Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Louis L. Martz, in Milton: Poet of Exile, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), has described Milton as a poet who disrupts the celebratory goals of Virgilian epic with patterns of change and instability that link him to the great Roman poet of exile, Ovid. Christopher D’Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 87–123, situates Milton in the experience of exile that conjoins seventeenthcentury English subjects with bitterly opposed convictions. For Milton and his contemporaries, exilic spirituality exists alongside “an ongoing interest in the public affairs of the homeland that had gone astray” (94). 2. John Milton, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 8:4. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Milton’s prose are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by volume and page with the abbreviation CPW. For a discussion of Milton’s letter to Heimbach, see David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, “Introduction: Milton’s Nationalism; Challenges and Questions,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 3–4. 3. All quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998) and are cited parenthetically by book and line numbers with the abbreviation PL. 4. See Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). 160 Notes to Pages 3–5 5. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 34. 7. I borrow the distinction between totalizing and exhaustive interpretations from Stanley Cavell’s influential reading of King Lear in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 83. 8. See, for example, J. Martin Evans’s statement, in Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 147, concerning Milton’s political commentary: “In and of itself, colonialism was neither good nor bad. Everything depended on the identity of the colonizer, the nature of the colonized, and the purpose of the colony. And so it is in Paradise Lost.” Such a reading would turn Milton into a precursor of J.A. Hobson, the classical theorist of empire who argued for a distinction between “colonialism,” which promotes a healthy internationalism, and cutthroat imperialism. Even Hobson admits, however, that the former is rare in history. See J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, 4th ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948). 9. Joanna Picciotto, in Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 462, demonstrates how “Milton puts himself and his reader to work to make uncertainty productive, and therefore redemptive.” For Picciotto (and pace Fish’s influential reading in Surprised by Sin), the strenuous intellectual labor of interpretation allows Milton’s fallen reader to approach perfected knowledge that reclaims something of paradise. 10. The force of this temptation is manifested in Michael Bryson’s argument, in The Tyranny of Heaven: Milton’s Rejection of God as King (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), that Milton’s theodicy is ironic, and that the poet deliberately creates a loathsome God in order to make a strong claim against monarchical tyranny. Such a reading does lead to moments of insight, but only by refusing the artful ambivalence of Milton’s writings. Bryson expands on the more restrained claims made by Stevie Davies in Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983). 11. For a study of Miltonic uncertainty, see Peter C. Herman, Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), in which Herman calls for a new Milton criticism that breaks with orthodoxies about Milton’s supposedly stable thought. As Marshall Grossman argues, however, in his review of Destabilizing Milton, Modern Philology 104 (2006): 263–68, Herman’s rhetoric of a paradigm shift within Milton criticism may amount to a misapplication of Kuhnian terms. If Milton criticism is something like a normative science, its norms already allow for analysis of Miltonic uncertainty. 12. Marshall Grossman, “The Genders of God and the Redemption of the Flesh in Paradise Lost,” in Milton and Gender, ed. Catherine Gimelli Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 95–114, provides a...