1660) would act as the chief prosecutor at the trial of Charles I in 1648– 9, and was eventually executed as a regicide in 1660. In the later 1630s, Cook travelled widely on the continent and particularly in France and Italy as he sought to gain knowledge about the history and institutions of Counter-­Reformation Europe. Cook dined at the English College in Rome in April 1638, as Milton would do six months later, along with Patrick Carey, the fourteen-­year-­old son of Lucius Carey, Viscount Falkland; Cook then lodged in Geneva with Jean Diodati, signing Cerdogni’s album amicorum in August 1638, as Milton would do just over a year later. According to Edmund Ludlow, his close friend, when Cook was in Rome he behaved in the same defiant manner that Milton claimed characterized his time in the city, speaking ‘freely on the behalfe of the Reformed Religion, and so farr discovered his zeale and abillityes therein that no endeavours were wanting for the drawing him to owne the popish interest’.7 The complaint that Protestant English visitors were subject to attempts to convert them to Catholicism was common to travellers’ tales in the period.

336  c h a p t e r 1 4

Milton’s identification of his own journey through Catholic Italy with that of the Lady through Comus’s forest echoes accounts of the dangers of travelling in Italy in early modern England. In the closing section of the first book of The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham lamented the fashion for young English gentlemen to visit Italy, a practice that he thought ‘to be mervelous dangerous’. Ascham protested his love for the Italian language, which he placed next to Latin and Greek, and asserted his self-­evident respect for classical Roman culture; but language and history could be studied without actually visiting a country that was in sad decline: tyme was, whan Italie and Rome, have bene, to the greate good of us that now live, the best breeders and bringers up, of the worthiest men, not onelie for wise speakinge, but also for well doing, in all Civill affaires, that ever was in the worlde. But now, that tyme is gone, and though the place remayne, yet the olde and present maners, do differ as farre, as blacke and white, as vertue and vice. Vertue once made that contrie Mistres over all the worlde. Vice now maketh that contrie slave to them, that before, were glad to serve it . . . Italie now, is not that Italie, that it was wont to be[.]8 Ascham goes on to add that ‘if a gentleman will needs travel to Italy’, he should follow the example of Odysseus, ‘the wisest traveler, that ever traveled thether’. This leads him into a surprisingly extended account of Italy as a modern version of Circe’s court, from which the English traveller will return transformed and degraded: ‘Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian’, if he does not follow the practice of Odysseus and ‘feede dayly, upon that swete herbe Moly with the blake roote and white floore, given unto hym by Mercurie, to avoide all the inchantmentes of Circes’. Homeric ‘moly’ signifies for Christians ‘the feare of God, and love of honestie’. Ascham’s polemic culminates in a vision of the ‘English man Italianated’ as one who ‘by living, & traveling in Italie, bringeth home into England out of Italie the Religion, the learning, the policie, the experience, the maners of Italie’. One of the particular marks of Italian irreligion according to Ascham, for all his dedication to the Christian virtue instilled by a humanist education in rhetoric and

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   337

poetry, is their elevation of pagan and secular literature over the Scriptures, both in Latin and the vernacular: ‘they have in more reverence, the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses: They make more accounte of Tullies [Cicero] offices, than S. Paules epistles: of a tale in Bocace [Boccaccio], than a storie of the Bible’.9 Milton quoted Euripides to Diodati to convey his belief that the beauty of divine wisdom could be found in many shapes—in pagan Greek tragedy, presumably, as well as the Bible—and Milton, at least at this stage of his life, was not so willing to oppose secular and sacred texts. Milton’s interest in the literary example of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio was surely one of the motivations for his decision to visit Italy. Writing (in Latin) from Florence on 10 September 1638 to Benedetto Buonmattei, an eminent member of the literary clubs or academies with which Milton associated in Florence and an authority on the Tuscan language, Milton insisted that despite having immersed himself in classical literature ‘as much as anyone of my years’, he was ‘nevertheless glad to go for a feast to Dante and Petrarch, and a good many of your other authors’.10 Yet, as both the commonplace book and ‘Lycidas’ show, Milton had also been paying particular attention to the censorship and suppression to which these writers’ works had been subjected by the Catholic Church and to the anti-­clericalism that could be found in their poetry. The Italian writers offered examples not only of literary achievement but of the fraught interactions between poets and ecclesiastical and political authority.

‘Flattery and Fustian’ Ascham admitted that ‘I was once in Italie my selfe; but I thank God my Venice abode there, was but ix dayes’.11 Milton looked rather to the experience of Henry Wotton, who had served on three occasions as ambassador to Venice during a long and distinguished diplomatic career and to whom Milton wrote to ask for advice about travelling in April 1638, enclosing a copy of the edition of the Maske that had been put into print a few months earlier. Milton’s pride in the letter he received in return from Wotton is evident in his inclusion of it in the 1645 Poems

338  c h a p t e r 1 4

and he referred to the letter in the Defensio Secunda as proof of Wotton’s ‘single esteem for me’ and as containing ‘precepts of no little value to one going abroad’. Wotton provided Milton with an introduction to the English ambassador at Paris, the Anglo-­Irish nobleman Thomas Scudamore, who in turn gave Milton ‘letters to English merchants along my projected route’ to Florence. The ‘precepts’ to which Milton refers in the final paragraph of Wotton’s letter are concerned, however, with how to stay safe among the dangers of Rome. Wotton recounts the advice he received from Alberto Scipioni, ‘an old Roman courtier in dangerous times’, who had once managed to escape with his life when the Duke to whom he was steward ‘with all his Family were strangled’: ‘Signor Arrigo mio (sayes he) I pensieri stretti, & il viso sciolto’ (My Lord Harry . . . close thoughts, and an open countenance).12 Wotton knew all about the need for subterfuge and discretion in Italy, having been involved in smuggling the manuscript of Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition to London—a work that became increasingly important to Milton’s thinking in the early 1640s about the pernicious effects of religious censorship on the intellectual health of a nation. For all the pride that Milton took from his acceptance by the literary academies in Florence, the main use to which he put his Italian experience in the prose works was as a salutary example of what would happen to English learning and culture under what he regarded as popish forms of clerical domination. The meeting that Milton had with Galileo, placed under house arrest in Florence since 1633 for the heretical belief that the earth moved around the sun, is invoked in a key moment in the argument that he would make in Areopagitica about how learning and literature decline in a nation under conditions of clerical tyranny, which breed only a servility inimical to intellectual and literary achievement: I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits;

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   339

that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.13 The picture that Milton paints here is of a nation that had fallen from the heights of intellectual and artistic creativity as a consequence of an encroachment of clerical upon civil power that had suppressed wit, learning, and poetry. Milton tapped here into what has been called ‘the ideological significance for early modern English readers of the discourse of Italian humiliation’, which had been influentially articulated by figures such as Ascham.14 The history of the decline of the Italian states from the fifteenth century and of the division of the Italian peninsula by French, Spanish, and Papal forces, which had been recounted most powerfully by Francesco Guicciardini in his Storia d’Italia (c. 1537–40), was held up as a cautionary example to the English. For example, William Thomas had presented his Historie of Italie (1549) as a collection of examples of ‘tyranny and ill governance’; in giving travel advice to his brother Robert in 1578, Sir Philip Sidney declared that, apart from the republic of Venice, ‘whose laws and customs we can hardly proportion to our selves, because they are quite of a contrary government, there is little but tyrannous oppression and servile yielding to them that have little or no rule over them’.15 Sidney echoes Ascham in suggesting the model of Odysseus and his avoidance of temptation for any traveller to Italy. As we know from his letter to Diodati at the end of 1637, Milton had been reading intensively about the fortunes of the Italians, and was moving on to read separately about the history of each state; the commonplace book records his reading after 1640 in the 1636 Florentine edition of Guicciardini, likely one of the books that he bought on his tour and, he tells us in the Defensio Secunda, had shipped home in chests from Venice. The literary and cultural influence of Italy was thus at odds with English perceptions of the nation as weak, degenerate, and subject to both political and religious tyranny: that double perspective shapes the representation of Italy in Milton’s early prose works as the Italians’

340  c h a p t e r 1 4

humiliation is offered as an example of what could happen to England under similar forms of clerical domination. The account in Areopagitica is the only occasion on which Milton mentioned his meeting with Galileo, which has led some to doubt that it ever really happened. But there were a number of avenues by which Milton could have got his introduction: through Élie Diodati, Galileo’s translator and the relative of Charles Diodati, or Milton’s Florentine friend and correspondent Carlo Dati, who had been taught by Galileo, or by Galileo’s son Vincenzo, whom Dati included in a list of Italian friends sending Milton their greetings in a letter of December 1648. The other major European intellectual figure to whom Milton was introduced at the beginning of his travels had also been subject to state persecution over religious matters. Milton tells us that when he arrived in Paris, Thomas Scudamore arranged an audience with the ‘most erudite’ Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist and renowned general scholar, whom he ‘ardently desired to meet’ and who ‘at that time was [was] ambassador from the Queen of Sweden to the French court’. Grotius had originally escaped to France in 1621 from his sentence of life imprisonment in the Dutch republic—he was smuggled out in a book chest—after the Calvinist ‘Contra-­Remonstrants’ had taken power in the country and removed the Arminian ‘Remonstrants’ from any positions of authority. Although Grotius had briefly returned to his homeland, he was forced to flee again in 1632 and was never able to return. John Hales had witnessed Grotius argue with the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort, and Hales subsequently became a great admirer, reputedly keeping a portrait of Grotius in his study at Eton. Grotius was a key influence more generally on figures involved in the Great Tew circle in the 1630s, offering men such as Hales and William Chillingworth ways of thinking about ‘the broader implications of their own insistence on freedom, choice, and effort as the basis of Christianity’, as well as how to align liberty of conscience in religion with obedience in political and civil matters.16 If Milton did discuss his tour with Hales as well as Wotton, then Hales would likely have urged Milton to try and meet with Grotius. If Milton was later in the polemical prose to present his time in Italy as illustrative of how clerical domination of civil power bred servility in

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   341

a nation and deformed its intellectual and literary culture, it is also clear that Milton greatly enjoyed his association with the Florentine literary academies, of which there was no comparable model in England beyond the loose communities in which verse circulated scribally in the universities and Inns of Court. Buonmattei was a leading member of a number of these academies, including the Svogliati (‘The Will-­less’), before whom Milton performed some of his Latin poems in March and September 1639, and the Apatisti (‘The Unruffled’), in a list of whose members Milton was named.17 Antonio Malatesti (1610–72), a member of the Apatisti, even dedicated the manuscript of his sequence of fifty sonnets, La Tina: equivoci rusticali, to ‘il Signor Giovanni Milton Nobil’Inghilese’ in 1638—the bawdy nature of the sonnets hardly fits with the image of the chaste Virgilian vates with which Milton had liked to identify himself at Cambridge, so Malatesti was perhaps gently poking fun at his new English friend.18 The Florentine academies seem to have offered Milton an example of the ideal community of learned men, engaging in poetic display, competition, and tribute; his pride in his acceptance by the academies is evident in the Defensio Secunda, where he refers to them as deserving ‘great praise not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse’.19 The kind of conversation in which Milton engaged in the academies is suggested by one of the extant letters that Carlo Dati wrote to Milton in November 1647, nearly a decade after Milton had first met Dati, then aged only eighteen but already hailed as an intellectual prodigy in Florence. Dati wrote in Tuscan because Milton was so gifted ‘for making dead languages live again and making foreign languages your own’. He asked if Milton would write an elegy for a recently deceased Florentine poet, Francesco Rovai, and disclosed ‘those most excellent patrons and men of letters of our age’, Nicholas Heinsius and Isaac Vossius, had already agreed to do so.20 Dati’s reference to Heinsius (1620–81) and Vossius (1618–89), both renowned Dutch humanists and textual scholars, indicates how Milton’s contact with the Florentine academies gave him insights into the workings of the ‘republic of letters’ in seventeenth-­ century Europe—a loose community of scholars joined by correspondence and personal affection who freely exchanged books, news, and

342  c h a p t e r 1 4

ideas across national boundaries. Given Milton’s vigorous anti-­ Catholicism, it has often been thought startling that he wrote in such fulsome terms from Florence in March 1639 to the Vatican librarian, Lukas Holste (1596–1661), who had shown him around the library and recommended him to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), the Prime Minister of Rome and chief advisor to Pope Urban VIII. When Milton attended the performance of a comic opera in the theatre of the newly constructed Palazzo Barberini in February 1639, the cardinal apparently ‘singled me out in so great a throng and, almost seizing me by the hand, welcomed me in an exceedingly honourable manner’. The New College Fellow, Daniel Vivian, also met with Barberini during his tour, and was similarly keen in his (unpublished) travel narrative to emphasize how friendly Barberini was towards him and the other Protestants with whom he was travelling.21 It has become increasingly clear that it is a misrepresentation of the seventeenth-­century republic of letters to regard its ‘citizens’ as standing above confessional divisions, dedicated to the ‘higher’ truths of scholarship. For example, the Stuarts’ Royal Librarian Patrick Young, who may have tutored Milton, and to whom Milton made a gift of a collection of his prose works in the later 1640s, found that his friendship with Holste was not enough to surmount confessional barriers when he asked about any manuscripts in the Vatican or Barberini libraries that would help him with his work on a new edition of the Septuagint. Holste and Barberini were both anxious not to assist an enterprise that could assert the superiority of Protestant biblical scholarship.22 But Holste was apparently happy to show Milton around the Vatican Library: ‘I was permitted to browse through the invaluable collection of Books, and also the numerous Greek Authors in manuscript.’23 If issues of biblical criticism could reveal the limits of inter-­confessional collaboration, poetry and the textual emendation of literary texts were the focus of Milton’s communications with Italian men of letters. Dati’s 1647 letter turns into a dizzying list of poetic citations and comparisons that encompass a range of classical and vernacular literary works, beginning with how the Italian literary theorist Castelvetro—whose commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics is recommended by Milton in Of Education—had noted an Horatian

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   343

echo in a tercet in Petrarch’s Triumph of Love (c. 1340; the very work that Ascham had bemoaned Italians preferred to Genesis). This leads Dati into consideration of whether a line in one of Tibullus’s elegies that describes the ‘whirling [rapido] sea’ should be emended to rabido (furious, fierce), by way of reference to Homer, Catullus, Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Valerius Flaccus, and Tasso, among others.24 This is the sort of textual scholarship on classical and literary texts that Milton can be seen engaged upon in the emendations that he made to the copy of Euripides that he bought in 1634. These emendations and the correspondence with men such as Dati show Milton dabbling in the textual criticism of classical literature that was an important part of the republic of letters, and for which men such as Nicholas Heinsius and Vossius had earned European renown. Yet this kind of supra-­confessional philological scholarship had never really become a feature of the English intellectual landscape, where textual scholarship had more usually been put to polemical and confessional uses. Milton would himself soon put his scholarship to polemical use in the prose works that he began publishing in 1641. Even in Dati’s intensely literary letter, however, the pressures of confessional allegiance are felt. In response to Milton’s request that in reading the anti-­papal satire of several of the verses in the 1645 Poems, he show ‘the same indulgence to freedom of speech’ that was shown to Dante and Petrarch in the past, Dati’s tone becomes suddenly more guarded: any of Milton’s poems ‘which are in dispraise of my religion . . . although coming from the lips of a friend, can only be excused, not praised’.25 Nonetheless Milton evidently believed that the unusual honour accorded to him as an English visitor in the Italian academies trumped any concern about being associated in public with Catholic men of letters. In the preliminary material of the Poemata, the non-­English half of the 1645 Poems, Milton tried to recreate in print the community of the academies by including commendatory verses and tributes from his Italian acquaintances: Latin epigrams by Manso, Giovanni Salzilli, and Matteo Selvaggio (probably the Italian pseudonym of an English Benedictine monk, David Codner), a lengthy Italian poem by Antonio Francini and a Latin letter by Dati. Milton included his own Latin poems to Salzilli

344  c h a p t e r 1 4

and Manso in the Poemata, as well as three epigrams on the heavenly voice of Leonora Baroni—Milton had presumably not encountered a professional female singer before. (In the first epigram, Ad Leonoram Romae Canentem, Milton once more returned to his favourite poetic topics of the guardian angel—‘Each individual (believe this, you nations) has been allotted a winged angel from the heavenly ranks’—and the Neoplatonic notion of the music of the spheres, speculating that Leonora’s voice transmits ‘the third mind [mens tertia] of a now empty heaven to earthly ears’ (lines 1–2, 5). Milton would later prefer to remain aloof from the attempts by Samuel Hartlib and others in England in the 1640s to establish new forms of intellectual association and cultural patronage in the aftermath of the dissolution of the patronage structures of the Stuart court. The Italian academies, however, seem to have embodied for him an ideal community of poetic endeavour and intellectual support. In his first major prose work, Of Reformation, Milton repeatedly invokes his recent experiences in Italy, and cannot resist an Italian phrase that is straight out of the literary conversation of the academicians but sits oddly in a work of polemical religion: explaining why a friend of the fourth-­century bishop, Athanasius, read religious works other than Scripture, Milton suggests ‘it was but . . . come un virtuoso, (as the Italians say,) as a lover of elegance’.26 Yet the elegance of thought and expression that he encountered in the pockets of light of the academies only cast into starker relief the dark age of Italian intellectual culture under the repression and intolerance of a nation dominated by the Counter-­Reformation Church. The long-­term consequences of life in such a condition of servitude, Milton maintained by the time he wrote Areopagitica, was a falling away from the heights of Dante and Petrarch and the production of writing that could not rise beyond ‘flattery and fustian’.

Non Angli, Sed Angeli Milton had presented himself to the students and Fellows of Christ’s College as a Virgilian epic poet in the making, who had adopted a chaste lifestyle that mirrored the life of Virgil, nicknamed Parthenias or ‘Virgin’,

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   345

as described by Donatus. It is striking how the Italian academicians treat Milton as an epic poet in their testimonials, despite him not having (yet) written an epic poem, and how they habitually emphasize his identity as an Englishman or Londoner.27 The most conspicuous example is Selvaggi’s two-­line epigram: ‘Let Greece boast of Homer, let Rome boast of Virgil; England boasts of Milton equal to both.’ Francini’s Italian tribute represents Milton in precisely the terms of daemonic hero and Ciceronian magnus animus in which Milton had envisaged himself in his Cambridge exercises: Milton is the prime example of how England ‘begets heroes [Eroi] who are rightly regarded by us as superhuman’ (lines 17–18); in his travels he has sought out ‘the best from the better in order to forge the Idea [l’ Idea] of every virtue’ (lines 47–8) and to draw ‘from the most beautiful forms [belle Idee] what was rarest in each’ (line 30); the ‘most profound mysteries’ in both heaven and earth, which nature sometimes even ‘bars to superhuman geniuses [Ingegni sovrumani]’, Milton has ‘clearly understood’ (lines 62–4). Dati represents Milton as one who has achieved the goal of universal learning already, who ‘with constant reading of authors as his companion explores, restores, traverses the hiding-­places of antiquity, the ruins of the distant past, the intricacies of learning [eruditionis ambages]’ (lines 12– 13). All the tributes make much of Milton’s polyglottism—Francini even ascribes Milton fluency in Spanish, for which there is little evidence otherwise.28 Milton had evidently been reading about the lives of the great Italian poets beyond Boccaccio’s life of Dante. In the second epigram on Leonora Baroni, he alludes to the story in Manso’s Vita di Torquato Tasso (Venice, 1621) of how Tasso fell into melancholy over his love for ‘another Leonora’. Manso, the founder of the Academy of the Oziosi (‘The Idlers’) in Naples, had been a patron of Tasso, as well as his biographer, and so embodied for Milton a connection to the tradition of European vernacular epic. Tasso had followed the Virgilian career path, proceeding from pastoral drama in Aminta (1573) to heroic verse in Gerusalemme libertata (1581); in Of Education, Milton recommended Tasso’s work on the theory of epic, Discorsi del poema eroico (Naples, 1594). In the 1645 Poems, Milton prefaced the hundred-­line Latin poem he wrote to Manso

346  c h a p t e r 1 4

in December 1638 by pointing out that Manso had been both an ‘extremely good friend’ to Tasso and a gracious host to Milton. Mansus has much in common with Ad Patrem in its address to an older patron by a poet expressing his ambitions to achieve literary fame, but it is also a somewhat disconcerting poem in that it concludes with Milton imagining his own post-­mortem existence after he has achieved the fame to which he aspires. Milton looks forward to ‘the rewards for the righteous’ in the afterlife, obtained through ‘toil, purity of heart [mens pura], and fiery virtue’, and imagines himself, as so often in the early verse, ‘removed into the ethereal regions of the heaven-­dwelling gods’; but this time he gazes not upon the magnificence of the heavens but looks back down on his own poetic achievements, which he hopes shall be commemorated by a patron such as Manso has been to Tasso, and who would ‘depict my countenance too in marble, binding my hair in Paphian marble or in the leaf of Parnassian laurel’ (lines 91–3, 95–6). In an echo of the description of Lancelot Andrewes in heaven in Elegia tertia, such a happy fate will see Milton’s daemonic face ‘suffused with blushing radiance’ as—and these are the final words of the poem—‘I applaud myself on Mount Olympus’ (lines 99–100).29 These lines are usually mocked for their egregious egotism but the tone is light, with a knowing echo of the miser in Horace’s first satire: ‘The people, they hiss me, but I, I applaud myself at home, as soon as I contemplate my coins in my chest.’30 Yet the Italian academicians seem to have wholly bought into Milton’s vision of his career as epic poet who not yet written an epic poem—unless Malatesti’s dedication of his bawdy sonnets to Milton does indeed strike an ironic note. Writing in Virgilian hexameters in Mansus, Milton turns to the nature of the work that would secure him such eternal fame: a national epic for the British, depicting ‘our native kings and Arthur waging wars even beneath the earth; or if I tell of great-­souled heroes of a table rendered invincible by the bond of friendship and (if only the breath of inspiration be present) I shatter the Saxon phalanxes in a British war’ (lines 80–4). Manso’s awareness that Milton was considering writing an epic about British history is suggested in his epigram that crowns the collection of

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   347

Italian tributes in the 1645 Poems: ‘If your religious devotion were as your mind, beauty, charm, appearance, character, you would not be an Angle, but by Hercules a very Angel.’ Manso makes an interesting allusion to British history that illustrates the ways in which confessional disputes were always latent in the treatment of historical topics. In his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Bede recounts Pope Gregory I’s comment on discovering that boys for sale at a slave market were English: if they were Christians, they would be Non Angli, sed angeli; according to Bede, this moment inspired Gregory subsequently to send Augustine to convert the English to Christianity. Manso thus jokes— perhaps half-­seriously—that Milton’s perfection would be complete if he only converted to Catholicism. Counter-­Reformation polemicists looked to Bede’s history as evidence for the Catholic origins of the primitive Christian faith in England; Protestants such as Matthew Parker, in his De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (1572), responded by claiming that pre-­Saxon inhabitants of ancient Britain had been converted directly by the Apostles.31 In envisaging an anti-­Saxon, Arthurian British history for his epic theme, Milton may thus be invoking debates that he had with Manso about the historical priority of the Catholic Church in England; such debates would also have a bearing on the growing crisis in Caroline England over the authority and antiquity of episcopacy, given Augustine was the first Archbishop of Canterbury. It would be hard to judge on the basis of Mansus alone whether Milton was serious about writing an Arthurian epic that would, presumably, have owed a considerable debt to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. While some of the details in Mansus suggest Milton had been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth on ancient Britain—such as the depiction of a land where druids sing verses about Loxo, daughter of Corineus, a Trojan who came to Britain with Brutus and became king of Cornwall—the source of other details, such as Arthur waging war ‘even beneath the earth’ are hard to trace.32 But Milton would return to the topic in the first poem that he wrote on his return to England, his Latin epitaph for his best friend, Charles Diodati. After Milton arrived in Geneva in June 1639 on his return journey from Italy, he stayed for a period and ‘conversed daily with John [ Jean]

348  c h a p t e r 1 4

Diodati, the learned professor of theology’ at the Calvinist Academy of Geneva and Charles’s uncle. Jean / Giovanni Diodati had been involved with Henry Wotton and Paolo Sarpi in a short-­lived attempt to win Venice over to Protestantism in 1606, when the republic had been placed under the Papal interdict for the way its government had asserted political authority over the clergy. Diodati had later translated Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, a work that Milton’s commonplace book shows him to have been reading closely on his return to England, into French in 1621, probably on the prompting of his cousin Élie Diodati, who went on to play a key role in the publication of Galileo’s works. Jean and Élie Diodati were seemingly both involved as well in the publication in Geneva in 1624 of Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition.33 Through his friendship with Charles, Milton had links to a family who were involved in the republic of letters but who transmitted books and manuscripts to confessional ends, in defiance of the Inquisition. It may well have been the conversations that he had with Jean Diodati in Geneva in early summer 1639 that prompted Milton to become such an avid reader of Sarpi. It may also have been from Jean Diodati that Milton discovered that Charles had died in August 1638, having not yet reached his twenty-­ ninth birthday; although in April Milton had visited Lucca, the birthplace of the Diodati clan, and it may alternatively be the case that the visit to Jean Diodati was made out of respect for his late friend.

Be Our Daemon Milton returned to the mode of pastoral funeral elegy to commemorate the early death of Diodati in Epitaphium Damonis, and it is with this poem that he chose to close the Poemata in 1645, as he had closed the English half of the volume with ‘Lycidas’. By placing the neo-­Latin pastoral of Epitaphium Damonis at the end of the Poemata, the close of the non-­English part of the collection reflects its opening, the first elegy being addressed ad Carolum Diodatum. Milton and Diodati had always communicated in Greek or Latin, invoking and displaying to each other their shared humanist education at St Paul’s School—a display characterized, as Milton recalled in his epitaph, by ‘Cecropian’, or Attic, wit

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   349

(line 56). But if Epitaphium Damonis was not a public funeral elegy in the manner of ‘Lycidas’, it was not kept entirely private either before its publication in 1645. Milton seems to have had a small number of copies of the poem printed that he could send to friends and perhaps relatives of Diodati, such as his uncle Jean in Geneva. Milton refers to having sent a copy to Carlo Dati ‘long since’ in his letter of 21 April 1647, as he named Dati (as well Manso and Francini) in the poem in recalling the poetic competitions that he had witnessed in the academies, and in which he had participated, when in Diodati’s homeland of Tuscany: ‘I had it sent purposely so that it might be, however small a proof of talent, by no means an obscure proof of my love for you, at least in those few little verses inserted—as it were inlaid—there.’34 An undated copy of Epitaphium Damonis, in a single quarto sheet, survives in the British Library: entitled simply Damon, it is unsigned and without details of the printer or bookseller, but was printed in London, presumably in late 1639 or early 1640. If Milton personally gave or sent out copies of the elegy, recalling the exchange of poetic gifts that characterized his friendship with Diodati, there was presumably no need to acknowledge authorship of the printed text. Nonetheless the printed text of Epitaphium Damonis continues the curious tension in early Milton between anonymity and the pronouncement of poetic ambition. When Milton’s elegy for Shakespeare was reprinted in John Benson’s 1640 volume, Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare—a volume that sought to claim Shakespeare’s poetry for an emerging ‘Cavalier’ mode of epigrammatic wit—it was now signed ‘J. M.’, the same signature placed below ‘Lycidas’ in 1638, whereas in 1632 it had been entirely anonymous.35 The inclusion of the initials suggests Milton knew that his poem was being reprinted; he was unlikely to have been consulted about the inclusion of his second poem on the death of Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, in an anthology of witty verse entitled A Banquet of Jests. Or a collection of Court. Camp. Colledge. Citie. Country, also published in 1640. Yet the printing of three of Milton’s poems within a year in three different forms of publication, following on from ‘Lycidas’ in 1638, is a reminder that there was a degree of circulation of his verse in print before 1645.

350  c h a p t e r 1 4

Milton engages more directly and notably more confidently in Epitaphium Damonis with the theme of his own Virgilian ambition that he had broached obliquely in ‘Lycidas’, perhaps liberated by writing in Latin for an audience of readers whom he knew personally, and for Italian acquaintances who encouraged his ambition. Epitaphium Damonis also recalls Elegia sexta, the verse epistle to Diodati on the different qualities of character and behaviour required of the epic and elegiac poets, in first displaying Milton’s mastery of a neo-­Latin lyric genre—in this case pastoral elegy rather than love elegy—and then declaring his intention to move beyond it. The pastoral pipes on which the poet has played his lament for Damon ‘burst asunder, their fastenings broken, and were unable to bear the deep tones any longer’. He now attempts to render the song again, hesitating ‘to seem rather high-­flown’ (lines 158– 9), and proceeds to give a potted summary of British history from the mythical landing of Brutus and the Trojans to the time of King Arthur: Give way, you woods. Go home unfed, lambs, your master has no time for you now. I will proclaim Dardanian [Trojan] ships over the Rutupian seas [Kentish coast] and the ancient realm of Inogen, daughter of Pandrasus, the leaders of Brennus and Arvigarus and Belinus the old, and Armorican settlers at last under British law; next Igerne pregnant with Arthur through a fatal deception when the lying countenance and weapons of Gorlois were assumed—Merlin’s trick. Oh if life remains for me, you my pipe, will hang far away upon an age-­old pine, very much forgotten by me, or else transformed by native muses, you will rasp out a British theme. (lines 160–71) ‘Give way, you woods’, vos cedite silvæ, alludes to Gallus’s farewell to pastoral life in Virgil’s tenth eclogue, while the image of the pastoral pipe or fistula is taken from Corydon’s renunciation of pastoral verse in the seventh eclogue: ‘The prise of artful numbers I resign, / And hang my pipe upon the sacred pine’.36 Milton’s vision of an Arthurian subject for his future epic, with the outline of ancient British history derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, suggests again the immediate ver-

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   351

nacular model of Spenser and his Virgilian progress from The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queene. The envisaged shift here is linguistic as well as generic: in the moment of his most consummate Latin poem, Milton declares not only his movement beyond pastoral lyric— explicitly, whereas in ‘Lycidas’ the anticipated development remains implicit, signalled by allusion—but beyond Latin as the language of his poetry. Epitaphium Damonis follows the sixth Elegy and ‘Lycidas’ in its use of classical poetic tradition—pastoral, love elegy—‘not merely as a passive container for the poem but as an active metaphor’.37 If Epitaphium Damonis articulates, more clearly than in ‘Lycidas’ or the earlier writing, Milton’s ambition to compose a vernacular epic on the topic of British history—and he accepts that such a poem may mean he will be ‘forever unknown and utterly without fame in foreign regions of the world’—then the close of the poem returns to some familiar concerns about virtue on earth and its rewards in the afterlife (lines 173–4). ‘Damon’ is, as with ‘Lycidas’, a name borrowed from classical pastoral convention; but it becomes clear by the end of the elegy that Diodati is also named ‘Damon’ because the poet believes that he has in death become a daemon—indeed that he might, just as ‘Lycidas’ became the ‘genius of the shore’ guarding over the Cornish coast, become the poet’s tutelary spirit. The poet addresses the spirit of his friend, who has now ‘received your due in heaven’, and asks him ‘whether you will be our Damon [Seu tu noster eris Damon] or whether you are more fittingly to be addressed as Diodati’ (lines 209–10). The lines pun on Diodati / deodatus, or god-­given, but also on the poet’s request that Diodati be ‘our daemon’ as well as ‘our Damon’: the spirit of Diodati has turned daemonic in reward for his earthly virtue. The heavenly apotheosis of Damon / Diodati is then revealed to be a consequence of, and implicitly compensation for, his sexual purity: Because blushing modesty and a stainless youthfulness [et sine labe juventus] were pleasing to you, because you never tasted the pleasures of the marriage-­bed [quod nulla tori libata voluptas], behold, even now virginal honours are reserved for you. You yourself, your shining head girt with a gleaming crown and wearing the joyful branches of

352  c h a p t e r 1 4

leafy palm, will enact for all eternity immortal marriage rites where there is singing and where the lyre, mingled with the dances of the blessed, sounds ecstatically, and the festive revels rave in bacchic frenzy under the thyrsus of Zion. (lines 212–19) ‘[B]lush of modesty’ (purpureus pudor) is taken from the third elegy of the first book of Ovid’s Amores, in which the speaker vows fidelity to his mistress and suggests (quite disingenuously, as we soon discover as we read on) that the reasons she should respond include (as Marlowe has it in the first and rather free English translation): ‘My spotless life, which but to gods gives place, / Naked simplicity, and modest grace’ (lines 13–14). In a manner reminiscent of the disconcerting depiction of the golden-­ankled Lancelot Andrewes as an Ovidian mistress in Elegia tertia, in Epitaphium Damonis the very physical terms of Ovidian love elegy animate the allegorical language of Revelation and its promise to the 144,000 virgins of the marriage feast with the Lamb: ‘These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’ (Revelation 14: 4).  The poem enacts linguistically the incorporation into Christian soteriology of a pagan eroticism that, it transpires, was anyway never more for Diodati than a literary motif. [E]t sine labe juventus recalls, surely deliberately, et sine labe manus from the character of the vates in Elegia sexta. The distinction made in the sixth Elegy between Milton the epic, priestly poet and Diodati the elegiac poet is collapsed as Milton and Diodati are revealed as equally untainted by earthly sexuality (though the latter’s purity is only apparent in death). Diodati’s transient lyric feasts are translated to the eternity of the heavens precisely because, as with Edward King / Lycidas, he has never ‘tasted the pleasures (voluptas) of the marriage-­bed’. Torus, the term rendered as ‘marriage-­bed’, is used frequently by Ovid in the Amores to refer simply to the bed or couch in which sex, of a more or less illicit nature, takes place, as in the opening lines of one of Marlowe’s most successfully erotic renderings of the Amores, the fifth elegy of the first book, that Milton had previously echoed in the daring final line of Elegia tertia (‘may such dreams

c o m e u n v i r t u o s o   353

often come upon me’): ‘In summer’s heat and mid-­time of the day / To rest my limbes upon a bed I lay’ (‘Aestus erat, mediamque dies exegerat horam; / adposui medio membra levanda toro’). Diodati finds eternal reward, it seems, for virtuously containing his attraction to Ovidian eroticism to poetic images. The conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis indicates that the belief in the power of earthly virginity to obtain daemonic or angelic status that had directed Milton’s revisions to the Maske in 1637, and which is implicit in ‘Lycidas’, continued to hold sway over his imagination after his return from his European tour and his successful navigation of the sensual, as well as religious, temptations for which Italy was notorious: that he wrote the concluding lines from the Maske in Cerdogni’s album amicorum in June 1639 already suggested as much. Soon after he returned to England in 1639, Milton made a note from the Church Father Chrysostom that encapsulates his sense in this period that virtuous behaviour can raise a man to angelic status, and may render such a man even more worthy of salvation, given the internal conflict with a body inclined to sin: ‘The good man in some sense seems to surpass even the angels, and that because he, wrapped in a feeble and mortal body, wrestling always with his desires, nevertheless aspires to live his life like those in heaven.’38 It may be the case that he was under the influence of his recent reading in the Church Fathers, in particular Jerome, who had argued in the Adversus Jovinianum for the superiority of virginity to marriage and indeed for the prophetic, or apocalyptic, powers of virginity. St John’s account in Revelation of the celestial song that only the 144,000 virgins can hear illustrates how ‘the virgin writer expounded mysteries which the married could not’, for John ‘was a virgin when he embraced Christianity, remained a virgin, and on that account was more beloved by our Lord’.39 Milton would have found in Erasmus’s commentary on the Adversus Jovinianum some scepticism about the way Jerome manipulated Scripture to make his argument, although Milton’s divorce writings are notable for their own freedom with biblical interpretation.40 But Milton’s literal interpretation of virginity in Revelation 14: 4 was flatly in opposition to Calvin’s reading of Revelation 14: 4 as metaphorical, distinguishing the chastely married from ‘whoremongers, and adulterers’. John

354  c h a p t e r 1 4

Donne, for example, followed the orthodox Calvinist interpretation in maintaining that ‘not defiled by women’ means not bodily virginity but that ‘every holy soule is a virgin’.41 The literal reading of Revelation 14: 4 was favoured by some notable anti-­Calvinist figures, such as the formidable Jeremy Taylor (bap. 1613, d. 1667), who served as Laud’s chaplain but also held a host of unorthodox religious views that place him closer to the Great Tew circle in terms of his interest in scepticism and religious toleration.42 The conclusion to Epitaphium Damonis marks, however, the high point of Milton’s fascination with the soteriological significance of virginity: by 1642, the year of his marriage, he was proposing the more conventional Calvinist interpretation of virginity in Revelation as encompassing chaste marriage.

Pa r t V •

London and Aldersgate Street, 1639–42

CHAPTER 15

•

Becoming a Polemicist

The Method of History It was presumably to Horton that Milton returned in July 1639, where the crates of books that he had sent from the continent would have been waiting for him. The books in these crates likely formed the basis for the renewed programme of reading and note-­taking that is evident in the extant commonplace book in 1639–43, which included works such as the Florentine imprint of Guicciardini’s history of Italy. Milton’s reading now expanded into other areas of European history. His conversations with Jean Diodati may have sparked his particular interest in the Gallican French historian Jacque-­Auguste de Thou (Thuanus; 1553–1617), who had been an acquaintance of Élie Diodati and whose Historiæ sui temporis, covering the second half of the sixteenth century, was published in Geneva in 1620—although it seems unlikely Milton carried the five massive volumes of de Thou back from Geneva with him, so perhaps he sent crates of books back from locations other than Venice (or simply bought de Thou on the London bookstalls). De Thou is the most cited source in the commonplace book alongside L’Histoire de France (Paris, 1576) of Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan (c. 1535–1610); Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino (History of the Council of Trent) is the third most cited work. Milton’s reading in continental historians in this period such as de Thou, Girard, Joannes Sleidanus (1506–56) on the history of the Reformation in northern Europe, and Phillipe de Commynes (1447–1511) on late fifteenth-­century French history was not, it should again be emphasized, unconventional: indeed Milton fol357

358  c h a p t e r 15

lows closely the regimen of reading in civil and political history recommended by the first Camden Professor of History at Oxford, Degory Wheare, in his De ratione et methodo legendi historias dissertatio (The Method and Order of Reading Histories; 1623). This conventional but heavy course of historical reading would be substantially deployed by Milton in making arguments for the execution of Charles I in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.1 This is a key point to make about the intellectual origins of Milton’s political radicalism: the historical evidence invoked in his arguments for the legitimacy of putting a tyrannical king to death in 1649 derive from a mostly orthodox programme of reading carried out in 1639–43. In the commonplace book, probably in 1642, Milton quoted in Italian from Machiavelli’s Dell’Arte della Guerra (The Art of War; c. 1520), under the heading ‘Respublica’: ‘A commonwealth is better than a monarchy: “because in the former virtue is honoured most of the time and is not feared as in the kingdom” ’. Does such a note offer evidence of a constitutional republicanism that was ‘nurtured long before the transformations’ of 1648–9? Or can such notes only be said to exemplify the heightened sense of the tyrannical abuse of power that was common to humanist-­educated men of pre–civil war England, rather than an early aversion to the principle of monarchy itself?2 The lawyer Sir William Drake, who was elected a member of the Long Parliament in 1641 but whose royalism led him to spend nearly all of the 1640s and 1650s in a kind of self-­imposed exile abroad, engaged much more closely than Milton with Machiavelli in his voluminous commonplace reading of the 1630s and early 1640s, as well as other authors associated with Italian history and statecraft, such as Guicciardini. In a note on the course of reading that he intended to follow in political history, Drake directed himself to ‘Machiavelli’s works [to] gather the marrow out of what he hath written in this kind, but above all [to] study Guicciardini’s history, which I esteem the best that was ever written’. At the same time, the note from Machiavelli that Milton made in the early 1640s is echoed in the opening lines of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (‘in whom virtue and true worth most is eminent, them [tyrants] fear in earnest’), even if Milton more likely has in mind his favourite ancient Roman historian

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   359

Sallust, whose epigram on the matter in Bellum Catilinae (7. 2) was cited by Milton on the title-­page of Eikonoklastes. Moreover, the two notes from Guicciardini in the commonplace book (both written in Italian) are placed under the headings ‘Rex’ (King) and ‘Libertas’ (Liberty) and deal with the limits of kingly power (‘ “The Aragonese kings do not have absolute regal authority in all matters.” Guicciardini, book 6, History, p. 347.’) and the tyrannous actions of kings to maintain their power (‘Tyrants attempt to prevent the people from military exercises: “previous kings in fear of popular uprising, have kept them unarmed and estranged from military exercise”, etc. Guicciardini, book 2, near the end’).3 Milton’s historical reading in the period after his return from Italy and the outbreak of civil war in England was, then, quite orthodox and in line with the curricular conventions of the Renaissance ars historica; but Milton became a republican when others did not, and it is remarkable how well prepared the notes that he took from this reading made him to defend the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. The ‘Index Politicus’ of his commonplace book is full of entries that he was able to quarry, when writing at great speed at the beginning of 1649, for historical precedents for the deposition of tyrannical kings: the notes under the heading ‘Rex’ take up two pages of the manuscript. In 1639–41 he recorded historical examples, mostly from Holinshed, of the ‘Liberties of English subjects’, noting there was once ‘an office to correct the K[ing]’: ‘the Earle of Chester bare the sword of St Edward before the K[ing] in token that he . . . had autority to correct the K[ing] if he should see him swerve from the limits of Justice’. In the same period he noted that the monarchy used to be elective rather than hereditary in Scotland; in a note made before 1644 he recorded, from Girard and de Thou, that the same was true in France, but emphasized that it was the power of deposition as well as election: ‘France an elective kingdom either to choose or to depose . . . [the French] reserved to themselves that power to elect, banish, and eject their kings.’4 We can conclude, without accepting Milton’s own characterization of his prophetic foresight in the 1645 headnote to ‘Lycidas’, that the events that Milton observed happening around him after he returned from Italy, as the country slid into civil war, led him to consume the conventional diet of

360  c h a p t e r 15

reading in political and civil history for what it could teach him about kingship, tyranny, and liberty in his own time and place. The commonplace book should be seen less as evidence of Milton’s early constitutional republicanism than of his mind connecting an orthodox (if impressively heavy) course of historical reading with the future of England as it unfolded; but he nonetheless read that history in a way that anticipated the political conflict over monarchical authority that would culminate in the deposition of Charles I. Revealingly, the notes on the topic of subjects living under kingship was cross-­referenced, at some point in the 1640s, to the heading ‘On Idolatry’ in the lost ‘Index Theologicus’— the connection of monarchical tyranny with religious corruption and the idolatrous worship of Charles I would be the topic of Eikonoklastes, Milton’s longest vernacular prose polemic. Milton was reading ecclesiastical history for these topics even before he left for Italy, as in the note recorded (in Latin) before April 1638 from the fifth-­century church historian Sulpicius Severus: ‘Concerning monarchy, Sulpicius Severus says that the “name of kings has always been altogether hateful to free peoples”, and he condemns the action of the Hebrews whereby “they chose to exchange liberty for servitude”. Sacred History, book 1, p. 56’. This note was perhaps in his mind in The Reason of Church-­government at the beginning of 1642, when he rather unpersuasively claims that if God permitted ‘this insurrection of episcopacy, it is to be feared he did it in his wrath, as he gave the Israelites a king’. At times, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the enormous programme of reading that he undertook, Milton seems to have simply picked out sententia on these topics from the massive works he had in front of him, taking advantage of the bibliographical tools that had been developed to help readers locate information without necessarily working their way through the entire text. Under the heading ‘Tyrannus’ (Tyrant), Milton cites (in Greek) the distinction made by Basil, the fourth-­ century Church Father, between a king and a tyrant: ‘ “In this way does a tyrant differ from a king, for the one considers from all angles his own self, whereas the other provides what is beneficial for his subjects.” [Basil,] volume 1, p. 456’. In the 1618 edition of Basil’s Opera that Milton used, the editors have marked this distinction in the margin with ‘Tyran-

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   361

nus à Rege quid differt’, the same phrase under which the passage is indexed. If this is an example of Milton using the short-­cuts of marginal notes and index, then it was common enough practice among early modern scholars faced with organizing and remembering such large amounts of reading.5 But it does indicate that Milton was sometimes unconcerned about the biographical or historical context of a quotation and was simply looking for exempla—Basil makes this distinction in a commentary on the Song of Solomon but that is irrelevant to Milton’s mode of reading, as is Basil’s own historical context when he expressed this view. As we shall see, Milton used a similar method of de-­ contextualized reading to produce a list of historical exempla to furnish the attack on episcopacy in his first venture into printed polemical prose in 1641. And indeed he did later use the sententia from Basil in the public argument of the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates: ‘A Tyrant . . . is he who regarding neither Law nor the common good, reigns onely for himself and his faction: Thus St. Basil among others defines him.’6

‘Brittish of the North Parts’ Milton also spread his reading after the return from Italy into British history, working his way through the major authors: Bede, William of Malmesbury, Stow, Holinshed, Speed, du Chesne (writing in French on Britain), Camden, Hayward. Given his declarations in Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis of his ambition to write a vernacular epic about King Arthur and ancient British history, this reading might logically be regarded as necessary preparation to fulfil that ambition. His poetic notebook from the period bears out his interest in British history as a literary topic, but as preparation for tragic drama rather than epic. After the draft of ‘Lycidas’ in the Trinity manuscript, there are seven pages of notes on possible literary projects, most likely made in 1639–40. The first page contains two lists of characters and a sketch of the plot of a tragedy under the title ‘Paradise Lost’; some of the first page and all of the next page are taken up with list of over fifty possible Old Testament topics for dramatic narratives, including several related to Samson, as well as eight topics from the New Testament; there are then two pages of ideas

362  c h a p t e r 15

for ‘British Trag[edies]’, consisting of thirty-­three subjects stretching from the Roman conquest to the Norman conquest, often consisting of just a title with a cross-­reference to the source of the story in a work of British history; the fifth and sixth pages give more extended accounts of four topics for tragedies, including one entitled ‘Adam unparadiz’d’. The final page is headed ‘Scotch stories or rather brittish of the north parts’ and contains five sketches of topics for dramas from Scottish history; also scribbled into the last two pages are some ideas for a play on the topic of ‘Christus patiens’. Surprisingly the list of ideas for ‘British tragedies’ contains no Arthurian material, although there is one reference to a possible topic for an epic: ‘A Heroicall Poem may be founded somewhere in Alfreds reigne, especially at his issuing out of Edelingsey on the Danes, whose actions are wel like those of Ulysses.’ Of course the plans for a tragic drama of the Fall eventually became the basis for an epic poem of the Fall in the late 1650s and, according to his nephew Edward Phillips, Milton had already composed around this time Satan’s soliloquy against the sun, later placed at the beginning of the fourth book of Paradise Lost, having intended it for the opening scene of a tragedy in English blank verse.7 In the opening book of Paradise Lost, the narrator explicitly asserts the superiority of his sacred subject matter over ‘what resounds / In fable or romance of Uther’s son, / Begirt with British and Armoric knights’ (1. 579–81). It appears that the period of reading in British history that Milton undertook in the year or so after his return from Italy put him off the idea of a British epic, although he would return to the matter of Britain and the Arthurian legends in his prose History of Britain, first published in 1670 but likely begun by 1648 at the latest. Despite his account in the opening book of the six-­book History of the mythical foundation of Britain by the Trojans under Brutus and then of the line of British kings down to Arthur, derived mostly from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Milton is scathing about the veracity and origins of Arthurian history: But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reigned in Britain, hath been doubted heretofore, and may again with good reason. For the monk of Malmesbury, and others, whose credit hath swayed most

Figure 15. Drafts for dramas, in in the Milton manuscript, Trinity College, Cambridge.

364  c h a p t e r 15

with the learneder sort, we may well perceive to have known no more of this Arthur five hundred years past, nor of his doings, than we now living; and what they had to say, transcribed out of Nennius, a very trivial writer yet extant, which hath already been related; or out of a British book, the same which he of Monmouth set forth, utterly unknown to the world, till more than six hundred years after the days of Arthur, of whom (as Sigebert in his chronicle confesses) all other histories were silent, both foreign and domestic, except only that fabulous book.8 It is unlikely that Milton had ever given much historical credit to the legends of the ‘British Troy’ and King Arthur, given that over the previous century English antiquarians had repeatedly put into doubt the credibility of these stories. The sketches of an Arthurian epic in Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis point anyway to a willingness to go beyond Monmouth’s history to encompass more fantastical elements of the Arthur myths, such as are found in medieval romance, in his putative poetic fiction. Milton’s attitude towards Arthurian legend was altered in the early 1640s by his exposure to the polemical use of antiquity and extra-­biblical sources by those who argued for the divine authority of episcopacy. In his prose polemic Of Reformation, as we shall see, the ‘Antiquarians’ are one of the groups who have prevented the full process of Reformation in England by seeking to ground the authority of episcopacy in spurious history and corrupt texts. This is a process that Milton identifies with popish imposture, as indicated by the dismissive reference to William of Malmsebury as ‘the monk of Malmesbury’ in the passage above from the History of Britain. In Mansus, the appeal to ancient British history was implicitly a response to the claim for the historical priority of the Catholic Church in England, as encapsulated in Manso’s reference in his tribute to Milton to the Angle / angel pun in Bede; but in the early 1640s Milton found himself engaged in polemical debate with supporters of episcopacy who claimed ancient and indeed apostolic authority for their office. The involvement in prose polemic from 1641 changed Milton’s conception of the fitness of historical, or pseudo-­historical, mate-

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   365

rial as epic subject; and while he would incorporate the Arthurian legends into his History of Britain, they are treated disparagingly in a work that more broadly details the inadequacy and credulity of the English throughout their history. The focus on writing a tragedy in the notes in the Trinity manuscript reflects Milton’s admiration both for the classical and vernacular dramatic traditions, in particular Euripides and Shakespeare. While Puritanism was associated with anti-­theatricalism in Caroline England, particularly as a consequence of Prynne’s infamous punishment for his attack on plays and masques in 1634, in his reading Milton considered the longer view of religious objections to the theatre. In an entry in the commonplace book made around 1639, Milton surveyed the arguments of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Lactantius about the sinfulness, not merely of ‘pagan shows’, but of the ‘whole dramatic art’. This is an entry in the commonplace book where Milton did not simply lift sententia from his texts but engaged in considered comparison of the arguments and offered his own considered response (in Latin): although the little corruptions of the theatre indeed should be removed, it is by no means necessary for that reason that all practice of the dramatic arts should be altogether abolished; on the contrary it would rather be absurd beyond measure. For what in all philosophy is more serious or more sacred or more exalted than a tragedy rightly designed; what more useful for seeing at a single view the trials and vicissitudes of human life?9 Sophocles and Euripides had provided models for the genre of sacred tragedy that became popular in the aftermath of the Reformation, and the great Scottish humanist and Reformer George Buchanan (1506–82) had translated Euripides’s Medea and Alcestis into Latin and also composed original sacred tragedies which adapted specifically the Euripidean example to explore issues of Christian theology. In this Buchanan was following the example of Erasmus, who translated Euripides’s Hecuba and Iphigenia in Tauris and had maintained the Christian theological relevance of Greek tragedy.10 The legitimacy of finding Christian truth in non-­Christian forms of literature is a matter that Milton had

366  c h a p t e r 15

been considering in his reading of patristic literature in the late 1630s, and it is something that he would later defend in the public forum of Areopagitica in 1644, where a speech from Euripides’s Suppliant Women that identifies ‘true liberty’ with the exercise of free speech in matters of state is quoted and translated on the title-­page. It is true that Milton also later adopts the language of Puritan anti-­ theatricalism in his polemical prose, in particular in Eikonoklastes, where it is a key element in a concerted assault upon the culture of courtly theatricality fostered by Charles I. But even in this context, Shakespeare is invoked as writer who is above all useful in revealing the theatrical artifice of tyranny and the corruption of kingship in British history.11 In the final page of the notes on dramas in the Trinity manuscript, with its revealing heading ‘Scotch Stories or rather brittish of the north parts’, Milton outlined plans for his own play about Macbeth, which might suggest either dissatisfaction with Shakespeare’s play, or more likely that he was inspired to develop aspects of the tragedy, which he later echoed at several key moments in the argument of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Milton thought to open his Macbeth with the meeting of Macduff and Malcolm in England, suggesting his version would have focused on the proper action to take against Macbeth’s tyranny, and also that it would have been written to reflect the need for an English–Scottish alliance to overthrow tyranny in the three kingdoms—Milton celebrated England and Scotland as ‘dearest Brothers both in Nature, and in CHRIST’, in Of Reformation.12

‘Tearing of Hoods and Cowles’ In the Defensio Secunda, Milton states it was the ‘sad tidings of civil war from England’ that led him to cut short his tour (which was intended to continue to Sicily and Greece) and return to where his ‘fellow-­citizens at home were fighting for their liberty’.13 In fact civil war would not break out in England for nearly three years; but in the country to which Milton returned in the summer of 1639, it was becoming increasingly clear that the relationship with the Scots was key to the future of the English Church and state. Milton arrived back shortly after the so-­called

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   367

Pacification of Berwick, which avoided war between Charles and the Scots over the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer on Scotland, if at the expense of some humiliation to the English. But it quickly became evident that the Scottish Covenanters were not going to back down in their rejection of episcopacy, which they abolished in Scotland and declared illegal, whether in Scotland or England, raising English fears the Scots intended to impose Presbyterianism on the three kingdoms through military force. To raise funds for a second military expedition against the Scots, Charles called in April 1640 the first Parliament in England since 1629, marking the end of the Personal Rule. The so-­ called Short Parliament lasted three weeks before Charles dissolved it in frustration at the Parliament’s demands for action to address its concerns about the king’s policies towards Church and state. As the king mustered forces to invade Scotland, the Scots pre-­emptively launched incursions into northern England and defeated the English at the battle of Tyburn, near Newcastle, in August 1640, subsequently occupying Newcastle; the king agreed to the Treaty of Ripon in October, which required him to recall Parliament in London and constituted a further humiliating and cripplingly expensive climb-­down before the Scots, who sent their commissioners to negotiate terms for a permanent settlement. Negotiations continued against a fractious backdrop in London throughout the spring and summer of 1641, as the new Parliament—the Long Parliament—pushed through a series of reforms intended to limit the powers of the king and his advisors, in particular Laud and the Earl of Strafford, who was accused of raising an army in Ireland that was ready to enter England to put down opposition to the king. Fifteen thousand Londoners had signed the ‘Root and Branch’ petition presented to the Long Parliament in December 1640, calling for the abolition of episcopacy and the removal of what were perceived as the popish innovations of the Laudian Church in liturgy and worship: Milton claimed in 1642 to have been one of them.14 It was against this backdrop of events that Milton had moved out of the family home and back to London, taking lodgings initially in St Bride’s Churchyard near Fleet Street and then moving to a large house in Aldersgate that was ‘sufficiently commodious for myself and my

368  c h a p t e r 15

books’, where he set himself up as a private tutor. His first pupils were his nephews Edward and John Phillips, aged ten and nine: for the next ten years, the two brothers lived with their uncle. Their mother Anne may have died around 1640, although her precise fate remains unknown; nor is it clear why, if this was the case, Milton should have effectively taken on the responsibility of raising the two boys from their stepfather, Thomas Agar.15 Milton also took on a small number of other pupils from aristocratic backgrounds, such as Richard Jones, son of Viscount Ranelagh and Katherine Boyle (1615–91), one of the most intellectually eminent women of the period and with whom Milton became friends. Lady Ranelagh was involved in the intellectual network constructed around the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, to whom Milton dedicated Of Education, so it was likely though this association that Milton ended up as her son’s tutor. Samuel Johnson was later amused by Milton’s decision to set up as a tutor during the 1640s: while the land was ablaze with civil war, Milton ‘vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding school . . . From this wonder-­working academy, I do not know that there ever proceeded any man very eminent for knowledge.’16 Certainly their achievements were minor, but both Edward and John Phillips went on to collaborate with their uncle and play an important role in both his polemical and poetic enterprises. Milton was sufficiently satisfied with John’s progress to give him the task in 1651, at the age of twenty, of answering the first major attack on Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (1651): John’s Latin response was published by the Commonwealth’s official printer. Edward was the chief amanuensis during the composition of Paradise Lost. He is also unquestionably central to our understanding of Milton’s life due to his role in the translation and publication of Milton’s Letters of State in 1694, prefaced by his own biographical sketch of his uncle, and to the information that he gave to Aubrey and John Toland for their own early lives of Milton. Edward also pursued several literary and intellectual projects of which his uncle would likely have approved and even personally encouraged, including works of literary criticism and history such as Tractatulus de Carmine Dramatico Poetarum Veterum (A Little Treatise on the Dramatic Poetry of the Ancient Poets), which appeared in 1670 and which shares the

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   369

concerns with the metre proper to classical dramatic genres that are found in the preface to Samson Agonistes, ‘Of that sort of dramatic poem which is called tragedy’, published a year later.17 We have seen throughout this book how central the humanist ideal of universal learning was to Milton’s understanding of intellectual life. Edward Phillips told John Aubrey how Milton rendered both boys fluent in Latin within one year, and within three years he had led them through the ‘best of Latin & Greec Poets’. The brothers’ education involved not only intensive instruction in Latin and Greek, with study of an exhaustive range of classical authors, but in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, as well as in modern European languages in their spare time (‘at any odd hour’, as Of Education has it) and in the disciplines of (in order) arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, geography, natural history, natural philosophy, moral philosophy, logic, rhetoric, and poetics. What has often been taken to be a utopian curriculum in Of Education was apparently applied in practice to the schooling of the Phillips brothers.18 His private academy should be seen as an attempt to put into practice the punishing programme that he advocated in Of Education as necessary to instil sufficient learning in the nation’s youth to enable them to govern the country virtuously and effectively—at least the nation’s aristocratic youth, as the heavily humanist programme is fused, somewhat unsteadily, with exercises in fencing, wrestling, and riding that seem to be derived from modern French academies established to train the nobility and gentry.19 In this respect, Milton likely did regard his educational experiments as a patriotic contribution to the recovery of the nation from the failures of knowledge that had led to civil war; or, as he put it in Of Education, the ‘compleat and generous Education’ that he outlined ‘fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War’.20 The Scot who had first tutored Milton himself in humanist learning and literature, Thomas Young, was increasingly involved in the debates about church government taking place in print between advocates and opponents of episcopacy, many of whom had previously been, as with Young, conformable Puritans. The abolition of the Courts of Star Chamber and the High Commission by the Long Parliament in July

370  c h a p t e r 15

1641 effectively ended the system of licensing and episcopal censorship that had been reasserted by the 1637 Star Chamber decree on printing, enabling a proliferation of print on political and religious matters; but printed debate about the future of the Church was already widespread by this point. Young’s profile as an articulate public opponent of Laudianism had been raised after Dies dominica was finally published in 1639 and he became part of an influential group of ministers that met regularly in the London home of Edmund Calamy. When the Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall (1574–1656), published defences of episcopacy in 1640–1 in an effort to persuade Calvinist episcopalians to preserve the unity of the Church of England against Presbyterian schism, Young was one of the five ministers who combined to respond to him under the collective name ‘Smectymnuus’ (comprising the initials of Stephen Marshall, Calamy, Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstowe). The first publication of Smectymnuus was their Answer to Hall’s An Humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament (1641), in which they objected to the ‘many Additions and Alterations . . . that have so changed the face and fabrick of the Liturgie’ and denied that episcopacy in its present form derived from the Apostles. Episcopacy had evolved over time, and was a product of a history characterized by ever growing corruption and exploitation of the people for personal gain: the English Church ‘groan[ed] under so many corrupt Prelates . . . their ambition (fed with the largenesse of their revenewes) discovered it selfe in great attendance, stately dwellings, and all Lordly pompe’. Moreover, Hall’s claim that bishops held office by divine right threatened the sovereignty of the monarch. The conclusion of Smectymnuus? ‘Let episcopacy be for ever abandoned out of the house of God.’21 Young was thought to have been the chief writer of the tract, which appeared in March 1641—the same month that Laud was imprisoned in the Tower of London after being impeached by the Long Parliament—and it seems he commissioned his former pupil and friend to write the brief, anonymous ‘Postscript’ to An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, or at least collaborate with him on it.22 Young likely turned to Milton not only because he knew of his talent as a writer but of his reading programme in British history, for the ‘Postscript’ offers

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   371

an historicall Narration of those bitter fruits, Pride, Rebellion, Treason, Unthankefulnes, &c. which have issued from Episcopacy, while it hath stood under the continued influences of Soveraigne goodnesse. Which Narration would fill a volume, but we wil bound our selves unto the Stories of this Kingdome, and that revolution of time which hath passed over us since the erection of the Sea of Canterbury[.]23 Milton supplied a series of short, often single-­line, references to moments in British history since Augustine which illustrate the repeatedly corrupt behaviour of bishops, emphasizing in particular how their malign influence on the monarch has led the country at various times in its history into disastrous civil war. The margins are full of references to Bede, Holinshed, Speed, and Stow—the works that Milton had been engaged in working his way through since returning to England. Milton takes evident pleasure in skewering some of the most celebrated names in English religious history, from Augustine—whose role in conversion he compares to ‘the Jesuits now among the Indians, who of Pagans have made but Arrians and Papists’—to Thomas Beckett, whose ‘pride and outragious treasons are too manifest’, to the Marian Protestant martyrs, Thomas Cranmer and Ridley, who showed rather ‘deficiencie of zeale and courage’ in trying to persuade Edward VI to allow his sister to continue to conduct mass in private.24 This bold reversal of accepted pieties about even Protestant bishops revered as martyrs is extended into a rhetorical strategy in Of Reformation two months later, in which Milton writes an alternative history of episcopacy that focuses relentlessly on the abuse of clerical power and its consequences for the retardation of reformation in England. The postscript resembles the commonplace book in offering a series of loosely connected exempla of episcopal corruption in British history, and it would seem that Milton simply supplied Young with a rough couple of pages of notes from his reading. There is an anticipation of the History of Britain that he began to write intensively in the late 1640s in the constant focus on British history as a history of repeated corruption and failure to achieve true liberty. There are also hints of the satirical zeal that distinguishes the five anti-­prelatical works that Milton subsequently published in 1641–2 and is present at times in the poetry, including Paradise Lost. The metonymic mockery

372  c h a p t e r 15

of bishops in terms of their accoutrements of power—‘the tearing of Hoods and Cowles, the miring of Copes, the flying about of wax Candles, and Censors in the scuffle, cannot be imagined without mirth’25— strikingly anticipates the account of the ‘Paradise of Fools’ in the third book of the epic: then might ye see Cowles, Hoods and Habits with thir wearers tost And flutterd into Raggs, then Reliques, Beads, Indulgences, Dispenses, Pardons, Bulls, The sport of Winds: all these upwhirld aloft Fly o’re the backside of the World farr off Into a Limbo large and broad, since calld The Paradise of Fools (3. 489–96) Milton’s career as a prose polemicist seems to have begun, then, with him giving a few pages of notes extracted from his reading in British history to Young, who attached them to the end of the first pamphlet issued by ‘Smectymnuus’. His continuing friendship with Young in 1640–1 is indicated by the recent discovery that Milton presented Young with a copy of the 1640 edition of Thomas Cranmer’s Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum (first published 1571), now in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, of which Young became Master in 1644.26 We might recall that in 1626 Milton had sent Elegia quarta to Young in response to his gift to Milton of a Hebrew bible: the friends had a history of presenting each with gifts of books and poems. It might seem ironic that Milton presented Young with a copy of a work by the very bishop whom he specifically ridicules for his deficiencies in both the ‘Postscript’ and Of Reformation, but it does suggest how they were engaged in study of, and conversation about, the history of the Reformation in England. Cranmer’s Reformatio, composed in 1552, was a work which argued that international papal authority had corrupted the Christian Church, and that it would properly function again only under the magistracy of the English monarch and in tandem with English law—a position that was entirely in line with what Young and his fellow ministers had to say in objection to the Laudian Church, which they regarded as having usurped the authority of the king.27

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   373

Young had introduced Milton as a young boy to the riches of the classical languages and literatures, and possibly also to Hebrew and the reading of the Scriptures in their original languages, an encounter which evidently shaped Milton’s mind and his idea of a literary career. Young embodied the potential for the British to combine profound humanist learning with a deeply reformed religious sensibility: if anyone could have persuaded Milton that the intellectual reformation of England, which would foster learning and poetry as well as spiritual and moral virtue, required the urgent reformation of the episcopal Church of England, it was surely Young. According to the humanist models of national and cultural history that dominated Milton’s education, his aspirations of becoming a vernacular national poet to rival Virgil among the classics and Dante among the moderns must be intertwined with the religious and civil conditions under which he lived. Milton had recently been to Italy and witnessed for himself the connection between the decline of a nation’s intellectual and literary culture and the tyrannous domination of the Church over secular power, an example conventionally held up as a warning to the English of what could happen to them. In the anti-­prelatical works of 1641–2, Milton repeatedly, and sometimes incongruously, presents poets as the chief spokesmen against clerical corruption and connects the achievement of his own poetic ambitions to the reformation of the English Church. If ‘Lycidas’ shows Milton’s alarm at the consequences for his poetic ambition of a slide back to a pre-­Reformation ‘dark age’, then conversations with Young must have encouraged him to take action with his pen. Seeing his ‘Postscript’ in print presumably also gave him a taste for writing polemical prose, for Of Reformation appeared within two months of the ‘Postscript’—written in the form of a letter to ‘a Freind [sic]’, as the title-­page has it, who was almost certainly Thomas Young.

Ancients and Moderns Of Reformation Touching Church-­Discipline in England: And the Cases that hitherto have hindered it appeared in May 1641—the same month that political events accelerated with the public execution of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford (1593–1641), after he was condemned by

374  c h a p t e r 15

Parliament as a traitor for allegedly advising the king to use Strafford’s Irish army against his opponents in England. Of Reformation is written in the form of a classical oration, following the five-­part structure of the genre recommended by the classical rhetoricians, most influentially Cicero in De oratore: exordium, historical narration, confirmation, refutation, and peroration. For Milton the oration was a prose mode of inauguration, in which he introduced new ideas and elaborated general principles: he would use the form again in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Of Education, Areopagitica, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. His use of the classical form of the oration for polemical prose such as Of Reformation lends a literary dignity to works that deal with ephemeral matters of controversy, and implicitly claims a permanence for writing that might otherwise be regarded as relevant only to its moment. Of Reformation proposes to examine the reasons, chiefly historical, why reformation has never been fully achieved in England under episcopacy. It is split into two books: the first opens with the sort of extravagant images that characterize the prose of the anti-­prelatical works and that immediately announce the writer as someone with ambitions beyond the merely disputative.28 The ‘Postscript’ had ended with the declaration that the Laudian bishops had made ‘all Religion into a pompous out-­side’; Of Reformation begins by condemning them for seeking to bring ‘the inward Acts of the Spirit to the outward, and customary ey-­Service of the body’ and this initiates a sequence of bodily images of the bishops’ idolatrous materialization of what should be spiritual expressions of devotion. The ‘Soul’ of the Church, ‘by this meanes of over bodying her selfe’, is strikingly imagined as bird whose ‘pineons now broken, and flagging, shifted off from her selfe, the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull, and droyling carcas to plod on in the old rode, and drudging Trade of outward conformity’.29 The degrading effect of the materialization of relations that should properly be spiritual will also be central to the rhetoric of the divorce writings of 1643–4; here the Neoplatonic flight of the soul to the heavens that repeatedly figures in Milton’s early writing as an image of poetic achievement is prevented by the ‘carnal’, ‘grosse’, and fleshy appetites of the bishops, whose emphasis on the physical

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   375

Figure 16. Title-page of [ John Milton], Of Reformation (1641).

decoration of the church and the role of the body and material objects in devotion is a manifestation of their own greed for financial gain: ‘what a plump endowment to the many-­benefice-­gaping mouth of a Prelate, what a relish it would give to his canary-­sucking, and swan-­eating palat’. Their behaviour is so disgusting that, in a startling image, it would ‘give a Vomit to GOD himselfe’.30 Milton took evident enjoyment in stretching English prose to its limits to abuse the bishops, and he seems to be trying to embody in prose the grotesque imagery of clerical greed and its punishment in Dante. In an early note in the commonplace book under the heading ‘Avaritia’ (Avarice), which is cross-­indexed to the heading ‘On ecclesiastical goods’ in the lost ‘Index Theologicus’, Milton recorded how Dante ‘aptly censures the clergy’ in Canto 7 of the Inferno. In this canto, Virgil leads Dante to the fourth circle of hell, where he tells him that the shaven-­ headed people rolling stones over and over without end were ‘clerics

376  c h a p t e r 15

without doubt, / And cardinals and popes in whom the sin / Of avarice brings its worst excesses about’. The canto begins with Virgil leading Dante past Pluto, with his ‘bloated features’ and guts that ‘gnaw / Internally with raging discontent’; the ‘gaping neck’ of the fourth circle ‘[r] etains the world’s evil like a sack’s’. In a later note under the same heading, Milton reminded himself that he had made notes in the ‘Index Theologicus’ about Pope Martin IV, who in Canto 24 of Purgatorio is found fasting after a life of gluttony, ‘purged / Of eels from Bolsena and Vernaccian wine’.31 Milton had written in something like this satirical mode about religion before, but in the neo-­Latin verse of In Quintum Novembris: in his vernacular prose he turned the tropes of anti-­papal satire against the Protestant Church of England but also looked for images of clerical corruption that would elevate his polemical style to the poetic example of Dante, a pre-­Reformation poet that he evidently regarded as a proto-­Protestant. Indeed one of the most striking aspects of Milton’s first full-­length prose work in print is how great poets are presented almost by definition as perspicacious critics of clerical corruption, regardless of the time in which they wrote or their own confessional identity. The learned defenders of episcopacy such as Joseph Hall and James Ussher (1581–1656), Archbishop of Armagh, offered detailed historical reconstructions of the early Church to show the antiquity of episcopacy, calling on evidence from the early Church Fathers as witnesses to the early practices of the Church and their transmission from the Apostles. Milton simply and audaciously dismisses ‘the foul errors, the ridiculous wresting of Scripture, the Heresies, the vanities thick sown through the volums of Justin Martyr, Clemens, Origen, Tertullian and others of eldest time’.32 Milton himself had been reading patristic texts and ecclesiastical history assiduously since he had left Cambridge, as confirmed by his commonplace book; and just before he dismisses patristic authority, he cites Ignatius, Eusebius, Hegesippus, and Irenaeus, showing that he can take on figures such as Hall at their own game if he wishes to do so. But Milton draws on the growing awareness among scholars of the textual difficulties presented by the writings of the Fathers. In the aftermath of Savile’s monumental edition of Chrysostom, members of the Great Tew

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   377

circle had become particularly interested in the Huguenot scholar Jean Daillé’s Traicté de l’employ des Saincts Peres (Geneva, 1632), in which he made an impressive case for the unreliability of the Fathers on the grounds of textual corruption. Daillé declared the Ignatian epistles, which made a distinction between episcopos and presbuteros that was invoked by defenders of the divine right of episcopacy, to be entirely spurious.33 Although Milton never cites Daillé, he echoes his arguments about the material history of texts in Of Reformation: ‘who knows how many surreptitious works are ingraff ’d into the legitimate writings of the Fathers, and of those Books that passe for authentick who knows what hath bin tamper’d withal, what hath bin raz’d out, what hath bin inserted, besides the late legerdemain of the Papists’. The argument for the corruption of ancient texts was of course a dangerous one because it could theoretically be extended to the Scriptural texts themselves. In Of Reformation, Milton simply opposed the ‘plainnes and perspicuity’ of the Bible, the meaning of which he maintained was obvious even to ‘the simple, the poor, the babes’, to the elaborate style and unreliable texts of the fathers.34 By the time that he wrote the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce two years later, Milton was making a somewhat more complex argument about how Scripture should be read: not literally, but through the lens of ‘charity’ and natural reason. The authorities upon whom Milton preferred to call in Of Reformation were not the Fathers but modern vernacular poets. He continued the inversion of conventional pieties about the role of bishops in the history of the Church that characterizes the ‘Postscript’ by presenting the Roman emperor, Constantine, not as someone to be revered for establishing Christianity—John Foxe had compared Elizabeth I with Constantine in the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments—but to be condemned for his patronage of bishops: ‘They extol Constantine because he extol’d them’. As proof that Constantine ‘marr’d all in the Church’, he quotes and translates Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on Constantine— the reference to Petrarch is, as we have seen, to one of his ‘Babylon’ sonnets, ‘which is wip’t out by the Inquisitor in some Editions’—and refers his readers to The Plowman’s Tale, then ascribed to Chaucer.35 The fact that all these poets were Catholics is only testament for Milton to

378  c h a p t e r 15

how Constantine’s corruption of the primitive Church was previously ‘a receiv’d opinion’. Milton concludes the first book of his tract by quoting the Friar in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales, and Chaucer and Petrarch are invoked as authorities again in the second book, which focuses on the episcopal usurpation of political and specifically monarchical power. Two passages of verse are quoted from The Plowman’s Tale on the dangers of letting priests assume ‘Lordships’, and Chaucer is then cited alongside another Catholic authority, the ‘great and learned’ Paolo Sarpi, as exemplifying warnings both ‘at home’ and ‘from abroad’ about the domination of secular government by the Church. Modern poets and a modern polemical historian such as Sarpi are preferred over the Fathers but also over the ‘Antiquarians’—British historians such as the esteemed William Camden, for whom Diodati had written a funeral elegy at Oxford, is dismissed as ‘a fast friend of Episcopacie’ who ‘cannot but love Bishops, as well as old coins, and his much lamented Monasteries for antiquities sake’.36 Such comments suggest why Milton had become less interested in ancient British history as subject for epic: the appeal to antiquity is something that he associated in the anti-­prelatical works with his episcopal opponents. British history is used in Of Reformation, as in the ‘Postscript’, only for what it reveals about the role of the bishops in hindering reformation and subverting royal authority. Of Reformation is constructed ‘like a Spenserian allegory’, except the division of good and evil is not simply between Protestantism and Catholicism but between true reformation and its episcopal opponents within English Protestantism. Consequently Milton adopts an ironic view of the apocalyptic rhetoric of Elizabethan Protestantism and the claims, made most influentially by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments, for the primacy of England as God’s chosen nation: Milton presents English history rather as a history of the failure to achieve reformation.37 The work nonetheless comes to an apocalyptic conclusion, with a vision of a day of judgement that recalls Mede’s description of the two-­handed division of men into the saved and the damned that would endure for the millennium of Christ’s rule on earth: the millenarian enthusiasm of the early 1640s is evident in the English translation of Mede’s Clavis

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   379

Apocalpytica that was ordered by Parliament’s Committee for Printing sometime before February 1642. When Milton predicts that at this moment ‘one may perhaps be heard offering at high strains in new and lofty Measures to sing and celebrate thy divine Mercies, and marvelous Judgements in this Land’, it is once more the Orphic voice of the daemonic poet that he imagines, singing the ‘inexpressive song’ of the angelic choirs, that is so familiar from the early poems.38 True reformation in England, Milton concludes, can enable the national poet to sing. What did the Puritan clerical collective of Smectymnuus make of the use of Chaucer, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Sarpi—Catholics all—to defend their cause? How did they react to the rhetorically effusive attacks on the great martyrs of English Protestant tradition, such as Ridley and Cranmer? There is perhaps some clue in Milton’s next prose work, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, published in July 1641, which is a much briefer work, written in pared-­down style, in which Milton engaged in conventional controversial mode with Bishop Ussher’s recently published arguments for episcopacy derived from Scripture, the Ignatian epistles, and the early Church Fathers. In this tract, Milton stuck to his brief and doggedly worked his way through the textual and historical evidence for a distinction between bishop and presbyter. There is no poetry in Of Prelatical Episcopacy, a work that has attracted little scholarly attention, although Milton continued to express his disdain for appeals to the authority of ‘antiquity’. It must be imagined that Young and his associates were more at ease with this second (and again anonymous) tract than they had been with Of Reformation, in which Milton sought to demonstrate how bishops through the ages have usurped royal and political power for their own material benefit and showed little interest in either the doctrine or discipline of Presbyterianism. While Milton would argue for the primacy of Presbyterian discipline the following year in The Reason of Church-­government, he never engages in any of the anti-­ prelatical works in either advocacy of Calvinist doctrine or attacks on Laudian doctrinal innovation—what Puritan polemicists condemned as ‘Arminianism’.39 The ‘Root and Branch’ petition against episcopacy had contained in its second clause a complaint about the failure of

380  c h a p t e r 15

Ministers to preach the truth of GOD, lest they should displease the Prelates as namely, the Doctrine of Predestination, of Free-­grace, of Perseverance, of Originall since [sic] remaining after Baptisme, of the Sabbith, the Doctrine against universall Grace, Election, for faith fare-­seene, Free will, against Antichrist, Nonresidents, humane Inventions of GODS worship: All which are generally with-­held from the peoples knowledge, because not relishing to the Bishops.40 But Milton himself says nothing of predestination, free grace, and free will until he insists that virtuous choice defines the human condition in Areopagitica. As we have seen throughout this book, there is no evidence that Milton ever subscribed to Calvinist doctrine before he began to write polemical prose, and the treatment of salvation in the Maske indicates that he held to a soteriology of virtue (and virginity) that derived more from his attraction to Platonism and Florentine Neoplatonism than the Arminian theology associated with the Laudians. His silence on matters of doctrinal controversy in the anti-­prelatical works is suggestive both of an aversion to the Calvinism of the Puritans on behalf of whose cause he was writing and an awareness that his own ideas about virtue, free will, and salvation would be deemed heretical by most of them. Milton’s polemic in Of Reformation is driven not by ecclesiology or doctrine, then, but by the abuse of episcopal power. In the second book, he is concerned with the effect of this abuse in civil government and how episcopacy tends ‘to the destruction of Monarchy’; and yet his images of monarchy in the opening pages of that book are odd and lacking in the dignity that divine right should confer. The question that must now be asked, he announces at the beginning of the second book, is ‘how to keep up the floating carcas of a crazie, and diseased Monarchy’. This bovine or ovine image of the monarchy as a rotting carcass, reminiscent of the swollen sheep of ‘Lycidas’, is immediately opposed not by an image of restored monarchical power, or of perfect reformation in the Church, but an Aristotelian description of the commonwealth as ‘one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest man, as big, and compact in vertue as in body for looke what the

b e c o m i n g a p o l e m i c i s t   381

grounds, and causes are of single happines to one man, the same yee shall find them to a whole state’. Milton cites ‘Aristotle both in his ethicks and politicks’ as his authority.41 Indeed the opening section of the second book reflects the conventional division of moral philosophy into ethics, economics, and politics that structures the extant commonplace book: ‘It is a work good, and prudent to be able to guide one man; of larger extended vertue to order one wel house; but to govern a Nation piously, and justly, which only is to say happily, is for a spirit of the greatest size, and divinest mettle’. It is magnanimity, the crowning virtue in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics but a quality of prideful self-­worth somewhat at odds with Calvinist views of the depravity of human nature, that Milton believes should be instilled by proper government: ‘to govern well is to train up a Nation in true wisdom and vertue, and that which springs from thence magnanimity, (take heed of that)’.42 When he declares that the plan of the bishops has been ‘to thrust the Laitie under the despoticall rule of the Monarch, that they themselves might confine the Monarch to a kind of Pupillage under their own Hier­ archy’, Milton nonetheless characterizes Charles I’s rule as despotic. In making reference to the Roman historian Polybius’s concept of the balanced constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and people, Milton outlines an English constitution comprising a monarchy free from clerical interference but more emphatically a Parliament that has the power, ‘with full approbation and suffrage of the People’, to make ‘the supreme, and final determination of highest Affaires’. Here he is, for once in the tract, interested in making a parallel with Presbyterian arguments that the Church should be governed by ministers and lay elders elected by their parish, ‘Functions that nothing concerne a Monarch’. Regardless of the hindsight inevitably cast on such comments by Milton’s later defences of the execution of Charles, monarchy in Of Reformation—in which Charles is never named—is ‘diseased’, ‘despoticall’, and properly kept apart from the making of ‘supreme, and final’, decisions about the country. Milton dwells on the infamous saying ‘No bishop, no king’ to ridicule it as a Jesuit invention, although he must have known that what he calls ‘this super-­politick Aphorisme’ was commonly ascribed to James I.43

CHAPTER 16

•

The Poetics of Polemic

‘Struggle of Contrarieties’ Joseph Hall responded to Smectymnuus with A Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (1641), and Milton responded to Hall in July 1641 with Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus— once more anonymously—and experimented for the first time with another rhetorical mode to which he would repeatedly return in his prose: the animadversion. This mode involved the quotation of an opponent’s text and extensive refutation of it by means of various proofs. It has something in common with the mode of disputation that Milton was familiar with from his university exercises, but also with judicial oratory as an opponent is forensically cross-­examined in print. Milton would return to the format of animadversion in Colasterion, a response to an attack on his arguments for divorce, and his first two publications as an official propagandist for the Commonwealth government in 1649, his Observations upon the Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels and, most exhaustively, Eikonoklastes. Animadversions is structured by the quotation of statements about church government from Hall’s Defence, followed by Milton’s literal and logical rebuttals; but animadversion had also become associated with ad hominem satire as the opponent is mocked and ridiculed for their stupidity. Milton adopts at times in Animadversions a knockabout satirical language that he presumably felt would be acceptable to Smectymnuus as it recalls the indecorous style of the Martin Marprelate tracts of the 1580s, written from a Presbyterian perspective against the Elizabethan bishops—although 382

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   383

the Marprelate style had caused almost as much offence to the leading Elizabethan Puritans as to the bishops against whom it was directed.1 The Marprelate style of rough jest and comic dialogue enabled Milton to develop a semi-­dramatic polemical mode that contrasted sharply with the solemn, conventional disputational style of his opponent. Hall had himself published a notable volume of verse satires in the aftermath of the Marprelate controversy, Virgidemiarum (1597), and Milton relentlessly turns the festive judgement on Hall into one of literary value, scorning the ineffectiveness of his satirical poetry as an index of the intellectual emptiness of the episcopal cause: Ans[werer]. Who would be angry therefore but those that are guilty, with these free-­spoken and plaine hearted men that are the eyes of the Country, and the prospective glasses of their Prince? But these are the nettlers, these are the babbling Bookes that tell, though not halfe your fellows feats. You love toothlesse Satyrs; let me informe you, a toothlesse Satyr is as improper as a toothed sleekstone, and as bullish. Remon[strant]. I beseech you brethren spend your Logick upon your own workes. Ans. The preemptory Analysis that you call it, I beleeve will be so hardy as once more to unpinne your spruce fastidious oratory, to rumple her laces, her frizzles, and her bobins though she wince, and fling, never so Peevishly.2 There are moments of content that must have given the clerics of Smectymnuus pause, even if they were untroubled by the unconventional style. The long quotation from the May Eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender by ‘our admired Spenser’ to exemplify how the prelates’ ‘whole life is a recantation of their pastorall vow’ would have been less surprising than the quotation of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto against Constantine in Of Reformation; but the sudden outburst against religious censorship under the bishops exhibits both Milton’s reading about, and experience of, the conditions of writing and reading in Counter-­Reformation Italy. There is a ferocious attack on the bishops’ ‘Monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes, your gags

384  c h a p t e r 16

and snaffles, your proud Imprimateurs not be to obtain’d without the shallow surview, but not shallow hand of some mercenary, narrow Soul’d, and illiterate Chaplain’.3 ‘[N]arrow Soul’d’ is the opposite of the Aristotelian prize virtue of magnanimity (megalopsychia, ‘great souled’) that was also elevated by Cicero in his vision of the perfect orator as magnus animus and that Milton regarded as the goal of a complete education; while ‘illiterate’ does not possess its modern sense but derives from the medieval term illiteratus, someone who has no education in Latin. What books does Milton have in mind? Perhaps Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants, about which Laud had been so concerned when Chillingworth was writing it and which eventually appeared from Oxford University Press with multiple ecclesiastical imprimateurs. Milton insists that there is ‘nothing more sweet to man’ than ‘liberty of speaking’ and celebrates the reappearance of ‘the conceal’d, the aggreev’d, and long persecuted Truth’ under ‘our time of Parliament, the very jubily, and resurrection of the State’.4 The priority of secular over religious government is asserted and the attack on pre-­publication religious licensing closely anticipates that of Areopagitica, in which the free circulation of books and ideas is depicted as reuniting and reanimating the divided body of a personified Truth—except in the later work it is aimed against the Presbyterians and Parliament for their restoration of licensing in 1643. The aim of Smectymnuus was to replace episcopal with Presbyterian church government, not to promote liberty of thought, speech, and writing: Milton’s apparent misunderstanding of the Presbyterians’ character and aims—perhaps due to his taking his cultured friend Young to be representative of the Presbyterian party—was soon to result in the personal humiliation of having his arguments for reform of the divorce laws condemned as libertine. Given confidence by his vigorous performance against Hall in Animadversions, Milton published the longest of his anti-­prelatical works, The Reason of Church-­government, in the opening months of 1642, as a Catholic uprising unfolded bloodily in Ireland and the king entered Parliament in an embarrassingly botched attempt to arrest five of its members on the charge of treason—an event that precipitated the departure of the king from London on 10 January 1642 for Hampton Court and

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   385

subsequently York. The next time that Charles returned to London would be to face trial in 1648. Milton was responding to Ussher’s compilation of works, Certain Briefe Treatises, Written by Diverse Learned Men Concerning the Antient and Moderne Government of the Church (Oxford, 1641). He returned to the prose genre of the oration, adopting a dignified tone after the rough forensic mode he had turned on Hall. One of the authors whom Ussher gathered in his compilation of apologies for episcopacy was Lancelot Andrewes, and it has sometimes been thought a glaring volte-­face for Milton to criticize the arguments of the bishop to whom he had dedicated spectacular neo-­Latin verse in Elegia tertia fifteen years earlier. But that is to assume his Latin funeral elegy must have been an expression of personal affection and veneration, rather than an experiment in poetic form designed to impress Cambridge readers close to Andrewes, such as Mede. Moreover Milton is respectful, initially at least, of Andrewes’s reputation and acknowledges that Andrewes and Ussher ‘for their learning are reputed the best able to say what may be said in this opinion’ of episcopacy.5 The declared purpose of The Reason of Church-­government—which is advertised as ‘By Mr John Milton’, the first occasion on which Milton appeared in print under his full name—is to prove that the pattern of church government set down in Scripture is Presbyterian rather than prelatical; but even in its opening pages, familiar Miltonic images from the poetry of the music of the spheres and of the shapes of angelic virtue in the heavens work against any argument for simply replacing one kind of religious conformity with another. ‘Discipline’ in religion is ‘not only the removal of disorder’ but an imitation of the ‘shape and image of vertue, whereby she is not only seen in the regular gestures and motions of her heavenly paces as she walkes, but also makes the harmony of her voice audible to mortall eares’.6 The conveyance of the perfect harmonies of heavenly virtue to ‘mortall eares’ is for Milton, as we have repeatedly seen, the burden of the poet as daemonic mediator between heaven and earth. This discipline in worship is not represented as a necessary consequence of sin and the Fall but rather encompasses the ranks of the angels (‘distinguisht and quaterniond into their celestiall Princedoms, and Satrapies [provinces of ancient Persia]’) and also the ‘blessed in

386  c h a p t e r 16

Paradise, though never so perfect’. Such divine discipline does not constrict and bind individuals to its uniform pattern but creates an order in which infinite variety moves: Yet it is not to be conceiv’d that those eternall effluences of sanctity and love in the glorified Saints should by this means be confin’d and cloy’d with repetition of that which is prescrib’d, but that our happiness may orbe itself into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight, and with a kind of eccentricall equation be as it were an invariable Planet of joy and felicity[.]7 The conceit here is astronomical, eccentricity being the measure of deviation of the orbit of a heavenly body from circularity, while ‘invariable planet’ encapsulates the paradox of creation as concordia discors: ‘planet’ derives from the Greek for ‘wanderer’. The striking verb ‘orb’ and the ‘thousand vagancies’, or wanderings, of ‘glory and delight’ recall the imagery of the ‘Nativity Ode’, in which the stars ‘in their glimmering Orbs did glow / Until their Lord bespake, and bid them go’, and the shepherds are surrounded by a ‘Globe of circular light’, which is revealed to be the ‘glittering ranks’ of the angels, ‘Harping in loud and solemn quire, / With unexpressive notes to Heav’ns new-­born Heir’ (lines 75–6, 110, 114–16). There is also an anticipation of the dance of the angels in the fifth book of Paradise Lost: Mystical dance, which yonder starrie Spheare Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheeles Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolv’d, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem (5. 620–4) Milton had turned to vernacular prose to campaign against the conformity enforced by Laudian episcopacy, but his complex metaphors for the divine pattern of religious discipline were a continuation of his devotional poetic idiom of over twelve years earlier. Yet the imagery of celestial discipline, of incorporation into ‘glittering ranks’, is overshadowed in the prose by imagery of individual freedom and independent movement—‘orbe itself ’; ‘a thousand vagancies’; ‘eccentricall equa-

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   387

tion’—which implies that free will is integral to the operation of creation at all its levels. The heavenly order of wandering movement is opposed to a discipline that is characterized by cloying confinement, repetition, and prescription. The language in the opening chapter of The Reason of Church-­government recalls the ‘Nativity Ode’ and the various astral, daemonic ascensions of the poet in Milton’s early verse and university exercises, but it also anticipates the explicit assertion of free will theology in Areopagitica: ‘If every action which is good or evill in man at ripe years, were to be under pittance, and prescription, and compulsion, what were vertue but a name . . . when God gave [Adam] reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a meer artificial Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions’.8 The same theology of free will is at the heart of Paradise Lost: in the third book, God is adamant that created beings, whether the fallen angels or man, are ‘Authors to themselves in all / Both what they judge and what they choose; for so / I formed them free, and free they must remain, / Till they enthrall themselves’ (3. 122–5). The Latin meaning of error is ‘wandering’ and in Areopagitica the discovery of truth through recognition of error is described in terms of wandering into new, unchartered intellectual areas: Since therefore the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason? . . . This justifies the high providence of God, who though he command us temperance, justice, continence, yet powrs out before us ev’n to a profusenes all desirable things, and gives us minds that can wander beyond all limit and satiety. Why should we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and of nature, by abridging or scanting those means, which books freely permitted are, both to the trial of vertue, and the exercise of truth.9 Free will—‘freedom to choose’—is the foundation in Areopagitica of the apology both for the unrestricted circulation of ideas in books and

388  c h a p t e r 16

for the toleration of varieties of Protestant opinion. The ‘thousand vagancies’ and ‘eccentrical’ movement of the stars that paradoxically constitute the divine discipline of the heavens in The Reason of Church-­ government are paralleled in more earthy, material images in Areopagitica of the construction of the ‘house of God’ through a concors discordia of dissimilar beliefs: And when every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can every peece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, that out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure.10  The argument and language of Areopagitica are anticipated more explicitly in the final chapter of the first book of The Reason of Church-­ government, where Milton addresses the claims of the ‘prelatical’ party that the attempts to reform or replace episcopal church government will enable ‘sects and errors’ to proliferate: ‘Forsooth if they be put downe, a deluge of innumerable sects will follow: we shall all be Brownists, Familists, Anabaptists.’ Milton rejects such claims as scaremongering and emphasizes the relative nature of such sectarian labels, choosing two of the more extreme sectarian identities, associated with claims of being perfected on earth, to make his point: ‘the Primitive Christians in their times were accounted such as are now call’d Familists and Adamites’.11 But he also develops a more sophisticated and positive argument for the emergence of diverse religious beliefs as the conformity previously enforced by episcopal power splinters: ‘it best besteems our Christian courage to think they are but as the throws and pangs that go before the birth of reformation, and that the work it selfe is now in doing’. The resounding declarations in Areopagitica that good can only be known through experience of evil, and truth through knowledge of error, are fuller developments of the earlier insistence that true reformation emerges from the ‘triall’ of virtue by vice and the ‘fierce encounter of truth and falsehood together’ in ‘so violent a jousting’: it is in the

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   389

nature of created things that they ‘cannot suffer any change of one kind, or quality into another without the struggle of contrarieties’.12

A Calvinist Suit of Armour The conventional account of Milton’s intellectual development is that it was the hostile Puritan reaction to his divorce writings in 1643–4, in which he argues for divorce on the grounds simply of incompatibility between husband and wife, that led to his split from the Presbyterians on whose behalf he had written the anti-­prelatical tracts. According to this account, the arguments about freedom of will, thought, belief, and expression which characterize Areopagitica can be explained in terms of a reaction to the Presbyterians’ attempts to suppress his own ideas and to enforce religious and intellectual conformity in exactly the same ways as the bishops against whom they themselves had campaigned. The ‘transformation that occurs in the prose tracts of 1643–5’ has also been ascribed to Milton’s reading of natural law theorists, in particular John Selden, the celebrated general scholar who had suffered imprisonment under Charles I for his actions as a member of Parliament in 1628–9 and become an impressive advocate of the legality of the Parliamentary cause. Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium (1640) is indeed cited in Areopagitica in defence of the proposition that truth is the product of studious encounter with every sort of opinion and error.13 Yet the narrative looks now less like one of intellectual transformation than of elaboration of arguments that Milton had already advanced in the anti-­ prelatical works. Indeed we might recall that as early as 1639, he had recorded in his commonplace book the Church Father Lactantius’s observation that God permits evil, ‘ “So that reason may correspond to virtue”. For virtue is made known, is illustrated, and is exercised by evil’.14 Milton’s sense of the indivisibility of good and evil stretches back beyond his career as a prose polemicist, and was derived, at least in part, from entirely orthodox Christian sources. The assumption that the explicit assertion of a free will theology in 1644 marks Milton’s break with the Calvinist doctrine of his youth and of the Presbyterian party for which he had written in the anti-­prelatical

390  c h a p t e r 16

tracts has been shown throughout this book to be built on a false premise. Areopagitica rather contains the first explicit formulation of a theology and soteriology founded in the virtuous exercise of reason that had previously been given complex poetic and dramatic expression in the Maske ten years earlier. It is thus hardly surprising that there is virtually no mention of Presbyterian doctrine, as opposed to discipline, in the anti-­prelatical writings: about the closest that Milton comes in The Reason of Church-­government is in a reference to the actions of the Scots in expelling episcopacy: ‘And that the principal reformation here foretold is already come to pass as well in discipline as in doctrine the state of our neighbour Churches afford us to behold.’15 The opposition to episcopacy in England in 1641–2 involved an uneasy alliance between those who favoured establishing a new national Presbyterian church government, most prominently Smectymnuus, and so-­called Independents, who rather favoured granting complete autonomy to each separate congregation, were generally more tolerant of sectarianism, and encompassed a more diverse range of theological views than orthodox Calvinism. Leaders of the two parties had agreed in a meeting at Edward Calamy’s house in London in November 1641 to maintain a united front in the campaign against episcopacy, but the coalition did not last: after Parliament convened the Westminster Assembly of Divines in June 1643 to decide on what form of church government should replace episcopacy, the Presbyterians turned their polemical fire on their former allies, the Independents, depicting their dissent from Presbyterian orthodoxy as fostering sectarian heresy in much the same way that the defenders of episcopacy stigmatized the Presbyterians. Milton may have been arguing for Presbyterian church government in 1642 but at the level of imagery the logic of his argument aligned with the Independent argument for the self-­determination of individual congregations—indeed the image of happiness ‘orbing’ itself ‘into a thousand vagancies of glory and delight’ implies an ideal of absolute individual autonomy in spiritual matters, free from any prescriptive authority. In a striking geometric metaphor, the sharply hierarchical structure of episcopacy is imagined as a ‘pyramidal figure’, which is ‘the most dividing and schismaticall forme that Geometricians know of ’;

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m ic   391

the pyramid must dissolve and episcopacy ‘must be faine to inglobe, or incube her selfe among the Presbyters’.16 But the logical drive of the metaphor is towards Independency and indeed individuality rather than Presbyterian church structures, which were flatter than those of episcopacy but still rose in a hierarchy from a local to a national level of decision-­making. There is little sense of the Calvinist conviction that there was an obligation on the elect to restrain and govern the reprobate through a compulsory church government, maintained by an alliance of ministers and magistrate. Tellingly the image of ‘inglobing’ returns at the end of the tract when Milton maintains that it is not fear of church discipline that encourages virtuous behaviour but ‘honest shame, or call it if you will esteem, whereby men bear an inward reverence towards their own persons’. The ethical proof here is Greek: his example is of Hector’s behaviour in the Iliad and the argument about shame is from Plato’s Republic and Euthyphro. This philosophy that virtuous action is a consequence of the fear of shame, which is begot by ‘self-­esteem’— Milton was in fact the first to coin this term in his fifth and final anti-­ prelatical work, the Apology Against a Pamphlet—is Hellenic, not Christian. Self-­esteem ‘hath in it a most restraining and powerful abstinence to start back and glob it self upward from the mixture of any ungenerous and unbeseeming motion’.17 The process by which self-­esteem creates virtue sounds rather like the whole process of creation from Chaos described in Paradise Lost: And vital virtue infus’d, and vital warmth Throughout the fluid Mass, but downward purg’d The black tartareous cold Infernal dregs Adverse to life: then founded, then conglob’d Like things to like, the rest to several place Disparted. (7. 236–40). The notion of self-­esteem as the motor of virtue in the anti-­prelatical prose is remote from the orthodox Protestant—or indeed Christian— doctrines of sin, grace, and regeneration. The essentially Platonic philosophy of grace as the reward of self-­willed moral virtue that he had dramatized in the Maske is explicated in the prose of The Reason of

392  c h a p t e r 16

Church-­government; in his autobiographical digression in the second book of the tract, Milton implicitly presents himself, as we shall see, as an exemplar of virtue, attained through his dedication to learning, his sexual purity, and the uses to which he puts his inspired poetic ability.18 It is worth wondering once again what Smectymnuus must have made of all this, especially Milton’s sceptical attitude towards the charge of sectarian heresy and insistence on the toleration of opinion and error in the pursuit of a greater truth. An important element of the argument in The Reason of Church-­government is that the imposition of episcopal authority has not facilitated the prevention of schism in English religion, but has itself been the cause of schism by enforcing doctrine and discipline that have no clear authority in Scripture. This is to apply to the specific case of the Laudian Church the general arguments that John Hales made in his Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, first published in 1642 but in circulation since 1636, and for which Hales was called to account by Laud. As we saw in Chapter 11, Hales’s language and argument bear comparison with that of Milton in The Reason of Church-­ government and Areopagitica, as is evident from Hales’s opening declaration that ‘Heresie and Schisme as they are commonly used, are two Theologicall scar crows, with which they, who uphold a party in Religion, use to fright away such, as making enquiry into it, are ready to relinquish and oppose it, if it appeare either erronious or suspitious’.19 It is more likely that Milton was familiar with the work of his ‘learned friend’ Hales about religious schism than with the arguments for religious toleration beginning to appear in print by figures associated with popular radical movements, such as the future Leveller leader William Walwyn’s Compassionate Samaritan, published four months before Areopagitica in July 1644.20 It is habitually noted that by excluding ‘Popery and open superstition’, Milton did not extend toleration to Roman Catholicism in Areopagitica, as did both Walwyn in the Compassionate Samaritan and Roger Williams in his Bloudy Tenent, of Persecution (1644) in the same year; but it is likely more relevant to the formation of Milton’s ideas about liberty of conscience that he did not come to the same conclusions as Hales’s friend in the Great Tew circle, William Chillingworth, who had argued in 1638 in The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   393

to Salvation for an ecumenical national church that could encompass all Christian believers. Hales and Chillingworth regarded themselves in the 1630s as following in the Erasmian humanist tradition in their anti-­ Calvinism and emphasis on a rational and learned scepticism of clerical claims to exclusive religious authority. They were sceptical at the same time of the Laudian appeal to the Church Fathers and antiquity.21 It is this scholarly milieu and intellectual tradition to which Milton can be more convincingly connected than to the culture of ‘popular’ religious radicalism emerging in London as civil war broke out, even if Hales and Chillingworth sided with the royalist party in the political conflict that finally broke out into open warfare between the Charles I and Parliament in the autumn of 1642. This is to provoke the question once more: why did Milton take up polemical prose in common cause with Smectymnuus and the Presbyterian clergy? He showed no interest in Calvinist doctrine and held views about the role of reason, virtue, and free will in salvation that they would likely have condemned as ‘Arminian’ at best and at worst Pelagian heresy, while his arguments for a replacement of episcopal church government displayed little enthusiasm for Presbyterianism as a solution and showed rather imaginative sympathy with the self-­determination of Independency that the Presbyterians would soon bitterly condemn as opening the door to blasphemy and irreligion.22 The example of his cultured tutor and friend Thomas Young should not be underestimated; but Milton might also be regarded as late example of the European phenomenon influentially described by Hugh Trevor-­Roper, in which free-­ thinking Erasmian intellectuals—including Catholics such as de Thou and Sarpi, the two most cited authors in Milton’s commonplace book— were pushed towards a Calvinism with which they had little in common theologically or temperamentally by the persecutory policies of the Counter-­Reformation and the Council of Trent. The turning-­point for these intellectuals in this account was the placing of Erasmus’s works on the Index by Pope Paul IV in 1559. They donned a Calvinist ‘suit of armour’ because ‘Calvinism, however intellectually reactionary’, provided the ‘necessary political ally of intellectual progress’ against a persecutory Catholicism.23

394  c h a p t e r 16

Something similar might be said about Milton in 1630s England: he was compelled towards an alliance with Presbyterians with whom he did not really have much in common theologically or temperamentally, but some of whom, like Young, he knew to be sound scholars, by what he perceived to be the clerical imposition of conformity under the Laudian Church. Milton’s peculiarly intense investment in humanist ideals of education and social theory led Milton to see the same process that had occurred in Italy, and in Catholic England, now occurring once again under Laud and Charles: the suppression of learning and culture by a clerical usurpation of civil power. This is why he could transfer the language of anti-­Catholic polemic from episcopacy to Presbyterianism with such ease by 1644 when the Presbyterians had, to his horror, turned their charge of heresy on his own writings on divorce. It is also why theological doctrine and varieties of ecclesiastical discipline had little to do with Milton’s ‘radicalization’ in the 1640s, and reading history and poetry had everything. This accounts for his otherwise perplexing decision to devote much of the second book of The Reason of Church-­ government to literary criticism, autobiography, and the promise that he will complete the great English epic once the insufferable conditions of episcopal tyranny have been removed.

‘Inquisitorious and Tyrannical Duncery’ In the first book of The Reason of Church-­government, Milton had lamented how the persecutory policies of the Laudian Church mimicked those of the Catholic Church in Spain and Italy, and how such repression brought ‘a num and chill stupidity of soul, an inactive blindness of mind upon the people by their leaden doctrine’.24 There is an echo here of the passage in Milton’s seventh Prolusion on the value of learning in which he recalls (in Latin) the condition of England in the medieval ‘dark age’ of Catholic rule, when ‘blind illiteracy [caecus inertia] had penetrated and entrenched itself everywhere, nothing was heard in the schools but the absurd doctrines of drivelling monks’. ‘Inactive blindness of mind’ is a more literal translation of caecus inertia, which carries the sense of heaviness, of lumpen igno-

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   395

rance, and Milton makes an equation between stupidity and materiality that can be traced throughout his writing, from the student exercises to the late poems. Popish clerical repression prevents the spiritualizing intellectual ascent that Milton had always associated with privileged divine knowledge; and as he made very clear in the extraordinary second book of The Reason of Church-­government, the repression of Laudian episcopacy must be removed to enable him to ascend to the role of national poet. This was Milton’s first appearance under his full name in any printed work, verse or prose, and that shedding of anonymity to appear in public evidently released him to reveal Virgilian poetic ambitions that had been known previously only to his family, close friends, and students and tutors during his time at Christ’s College. He begins his famous, much-­quoted autobiographical account of his vocation and the conditions that threaten it by emphasizing that if he sought merely to show off his ‘wit and learning’ to readers, then ‘I should not write thus out of mine own season, when I have neither yet compleated to my minde the full circle of my private studies’. The humanist ideal of the universal scholar was acknowledged to be in one sense a utopian one, and so it might be asked whether Milton (now ten years out of Cambridge) would ever have felt himself to have completed the ‘full circle’ of his studies. Nor would he have chosen to write in prose, ‘wherin knowing my self inferior to my self, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand’.25 This statement has often been taken at face value but the claim that his prose is the work of a true poet might rather be said to increase its prestige: it is a quality of prose that only such a poet can produce.26 The pride that Milton took in his prose writing is suggested by his donation to the Bodleian library in 1646 of a set of all eleven of the prose tracts that he published by 1645, which he thought worthy of being received, as he put it in the Latin dedication to the librarian John Rouse, into ‘a temple of everlasting memory’; and by his gift in the same year of ten of the prose works to ‘the most learned man’, the royal librarian Patrick Young, ‘satisfying himself with but few readers of this kind’—an anticipation of the expectation in Paradise Lost to ‘fit audience find, though few’.27

396  c h a p t e r 16

Milton then declares that while it would be more suitable for ‘a Poet soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and his singing robes about him’—once more the familiar image of the daemonic poet— to ‘divulge unusual things of my selfe’, he will proceed to do so anyway in the ‘cool element of prose’. He cites as proof of his poetic vocation the reception of his writing, ‘prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter’, by his teachers at home and at school, by the ‘privat Academies of Italy’, and by his ‘friends here at home’. He also refers for the first time in the prose to the ‘inward prompting’ that leads him to believe he ‘might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die’.28 Milton explains how his decision that he should write such immortal verse in the vernacular was motivated by a desire to instruct his countrymen and also by a more pragmatic awareness that ‘it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among theLatines’. He consequently applied himself ‘to that resolution which Ariosto follow’d against the perswasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toylsom vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect’. We have seen Milton’s fascination with the biographies of the great poets, particularly Virgil and Dante, and here he shows that he has also been reading the Italian biographies of Ariosto, perhaps mediated through Sir John Harington’s ‘Life of Ariosto’, prefixed to his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso.29 What follows is a discussion of which literary forms would offer the best vehicle for Milton’s poetic ambition. What did Archbishop Ussher, to whom the tract was nominally a response on the authority of episcopal church government, make of all this, coming from a polemicist of whom he had presumably never previously heard? Milton first considers the examples of the ‘diffuse’ epic by Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, as well as (more surprisingly) the Book of Job as an example of ‘brief ’ epic. While his notes on potential literary projects from around this period suggest he was moving away from the idea of an Arthurian epic that he had envisaged in Mansus and Epitaphium Da-

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   397

monis, he remained interested at this point in considering what ‘Knight before the [Norman] conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian Heroe’ and in composing heroic poetry derived from ‘our own ancient stories’. The notes on literary projects in the Trinity manuscript consist mainly of titles for tragic dramas, and Milton shifts to a consideration of the claims of drama which is notable for the opacity of its syntax: ‘Or whether those Dramatick constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides raigne shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation, the Scripture also affords us a divine pastoral Drama in the Song of Salomon consisting of two persons and a double Chorus, as Origen rightly judges.’30 Scripture affords an alternative example of ‘doctrinal and exemplary’ drama, and while there may be an implicit sanction granted to the instructive power of drama by adducing the biblical example, there is no clear register in this sentence of the priority of the Christian over the classical model of instruction: the syntactical disconnection between the two parts of the sentence perhaps reflects some semi-­conscious awareness that the biblical example should properly be (but is not) given priority. The tone becomes once more polemical as Milton details the failure of his poetic contemporaries to fulfil the educative role of the true poet, which is to ‘inbreed and cherish’ in their people ‘the seeds of vertu, and publick civility’. He complains of the ‘corruption and bane’ that ‘our youth and gentry . . . suck in dayly from the writings and interludes of libidinous and ignorant Poetasters, who having scars ever heard of that which is the main consistence of a true poem . . . doe for the most part lap up vitious principles in sweet pils to be swallow’d down, and make the taste of vertuous documents harsh and sowr’.31 That Milton hits at poets associated with the Caroline court—the ‘sons of Ben’—is evident from the immediately subsequent condemnation of the ‘publick sports, and festival pastimes’ that Charles and Laud had sought to enforce through the 1633 Book of Sports as an extension of the liturgy of the Church. We have seen how the young Milton attached a particular soteriological significance to virginity. An identification of the sexual morality of the poet and the generic ambition of his poetry is made more vehemently in The Reason of Church-­government, where Milton evidently

398  c h a p t e r 16

felt confident enough in his future career as the nation’s epicist to declare in print that he would covnant with any knowing reader, that for some few years I may go on trust with him toward the payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be rays’d from the heat of youth, or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at wast from the pen of some vulgar Amorist, or the trencher fury of a riming parasite, nor to be obtained by the Invocation of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow’d fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whome he pleases; to this must be added industrious and select reading, steddy observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affaires.32 The sense in Elegia sexta of the generic and moral inferiority of love elegy has intensified in the anti-­prelatical prose into disgust at the moral corruption of its practitioners, the ‘vulgar Amorists’—a phrase which invokes specifically writing in the style of Ovid’s Amores. The elegiac poet and the priestly, prophetic poet are opposed in the manner of the (jocular) 1629 verse letter to Diodati, but in the polemical, public context of the prose work the tone is now one of censorious moral judgement and disgust. Epic gravity is asserted over elegiac and lyric flippancy, but the generic hierarchy is also a moral one. As in the invocation of the ‘heavenly Muse’ in the ‘Nativity Ode’, where the poet calls for his mouth to be touched by ‘hallowed fire’ from the angelic altar (line 28), Milton presents himself as a type of Isaiah, whose prophetic speech is released by a fiery coal placed against his lips by the one of the seraphim (Isaiah 6: 6–7). Milton’s lips are purified by holy fire but the ‘Vulgar Amorist’, whose desire is directed towards the body, is unable to control his physical discharges and so is implicitly feminized in terms of contemporary stereotypes of woman as ‘leaky vessel’. The wine drunk by the elegiac poet flows ‘at wast’ back out through his pen: ‘at wast’ punningly reduces the verse to waste-­product which is produced from the waist, to both urine and, with a recollection of the opening line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 (‘The expense of spirit

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   399

in a waste of shame’), seminal fluid. Milton had seen the writers of Ovidian verse at Cambridge—he may have had the likes of Thomas Randolph in mind—turn into the ‘riming parasites’ of Laudian and court society, with their ‘trencher fury’ or wholly materialistic, patronage-­led poetic ambitions. Conversely Miltonic texts will maintain (like their author’s chaste, sealed-­up body) integrity and individuality, preserving ‘as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them’, as Areopagitica would describe a good book.33 The link ‘between sexual purity and prophetic utterance’ that is made in Milton’s major works of the 1630s—the Maske, ‘Lycidas’, Epitaphium Damonis— also informs the polemical prose.34 It is an astonishing covenant that Milton makes with his reader, especially since that reader would have bought the tract expecting an argument for the replacement of episcopal with Presbyterian church government rather than a promise to write an English epic that could compete with Homer and Virgil. Milton craves ‘excuse that urgent reason hath plucked from [him] by an abortive and foredated discovery’ the conviction that he will produce the great national epic. When Milton received his passport to leave for Italy from Henry Lawes, he described the ‘spheres’ that would speed him on his way as ‘overdated’; now the promise to complete an epic is ‘foredated’. Yet it is made clear that this promise depends on the religious and political conditions in which Milton writes: he will not be able to fulfil his covenant with the English people until ‘the Land had once infranchis’d herself from this impertinent yoke of prelaty, under whose inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.’35 This is an archetypal humanist analysis of the relationship between the condition of the institutions of Church and state and the moral, intellectual, and cultural health of a nation. The ‘inquisitorious’ behaviour of the Laudian clergy has returned England to the intellectual and cultural dark age of life under the Roman Catholic Church; only with the complete reformation of the English Church and the expulsion of clerical tyranny can such great feats of learning and literature be once more attempted. Milton warns of the bishops’ ‘corrupt and servile doctrines boring our eares to an everlasting slavery, as they have done hitherto’: while the

400  c h a p t e r 16

obvious allusion is to Exodus 21: 6, there may also be an invocation of the punishments that had been meted out to the ears of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton in 1637, and that cast a shadow over the poet’s ambition to ascend to epic in ‘Lycidas’. In his next prose work, An Apology Against a Pamphlet, he charged his pro-­episcopal opponent of being as ‘good at dismembering and slitting sentences, as his grave Fathers and Prelates have bin at stigmatizing and slitting noses’.36 Although we have seen how little evidence there is that Milton was ever set on a clerical career after leaving Cambridge, he concludes his lengthy autobiographical digression by disclosing that he has been ‘Church-­outed by the Prelats’, having perceived ‘what tyranny had invaded the Church’ in the 1630s: the threat now is that he will be outed from the pantheon of poets by the continuation of that tyranny. But whatever the notes in Milton’s commonplace book indicate about the private political direction of his thinking, in the concluding section of the work he echoes Presbyterian and Parliamentarian polemic of the early 1640s by representing the bishops as ‘evil counsellors’ to Charles, ‘the greatest underminers and betrayers of the monarch’. The set-­piece image of the king as a Samson who has been rendered impotent by the ‘prelatical razor’ is nonetheless deeply ambiguous: it presents Charles as a once-­mighty figure who has betrayed himself to the ‘strumpet flatteries of prelates’ and is now bound and blinded, made to ‘grinde in the prison house of their sinister ends and practices’.37 The ‘puissant hair’ that represents Charles’s kingly power will grow back, and there is an echo of the ‘Mitr’d locks’ that St Peter shook in ‘Lycidas’ before he ‘sternly bespake’ (line 112) in the prophecy of how the rejuvenated locks of the king, ‘sternly shook’, will ‘thunder with ruin’ upon the heads of the bishops. But of course, in an episode that would prove enduringly fascinating to Milton, the destruction of the Philistines who had bound Samson also inevitably entailed Samson’s own death.

Ignorance of the Beautiful The lifting of his career-­long anonymity as a writer in The Reason of Church-­government prompted Milton to make his poetic ambitions not

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   401

only public but to present them as evidence of the need to abolish the persecutory structures of episcopal church government. He represented himself as exemplary of the kind of exceptional person who would flourish in an England freed of such religious tyranny—by which in 1642 he ostensibly meant an England placed, as with Scotland, under a Presbyterian system of church government.38 Yet he returned to anonymity to respond in April 1642 to an attack on Animadversions, entitled A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel, Entituled, Animadversions. This was also published anonymously, although in An Apology Against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Confutation, Milton does hint on several occasions at his suspicion that it was written by Joseph Hall in collaboration with his son. Yet Milton regardless made his own life, character, and formation as a poet the foundation of his response, even though his readers outside Smectymnuus would presumably not have known of his identity. He seems to have been genuinely insulted by the confuter’s characterization of the writer of Animadversions as ‘a grim, lowring, bitter fool’, who ‘being grown to an Impostume in the brest of the University, was at length vomited out thence into a Suburbe sinke about London’, where he haunted ‘the Play-­ Houses, or the Bordelli’. The confuter admits in his opening lines that, as he does not know the identity of the man behind Animadversions, he ‘must fetch his character from some scattered passages in his own writings’.39 Milton leapt on this reference to constructing a ‘character’ because one of Joseph Hall’s best-­known publications was his Characters of Vertues and Vices (1608), the first of the several collections of ‘characters’ or types of people that appeared during the seventeenth century. Milton suggests that the confuter has pieced together his attack ‘from some penurious Book of Characters he had been culling out’: he responds with a narrative of his own virtue that is constructed upon an extraordinary but characteristic defence of his sexual morality through an account of his reading. Milton recalls his literary interests at university to refute the charge that he visits brothels and to demonstrate rather his ‘love and stedfast observation of that vertue which abhorres the society of Bordello’s’. He recounts how at university he was ‘allured to read’ the ‘Smooth Elegiack

402  c h a p t e r 16

Poets, whereof the Schooles are not scarce’ and ‘which imitation I found most easie’, before rejecting ‘those authors any where speaking unworthy things of themselves; or unchaste of those names which before they had extoll’d’. Milton was particularly attracted by the ‘pleasing sound’ of elegy: smooth, musical love poetry is here associated with licentiousness.40 There is an anticipation in this language of the ten-­line Latin recantation that Milton appended to his Latin elegies in the 1645 Poems, ‘Haec ego mente olim lævâ’ (In the past with foolish mind), in which the elegies are dismissed as ‘empty memorials of my wantonness’. Having been seduced by the superficial attractions of such verse as a student, Milton assures his readers that now ‘my heart has grown numb with a cover of thick ice’ (lines 1–2, 8). It is hard to know how to judge the tone of this recantation, given that only four of the elegies may be said to treat of Ovidian amatory themes and that the palinode, or retraction of a view in an earlier poem, particularly a love poem, was a literary convention in itself. Milton’s careful insertion of his age above the more Ovidian of the elegies in the Poemata is a reminder that the recantation of love elegy as a youthful indiscretion is a typical gesture of the poet who has left behind childish things as he progresses up the Virgilian hierarchy of poetic genres. Yet the movement of Milton’s narrative of his reading in the Apology is moral as much as generic: soon he came to prefer ‘the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never write but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts, without transgression’. It was Dante and Petrarch who confirmed Milton ‘in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem; that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things’.41 Milton does say in the Apology that if he found a talented writer, then ‘their art I still applauded, but the men I deplor’d’, and the claim that the true poet ‘ought himself to be a true poem’ is not, it is true, quite the same thing as saying that the good poet must be a good man, leaving open at least the possibility of an aestheticized rather than a simply moral life; although the whole point of this section of the Apology is to vindicate Milton’s impeccable chastity, and elsewhere in the work he insists, echoing a fundamental precept of Quintilian’s account

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   403

of the perfect orator, that ‘how he should be truly eloquent who is not withall a good man, I see not’.42 The rejection of the elegiac poets for Dante and Petrarch is followed by the relegation of lyric poetry as a kind, as Milton recounts how he eventually found in Platonic philosophy a truer guide to virtuous love. We have seen how important the examples of Dante and Petrarch were to Milton’s sense of the formation and role of the poet. In the light of the Maske, there seems little reason to doubt Milton’s account of the place of Greek philosophy in his intellectual and moral development: Thus from the Laureat fraternity of Poets, riper yeares, and the ceaselesse round of study and reading led me to the shady places of philosophy, but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato, and his equal Xenophon. Where if I should tell ye what I learnt, of chastity and love, I meane that which is truly so, whose charming cup is only vertue which she bears in her hand to those who are worthy. The rest are cheated with a thick intoxicating potion which a certaine Sorceresse the abuser of loves name carries about; and how the first and chiefest office of love, begins and ends in the soule, producing those happy twins of her divine generation knowledge and vertue, with such abstracted sublimities as these, it might be worth your listning, Readers, as I may one day hope to have ye in a still time, when there shall be no chiding[.]43 The passage is echoed in the palinode, ‘Haec ego mente olim lævâ’, where it is the ‘Socratic streams’ offered by the ‘shady Academy’ which ‘casued me to discard the yoke I had incurred’ (lines 5–6). The appearance here of the figures of Circe as a poisonous figure of sexual temptation and of Love as an allegorical figure of chastity, with her cup of virtue that is only offered to ‘those who are worthy’, seems to replay the drama of the Maske as an abstracted moral philosophy. The Platonic union between Love and the Soul, producing Knowledge and Virtue, recalls lines in the Daemon / Attendant Spirit’s speech that are not in the Bridgewater text but were added in 1637, in which the Daemon describes how ‘far above in spangled sheen’ sit ‘celestial Cupid’ and ‘his

404  c h a p t e r 16

eternal bride’ Psyche, from whose union issue twins, Youth and Joy (lines 1003–11). However, a few months later, in the summer of 1642, Milton got married. Mary Powell was the seventeen-­year-­old daughter of an Oxfordshire landowner, Richard Powell, who in 1627 had taken out a loan from Milton’s father and from whom Milton himself had long been collecting interest payments. The reproduction of Knowledge and Virtue through a Platonic union of Love and the individual soul now anticipates the defence of marriage as a Christian precept that immediately follows in the Apology. Milton’s education in sexual morality was completed by reading the Scriptures (‘last of all not time, but as perfection is last’) and he returns to Revelation 14, a scriptural passage that had long fascinated him, in which the hymn that is sung at the marriage of the Lamb can only be understood by the 144,000 men who were ‘redeemed from the earth’ because ‘they were not defiled with women; for they are virgins’. We have seen how literally Milton had read this passage in Epitaphium Damonis three years earlier, and how it echoes through several of his major poetic works of the 1630s: Milton emphasizes the effect on his youthful beliefs of imagining ‘that place expressing such high rewards of ever accompanying the Lambe, with those celestiall songs to others inapprehensible, but not to those who were not defil’d with women’. But in the Apology he adopts the orthodox Calvinist interpretation of this passage in Revelation, insisting that the biblical phrase ‘not defiled with women’ in Revelation ‘doubtlesse means fornication: for marriage must not be call’d a defilement’.44 Milton now offers a firmly Reformed reading of the meaning of ‘virginity’ in the New Testament as encompassing chastity within marriage. His own impending marriage—or sense that he would soon seek to marry—doubtless shaped his conviction by 1642 that the heavenly song which animates the inspired poet, the vates, can be as well understood—indeed might be better understood—by the chastely married as the perpetually virginal; or perhaps a change in his views on the matter even encouraged him to marry. To his own elevated literary education in sexual morality, Milton contrasts his experience of the Laudian clergy, whose intellectual and literary inadequacies are presented as an index of their moral corruption. He biliously recalls how at Cambridge he had witnessed future minis-

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   405

ters ‘so oft upon the Stage writhing and unboning their Clergie limes . . . prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court-­Ladies, with their Groomes and Madamoisellaes’.45 Milton combines his contempt for both the Laudian emphasis on ceremonial religion and the effeminate luxury of the Caroline court with an expression of puritanical distaste for the immorality of theatrical display. The suggestion of grotesque sexual as well as dramatic performance in the image of the (presumably cross-­dressed) student actors ‘writhing and unboning’ recalls the charges of sodomy levelled against Buckingham and the royal court in the manuscript libels that circulated in the universities in the late 1620s. He may again have had in mind the university comedies of his Cambridge contemporary Randolph, which had received great acclaim from the visiting Caroline court. Here Milton sounds like Prynne in his attack on masques in Histrio-­Mastix, and he would again adopt this typically Puritan anti-­theatrical language in furious attacks in Eikonoklastes on the corrupt theatricality of Charles’s court and the susceptibility of the English people to idolatry of false, empty images of power. Yet, as is evident from the list of projects for drama in the Trinity manuscript and his disagreement in the commonplace book with Tertullian’s blanket condemnation of ‘shows’ as anti-­Christian, his position in 1639–42 was that ‘the little corruptions of the theatre should indeed be removed’ but the instructive power of the serious ‘dramatic arts’, in particular tragedy, should be nonetheless harnessed for the public good.46 It may be that he was now less well disposed to the sort of stage comedies that were popular, both in Latin and the vernacular, in Caroline Cambridge. The Ciceronian distinction between humanissimi homines and barbaria was a repeated motif of Milton’s Cambridge prolusions, and in the Apology he applies this distinction to define the opposition between himself and the confuter, and by extension the bishops whom the confuter is taken to represent: How few among them that know to write, or speak in a pure stile, much lesse to distinguish the idea’s, and various kinds of stile: in Latine barbarous, and oft not without solecisms, declaming in rugged and miscellaneous geare blown together by the foure winds, and

406  c h a p t e r 16

in their choice preferring the gay rankness: of Apuleius, Arnobius, or any moderne fustianist, before the native Latinisms of Cicero. In the Greek tongue most of them unletter’d, or unenter’d to any sound proficiency in those Attick maisters of morall wisdome and eloquence[.]47 The origins of such polemical rhetoric stretch back to the attacks on the barbarity instilled under Catholicism from the original English humanists, such as John Colet, who wrote such language into the very statutes of St Paul’s School. The Protestant humanist identification of tyrannical Catholic rule with the decline of English letters, vividly exemplified by Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster, is turned by Milton against Protestant episcopacy. Milton had turned such polemic against his Protestant countrymen before, but in the semi-­public space of his Cambridge exercises, where the tone of such language tended rather to the serio-­ comic. His excoriation in The Reason of Church-­government of the education received by the English gentry at the universities echoes the Latin of the Prolusions: [studious men] coming to the Universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, and there unfortunately fed with nothing else, but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry, were sent home again with such a scholastical burre in their throats, as hath stopt and hinderd all true and generous philosophy from entring, crackt their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms, and hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men prelatically addicted[.]48 ‘Gargarisms’, or gargling sounds, recall the opening of Milton’s first Prolusion, in which he declares he would rather have the appreciation of an erudite few than that of ‘countless legions of ignorant fellows who have no mind, no reasoning faculties, no sound judgment’ and who are compared to frogs who can barely muster a croak. The attack on the ‘metaphysical’ scholastic curriculum would be continued by Milton in Of Education, but it had also been a repeated feature of his university exercises: we have seen how such attacks on scholastic

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   407

method did not authentically represent the content of the university curriculum in Milton’s time but were well-­established tropes of humanist rhetoric. The representations of university education in Milton’s prose, in particular the Apology, have often been taken as evidence of his own extreme unhappiness with his time at Cambridge; but he was redirecting a familiar rhetoric of anti-­Catholic and anti-­scholastic abuse against the Laudian Church that should not be taken as an accurate account of his own education. At the same time, Milton had expressed his concerns in his private correspondence with Alexander Gil as early as 1628 about the inadequacy of his fellow students in ‘Philology and Philosophy alike’, and had worried that eventually ‘the priestly Ignorance of a former age may gradually attack our Clergy’. The anti-­episcopal tracts depict such a world, in which the ‘priestly Ignorance’ of pre-­ Reformation and Marian England has returned in a supposedly Protestant country and can only be dispelled by further and truer reformation. In the Defensio Secunda, Milton explained that he published Of Education in 1644 because ‘nothing can be more efficacious than education in moulding the minds of men to virtue (whence arises true and internal liberty), in governing the state effectively, and preserving it for the longest space of time’.49 The confuter and those he represents are scorned in the Apology as not having ‘so much learning as to reade what in Greek APEIROKALIOI is’.50 The Greek term, meaning ‘want of taste’ or ‘ignorance of the beautiful’, is taken from the discussion of the ‘Aim of Education in Poetry and Music’ in Plato’s Republic (403 C). The damage done to English society by episcopal tyranny is aesthetic as well as intellectual and spiritual—Milton inverts the Laudian mantra of the ‘beauty of holiness’. In his November 1637 letter to Diodati, with whom he had always shared a bond through their common experience of learning Greek at St Paul’s, Milton had expressed his constant desire (shifting from Latin to Greek) to seek out ‘the idea of the beautiful’ wherever it may be found, quoting the Euripidean motto, ‘many are the shapes of things daemonic’. The association for Milton of Euripidean tragedy with the earthly manifestation of the daemonic in beautiful forms is evident in the invocation of Euripides in the sonnet that Milton likely composed in November 1642,

408  c h a p t e r 16

and which is his most notable poem of the early 1640s. By this point, civil war had fully broken out in England: the king had raised his standard at Nottingham in August, and the first major battle had taken place at Edgehill in late October, with the Parliamentarian army coming off worst. The royalist army marched towards London, eventually retreating when only a few miles from Milton’s house at Aldersgate Street. Milton began annotating his copy of Euripides again after 1639 and it seems likely that he did so because of pedagogical reasons, employing the texts and making further emendations to them in his role as private tutor, initially to his nephews.51 In the sonnet published in the 1645 Poems as ‘Sonnet VIII’, and entitled ‘When the assault was intended to the City’ in the Trinity manuscript, the Euripidean example emboldens the poet to proclaim the power of his art to persuade men from destructive violence: Captain or Colonel, or knight in arms, Whose chance on these defenceless doors may sieze, If deed of honour did thee ever please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms, He can requite thee, for he knows the charms That call fame on such gentle acts as these, And he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas, Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms. Lift not they spear against the muses’ bower. The great Emathian conqueror did spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground: and the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare. The story, recounted in Plutarch, of how the singing of the first chorus from Euripides’s Electra by a defeated Athenian moved the victorious Spartans to halt their planned destruction of the city, would seem to exemplify the power of the divine beauty given material form in poetry to have a real, transformative effect in the world. This can be considered

t h e p o e t i c s o f p o l e m i c   409

as the first occasion on which Milton puts the sonnet to political work, although the tone is very different from the model of anti-­papal polemic that he knew from the model of Petrarch’s ‘Babylon’ sonnets and from that of his later sonnets praising military and political leaders such as Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. Milton chose to follow the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet rather than the Shakespearian adaptation of the form. Yet the concluding echo of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 58— ‘Bare ruined choirs were late the sweet birds sang’ (line 4)—retains the threat of destruction and loss even as the poet ostensibly celebrates the capacity of art to save itself, conveying the precarious future of civility in a world of division, polemic, and war.

EPILOGUE

•

Towards Regicide and Epic

The aim of this book has been to provide a new and detailed account of the intellectual development of John Milton which can explain how he went from being an obscure student poet in the early 1630s, albeit one with grand Virgilian pretensions, to a leading oppositional prose polemicist as civil war broke out a decade later. The development of Milton’s mind to 1642 should neither be explained in terms of a consistently evolving Puritan radicalism, nor alternatively as a sharp but unexplained break with a youthful Laudian conservatism, but rather in the light both of his intensive humanist education in the relationship between culture (or what he calls ‘civility’), religion, and society and his overwhelming ambition to become a national poet who could rival the ancient writers of epic. His ideas derive mostly from a quite orthodox regimen of reading in patristic, classical, and modern texts, which he increasingly read in relation to the events occurring around him in an England descending into clerical tyranny and then civil war. This reading was nonetheless an excellent preparation for the arguments that he made during the rest of the 1640s for reform of the divorce law, the free circulation of knowledge, a (limited) religious toleration, the legitimacy of executing a tyrant, and the benefits of a republican system of government: we do not need to place Milton in a ‘radical underground’ to explain how he came to hold his radical beliefs. His early exercises in traditional literary genres, from Latin funeral elegy to court masque, contain some distinctly heterodox ideas of virtue and salvation that have as much in common with Erasmian humanism and Florentine Neoplatonism as the varieties of Protestantism. 410

t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic   411

There is nothing to suggest that Milton ever held to an orthodox Calvinist theology of double predestination; but also little to indicate that his soteriology, which was grounded in virtuous choice and action, particularly in the realm of sexuality, had much to do with the ‘Arminian’ ceremonialism that was ascribed to Laudian intellectuals. The heterodox views that he systematically formulated in the De Doctrina Christiana during the 1650s, and that he finally seems to have considered too provocative to publish—on free will, the unity of body and soul, and anti-­trinitarianism—look less surprising in this light, and have several elements in common with the versions of Platonism developed by contemporaries such as Thomas Jackson and Henry More.1 His friendships and associations were with men whom he respected for their learning and their appreciation of the ‘beautiful’, regardless of their religious allegiances: Thomas Young, Alexander Gil the younger, Charles Diodati, Henry Lawes, and the various Catholic men of letters with whom he engaged in intellectual and literary conversation in the academies of Rome and Florence; and likely also, although the evidence is less solid, renowned men of general learning such as Joseph Mede and John Hales. This study of one half of the life of John Milton has shown how attempts to categorize Milton—like other intellectuals in pre–civil war England—in terms of ‘Puritan’ and ‘Laudian’ allegiance are insufficiently sensitive to the bonds of friendship, learning, and literature that eventually frayed, or were torn, only with the descent of the country into the polarization of civil war. This book concludes at the point in Milton’s writing life at which he published his fifth (and final) prose polemic against the bishops, in April 1642, and the point in his personal life that he got married to Mary Powell, in the summer of 1642, at the age of thirty-­three. This was an event that seems to have surprised everybody who knew him, if Edward Phillips’s account is to be believed: ‘About Whitsuntide it was, or a little after, that he took a Journey into the Country; no body about him certainly knowing the Reason, or that it was any more than a Journey of Recreation; after a Month’s stay, home he returns a Married-­man, that went out a Batchelor’.2 The composition and publication, once again anonymously, of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the first edition

412  e p i l o g u e

of which appeared in summer 1643, has unsurprisingly always been regarded as a direct consequence of recent personal circumstances and experience. The work argues for the right of the husband to divorce on the grounds of incompatibility or unhappiness, as opposed merely to adultery or non-­consummation: Mary Milton had left the Milton household in Aldersgate to return to her family in Oxfordshire little more than a month after their marriage in July 1642, on the proviso that she would return a few weeks later. She did not return for some three years. In his 1633 letter to ‘a friend’, Milton had represented the scholar-­ poet’s life of devotion to the universal learning required to write epic as in conflict with ‘the desire of house and family of his own’. His self-­image of the true poet as daemonic mediator between heaven and earth was predicated throughout the 1630s on the prophetic power obtained through the preservation of virginity. Why did he marry? Perhaps the practical experience of having his young nephews, the Phillips brothers, live with him in his house in Aldersgate played a role. (Although he barely mentions children in his divorce writings.) Milton seems in effect to have been raising his two nephews, and the situation must have altered his lifestyle significantly. Why did the marriage so rapidly break down? The answer to that question will always finally be unknowable, and it is more fruitful to think about the writings on divorce in the context of the unfolding civil war and their role in the development of Milton’s thought and career. In Animadversions, Milton had celebrated, as we have seen, the reappearance of ‘the conceal’d, the aggreev’d, and long persecuted Truth’ under ‘our time of Parliament, the very jubily, and resurrection of the State’. The effective dissolution of the episcopal Church of England and its mechanisms of censorship meant an end, Milton proclaimed, to ‘Monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes’. The calling by Parliament of the Westminster Assembly in June 1643 to debate what form a reconstituted church should take must have convinced Milton that he could now publish arguments and ideas that would previously have been suppressed under the licensing system of the Laudian regime. After all, the Assembly included not only Puritan clerics such as his

t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic   413

friend and the man who had introduced him to Latin poetry, Thomas Young, but lay members such as John Selden, praised by Milton in Areopagitica as ‘the chief of learned men reputed in this land’. The Assembly was predominantly composed of Presbyterian clerics but there were also prominent Independents, while Selden represented the so-­called Erastian party, a small group who argued that the national Church, whatever form it took, should be subordinate to the authority of the civil magistrate to prevent a recurrence of the usurpation of civil by religious power. As Milton would point out in his autobiographical narrative in the Defensio Secunda, Selden himself published a work on Jewish marriage law in 1646, Uxor Ebraica—except Selden kept his views in Latin and so locked away from uneducated eyes, something Milton insisted in the Defensio Secunda that he regretted not having done.3 The summer of 1643 must have seemed to Milton like the right moment to call for a reform of the divorce laws as the Parliament and the Assembly began to debate how to reform state and Church—although the direction of travel became evident when, only weeks before the tract was published, Parliament passed an ordinance reinstating the Caroline system of pre-­publication censorship by a panel of licensers. (The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce nonetheless appeared without a licence.) When the Assembly debated the terms of the new Directory of Worship that it had been tasked to draw up, the topic of the marriage service provoked heated debate over whether marriage was a civil contract or a covenant of God.4 The extensively revised and expanded second edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which Milton issued in February 1644 in response to the hostile reception of the first edition (and again without a licence), was prefixed by an appeal to ‘the Parliament of England, with the Assembly’. Milton also now threw off his anonymity, at least in the prefatory address, which is signed ‘John Milton’ (although the title-­page ascribes the work merely to ‘J. M.’). In choosing to publish his arguments on divorce Milton had become caught up in the Presbyterians’ campaign to impose a national, compulsory church government and to discredit the Independents, their former allies in the anti-­episcopal coalition who sought rather a much looser church government that granted autonomy to individual

414  e p i l o g u e

congregations. The more radical Independents were a strong presence in the New Model Army, the reorganized Parliamentary Army that was formed in early 1645 in response to a series of royalist victories, and this made them a greater threat to the imposition of Presbyterian authority. The Presbyterians’ key polemical strategy against the Independents was to present their greater tolerance of sectarianism as opening the floodgates to heresy and blasphemy of every exotic variety, bringing religious and sexual anarchy to the country and threatening the security of private property.5 Milton’s argument for divorce reform was condemned as heretical and in need of suppression by a series of prominent Presbyterians, including that seasoned campaigner William Prynne, who represented it as a prime example of the sexual libertinism that would thrive in the absence of a national Presbyterian church government. In a sermon preached before Parliament in 1644, published on the same day it was given, Herbert Palmer referred to ‘a wicked booke’ that is ‘abroad and uncensored, though deserving to be burnt’, in which the author pleads for divorce ‘for other causes than Christ and his apostles mention [and] has been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves’. Within two weeks of this sermon, the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce was one of three books cited when the Stationers’ Company petitioned Parliament to suppress recent heretical publications under the reintroduced licensing system.6 Whether these critics had actually read Milton’s arguments with any care (or at all) is open to serious doubt; but Milton must have been particularly hurt by Thomas Young’s sermon before Parliament in February 1644—the month that the second edition of the Doctrine and Discipline appeared—in which Young warned Parliament that it must ‘have no hand in the enacting of a Law that makes against God or his cause’ by citing the example of the legalization of digamy under the Roman Emperor Valentinian. Milton in fact made several entries in his commonplace book on the topic of digamy, noting in the early 1640s from Caesar’s Commentaries and Girard’s History of France that the ‘ancient Germans had more than one wife’ and from Selden’s De Jure Naturali (1640) that ‘in the ancient Christian church one concubine was allowed’. In the subsequent tract that he published in July 1644 to defend

t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic   415

his views on divorce, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, Milton insisted that the laws of Valentinian on marriage and divorce ‘are not contrary to the word of God [and] therefore may be recall’d into use by any Christian Prince or Common-­wealth’.7 Young knew better than anyone the intellectual abilities of his former pupil; perhaps they even disputed the issues of divorce and digamy privately. But this moment seems to have marked the end of the long and important friendship with Young. (Of the other great friendships of Milton’s youth, Diodati was dead before 1640 and Alexander Gil the Younger died in late March 1644: Gil left ‘all my printed, & manuscript Poems’ to a godly preacher, Samuel Bolton, who was an exact contemporary of Milton at Christ’s College; but there is no mention of Milton in the will.8) In 1642 Milton remained relatively unknown. The only printed work to appear under his full name had been The Reason of Church-­government. Milton’s name soon became better known—not for poetic skill or disputative power, but for allegedly encouraging sexual promiscuity through the publication of arguments about divorce. The irony of this development for a man who had long exhibited an intense interest in the connection between chastity and prophetic powers of insight in his poetry, and who had made his personal sexual virtue a keystone of the ethical appeal to the reader in his prose, was hardly lost on Milton, and he converted that sense of irony into characteristically Miltonic responses: an overwhelming assertion of his superior learning and bitter laughter at the intellectual inadequacies of his critics. But the affair also led him to shed the Presbyterian ‘suit of armour’ that he had donned in the anti-­prelatical tracts and to oppose directly, and most daringly in Areopagitica, those with whom he had formerly aligned in what he had thought was the name of religious and intellectual freedom. For all its exhilarating rhetoric and compelling imagery of truth and intellectual freedom, Areopagitica is also a brief history of priestcraft in which the same spirit of persecution and will to power over the conscience is perceived in Presbyterianism as the Presbyterians themselves had ascribed to Catholicism and episcopacy. Milton’s anger at the apparent supremacy of the Presbyterians in 1646–7 was given its most concentrated expression in ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under

416  e p i l o g u e

the Long Parliament’, a twenty-­line sonnet cauduto, a comparatively rare Italian form associated with satire, with its devastating final line: ‘New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large’. As I intend to show in a subsequent volume which encompasses Milton’s later life, from the divorce writings to the great final poems, it was the threat of a Presbyterian clerical tyranny which might even surpass that of the bishops that drove much of Milton’s writing in the 1640s, and which impelled him to put into print explicitly political arguments for the first time in defending the execution of Charles I – who formed an alliance of convenience with the Scots and Presbyterians in 1648 – in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.9 Yet this was not quite the ‘break’ with former allies that is usually portrayed, and it was certainly not motivated merely by Milton’s personal injured merit. We have seen that Milton had long been reading about the deadening effects of religious tyranny, censorship, and persecution on the cultural health of a nation, and that his trip to Italy had shown him those effects on a once great civilization. We have also seen that his alliance with the Presbyterians in the early 1640s did not have deep roots, and had little basis in shared theological doctrine or notions of ecclesiastical discipline: the densely poetic language of The Reason of Church-­government already reveals his attraction towards the religious self-­determination of Independency. Milton’s public appearance as a political writer in the weeks after the regicide looks less sudden in the light of the ‘Index Politicus’ of his surviving commonplace book, with its many entries from the late 1630s and early 1640s recording historical examples of the excesses and limits of royal authority, some of which appear in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates almost verbatim and even in the same order as in the notebook. In 1649, within seven years of his marriage and by the age of forty, Milton held the salaried role of Secretary for Foreign Tongues in the new republican government and was one of its chief propagandists. Once again, the defence of the new republic was a job for which his self-­imposed regimen of reading in the late 1630s and early 1640s had prepared him well, and it gave him the opportunity to put his skills in Latin and rhetoric in the service of the nation. Between 1649 and 1658, Milton exchanged the Virgilian ambition to write the great national epic

t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic   417

that had shaped his life and character for the Ciceronian ambition to be the pre-­eminent writer of political prose on behalf of the new, post-­ monarchical British empire. Pater patriae, ‘father of the nation’, was the title bestowed on the worthiest citizens by the senate in republican and imperial Rome. Milton ascribes it to Oliver Cromwell in the Defensio Secunda, after Oliver Cromwell had become Lord Protector. The title had been held both by the republican Roman general Camillus, as Milton observed, and also the emperor Augustus: Cromwell at this point indeed seemed to be making the transition from English republican general to British emperor. The title of Pater patriae was also conferred on Cicero for his outstanding service to the state, and Milton in his role as official spokesman of the Commonwealth and Cromwellian governments increasingly identified with the example of Cicero as a political writer and orator. Cicero could not adopt the generic and chronological structures of the Virgilian poetic career, but instead sought to ‘fashion a convincing and coherent form of narrative’ which could ‘record his political career’.10 Something like this can be observed occurring in Milton’s own attempt to record his career. In the autobiographical digression in the Defensio Secunda—his third great autobiographical digression in prose, but this time in Latin—Milton astonishingly gave no indication that he had ever written poetry or that he ever intended to write poetry.11 It is the composition of the first Defensio, his 1651 Latin defence of the regicide to a European readership that incorporates much of the theoretical argument of the Tenure, that is presented as the centrepiece of his literary achievements. Milton returned to the project of an epic poem in English in 1658, the year of Cromwell’s death, as the state for which he had worked for nearly a decade rapidly disintegrated and the country around him ‘revolted’ to monarchical rule. But he did not return to his plans of the late 1630s for an epic on Arthurian themes or about the past deeds of the British—his jaundiced, pessimistic account of the repeated failure of the English to obtain liberty in his History of Britain, which he had begun to work on again in the mid-­1650s, is a prose anti-­type to the epic plans of his younger days. Rather he returned to the plans he made for tragic dramas in the early 1640s, and to the topic of ‘Adam Unparadis’d’, or ‘Paradise

418  e p i l o g u e

Lost’. The Fall and original sin had not been a prominent feature of Milton’s pre-­war writing, at least in his multiple self-­representations, which insistently look upward, focused on the potential for ascension to the stars through virtue and the intellectual endeavour to which had dedicated much of his early life. The irony of Milton’s fulfilment of his promise to complete the great English epic is that he did so under the restored Stuart rule of the 1660s and thus under the very conditions of ‘inquisitorious and tyrannical duncery’ that he repeatedly argued in the polemical prose would prevent him from ever doing so, even if the poem turned out to be very different from the one that he had originally envisaged. By writing an English epic that encompassed human history in its entirety, from the creation to the end of time, Milton attempted on an unprecedented scale the classical and humanist ideal of epic as the ultimate compendium of knowledge: the fount of all arts, learning, and eloquence. It was an ideal that had fired his imagination from his earliest encounters with Latin poetics under the teaching of Thomas Young and it shaped his idea of himself as a man and writer from at least his student days at Cambridge. Near the opening of the seventh book of Paradise Lost, the poet describes himself as ‘In darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude’: these lines are often taken as emblematic of the late Milton as an isolated and shunned Puritan dissenter, a disappointed prophet and internal exile living in literal blindness in what he regarded as a corrupt, metaphorically blind nation (7. 27–8). But in the lines that actually begin the seventh book, the narrator finally assumes the place of the poet as daemon, bringing celestial knowledge and virtue down to earth—a pagan ideal to which the young John Milton had aspired from his earliest student writing and that over thirty years earlier he had imagined inhabiting in astral conversation with his father: Descend from Heaven Urania, by that name If rightly thou art called, whose voice divine Following, above th’ Olympian hill I soar, Above the flight of Pegasean wing. [ . . . ]

t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic   419

Up led by thee Into the Heaven of Heavens I have presumed, An Earthly Guest, and drawn Empyreal Air, Thy tempering; with like safety guided down Return me to my Native Element[.] (7. 1–4, 12–16) The story of the second half of Milton’s life is the story of how this gleaming vision of the poet’s powers became darkened, but not overshadowed, by the experience of revolution.

No t e s

•

Introduction. Two University Scenes 1. The Anglican Canons, 1529–1947, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge, 1998), 320. 2. Sarah Knight, ‘Milton’s Student Verses of 1629’, Notes and Queries, 255, 1 (2010), 37–9; although it has now been argued that Milton’s verses were recited at the university’s Great Commencement ceremony in July 1629 rather than before the French ambassador two months later: see Robert Dulgarian, ‘Milton’s “Naturam non pati senium” and “De Idea Platonica” as Cambridge Act Verses: A Reconsideration in Light of Manuscript Evidence’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 847–86. 3. The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford past in their Convocation July 21, 1683, against certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines Destructive to the Sacred Persons of Princes, their State and Government, and of all Humane Society (Oxford, 1683), 1, 3, 7. The decree was initially issued in Latin. 4. A proclamation for calling in and suppressing of two books written by John Milton (1660), broadside. See further Leo Miller, ‘The Burning of Milton’s Books in 1660: Two Mysteries’, English Literary Renaissance, 18, 3 (1988), 424–37. 5. The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1894), 5 vols., 3: 62–4. 6. Hobart quoted in Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The Early Reception of Paradise Lost (1667)’, Review of English Studies, 47 (1996), 479–99. The letters in which Hobart discusses Milton are Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 45, fol. 258; MS Tanner 45*, fol. 271. 7. Letter of John Beale to John Evelyn, Evelyn Papers, British Library, Additional MS 78313, Letter 93, 18 Dec. 1669; Letter 108, 24 Dec. 1670. For discussion, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Laureate, Republican, Calvinist: An Early Response to Milton and Paradise Lost (1667)’, Milton Studies, 29 (1992), 181–98; von Maltzahn, ‘Early Reception of Paradise Lost’, 496–9; William Poole, ‘Two Early Readers of Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill’, Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), 76–99. 8. Christopher Wase, ‘Epilogue’, in Electra of Sophocles presented to Her Highnesse the Lady Elizabeth (1649), 3. 9. For Hyde’s letter to Sir Edward Nicholas, see Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS 29, fol. 183; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘An Early Comment on Milton’s Poems (1645)’, Milton Quarterly, 48 (2014), 15–18; Ten books of Homers Iliades, translated out of French, by Arthur Hall Esquire (1581), 25. 10. Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), 57. 11. Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford, 8. 12. Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘How Radical was the Young Milton?’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (eds.), Milton and Heresy (Cambridge, 1998), 49–74 (50), which summarizes the arguments made in greater detail in Lewalski, Life. 13. In his two-­volume biography, first published in 1968 and the most exhaustive twentieth-­ century life of Milton, William Riley Parker distanced Milton from Puritanism without ever 421

422  N o t e s t o t h e i n t r odu c t ion directly addressing the issue of Milton’s religious identity; and he did so by offering an unhistorical caricature of the ‘Puritan’ as a ‘narrow, dehumanized’ character, inherently hostile to the classical culture that animated Milton as a poet. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2nd edn., ed. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1996), 1: 10. 14. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 95. 15. Ibid., 84. 16. See e.g. the concise accounts and critiques of revisionist historiography of the period in Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd edn. (1998); Mike Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2016). 17. Milton, The Reason of Church-­government Urg’d against Prelaty (1641), 40. 18. See e.g. the wide-­ranging account of ingenium in Rhodri Lewis, ‘Francis Bacon and Ingenuity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67 (2014), 113–63. In arguing for Milton’s commitment to the cause of wit, both on a personal and at a national level, I am continuing some of the concerns of an earlier book, in which I argue that the allegiance to wit of Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, over and above political faction, helps to explain some of the apparent ambiguities of Marvell’s early political identity: see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford, 2008). 19. Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing (1644), 24. 20. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, 1986), 99. 21. See e.g. Angus Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic (Woodbridge, 2006); Gregory Leadbetter, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Basingstoke, 2011). 22. The identification was first made by Jason Scott-­Warren on the blog of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts on 9 September 2019 (https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/?p=5751) on the basis of a study of the annotations in the Free Library’s copy of the First Folio by Claire M. L. Bourne. I am grateful to Jason Scott-­Warren for sharing with me his some of his preliminary work on the Folio, which I have not been able to examine in person for this volume. For Bourne’s thorough analysis of the annotations, published prior to the ascription to Milton, see ‘Vide Supplementum: Early Modern Collation as Play-­Reading in the First Folio’, in Kathy Acheson (ed.), Early Modern English Marginalia (2019), 195–233. 23. The very latest research suggests that Shakespeare may have been more appreciated in the early Stuart universities than has been thought: see Daniel Blank, ‘“Our Fellow Shakespeare”: A Contemporary Classic in the Early Modern University’, The Review of English Studies (2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz146. 24. A recent biography which is more directed towards speculation about Milton’s personal and emotional life is Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008). I have been particularly influenced in my method by two comparatively recent biographies of early modern English writers: David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004) and Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind, and World of William Shakespeare (2008). Beyond the early modern, I have tried to learn from the first part of Joseph Frank’s great five-­volume life of Dostoevsky, Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, NJ, 1979).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   423 25. Marco Santagata, Dante: The Story of His Life, trans. Richard Dixon (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 162. 26. Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Development of Intellectual Biography in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 73, 4 (1974), 513–23 (513). 27. For Johnson’s Lives of the Poets as emergent intellectual biography, see Korshin, ‘Development of Intellectual Biography’, 518–19, 522–3; Johnson, ‘Milton’, in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2006), 1: 265, 276.

1. Londiniensis 1. Life Records, 5: 173–4; Alan Dures, English Catholicism 1558–1642: Continuity and Change (Harlow, 1983), 28–9. 2. Life Records, 5: 161–3. 3. Early Lives, 1, 35. 4. Dekker, Jests to make you Merie (1607), 35–6. 5. See e.g. V. F. Harding, ‘City, capital and metropolis: the changing face of seventeenth-­ century London’, in J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge, 2001), 117–43. 6. Early Lives, 50–1. 7. Anon., The Character of a London Scrivener (1667), sig. A3r; J. M. French, Milton in Chancery: New Chapters in the Lives of the Poet and his Father (New York, 1939). 8. See Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), the arguments of which are usefully summarized in Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 2011), 102–21. On Ciceronian prudentia and honestas, see Cicero, On Obligations: A New Translation, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford, 2000), xviii, liv. 9. On Milton as a money-­lender, see David Hawkes, ‘Milton and Usury’, English Literary Renaissance, 41, 3 (2011), 503–28; Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Making Use of the Jews: Milton and Philo-­Semitism’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Milton and the Jews (Cambridge, 2008). 10. See respectively Jonathan Barry, ‘Civility and Civic Culture in Early Modern England: the Meanings of Urban Freedom’, in Peter Burke, Brian Harrison, and Paul Slack (eds.), Civil Histories: Essays Presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000), 181–96; Peter Earle, ‘The Middling Sort in London’, in Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brook (eds.), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Harlow, 1994), 141–58. 11. Withington, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Citizenship’, 108. 12. The Latin text of Milton’s Prolusion VI is given with translation in John K. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing the Genres, 1625–1632 (Tempe, AZ, 2005); Ad Salsillum, line 9, in Oxford Milton, 3: 202. 13. Gataker, Abrahams Decease . . . Delivered at the Funerall of that Worthy Servant of Christ, Mr Richard Stock, Late Pastor of All-­Hallowes Bread Street (1627), 4. 14. See e.g. the classic study by Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), 32–76; see also the various essays in Peter Lake and Michael

424  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 ­Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660 (Cambridge, 2000), and the up-­to-­date set of essays on the historiographical issues and debates over ‘Puritanism’ in John Coffey and Paul H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008). For a fine single-­author study, see John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Harlow, 1998). 15. Richard Stock, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1609), 15–16, 19. On the size of All Hallows parish church, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 28. 16. Daniel W. Doerksen, ‘Milton and the Jacobean Church of England’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 1.1 (1995), 5.1–23; Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Milton and the Conformable Puritanism of Richard Stock and Thomas Young’, in Edward Jones (ed.), Young Milton: The Emerging Author 1620– 1642 (Oxford, 2012), 73–95. For examples of the content of Stock’s sermons, see ‘Notes taken, at 61. Severall sermons of one Mr Richard Stock in London. A°. 1606. & 1607’ (British Library MS Egerton 2977). 17. Reason of Church-­government, 37; Early Lives, 18. It was argued by Helen Darbishire in Early Lives that the author of the anonymous life was Milton’s nephew and pupil John Phillips, brother of Edward, but the ascription to Skinner is now generally accepted: see Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume II 1625–1700 (1993), 86. 18. On this gap, see e.g. Edward Jones, ‘ “Ere half my days”: Milton’s Life, 1608–1640’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 3–25. 19. Ian Green, ‘ “For Children in Yeeres and Children in Understanding”: The Emergence of the English Catechism under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 397–425; Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Religious Instruction in England, c. 1530–1740 (Oxford, 1996). 20. See Paul C. H. Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012); Gordon Campbell, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana (Oxford, 2007), 98–101. 21. Milton, Of Education (1644), 1. 22. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 612. 23. On the dating of the poem, see Complete Shorter Poems, 148, which goes for 1632; Campbell, Milton Chronology, 59; Oxford Milton, 3: cxxiii. In support of a 1632 dating, compare, for example, the dream of the speaker of ‘Il Penseroso’ (‘There in close covert by som Brook, / Where no profaner eye may look’ (lines 139–40)), with the delight of the speaker of Ad Patrem that he shall no longer mingle ‘with the witless populace, but my footsteps will avoid eyes profane’ (lines 103–4; I use here the translation in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Patterson et al., 18 vols (New York, 1931-8), 1: 276–7.). 24. Ovid, Tristia, 4.10.17–20; Amores, 1.15.5–6; Jacobus Philippus Thomasinus, Petrarcha Redivius Laura Comite (Padua, 1635), 15; John Harington, ‘Life of Ariosto’, in Orlando Furioso (1591), 415–16. For the note on Thomasinus’s life of Petrarch in Milton’s commonplace book, see Oxford Milton, 11: 247–8. 25. Early Lives, 51. 26. Early Lives, 48. 27. Gordon Campbell, ‘Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton’, Milton Quarterly, 33 (1999), 95–105.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1   425 28. One candidate for another of Milton’s tutors is Patrick Young (1584–1652), also a Scot educated at St Andrews who may have been a relation of Thomas and was certainly his correspondent when Thomas was in Hamburg. Patrick was royal librarian from 1612 and became treasurer of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1621. He was renowned for his learning, particularly in patristics, and in 1633 published a landmark edition of the first epistle of Clement. Milton certainly knew of Patrick Young, as at some point after 1645 he sent him a bound copy of ten of his printed works (now Trinity College, Dublin, R. dd. 39), perhaps to show an ex-­tutor what his teaching had achieved; Franciscus Junius observed in a letter to Isaac Vossius that Milton was ‘Patrick Young’s disciple’ (‘disciplum Patricii Junii’). For comment on Patrick Young as Milton’s possible tutor, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 145–6; Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 389 n. 42. 29. The letter is translated in Complete Prose Works, 1: 312. 30. For a lively discussion of this culture of literary gift-­giving, see Jason Scott-­Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001). 31. Lisa Jardine, ‘Reading and the Technology of Textual Affect: Erasmus’s Familiar Letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear’, in Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London, 1996), 78–97 (88). 32. For the argument that Milton imagined the ideal marriage in the terms of classical friendship between men, see Thomas H. Luxon, Single Imperfection: Milton, Marriage and Friendship (Duquesne, PA, 2005). 33. Estelle Haan, ‘Milton’s Elegia Quarta and Ovid: Another “Cross-­Comparison” ’, Notes and Queries, 54, 4 (2007), 400–404; Maggie Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid (Oxford, 2012), 50–3. 34. ‘The Constant Method of Teaching in St Pauls Schoole London’ (Trinity College, Cambridge, MS. 0. 10. 22) was found in the manuscripts of Thomas Gale, High Master of St Paul’s in 1672–97. For transcripts and very full discussion of the manuscript and its use for reconstructing the curriculum earlier in the century, see T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, IL, 1944), 1: 118–33; Donald Leman Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School: A Study in Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New York, 1948), 109–26. Clark notes that William Lilly the astrologer cites Ovid’s Tristia as the first poetic text that he studied at Ashby de la Zouch Grammar School, where he began in 1613; it is also the first poetic work in the curriculm in John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar Schoole (1612). See also Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 30–1. 35. Hoole, A new discovery of the old art of teaching schoole in four small treatises . . . shewing how children in their playing years may grammatically attain to a firm groundedness in and exercise of the Latine, Greek, and Hebrew tongues : written about twenty three yeares ago (1661), 156–7. 36. Of Education, 3–4. 37. An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642), 32; Reason of Church-­government, 37. 38. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, the Grammar School (1612), 222–3. 39. Early Lives, 2. 40. Steven J. Reid, Humanism and Calvinism: Andrew Melville and the Universities of Scotland, 1560–1625 (Aldershot, 2011), 173. Reid makes it clear that of the three colleges which constituted St Andrews in the period, it was St Leonard’s—Young’s college—that had been most active in seeking to establish a Calvinist regimen.

426  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 41. See e.g. Lewalski, Life, 25, who describes Young as ‘a voluntary exile for his Puritan views’, ‘exposed by Stuart policies to the dangers of the continental religious wars’; and Neil Forsyth, John Milton: a Biography (Oxford, 2008), 23: ‘Young, who in 1627 was in voluntary exile in Hamburg because of his Presbyterian views’. 42. Milton, Eikonoklastes (1649–50), in Oxford Milton, 6: 308. Compare Lewalski, ‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’, 50, who presents Milton’s closeness ‘with militants opposed to Stuart pacifism in the Thirty Years’ War’ as a telling example ‘of his early oppositional associates and attitudes’. 43. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 505. On Young’s sermon before Frederick V, see Edward Jones, entry for Thomas Young, ODNB; Jones also points out that Young spoke of his time in Hamburg with affection. 44. See Miller, ‘Conformable Puritanism’, 84–9, to which I am indebted here. See more generally Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-­Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990); Peter Lake, ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church’, in Lake and Questier (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, 179–205. 45. Jill Kraye, ‘ “Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus”: Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations from Xylander to Diderot’, in Jill Kraye and M.W.F. Stone (eds.), Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy (2000), 107–35 (114–18). 46. Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 48.

2. Pure Chaste Eloquence 1. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 119, 121, 145–6, 177. 2. Of Education, 2; Early Lives, 12. 3. Riggs, World of Christopher Marlowe, 37. 4. There is a recent scholarly edition of the first part of the text: Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English, ed. Hedwig Gwosdek (Oxford, 2013). 5. See Ian Green, Protestantism and Humanism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot, 2009), 127–8. See also Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), 100–115. 6. See the lively discussion in Bate, Soul of the Age, 83­–92. 7. Of Education, 3. 8. Nicholas Orme, ‘Schools and Schoolbooks, 1400–1550’, in Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume III: 1400–1557 (Cambridge, 1999), 449–69 (469); Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 1: 169–70. 9. Articles to be Enquired of within the Diocese of London (1640), cited in Ian Green, Humanism and Protestantism, 74. 10. The first poem is entitled Carmen Elegiaca, ‘Elegiac Verses’, and the second, warning a governor of the consequences of oversleeping, is untitled. The manuscript is housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, as Pre-­1700 MS 127. For a thor-

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2   427 ough discussion of whether the items can be considered authentic, with the conclusion that they should be classified as dubia, see William Poole’s discussion in Oxford Milton, 11: 378–81. 11. See Lily’s Grammar, ed. Gwosdek, 194. 12. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1995), 27; Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 17–19, 237; Oxford Milton, 3: lxxxvi–vii. 13. Wyman Herendeen, ‘Milton’s Accidence Commenc’t Grammar and the Deconstruction of Grammatical Tyranny’, in P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World (New York, 1995), 297–312. 14. See generally Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 55–68, the arguments of which are usefully encapsulated in Mack, ‘Humanist Rhetoric and Dialectic’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), 82–99. 15. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), 112–13; see also Cummings, ‘Erasmus and the End of Grammar: Humanism, Scholasticism and Literary Language’, New Medieval Literatures, 11 (2009), 249–70. 16. English Works of Roger Ascham, ed. W. A. Wright (Cambridge, 1904; repr. 1970), 259. 17. Apology, 13. The phrase ‘cause them to be read’ probably refers to having others read to him rather than his own teaching. 18. Erasmus quoted in Kristian Jensen, ‘The Humanist Reform of Latin and Latin Teaching’, in Jill Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 63–81 (68); Colet’s statutes are transcribed in Admission Registers of St. Paul’s School from 1748–1876, ed. Robert Barlow Gardiner (London, 1884), 382. 19. William Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger (1596/7–1644)’, Milton Quarterly, 53 (2019), 215–21 (215–16); Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 2011), 47–8. 20. P. Albert Duhamel, ‘The Oxford Lectures of John Colet: An Essay in Defining the Renaissance’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), 493–510; Admissions Registers of St. Paul’s School, 382–3. 21. Mordecai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford. Volume IV: Seventeenth-­Century Oxford, 211–358 (243). 22. See e.g. the classic essay by Theodor F. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages” ’, Speculum, 17 (1942), 226–42. 23. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 121. 24. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, Volume I: Books 1–2, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, Loeb Classical Library 124 (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 197 (12. 1. 1). 25. Apology, 5. 26. English Works of Roger Ascham, 265. 27. Clark, Milton’s at St Paul’s School, 54. 28. Carmen de Moribus is translated in William Haine, Lillies Rules Construed (1633), sig. G5r; this translation is also given in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 1: 145. 29. Cicero, On the Orator: Books 1–2, ed. and trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cam-

428  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 2 bridge, MA, 1942), 25 (I. 33); Ben Jonson, Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1996), 430. 30. I use here the old but lively translation by W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge, 1904), 161–78. 31. Alexander Nowell, A Catechisme, or First Instruction and Learning of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (1570); for the use of various forms of Nowell’s catechism in grammar schools, see Green, Humanism and Protestantism, 290. 32. English Works of Roger Ascham, 183. 33. John K. Hales, Milton’s Languages: the Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge, 1997), 1–18. 34. See Estelle Haan, ‘The “adorning of my native tongue”: Latin Poetry and Linguistic Metamorphosis’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 51–65 (57). 35. The date at which these poems were composed is unknown, and the translation of the Horatian Ode, in particular, has been a matter of dispute; however, Haan makes a persuasive case for both Apologus De Rustico et Hero and the Ode as school exercises; although it is of course possible (if perhaps psychologically unlikely) that Milton later revised them before publication (‘ “The adorning of my native tongue” ’). 36. Paradise lost. A Poem in Ten Books (1668), ‘The Verse’, sig. a3v. 37. English Works of Roger Ascham, 223; see further Robert Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1994), 29. 38. Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 107. A concise account of this subtle shift of emphasis in educational practice is provided by Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Humanism and Seventeenth-­Century English Literature’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 269–93. 39. See e.g. Joost Keiser and Todd Richardson, ‘Introduction’, in Keiser and Richardson (eds.), The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts (Leiden, 2012), 1–26; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), 61–88; Maurizio Campanelli, ‘Languages’, in Michael Wyatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2014), 139–63. 40. Gil, Logonomia Anglica (London, 1619), sigs. P4v, N4v, M3r-­v. 41. Gordon Campbell’s entry for Alexander Gil the Younger in the ODNB gives ‘1642?’ as the year of his death, but the recent recovery of Gil’s testament establishes that he died in 1644; see Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger’, 215. 42. See further Stefano Villani, ‘The Italian Protestant Church of London in the Seventeenth Century’, in Barbara Schaff (ed.), Exiles, Emigrés, and Intermediaries: Anglo-­Italian Cultural Transactions (Amsterdam and New York, 2010), 217–36. 43. See CELM, s.v. ‘John Milton’; Oxford Milton, 11: 24. 44. Maurice Kelley, ‘Milton’s Dante–Della Casa–Varchi Volume’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 66 (1962), 499–504. 45. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 270. 46. For the evidence, see respectively Gordon Campbell ‘Milton’s Spanish’, Milton Quarterly, 30 (1996), 127–32; Esther van Raamsdonk, ‘Did Milton Know Dutch?’, Notes and Queries, 63, 1 (2016), 53–6. On Dutch, see further Esther van Raamsdonk, Milton, Marvell, and the Dutch Republic (2020).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3   429 47. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 272; The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (1976), 16–17. 48. Of Education, 6. 49. See Jason Lawrence, ‘Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?’ Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006), 5, 11. See now also John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2019). 50. See Ovid, Tristia, 3. 1. 11–12. 51. I use the translations in Complete Prose Works, 1: 316, 314; Leo Miller, ‘On some of the verses by Alexander Gil which John Milton read’, Milton Quarterly, 24 (1990), 22–5. 52. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 256; L. A. Ferrell, ‘An imperfect diary of a life: the 1662 diary of Samuel Woodforde’, Yale University Library Gazette, 63 (1989), 141.

3. The Pursuit of Universal Learning 1. I use the translation of the Defensio Secunda in Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 612; An Apology, 2. 2. For a comprehensive account of Milton’s consistent representation of himself as beyond moral reproach, with an emphasis on the consequences for his theology, see Stephen Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-­Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY, 2007). 3. Leon Battista Alberti, ‘Self Portrait of a Universal Man’, trans. James Bruce Ross, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York, 1953; repr. 1967), 480–2. 4. I prefer here John Carey’s translation of lines 86–8 of Ad Patrem in Complete Shorter Poems, 154. 5. ‘An Epistle to Master Selden’, in Jonson, Complete Poems, 147–9, lines 29–34. 6. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 220; J. H. Elson, John Hales of Eton (New York, 1948), 11. 7. Isaac Barrow, ‘Of Industry in our Particular Calling, as Scholars’, in Works of Isaac Barrow, ed. R. J. Hamilton, 3 vols. (1845), 1: 492, col. 2. 8. Victor Morgan, with the assistance of Christopher Brooke, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2: 1546–1750 (Cambridge, 2004), 461; The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-­ learned Joseph Mede, B.D., Sometime Fellow of Christ’s Colledge in Cambridge, 2nd edn. (1672), ii; Milton, Areopagitica, 11. 9. Cicero, On the Orator, 6–7, 17, 53; see also 13–14; I prefer here the older translation in Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 1. 4. 4, 1. 10. 1. See further Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998), 50–89. 10. On the concept of ‘general learning’ in England, see Generall Learning: A Seventeenth-­ Century Treatise on the Formation of the General Scholar by Meric Casaubon, ed. Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge, 1999), 13–25; on its importance to the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century, see Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 218–42. 11. M. T. Ciceronis oratio pro A. Licinio Archia, ed. Philip Beroaldus (Lyons, 1517), sig. C2r, translated (in the style of early modern English) in Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow, 2001), 39. See also the definition

430  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 3 of humanitas as ‘erudition and instruction in all good and liberal arts’ by the influential second-­ century Roman commentator, Aulus Gellius, in his Noctes Atticae, trans. Peter K. Marshall (Oxford, 1968), 13. 17. On the importance of the Pro Archia poeta for Petrarch and the foundation of Italian humanism, see Michael D. Reeve, ‘Classical Scholarship’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 20–46. 12. Extracts from Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum (c. 1363), in Boccaccio on Poetry, trans. C. G. Osgood (New York, 1956), 39–40. 13. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governor (1531), fol. 52v. On Elyot’s importance for early modern educational practice in England, see e.g. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, 21–3. 14. Elyot, Boke Named the Governor, fols. 31v, 32v–33r; Chapman’s Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1967), 1: 14. See further Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley, 1973), 22–3. 15. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem. Sieben Bücher über die Dichtkunst, ed. Luc Deitz, Gregor Vogt-­Spira, and Manfred Furhmann, 6 vols. (Stuttgart-­Bad Cannstatt, 1994–2011), 1: 6–8, 126. 16. Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys, 5, 48. 17. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford upon Avon, 1913), 160–1; Dryden, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, and Vinton A. Dearing, 20 vols. (Berkeley, 1956–2000), 4: 3–90. 18. For ‘polyhistor’, see OED; Anthony Grafton, ‘The World of the Polyhistors: Humanism and Encyclopedism’, Central European History, 18 (1985), 31–47 (33–4). 19. Milton, Defensio Secunda, 83; Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd edn. (1644), 64; Lewalski, Life, 89. 20. Obadiah Walker, Of Education, especially of Young Gentlemen (Oxford, 1673), 101; Early Lives, 2; Oxford Milton, 3: 14; Johnson, Lives of the Most Eminent Poets, 1: 243. 21. Gabriel Naudé, ‘Bibliographia politica’, in Hugo Grotius et al. (eds.), Dissertationes de studiis instituendis (Amsterdam, 1645), 23, trans. in Grafton, ‘World of the Polyhistors’, 39–40. See also Grafton, ‘The New Science and the Traditions of Humanism’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 203–23 (208–10). 22. Generall Learning, ed. Serjeantson, 85–6. 23. Defensio Secunda, 82–3; Reason of Church-­government, 36. 24. Prolusion VII (‘In Sacrario habita pro Arte. Oratio.’), trans. in Complete Prose Works, 1: 300. For the dating of this Prolusion, see below. 25. Of Education, 8. Early Lives, 60–1. For intensive discussion and reconstruction of the curriculum in which Milton instructed his pupils, see William Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 49–65, 297–300. 26. Grafton, ‘New Science and the Traditions of Humanism’, 208–9. 27. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Le Motteux (1994), 196–7; Brian Cummings, ‘Encyclopedic Erasmus’, Renaissance Studies, 28, 2 (2014), 183–204 (184–5). See also Donald R. Kelley, ‘History and the Encyclopaedia’, in Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin (eds.), ‘The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   431 Enlightenment’, Archives internationales d’histoire des idées/ International Archives of the History of Ideas, 124 (1991), 7–22. 28. Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings, ed. William Poole (Harmondsworth, 2014), xii. 29. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 229.

4. Philology and Philosophy 1. See e.g. the classic essay by Donald Lemen Clark, ‘John Milton and William Chappell’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 18 (1955), 329–50; Oxford Milton, 3: civ. Elegia prima is usually ascribed to spring 1626, although Campbell and Corns argue that the rustication, if it occurred, is more likely to have been in spring 1627, for this is when Milton signed documents in London during term time (John Milton, 41–2). 2. For use of the Circe personification, see e.g. Ascham, Scholemaster, in English Works of Roger Ascham, 226–7. 3. Early Lives, 10; Cambridge University Library, Add. MSS 6986. Elegia prima was interpreted by Samuel Johnson as making reference to Milton’s rustication; see Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 243–44. 4. Joseph Mede, Works of the Pious and Most Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede (1664), vii; Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 243. On the role of the College tutor, see further Lawrence Stone, ‘Social Control and Intellectual Excellence: Oxbridge and Edinburgh (1560– 1983)’, in Nicholas Phillipson (ed.), Universities, Society and the Future (Edinburgh, 1983), 3–30. The break with Chappell is seemingly confirmed in a 1654 letter by Bishop John Bramhall, referring to Milton being ‘turned away by [Chappell] as he well deserved to have been both out of the University and out of the society of men’ (Life Records, 3: 374-­5). This latter phrase leads Campbell and Corns (John Milton, 38) to suggest that Milton’s offence may have been sexual in nature, but Bramhall, a royalist exiled in Antwerp, was writing at a time when Milton’s character, including his sexual history and behaviour at Cambridge, were under (seemingly groundless) public attack by Salmasius and others after his defences of the execution of Charles I. 5. Ascham, Scholemaster, in English Works of Roger Ascham, 187. See the useful account of discipline in the humanist schoolroom in Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 23–72. 6. Clark, Milton at St Paul’s, 62; A Shorte Dictionarie quoted in Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ, 1997), 93; Brinsley, Ludus Literarius, 74, 290, 295. 7. Early Lives, 14. 8. On the discipline of learning Latin as a rite of admission to the extra-­familial world of male public life, see the classic essay by Walter J. Ong, ‘Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite’, Studies in Philology, 56 (1959), 103–24. 9. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd edn. (1644), 80. All further references are to the 2nd edn. unless otherwise stated. Areopagitica, 20–1. 10. Alan Cobham, English University Life in the Middle Ages (London, 1999), 46. On the earlier tradition of a weekly display of the whipping of undergraduates in some Cambridge

432  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4 colleges, something which seems to have been out of use by Milton’s time, see Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 59. 11. Middleton, Women Beware Women and Other Plays, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford, 1999), 3. 2. 131–7). 12. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford, 1980), 3.2. 13. For the suggestion of political and religious disagreement, see Clark, ‘John Milton and William Chappell’, 335–6; Lewalski, Life, 21–2. 14. J. B. Williams, The Lives of Philip and Matthew Henry (1825), 17. 15. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 28–35. 16. Quentin Skinner, ‘The Generation of John Milton at Cambridge’, in Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics (Cambridge, 2018), 118–38 (131), citing Mede’s account books in Christ’s College Muniments Room, T. 11. 17. Clement Barksdale, An Oxford Conference of Philomathes and Polymathes (1660), 3. 18. Of Education, 2. 19. For current ideas about the impact of Ramism, which has been much disputed, see the essays in Steven J. Reid and Emma Annette Wilson (eds.), Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Aldershot, 2011). The very latest research suggests the influence of Ramism had waned in Milton’s Cambridge: see Katrin Ettenhuber, ‘Milton’s Logic: the Early Years’, in The Seventeenth Century (2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2020 .1755356 20. Private Memoirs of John Potenger, ed. C. W. Bingham (1841), 29. 21. For recent accounts of this culture of performance and Milton’s place in it, see Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin: Performing in the Genres, 1625–1632, 91–106; Sarah Knight, ‘Milton’s Forced Themes’, Milton Quarterly, 45 (2011), 145–60. 22. See Clark, Milton at St Paul’s, 208–17; Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 135. 23. Walker, Of Education, 119. 24. Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 1: 133–4, 138–40. Hale concludes that Cambridge saltings in Milton’s time seem to have been more scripted and benign than the later Oxford performance described by Wood (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 197–8). 25. I use the rather free but very effective translation here in Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 81, 83. 26. [Holdsworth], ‘Directions for a Student in the Universitie’, in Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 637; Brinsley, Ludus literarius, 280–6. 27. Cicero, On the Orator, 444–45 (II. 325); on the suitability of Milton’s choice of the title ‘prolusions’, see Knight, ‘Milton’s Forced Themes’, 4–5. 28. James D. Tracy, Erasmus, the Growth of a Mind (Geneva, 1972), 65; definition of aemulatio in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879). 29. I use here the translation in John Milton: Complete Poems and Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1957; repr., Indianapolis, 2003), 595. 30. The English verses delivered at the end of the Prolusion that Milton published in his 1673 Poems as ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’ state that they were composed at the age of nineteen, which would date them to 1628; Campbell and Corns make ingenious, if certainly not definitive, arguments for 1631, although they are forced to insist that Milton must have misremembered the date of this own composition and performance (John Milton, 58–60, 398–9). Hale points

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 4   433 out that a reference to the failed military expedition of the Duke of Buckingham to the Isle of Rhé in 1627 would make more sense in 1628 (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 185 n. 1). 31. Complete Prose Works, 1: 313–15; Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 37. 32. Lambeth Palace MS 770, 238–9; the account was discovered by Sarah Knight, ‘Royal Milton’, Times Literary Supplement (5 February 2010), 15; Knight, ‘Milton’s Student Verses of 1629’. Compare Dulgarian’s alternative interpretation that the verses were written for the university’s Great Commencement ceremony in July 1629 (‘Milton’s “Naturam non pati senium” and “De Idea Platonica” as Cambridge Act Verses’). 33. W. H. Kelliher, entry for ‘Thomas Randolph’ in ODNB; Rosalyn Richek, ‘Thomas Randolph’s Salting (1627), Its Text and John Milton’s Sixth Prolusion as Another Salting’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 102–31. 34. A. D. Cousins, entry for ‘John Cleveland’, in ODNB; see ‘Oratio habita ad Legatum quendam Gallicum, et Hollandiae Comitem, tunc temporis Academiae Cancellarium’, in Clievelandi Vindiciae (1677), 180. 35. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, ‘Concerning education’, in The Miscellaneous Works of . . . Edward, Earl of Clarendon (1727; 2nd edn., 1751), 326; Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 133–4, citing Mede’s account books, which survive in Christ’s College, Cambridge, Muniments Room T. 11. 36. Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 120–1, 136. 37. Joannis Miltonii Angli, Epistolarum familiarium liber unus (1674), 11, translated in Complete Prose Works, 1: 313. 38. See e.g. Jill Kraye, ‘Philologists and philosophers’, in Kraye (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, 142–60; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 23. 39. Prolusion I as translated in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 595. 40. Complete Prose Works, 1: 293; Milton, Epistolarum familiarium, 141-­2; Prolusion III as translated by Hughes in Milton: Complete Poems, 605. The 1630 date is suggested by Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 36, who date it before Prolusion VI, which they believe was performed in the summer vacation of 1631; Hale, however, argues persuasively for Prolusion VII as Milton’s last declamation (Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 91). 41. See Hale’s translation of the Latin prose parts of Prolusion VI in Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 261. 42. Of Education, 2–3. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, passim. See also Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), 73, 85: ‘Many of the theological notebooks which have been used to demonstrate the scholasticism of seventeenth-­century Oxbridge are . . . in fact substantially devoted to refutations of scholastic theology . . . to assume the focus of the early Stuart curriculum was Neo-­scholastic rather than humanistic is to disregard thousands of folios of evidence in the Trinity College library alone.’ 43. See the illuminating etymological discussion in Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford, 2013), 22. 44. For a discussion of the use of ‘rude’ in Shakespeare, see Patricia Parker, ‘ “Rude Mechanicals” ’, in Margreta de Grazia et al. (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge, 1994), 44. 45. Cicero, Pro Archia poeta, VIII. 19; Prolusion I, as translated by Hughes in Milton: Complete Poems, 598. See also a passage in Cicero’s De oratore which had become a commonplace of early

434  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 modern apologies for rhetoric and poetics: ‘Who therefore would not rightly admire this f­aculty, and deem it his duty to exert himself to the utmost in this field, that by so doing he may surpass men themselves in that particular respect wherein chiefly men are superior to animals? To come, however, at length to the highest achievements of eloquence, what other power could have been strong enough either together scattered humanity into one place, or to lead it out of its brutish existence in the wilderness up to our present condition of civilization as men and as citizens, or, after the establishment of social communities, to give shape to laws, tribunals, and civic rights?’ (I. 33). 46. For the inclusion of De officiis in the grammar school curriculum, usually in the fifth or sixth forms, see Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 121–4. 47. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: the America-­Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1987), 16. The claim that barbaros was onomatopeic—such people spoke what sounded to the Greeks like ‘barbar’—is made by Strabo in his Geography, 14. 2. 27–8. 48. Of Education, 2. 49. Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge, 1988), 186 (1252b 5, 1337b 5-­20); Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 47; E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (1948; Princeton, NJ, 2013), 37. 50. William Harrison, ‘An Historicall Description of the Iland of Britaine’, in The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles . . . first collected and published by Raphaell Holinshed, William Harrison, and others (1587), 162; Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (1963), 234; John Marston, The Scourge of Villanie (1599), in Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool, 1961), 96. 51. Harrison, ‘Historicall Description’, 162. 52. Prolusion I as translated in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 595. 53. The Erasmus Reader, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto, 1990), 55. For a recent interrogation of this representation and its profound importance in structuring northern European ideas of literary and cultural history, see Brian Cummings and James Simpson (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010). Cummings and Simpson observe in their introduction how the Reformation ‘gave ideological exactitude and political compulsion to emerging prejudices’ in Renaissance humanism (4–5). 54. English Works of Roger Ascham, 281. 55. Ibid., 282, 265. 56. ‘A Book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon’, lines 13–14. This sonnet was first published in the 1673 Poems as Sonnet XI.

5. Beginning as a Poet 1. I prefer here the translation in Complete Shorter Poems, 35–6. 2. André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins (Princeton, NJ, 1968), 35. 3. See ‘A Premonition of his Maiesties, to all most Mightie Monarches, Kings, free Princes and States of Christendome’, in James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, rev. 2nd edn. (1609), 43. 4. Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Reconstructing Milton’s Lost “Index Theologicus”: The Genesis and Usage of an Anti-­Bellarmine, Theological Commonplace Book’, Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 187–219.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5   435 5. The classic essay on this matter is William Kerrigan, ‘The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism’, English Literary Renaissance, 5, 1 (1975), 125–66; see further Nicholas McDowell, ‘Dead Souls and Modern Minds: Mortalism and the Early Modern Imagination from Marlowe to Milton’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40, 3 (2010), 559–92. 6. George Buchanan, The Political Poetry, ed. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson (Edinburgh, 1995), 168–9, 225–6. 7. Cf. Gil, Parerga sive Poetici Conatus Alexandri ab Alexandro Gil Londinensis (1632), 10–13. On the significance placed upon the disaster, which became known as the ‘Fatal Vespers’, in Protestant propaganda, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 266–80. 8. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ashmole 36/37, fols. 22r (Milton), 109r–110v (Gil)—the poems are admittedly almost 90 folios apart in the miscellany. The title in the Ashmole manuscript is similar to the one originally given the poem in Milton’s poetic notebook of the 1630s and early 1640s, the Trinity manuscript, but which has been scored out: ‘. . . set on a clock case’. The words before ‘set’ have been lost due to deterioration of the manuscript but are likely something such as ‘To be’. 9. As observed by Leo Miller, ‘On some of the verses by Alexander Gil which John Milton read’, Milton Quarterly 24 (1990), 22–5. The Latin original makes the same comparison. On Gil and In Quintum Novembris, see also David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 278–81. 10. Phineas Fletcher, Locustae Vel Pietas Jesuitica, ed. Estelle Haan (Leuven, 1996), xx. See the list of neo-­Latin Gunpowder Plot poems in J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (Leeds, 1990), 447 n. 31. 11. Richard Stock, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the Second of November. 1606 (1609). 12. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 165; The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford, 1967), 72–4 (under ‘Poems probably by Cleveland’). 13. See British Library Egerton MS 2875, ff. 153r–79r, which is dedicated to Prince Henry and so must date from earlier than 6 November 1612, when Henry died aged fourteen. 14. ‘The Locusts, or Apollyonists’, in Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, ed. Fredrick F. Boas, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1908), 1: 133, 135. As David Quint has observed, in the only concerted discussion of the matter, Fletcher’s Gunpowder poem ‘appears to have haunted Milton’s career’ (Epic and Empire, 269; see further 271–81). 15. James I, ‘A Premonition’, in An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, 44. 16. ‘A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majestie, at White-­Hall, on the V. of November. A. D. MDCXIII’, in XCVI. sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrevves, late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties speciall command (1629), 943. There are ten sermons preached on 5 November included in this edition. 17. William Laud, A Sermon Preached before his Maiestie, on Wednesday the Fift of Iuly, at White-­hall. (1626), 21, 24. 18. Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), 167. 19. On the aesthetics of the Laudian ‘counter-­reformation’, see Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-­Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Woodbridge, 2006); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c. 1700 (Oxford, 2007).

436  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 5 20. Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Archbishop Laud’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church (Basingstoke, 1993), 51–79 (62). See also Peter McCullough, ‘Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642’, The Historical Journal , 41 (1998), 401–24. 21. David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (1989). See also Mary Morrisey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558–1642 (Oxford, 2011), 152–3. 22. David Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante: News, Sociability and Credibility in Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 293–312; British Library, MS Harley 389, fol. 247. 23. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge, 1995), 119. 24. Joseph Mede, Works of the Pious and Most Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede, 3rd edn. (1677), 818; Jeffrey K. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth: Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and the Legacy of Millenarianism (Dordrecht, 2006), 28–33; Alan Ford, entry for ‘William Chappell (1582–1649)’, in ODNB. 25. On the allegations against Buckingham and their reception, see Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven, CT, 2015). 26. Gil, In Obitum Arthur Lake, Episcop. Bathon & Wellens, in Parerga (1632), 10. Gil’s elegy is, however, only eight lines long. 27. Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson D 40, quoted in Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 246; Walker, Of Education, 109. 28. Lewalski, Life, 17. 29. Bodleian MS Malone 23, pp. 28–31. All quotations from libels on Buckingham are from Early Stuart Libels, ed. Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae, http://www.earlystuartlibels.net. 30. Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 38, fol. 229r–v, lines 25–8. 31. Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge, 2004), 82. 32. Public Records Office, State Papers Domestic 16/111/51, 16/117; Gordon Campbell, ‘Alexander Gil the Younger’, in ODNB. 33. ‘Tandem (propitio Deo) post quindecim mensium ærumnas optimum Regem tetigit hominis omnibus fortunis exuti miseratio; vitâ Ille me priùs donaverat, nunc etiam carcere solutum luci reddidit’ (‘At last, with God’s assistance, after fifteen months of distress, compassion for a man stripped of all fortune has moved the best of kings; he who had first granted me my life has now also released me from prison and into the light.’) See East Sussex Record Office, FRE 690, p. 62. I am indebted to William Poole for sending me details of this manuscript letter. See further William Poole, ‘The Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Elder (1565–1635) and Younger (1596/7–1642?)’, Milton Quarterly, 51 (2017), 163–91. 34. Complete Prose Works, 1: 285, lines 1–6. British Library Add. MS 29492, fol. 55r. 35. Randall, ‘Joseph Mead, Novellante’, 306; Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. c. 50, fols. 14r–15r, lines 37–45. 36. The libel is ascribed to Drummond in one manuscript copy (Bodleian MS Eng. Poet. c.50) and was included in a 1711 edition of Drummond’s works. To complicate things further, there is a version of the poem in Scottish, which has also been ascribed to Drummond. Gil’s authorship is argued for by Clark, Milton At St Paul’s School, 86–7. For (serious) question marks

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6   437 over the ascription to Drummond, see Allan H. Gilbert, ‘Jonson and Drummond or Gil on the King’s Senses’, Modern Language Notes, 62 (1947), 35–7. 37. See CELM, s.v. ‘William Drummond’, DrW 117.17. 38. East Sussex Record Office, FRE 690, p. 65: ‘quid me vetet in mei Principis honorem cui vitam et salutem acceptam fero, Virgiliana adinstar Æneidos, Caroloïdem aliquando contexere?’ 39. Decollato Comite Straffordio (1641); Gratulatoria dicata sereniss. ac potentiss. Carolo regi, e Caledone ad Trinobantes suos reverso (1641). 40. I prefer here the translation of the letter in Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 88. 41. On this translation, see Poole, ‘Literary Remains’, 177, 182 n. 10, 184 n. 36. 42. Epinikion, a song of victorie, vpon the proceedings and successe of the warres vndertaken by the most Puissant King of Sweden. / Dedicated in latin to our Gracious Soveraigne Lord, King Charles by the author, Alex. Gil. Heere Englished and explaned with marginall notes by W.H. (1632), 6. For the Latin original, see The new starr of the north, shining vpon the victorious King of Sweden (1632), to which is appended Gil’s Epinikion de gestibus successibus et victoriis Regiae Sueciae in Germania 1631.

6. Heroes and Daemons 1. Skinner, ‘Generation of John Milton’, 129. 2. Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 625–47; Private Memoirs of John Potenger, ed. C. W. Bingham (1841), 30–1; Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 228. 3. Campbell, Milton Chronology, 43. 4. ‘On the University Carrier who sicken’d in the time of his vacancy, being forbid to go to London, by reason of the Plague. Another on the same’, in Oxford Milton, 3: 26–7, lines 7–10, 32–4. 5. Bodleian, MS Malone 21, fol. 69r; Huntington Library, HM 116, 100–1; St John’s College Library, Cambridge, MS S. 32 ( James 423), fols. 18v–19r; Folger Library, MS V.a.96, fols. 79v–80r. For an account of these manuscripts, see CELM, s.v. ‘John Milton’, MnJ2, MnJ 4, MnJ 5, MnJ19. 6. Early Lives, 62. 7. ‘On the Marchionesse of Winchester whoe died in Childbedd. Ap: 15. 1631 [altered from 1633]’, in British Library, Sloane MS 1446, fols. 37v–38v. 8. Jonson’s An Elegie On the Lady Jane Pawlet, Marchion: of Winton is found, for instance, in a 1630s miscellany (Trinity College, Dublin, MS 877, [Part II], fols. 176r–77v.); John Creaser, ‘Milton: The Truest of the Sons of Ben’, in Margo Swiss and David A. Kent (eds.), Heirs of Fame: Milton and Writers of the English Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA, 1995), 158–83 (158). 9. See Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-­Century England (Oxford, 1993). 10. Bodleian, MS Ashmole 36/37, fol. 22r; Donne, Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth, 1996), 313, lines 13–14. 11. William Poole has pointed out that the clumsy nature of the other (much more minor) variants in the Ashmole version cast some doubt on whether the text is authorial (‘Milton’s Two Poems to be Fixed on Objects’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 56, 2 (2009), 213–15). 12. Jonson, Complete Poems, 263–5; on variants of the text of Milton’s poem in the Second Folio, see Complete Shorter Poems, 122.

438  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 6 13. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton and Literary History (New York, 1983), 19. 14. The Shakespearean references and echoes in Milton’s political prose will be surveyed in the second volume of this biography, but see in the meantime Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Uses of Shakespeare in Milton’s Regicide Tracts’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 252–71; Oxford Milton, 6: 32–6, 72–5. 15. Lines 253–9. See the important discussion in Paul Stevens, ‘Subversion and Wonder in Milton’s Epitaph on Shakespeare’, English Literary Renaissance, 19 (1989), 375–88. 16. It is nonetheless worth noting that Milton, or possibly his printers, had some doubt about the sense of ‘our fancy of it self bereaving’, because while both the 1645 and 1673 Poems have ‘it self ’, the 1632 Folio has ‘her self ’, while the text of the poem as included in the 1640 publication, Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare, is now ascribed to ‘J. M.’ and has the markedly different ‘our self ’. 17. The text of the two libels is given in Clark, Milton at St Paul’s School, 94–6; see also Jonson, Poems, 350 (lines 15–16). 18. On the Italian models for these poems, see the brief but still suggestive account by F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, 1954), 63–6. 19. See Purgatorio, 29: 22–30; Paradiso, 32: 7–9, in Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. Peter Dale (2004). The notion of sin preventing men from hearing the divine harmonies in the music of the spheres is common enough, however, and is most memorably expressed by Lorenzo in Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 5. 1. 65–71. 20. Gil, Logonomia Anglica, trans. Robin C. Alston, ed. Bror Danielsson and Arvid Gabrielson (Stockholm, 1972), 86. 21. See e.g. Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (eds.), Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and Praxis (New York, 2002); Joanne Paul, ‘The Use of Kairos in Renaissance Political Philosophy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 67, 1 (2014), 43–78. 22. See Keith Rinehart, ‘A Note on the First Fourteen Lines of “Lycidas” ’, Notes and Queries, 198 (1953), 103; John Kerrigan, ‘Milton and the Nightingale’, in Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford, 2001), 217–29. 23. Milton: Complete Poetry, ed. Hughes, 603; for the dating of Prolusion II to the MA period, see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 36–7. 24. Hale, Milton’s Cambridge Latin, 202–7. 25. See Alastair Fowler’s review of John K. Hales, Milton as Multilingual: Selected Essays, 1982-­2004 (Otago, 2005), Translation and Literature, 15, 2 (2006), 277–81; Julius Pollux, Onomasticon (Frankfurt, 1608), Christ’s College Old Library N. 6. 30; Pollux quoted in Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation, trans. Henry Thornton Wharton, 3rd edn. (1908), 180. 26. Early Lives, 72, although Phillips makes it clear that the primary model was Robert Stephanus, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1532). 27. Ovids Elegies, 1. 5, in Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar (Oxford, 2005). 28. Noam Reisner, ‘Obituary and Rapture in Milton’s Memorial Latin Poems’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 161–81 (176). Reisner points out that in Amores 3. 23, lines 25–6, the maidens are dressed out with ‘golden feet’, i.e. slippers, as part of the marriage rites.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 7   439 29. Pico della Mirandola, from Orate de dignitate hominis, and Ficino, ‘The Soul of Man’, in Ross and McLaughlin (eds.), Portable Renaissance Reader, 478, 390–1. 30. I use the translation of Prolusion VII in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 625. 31. ‘To his Tutor. Master Pawson. An Ode’, in John Hall, Poems (1646/7), 61–4. 32. Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford, 2002), 221; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, 31–3. 33. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 625. 34. Cicero, De officiis, 1. 60–2; on the Renaissance cult of magnanimity, see e.g. Margaret Greaves, The Blazon of Glory: A Study in Renaissance Magnanimity (1964); some comment on Milton and the Ciceronian vir sapiens can be found in Paul A. Rahe, Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory Under the English Republic (Cambridge, 2008), 24–5, 106–7. 35. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 624; see further on this passage, Hammond, Milton and the People, 17–18. 36. Joseph Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times . . . or the Gentiles’ Theology of Daemons (1641), sig. a2r, 9–10, 18. For the dating of this work to 1617–24, see Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 100. On Mede’s work, see further the striking essay by Debra Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion: the Early Years’, Milton Quarterly, 46 (2012), 137–53. See also Sarah Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton, and More: Christ’s College Millenarians’, in Juliet Cummins (eds.), Milton and the Ends of Time (Cambridge, 2003), 29–41. 37. Mede, The Apostasy of the Latter Times, 24, 18, 19. For a recent account of Greek daimonology, see Guilia Sfameni Gasparro, ‘Daimonic Power’, in Esther Edinow and Julia Kindt (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (Oxford, 2015), 413–28. 38. Thomas Jackson, The knowledg[e] of Christ Jesus. Or The seventh book of commentaries ipon the Apostles Creed: containing the first and general principles of Christian theologie (1634), 282; William Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity (1631), 438. Jackson’s 1634 volume was the seventh in a series of twelve volumes of commentaries on the Creed, and Twisse was responding to the same ideas proposed in earlier volumes. See further Sarah Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39, 4 (1978), 635–52. 39. William Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge, 2005), 128. The various versions of ‘At a Solemn Musick’ are transcribed in Oxford Milton, 3: 562–5. 40. Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 604. Campbell and Corns date Prolusion II to the 1629–32 period (John Milton, 36–7). 41. Oxford Milton, 3: 563; Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 603. 42. Complete Prose Works, 1: 283; Early Lives, 194. 43. Gordon Campbell, ‘Milton and the Lives of the Ancients’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 47 (1984), 234–8; Complete Prose Works, 1: 284.

7. The Poetics of Play and Devotion 1. For the popularity of this poem in manuscript in university circles, see the entry for the poem in CELM, s.v. ‘Randolph, Thomas’, RnT 205–212. 2. Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 15.

440  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 7 3. On the influence of the classical and particularly Virgilian cursus in the Renaissance and beyond, see e.g. Philip Hardie and Helen Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge, 2010). 4. David Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” ’, Modern Philology, 97 (1999), 195–219 (204). 5. I use the translations of Diodati’s Greek letters in Parker, Milton: A Biography, 1: 59–60. See also Complete Prose Works, 1: 336–8. 6. See Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (gen. eds.), Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (Oxford, 2007), 426–7. 7. See CELM, s.v. ‘Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’, B&F 111.5–153; ‘William Strode’, StW 641–663. 8. The Family Album, Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, Wolf MS, 73-­4; Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D. 1092, fol. 273r–v. See also Bodleian Library, Malone MS 21, fol. 80r–v (c. 1634); Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. poet. c. 50, fols. 128v, 130r (1630s); Aberdeen University Library, MS 29, 187–9 (c. 1631). 9. Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 36/7, fol. 26r. 10. Taylor and Lavagnino, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, 296–7. 11. Text taken from Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D. 1092, fol. 273r, lines 7–10. 12. See John Creaser, ‘ “Through Mazes Running”: Rhythmic Verve in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” ’, The Review of English Studies, 52 (2001), 376–410 (392), who observes that ‘L’Allegro’ has ‘at least 54’ heptameter lines out of 142 lines of tetrameter, and ‘Il Penseroso’ has 28 out of 166. 13. Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 325, fol. 140. Strode’s ‘An Opposite to Melancholy’ was first printed in Wit Restor’d (1658). On Strode’s lyric and ‘L’Allegro’, see the somewhat neglected essay by J. B. Leishman, ‘ “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” and Their Relation to Seventeenth-­Century Poetry’, in Alan Rudrum (ed.), Milton: Modern Judgements (1968), 58–93 (60–5). 14. See Adam Smyth, ‘ “Art Reflexive”: The Poetry, Sermons, and Drama of William Strode (1601?–45)’, Studies in Philology, 103, 4 (2006), 436–64 (454–5). 15. MS Ashmole 36/7, fol. 26r, lines 1–3, 9–11, 16. 16. Areopagitica (1644), 13. 17. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson (Toronto, 2006), 141. 18. As claimed by Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 61. See Hero and Leander, 1. 162, 212, in Cheney and Striar (eds.), Complete Poems of Christopher Marlowe. 19. The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals written by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea, trans. Philemon Holland (1603), 398. John Leonard has argued strongly that the young Milton did not have a peculiar attachment to celibacy, as opposed to chastity, in ‘Milton’s Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence’, in P. G. Stanwood (ed.), Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World (New York, 1995), 187–201. 20. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, 1: 18–19. 21. Giles and Phineas Fletcher, Poetical Works, 1: 19, 39; J. B. Leishman, Milton’s Minor Poems, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson (1969), 58. 22. Matthew Wren’s statutes of the Watt Foundation, quoted in Austin Warren, Richard

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   441 Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Baton Rouge, LA, 1939), 215–16. See also Thomas F. Healy, Richard Crashaw (Leiden, 1986), 57–8. 23. W. Hilton Kelliher, ‘The Latin Poems Added to Steps of the Temple in 1648’, in Robert M. Coope (ed.), Essays on Richard Crashaw (Salzburg, 1979), 14–34. 24. Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 46, 32v–36v. 25. Thomas Philipot, Poems (1646), 46-­50. See further the useful survey of common topoi in Caroline devotional poetry in Thomas N. Corns, ‘ “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, “Upon the Circumcision”, and “The Passion” ’, in Corns (ed.), A Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2001), 215–32, repr. in Corns (ed.), A New Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2016), 213–30. 26. Morgan, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2, 461. 27. Joseph Mede, A Key of the Revelation, trans. Richard More (1643), 1; Mede ‘A Summary View of the Apocalypse’, in Works of the pious and profoundly-­learned Joseph Mede, 3rd edn. (1677), Book V, 921–3. 28. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 39; Sarah Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s’, in James E. Force and Richard H. Popkins (eds.), The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-­American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Dordrecht, 2001), 1–14. 29. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 9. 30. Diatribae. Discourses on divers texts of Scripture: delivered upon severall occasions, by Joseph Mede, B.D. late fellow of Christs Colledge in Cambridge (1642), 181. 31. Of Education, 4. A recent account of early modern ideas about the cessation of the oracles is Anthony Ossa Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: The Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, NJ, 2013). 32. The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, 1296. The most extensive argument for Milton’s reliance on Selden is Joseph Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford, 2006), 74–92, although the reliance is more assumed than demonstrated. 33. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 17. 34. See e.g. Andrew Laird, ‘Re-­inventing Virgil’s Wheel: the poet and his work from Dante to Petrarch’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, 138–59 (141–3). 35. Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” ’, 198. On the Homeric hymn to Apollo in relation to the ‘Ode’, see Stella Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Naeara’s Hair: the Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, MO, 1997), 64–90. 36. Thomas Jackson, The eternall truth of scriptures, and Christian beleefe, thereon wholly depending, manifested by its owne light Delivered in two bookes of commentaries upon the Apostles creede (1613), 48–50, 89; Jackson, The knowledg[e] of Christ Jesus. Or The seventh book of commentaries upon the Apostles Creed, 43, 48. 37. John Carey, Milton (1969), 27–8.

8.. Laudian Poet? 1. See further Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede’. 2. William Twisse, ‘The Preface to the Reader’, in Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, sig. A4r. 3. Ibid., sig. A5r.

442  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8 4. Mede, The Name Altar, or Thysiasterion, Anciently Given to the Holy Table (1637), sigs. A3r–v. 5. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 95; Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-­ Reformation, 154–5. 6. Stephen Porter, ‘University and Society’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-­Century Oxford, 64. 7. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 26; Porter, ‘University and Society’, 67. 8. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 40. On Tovey’s connection to Diodati, see Gordon Campbell, ‘Nathaniel Tovey: Milton’s Second Tutor’, Milton Quarterly, 21 (1987), 81–90. 9. Mede, Works, 2nd edn. (1672), 848–9, 818. All further references are to this edition unless otherwise noted. 10. For an excellent account of this development, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 93–127. 11. Mede, Works, 818. 12. Mede, Works, 796; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 536. 13. Jue, Heaven Upon Earth, 29–30; Mede, Works, xviii–ix, 868. 14. Thomas Jackson, Treatise of the Divine Essence (1628), 90, 94; Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity, 173–4. Cf. Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist’, 651. On Jackson as an important intellectual influence on English Arminianism, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-­Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford, 1990), 65–7, 83–4, 120–1, 142–4. 15. Prynne, Canterburies doome, or, The first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-­bishop of Canterbury (1646), 178, 511; Alan Ford, ‘ “That Bugbear Arminianism”: Archbishop Laud and Trinity College, Dublin’, in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), 135–60. 16. Ford, ‘ “That Bugbear Arminianism” ’, 154; Matthew Reynolds, Godly Reformers and Their Opponents in Early Modern England: Religion in Norwich, c. 1560–1643 (Woodbridge, 2005), 180 n. 93; Alan Ford, entry for ‘William Chappell (1582–1649)’ in ODNB. 17. Morgan, History of the University of Cambridge. Volume 2, 32–3; Robert Porter, The life of Mr. John Hieron with the characters and memorials of ten other worthy ministers of Jesus Christ (1691), 3–4. 18. ‘Author’s Life’, in Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot (1684), II; Mede, Works, v. Such contemporary testimony rather undermines Leo Miller’s colourful depiction of Chappell as ‘this uninspired mediocrity of a tutor’: ‘Milton’s Clash with Chappell: A Reconstruction’, Milton Quarterly 14 (1980), 77–87 (79). 19. See e.g. Benjamin Myers, Milton’s Theology of Freedom (Berlin, 2006), 76–7. For the argument that this passage in Paradise Lost grafts a remnant of Calvinist election onto Milton’s Arminian theology, see Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 182–202. 20. An Apology, 12. 21. John Rumrich sketches some broad-­brush ‘instances of intellectual resemblance’ in ‘Milton and Mead’, Milton Quarterly, 20 (1986), 136–9 (137). 22. The documents were discovered in 1996 by the late Jeremy Maule; see Campbell, Milton Chronology, 43, 46–7, which lists the records in the Hammersmith and Fulham Record Office. 23. John Bowack, Antiquities of Middlesex (1705), 35.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 8   443 24. Cambell, Milton Chronology, 49; Edward Jones, ‘ “Ere Half my Days”: Milton’s Life, 1608–1640’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 3–25 (14 n. 31). 25. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 68; Beer, Milton, 57. 26. ‘Charles I – volume 153: December 1629’, in Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1629–31, ed. John Bruce (London, 1860), 111–30. British History Online http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/domestic/chas1/1629-31/pp111-130. Thomas Faulkner, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hammersmith (1839), 96–100. 27. Victor Slater, entry for ‘Edmund Sheffield, first Early of Mulgrave (1565–1646)’, in ODNB; Elizabeth Allen, entry for ‘John Everard (1584?–1640/41)’, in ODNB. C. H. Firth’s entry for ‘Edmund Sheffield, second Earl of Mulgrave (1611–58)’, mistakenly ascribes the association with Everard to the grandson rather than the grandfather. On Everard’s importance in the emergence of radical religious ideas in England, see also David R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-­Civil-­War England (Stanford, CA, 2004), 4–9, 219–65. 28. Ariel Hessayon, ‘John Everard’, in Marco Sgarbi (ed.) Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Cham, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_485-1; Mr. John Arndt (that famous German divine) his book of Scripture . . . translated out of the Latine copie by Radulphus Castrensis Antimachivalensis (1646), sig. a4r. For the radical Puritan and sectarian contexts in which these mystical texts were read during the civil wars, see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989). 29. Faulkner, History and Antiquities of the Parish of Hammersmith, 106. 30. John Newman, ‘The Architectural Setting’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-­Century Oxford, 135–78 (164). 31. Hessayon, ‘John Everard’. Milton could have learned about Hermetic philosophy from more orthodox sources—Lactantius, one of the Church Fathers in whom Milton was most interested, quotes from the Hermetic books. See Edward Chauncy Baldwin, ‘A Note on “Il Penseroso” ’, Modern Language Notes, 33, 3 (1918), 184–5. 32. See Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 145–77. 33. Nigel Smith, ‘Retranslating the Bible in the English Revolution’, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015), 98–112 (108); Como, Blown by the Spirit, 8. See also See Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton and More’, 33–5. 34. Peter Lake, ‘The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–42 (Basingstoke, 1993), 72–106. 35. All references to Crashaw’s poems are to Poems: English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1957). 36. Corns, ‘ “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, “Upon the Circumcision”, and “The Passion” ’, 219. 37. See Thomas Healy, entry for ‘Richard Crashaw (1612/13–1648)’, in ODNB. 38. See e.g. Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (London, 1957). On the tendency to exclude Crashaw from the English literary tradition because of his ‘foreign’,

444  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9 i.e. Catholic, style, see also Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge, 1999), 97–104. 39. Healy, Richard Crashaw, 64. 40. British Library, Add. MSS 23146, fol. 33v. 41. Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and his Circle in the 1630s: A “Parliamentary–Puritan” Connexion?’, Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 784. See also McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 92–5. 42. Sarah Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), 9–10, 75; Roger Pooley, entry for ‘John Saltmarsh (d. 1647)’, in ODNB. 43. John Saltmarsh, A Solemn Discourse upon the Grand Covenant (London, 1643), 72. 44. John Saltmarsh, Poemata Sacra Latine et Anglice Scripti (Cambridge, 1636), 6. 45. Saltmarsh, ‘Meditation IX’, in Poemata Sacra, vernacular book, 11. 46. The ‘Directions’ are printed in Fletcher, Intellectual Development, 2: 623–64. See the illuminating discussion in relation to Crashaw in Healy, Richard Crashaw, 45–52. 47. John Harper, ‘ “One equal music”: the Music of Milton’s Youth’, Milton Quarterly, 31 (1997), 1–10. 48. The phrase is Carey’s in Complete Shorter Poems, 123. See e.g. Marshall Grossman, ‘ “In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit”: Milton on the Passion’, in Mary Maleski and Russell A. Peck (eds.), A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton (Binghamton, NY, 1989), 206–20; Lewalski, Life, 424. 49. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, sig. A2r; Tetrachordon, 9.

9. In Search of Patronage 1. Defensio Secunda, 82–3. I prefer here the translation in Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 828. 2. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 69; Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Introduction’, in Tyacke (ed.), Seventeenth-­Century Oxford, 16. 3. The Reason of Church-­government, 41. 4. Parker’s arguments both for the 1633 dating of the letter, and for Young as the most likely addressee, remain persuasive if far from watertight (Milton: A Biography, 1: 783). 5. References are to the ‘transcription’ of the letter in Complete Prose Works, 1: 319–21, though it should be noted that the text is presented as what the editors believe ‘to have been Milton’s final intention’ (318). 6. Euripides, Medea, trans. Rex Warner (1944), lines 791–4. The echo is noted by Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 16 n. 4. On Milton’s copy of Euripides, see Maurice Kelly and S. D. Watkins, ‘Milton’s Annotations of Euripides’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 60 (1961), 680–87. 7. See Nicholas McDowell, ‘Milton’s Euripides and the Superior Rationality of the Heathen’, The Seventeenth Century, 31, 2 (2016), 215–37. 8. I am indebted here to Fallon’s detailed reading of the letter (Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 17–18). 9. The Reason of Church-­government, 37, 41. 10. Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (1996), 106.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 9   445 11. Campbell and Corns mix up ‘the late R.’ and the ‘common friend R.’, identifying them both with Randolph and speculating on how Milton became friends with Randolph (104). 12. Lewalski, Life, 76. The point is well made by Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘Anonymous Milton, or “A Maske” Masked’, English Literary History, 71, 3 (2004), 609–29 (613–14). 13. CELM, ‘Introductions’, s.v. ‘John Milton’. 14. See now Poole’s discussion in Oxford Milton, 11: 322–3. 15. Cedric Brown, John Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments (Cambridge, 1985), 47; Louise A. Knafla, entry for ‘Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby (1559–1637)’, in ODNB. 16. Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford, 2000), 56. 17. See the extensive discussion of the personal and political contexts of this sonnet in Nicholas McDowell, ‘Dante and the Distraction of Lyric in Milton’s “To My Friend Mr Henry Lawes” ’, The Review of English Studies, 59 (2008), 232–54. 18. Mede, Apostasy of the Latter Times, 19. 19. Complete Prose Works, 1: 327. 20. Prynne, Historio-­Mastix: the Players Scourge (1633), 587. 21. The original argument was made by Barbara Breasted, ‘Comus and the Castlehaven Scandal’, Milton Studies, 3 (1971), 201–24; Campbell and Corns go into some detail on the legal case (John Milton, 69–72). 22. Jonson, Complete Poems, 345–6. 23. See Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 68 (1. 3. 16), II, fols. 8r–16v, dated to c. 1630; CELM, s.v. ‘William Browne of Tavistock’. 24. See Gillian Wright, ‘Giving Them But Their Own: Circe, Ulysses, and William Browne of Tavistock’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999), 190–217. 25. The text cited is [Townshend], Tempe Restored. A Masque Presented by the QVEENE, and foureteene Ladies, to the KINGS MAIESTIE at Whitehall on Shrove-­Tuesday, 1631 (1631–2). 26. Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Early Stuart Drama (Cambridge, 2005), 52–4. 27. English Works of Roger Ascham, 225; see Gareth Roberts, ‘The Descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance Fictions’, in Jonathan Barry, Michael Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge, 1996), 183–206. 28. [Townshend], Tempe Restored, 17. 29. See e.g. Bonnie Lander Jonson, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge, 2015), 103–37. 30. See e.g. Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge, 1989), passim. 31. The Muses Looking-­Glass, in Thomas Randolph, Poems with the Muses looking-­glasse; and Amyntas (Oxford, 1638), 31. 32. Conte, Mythologiae, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ, 2006), 2. 474. On Milton’s Maske in relation both to Homeric commentary and Tempe Restored, see Sarah Van de Laan, ‘Circean Transformation and the Poetics of Milton’s Masque’, The Seventeenth Century, 31, 2 (2016), 139–60. 33. Ann Baynes Coiro, ‘The Lady and the Maske’, in McDowell and Smith (eds.), Oxford Handbook, 89–111 (99). 34. [Townshend], Tempe Restored, 10.

446  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10 35. Achsah Guibbory, ‘Milton and English Poetry’, in Corns (ed.), Companion to Milton, 72–90 (75). 36. Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlop (Oxford, 1949), 157, lines 141–3. 37. On the Shakespearean echoes, see Complete Shorter Poems, 173; on Charles I’s copy of the 1632 Second Folio—where he presumably read Milton’s epitaph—see McDowell, ‘Milton’s Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare’, 252–4. 38. Areopagitica, 13. Guillory makes a complex and influential argument for the tension between the Shakespearean and Spenserian elements of the Maske in Poetic Authority, 68–93; for various views on the Spenserian influence, which is undeniable but the nature of which is much contested, see the set of essays in the special issue of Milton Quarterly, 37 (2003), 179–244: ‘The Faerie Queene at Ludlow’.

10. Many Are the Shapes of Things Daemonic 1. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 83–4. 2. The Bridgewater manuscript is now British Library, Loan MS 76. For detailed analysis of the various revisions, including some more minor changes to the text in the 1673 Poems, see Brown, Milton’s Aristocratic Entertainments, 132–52. The Trinity and Bridgewater texts are printed in the appendix to Oxford Milton, 3: 300–60. A ‘corrected impression’ of this volume was issued in 2014 after Paul Hammond identified errors of transcription, many of them in the texts of the Maske from manuscript (The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013) 239–41). 3. This debt to Plutarch was first noted by Michael Lloyd, ‘ “Comus” and Plutarch’s Demons’, Notes and Queries 205 (1960), 421–3; see also Carey’s notes to the speech in Complete Shorter Poems, 175; and Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 143–4. 4. Plutarch, Philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, 1219, 1182. Further references to Holland’s translation of the Moralia are included in parentheses in the text. 5. Comus’s declaration that he and his crew are ‘spirits of purer fire’ seems to be taken from Randolph’s poem, ‘An Eclogue to Mr Jonson’, in which the shepherd Tityrus, who stands for Ben Jonson, tells the younger shepherd Damon, who stands for Randolph, that those such as themselves who write for a living are ‘souls of purer fire’; once again, the poetry of Milton’s more successful Cambridge contemporary, known for his libertine verse, is given to Comus—perhaps one reason why Milton, if he suffered from injured merit with regard to Randolph, can summon such rhetorical ‘vehemence’ in the Lady’s responses to Comus’s blandishments (Randolph, Poems, 100). 6. Luigi Battezato, ‘Dithyramb and Greek Tragedy’, in Barbara Kowalzig and Peter Wilson (eds.), Dithyramb in Context (Oxford, 2013), 93–110 (95). 7. See the suggestive discussion of Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s concept of sophrosyne in relation to the Maske in John Arthos, ‘Milton, Ficino, and the Charmides’, Studies in the Renaissance, 6 (1959), 261–74 (264). 8. See the illuminating discussion of how ‘the masque of temperance became the masque of virginity only in the 1637 printed text’ in J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington, KY, 1997), esp. 51–3. 9. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration: on the Dignity of Man, 1486’, trans. Douglas

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 10   447 Brooks-­Davies and Stevie Davies, in Renaissance Views of Man, ed. Stevie Davies (Manchester, 1979), 68–9. 10. Of Education, 5; Milton: Complete Poems, ed. Hughes, 600. See the classic essay by D. P. Walker, ‘Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16, 1–2 (1953), 100–120. The various writings ascribed to Orpheus, including the Hymns, could be read in Lectius’s Poetæ Græci veteres carminis heroici scriptores (Geneva, 1606), with accompanying Latin glosses and an index. 11. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10. 1–85. 12. My argument here has elements in common with William Kerrigan’s Freudian-­inflected reading of the Maske in The Sacred Complex: On the Pyschogenesis of Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA, 1983), esp. 42–4, 54–5. 13. On this aspect of the theology of the Maske, see also Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 113–14. 14. A venerable study of possible sources for Milton’s Platonic thought is Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, NY, 1947). 15. The Life of Henry More by Richard Ward (1710), ed. Cecil Courtney, Sarah Hutton, Michelle Courtney, Robert Crocker, and A. Rupert Hall (Dordrecht, 2000), 18–20. On the availability and reception of Platonism in early modern England, see more generally Platonism and the English Imagination, ed. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge, 1994), esp. 65–75. On Milton and Lactantius, see William Poole, ‘The Genres of Milton’s Commonplace Book’, in McDowell and Smith, Milton Handbook, 367–81 (377–9). Dimitri Levitin has recently argued, however, that More’s version of Platonism had little to do with that of Ficino (Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015), 132–9). 16. Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Peter Sterry MSS 289. 17. On Pico, see Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 303–85 (313–14). 18. Evans, Miltonic Moment, 64. 19. Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanity, sig. ***v, 438, 682; Hutton, ‘Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist’, 651–2. 20. John M. Steadman, ‘Milton’s Haemony: Etymology and Allegory’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 77, 3 (1962), 200–07. 21. Oxford Milton, 3: 60. 22. Complete Prose Works 1: 325–38. For the Latin (and Greek, in the Euripides quotation), see Milton, Epistolarum Familiarium (1674), 18–19. 23. Euripides, The Bacchae, in The Tragedies of Euripides, trans. T. A Buckley (1850), lines 1388–91. 24. Neil Rhodes, ‘Introduction’, in English Renaissance Translation Theory, ed. Neil Rhodes with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson (2013), 34. 25. Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1892), 1: 573-­4, which, despite its age, is closer to Miltonic terms than more recent versions; Marsilio Ficino, ‘Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 1484’, trans. Gordon Neal, in Davies (ed.), Renaissance Views of Man, 47. 26. Despite reading the Symposium as Christian allegory, Ficino did not deny the importance of male friendship to the Platonic philosophy of love, and maintained that spiritual love between

448  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 11 men could lead to God. There is a learned and sensitive account of Milton’s ideas of friendship with Diodati in the context of Platonic homoeroticism in Gregory Chaplin, ‘ “One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul”: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage’, Modern Philology, 99, 2 (2001), 266–92. Beer, Milton: Poet, Polemicist, and Patriot, 45–52, is more speculative about the homoerotic qualities of the friendship. 27. Nathanial Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), 47-­8; he depends upon Romans 2: 14–15. 28. Shuger, ‘Milton’s Religion’, 142. 29. Stuart Clark, ‘Wisdom Literature of the Seventeenth Century: A Guide to the Contents of the “Bacon-­Tottel” Commonplace Books. Part II’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 7, 1 (1977), 46–73 (49). 30. The shelf-­mark of Milton’s Euripides is Bodleian Library Don. d. 27 and 28; the edition is Tragoediae quae extant, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1602). For accounts of the annotations, see Kelley and Atkins, ‘Milton’s Annotations of Euripides’; John K. Hale, ‘Milton’s Euripides Marginalia: Their Significance for Milton Studies’, Milton Studies, 27 (1991), 23–35. 31. Thomas Festa, The End of Learning: Milton and Education (2006), 26–7; see e.g. Bodleian Library Don. d. 27, 484. 32. Complete Prose Works, 1: 322–4. 33. For the identification of the copy of Boccaccio, see William Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, Milton Quarterly 48 (2014), 139–70. 34. The Milton family Bible is British Library Add. MSS 32310.

11. The Circle of Studies 1. Complete Prose Works, 1: 323. 2. The supposed evidence for Milton senior’s discharge at his own request from the Company of Scriveners on 12 May 1636 has been lost since the late nineteenth century; see Jones, ‘Milton’s Life, 1608–40’, 16–17. 3. See Hilton Kelliher, entry for ‘Thomas Randolph (bap. 1605–1635)’, in ODNB. 4. Brett Usher, entry for ‘Thomas Gataker (1574–1644)’, in ODNB; Edward Jones, ‘ “Church-­ outed by the Prelates”: Milton and the 1637 Inspection of the Horton Parish Church’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 102, 1 (2003), 42–58. 5. Oxford Milton, 8: 116–19; Homer, The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA., 1919), I, 1. 32–4. For some discussion of the quotations from Homer, see Sarah Van der Laan, ‘Milton’s Odyssean Ethics: Homeric Allusions and Arminian Thought in Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 49 (2009), 48–76. 6. Hilary Gatti, ‘Giordano Bruno and the Stuart Court Masques’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48, 4 (1995), 809–42. The classic study is Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964). 7. Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992), 133–69. 8. On Hartlib’s access to Bodin’s manuscript, see Poole, ‘Milton’s Scholarship’, 39–40; and

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 11   449 Louis I. Bredvold, ‘Milton and Bodin’s Heptaplomeres’, Studies in Philology, 21 (1924), 399–402. 9. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge, 1987), 53–95, shows the ubiquity of Erasmus in student commonplace books; Fletcher, Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2: 562–3, 588, 620–1. 10. Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings 2: De Copia / De Ratione Studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson, trans. Betty I. Knot and Brian McGregor, vol. 24 of Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto, 1978), 636, 638. 11. Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-­Century Commonplace Book’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghamton, NY, 1993), 131–47 (134). 12. John Hales, Golden Remains, 2nd edn. (1673), 288, 271, 274. 13. See John T. Murray, ‘John Hales on History’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 19, 3 (1956), 231–3. Compare Degory Wheare’s textbook De Ratione et Methodo Legendi Historias Dissertatio (1623), where the ‘philosophical’ (as opposed to ‘philological’) reading of history is divided into ‘Moral, Politick, Oeconomick and Military Examples’. The indispensable guide to Milton’s commonplace book is now William Poole’s introduction in Oxford Milton, 11: 11–82, whose scholarship I follow on the matters of dating the manuscript and its entries. 14. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in Schmitt and Skinner (eds.), Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, 305. 15. Jeffrey Alan Miller, ‘Reconstructing Milton’s Lost “Index Theologicus” ’, Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 187–219. 16. Bartholomaeus Keckermannus, Apparatus Practicus siue Idea Methodica et Plena Totius Philosophiæ Practicæ nempe Ethicæ, Oeconomicæ, & Politicæ (Hanover, 1609), 2nd pagination, 63; Joseph Freedman, ‘The Career and Writings of Bartholomew Keckermann (d. 1609)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 141, 3 (1997), 305–64 (320). 17. The authoritative study is Jean-­Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: the Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009). 18. John Hales, Sermons Preach’d at Eton (1660), 11–12; Quantin, Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 211. 19. Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 265. The presentation volume is now Trinity College, Dublin, 4. dd. 39. On Young’s reputation and practice as a biblical scholar, see Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth-­Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017), esp. 277–80. 20. See my discussion in the introduction to Oxford Milton, 6: 16–17. 21. Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst and Boston, 2010), 156. 22. Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT and London, 2000), 318; Sharpe makes in passing an explicit comparison of the note-­taking of Drake and Milton (292). 23. Oxford Milton, 11: 113–14, which also gives the original Latin text. 24. Areopagitica, 12, 17. 25. Oxford Milton, 11: 114–15.

450  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 11 26. Oxford Milton, 11: 211–12. 27. It is Bodleian Library, Arch A f. 145; for the identification, see Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, which gives a full list of Milton’s annotations in appendix. 28. Poole, ‘John Milton and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante’, 11–12. 29. Of Reformation, 30. Bodleian Library, MS. Rawl. D. 929, ‘Juvenile Collecting of the Famous Joseph Mead’; the Petrarch translation appears on fol. 27r, entitled ‘The discriptione of hell’. See Deidre Serjeantson, ‘Milton and the Tradition of Protestant Petrarchism’, The Review of English Studies, 29 (2015), 632-­49. 30. Complete Prose Works, 2: 764. 31. Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1576), bk. 4, 418; John R. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, 2000), 24–5. 32. Oxford Milton, 11: 226–7. The index to the commonplace book has an entry for ‘de libris prohibitis’ but the reference is under the heading ‘lenitas’ (mildness), where Sarpi and de Thou are cited on prohibition of books. 33. Of Reformation, 53. See further Nigel Smith, ‘Milton and the Index’, in Holly Nelson and Donald R. Dickson (eds.), Of Paradise and Light: Essays for Alan Rudrum (Cranbury, NJ, 2004), 101–22. 34. Areopagitica, 24. 35. Jacobus Philippus Thomasinus, Petrarcha Redivivus Laura Comite (Padua, 1635), cited at Oxford Milton, 11: 247–8, probably sometime after 1643. 36. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. G. R. Carpenter (New York, 1900), 83. 37. Apology Against a Pamphlet, 16. 38. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, 41–2. 39. Ibid., 42, 56, 96, 99, 104, 140. 40. Ibid., 127, 56. 41. Edward Jones, ‘ “Filling in a Blank in the Canvas”: Milton, Horton, and the Kederminster Library’, Review of English Studies, 53 (2002), 31–60; Poole, ‘Milton’s Scholarship’, 31–2, points out the problem with the different editions. 42. Oxford Milton, 3: 61. 43. William Poole, ‘‘Analysing a Private Library: A Shelf-­List Attributable to John Hales of Eton, c. 1624’, in Edward Jones (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts (Oxford, 2015), 41–65. 44. Basil Greenslade, entry for ‘John Hales (1594–1656)’, in ODNB. 45. W. R. Parker, ‘Wood’s Life of Milton: Its Sources and Significance’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 52 (1958), 1–22 (4 n. 6). 46. A useful account of the circumstances surrounding the publication of the Historia in London is Hilary Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe: From Machiavelli to Milton (Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2015), 127–33. 47. Hales, Golden Remaines, 2nd edn. (1673), sig. A4v. 48. For the appeal of Erasmus to the Circle, see e.g. Sarah Mortimer, ‘Great Tew Circle (act. 1633–1639)’, in ODNB; Thomas Roebuck, ‘Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 48–71 (67 n. 16).

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 12   451 49. See Nicholas McDowell, ‘Self-­Defeating Scholarship? Antiscripturism and Anglican Apologetics from Hooker to the Latitudinarians’, in Killeen, Smith, and Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible, 223–54 (242–5). 50. Hales, Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, 1, 3, 7; Hales, Sermons Preach’d at Eton, 10–11. 51. Areopagitica, 26, 31. 52. Francis Cheynell, The Rise, Growth, and Danger of Socinianisme (1643); Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010), 22. 53. Campbell, Milton Chronology, 135 (20 February 1652); see further Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana, 99–101; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and Antitrinitarianism’ in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (Oxford, 2007), 171–85. 54. Chillingworth’s unpublished ‘Observations on the Scottish Declaration’, Lambeth Palace Library, Wharton MSS 943, fol. 890, quoted in Robert Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford, 1967), 192. 55. John Butt, ‘Izaak Walton’s collections for Fulman’s life of John Hales’, Modern Language Review, 29 (1934), 267–73.

12. Love and Death in ‘Lycidas’ 1. Complete Prose Works, 1: 326–7. 2. Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 278. 3. Norman Postlethwaite and Gordon Campbell, ‘Edward King, Milton’s “Lycidas”: Poems and Documents’, Milton Quarterly, 28 (1994), 77–111 (79). 4. Samson Briggs, ‘When common souls break from their courser clay’, in the English book of Justa Edouardo King naufrago (Cambridge, 1638), ‘Obsequies to the memorie of Mr Edward King’, 14–15, ll. 13–16; the text of Paman’s elegy is included in Postlethwaite and Campbell, ‘Edward King, Milton’s “Lycidas” ’, 92–5. 5. Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. poet. 147; Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660 (Oxford, 1998), ed. Peter Davidson, 58–9 n. 53. 6. There is an ingenious account of the possible names on which Milton puns in both the Latin Prolusion and the English verses which followed it, to which I am indebted here, in Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 58–9. 7. Sarah Knight, ‘Milton and the Idea of the University’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 137–60 (142). 8. Majorie Nicholson, ‘Milton’s “Old Damaetas” ’, Modern Language Notes, 61 (1926), 293–300. 9. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, 140. 10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth, 1955), 246–7. 11. On how images of sparagmos ‘struck at the heart of Milton’s sense of himself and his vocation’, see Michael Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), 38–82 (42).

452  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 13 12. An extended recent analysis of how allusion works in ‘Lycidas’ is Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 166–202. 13. ‘Virgil Pastorals’, in The Works of Virgil, trans. John Dryden (1697), 1. 14. Amyntas, in Randolph, Poems, new pagination, 6. 15. Michael Lieb, The Sinews of Ulysses: Form and Convention in Milton’s Works (Pittsburgh, PA, 1989), 67; Evans, Miltonic Moment, 80. See also G. W. Pigman III, Grief and Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), 109–24. 16. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (Harmondsworth, 1987), I. x. 59. 17. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Possession: Ovid, Spenser, and Counter-­Nationhood (Toronto, 1997). 18. Alessandro Barchiesi and Philip Hardie, ‘The Ovidian Career Model: Ovid, Gallus, Boccaccio’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception, 59–88; James C. Kriesal, ‘Boccaccio and the Early Modern Reception of Tragedy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69, 2 (2016), 415–48. 19. Rudierde, The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard Hearted and Stiff-­Necked Atheists (1618) Chapter 22, 29; J. B. Leishman (ed.), The Three Parnassus Plays (1949), lines 290–93. 20. Nicholas McDowell, ‘ “Lycidas” and the Influence of Anxiety’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 112–35 (112–17); Kilgour, Milton and the Metamorphosis of Ovid, 86–91; Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (Harmondsworth, 2000), xiii–xiv. 21. References are to Cheny and Striar (eds.), Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe. 22. Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52. 23. This is to disagree with the influential reading of Stanley Fish, who regards the various digressive voices in the poem to leave it finally without a ‘unified consciousness’ (‘ “Lycidas”: A Poem Finally Anonymous’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, 2nd edn. (Columbia, MO, 1983)). 24. Evans, Miltonic Moment, 81; Works of Virgil, trans. John Dryden (London and New York, 1903), 483–6, lines 98–9. 25. Brinsley, Virgils Eclogues (1620), 95, 98; Ramus, P. Virgilii Maronis Bucolia (Paris, 1555); Melanchthon, Argumenta . . . in Eclogas Virgili (1568). 26. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 3–6.

13. Writing and Society in ‘Lycidas’ 1. Animadversions, 58–9. 2. In David Norbrook’s influential reading, ‘Lycidas’ ‘marks a decisive and unambiguous commitment to the Spenserian tradition’ of reformist, anticlerical complaint (Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 256–8). For ‘bite-­sheep’, see John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 2 vols. (1583), 2: 1218. 3. Oxford Milton, 11: 117–18; again I use the the terza rima translation in The Divine Comedy, trans. Peter Dale (1996). 4. Of Reformation, 30.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 13   453 5. Randolph, Poems, 95; CELM, s.v. ‘Thomas Randolph’. 6. David R. Como, ‘Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London’, The Historical Journal, 46, 2 (2003), 263–94; Jason Peacey, ‘ “Printers to the University” 1586–1658’, and William Poole, ‘The Learned Press: Divinity’, in The History of Oxford University Press. Volume 1: Beginnings to 1780, ed. Ian Gadd (Oxford, 2013), 51–78 (64–5), 351–70 (355). 7. Randolph, Poems, 96. 8. Complete Prose Works, 1: 314. 9. Cleveland, ‘On the Memory of Mr. Edward King, Drown’d in the Irish Seas’, in Justa Eduardo King naufrago, ll. 1–8. 10. J. M. French, ‘The Digressions in Milton’s “Lycidas” ’, Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 485–90 (488). 11. For a recent survey of the long history of elaborate explanations of the image, see John Leonard, ‘ “Lycidas” and the Millennium at the Door’, in Jones (ed.), Young Milton, 252–79. 12. Mede, ‘Epistle LXVI: Mr Mede’s Answer to Dr Twisse’s 7 Quare’s’, in Works (1664), 1031. 13. See Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton, and More’, 36–7. 14. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 99; Patrick McGrath, ‘Lycidas and Laud’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 252–71. 15. See Mede, Works (1677), 796, 818. 16. Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I, ed. J. R. Tanner (Cambridge, 1961), 55–6. 17. Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-­Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylin (Manchester, 2007), 53. 18. Oxford Milton, 11: 128–32. I use here the English translation of Dies Dominica published in 1672, with a preface by Richard Baxter: The Lords-­day, or, A succinct narration compiled out of the testimonies of H. Scripture and the reverend ancient fathers, sig. a8v. As Poole observes, Jerome’s conspicuous absence from Milton’s commonplace book is due to the material collected in the manuscript being of a strictly ethical, rather than theological, nature (Oxford Milton 11: 46 n. 126). 19. Young, The Lords-­day, sigs. b2v–b3r. 20. Hartlib cited in Miller, ‘Milton and the Conformable Puritanism of Richard Stock and Thomas Young’, 89–90. 21. John Bastwick, The answer of John Bastwick, Doctor of Phisicke . . . In which there is a sufficient demonstration, that the prelats are invaders of the Kings prerogative royall, contemners and despisers of holy Scripture, advancers of poperie, superstition, idolatry and prophanesse ([Leiden], 1637), 7. 22. For speculation about the ‘Index Theologicus’, see Oxford Milton, 11: 89. 23. John Rushworth, ‘The Star Chamber on printing, 1637’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State: Volume 3, 1639–40 (1721), 306–16 (British History Online http://www.britishhistory.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol3/pp306-316). 24. Prynne, Canterburies doome, or, The first part of a compleat history of the commitment, charge, tryall, condemnation, execution of William Laud, late Arch-­bishop of Canterbury (1646), 245. 25. Prynne, Twelve Considerable Serious Questions Touching Church Government (1644), 7. 26. Oxford Milton, 3: 571.

454  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 4 27. The argument was first made by John Leonard, ‘ “Trembling Ears”: The Historical Moment of “Lycidas” ’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 21 (1991), 59–81. 28. Piers quoted in John Reeks, ‘ “The churchwardens have not used to meddle with any seate”: Seating Plans and Parochial Resistance to Laudianism in 1630s Somerset’, The Seventeenth Century, 33, 2 (2018), 161–81 (175). 29. See the full account and references to parish records in Jones, ‘ “Church-­outed by the Prelates”: Milton and the 1637 Inspection of the Horton Parish Church’. 30. Reeks, ‘ “The churchwardens have not used to meddle with any seate” ’, 177. 31. Of Reformation, 80–1. 32. John Leonard argues there is no need to equate King’s apotheosis with celibacy rather than chastity, as the ‘unexpressive nuptiall song’ more likely refers to Revelation, 19: 1, in which St John hears the voice of ‘all [God’s] servants . . . saying “Alleluia” ’, than 14: 1–4 (‘Milton’s Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence’, 191–3). But celibate or chaste, King’s sexual purity is seemingly rewarded with spiritual marriage to Christ. 33. See The Erasmus Reader, ed. Rummel, 239–48. 34. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 100–1, 110–14. There is also an echo of the end of Eclogue 1; see Pigman, Grief and Renaissance Elegy, 121–3. 35. Cleveland, ‘I like not tears in tune’, lines 11–12; F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford, 1954), 71–88. 36. The Reason of Church-­government, 38; Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), sig. iir. 37. Patrick Cheney, ‘ “Joy on, joy on”: European Career Paths’, in Patrick Cheney (ed.), European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Toronto, 2002), 3–23 (9). 38. Christopher Ricks, ‘Milton: Poems (1645)’, in Christopher Ricks (ed.), Penguin History of Literature, ii. English Poetry and Prose, 1540–1674, rev. edn. (Harmondsworth, 1993), 245–75 (255).

14. Come un Virtuoso 1. Timothy Raylor, ‘Exiles, Expatriates and Travellers: Towards a Cultural History of the English Abroad, 1640–1660’, in Philip Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (Aldershot, 2010), 15–44 (22–4). Vivian wrote a lengthy narrative of his travels (New College, MS 348), which is discussed by William Poole, ‘Daniel Vivian’s Grand Tour, 1636–37’, in New College Notes, 8 (2017) https://www.new.ox.ac.uk/sites/default /files/2018-07/8NCN1%20%282017%29%20Poole%20on%20Vivian_0.pdf 2. In his account of his travels in the Defensio Secunda, Milton states that after about fifteen months abroad he returned just as the second Bishops’ War was about to occur; but that would date his return to the summer of 1640 and would mean he was away for 27 months, so the conclusion must be that Milton confused the first and second Bishops’ Wars. 3. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 127. 4. Complete Shorter Poems, 254; Kerrigan, ‘Milton and the Nightingale’, 223. 5. I use the translation in Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 619–20. 6. French, Life Records, 1: 149. Cerdogni’s album amicorum is now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University (MS Sumner 84, Lobby XI. 3. 43). See Horace, Epistulae, 1. 11. 27: ‘caelum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt’.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 1 4   455 7. Wilfrid Prest, ‘John Cook (bap. 1608, d. 1660)’, in ODNB; Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower. Part Five: 1660–1662, ed. A. B. Worden (1978), 229. 8. English Works of Roger Ascham, 223. 9. Ibid., 225, 229, 232. 10. Complete Prose Works, 1: 330. 11. English Works of Roger Ascham, 234. 12. Oxford Milton, 3: 62. 13. Areopagitica, 24. 14. Michael J. Redmond, Shakespeare, Politics, and Italy (2009), 98. I thank Paul Slade for bringing this work to my attention in ‘Italia Conquistata: The Role of Italy in Milton’s Early Poetic Development’, PhD thesis, University of Exeter (2017). 15. William Thomas, Historie of Italie (1549), sig. A2r; Sir Philip Sidney: The Oxford Authors, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones (Oxford, 1989), 286. 16. Greenslade, entry for Hales in ODNB; Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution, 83-­4 (84). 17. Estelle Haan, From ‘Academia’ to ‘Amicitia’: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (Philadelphia, 1998), 19–21, 36; see also A. M. Cinquemani, Glad to go for a Feast: Milton Buonmetti, and the Florentine Academici (Oxford, 1998). Milton’s Italian tour has been well served by scholarship: see further Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions (New York, 1991); Filippo Falcone, ‘Milton in Italy: A Survey of Scholarship, 1700–2014’, Milton Quarterly, 50 (2016), 172–88; Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton’s Italy: Anglo-­Italian Literature, Travel, and Connections in Seventeenth-­Century England (2016). 18. The manuscript was only rediscovered in 2010, having been missing since the eighteenth century; see Antonio Malatesti, La Tina: equivocali rusticali, ed. Davide Messina (2014). 19. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 615–16. 20. Complete Prose Works, 2: 767. 21. Complete Prose Works, 1: 334; Poole, ‘Daniel Vivian’s Grand Tour’. 22. Hardy, Criticism and Confession, 285–303. 23. Complete Prose Works, 1: 333. 24. Complete Prose Works, 2: 768–72. 25. Complete Prose Works, 2: 765; Feingold, ‘Humanities’, 265–6. For some interesting comments on the career of textual scholar as ‘an alternative scholarly future’ for the young Milton, see Sharon Achinstein, ‘High Enterprise: Milton and the Genres of Scholarship in the Divorce Tracts’, in Thomas Festa and Kevin J. Donovan (eds.), Scholarly Milton (Liverpool, 2019), 19–40 (20). 26. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, 61–8; Of Reformation, 35. 27. The point is well made by Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost, 45–7. 28. Oxford Milton, 3: 106–15; Campbell, ‘Milton’s Spanish’. 29. As Teskey nicely observes, in heaven Milton ‘will not gaze upon God (as Dante does) but, as we should expect, on himself ’ (Poetry of John Milton, 207). 30. Satires, 1. i. 66, in Works of Horace, trans. James Londsdale and Samuel Lee (1900). 31. Roebuck, ‘Milton and the Confessionalization of Antiquarianism’, 50–1. 32. Helen Cooper, ‘Milton’s King Arthur’, The Review of English Studies, 65 (2013), 252–65.

456  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 15 33. Mark Greengrass, ‘Thinking with Calvinist Networks: From the “Calvinist International” to the “Venice Affair” (1608–1610)’, in Vivienne Larminie (ed.), Huguenot Networks, 1560–1780: The Interactions and Impact of a Protestant Minority in Europe (2018), 9–28 (13–14); for more detail on Élie Diodati’s association with Galileo, see Stephane Garcia, Élie Diodati et Galilée (Florence, 2006). See also Donald Clayton Dorian, The English Diodatis (New York, 1950). 34. Complete Prose Works, 2: 763. 35. See David Baker, ‘Cavalier Shakespeare: The “1640 Poems” of John Benson’, Studies in Philology, 95, 2 (1998), 152–73. 36. Dryden (trans.), Works of Virgil, lines 33–4. 37. R. W. Condee, ‘The Latin Poetry of John Milton’, in J. W. Binns (ed.), The Latin Poetry of English Poets (London and Boston, 1974), 58–92 (82). 38. Oxford Milton, 11: 115. 39. Brooke Conti, ‘Milton, Jerome, and Apocalyptic Virginity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 72 (2019), 194–230 (204); Jerome, ‘Letters and Select Works’, trans. W. H. Freemantle, in Nicene and Post-­Nicene Fathers, second series (1994), 6: 366. 40. Hilmar M. Pabel, ‘Reading Jerome in the Renaissance: Erasmus’ Reception of the “Adversus Jovinianum” ’, Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002), 470–97. 41. For Calvin’s interpretation, see Institutes of the Christian Religion (1634), trans. Thomas Norton, 615; Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley, CA, 1953–62), 10: 43. 42. On Taylor and Revelation 14: 4, see Patrick McGrath, ‘Reconsidering Laud: Puritans and Anglican Asceticism’, Prose Studies, 34, 1 (2012), 32–49; on Taylor’s various unorthodox views, see McDowell, ‘Self-­defeating Scholarship?’, in Killeen et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Bible; Poole, Milton and the Idea of the Fall, 50-­7.

15. Becoming a Polemicist 1. J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Precept, example and truth: Degory Wheare and the ars historica’, in D. R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1997), 11–36. 2. Oxford Milton, 11: 189; Fulton, Historical Milton, 139, whose view is shared by Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), 237–8. Blair Worden argues against what he sees as a scholarly tendency to conflate the languages of civic humanism with constitutional republicanism in ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: the English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. Volume I: Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002), 307–28. 3. Drake cited in Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 85; Alexandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern Translations of The Prince (Abingdon and New York, 2009), 64; Oxford Milton, 6: 151; 11: 216, 250–1. 4. Oxford Milton, 11: 221, 237–9. 5. Oxford Milton, 11: 212–13, 214. The Reason of Church-­government, 29. On the early modern development of reading aids such as marginal notes and commonplace books, see e.g. Ann Blair,

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 15   457 Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven, CT and London, 2010). 6. Oxford Milton, 6: 161. 7. Oxford Milton, 11: 360; Early Lives, 72–3. 8. Complete Prose Works, 5: 164. 9. Oxford Milton, 11: 277–8, where it is observed that Milton’s source may in fact be pseudo-­Cyprian. 10. See, most recently, Russ Leo, ‘Scripture and Tragedy in the Reformation’, in Killeen et al. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Bible, 498–517; and, more generally, Leo, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World (Oxford, 2019). For the argument that Milton’s reading in the 1640s of Buchanan’s late sixteenth–century Latin history of Scotland influenced his attitude to Arthurian myth, see Su Fang Ng, ‘Milton, Buchanan, and King Arthur’, The Review of English Studies, 70 (2019), 659–80. 11. See further Nicholas McDowell, ‘The Nation’s Poet? Milton’s Shakespeare and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’, in Willy Maley and Rory Loughnane (eds.), Celtic Shakespeare: The Bard and the Borderers (Aldershot, 2013), 205–16. 12. Oxford Milton, 11: 369; Of Reformation, 68. 13. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 618–19. 14. Apology Against a Pamphlet, 9. 15. Jones, ‘Milton’s Life, 1608–40’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 24–5. 16. Johnson, Lives of the Eminent Poets, 1: 248–9. 17. For more detailed discussion of the activities of the Phillips brothers, see Nicholas McDowell, ‘Family Politics: Or, How John Phillips Read His Uncle’s Satirical Sonnets (with Transcription from Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet. 30’, Milton Quarterly, 42 (2008), 1–22; Nicholas McDowell, ‘Refining the Sublime: Edward Phillips, a Miltonic Education, and the Sublimity of Paradise Lost’, Milton Studies, 61 (2019), 239–60. 18. Poole, Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost, 50, 65; see further the appendix, 297–300, which offers a systematic comparison of the curriculum proposed in Of Education with that experienced by Edward Phillips. 19. See Timothy Raylor, ‘Milton, the Hartlib Circle, and the Education of the Aristocracy’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 382–406. 20. Of Education, 3. 21. ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (1641), 5, 65, 32. 22. The attribution of the ‘Postscript’ to Milton, first proposed by Masson in the nineteenth century, has been confirmed by the various techniques of stylistic attribution applied in David L. Hoover and Thomas N. Corns, ‘The Authorship of the Postscript to An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance’, Milton Quarterly, 38 (2004), 59–75. 23. [Milton], ‘A Postscript’, in ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 95. 24. Ibid., 95, 97, 103. 25. Milton, History of Britain (1670), 99. 26. The existence of the book was first noted by Edward Jones, ‘The Wills of Edward Goodall

458  N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 16 and Thomas Young and the Life of John Milton’, in Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (eds.), John Milton: ‘Reasoning Words’ (Selinsgrove, PA, 2008), 60–76 (72–3). 27. On the Reformatio and its reception in Elizabethan England, see Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven, CT, 1996), 501–2, 611; see also Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge, 2014), 52–3. 28. On the densely metaphorical style of the anti-­prelatical writings, see Thomas N. Corns, The Development of Milton’s Prose Style (Oxford, 1982). 29. [Milton], ‘A Postscript’, in ‘Smectymnuus’, An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 104; Of Reformation, 2–3. 30. Of Reformation, 13. 31. Oxford Milton, 11: 117–18, 119; Dante, Divine Comedy, 19. 7–9, 18, 46–8; 24. 23–4. As Poole points out, if Milton was thinking of the depiction of Martin IV in Dante, then the note should really be under the next heading in the manuscript, ‘Gula’ (Gluttony). 32. Of Reformation, 24. 33. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 228–51. 34. Of Reformation, 25, 37. 35. Ibid., 26, 29–32. 36. Ibid., 41, 50–1, 53, 17. 37. See, respectively, Nigel Smith, ‘The Anti-­Episcopal Tracts: Republican Puritanism and the Truth in Poetry’, in McDowell and Smith, Oxford Handbook, 155–73 (161); Janel Mueller, ‘Embodying Glory: the Apocalyptic Stain in Milton’s Of Reformation’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose (Cambridge, 1990), 9–40. 38. Of Reformation, 89. 39. See e.g. Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s antiprelatical tracts and the marginality of doctrine’, in Dobranski and Rumrich (eds.), Milton and Heresy, 39–48; N. H. Keeble, ‘Milton and Puritanism’, in Corns (ed.), Companion to Milton, 124–40 (128–9). 40. Cited in Complete Prose Works, 1: 978. 41. Of Reformation, 43, 44. 42. Ibid., 42–3. 43. Ibid., 67–8, 72, 53.

16. The Poetics of Polemic 1. James Egan, ‘Milton and the Marprelate Tracts’, Milton Studies, 8 (1975), 103–21; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1994), 297–304. 2. Animadversions, 8. 3. Ibid., 7–8. 4. Ibid., 8. 5. The Reason of Church-­government, 11. 6. Ibid., 4. 7. Ibid. 8. Areopagitica, 17.

N o t e s t o C h a p t e r 16   459 9. Ibid., 13, 18. 10. Ibid., 32. 11. The Reason of Church-­government, 22, 24. On depictions of the Adamites, alleged to go naked as a sign of their restored perfection, see David Cressy, ‘The Adamites Exposed: Naked Radicals in the English Revolution’, in Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1999), 251-­79; on Familists and the Family of Love, see e.g. Como, Blown by the Spirit. 12. The Reason of Church-government., 29. 13. Jason Rosenblatt, ‘Milton, Natural Law, and Toleration’, in Achinstein and Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration, 126–43 (132). The classic argument for a revolution in Miltonic thinking in 1643–5, sparked by a reformulation of the relationship between natural law and divine law, is Ernest Sirluck’s introduction to Complete Prose Works, 2: 1–216. 14. Oxford Milton, 11: 113–14. 15. The Reason of Church-­government, 10. 16. Ibid., 25. 17. Ibid., 53. 18. My argument here bears some comparison with that of Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, who observes that Milton ‘smuggles the ethical self-­image into his literary construction’ (99); on Homeric shame in the tract, see Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago and London, 2011), 248–82. 19. Hales, Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, 1. 20. For arguments for Walywn’s influence on Milton, see most recently David Williams, Milton’s Leveller God (Montreal and Kingston, 2017), 37–42. The most influential account of Milton in relation to ‘popular’ radical culture has been Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1977); for discussion and qualification of the idea of radical religious culture in the mid-­seventeenth century as an efflorescence of popular culture, see McDowell, English Radical Imagination. 21. Marc Schwarz, ‘Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Albion, 14 (1982), 1–19; Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 209–27. 22. For the argument that Milton in 1641–2 ‘was no “Presbyterian” in the ways that we have currently thought about Presbyterianism, that is, in the Scottish, or Continental Calvinist version’, see Sharon Achinstein, ‘John Milton and the Communities of Resistance, 1641–42’, in Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (eds.), Writing and Religion in Early Modern England, 1559–1689 (Aldershot, 2009), 298–304 (294). 23. Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’, in Achinstein and Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration 86–106 (102–3), citing Hugh Trevor-­Roper’s influential and much-­ discussed essay, ‘Religious Origins of the Enlightenment’, in Trevor-­Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, 2nd edn. (1972), 193–236 (234–6). For recent, sceptical appreciations of Trevor-­Roper’s arguments, see the essays by Noel Malcolm and John Robertson in Hugh Trevor-­Roper: The Historian, ed. Blair Worden (2016). A more recent work that has much in common with Trevor-­Roper’s thesis, and which persuasively puts de Thou, Sarpi, and Milton together, is Gatti, Ideas of Liberty in Early Modern Europe. 24. The Reason of Church-­government, 23.

460  N o t e s t o e p i l o g u e : t o wa r d s r e g ic i de a n d e p ic 25. Ibid., 36, 37. 26. A point made in Poole (ed.), Milton, Areopagitica and Other Writings, xxiii. 27. Paradise Lost, 7. 31; Oxford Milton, 11: 373–5. 28. The Reason of Church-­government, 37. 29. Ibid., 38; Harington, ‘Life of Ariosto’, in Orlando Furioso in English Heroic Verse (1591), 417-­18. 30. The Reason of Church-­government, 38. 31. Ibid., 39–40. 32. Ibid., 40–1. 33. Areopagitica, 4. 34. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace, 98. 35. The Reason of Church-­government, 40. 36. Ibid., 60; An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 19. 37. The Reason of Church-­government, 64. 38. My position here is similar to that of Richard Strier in The Unrepentant Renaissance, 292–3, although Strier regards Milton as more fully invested in the structures of the Presbyterian system. 39. Anon., A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libel, Entituled, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against SMECTYMNUUS (1642), sigs. A3r–v. 40. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 17, 15–16. 41. Ibid., 16. 42. Ibid., 16, 5. 43. Ibid., 17. 44. Ibid., 17–18. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Oxford Milton, 11: 277–8. 47. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 45. 48. The Reason of Church-­government, 62. For Milton’s ‘connection between a distinctive national language and a nation’s political climate’ in the early prose, see Hannah Crawforth, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013), 147–84 (158). 49. Complete Prose Works, 4. 1: 625. 50. An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 50. 51. The suggestion of Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 156, that the poem ‘may have functioned as a spoof between uncle and nephews’ does not ring true to the dignified tone of the sonnet, although it does usefully invoke the pedagogical context in which Milton was likely studying Euripides in the early 1640s.

Epilogue: Towards Regicide and Epic 1. For a discussion of the theology of the De Doctrina Christiana that makes this general point, see Richard Strier, ‘Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden is Better than Heaven’, in Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge, 2012), 25–48. 2. Early Lives, 63.

N o t e s t o e p i l o g u e : t o wa r d s r e g i c i de a n d e p ic   461 3. Areopagitica, 3; Defensio Secunda, 90–1. 4. Sharon Achinstein, ‘Saints or Citizens? Ideas of Marriage in Seventeenth-­Century Republicanism’, The Seventeenth Century, 25, 2 (2013), 240-­64. 5. Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), 318– 415, is the most comprehensive guide to the Presbyterian polemical campaign of the mid-­1640s against Independency and sectarianism. 6. Palmer, The Glass of God’s Providence (1644), 57. Prynne’s comments are in Twelve Considerable Serious Questions (1644). See the useful reprinting of the major attacks on Milton in 1644–5 in The Divorce Tracts of John Milton: Texts and Contexts, ed. Sara J. van den Berg and W. Scott Howard (Duquesne, PA, 2010). 7. Young, Hope’s Incouragement pointed at in a Sermon, Preached in St Margarets Westminster, before the Honourable House of Commons (1644), 32; Oxford Milton, 11: 162, 165; Milton, The Judgement of Martin Bucer, 15. 8. Poole, ‘More Light on the Literary Remains of Alexander Gil the Younger’, 215. 9. See, in the interim, my narrative of the composition of the Tenure in Oxford Milton, 6: 12–45. 10. Roy Gibson and Catherine Steel, ‘The indistinct literary careers of Cicero and Pliny the Younger’, in Hardie and Moore (eds.), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, 118–37 (125). 11. The point is well made by Blair Worden, ‘John Milton: Literature and Life’, in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds.), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford, 2010), 1–21 (4).

I n de x

Ariosto, Ludovico, 274, 333, 377, 379, 383; biography of, 33, 396; Orlando Furisoso, 330 Aristotle, 48, 105, 297; and magnanimity, 381, 384, 439n34; Nicomachean Ethics, 85, 164, 381; Organon, 86, 91; Physics, 132–33; Poetics, 342; Politics, 101; and proairesis, 85; and slavery, 101–02 Arminius, Jacob, 118, 241–42 Arminianism and Arminians, 118–19, 122, 188–89, 192–95, 288, 291, 379–80, 393, 411; and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 237–38, 241–42, 249–51, 266; and the Dutch ‘Remonstrants’, 288, 340; in the universities, 192–95; see also free will; Great Tew circle; Laudianism Army, New Model, 208, 414 Army, Parliamentary, 204, 408 Arndt, Jacob, 199 Arthur, King, and Arthurian myth, 346–47, 350–51, 396–97; Milton’s scepticism about, 361–65. See also British history Ascham, Roger, 112, 269–70; and double translation, 54–55; and Italy, 230, 336–37, 343; and Marian England, 104–6, 269, 322; and physical punishment, 82–83; and rhyme, 56–57; The Scholemaster, 49– 50, 52, 104, 406 Ashmole, Elias: manuscript verse miscellany compiled by, 113, 165, 435n8 astronomy, 77 Athanasius of Alexandria, 344 Athens, 408

Adamites, 388 Adolphus, Gustavus, 128–29 Aesop, 37 Agar, Thomas, 368 Ahab, King of Israel, 41 Alberti, Leon Battista, 67 Alsop, John, 313 Ambrose, Saint, 51, 326 Ames, William, 86–88 Anabaptists, 324, 388 Anacreon, 58 Andrewes, Lancelot, 116–19, 121–22, 385; Milton’s elegy for, 118–20, 144–46, 157, 160, 196, 201, 346, 352–53 angels, 151–52, 178, 224, 252–53, 344, 386 animadversion, 282 anonymity, 35, 123, 133, 136, 166, 169, 220, 253, 289; and publication, 43, 264, 295, 349, 370, 379, 382, 395, 400–401, 411, 413 anticlericalism, 97–100, 107, 112, 283, 311–14, 331, 337, 371–76, 399–400 Antinomianism, 201, 207, 324 apocalypticism, 109, 119–20, 157, 177–78, 187, 191, 197, 353, 378–79; in ‘Lycidas’, 305, 317– 18, 329–31. See also millenarianism Apollo, 34, 161, 182, 301, 309; Apollonian priest, 162–63, 179, 248; temple of, 181 apotheosis, 111, 149, 168, 184 Apuleius, 152 Aquinas, Thomas, 46, 236 Aramaic language, 76–77, 177, 369 Aratus, Phaenomena, Milton’s copy of, 259 Arianism, 371 463

464 L’Aubespine, Charles, marquis de Châteauneuf, 94 Aubrey, John, 39–40, 45, 74, 81, 158, 368–69 Augustine of Canterbury, 347, 371 Augustine of Hippo, 51 Augustus Caesar, 42, 109, 184, 417; Augustan Rome, 63 Aurelius, Marcus, 43 Bacchus and Bacchantes, 169, 172, 181, 229, 232, 243–44, 248, 299, 302 Barberini, Francesco, 342 Barker, Arthur, 9 Barksdale, Clement, 86 Barnes, Joshua, 258 Baroque, the, 110, 201, 208–9, 315–16 Baroni, Leonora, 344 Barrow, Isaac, 68 Basil the Great, 360–61 Bastwick, John, 321–22, 327, 400 Beale, John, 5–6 Beaumont, Francis, 165 Beaumont, Joseph, 296, 300, 312, 316 beauty and the beautiful, 256–58, 293, 407–8 Beckett, Thomas, 371 Bede, 276, 361, 364, 371; Historia ecclesiastica, 347 Beer, Anna, 422n24, 447–48n26 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 272; English attacks on, 110–11, 116–17, 127 Bembo, Pietro, 58, 141–42, 396 Benson, John, 349 Beroaldus, Philip, 71 Berwick, Pacification of, 333, 366–67 Bible, the 39, 153, 217–18; and biblical scholarship, 106, 119, 342; and classical literature, 55, 182–83, 251–52, 257–58, 267, 365– 66, 337, 397; Hebrew bible, 35, 39, 371; King James Bible, 121; and logic, 194–95; Milton family Bible, 59–60, 259, 448n34; Milton’s reading of, 404; New Testament, 39, 138, 321, 361, 404; Old Testament, 15, 180, 206, 268, 361; and reason,

i n de x 289–90; Septuagint Bible, 151, 342; and textual criticism, 377 —books of: Genesis, 337; Exodus, 400; Judges 113; 2 Kings, 109; Job, 396–97; Song of Solomon (Song of Songs), 361, 397; Isaiah, 215, 218, 398; Ezekiel, 154; Matthew, 215, 217, 317; Luke, 217; Acts, 248; 1 Corinthians, 50; 2 Corinthians 138; Galatians, 290; 1 Timothy, 151; Hebrews, 329; 1 John, 30; Revelation, 119, 154, 163, 177, 191, 317, 328, 352–54, 404 bishops. See Episcopacy and Episcopalians Bishops’ Wars, 333 Blackfriars theatre, 35 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 17, 58, 71, 274, 333, 337; Decameron, 302; Vita di Dante, Milton’s copy of, 259, 279, 287, 450n27; Vita di Dante, idea of the poet in, 284–86, 298, 303, 327, 345 Bodin, Jean, 74; Colloquium Heptalomeres, manuscript of, 269 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 279, 287 Bohemia, 42 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 274, 333 Bolton, Samuel, 415 Book of Common Prayer, 265, 333, 366 Book of Sports, 318–20, 397 books, licensing of, 84, 322–23, 327, 370, 384, 412, 414 Boscán, Juan, 305 Boyle, Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, 368 Bramhall, John, 431n4 Briggs, Samson, 295, 300, 312 Brinsley, John, 39, 46, 57, 83, 91, 308–9 British history, 283, 346–47, 350–51, 361–65, 371–72, 396–97, 417 Browne, William: Inner Temple Masque, 228–29 Brownists, 388 Bruno, Giordano, 268 Brutus of Troy, 347, 350, 362 Buchanan, George, 111–12, 365, 457n10

i n de x Burbage, Richard, 35 Buonmattei, Benedetto, 337, 341 ; see also Milton, John, correspondence of Burton, Henry, 319–21, 327, 400 Butt, Henry, 95 Byzantine history, 273 Caesar, Julius, 116, 414 Calamy, Edward, 370, 390. See also ‘Smectymnuus’ Calvin, John, 129, 322, 353–54 Calvinism and Calvinists, 27–28, 40, 54, 187, 193, 196–97, 199, 266, 288; and anti–Calvinism, 44, 73, 118, 238, 290, 354, 393; and Calvinist doctrine, 380–81, 389–93, 410– 11; in Cambridge, 192–93; and the ‘Contra-Remonstrants’, 340; and episcopacy, 42, 370; and grace, 241–42, 250–51, 314. See also free will; predestination Cambridge Neoplatonists, 250–51, 257. See also Neoplatonism Cambridge, University of, 1, 12, 83, 96, 120, 219, 228, 264, 269; Baccalaureate of Divinity at, 213, 273; Cambridge University Press, 43, 174, 208; Clare College, 176; closure of, due to plague, 109, 132; Commencement ceremony of, 94–95, 200; college tutor at, 189; curriculum of, 98– 99, 209, 433n40; drama in, 83, 296, 297, 303, 307–308, 405; Emmanuel College, 91, 127, 176, 209; Jesus College, 372; King’s College, 108, 115, 295; Magdalene College, 208; Master of Arts requirements at, 131– 32, 197; in reign of Mary I, 104–106; modern languages teaching at, 60–61; Pembroke College, 121, 175, 205; Peterhouse, 205, 296, 316; poetry at, 123, 127, 133–34, 139, 165, 173–78, 201–11, 295–96, 314–17; public disputations at, 89–91, 133; St John’s College, 104, 148, 296; Sidney Sussex College, 3; statutes of, 70, 85–86, 131; students, ignorance of, 64, 99–101, 404– 5; Trinity College, 82, 96, 108, 173, 219,

465 264, 433n40; whipping at, 82–84. See also Christ’s College, Cambridge; Milton, John, education of Camden, William, 63, 276, 289, 361, 378 Camillus, Marcus Furius, 417 Campbell, Gordon, 10–11, 16, 189, 197, 431nn1 and 4, 432n30, 433n40, 445n11, 460n51 Carey, John, 184, 334 Carey, Lucius, Lord Falkland, 288, 335 Carey, Patrick, 335 Carew, Thomas, 128, 223–24; Coelum Britannicum, 234–35, 268 Caroline court. See Charles I, court of Cartwright, William, 176, 223 Casaubon, Isaac, 75, 200 Casaubon, Meric, 43, 74–75 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 61, 342–43 catechisms, 46, 54 Catholicism, Roman, 23, 40, 42, 240–41, 272, 335, 342–43; and anti-Catholicism, 27, 34, 104–5, 110–17, 123, 157, 180, 193, 198, 266, 318; as Antichrist, 177, 191, 281, 317; and the Bible, 289–90; and British history, 347, 364–65; in Caroline court, 118, 128–29; and celibacy, 170; and idolatry, 152, 157, 178–79, 188; and plots, 123; and temptation, 230; and veneration of saints, 151. See also Counter-Reformation; Gunpowder Plot; Jesuits Cato, Distichs, 37 Cato the Elder, 51 Catullus, 343 Caussin, Nicolas, 209 Cavalier poets, 223–24, 349 Censorship, 279–84, 291, 322–27, 337–38, 383–84, 412–13 Cerda, Juan Luis de la, 50 Cerdogni, Camillo, 335, 353 Chapman, George, 72 Chappell, William, 81–88, 295, 442n18; and Ramist logic, 86–88; religious identity of, 85, 120, 189, 193–95, 266; and whipping of Milton, alleged, 81–82, 85, 431n4

466 Charles I, 1, 41–42, 94, 128–29, 134, 296, 381; accession of, 122–23; and the Bishops’ Wars, 333; court of, 118, 124, 129, 223, 227, 229–35, 238, 250; Eikon Basilike, 138; marriage of, 108; and Parliament, 384–85, 393, 408; Personal Rule of, 10, 118–19, 192, 200, 207, 318–19; and the Scots, 366–67, 416; and theatricality, 129, 219, 225, 227–29, 236, 301, 366, 446n37; trial and execution of, 2–6, 8, 335, 358, 385, 416 Charles II, 2, 3–5, 8, 24. See also Restoration chastity, 158, 159–63, 171, 236, 286, 334. See also virginity Chaucer, Geoffrey, 73, 276, 331, 378–79 Cheke, Sir John, 104–7 Chillingworth, William, 289–92, 313, 340, 384, 392–93 Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1–2, 81–107, 119, 129, 152, 219, 294–95, 297–300; and Arminianism, 189; chapel of, 107, 151; ‘fellow commoner’ students at, 96, 102; and Laudianism, 187–95, 201; library of, 145; ‘pensioner’ students at, 96; logic at, 87– 88; ‘salting’ at, 90–91, 143–44, 432n24; ‘sizar’ students at, 96. See also Milton, John, education of Chrysostom, John, 274, 279–80, 353, 376–77 Church of England, 8, 10, 23, 27–8, 40, 116, 265, 281, 370, 375; and ‘Anglican’ sensibility, 204; Calvinism in, 40–42; dissolution of, 312; Thirty-Nine Articles of, 1, 131, 212. See also Episcopacy and Episcopalians; Laud, William; Laudianism Cicero, 26, 46, 50–55, 61, 103–5, 112, 273, 337, 405; on Cambridge curriculum, 85–86; career model of, 417; De officiis, 26, 101, 142, 434n46; De oratore, 52–53, 69–70, 92, 101, 150, 374, 433–34n43; and the magnus animus, 150–51, 345, 384; and otium and negotium, 215; Pro Archia poeta, 70–71, 73, 100, 429–30n11 Circe, 172, 247, 403; in masques, 228–30; associated with Roman Catholicism, 81, 230, 336. See also Homer; Odysseus

i n de x Civil War, English, 7, 16, 198, 273, 366, 408, 410 Clarke, Samuel, 113 Clement of Alexandria, 376 Cleveland, John, 95–96, 295, 300; at Christ’s College, Cambridge, 95, 296, 331; elegy for Edward King, 312–13, 315–16, 330 Codner, David, 343. See also Selvaggi Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 14, 251 Colet, John, 45, 48, 50–51, 104, 406 commonplace books, 110–11, 133, 213, 270– 73, 433n42, 449n9 commonwealth government (1649–53), 148, 198, 335; Council of State, 225 Commynes, Philippe de, 357 Constantine I, 109, 312, 377–78 Conti, Natale, Mythologiae, 233 Cook, John, 335 Coppe, Abiezer, 207 Corns, Thomas N., 10–11, 16, 189, 197, 431nn1 and 4, 432n30, 433n40, 445n11, 460n51 Cornwall, 329, 347 Cosin, John, 205 Counter-Reformation, the, 13, 61, 117, 201, 281, 327, 344, 393; and British history, 347; and Italy, 13, 61, 120, 282, 327, 344, 383; and poetic style, 201, 205, 209, 266. See also Trent, Council of Cowley, Abraham, 219 Cranmer, Thomas, 371, 379; Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, 372 Crashaw, Richard, 2, 202–7; and Cambridge poetry, 175, 202, 205, 295; and Latin poetry, 204–7, 316; and Laudianism, 202–5, 316; and Roman Catholicism, 204, 443–44n38 Crashaw, William, 198 Creaser, John, 440n12 Cromwell, Oliver, 409, 417 Crucifixion, the, 202–6, 208–9, 315–16; and Laudianism, 206–7, 209–10 Culverwell, Nathaniel, 257 Cyprian, 273, 365

i n de x Daniel, Samuel, 58 daemons and the daemonic, 14–15, 151–57, 184, 196, 278, 328–29, 345–6; in Euripides, 256–58, 267, 407; and Neoplatonism, 146–9, 152, 256–7; and pagan oracles, 178–80; in Plutarch, 181–2, 238–41, 243– 45, 251; and the poet, 163, 251–52, 260, 267, 269, 379, 385, 387, 396, 412–13; types of daemon, 151–54, 157, 179–80, 201, 224, 244; and virginity, 159, 244–45, 351–53 Daillé, Jean, 377 Dante, Alighieri 18, 182, 274, 280, 298, 312–13, 333, 343–44, 379, 383; L’Amoroso Convivio, Milton’s copy of, 60, 141, 259; biography of, 284–86, 303, 396; and censorship, 279, 283–84, 298, 325; and the clergy, 375–76; De Monarchia, 279–80, 284; Inferno, 280, 311, 375; and Italian language, 58, 285–6; Milton’s admiration for, 284–85, 337, 373, 402–3; Paradiso, 141, 280, 311; poetic career of, 13,17, 285, 373; as proto-Protestant, 280–81, 375–77; Purgatorio, 141, 376; Vita Nuova, 279. See also Boccaccio, Giovanni Darbishire, Helen, 424n17 Dati, Carlo, 340–43, 349. See also Milton, John, correspondence of Davenant, William, 223 De Dominis, Marco Antonio, 288 Della Casa, Giovanni, 140; Galateo, 96; Rime et Prose, Milton’s copy of, 59–60, 140–41, 259, 333 Demodocus, 156 Demosthenes, 105 Dio Chrysostom, Orationes LXXX, 259 Diodati, Charles, 81, 189, 266, 274, 289, 332– 33, 340, 378; death of, 348–52; and friendship with Milton, 59, 61–62, 64, 159–64, 255–60, 293, 337, 348–54, 411, 415, 447– 48n26; letters to Milton, 62, 163. See also Milton, John, correspondence of Diodati, Élie, 340, 348, 357 Diodati, Jean, 335, 348, 349, 357 Diodati, Theodore, 189, 255 Dionysus. See Bacchus and Bacchantes

467 Donatus, Aelius, 158, 284, 303, 344–45 Donne, John, 28, 160, 169, 291–92; in manuscript miscellanies, 132–35; Roman Catholicism of, 1, 24; sermons of, 119, 353–54 Dort, Synod of, 288, 340 Dowland, John, 34 Downham, George, 88 Drake, Sir William, 258, 277, 358 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 127, 436–37n36 Dryden, John, 73, 116, 291 Du Bellay, Joachim, 58 Du Chesne, André, 361 Dugard, Thomas, 207 Du Moulin, Pierre, 334 D’Urfé, Honoré, 231 Durham House group, 118 Dury, John, 192 Dutch language, 60 Dutch republic and the Dutch, 64, 73, 128, 280, 288, 340; Dutch language, 60, 428n46 Duport, James, 81–82 Edgehill, Battle of, 408 Edward VI, 104–105, 371 Egerton, Alice, 225–227, 229, 245–46 Egerton, Alice, Dowager Countess of Derby, 34, 221, 226–28 Egerton, John, Viscount Brackley, 225, 234 Egerton, Sir John, Earl of Bridgewater, 34– 35, 222, 224–25, 246 Egerton, Katherine, 229 Egerton, Thomas, 225, 234 Egypt and Egyptians, 181, 200 elegy: funeral, 7, 16, 62, 117–18, 120–22, 128, 134, 139, 144, 296–97, 331, 385, 410; love, 37, 39, 62, 122, 146, 160–62, 172, 302, 350– 52, 398, 402; pastoral, 298, 301, 330, 348–51 Elijah, 41, 144 Elizabeth I, 23, 27, 30, 33, 106, 377; Elizabethan England, 65, 378, 382–83 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 71–72, 104

468 Empedocles, 70 English language, 55, 57–58, 141–42, 311 epicureanism, 303, 329 epic poem, 8, 14, 121, 172, 218, 283, 302, 345– 46, 350–54, 362; as encyclopaedic form, 72–73, 161, 418; and the epic poet, 17, 58, 157–58, 202, 265, 280, 309–10, 327, 330–31, 398, 417–19 epigrams, 108–10, 116, 133, 144, 280, 343–44; sacred, 2, 114–15, 175, 204–9, 316; satirical, 115, 122–23, 126–27 Episcopacy and Episcopalians, 7, 13, 27–28, 116, 129, 213, 321–22, 326, 385–86, 400; abolition of, calls for, 367, 393; and divine right, 370, 377; and licensing of books, 323–24; and ‘no bishop, no king’ motto, 322, 381; polemical images of, 371–81. See also Laud, William; Laudianism epitaph, 108, 132–33, 136–37, 141, 264, 347– 48; mock, 126 Erasmus, Desiderius, 45–6, 48–9, 82, 104, 256, 269–70, 353, 393, 449n9; and aemulatio, 58, 92; Antibarbarorum liber, 51, 103– 104; De conscribiendis epistolis, 36; De copia, 47–48, 270; De ratione studii, 48–51, 53–54, 77; and imitatio, 57–58, 106; Moriae encomium, 99; Naufragium, 329. See also humanism and humanists Erastians, 413 Eton College, 68, 271, 274, 286–88, 291, 349 Eucharist, 205–206, 251–52 Euripides, 16–17, 255–58, 267, 337, 364, 397, 407–8; Alcestis, 256, 365; The Bacchae, 244–45, 256–58; Electra, 408; Hecuba, 365; Helen, 256; Heracleides, 245; Hippolytus, 245; Iphigenia in Tauris, 182, 216, 365; Medea, 216, 256, 365; Suppliant Women, 366; Milton’s copy of, 17, 140, 216–17, 258– 59, 343, 408, 444n6, 448n30 Eusebius, 273, 320, 376 Evans, J. Martin, 446n8 Evelyn, John, 5 Everard, John, 198–200

i n de x Fairfax, Edward, 330 Fairfax, Thomas, 409 fall, the, 155–56, 362, 385, 417–18 Fallon, Stephen M., 429n2, 444n8, 459n18 Familists, 388 Fathers, Church. See patristics Fawkes, Guy, 109 Felton, John, 125 Felton, Nicholas, 121, 144 Ferrabosco, Alphonso, 33 Ficino, Marsilio, 50, 146–47, 200, 231, 248, 250–51, 257, 446n7, 447n26. See also Neoplatonism Filmer, Sir Robert, 3 First World War, 11–12 Fish, Stanley, 452n23 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias, 281 Fletcher, Giles, 139, 174–74 Fletcher, Harris F., 17, 44 Fletcher, John, 165, 231, 234 Fletcher, Phineas, 115–16, 123, 139 Florence, 284, 337–38 Forster, John, 94–95 Foxe, John, 281, 311, 377–78 Francini, Antonio, 343, 345, 349 France and the French, 2, 23, 126, 230; French academies, 369; French history, 357–59; French language, 31, 38, 60, 273 Frankfurt, 145, 295 Frederick V of the Palatinate, 426n43 Francis, Saint, 111 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 42 Free Library of Philadelphia, 16–17 free will, 15, 196, 201, 249–53, 288–89, 379– 80, 387, 389–90, 411. See also Arminianism and Arminians freedom of thought, 78, 266–67, 384–88, 393–94, 410, 415 Frye, Northrop, 170–71 Fuller, Thomas, 194 Galileo, Galilei, 283, 338–40, 348 Galileo, Vincenzo, 340

i n de x Gataker, Thomas, 27–28, 35, 39, 43, 265 Gell, Robert, 94, 200–201 Gellicus, Aulicus, 429–30n11 Geneva, 75, 335, 347–48, 357; Calvinist Academy of, 163, 266, 348 German language, 60 Gibbons, Orlando, 33 gift poems, 35, 62, 145, 349 Gil, Alexander, the younger, 50, 82, 99, 128– 30, 321; death of, 415; 428n41; and friendship with Milton, 59, 63–64, 94, 97–98, 100–101, 113–14, 144, 226, 411, 415; imprisonment of, 125–26, 226, 266, 407; and Ben Jonson, 138–39; poems of, 64, 113, 121, 128; political identity of, 128–29, 436n33. See also Milton, John, correspondence of Gil, Alexander, the elder, 57–58, 82, 138–39, 141, 257 Girard, Bernard de, Seigneur de Haillan, 276–77, 357, 359, 414 Giustiniani, Bernardo, De origine urbis Venetiarum, 260, 274 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 14 Goodall, Edward, 265–66, 325–26 Gostlin, John, 120 Gower, John, 276 Grafton, Anthony, 73 grammar, 48–50, 72. See also Latin grammar schools, 26–27, 86, 151. See also St Paul’s School Great Tew circle, 288–92, 340, 354, 376–77, 392 Greece and the Greeks, ancient, 55, 260, 271, 342, 391; and liberty, 102; and philosophy, 403; and slavery, 101–2 Greek language, ancient, 39, 60, 145, 177, 240, 252, 295–6, 321; and beauty, 255–56, 337, 407–8; and circle of studies, 70, 72, 75; composition in, 59, 64; in Milton’s correspondence, 62, 256–57, 348; Milton’s teaching of, 76, 369; poetry in, 55, 57, 131, 267, 295; and rationality, 101–102, 255; in school curriculum, 45–46, 49, 52, 54

469 Gregory I, Pope, 347 Greville, Robert, Lord Brooke, 207 Grotius, Hugo, 73–74, 76–77, 288, 291, 340 Guicciardini, Francesco, 276–77, 339, 357–59 Guillory, John, 446n38 Gunning, Peter, 7 Gunpowder Plot, the, 1, 28–9, 108–16, 122– 23, 127–29, 144, 280; decline of celebrations of, 119, 123; poems about, 115–16 Guntram, King of Burgundy, 320 Habsburg empire, 119 Hague, the, 288 Hale, John K., 432nn24 and 30, 433n40 Hales, John, 68–69, 271–72, 274, 288–92, 411; on Calvinism, 288, 340; library of, 287, 291; and toleration, 290–92, 340; Tract Concerning Schismes and Schismaticks, 289–90, 392 Hall, John, of Durham, 148–49 Hall, Joseph, 370, 376, 382–83, 401 Hamburg, 35, 40, 42 Hammersmith. See Milton, John, residences of Hammond, Paul, 446n2 Hampton Court, 384 Harefield, Middlesex, 221, 224 Harington, Sir John, 58, 330, 396 Harrington, Lord John, 189 Harrison, William, 102–103 Hartlib, Samuel, 76, 119, 192, 269, 320, 344, 368 Harvey, Gabriel, 72–73 Hatton, Christopher, 1st Baron Hatton, 7 Hausted, Peter, 296 Hayward, Sir John, 361 Hawkins, William, 128–29 Hazlitt, William, 18 Hebrew language, 31–2, 39, 45, 55, 57, 76–77, 177, 369, 373 Hegisippus, 376 Heinsius, Nicholas, 341, 343 Helicon, Mount, 36–37

470 Hendrik, Frederik, Prince of Orange, 64 Henry VIII, 46 Henry, Philip, 85 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, 435n13 Heraclides of Pontus, Allegoriæ in Homeri Fabulas de Diis, 259 Herbert, Lord Edward of Cherbury, 60 Herbert, George, 220, 292 heresy, 13, 193, 251, 281, 289–90, 376, 390, 392–4, 414 Hermes Trismegistus, 152–53, 167, 200, 250; and the Hermetic philosophy, 168, 200, 247, 250, 268, 443n31 Herodotus, 131 Herrick, Robert, 223 Hesiod, 152 Heylin, Peter, 319–20 Heyward, Thomas, 121 Hierron, John, 194–95, 219 High Commission, Court of, 198, 369–70 Hill, Christopher, 9, 459n20 Hobart, Sir John, 5–6 Hobson, Thomas, 132–34, 349 Holdsworth, Richard, 91–92, 131, 209 Holinshed, Raphael, 276, 359, 361, 371 Holland Philemon, 238 Holy Roman Empire, 117, 122 Holste, Lukas, 342 Homer, 56, 58, 72, 76, 343, 345: Iliad, 7, 156, 391, 399; and Homeric myth, 120–21, 247; and the Homeric hymns, 182; Odyssey, 228–30, 268, 448n5. See also Circe; Odysseus Hooker, Richard, 292 Hoole, Charles, 37–8 Horace, 36, 55–56, 112, 136, 161, 342–43, 346; Epistulae, 335, 454n6 Horton. See Milton, John, residences of Huguenots, 88, 126, 200, 377 humanism and humanists, 26, 36, 49, 256, 269, 305–6, 341, 369, 393, 418, 434n53; and aemulatio, 58, 89; and humanitas, 53, 69– 71, 75–78, 101–103, 150, 429–30n11; and the studia humanitatis, 48, 66, 70–71, 76,

i n de x 97, 104; and ‘general learning’, 67–68, 74– 75, 153; and Protestantism, 103–107, 283; and punishment, 82–83; and virtue, 25– 26, 52, 307. See also Erasmus; universal learning Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 7, 287 idolatry, 41, 178, 182, 184, 360, 374, 405; and Roman Catholicism, 151–52, 157, 179, 188, 236 Ignatius of Antioch, Saint, 376 imitation (imitatio), 57–58, 63. See also Erasmus Independency and the Independents, 390, 393, 412–16, 461n5. See also Presbyterianism and Presbyterians Index of Prohibited Books, 281, 393 Inns of Court, 133, 225–26, 228, 341; Gray’s Inn, 134; Inner Temple, 212; Middle Temple, 96, 225 Inquisition, the, 268, 298, 348 intellectual biography, 18–19 Irby, Sir Anthony, 139 Ireland, 193–94, 270, 384; the Irish Sea, 316, 329 Irenaeus, 376 Israelites, 360 Italy, 13, 24, 34, 260, 291, 327, 333–48, 383–84, 394, 400, 416; and Italian history, 271, 276, 333, 338–39; and the Italian language, 38, 55, 57, 59–61, 140–42, 273, 330, 336; and Italian literary academies, 337–38; 341– 46, 396, 411; and Italian literature, 260, 274, 279–80, 283–84, 330; and Italian Protestants, 59–60, 333, 335; and temptation, 230, 335–37; and Tuscan language, 58, 337. See also Milton, John, travels of Jackson, Thomas, 152–53, 183–84, 193, 200, 411, 439n38; and Arminianism, 249–51, 266, 442n14 James I ( James VI and I), 24, 40, 41, 115–16, 139, 144, 198, 272, 381; anti-Catholicism of, 110, 288; and Book of Sports, 318–19;

i n de x court of, 124, 222; death of, 107–09, 127; England under rule of, 65, 111, 122, 194, 200; and Oath of Allegiance, 110 James, Duke of York, 2 Jerome, Saint, 50, 51, 320, 353, 453n18 Jesuits, 116, 123, 129, 199, 205, 207, 209, 313, 334, 381 Jews and Judaism, 181, 317, 319, 413 Jezebel, 41 Johnson, Samuel, 9, 18–19, 74, 82, 102, 294, 368 Jones, Inigo, 124, 225, 227, 229 Jones, Arthur, 2nd Viscount Ranelagh, 368 Jones, Richard, 1st Earl of Ranelagh, 368 Jonson, Ben, 26, 53, 134–37, 139–39, 171, 219– 20, 229, 234–35, 264; death of, 223; ‘Epistle to Master John Selden’, 67–68; ‘Expostulation with Inigo Jones’, 227; The Gypsies Metamorphosed, 124; Masque of Blackness, 222; Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 229; ‘sons of Ben’, 138, 160, 220, 397 Justinian I, Institutes, 276 Justin Martyr, 273 Juvenal, 58 Juxon, William, 47 Keckermann, Bartholomew, 86, 272–73 Kedermister, Sir John, 286 Kedermister library, 286–87 King, Edward 96, 163, 312; at Christ’s College, Cambridge, 294; death of, 293, 328– 29; as poet, 294–96 King, Roger, 295, 297 King’s Men, the, 35 Knott, Edward, 313 Lactantius, Firmianus, 50, 250, 277–79, 365, 389, 443n31 Laertius, Diogenes, 131 Lake, Arthur, 121 Latin, 15, 55, 60, 65, 215, 273, 348; composition of poetry in, 37–9, 175–76, 295–96, 350–51; epigrams, 121–23, 133; grammar, 38, 45–50, 72; and manhood, 84, 431n8;

471 Milton’s teaching of, 369; and physical punishment, 82–83, 431n5, 431–32n10; ‘pure’, 50–52; and university exercises, 89–90; and virtue, 52–54, 405–6. See also Neo-Latin Laud, William: 10, 13, 42, 125, 128–29, 190– 92, 198, 354, 392; as Archbishop of Canterbury, 117–18, 187–88, 191, 195, 266, 318; patronage of, 266; and Puritanism, 117– 18, 318, 321; impeachment and imprisonment of, 370; trial and execution of, 193, 323. See also Episcopacy and Episcopalians Laudianism, 10–11, 44, 122, 187–93, 213, 237– 38, 265–66, 289, 313, 367; and the ‘beauty of holiness’, 199, 231, 407; and clerical power, 283, 374–76; and conformity, 266–67, 326, 399; and Hammersmith, 197–201; and patristics, 273–74, 393; and poetry, 201–11; and Roman Catholicism, 188; and visitations, 265, 325–26. See also Arminianism; Episcopacy and Episcopalians; Laud, William law and the legal career, 33, 212, 272 Lawes, Henry, 34–35, 220–26, 264–65, 333, 399; and collaborations with Milton, 220–22, 228, 238, 247–48, 253, 411; and court masques, 223–24, 229, 234 Lawes, William, 225–26 Lectius, Poetæ Græci, 447n10 Leicester, 189 Leiden, 322 Leighton, Sir William, 33 Leonard, John, 440n19, 454n32 letter-writing, 36, 256 Levellers, 322, 392 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 9, 426n41 and 42 libels, 123–29, 138–39, 235, 266, 321–22, 405, 436n36; seditious libel, 226, 321. See also satire; Villiers, George, 1st Duke of Buckingham liberty, 13, 19, 78, 102–3, 199, 320, 366, 371, 407, 417; liberty of conscience, 292, 340, 392; liberty of speech, 384; and Milton’s

472 liberty (cont.) reading, 359–60. See also freedom of thought; toleration; tyranny Lightfoot, John, 195 Lilburne, John, 322–23 Lily, William, 45, 104; Lily’s Grammar (Authorized Grammar, Royal Grammar), 45–48, 50, 52–54 literacy: vernacular, 29–30; Latin, 82–83 logic, 48, 76, 194–95, 297, 369; university teaching of, 86–88. See also Ramus, Petrus, and Ramism Lombard, Peter, 50 London, 23–29, 34, 62, 81, 136, 190, 197, 268; All Hallows parish, 27–9, 190; Blackfriars, 113, 128; Bread Street, 24–29, 31, 59, 132, 197; Cheapside, 59–60, 84, 226; Deptford, 303; Fleet Prison, 125; Fleet Street, 367; Fulham 198, 200; Great Fire of, 37; Kensington, 200; Rotherhithe, 35, 39; St Mary, Aldermary, 201; St Paul’s Churchyard, 258; Strand, the, 225; Tower of, 199, 370; Westminster, 226; Whitehall, 110, 117, 124, 225 Lords, House of, 199 Lovelace, Richard, 223 Lucan, 58 Lucretius, 70 Ludlow, Edmund, 335 Ludlow Castle, 225, 228, 236 Luther, Martin, 129, 250 Lycophron, Alexandra, Milton’s copy of, 259 Lydgate, John, 73 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 276–77, 358 madrigal, 140 Maenads, 181 Malatesti, Antonio, 341, 346 Malmesbury, William of, 361–62, 364 Manso, Giovanni Batista, 334, 343, 345–46, 349; Vita di Torquato Tasso, 345 Mantuan (Baptista Mantuanus), 55–56 Maria, Henrietta, 108, 118, 123, 134, 219, 249,

i n de x 296; and masque performance, 225–26, 229–31, 234, 236–37, 242; and Platonic love, 231, 234 Marino, Giambattista, 140 Marius, Gaius, 111 Marlowe, Christopher, 26, 145–46, 160; death of, 303, 309; Hero and Leander, 171, 302–308; literary career of, 302–303; Ovid’s elegies, translation of, 352; ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, 169–70, 221, 232, 302–303 Marprelate, Martin, 382–83 marriage, 245–49, 286, 353–54, 404, 412. See also Milton, John, character and mind of Marshall, Stephen, 370. See also ‘Smectymnuus’ Marston, John, 102 Marten, Henry, 207–208 Martin IV, Pope, 376, 458n31 Marvell, Andrew, 26, 96, 149, 176 Mary I and Marian England, 104–106, 111, 269, 283, 322, 371, 407 masques: and the Caroline court, 124, 225– 35; and female actors, 225–27; and the Inns of Court, 225–26, 228–29 Masson, David, 9, 457n22 Maule, Jeremy, 442n22 Mazzoni, Giacomo, 61 Mede (Mead), Joseph, 82, 95, 126, 177–84, 196–97, 250, 269, 280, 286, 298, 331, 411; account books of, 86, 96, 433n35; Apostasy of the Latter Times, 151–52, 178, 187; and church history, 273–74; Clavis Apocalyptica, 69, 119–20, 177, 187, 191–92, 317– 18, 378–79; and daemons, 151–53, 178–80; and idolatry, 151–52, 157, 178–79; and Laudianism, 119–20, 187–92, 266, 318; learning of, 68–69; and millenarianism, 151, 177, 187, 192, 317–18, 378–79; and predestination, 192–93, 195; and prophecy, 177; religious identity of, 120, 122, 188–92, 197 Melanchthon, Philip, 309

i n de x Merchant Adventurers, 35 Meres, Francis, 58 metaphrase (metaphrasis), educational practice of, 55–56 ‘Metaphysical’: poetry, 132, 135–36, 140; language, 406 Metham, Sir Thomas, 208 middling sort, 26, 31 Middleton, Thomas, 165; A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 84–85 millenarianism, 119, 151–52, 177–78, 187, 192, 201, 267, 317–18, 378–79. See also apocalypticism; Mede, Joseph Miller, Leo, 442n18 Milton, Anne, sister, 24, 29 Milton, Christopher, younger brother, 24, 81, 96, 212, 225 Milton, Elizabeth, third wife, 94, 201 Milton, John. See Milton, John, career of; Milton, John, character and mind of; Milton, John, correspondence of; Milton, John, education of; Milton, John, residences of; Milton, John, travels of; Milton, John, writings of Milton, John, career of: and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 417; divorce writings of, 6, 193, 217, 324, 353, 389, 413–15; imprisonment of, 8; and patronage, aristocratic 222–25, 263–65, 345–46; and poetry, beginning to write, 39, 43, 121–22, 201–202, 235; private tutor, career as, 8, 30, 276, 367–69; and prose polemic, beginning to write, 370–74; and the regicide, 3–10, 12, 41, 276–77, 416; and the Root and Branch petition, 367; scribal circulation of his verse, 131–38, 165, 250, 253–54, 264; as Secretary for Foreign Tongues (Latin Secretary) in Commonwealth government, 3, 27, 150, 274–75, 291, 335, 416–17; treason, accused of, 3–5, 8 Milton, John, character and mind of: blindness of, 8, 66, 142–43, 221, 273, 418; books belonging to, 16–17, 59–60, 140–41, 216,

473 259–60; book buying of, 75, 212–13, 216, 258–60, 339, 357; and clerical career, rejection of, 213–17, 221, 224, 255, 285, 400; and education, the power of, 31, 407; and father, relationship with, 31–35; and friendship, 15, 59, 159, 222–23, 255–60, 266, 341–42, 348–54, 411, 415; and hair, as image of temptation, 39, 301; as ‘Lady of Christs’, 157–58, 296, 300, 331, 344; and Laudian visitation of Horton parish church, 325–26; and marriage to Mary Powell, 404, 411–12; musical ability of, 34, 210; and nephews, relationship with, 368–69, 412; and pagan knowledge, 183– 84, 251–53, 267–68, 365–66; and poetry, the power of, 101–2, 153; portraits of, 41, 74, 160; print, attitude towards, 264–65, 296, 325, 349, 385, 415; radicalism of, alleged early, 9, 122; ‘radicalization’ of, 11, 358, 410; reading of, 259–60, 269, 271–72, 276–77, 286–88, 339, 357–61, 416; religious identity of, 9–12, 188–92, 195–97, 265–70; as scholar, 75–77, 259–60; self– representation of, 66–67, 142–43, 157–58, 202, 212–18, 246–47, 333–34, 344–45, 392, 397–400, 415–17; social life of, 15, 133–34, 343–44, 446n38; and study, dedication to, 66–67, 213–18, 260, 263, 284, 293, 327; and timeliness, 142–43, 218; and wit, 12– 13, 283, 339, 399 Milton, John, correspondence of: to Benedetto Buonmattei, 10 September 1638, 337; to Carlo Dati, 21 April 1647, 280, 343; to Charles Diodati, 2 September [November?] 1637, 259, 263; to Charles Diodati, 23 September [November?] 1637, 255–58, 260, 263, 267, 270, 293, 310, 332, 339, 407; to Alexander Gil the younger, 2 July 1628, 64, 94, 97, 112, 314, 407; to Alexander Gil the younger, 20 May ‘1628’ [1630], 64, 125, 128; to Alexander Gil the younger, 4 December 1634, 64; to Thomas Young, 26 March 1627, 35, 40

474 Milton, John, education of: and the Bachelor of Arts degree, 1, 90, 97, 131, 219; at Cambridge University, 1, 7, 10, 18, 31, 62– 63, 221, 399, 405; at Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1–2, 29, 69, 75, 81–107, 108, 159, 189–211, 219, 250, 293–94, 297–98, 300, 331, 395, 415; as ‘father’ in Christ’s College ‘salting’, 92–95, 143–44, 157; and the Master of Arts degree, 75, 89, 94, 131– 32, 139–40, 159, 164, 197, 212; multilingualism of, 59; rustication of, alleged, 81–83, 89, 431n1; St Paul’s School, pupil at, 26, 31, 35, 45–6, 49, 52, 56, 59–60; tutors of, private, 31, 35–44, 45, 60; tutors of, at university, 81–82, 189–90, 265–66; university exercises of, 89–107, 142, 171, 297, 300, 382, 406; and whipping as a student, alleged, 81–85, 189 Milton, John, residences of: Aldersgate Street, London, 367–68, 408, 412; Bread Street, London, 24–29, 31, 59, 132, 197; Hammersmith, 132, 197–201, 213, 221, 259, 263, 266; Horton, 197, 213, 259–60, 263, 265, 286, 293, 325–26, 357; St Bride’s Churchyard, London, 367 Milton, John, travels of: European tour of, 16, 24, 30, 31, 78, 216, 258–59, 272–73, 286, 333; book–buying of, 357; in Florence, 338; in France, 335; and Galileo, meeting with, 338–40; in Geneva, 335, 347–48, 357; and Italian literary academies, 337– 38, 341–46, 396, 411; Milton’s account of, 334–36; in Paris, 73, 338, 340; and religious censorship, effects of, 130, 283, 327, 338–39, 344, 383–84; and return from, 276, 366–67, 454n2; in Rome, 334–35; and sexual temptation, 334–35; and travel, 17th–century conventions of, 332– 33; in the Vatican library, 342 Milton, John, writings of: Manuscripts: De Doctrina Christiana, 30, 88, 195, 210, 267–68, 291, 318; Greek lexi-

i n de x con (lost), 145, 438n26; ‘Index Theologicus’ (lost), 110–11, 272, 280, 322, 360, 375–76 commonplace book (British Library Add MS 36354), 213, 263, 268, 270–83; and British history, 276, 371; and censorship, 279– 83, 337; and ecclesiastical and political history, 260, 270–72, 339, 358–60, 376; and European history , 357–59, 393; indexes of, 272–73, 275; ‘Index Ethicus’ of, 278, 280; ‘Index Politicus’ of, 273, 276, 359, 416; languages used in, 273; and poetry, 274, 276; and ‘profane writers’, 320; and the prohibition of books, 281–83, 322, 450n32; use of in Milton’s polemical prose, 276– 78, 357–61, 416 letter ‘to a friend’ (1633?), 213–19, 257, 300, 444n4; different drafts of, 214–15, 444n5; and Greek literature, 216–17; and love of learning, 217–18; and vocation, 215–19 Trinity Manuscript, 16, 155, 164–65, 215, 324, 408, 435n8; ideas for dramas in, 361–66, 397, 405; and ‘Lycidas’, 293–94, 312, 361; and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 228, 238, 246; and Paradise Lost, 361–62; significance of, 221 Poetry: ‘act verses’ of, 94–95, 135–36, 174, 201, 433n32; Ad Joannem Rousiam Oxoniensis Academiae Bibliothecarium, 287–88; Ad Leonorarum Romae canentem (first epigram), 344; Ad Leonorarum Romae canentem (second epigram), 345; Ad Salsillum poetum Romanum, 343– 44; Apologus De Rustico et Hero, 55–56, 428n35; Arcades, 34–35,

i n de x 153, 221–24, 263, 305; ‘At a Solemn Musick’, 34, 140–41, 154–56, 224, 250, 330, 439n39; ‘At a Vacation Exercise in College’, 143–44, 156– 58, 218, 249, 297, 432n30; Canzone, 59, 330; Carmen Elegiaca, 47, 426–27n10; Comus: see A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle; De Idea Platonica, 94; devotional poems of, 172–84, 201–11, 266, 386; Elegia prima (‘To Charles Diodati’), 62–63, 81, 161, 348, 431n1; Elegia secunda (‘On the Death of the University of Cambridge Beadle’), 121; Elegia tertia (‘On the Death of the Bishop of Winchester’), 116, 118–20, 144–46, 157, 160, 196, 201, 346, 352–53, 385; Elegia quarta (‘To Thomas Young’), 35, 39, 190, 372; Elegia quinta (‘On the arrival of spring’), 161–62; Elegia septima, 161–62; ‘An Epitaph on the admirable Dramatick Poet, W. Shakespeare’: see ‘On Shakespeare. 1630’; ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’, 134–35, 141, 149, 153, 305; ‘The Fifth Ode of Horace, Lib. 1’, 55–56, 428n35; ‘Fix here, ye overdated spheres’, 333–34, 399; funeral elegies in Latin of, 121, 144–46; Haec ego mente olim laevâ, 402–3; Ignavus Satrapam, 47, 426–27n10; In Obitum Procancellarii Medici, 120–21; In Obitum Praesulis Eliensis, 121, 144, 149, 153, 201; In Inventorum Bombardae, 108–109; In Proditionem Bombardicum, 108–109, 144; Italian poems of, 59–60, 63; Mansus, 283, 344–46, 361, 364, 396–97; ‘Nativity Ode’: see ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’; Naturam

475 non pati senium, 94; ‘On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough’, 139–40, 173; ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience Under the Long Parliament’, 324, 415–16; ‘On Shakespeare. 1630’, 35, 135–38, 156, 264, 295, 349, 438n16; ‘On Time’, 113, 135, 140–41, 165; ‘On the University Carrier’, 132–34; ‘On the University Carrier: Another on the Same’, 132–34, 349; Paradise Regained, 5, 115; ‘The Passion’, 175–7, 201–11, 235, 251, 266, 315; Philosophus ad regem, 55; Poems (1671), 3, 5; Poems (1673), 55–56, 139, 143, 158, 202, 294, 312, 438n16; Psalm 114, translation of, 34, 64, 74, 145, 226, 260; Psalm 136, translation of, 34, 74; Samson Agonistes, 5–6, 113–14, 368–69; ‘Song: On May Morning’, 170; sonnets of, 36, 59, 96, 107, 324, 409; Sonnet I (‘O Nightingale’), 141, 218; Sonnet III (‘Qual in colle aspero’), 62; Sonnet IV (‘Diodati, e te’l dirò con maraviglia’), 61–62; Sonnet VII (‘How soon hath time’), 214, 219, 308; Sonnet VIII (‘Captain or Colonel’), 407–8; Sonnet XI (‘A book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon’), 107; Sonnet XIII (‘To Mr H. Lawes’), 222, 445n17; ‘Upon a Clocke Case, or Dyall’ (scribal variant of ‘On Time’), 113, 135, 141, 165, 435n8, 437n11; ‘Upon the Circumcision’, 140, 175–7, 201–204, 206, 251, 266 Ad Patrem, 31–35, 67, 99, 346, 418; date of, 31, 424n23; and languages, 32, 60; and music of the spheres, 157, 162–63, 224, 248; Orpheus in, 34, 247–48, 299

476 Milton, John, writings of: Poetry (cont.) Elegia sexta (‘To Charles Diodati staying in the country’) 62–63, 179, 251; the chaste life in, 162–63, 248; date of, 161; and the poet, types of, 161–63, 248, 301, 350, 352, 398 Epitaphium Damonis, 62, 296, 348– 54; and ambition to write epic, 283, 350, 361, 396–97; and British history, 347, 350–51; and the daemonic, 351–52; and erotic desire, 351–53; and Latin, 350–51; in print, 349; and virginity, 353–54, 399 ‘Il Penseroso’, 13, 31, 156, 164–69, 235, 251, 301–302; church architecture in, 199–200; and daemons, 153, 168, 179–80, 184, 224; and erotic desire, rejection of, 170–71, 246; metre of, 166–7, 440n12; and Milton’s self–representation in, 293, 424n23; and Platonism, 147–48, 167; and university manuscript culture, 165–67 In Quintum Novembris, 108–15, 121, 266, 280, 318, 376; on James I, 109–10; and the neo–Latin ‘brief epic’, 115–16; Satan in, 111, 113 ‘L’Allegro’, 13, 164–72, 235; and Charles Diodati, 164–65, 172; and Comus, 232; and erotic desire, lack of, 169–71, 301–2; metre of, 440n12; and university manuscript culture, 168–69; ‘Lycidas’, 7, 13, 283, 293–330, 348–49; and allusion, 300–301, 329–30, 351; Amaryllis and Neaera in, 300–302, 324–25; apocalyptic imagery in, 305, 317–18, 329, 331; ‘blind mouths’ of, 316; Cambridge context of, 295–97, 307–

i n de x 308, 314–15, 318, 331; and censorship, 324–25, 337, 400; and the clergy, 292, 311–14, 322, 331, 373, 380; conclusion of, 329–31; and the daemonic, 328–29; and Dante, 298, 312–13; digressions in, 305–306, 308, 311–12, 316–18; draft of, 293–94; erotic desire in, 160, 181, 299–310; and the Furies, 304– 305; headnote to, 16, 294, 312, 331, 359; and Laudianism, 314–19; and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, 303–308, 331; ‘Old Dametas’ in, 298; origins of, 293–94; Orpheus in, 299, 327–28; and the poet, types of, 301–303, 309–310; and Puritanism, 318; and Roman Catholicism, 314; and scholarship, 306–10; and the sonnet, 142; St Peter in, 269, 297, 305, 311–14, 317–18, 327, 331, 400; and Edmund Spenser, 302, 311, 313, 331; ‘two–handed engine’ in, 317–18; and virginity, 328–29, 399 A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 11, 13, 224–55, 263, 292, 328, 335– 36, 390; ambition of, 235, 266; Bridgewater manuscript of, 238, 246–47, 446n2; the Brothers in, 242–46, 249, 251, 257, 278–79; and Castlehaven scandal, 227, 445n21; Comus in, 172, 228–29, 232, 236, 237, 243–46, 278, 299, 304, 446n5; and court culture, 224–35; the Daemon (Attendant Spirit) in, 153, 167, 224, 237–38, 240–43, 247–49, 251–52, 278–79, 403–4; erotic desire in, 160, 181, 244–45, 248, 304; and grace, 250–51, 266, 335, 391–92; and Homeric myth, 228–34, 445n32; the Lady in, 227–28, 232–34, 236, 237, 242–47, 278, 299, 304, 334–36; and Laudi-

i n de x anism, 237–38, 249; and Henry Lawes, 34–35, 222, 224, 228, 238, 249, 253–54; and the masque form, 221, 225–34; occasion of, 225; Platonic and Neoplatonic theology in, 241–43, 247, 249–53, 266, 335, 403–04; and Plutarch, 239–43; printed text of (1637), 220, 238, 247–49, 253–55, 264, 286, 288, 295, 328, 353, 403–4, 446n8; and Thomas Randolph, 220, 231– 32; and Roman Catholicism, 236; Sabrina in, 228, 237, 242–44, 251; and Edmund Spenser, 236–37, 446n38; Trinity manuscript of, 221, 228, 238, 246, 446n2; and chastity and virginity, 242–49, 328, 399 ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, 13, 173–84, 209–10, 224, 301; and classical models, 182–83; composition of, 63, 162, 172, 202; and daemons, 152; imagery of, 386–87; invocation in, 398; manuscript transcription of, 176; and the millennium, 177–78, 196; pagan gods in, 156, 176–84, 252; and the poetry of contemporaries, 173–79, 203 Paradise Lost: 15, 16, 18, 44, 156; Adam and Eve, relationship of, 36, 111, 171, 245; angels in, 252–53, 386; and the Bible, 183; and British history, 362; and Calvinism, 442n19; Chaos in, 391; composition of, 362, 417–18; creation in, 391; first edition of (1667), 3; ‘fit audience’ of, 395–96; and free will, 196, 253, 387; Death in, 170; early plans for, 361–62, 417–18; Eve in, 304; God in, 253; heaven in, 153; invocations in, 418–19; Limbo of Fools in, 240, 372; ‘mid-

477 dle spirits’ in, 240; Milton’s self– representation in, 142–43, 418–19; Nimrod in, 182; and the ‘Note on the Verse’ (1668), 56–57; and Edward Phillips, 362, 368; Raphael in, 252–53; religious satire in, 371– 72; Satan in, 111, 115–16, 148, 170, 245, 253, 362; Tower of Babel in, 182 Poems of Mr John Milton, Both English and Latin (1645), 1, 7, 34, 64, 132, 165, 170, 222, 264, 343, 408; arrangement of, 160, 171, 202, 220m 348; headnotes in, 109, 202, 221, 294, 312, 345–46; Latin poetry in, 27, 35, 121, 160–61, 296, 343, 348, 402; portrait in, 219, 223; reception of, 15–16; revision of poems in, 155, 438n16 Prose: Accedence Commenc’t Grammar, 46; Animadversions, 311, 382–84, 412; Ars Logicae, 88; Colasterion, 382; Defensio Secunda . . . pro Populo Anglicano (Second Defence of the English People), 31, 66–67, 212, 258, 333–34, 338–39, 341, 366, 407, 417; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 7, 73–74, 83, 196, 374, 377, 413–15; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1st edn., 411–13; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 2nd edn., 211, 282, 413–14; Eikonoklastes, 3, 137, 227, 359, 366, 382; History of Britain, 5–6, 362–63, 371, 417; The Judgement of Martin Bucer, 415; Letters of State, 368; Observations upon the Articles of Peace, Made and Concluded with the Irish Rebels, 382; Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 379; ‘Postscript’ to An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 370–74,

478 Milton, John, writings of: Prose: Accedence Commenc’t Grammar (cont.) 377–78, 457n22; Prolusions, 89– 92, 171, 297, 300, 406, 432nn21, 27, and 30; Prolusion I (‘Whether day or night is the more excellent’), 92, 97, 101, 103, 248; Prolusion II (‘On the music of the spheres’), 143, 153, 155, 157; Prolusion III (‘Against scholastic philosophy’), 98; Prolusion IV (‘In the destruction of any substance there can be no resolution into first matter’), 90, 99; Prolusion V (‘Partial forms are not in an animal besides its whole form’), 90, 99; Prolusion VI (‘That sportive exercises are occasionally not adverse to philosophic studies’), 90–91, 99, 126, 156–58, 432n24, 451n6; Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (First Defence of the English People), 3, 368, 417; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 3, 137, 358, 366, 374, 416–17; Tetrachordon, 211; ‘theme’ on early rising, 47 An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 49, 75, 400–7; anti-clericalism in, 404–5; on Dante, 402–3; and love poetry, 402–03; and marriage, 404; on Milton’s character, 66–67, 196, 401–3; on Petrarch, 402–3; and Platonic philosophy, 403; and the poetic career, 402– 3; and self-esteem, 391; and sexual morality, 403–4; and the universities, 405–7 Areopagitica, 13, 84, 170, 181, 291, 387–88, 399; anti–clericalism in, 269, 344; anti-Presbyterianism in, 292, 384, 389, 416; Euripides in,

i n de x 258, 366; and free will, 196, 278, 292, 380, 387, 389–90; Galileo in, 338–39; and licensing of books, 383–84; and moral philosophy, 278; and natural law, 389; as oration, 374; and toleration, 392; and truth, 388–89 Of Education, 30, 38, 45, 181, 274, 342–43; curriculum in, 76–77, 240, 248, 369; and grammar learning, 49–50; and Samuel Hartlib, 119, 269, 368; and modern languages, 60–61; and the nation, 369; as oration, 374; and scholasticism, 86–88, 99, 406–7; and the universities, 101 Of Reformation, 128; on antiquarians, 364, 378; on clerical power, 282, 326, 372–73, 380; on Constantine, 377–78, 383; imagery of, 374–76; Italian literature in, 280, 312, 344, 377–79, 383; and monarchy, 380–81; and moral philosophy, 381; as oration, 373; and textual corruption, 377; two books of, 373 Prolusion VII (‘Learning makes men happier than does ignorance’), 103, 106–107, 184, 218, 314, 394; date of, 433n40; and the magnus animus, 150–52; Milton berates his peers in, 75–76, 98–100; and Neoplatonism, 147–50 The Reason of Church–government, 213, 218, 321, 384–400, 416; and autobiography, 394–99; and Charles I, 400; and conformity in religion, 385–86, 393–94; and drama, 397; and episcopacy, 360; and free will, 387; imagery of, 390–91, 416; and the Independents, 390–91, 416; and the Lau-

i n de x dian church, 394–95, 397–400; and the poetic career, 300, 396– 400; and Presbyterianism, 379, 385; and prose writing, 395–96; and the Scots, 390; and sectarian identities, 388, 392; and self–esteem, 391; and sexual morality, 397–98; and the universities, 406; and virtue, 391–92 Milton, John, father, 23–27, 31–35, 195, 212, 418; and Blackfriars theatre, 35, 136; as citizen, 25–26; as composer and musician, 33–34, 222; in Hammersmith, 132, 197– 201; and Laudian visitation of Horton parish church, 325–26; and moneylending, 24, 32; religious identity of, 44, 188–90, 197–98; as scrivener, 23–27, 32, 263, 448n2 Milton, Mary, first wife, 83, 404, 411–12 Milton, Richard, grandfather, 23 Milton, Sarah, mother, 24; death of, 263; tombstone of, 324–25 Minshull, Elizabeth. See Milton, Elizabeth, third wife miscellanies, poetic, 127, 133–36, 165–68, 176, 250, 295 modern languages, teaching of, 59–61, 369 Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 327, 350–51, 362 Montagu, Walter, 226, 231 More, Henry, 152–53, 201, 250, 257, 331, 411, 447n15; elegy for Edward King, 295–96, 300 More, Thomas, 256 mortalism, 111 Mosaic Law, 203 Moses, 152, 337 music of the spheres, 153–55, 159, 177, 224, 248–49, 344, 385 mysticism, 198–200, 266 Naples, 334, 345 natural law, 389, 459n13 Naudé, Gabriel, 74

479 Neo-Latin, 54–55; verse, 111, 121, 126, 206–8; pastoral, 300, 350. See also Latin Neoplatonism, 146–53, 193, 251–52, 344; in the Caroline court, 231–32, 238, 250; Florentine, 50, 146, 150, 152, 200–201, 231, 247–48, 250, 267, 380, 410. See also Cambridge Neoplatonists; Ficino, Marsilio; Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni [Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni]; Platonism Nevile, Thomas, 173 Newcomen, Matthew, 370. See also ‘Smectymnuus’ Nimrod, 5 Norman conquest, 362 Norton, Thomas, 54 Nottingham, 408 Nowell, Alexander, 46; Nowell’s Catechism, 54 Odysseus (Ulysses), 76, 156, 228–29, 248, 336, 339, 362. See also Circe; Homer oration, classical, 374, 385 oratory, 89–90, 150; and captatio benevolentiae, 92; judicial, 382. See also Cicero; Quintilian Origen of Alexandria, 376, 397 Orpheus, 34, 152, 247–48, 299; Orphic Hymns, 248, 447n10; Orphic poet, 252, 266, 379 Ovid, 35, 40–43, 46, 59, 62, 248, 343, 352–53; Amores, 33, 145, 161, 170, 302, 352, 398, 439n28; Epistulae ex Ponto, 37; Heroides, 303–4; Metamorphoses, 37, 162, 299; Ovidian elegy, 120–22, 145–46, 159–60; Ovidian literary career, 302–3, 398–99; Tristia, 33, 37, 62–63, 425n34 Oxford, University of, 2–6, 50, 59, 63, 65, 288; Arminianism in, 193; Bodleian Library, 2–3, 279, 287–88, 395; Christ Church, 134, 165; Corpus Christi College, 152, 193; Jesuits in, 313; Judgement and Decree suppressing books by Milton (1683), 2–3; Lincoln College, 3, 199;

480 Oxford, University of (cont.) Magdalen College, 60; modern languages at, 60; New College, 332, 342; Oxford University Press, 209, 384; Pembroke College, 84; poetry at, 88, 121, 133–34, 165; ‘salting’ at, 90–91, 432n24; Trinity College, 125, 289 Palazzo Barberini, Rome, 342 Palmer, Herbert, 414 paraphrase, educational practice of, 47–48, 55 Paris, 73, 231, 288, 338 Parker, Matthew, De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae, 347 Parker, William Riley, 421–22n13, 444n4 Parkinson, James, 3 Parliament, 10, 108–9, 118, 120, 126, 381, 389 Parliament, Long, 128, 178, 187, 207, 211, 291– 92, 313, 367, 369–70, 390, 393; committee for printing, 379; and licensing of books, 84, 291, 323–24, 384, 412–14 Parliament, Short, 367 Paman, Clement, 295, 300, 313 Parnassus, Mount, 37, 297 Parnassus plays, 297–98, 303, 307–8 pastoral: academic, 297–98, 307–8; drama, 220–21, 226, 231, 234; poetry, 300–302, 307–10, 348 Patristics, 273–74, 277–78, 287; authority of, 274, 376–77, 393 patronage. See Milton, John, career of Paul IV, Pope, 393 Paulet, Jane, 134 Pawson, John, 148 Peacham, Henry, The Compleat Gentleman, 96 Pedantius, university play, 83 Pelagianism, 193; and Arminianism, 251, 393 Perotti, Niccolo, 48 persecution, state, 129–30, 281–83, 322–27, 338, 400

i n de x Petrarch, Francesco, 13, 33, 51, 70–71, 337, 344, 379, 383; biography of, 284; Canzoniere, 140, 280; and censorship, 279–80; and the ‘dark age’, 104; and Italian language, 58, 61; Milton on, 280, 284, 343, 402–3; Petrarchan sonnet, 61–62, 142, 217; political sonnets, 279–80, 377–78, 409; as proto-Protestant, 280–81; Triumph of Love, 343 Philipot, Thomas, 176 Phillips, Edward, nephew, 24, 33, 145, 411; amanuensis to Milton, 368; and Paradise Lost, 362; as pupil of Milton, 45, 76, 83, 276, 368–69; Tractatulus de Carmine Dramatico Poetarum Veterum, 368 Phillips, John, nephew, 45; Latin writings of, 368; as pupil of Milton, 76, 83, 276, 368–69 philology, 48, 65, 97, 145, 407 philosophy, 88, 97, 285, 369, 403, 406–7; moral, 85–86, 142, 240, 272, 403; natural, 86, 132, 272 Pickering, William, 125 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 50, 146, 200, 247, 250–51 Piers, William, 325 Pilgrimage to Parnassus. See Parnassus plays Pindar, 211; Pindaric poetry, 121 plague: closure of University of Cambridge for, 109, 132 Plato, 36, 148, 152, 181, 248, 251, 267, 304, 403; Euthyphro, 391; on kairos, 142; Republic, 224, 391, 407; Symposium, 256–57, 260, 447–48n26 Platonism and Platonic philosophy, 14–15, 148, 153, 224, 256–58, 403–4, 411, 447n15; in Caroline court, 230–31; and homoeroticism, 447–48n26; and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 241–44; and sophrosyne, 245, 446n7. See also Neoplatonism Plotinus, 251 Plutarch, 152, 408; on daemons, 181–83,

i n de x 240–44; Lives, 116; Moralia, 153, 181–82, 229, 238–41, 251 Poland, 129, 291 Poliziano, Angelo, 74 Pollux, Julius, 144 Polybius, 381 Poole, William, 273, 430n25, 436n33, 437n11, 449n13 Pory, Robert, 219 Potenger, John, 88 Powell, Mary. See Milton, Mary, first wife Powell, Richard, 404 Prague, 119 predestination, 27–8, 117–18, 192, 195, 250–51, 268, 278, 289–90; and Root and Branch petition, 379–80; royal proclamation prohibiting discussion of, 118, 313. See also Calvinism and Calvinists; free will Presbyterianism and Presbyterians, 28, 40, 43–44, 196, 319–24, 370, 379–81, 389–94, 399, 401, 459n22; and antiPresbyterianism, 127, 292; definition of, 321–22; and education, 88; and the Independents, 390, 412–14, 461n5; and Milton’s divorce writings, 323–24, 413–16; and the Scots, 367. See also Puritanism; ‘Smectymnuus’ Prideaux, John, 313 prophecy and the prophetic poet, 16, 121, 161–63, 168, 218, 359, 398–99, 412 Protectorate, Cromwellian, 148, 417 Prynne, William, 129, 193–94, 235, 327, 365; and the Book of Sports, 318–22; Canterburies Doome, 323–24; HistrioMastix, 124–25, 226, 405; on Milton’s divorce writings, 324, 414; punishments of, by the state, 124, 130, 226, 321, 324–25, 400 Ptolemaic universe, 156 Purchas, Samuel, Purchas his Pilgrimes, 276 Purgatory, 110–12, 240 Puritanism and Puritans, 9–10, 12, 15, 27–28,

481 116, 156, 194, 199, 291, 313, 418; and anti– Puritanism, 119, 296; and antitheatricality, 226–27, 235, 238, 365; and the Book of Sports, 318–20; ‘conformable’, 28, 39–40, 42, 118–19, 122, 190, 200, 265, 369–70; and the Marprelate tracts, 382–83; and the Parliamentary-Puritan cause, 187, 207–8; separatist, 28, 198. See also Calvinism and Calvinists; Presbyterianism and Presbyterians Pythagoras, 154–55, 159, 181 Quintilian, 51, 69–70, 86, 89–90, 402–3 Quint, David, 435n14 Rabelais, François, 77, 229 Racovian Catechism, 291 radicalism, religious, 9, 198–201, 207–11, 392–93, 443nn27 and 28 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 169, 276 Ramus, Petrus (Pierre de la Ramée), and Ramism, 86–88, 195, 309, 432n19. See also logic Randolph, Thomas, 133, 138, 230, 246, 287– 88, 309, 446n5; academic and literary career at Cambridge of, 95, 108, 144, 168, 405; ‘An Eglogue occasion’d by two Doctors disputing upon predestination’, 313– 14; as manuscript poet, 160, 165, 219–20; and Milton, compared with, 219–21, 265, 303, 313, 399, 445n11; plays and entertainments of, 168, 219, 231–33, 301 Ranters, the, 207 Ravenscroft, Thomas 33 Reformation, the, 104, 276, 364–65, 372, 434n53 Renaissance, Italian, 17, 147–48 ‘republic of letters’, 341–42, 348 republicanism, 8, 12, 358–60, 410, 417, 456n2 Restoration, the, 8, 15, 90, 127, 201, 418; and the Church of England, 292 Returne from Parnassus. See Parnassus plays

482 revisionist history, 11 Rhé, Isle of, 126, 432n30 rhetoric, 48–9, 69–72, 76, 369; in Milton’s prose, 373, 382; university teaching of, 85–86 rhyme, 55–57, 166, 173, 176, 324, 409 Rich, Henry, Earl of Holland, 94 Ricks, Christopher, 331 Ridding, Richard, 121 Ridley, Nicholas, 371, 379 Ripon, Treaty of, 367 Rivers, George, 297 Rivers, Nizell, 297 Rome and Romans, ancient, 27, 32, 45, 47, 55, 57, 62–63, 101–2, 333 Rome, 119–20, 123, 268, 281, 321, 334–36, 338; English College in, 335. See also Milton, John, travels of Romanticism, 14, 333 Root and Branch petition, 367, 379–80 Royal Library, 274, 342 Royal Society, 5 Rouse, John, 287–88, 395 Rovai, Francesco, 341 Rubens, Peter Paul, 110 Rudierde, Edmund, The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath, 303 Ruskin, John, 316 Russell, Lord William, 2 Rye House Plot, 2 sabbath, the, and sabbatarianism, 318–20 St Andrews, University of, 35, 39, 88 St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 88 St Paul’s Cathedral, 24, 34, 54 St Paul’s School, 26, 45–46, 63, 138, 257, 269; curriculum of, 37–8, 59, 85–86; and humanism, 49–50, 63, 348; ex-pupils of, 65, 85; statutes of, 50–51, 103–4, 406; and whipping, 82–85. See also Colet, John; Milton, John, education of Sallust, 51, 358–59 Salmasius, Claudius, 431n4

i n de x Saltmarsh, John, 205; Cambridge poetry of, 207–11 Salzilli, Giovanni, 343–44 Samson, 400 Sancroft, William, 127–28, 176 Santagata, Marco, 18 Sappho 145; Sapphic poetry, 121 Sarpi, Paolo, 276, 324, 378–79, 459n23; History of the Council of Trent, 282–83, 288, 348, 357; History of the Inquisition, 268, 283, 338, 348; in Milton’s commonplace book, 282–83, 348, 393 satire: prose, 382–83; verse, 123–29, 321, 405. See also libel; Villiers, George, 1st Duke of Buckingham Savile, Sir Henry, 274, 376–77 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 72, 218, 273 scholasticism, 86–88, 98–99, 406–7, 433n42 Scipioni, Alberto, 338 Scotland and the Scots, 40, 127, 208, 270, 292, 365; and Charles I, 128, 366–67, 416; Covenanters, 367; and elective monarchy, 359 ‘Scotch stories’ in Milton’s ideas for dramas, 362–64, 366; Scottish Presbyterians, 44, 333, 367; union of crowns under James I, 110 Scotus, Duns, 50, 105, 236 Scriveners, Company of, 24, 26 Scudamore, Thomas, 338, 340 Selden, John, 67–69, 413, 441n32; De diis Syris, 181; De Jure Naturali et Gentium, 276, 389, 414; Uxor Ebraica, 276, 413 Selvaggi [Selvaggio, Matteo], 343, 345. See also Codner, David Seneca, 343 Shakespeare, William, 26, 46, 135–39, 171, 291, 364–66, 438n14; As You Like It, 235; First Folio, Milton’s copy of, 16–17, 60, 137, 140, 259; Henry IV, part 2, 100; Love’s Labour’s Lost, 100; Macbeth, 366; The Merchant of Venice, 438n19; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 102, 139, 235; The Passionate Pilgrim (with other hands), 139;

i n de x Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare, 349, 438n16; Richard II, 100; Romeo and Juliet, 16–17; Second Folio, 35, 136, 264; Second Folio, Charles I’s copy of, 235, 446n37; Sonnets, 398–99, 409; The Tempest, 225, 235; Twelfth Night, 47; Venus and Adonis, 139 Sheffield, Edmund, first Earl of Mulgrave, 198–200, 266, 443n27 Sheffield, Edmund, third Earl of Mulgrave, 198 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14 Shirley, James, 223, 226 Sibyl, the Cumaean, 183–84 Sicily, 366 Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 268, 276, 339 Sidney, Robert, 339 Skinner, Cyriack, 29 Sleidan (Sleidanus), Joannes, 276, 357 ‘Smectymnuus’, 370, 379, 382–84, 390, 401 Smith, Sir Thomas, 104 Soame, Henry, 295 Socinianism, 290–91 Socrates, 240, 256, 403; Socratic dialogues, 148 Socrates Scholasticus, 273, 320 Solemn League and Covenant, 208 Sophocles, 6, 365, 397 Spain, 23, 394; Spanish language, 31, 60 Speed, John, 276, 361, 371 Spenser, Edmund, 58, 136–38, 170, 221, 313, 446n38; and allegory, 378; The Faerie Queene, 58, 173, 236–37, 302, 351; ‘Hymn of Heavenly Beauty’, 137–38, 173; Milton’s views of, 236; The Shepheardes Calender, 183, 311, 331, 351, 383; The Teares of the Muses, 302; A View of the State of Ireland, 276; and the Virgilian career, 302, 331, 351 Spurstowe, William, 370. See also ‘Smectymnuus’ Star Chamber, Court of, 125, 321–22, 369– 70; decree ‘concerning Printing’ (1637), 322–23, 327, 370

483 Stationers’ Company of London, 323, 414 Stephanus, Robert, 438n26 Sterry, Peter, 250 Stock, Richard, 27–29, 35, 42, 116, 122, 190, 200, 265 Stow, John, 276, 361, 371 Strabo, 434n47 Strada, Famianus, 209 Strier, Richard, 460n38 Strode, William, 165, 168 Stuart, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, 189 Stuteville, Sir Martin, 126 Suckling, Sir John, 223–24 Suetonius, 50 Sulpicius, Severus, 273, 360 Sweden, 340 Syria, 181 Syriac language, 76, 369 Tallis, Thomas, 33 Tasso, Torquato, 61, 140, 174, 330, 343, 396; literary career of, 345–46 Taylor, Jeremy, 354 Terence, 51, 53–54 Tertullian, 273, 277–78, 365, 376, 405 theatre and theatricality, 137, 227–28, 234–35, 278, 365–66, 405. See also Charles I Theocritus, 301 Theoderet of Cyrus, 320 Theodosius I, Emperor, 326 Theologia Germanica, 198–99 theology, teaching of, 97 Thirty Years War, 40–1, 117, 119, 128 Thomas, William, 61, 339 Thou, Jacques–August de (Thuanus), 276– 77, 357–59, 393, 459n23 Thucydides, 131 Tibullus, Albius, 342 Timarchus, 240 Toland, John, 268, 368 toleration, 12–13, 289–92, 388, 392, 410 Tomkins, John, 33–34 Tomkins, Thomas, 33–34

484 Tovey, Nathaniel, 81–82, 189, 195–96, 212, 266, 442n8 Townshend, Aurelian: Tempe Restored, 229– 37; and Henrietta Maria, 229–31, 236–38, 242 tragedy, 172, 234, 361–62; Greek, 337, 365, 369 translation, 57–58, 60; biblical, 121; double, educational practice of, 54–55, 61 Trent, Council of, 276, 281–83, 324, 393. See also Counter-Reformation; Sarpi, Paolo Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 393 Trinity, doctrine of the, 30–31, 54, 200, 237, 291, 411 Trinity College, Dublin, 120, 194 trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic), 77 Troy, 172, 350, 362–64 Trumbull, William, 60 ‘turning’ of verses, educational practice of, 55–56 Tyburn, Battle of, 367 tyranny, 2, 12–13, 182, 292, 338–39, 401, 410; and bishops, 213, 326, 394, 399–400, 407; and drama, 137, 366; and Italy, 283, 338–39; in Milton’s commonplace book, 270, 276, 358–61; and Presbyterianism, 14, 324, 416; and the Restoration, 418; and Roman Catholicism, 104–6, 283, 373, 406 Twisse, William, 151, 153, 187–88, 190–91, 251, 317, 439n38 universal learning, 67–73, 77–78, 153, 159, 345; and the ‘circle of studies’, 75–76, 270, 273; impossibility of, 77; and the ‘polyhistor’, 73–74. See also humanism and humanists Urban VIII, Pope, 342 Ussher, James, 376, 379, 385, 396 Valentinian, Emperor, 414–15 Valerius Flaccus, Gaius, 343

i n de x Varchi, Benedetto, I Sonetti, Milton’s copy of, 60, 259, 333 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 70–71 Vatican, 295; Vatican Library, 342 Venice and Venetian republic, 220, 268, 274, 282–83, 288, 337, 348 verse letters, 35–37, 62–63, 122 Vida, Marco, 210 Villiers, George, 1st Duke of Buckingham, 94, 120, 432n30; assassination of, 125; satires and libels on, 123–27, 139, 235, 321, 405; and sodomy, 123 Virgil, 17, 36, 50, 51, 53, 56–57, 109, 112, 128, 179, 312; Aeneid, 128, 161, 316; Eclogues, 63, 167; first Eclogue, 237, 301; second Eclogue, 264–65; fourth Eclogue, 182– 84, 281; sixth Eclogue, 310; tenth Eclogue, 301, 308, 310, 330, 350; as epic poet, 58, 72–73, 286, 373, 416–17; Georgics, 247; moral conduct of, 158–59, 303, 344–45; and the Virgilian career (cursus), 158, 161, 202, 264–65, 302, 330–31, 396, 402, 440n3. See also Donatus, Aelius virginity, 158, 162, 232, 236, 304, 334–35, 380, 397, 412; and chastity, 171, 245; and marriage, 354, 404, 412; and A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 242–50; and Revelation, 163, 328, 353–54, 404. See also chastity Vivian, Daniel, 332, 342 Vossius, Isaac, 341, 343 Wales, 225 Walker, Obadiah, 90, 121 Waller, Edmund, 223 Walton, Izaak, 292 Walwyn, William, 392 Warton, Thomas, 311 Warwick Castle, 207 Warwick School, 207 Wase, Christopher, 6

i n de x Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of Strafford, 128, 313, 367, 373–74 Westminster Assembly of Divines, 44, 85, 187, 211, 265, 324, 390; membership of, 412–13; and the Directory of Worship, 413 Westminster School, 53 Wheare, Digory, 358, 449n13 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 225 Whitney, Oxfordshire, 193 William of Malmesbury, 276 Williams, John, 199 Williams, Roger, 392 Windsor, 197, 290 Wither, George, 58, 138 Wolfe, D. M., 9 Wood, Anthony, 90–91, 288, 432n24 Woodford, Samuel, 65, 85 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 9 Wordsworth, William, 333 Worthington, John, 69, 192–93, 195 Wotton, Sir Henry, 68, 286–88, 291–92, 295, 337–38, 340; as ambassador to Venetian republic, 288, 337; and A Maske presented

485 at Ludlow Castle, 220–21, 337; and Paolo Sarpi, 338, 348 Wren, Matthew, 440–41n22 Xenophon, 131 York, 385 Yorkshire, 208 Young, Edward, 7 Young Patrick, 274, 342, 395, 424–25n28, 449n19 Young, Thomas, 35–45, 62, 90, 190, 265, 274, 327, 384, 411; and An Answer to a Booke Entituled, An Humble Remonstrance, 370– 73; as ‘conformable’ Puritan, 122, 200; Dies Dominica, 318–21, 370; ‘exile’ of, alleged, 40–1, 81, 426n41; and Latin poetry, 39–41, 59, 373, 413, 418; and Milton’s letter ‘to a friend’, 215, 218, 224, 257; and Presbyterianism, 39–42, 320–21, 369–70, 393; sermon before Parliament of, 414–15. See also Milton, John, correspondence of; ‘Smectymnuus’

A NO T E ON T H E T Y PE

This book has been composed in Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe.