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tic theology is out of history. A work of literature is embedded in history. A theology expounds the invariant word in its ultimate coherence. Literature struggles through the human incoherence to ascertain how the word addresses us. Between the unchanging truth and the time-bound human endeavour to connect itself to that truth a distance must open by which the poem must be troubled even though that distance is formally the space of incarnation. MacCallum has clarified the design of Paradise Lost, but whether the poem is fully assimilated to its design and whether the design itself is rigorously unproblematic are matters which still need to be explored. We can and probably should argue that the distinctiveness of Milton's theology is important in bringing about the distinctiveness of his poetry. But poetic distinctiveness must be shown in relation to the literary milieu, just as theological distinctiveness is defined by MacCallum in relation to the environment of religious debate. MacCallum's literary comparisons are sparse. Donne is mentioned four times in passing and Herbert never. The poet most often cited is Joseph Beaumont. Giles Fletcher, whose poems on Christ's victories comprise the only literary treatment similar to Milton's in completeness, is absent from MacCallum's pages. That more needs to be said in Milton scholarship is always obvious. MacCallum's book provides several of the findings that are important in deciding what to say next and how we are to say it more precisely. (B. RAJAN) Paul Stevens. Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in 'Paradise Lost' University of Wisconsin Press 1985. 270. US $32.50 Some critics have held thatShakespeare represented for Milton the power of the imagination to generate forms irresponsibly. In opposing this notion, Paul Stevens argues that Milton regarded Shakespeare as a symbol of how the imagination works as a redemptive force necessary to faith. To this end Stevens asserts, against Harold Bloom's patricidal view of literary history, that 'for Milton, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale are all imperfect models of the way grace ... moves through the imagination to provide us with an assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' (p 248). For such assurances one might have expected Milton to look elsewhere. The terms Stevens uses - mimesis eilmstikeand mimesis phantastike - have had a variable history in their passage from Plato's Sophist to Sidney's Apology. But fantastic imitation was normally defined (following a celebrated passage in Lucretius) as the joining of natural objects in an unnatural way to produce such a thing as a centaur, or a weaver with the head of an ass. One fmds in Renaissance critical theory (of which Shakespeare's HUMANlTIES I 15 Theseus is a typical practitioner) an anxiety conc.erning the legitimacy of such prodigies that is not dissimilar to Russell's anxiety over non-existent objects. If a thing like a centaur can be imagined does it, in some sense, exist? Whereas Renaissance moralists and neo-Aristotelians are likely to condemn as hubristic all but the most slavishly imitative imaginative acts, Shakespeare delights in the ambiguous status of extravagant fictions, particularly such fictions as Ariel and Puck. It is therefore surprising that Stevens should regard Milton's response to Shakespeare's imagination as a fulfilment of its icastic potential: 'faith,' we are told, 'requires the activity of the icastic imagination' (p 79). This result will seem less strange, however, when it is recognized that Stevens is really talking about the romantic distinction between imagination and fancy, wherein fancy is seen as a defect. And of course the claim that Milton recognized in the 'autonomous imagination of Shakespeare' what he would openly treat as the 'psychological mechanism of faith' fulfilling 'typologically' what Shakespeare could only accomplish in part (pp 247-8) - identifies the argument as late Coleridgean. If the sonnet published with the second folio tells us anything at all, Milton's conscious attitude to Shakespeare was rather more dull than that of the critics. Unlike Maeonides and Phineus and the prophets of old, Shakespeare was not, in the fullest sense of the word, an author to Milton. When Stevens turns his attention directly on...

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