EmmaDepledge, John S.Garrison, MarissaNicosia, eds. Making Milton: Print, Authorship, AfterlivesOxford: Oxford UP, 2021. xiv + 250pp. ISBN 13: 9780198821892. £70.00; $90.00 (cloth).

Abstract

Because he so insistently “wrote himself,” as we say, into the work, the meaning of Milton's authorial persona—how it was created, how consistent it seems to be, its relationship to the flesh and blood human being we only imperfectly know from the biographical record, the ways in which it expresses various values and political positions, etc.—has always mattered to the reception and study of Milton's work. This new collection of essays does a good job of offering us a snapshot (or sixteen snapshots) of current academic thinking about these matters, and it is particularly strong in the way it provides an introduction to the material history of Milton's self-construction and its later reconstructions by publishers and readers. In addition to a useful introductory chapter by the editors and an Afterword by Elizabeth Sauer, the collection is divided into three main sections. Part 1, “Milton and the Book Trade,” presents two essays, one by Stephen Dobranski and another by Blaine Greteman, about how Milton navigated the world of print, the material means by which he found his first readers. Two more essays—by Emma Depledge and Thomas Corns—examine the sometimes surprising ways in which the book trade of the later seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries shaped Milton's growing reputation and helped make him into a canonical figure. The six essays in Part 2, “Milton's Construction of an Authorial Identity,” cover the more familiar ground of Milton's self-presentation in the language of the texts themselves. Noam Reisner examines Milton's youthful engagement with Paul, not only as a theological guide, but as a model for various modes of self-presentation. David Loewenstein examines the Ludlow Maske as an early site of Milton's wrestling with ideas about English nationhood. Rachel Willie discusses Milton's engagement with dramatic form and convention. John Hale provides a close reading of Milton's autobiographical address, in Defensio Secunda, to a transnational community of Latin readers. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar places Milton's purported iconoclasm in the context of a range of contemporary theological and legal positions on the proper and improper representation of God, and Kyle Pivetti contemplates the conflicted erotic elements of Milton's self-presentation as an inspired poet. Part 3, “Milton's Afterlives,” leaps forward in time to examine Milton's reception history. Two essays, one by Lara Dodds and another by Angelica Duran, look at particular episodes in that history: the ambivalence that Milton's writing inspired in 18th-century poet Anne Finch, whose work has begun to attract increasing attention, and the roles that Milton's poetry and prose have played in the literary worlds of colonial and post-colonial Mexico. A third essay, by Neil Forsyth, examines the ways in which twenty-first century dramatic adaptations and performances uncover erotic elements in Milton's original texts. In a final essay, Nigel Smith examines our shifting sense of Milton's political radicalism, the ways in which its place in the politics of Milton's own time has become clearer and the ways in which it remains relevant to current debates and anxieties concerning the political radicalisms we face today. Making Milton is an engaging, but in some ways odd volume. It claims to uncover new ground, but the essays are mostly quite brief and therefore fall short of presenting full-court analytical or interpretive arguments. They introduce new areas of investigation, but they do not follow through on them completely. Several of the essays use a very light touch, which is attractive, and there is much in the way of open-ended speculation and invitations to further thought. Several of the essays feel a little like partially expanded conference papers or the sort of introductory essays usually found in handbooks or companions. This is not, however, to say that the essays are sub-par. In fact, there is a great deal of erudition on display in the collection and a lively sense of cross-talk. Several of these essays have strongly piqued my interest, and I am eager to see their concerns explored more fully by these authors or by others. Part 1 is the strongest of the three parts because it fulfills the promise of the volume most fully, introducing us to the new ways in which some scholars have been approaching the material conditions that underpinned Milton's entrance into public consciousness in his own and in subsequent centuries. Dobranski's chapter is a good introduction to Milton's concern with both the material and the transcendent existence and durability of his works. We have usually tended to consider only the latter in discussions of Milton's bid for immortality, but Dobranski shows how Milton understood the dependency of the latter on the former, and how much care he took to ensure that his books ended up in the hands of those who, as he famously put it in the autobiographical digression of The Reason of Church-Government, “would not willingly let [them] die.” The essay beautifully sets the stage for Greteman's short and tantalizing essay on Epitaphium Damonis. Readers often overlook Milton's first assay into the publishing world, but Greteman reminds us that the fiction of the poet's isolation in that poem is just that, a fiction, and one designed—via publication—to “alleviate that condition” (36). Greteman uses network analysis to underline the social nature of Milton's early print history, especially his connections to a network of oppositional printers, and the essay joins fascinating work recently published by other scholars who have found ways of using computer technology to tell us more about both the physical machinery and the social connections that made publication possible. See, for example, the essay published in 2020 (too late for Gretemen to have engaged it here) by Christopher N. Warren, Pierce Williams, Shruti Rijhwani, and Max G'Sell that traces, using computer analysis of broken typefaces, the clandestine network of printers responsible for publishing Areopagitica (Milton Studies 62: 1–47). Emma Depledge's essay examines the circumstances surrounding the publication of Jacob Tonson's first edition of Paradise Lost (1688). It provides useful details about how Tonson came to publish the book and adds some interesting speculation about how he might have been inspired to publish out of his, at that point, frustrated desire to publish Dryden's The State of Innocence, a text which in turn might also have helped increase interest in Milton's poem, setting the stage for the success of the 1688 edition itself and the prestige it conferred. Thomas Corns's delightful essay on Addison and early eighteenth-century readers follows, and it is one of the gems of the volume. With a light rhetorical touch, Corns picks up where Depledge's essay leaves off, showing how Addison's “domestication” of Paradise Lost in his series of commentaries in The Spectator, worked together with a crucial shift in Tonson's marketing strategy for the poem—the publication of relatively inexpensive editions in 1705 and 1707 and of a pocket-sized edition in 1711 (56). He makes a strong case for the mutually reinforcing synergy between the critical essays and the new editions and for the importance of the moment in the history of Milton's rise to canonical status. Part 2 is the longest section of the book, and of its six essays, a few stand out. One of them is Reisner's terrific examination of the essentially Pauline nature of Milton's early authorial persona—the ways in which its basic framework continued to shape Milton's sense of himself as author until the end. Elegant and detailed enough to bring this aspect of Milton's self-fashioning into sharp focus, it is slightly frustrating only in the sense that I wish it were longer and even more detailed. Another stand out is John Hale's essay, a superb close reading of the significance of Milton's Latin rhetorical choices in the Defensio Secunda's autobiographical digression. Perhaps most telling of the volume's examinations of the way Milton constructed his persona, this is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a passage that has been mined repeatedly for its biographical details, but that has rarely been looked at closely as a rhetorical performance in-and-of itself. Hale carefully traces the cumulative impact of a sequence of Latin “features and figures” (109) invisible in even the most attentive English translations, but crucial to the effect Milton wanted the passage to have on his readers. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar's essay on Milton's iconoclasm actually argues for Milton's “iconophilia” (a nod to Patrick Collinson's term, “iconophobia” found in his 1985 Stenton Lecture “From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation” [Reading, 1986]). She begins with a discussion of Milton's understanding of the sin of idolatry, rather than with his iconoclasm, per se. Milton's concern was not so much with the literal breaking of images as with “the false worship of the true God through misrepresentation or false imaging” (126). Zlatar places Milton's attitude in the context of a wide “spectrum of attitudes prevalent” at the time (128), examining, in particular, a fascinating 1633 case in the court of Star Chamber. The essay is very useful and makes a good case for the “iconophilia” of Paradise Lost's descriptions of the Father and Son in Book 3. While, like so many of the essays in the volume, it stops short just as it begins to approach the most interesting and consequential implications of its argument, Zlatar's claims prove illuminating and fertile. Hopefully, readers can look forward to hearing more, in her forthcoming book, about the passages that describe the Son in Book 3, where Milton's language suggests something strange—or at least unconventional—about the material existence of the Son long before the Incarnation made him, and through him the Father, materially visible on Earth. The Son is more than a mirror, or as Zlatar puts it, a “radiant reflection of the Father's brightness” (138). In him that brightness is “substantially expressed” (PL 3.140), and that phrase, along with the peculiar figurations Milton uses at lines 387–89, suggests not just a reflection, but a vehicle or conduit that has and applies its own uncanny physical pressure. I have long felt that the unusual language found in these passages—key moments in Milton's larger representation of the deity—requires more and better attention. Zlatar's essay offers a promising new framework for coming to terms with the strangeness of Milton's terms. The final section of the volume offers several useful and interesting discussions of Milton's reception history, and the first one, Lara Dodds's fascinating essay on Anne Finch, stands out in particular. In counterpoint to Corns's discussion of the rise of Milton's reputation in the early 18th Century, the essay takes us away from the male world of the Kit Cat Club into the mind of an ambitious woman working to establish her own authorial persona—in the shadow of masculinity in general. Dodds looks at Finch more closely than earlier critics have and presents a more subtle account of how she struggled with Milton, mastering his style for purposes of canny and generous mock-epic parody, pointedly turning ostensibly masculinist moments in Paradise Lost to her own purposes, occupying Adam's subject position to represent her own desires, using elements of Milton's representation of paradise and the relationship between Adam and Eve to describe an ideal female friendship, and finally addressing the problem of how to find a place for a female poetic voice in a male-dominated tradition. The essay gives us a strong impression of the complexity of Finch's project and of the way it was shaped by the profound ambivalence she felt about the tradition she inherited. Finch is clearly worth further attention, and Dodds's essay has sent me back to Finch's work with new interest. I look forward to reading more. All in all, the collection is worth reading for anyone interested in some of the ways in which an old preoccupation in Milton Studies is being reframed and reexamined. In the collection's final essay, Nigel Smith, referring to our ongoing critical conversations about Milton's radicalism, tells us that “quite a lot” is “left to be said” (203), and he is right, not just about Milton's politics, but about the persona Milton crafted and its effects more generally, the ways in which it has been used, praised, and resisted. This volume is a useful introduction to the conversation as it now stands and to some of the directions it is likely to take in the near future.