Abstract
The Poetics of Scriptural Quotation in the Divorce Tracts
Highlights
This article examines how Milton creatively adapts biblical quotations in the divorce tracts, in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon. It argues that these quotations are the ideal place to observe the interlinked poetics, rhetoric, and hermeneutics of Milton’s prose, i.e., how its creative, persuasive, and interpretive elements work together
This section follows Fletcher in discussing common features of Milton’s quotational style across the tracts, with an implicit emphasis on Doctrine and Discipline and Tetrachordon as the two tracts that are most engaged with biblical exegesis and so have a higher number of scriptural quotations
The argument in favor of divorce made in the first tract, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), is so concerned with scriptural interpretation that Regina Schwartz remarks that it “could have been justifiably titled Doctrine and Discipline of Biblical Exegesis” (39)
Summary
Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644) and Colasterion (1645)—quote less often from Scripture but advocate similar interpretive principles. Italicizing this phrase, which restates Milton’s fundamental argument using a parallel phrase, is probably an error but could conceivably mark emphasis rather than attribution or could even be a piece of typographical legerdemain to make Milton’s scriptural case look stronger, though false quotations that might be deliberately misleading are very rare Either way, these passages (and others such as 1644, F3r [Lev. 19.17] and Tetrachordon, L1v [Mark 10.26]) suggest that while it is unwise to assume total authorial intention in the tracts’ italics, their introduction, in the second edition of Doctrine and Discipline, tends to coincide with closer proximity to the King James text and so increases the likelihood that the author checked the text against the Bible. Doctrine and Discipline and Tetrachordon, in much subtler ways than the translation of De Regno Christi, show Milton shaping the biblical material he encounters to bring control, charisma—more or less in its literal, theological sense denoting a gift of grace—and the immediacy of living truth to his prose
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