ABSTRACT This article cross-reads allusion, adaptation, and remediation in Paradise Lost and Allan Cubitt’s crime television-series The Fall (2013–16), exploring relations of feminine subjectivity and mediation in both texts. Mediated representations of women and women’s uses of mediated representation are central themes in both The Fall and Milton’s epic. Hypermediations that densely interleave different media forms draw attention to their operations, making them available for critique and perhaps for emendation. The Fall presents a series of hypermediated images that crystallize questions about the ways that adaptations can reproduce, question, or counter ideology encoded in their source texts.

ABSTRACT Filmmaker Robert Eggers may not have intentionally set out to adapt the works of John Milton, but his 2015 horror film The Witch evokes Milton’s many temptation narratives, especially A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. Set in 1630s New England, the movie tells the story of a devout English farming family who loses their infant son to a witch and gradually comes undone. Eggers, who has acknowledged Milton’s influence on his film, constructs a Miltonian universe to explore the psychological aftermath of fear and tragedy that accompanies the family’s isolation; he focuses on the suffering and possible liberation of the daughter Thomasin as she ultimately confronts the devil in the woods. Analyzing The Witch in relation to Milton sheds new light on the power and, paradoxically, the limitations of his various scenes of temptation in his major works.

ABSTRACT This article takes up a question that has vexed feminist Milton scholars for the past fifty years: does Milton inhibit women’s writing? Mary Robinson’s 1796 sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon would suggest that the answer is no. This article examines Robinson’s loose adaptation of Comus, an abridgment of Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, in which Robinson herself had performed the role of the Lady. It contends that Robinson, like Milton, presents a positive construction of the melancholic poet who preserves chastity. Robinson’s inclusion of Milton’s Sonnet 1 in the preface to her sequence directs readers to her own use of the nightingale. As Robinson rehabilitates the image of Sappho, she uses enjambment in depicting heavenly bodies, which this article argues puns on her own embodiment as mobility impaired.

ABSTRACT This article argues that both Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show draw on Miltonic companionship to address broad philosophical issues and to undergird their critiques of, respectively, the overreaching male Romantic ego and mindless consumerism prompted by mass media. In Paradise Lost, disruptions of the looks of sympathy and love that characterize Edenic companionship are linked with the fall into knowledge. Neglecting his own family, Shelley’s solipsistic Frankenstein makes a physically abhorrent Creature; when Frankenstein, in turn, denies the lonely Creature companionship, he dooms his family, the Creature, and himself. In The Truman Show, the quest for Miltonic companionship leads directly to a fall into knowledge. Drawing on both Milton and Shelley, Weir shows how Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of a reality television series, comes to discover the truth and flee a false Eden through his search for his true Eve, Sylvia. While both Frankenstein and The Truman Show might seem to challenge Milton, the stress on companionship ultimately affirms core Miltonic values.

ABSTRACT This article explores the formal similarities between epic similes and musical numbers within a musical film, specifically Menahem Golan’s 1980 movie The Apple, a parable about the corruption of artistic ideals by a Satanic and fascistic record executive. Both of these self-consciously artificial and metaleptic features challenge narrative immersion as the primary aesthetic experience. The simile and the song interrupt the story, but also serve as defining formal elements of the art object. Yet even within such formal unity, musical number and epic comparison rely upon a metaleptic skein of levels that distinguishes story from world, that reminds readers, redundantly, that they are reading and viewing an artificial object. In the end, Paradise Lost and The Apple reveal how much “gratuitousness,” “digression,” and “irrelevance” are the nature of both the art work and the real itself and, in so doing, challenge the presumed centrality of story-telling to human social orders.

ABSTRACT The recent identification of Milton’s marginalia in a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Philadelphia Free Library allows for a reevaluation of the epic poet’s relationship with his dramatic predecessor. This article follows in the footsteps of recent scholarship undertaken in response to the finding. It focuses on Milton’s markings of Romeo and Juliet and traces two interrelated aspects that interested him: the theme of amorous infection, poison, and cure, and the play’s tension between tragic necessity and the possibility of a cure to avert a tragic ending. On the basis of these markings, the article highlights similarities between Romeo and Juliet and book 9 of Paradise Lost, ultimately suggesting that Adam and Eve owe a greater debt to Romeo and Juliet than previously recognized.

ABSTRACT Milton’s worldly, prosaic Manoa has won few admirers, and the ransom plot in Samson Agonistes often elicits puzzlement. This article situates Manoa in relation to the soteriological anxieties that Milton’s tragedy explores. Drawing on Freud’s psychoanalytic account of monotheism, this article suggests that Manoa’s presence clarifies the paternal substitution realized in Samson’s elevation by God, but also threatens to unsettle it. Whereas Yahweh chooses Samson, Manoa’s love is fundamentally choiceless—an expression of an absolute bond. Reading Samson against two other Judges tragedies—Buchanan’s and Vondel’s plays about Jephthah’s sacrifice—the article argues that Milton’s dramatic poem reveals both the allure of chosenness and its psychological impasses. Manoa’s unconditional love offers a release from the drama of election. But Samson’s tragedy is that he can only reject it: to accept a love that demands nothing, that needs no choice, would mean giving up his most cherished wish—the wish to be chosen.

ABSTRACT This article reevaluates Adam’s “commotion strange” in book 8 of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a co-motion or communal movement representing the highest fulfillment of innocent social relationships. Milton’s epic reimagines paradisal passion as a positive collective movement of a united body and soul, not as a turbulent and dangerous feeling. By bringing together Adam’s “commotion” in book 8, Satan’s “compulsion” in book 9, and the fallen couple’s “commiseration” in book 10, this article foregrounds Milton’s paradisal passion as a co-motion produced by relational encounters that has the potential to transport the fallen back to a state of goodness.

ABSTRACT This article explores the influence of Charles Diodati’s Latin and Greek writings upon John Milton and examines the intertextuality between their poems. It argues that Diodati’s abilities as an author in his own right have been underestimated, and it revises the perception of the role Diodati played in Milton’s life and works. The Miltonic and Diodatian texts are analyzed in approximately chronological order. The first section looks at the earliest evidence of Diodati’s intertextual presence in Milton’s poetry by comparing Diodati’s Latin obituary poem (1624) with Milton’s “In obitum Procancellarii medici” (1626). The second section examines the language of Diodati’s two Greek letters and sheds new light on his literary allusions and engagement with Platonism. The third section focuses on Milton’s descriptions of Diodati’s lost poems and explores the ongoing poetic collaboration between Milton and his best friend.