Bees in My Bonnet: Milton's Epic Simile and Intertextuality

The obvious debts to Homer and Virgil in Mil ton’s Bee Simile were initially recorded in Patrick Hume’s “Notes on Paradise Lost” (1695), though the extended comparison was argued nearly a generation ago as referring us obliquely to Shakespeare and Spenser. In the following essay, I shall briefly review arguments made by Harold Bloom and taken up most conspicuously by John Hollander and John Guillory, for two reasons. First I would like first to demonstrate that, as the Bee simile metamorphoses over nearly thirty lines, it also alludes to Renaissance and classical precedents hitherto unsounded. Secondly, I would like to breathe new life into the question: what is the difference between a source and an intertext? I have reservations about the validity of the latter as a concept supplanting the former term for literary critics, though my qualms are voiced from the inside, for in my analysis of Milton’s passage I, too, hear echoes, but of Tasso. In conclusion, I argue that the strategies of the source-hunters and intertextualists on Milton are worth revisiting, not in order to reiterate that the difference hangs on a changed understanding of how language functions, but to suggest that our ability to recognize an intertext, as an extension of our ability to recognize a source, is a working out of an aesthetic response to literature.

Bloom dubbed the bravura gesture of Paradise Lost towards its literary past as transumptive, and, followed by Hollander and Guillory, he uses the rhetorical trope of transumption or metalepsis to discuss a Miltonic style. Although a study of trope as defined by the rhetorical treatises would not lead the aspiring orator to suspect it was more than a curiosity, the trope is far more important for literary critics. ¹ Because it involves a doubling of figures, or denotes a way of referring to something by the omission of an intermediate step, transumption has been linked with allusion in general, as opposed to a more direct kind of citation. Yet the intermediate, skipped-over step becomes a bone of contention in the attempt to identify the missing intertext: are the “Faerie Elves” of the Bee simile meant to put us in mind of The Faerie Queene or A Midsummer’s Night Dream?

All three critics tacitly agree that the epic simile is the crucial site wherein to spot the operation of the rhetorical trope, which they employ as a hallmark for discussing the larger implications of a transumptive style. Bloom’s Map of Misreading (1975) boldly attri butes to the Oedipal burden weighing on the Milton’s shoulders the impetus behind his casting off or transuming Spenser. Hollander’s Figure of Echo (1981) more prudently worries the differing varieties of literary echo in order to evoke the numerous resonances in Paradise Lost, not only of The Faerie Queene, but of Shakespearean drama as well. Guillory’s Poetic Author ity (1983) inverts Bloom’s formula in order to claim that Milton’s transumption of his forebear represents an effort to draw himself closer to, rather than to distance himself from, Spenser, but at the expense of denying his obligations to Shakespeare.

On the one hand, their collective insight gives us pause over the explicit reference to Odyssean wanderings in Paradise Lost’s voyage from Hell to Eden, for beneath the voice of Milton’s Satan we also hear the undertones of another Odysseus. In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare’s Ulysses is pleased to espouse a universal chain of command so long as his position relative to Agamemnon is superior to that of Achilles: “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre / Observe degree, priority, and place” (1.3.85–6). It suits Satan likewise, when addressing his inferiors, to remind them that “Orders and Degrees / Jar not with liberty” (5.792–3), though the point is promptly forgotten in the boast that he is “self-begot, self-raised” (5.860). Satan’s plaint, furthermore, that the mind “Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (1.255) uncannily recalls not only the introspection of Faustus and Hamlet, but...