Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal

Preface

PREFACE My first reading of Milton’s prose came as an undergraduate at the University of Washington in the fall of 1948, in the midst of one of the first postwar witchhunts in an American state university. The anxiety and disappointed idealism that followed World War II were developing into the Cold War and were soon to spawn the venomous McCarthy Era of irresponsible accusations and proscriptions. In the spring of that year, the Washington State Un-American Activities Committee—the “Canwell Committee” took its name from its chairman—had investigated “communist activity” on campus. My friends and I considered that committee more or less rabid, and Edwin O. Guthman of the Seattle Times proved us more or less right in the series of stories which won him the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1950. Among those investigated was my first Milton professor, Garland Ethel. Professor Ethel had become something of a campus hero that summer when he admitted to brief membership in the Communist Party but declined to “name names,” the tag line for what many of us construed as squealing on one’s fellows. At the hearings, which we attended whenever we could, Ethel made campus history when he was asked to give the names of colleagues who had attended “Communist cell” meetings with him; Dr. Ethel said he wanted to make a statement from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, one which proved to have no Polonian ambivalence in this context: “This above ix all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man”; and he refused to “name names” (Hamlet, 1–3.82–84). Chairman Canwell was outraged; he pounded his gavel in counterpoint to Ethel’s recitation of the Shakespeare text while loudly chanting into the microphone, “We’ll—Have—No—Shake— Speare—Quo—Ted—Here!” Dr. Ethel was cited for contempt. Unlike three of his colleagues Ethel was not fired.1 That Fall I took my first Milton course from him. The readings of Areopagitica and Samson Agonistes were especially memorable in that class. The One Just Man was ideal and real. However much that naïveté was to be diluted later, the experience of that summer and fall influenced the way I look at heroic gestures against the odds, moved me to read Milton with at least a political memory, and to take his confrontational prose seriously. Some years later I read all the prose when, again at the University of Washington, I did my dissertation, on Milton’s decorum, under Arnold Stein, a very different kind of reader of Milton, but one who particularly encouraged me after he read my chapter on three groups of the prose: the anti-prelatical tracts, the divorce tracts, and the three Latin defenses. In that reading and writing I found a great and somehow personal pleasure in the very range of styles, perhaps even in the impropriety, of the early work. A thesis, and later a book, became a study of how and why Milton violated the standards of a safe decorum which emphasized conformity rather than appropriateness. Toward the end of rewriting my dissertation as The Fierce Equation—but too late to make it a part of that book—I came on the work of Thomas Brightman and the tradition of zeal that he fostered, particularly in the 1630s and 1640s. The essay “Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal” was a first statement of my findings. I have been expanding on that essay for 30 years, quite happily, with the support of friends (slightly bemused), colleagues and institutions. John Milton was heir to a rhetorical tradition of zeal, of inspired truth-telling that could include displays of outrage and intolerance, unreasonable passion, and coarseness. But x Preface under that crudeness lay the heart of Puritan zeal and in a real sense the power of Puritanism, the energy of a focused belief system that liberated and empowered the individual. The Bible was the center of that system, but for Milton, and for many others like him, it was a Bible read with the individual assurance of the authority, God-given, to interpret. Mere fundamentalism is not the issue. Milton’s faith in Scripture liberated him to read it independently, and his faith liberated him to challenge, analogically, the conventional limits of systems, of the institutions of the church, of marriage...