Milton: Lives and Deaths

The four hundredth anniversary, in December 2008, of Milton’s birth came and went with predictably modest public ceremony. There were a few special events, lectures, or speeches. There were broadsheet editorials, but there was no general enthusiasm. There was no John Milton postage stamp, no Milton £50 note. Milton, as Keats once pointed out, is not Shakespeare. A fact that Milton, to his credit, precociously acknowledged.

Milton is not companionable. He is good at scorn, disgust, edification, wonder, passionate rectitude, conjugal love, spiritual truth, and celestial vision, but he never exerts himself merely to amuse. Aside from a handful of stiff juvenile elegies for deceased Laudian bishops, he was never ingratiating. Can we imagine a film called Milton in Love? Are there any novels of which Milton is the worthy hero? Aside from David Masson’s fictional-historical mid-Victorian six-volume biography, I know of only two modern novels with Milton at their centre. Neither is particularly favourable. Robert Graves’s Wife to Mr Milton (1943) is told in the voice of Milton’s first wife, 17-year-old Mary Powell. It’s a relentlessly effective satire on masculine self-regard. Fifty years after Graves, Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1997) did it again, with a slightly lighter touch. Ackroyd’s Milton is a comic monster of Puritan rectitude, a man who thoroughly deserves his ingeniously imagined humiliation. Interestingly, both Graves and Ackroyd offer a Milton whose creativity has been compromised by blustering sexual incompetence. They imply that Milton pays a price for his quixotic idealism, an idealism rooted in his fascinated, confused contempt for the erotic.

Evidence of Milton’s stubborn powers of survival, here are two new biographies – full-dress, centenary biographies. They address different audiences and, instructively, they embody rival conceptions of the biographical enterprise. In Milton’s case, that enterprise has always been uniquely complicated. Could it be that we know too much about Milton? There is a prodigious documentary paper trail leading from his London birthplace at the sign of the Spreadeagle on Bread Street. Those prosperous, meticulous, bookkeeping citizens of seventeenth-century London secreted such a daunting abundance of individual life records that Milton became, perhaps to his cost, the first great English poet of whom we might write a comprehensive narrative biography. Thus the angelic poet hovers, with wings anxiously fluttering, above a midden of reekingly bourgeois archival matter: letters and diaries, family gossip, Bible marginalia, baptismal certificates, title deeds, mortgage papers, guild records, publisher’s contracts, staple bonds, legal petitions, and diplomatic papers. Add to the mixture Milton’s strenuous self-concern, his proud, embattled, idealised sense of himself. That political, public self was vulnerable. Such a man, ‘clad in complete steel’, to quote Comus, always offered an easy and alluring target for derision, and worse. This is a man whose political antagonists accused him, for example, of having financed his Italian journey by offering his services as a male prostitute. The defensive posture imposed by the wearing of complete steel distorts the biographical record at its very source. Milton’s biographers thus find themselves locked into an uncommonly ambivalent feat of identification. On top of that, they have to master an exceptionally abundant and miscellaneous archive.

Anna Beer’s sympathetically fluent contribution to national memory, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot, is unashamedly populist. In other words, this biography is not the work of a Milton specialist and it is not addressed primarily to Milton specialists. Beer writes a loose and agreeably colloquial prose, to address a readership that is both more diverse and less committed. Her protagonist is a Londoner, a bourgeois in the best progressive sense, a forward youth embedded in a dynamic urban community, an author formed by the emergent print culture but also...