In April 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson traveled from London to Stratford-upon-Avon to see where William Shakespeare was born. The two friends and future American presidents were in England to hammer out a set of commercial treatises. When the negotiations briefly stalled, they decided to go sightseeing, taking in mainly country estates and gardens but also relishing a few historical sites, most notably, the battlefield at Worcester where Oliver Cromwell had defeated King Charles II. Adams deemed it “holy Ground.”1In Stratford, though, Adams was disappointed. The town, he felt, had preserved so little from Shakespeare’s time and nothing of “this great Genius which is worth knowing—nothing which might inform Us what Education, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters and the Drama. His name is not even on his Grave Stone.”2 The more practical-minded Jefferson also seems to have been underwhelmed. He recorded in his diary only his expenses: 1 shilling to enter the home, 2 shillings for servants, and 1 shilling to see Shakespeare’s tomb.3Both Adams and Jefferson greatly admired Shakespeare for his moral teachings and his insights into human nature; they sometimes quoted or alluded to passages from his plays in their private and published works. Yet, based on the relative number of allusions and quotations from John Milton in Adams’s diary and Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book, the founding fathers may have enjoyed reading Milton even more so. Often the two English authors are closely linked. Adams cites both Shakespeare and Milton to define poetic genius, then singles out Milton for the superior achievement of having “feigned the Characters of Arch Angells and Devills, of Sin, Death, &c., out of his own creative Imagination and . . . [having] adjusted, with great Sagacity, every . . . Action and Event in his whole Poem to these Characters.”4 Jefferson in his commonplace book repeatedly quotes passages about rebellion and political resistance from Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.5 But in his other writings he seems to have taken greater interest in both Milton and Shakespeare’s diction and prosody. He emphasizes how “the full powers of the English language” are on view in Shakespeare’s plays, and seems especially moved and inspired by Milton’s epic, citing the “pomp and majesty” of the first proem in Paradise Lost to illustrate blank verse, what he calls “the most precious part of our poetry.”6We are probably not surprised that Shakespeare and Milton were already being allied and held up as the two greatest English writers in the 1700s. Shakespeare had begun to enter scholarly discourse by the 1600s, and Milton within fourteen years of his death in 1674 was bring praised by the Poet Laureate John Dryden for having surpassed Virgil and Homer.7 Still today, the preeminence of the two authors is a widely held view. When in 2019 Jason Scott-Warren and Claire M. L. Bourne discovered that a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held at the Free Library of Philadelphia contains Milton’s handwritten notes and notations, Rhodri Lewis of Princeton University summed up the finding’s significance, “We now have firsthand evidence—literally, firsthand evidence—of arguably the second-greatest seventeenth-century writer reading the first.”8This special issue of Milton Studies on Milton and Shakespeare was inspired most immediately by the discovery of Milton’s marginalia in the Philadelphia First Folio. But, of course, the connection between the two early modern authors is much older and more complicated. Maggie Kilgour in her essay in this issue traces how critics have traditionally distinguished the two writers, debating both how much Milton admired Shakespeare and how much they embodied different types of poets. Today, as syllabi and classroom reading lists have rightly expanded and diversified, some students might not remember a time when Milton and Shakespeare along with Geoffrey Chaucer formed a holy trinity in literary studies, and English majors were routinely expected to take courses on one or all three.The practice of teaching Milton and Shakespeare emerged in America in the late nineteenth century, as Latin and Greek were removed as requirements at colleges and universities, and the new curriculum introduced undergraduate students instead to “classical” works by the two early modern writers.9 Here “classical” indicates that Milton and Shakespeare were thought to be of lasting value, on par with Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. A literature textbook from 1886—a hundred years after Adams and Jefferson’s journey to Stratford-upon-Avon—thus pairs and compares the two authors. Milton is introduced as “the greatest English poet except Shakspere [sic]” but is lauded for having a grander style: “Milton’s blank verse is enough to bear up the most prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style more massive and splendid than Shakspere’s, and comparable, like Tertullian’s Latin, to a river of molten gold.”10Before the discovery of the Philadelphia Folio, discussions of the relation between Milton and Shakespeare usually began with Milton himself. His “An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet, W. Shakespeare” was first published in the front matter of Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632). Here in a sixteen-line encomium—fittingly, Milton’s first printed English poem—the two authors meet in the open. Milton praises Shakespeare’s prophetic insights (“Delphic lines”), fluid meter (“easy numbers”), and the lasting impact that his works have on his readers’ imagination (the “deep impression” on “our fancy”).11 Aside from the passing reference to “dramatic” in the poem’s title, Milton makes no mention of the theater, an omission that has sometimes been attributed to his Puritan leanings. More likely, the poem’s focus on Shakespeare’s book reflects Milton’s early interest in print publication and his appreciation of what Shakespeare’s folio meant practically and symbolically for the playwright’s enduring fame. Milton emphasizes that Shakespeare’s “leaves” and “book” are a crucial though still “unvalued” part of his lasting achievement (line 11). When he concludes in the final line that “kings for such a tomb would wish to die” (line 16), he sounds almost envious, maybe wistful. If even kings covet the “pomp” (line 15) of Shakespeare’s bibliographic monument, so must Milton.Critics have long detected and debated other, more subtle Shakespearean influences in Milton’s works—the presence of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, say, or allusions to Hamlet and Macbeth in Paradise Lost (at, for example, 8.15 and 11.496–97). But the other most direct connection between Milton and Shakespeare occurs in the first part of Eikonoklastes (1649), as Milton excoriates Charles I for turning to Shakespeare, a popular author, as his “Closet Companion” while awaiting execution.12 Milton implies that the king should have been reading a more learned or more religious writer, and as Nicholas McDowell discusses in his article in this issue, Shakespeare had already become politically charged in the midst of the civil wars, a way for Parliamentarians to mock the king as a libertine or dilettante. Milton then goes on to compare Charles I to Richard III and quotes four lines from one of Richard’s speeches in Shakespeare’s play, another clear indication of Milton’s familiarity with his esteemed predecessor.Now, with the discovery of Milton’s marked-up copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio, we have an important addition to studies of Milton and Shakespeare. This unique text more dynamically brings together the two writers, and we can privilege the handwritten markings because they presumably lack any rhetorical posturing or concerns about a wider audience. The volume contains the traces of Milton’s most private, unvarnished engagement with Shakespeare; it shows us both how Milton read and how he read specifically Shakespeare. Importantly, though, the book contains only traces of Milton’s experience. Like any residue of reading activity, Milton’s surviving notes are incomplete and often ambiguous, even if they are far more than we could ever have hoped to find.All seven articles collected here address, to varying degrees, Milton’s copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio and assess the impact of his marks and marginalia for our understanding of his relation to Shakespeare. But each of these essays also takes the long view, considering various connections and contrasts between the two writers. The discovery of Milton’s notes on Shakespeare’s plays is an opportunity to think more broadly about early modern reading habits, Shakespeare’s status in the middle of the seventeenth century, and the two authors’ ongoing relevance. How do we understand Milton and Shakespeare, separately and in relation to each other, now that curricula no longer adhere to a traditional canon, and aesthetic judgments are qualified by attention to prevailing ideologies and competing cultural narratives?Each essay in this issue takes a different tack, analyzing the authors’ poetic development, literary expression, method of reading, assumptions about textual corruption, concepts of liberty, international influence, or ideas about grace and tragedy. If we return to Adams and Jefferson’s disappointment in visiting Stratford-upon-Avon, this special issue is trying in part to glimpse for Milton what Adams believed was missing from Shakespeare’s birthplace—insight into “what Education, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters.” Can we discover something new about Milton’s formation as a poet? What do we learn from how he read another vernacular English author whom he admired—and not just any author but arguably the greatest dramatist of all time? What insight do we gain into Milton’s ways of interpreting and thinking?Simultaneously, though less directly, the essays in this issue strive to provide fresh perspective on the meanings and implications of Shakespeare’s poems and plays. Examining what Milton gleaned from his predecessor can help us to read Shakespeare anew, informed by the experience of a close contemporary, a sensitive, discerning poet-scholar. As enrollments in the humanities continue to decline, as student interest in pre-1800 British literature continues to recede, it is remarkable that a single copy of the First Folio could gain so much attention and that such a significant new finding could be made in fields as old as Milton and Shakespeare studies. Each of the seven essays here offers a striking new reading of Milton and Shakespeare; collectively they illustrate how we still have more to learn, more to think about, and more to discover.