‘Both English and Latin’: Milton's bilingual Muse

Abstract

This paper examines bilingual speaking voices in Paradise Lost within the wider contexts of Renaissance pedagogy, Milton's Latin writings composed at Cambridge and in Italy, the Renaissance questione della lingua, and his self‐presentation in the 1645 volume: Poems Both English and Latin. It argues that in Milton's vernacular epic the Latinless reader is, like Eve, surprised by syntax: bemused, seduced, confounded by the linguistic alterity of a Satan whose use and abuse of Latinate language enables him to function as a serpens bilinguis, a double‐tongued Ciceronian orator, and also by way of a possible pun on ‘brute’ as a second Brutus assassinating Eve, a second Caesar. It concludes by examining the bilingual authorial voice, a voice that is ‘both English and Latin’ and whose essential Latinitas can function perhaps as a signifier of the classical intertexts with which the poem engages.