Milton's Attitude Towards Women in the History of Britain

Abstract

When all the evidence has been marshalled, Milton's views on the position of women are both consistent and plain, whatever the astonishing obfuscations of many of his critics, assailants and apologists alike. Each side in the old controversy might at least have known better what they were attacking or defending if they had not ignored a major source-book for Milton's attitude, the History of Britain. There is reason to believe that Milton was here giving vent to a passing mood, but it was sharp and arrogant while it lasted. Herein we have a contrast with the evidence usually cited. Just preceding the composition of the early books of the History had come the divorce tracts, where the author made an heroic effort at impersonality, and perhaps only his images betray him; it would take a very sensitive critic to analyze them. Years later came Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, where, as Professor Allan H. Gilbert has warned,1 the interpreter must tread lightly, for the poet in the angry outbursts of Adam and of Samson was not ostensibly speaking in his own person but rather writing as a dramatist. But in the History of Britain the voice that speaks out on the inferiority and proper subjection of women is at times unmistakably Milton's own. To heap up discredit upon what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of women” he will go out of his way, whether by parenthetical remark, or by free alteration of his sources, or, in one case, by sheer misinterpretation of the original Latin.