Milton in the Long Restoration ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Milton in the Long Restoration ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro Anthony W. Lee Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Blair Hoxby and Ann Baynes Coiro. Oxford: Oxford 2016. Pp. xix + 635. $135. Like another book published in 2016, Milton’s Modernities (Northwestern), the present volume foregrounds issues of periodization and the relation of Milton to his literary and cultural inheritors. The editors explain their title in a (rather perfunctory) introduction: “Long Restoration . . . is not meant to imply that the court of Charles II set the cultural tone of the late seventeenth century, or even that the cause of the Stuarts defined the age. Instead, it asks readers to imagine the project of restoration as on-going and contested.” Given the evidence of the essays they gather, their project is an elastic one indeed, extending from the lyric poetry of the 1630s on to Adam Smith, Jane Austen, and beyond. If there is a danger in stretching the proposed period to a limitless inanity, the effort to contextualize Milton’s presence within the literary climate of the long eighteenth century is generally a laudable and often successful one. Comprising twenty-nine essays and twice the length of most academic books, this is a hefty volume. I will examine only those pieces likely to be of most interest to Scriblerian readers. The first chapter, Denise Gigante’s “Milton’s Spots: Addison on Paradise [End Page 82] Lost,” speculatively situates Addison’s analysis of Milton’s “little faults and errors” in Spectator 291 within an Italian aesthetic tradition that associated the sublime with macula/macchia (“spot” or “blotch”). Ms. Gigante then goes on to connect this with a reference in Spectator 303 to sunspots, referencing Milton’s inclusion of the phenomenon in Paradise Lost. Resting largely on a portion of the motto for 291, Offendar maculis, quas aut Incuria fudit (taken from Horace’s Ars poetica), the argument, while clever, seems rather tenuous. Mary Nyquist’s “Friday as Fit Help” explores Milton’s relationship to Defoe. Noting that despite the many political and religious affinities they shared, few have connected the two, Ms. Nyquist analyzes Defoe’s appropriation of Milton (as well as Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke) in his project of legitimizing the European slave trade. Most interesting here, perhaps, is the correlation made between the Crusoe/Friday and Adam/Eve pairings, where the latter’s ideological naturalization of masculine dominance parallels the former’s similar maneuver in racial terms. Ruth Smith’s “Milton Modulated for Handel’s Music” examines three settings of Milton’s poetry, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato, Samson, and A New Occasional Oratorio. Ms. Smith’s meticulous analysis details the circumstances attending Handel’s collaboration with his librettists and the textual adaptations of the settings. The larger conclusion emerging suggests the importance of Milton at midcentury as a great English poet and emblem of English patriotism and liberty, especially during times of national peril (as in 1745–1746, when Samson was produced). Two essays probe the relationship between Milton and Dryden: Steven N. Zwicker’s “John Dryden Meets, Rhymes, and Says Farewell to John Milton: A Restoration Drama in Four Scenes,” and Ann Baynes Coiro’s “Milton’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy: Samson Agonistes.” The latter fruitfully reads Milton’s closet drama as an intervention in the revival of theatrical production after its silencing during the Interregnum. Focusing on the debate over blank verse and “the jingling sound of like endings,” she reads the tragedy not simply as a rejection of the moderns in favor of the ancients, but also as an attempt to reform the practice of contemporary dramatists. Mr. Zwicker also takes up this prosodic contest, imaginatively reconstructing interviews (both interpersonal and intertextual) between Milton, Dryden, and Marvell as a four-scene play plotted as initial meeting, conflict, reconciliation, and commemoration. The two chapters complement one another nicely. Another pair of essays explores Milton’s influence on Pope: Sophie Gee’s “Milton’s Pope” and John Leonard’s “Milton, the Long Restoration, and Pope’s Iliad.” Focusing on Rape of the Lock, Ms. Gee argues that—in spite of the ideological differences separating the Puritan apologist and the purported Tory reactionary...