"Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books": Essays on the 1667 First Edition

3. Simmons’s Shell Game: The Six Title Pages of Paradise Lost

3 Simmons’s Shell Game The Six Title Pages of Paradise Lost STEPHEN B. DOBRANSKI [C]an you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the knottiest of all. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick Readers who purchased Paradise Lost between 1667 and 1674 would have encountered one of six different title pages that the publisher Samuel Simmons had printed with the first edition of the poem (see figs. 1–6).1 These title pages contain varying degrees of detail about the work’s provenance: three of the pages announce “Printed by S. Simmons,” for example, while the other three note instead that the book was “Licensed and Entred according to Order”; five title pages include John Milton’s full name, while one refers more discreetly to “The Author J. M.” The differences among these title pages have prompted much speculation, especially over the past 150 years, as modern critics have devised sometimes subtle theories to account for Milton’s changing attribution. Did Simmons and / or Milton manipulate the title page’s design so as to cloak the poet’s identity? Or can other factors account for the epic’s inconsistent appearance? In this essay I wish to examine the origin and implication of Paradise Lost’s various title pages in the context of the seventeenth century book trade. Analyzing the poem’s first edition in relationship with other early modern texts printed in multiple issues helps to explain 57 Fig. 1. First edition, 1667 (with larger authorial attribution) Fig. 2. First edition, 1667 (with smaller authorial attribution) Fig. 3. First edition, 1668 (wihout Simmons’s name) Fig. 4. First edition, 1668 (with Simmons’s name) Fig. 5. First edition, 1669 Fig. 6. First edition, 1669 (with altered punctuation) 64 Stephen B. Dobranski why Milton’s epic required so many title pages and why the first edition ’s design underwent these particular revisions. The first step, however, is establishing how many title pages were actually printed for the epic’s first edition, a task not as straightforward as we might suppose. Critics have counted as many as nine and as few as four issues for the first edition of Paradise Lost. The term “edition,” we may recall, refers to all the copies of a book printed from one setting-up of type, while “issue” designates a special version of a book produced at one time, comprising mostly the original printed sheets but differing from the earlier form in some substantial way, often by the addition of new material. A “variant” or “state,” by comparison, broadly refers to an alteration in a printed text made during the original printing, before the text is offered publicly for sale.2 For Paradise Lost, the confusion over the number of the first edition ’s issues and title pages stems in part from disagreements about what constitutes a separate title page (and thus a likely reissue) and what instead ought to be deemed merely a variant. I arrive at six as the number of Paradise Lost’s title pages by, first, setting aside nineteenth century claims for two unique title pages whose existence has never been proven. Henry G. Bohn in 1864 first referred to an unsubstantiated eighth title page, dated 1668, with Milton’s name printed between two groups of asterisks, and, some 20 years later, David Masson claimed to have come across another unique title page in Scotland whose design and ownership he never divulged.3 Of the seven substantiated designs that have been found bound with Paradise Lost’s first edition, two are virtually identical—the single difference is a period after the word “BOOKS” in the phrase “A POEM IN TEN BOOKS” (see fig. 3)—so that both pages were evidently produced during the same printing, and the version with the additional period can be classified as a variant.4 The remaining six title pages, then, contain significant enough distinguishing marks as to be counted separately. But we should not conclude , as does Douglas Bush in A Milton Encyclopedia, that “Of this first edition there were six issues, dated 1667, 1668, and 1669.”5 A new title page does not necessarily designate a separate issue. More probably, as K. A. Coleridge and R. G. Moyles have shown, there...