Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of 'Paradise Lost', 1667-1837 by Anne-Julia Zwierlein (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 961 use of censorship to act out royal power within a national and, more importantly, international context. This very public mode of censorship contrasts with the King's 'secretive' use of censorship in matters that touched on his personal honour. His style of personal censorship becomes a model for acts of individual and institutional cen? sorship that, according to Clegg, sought to bolster authority and protect reputations rather than enforce a cultural hegemony. The subject matter of her chapter on the early 1620s public sphere radicalized by the Bohemian crisis requires her to move away from the case-study method ofthe earlier chapters and, as a consequence, this allows her to locate censorship practices more successfully within a wider political culture. The concluding chapter takes the study into the Caroline period. Control over ecclesiastical licensing was slowly wrested from the Calvinist Archbishop Abbot by the anti-Calvinist Bishop of Durham, Richard Neile, and his Arminian circle at Durham House, which effectively replaced Calvinist print-based disputation with a rhetoric of silence that hardened into state practice under Laud in the 1630s. In con? trast to Charles I, James emerges as a monarch who used censorship as a rhetorical tool of negotiation and accommodation rather than confrontation. This is a thorough and largely convincing study of a particular aspect of early modern censorship. Problems arise when press censorship is assumed to be identical with censorship as a whole and then offered as a corrective lens for reading early modern culture. This can give the misleading impression of a primarily print-based culture. Some attention is paid to scribal and oral channels of publication in the early 1620s, but not in the earlier period that, for example, saw an explosion of libels following the death of the Earl of Salisbury. One effectof this is a misreading of the Earl of Northampton's recourse to scandalummagnatum in this period, which points to more fundamental problems with Clegg's model ofpersonal censorship. The question still remains: is press censorship, even in this revisionist form,the most effectivepoint of entry into understanding what really mattered in early modern political culture? Oxford Brookes University Michelle O'Callaghan Majestick Milton: British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of 'Paradise Lost', 1667-1837. By Anne-Julia Zwierlein. (Studien zur englischen Literatur, 13) Miinster, Hamburg, and London: LIT. 2001. xi + 492 pp. DM 128. ISBN 38258 -5432-9. Anne-Julia Zwierlein's astonishingly energetic, wide-ranging, and sometimes quite brilliant Majestick Milton is an important book which, despite the problems I outline below, constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Milton's powerful cul? tural afterlife. Like many others before her, Zwierlein realized that when placed in the context of postcolonial literature and theory Paradise Lost took on a new look? Milton's biblical epic revealed many 'startling resonances' (p. 4) with the discourse of Western colonialism. Out of these resonances, self-consciously rejecting Lyotard, Zwierlein constructs a master narrative or grand recit(p. 3), indeed a story of all things imperial over the course of English literary studies' (increasingly) long Eighteenth Century, at the centre of which stands Milton's great poem. While Paradise Lost itself may have been written out of Milton's disillusionment with the promise of England 's national election, its reception, Zwierlein argues, is to be understood largely as a complex series of imperial appropriations. In this, she offers Keith Staveley's 1990 argument on Milton and 'the Rising Glory of America' Anglicized and writ large. According to Zwierlein, the poem was exploited not only in America but even more so in Britain, being made to serve various nationalist and colonial ends in both the America-centred First British Empire and the India-centred Second. The poem 962 Reviews came to animate imperial discourses as diverse as language, travel, agriculture, and commerce?but paradoxically it also functioned as a means of arousing opposition to such imperial practices as the slave trade. Despite its impressive erudition and passion forclarity,the book runs into a num? ber of difficulties. Most important, in the first part of the book, Zwierlein seems unsure whether Paradise Lost itself is pro- or anti-imperial. When she listens...