That Slumbring Leviathan: Milton in the Restoration

not very long ago, one could justifiably observe (or indeed complain of) the tendency among scholars of Milton to cordon the poet from his Restoration contexts, to imagine him a kind of Renaissance leviathan, "beached on the shores of an alien culture, writing poetry that casts into doubt the very premise of Stuart Court culture."¹ Where students of Milton did make inroads into the Restoration, it was most often under the auspices of "the literary culture of nonconformity," as N. H. Keeble has influentially termed that congeries of godly writers formed, as he saw it, by the political defeat of millenarian Puritanism.² Scholars have also become interested (or rather newly interested) in Milton's natural philosophy, in particular his theory of matter, siting his poetry and thought variously within the intellectual ferment of later seventeenth-century vitalism or materialism.³ In the trio of titles reviewed here, but above all in Milton in the Long Restoration, however, we are confronted with the specter of a Milton fully unbound from the margins of the Restoration—a development that has the potential, as these rather different books bear out, not only to redress the imbalances of literary history but also to exacerbate its fissures and elisions.

Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro's edited volume—a leviathan in its own right, comprising 656 pages and nearly thirty chapters—is the fruit of a transcontinental symposium held at Rutgers and at Stanford in 2013 and 2014. It includes a who's who of Miltonists and of scholars working more widely in the fields of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century studies, and across the disciplines of literature and history. The volume's length, its august assembly of contributors, and what must have been its considerable cost to produce (it is priced at $135 U.S.) position it as a major statement not only by the editors and their team but also by Oxford University Press. Indeed, it is hard to think of a recent book with "Restoration" in the title that can compare to Milton in the Long Restoration either in terms of substance or as an event: certainly not a collection of essays, nor is there a similarly magisterial Handbook of Restoration Literature to which we might point. (Of books with "Milton" in the title, now, that is another story.)

It is hardly a secret that economics—and not only those of academic publishing—significantly shape the form and content of scholarly books, especially at a time when the marketplace demands ever increasing output for the purposes of hiring, tenure, and promotion, even as the margins of academic presses shrink. At a distance, and over time, these dynamics seem also to affect the shape of literary history—its conditions of growth, contraction, and reorganization. The Restoration is already ill served by its annexation as the dressing room for a "long eighteenth century." Under the teleological pressure of such a construct, the later Stuart era has come to be studied, as the historian Jonathan Scott posits of Restoration politics and political culture, predominantly in terms of "the shape of the future"—that is, for the "origins" of later eighteenth-century literary and political formations.⁴ It is telling that this year's omnibus SEL review "Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century," which is loosely organized by author, contains no heading for John Dryden, nor for Lord Rochester, much less for any of the other poets or dramatists connected with the Stuart court (Pepys is the closest thing to a court writer to be touted by the essay's overt signaling, appearing under the heading "John Bunyan, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, and Company").⁵ By contrast, the...