“The Simple Urge to Correct”

Richard Bentley is best known to students of English literature as the misguided editor of Paradise Lost who thought that Milton’s text had been corrupted by a negligent amanuensis, a sloppy compositor, and a perfidious “editor” who actually interpolated verses of his own. Milton’s text was so badly treated that, in Bentley’s words “Paradise . . . may be said to be twice lost.” ¹ Recourse to the slender (he says nonexistent) manuscript evidence is of no avail against such machinations, and the “truest and correctest” text can be restored only through the brilliance of conjectural emendations. When these are confined to punctuation or diacritical marks to indicate pronunciation, Bentley silently emends the text. His many emendations that change a word or more are confined to the margins, but the offending words in the text are italicized, and whole phrases or passages are put in square brackets. Bentley is not quite as intrusive as his reputation suggests; he made his boldest strokes in the margins. But whether or not they intrude on the text, Bentley’s emendations, somewhat paradoxically, derive their authority not from the author himself but from the new editor, Bentley, who is as good as the previous editors were bad: he restores “the Poet’s own Words” by “Sagacity, and happy Conjecture” (sig.a2v) and silently styles himself the savior of paradise. For example, Bentley treats the low puns and the occasionally pedestrian lines in Paradise Lost as editorial interpolations that must be cast out. To Bentley’s all-seeing eye, it is obvious that Milton did not write the groan-inducing phrase “small infantry” to describe the pygmies warred on by cranes in a simile comparing human armies to Satan’s crew (1:575). Milton could not have written this because it is beneath the dignity of the poem, so Bentley encloses it in brackets and, in his note, suggests removing it. Likewise, Milton could not have written so “trifling” a phrase as “No fear lest dinner cool” supplied by the narrator to describe the Edenic state of things when Eve arrives with a tray of refreshments for her husband and his visitor Raphael (5:396). For similar reasons, Milton could not have shifted the places where the accent falls in certain words, and he could not possibly have written so many lines without the elegance of end stops. In the next century, Romantic critics like Coleridge so venerated the greats of English literature that they regarded every word as perfectly placed in the textually unreliable Shakespeare, much more so in Milton. Bentley’s predecessors and coevals regarded his work on Milton as fusty and arrogant, although they often were just as guilty as Bentley as editorial interpolators. Because Pope’s efforts to ridicule Bentley’s editorial behavior, long before his edition of Milton, and before editorial practice in its postromantic phase gave much more credence to copy-texts than to conjecture, Bentley is often adduced to point a moral or adorn a tale, though his was a name at which the learned world once grew pale.

Kristine Haugen has written well on Bentley’s Milton (I borrow from her in my account), and she has given his best-known work pride of place, treating it at the start and the finish of her fine book. Her great achievement, however, is in her expert explanation of the rest of Bentley’s career as a scholar and editor. An impressive amount of working through the forgotten works of Bentley enables Haugen to put the edition of Paradise Lost in a rich and deep context comprising not only Bentley’s life’s work but also the traditions of scholarship, of academic and clerical life, and of the business of writing in Bentley’s time.

In Haugen’s patient, thorough, and impeccably composed study, Bentley emerges from a seventeenth-century tradition of academic scholarship that favored cloistered study of obscure Greek texts that often issued in no more than marginal glosses and notebooks passed among the initiated. When the...