Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (review)

236 Reviews some qualities have been reassessed as ones that can be values for living, whatever one's sex. M y o w n view, for what it is worth, is that friendly conviviality, intimacy, gentleness, nonviolence, cooperation and mutuality are self-evidently more sensible and morally justifiable bases of action than their opposites. For strategical and historical reasons these qualities have in the recent past been gendered female, while violence, competitiveness, and the will to power have been gendered as male. This m a y have been the case from time immemorial, but there is little reason or utility for the mythology to be perpetuated forever. The undercurrent of Goldberg's book is that the need, the political 'desire' for such stark binarisms along gender lines is n o w unnecessary and out of date. W e can drop the easy stereotypes and name-calling and accept that some values can be agreed upon as morally worthy and others as unworthy, whether one is male or female, homosexual or heterosexual, and that the whole area of women's writing in the Renaissance can n o w be incorporated into a more comprehensive and mutually tolerant re-reading of the field. R. S. White Department of English The University of Western Australia Hale, John K. Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism Style, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997; cloth; pp. xvi, 245; R.R.P. AUS$90.00. This is a brilliant book: short, pithy, erudite, and (in spite o complexity of the material) astonishingly accessible—even to those w h o (like most of us) lack the multilingual expertise of a Milton or a Hale. Hale has no truck with 'the Babel of autobiographical Reviews 237 or historical readings' that plagues contemporary criticism (p. 192): he concentrates firmly on the written word. H e rejects, too, the ludeous jargon' that has become more or less de rigeur in critical discussion—Genette's '"autodiegetic", and the like', de Jong's '"focalizer", "focalization", "focalizee" and so on' (p. 132). Hurray for a critic w h o has the courage (in these times) to take more notice of what authors write than of what they have for breakfast, w h o has the good manners to express his o w n views intelligibly, and who does so with elegance! The first half of the book offers critical appreciations of Milton's writings in and about the astonishingly wide range of languages of which he had mastery. The texts to which particular attention is given include (in Latin verse) the Elegiae, the Sylvae, the Epitaphium Damonis, and the poems to his father and to John Rouse; (in Greek) the joky epigram to the frontispiece of his Poems, 1645 beneath the engraving of the 'sour-faced, elderly man' which purported to be the poet 'at age 20', as well as the Greek poems in the collection; (in Italian) the several sonnets (especially number IV, to Diodati) and the Canzone; and (in Latin prose) the school exercise on getting up early, the Cambridge prolusion which leads to the English verses At a Vacation Exercise, the marginal annotations on Greek texts, letters to various friends, the argumentum to Epitaphium Damonis, the witty defence of publishing his friends' commendations in his bilingual Poems, 1645, and (in detail) the Prima Defensio of 1651. The emphasis is on Milton's experimentation, his playfulness, his scholarship, his interest in lexicography, his skill as a translator (into English as well as between other languages), his development as a stylist, and, finally, the contribution his multilingualism m a d e to this development. The matter is heavy, the treatment always deft and good-humoured: 'Reading a neo-Latin writer whose sole strength 238 Reviews is copia is like eating a meal of marshmallows' (p. 12); 'when Milton waxed polemical, Latin became for him, not a musical instrument' but a cosh' (p. 10); the Cambridge prolusion is an exercise in 'voluntary press-ups' (p. 84). These chapters combine 'precriticism', i.e. 'the recovery of relevant conditions of understanding' (p. 28), with acute practical criticism of Milton's writings in languages other than English. In the second half of the book Hale examines the...