On First Looking into Milton’s Shakespeare

For Miltonists and early modern scholars in general, the identification of Milton’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio through the combined work of Claire Bourne and Jason Scott-Warren was exhilarating. At last there seemed hard proof of a bridge between the writers whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as the “twin peaks” of English literature. But what do Milton’s marginal brackets and editorial emendations tell us? This article addresses some of the patterns that can be found in the folio and considers how they might be connected to major concerns in Milton’s poetry, particularly through his reading of Romeo and Juliet.