John Milton

Neil Forsyth

Description

John Milton (1608–1674) is often regarded as one of England's greatest poets, second only to Shakespeare. Best known for his magnum opus Paradise Lost, Milton was also one of history's most politically active writers. A radical Protestant and staunch republican, he served as Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell during the Commonwealth and throughout his life wrote eloquent treatises on topics including divorce, freedom of the press, kingship, and education. This extensive look at Milton's life and ethos addresses the psychological complexities and political tenets of the man who dared to put words in God's mouth, and whose life was spared following the restoration of the monarchy due only to his reputation as a poet.

Informations

• Publié par: Lion Hudson
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780745959290
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

John Milton

NEIL FORSYTH ‘An excellent book’ John Leonard, editor ofJohn Milton: The Complete Poems

A biography

John Milton A Biography

For James and Alice and the families connected to all of us.

John Milton A Biography

N F EIL ORSYTH

Copyright © 2008 Neil Forsyth

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A Lion Book an imprint of Lion Hudson plc Wilkinson House, Jordan Hill Road, Oxford OX2 8DR, England www.lionhudson.com ISBN 978 0 7459 5310 6

First edition 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

All rights reserved

Scripture quotations taken from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.

The text paper used in this book has been made from wood independently certified as having come from sustainable forests.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset in 10/12 Bembo Printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Press

Contents Abbreviations6 Preface7 Introduction: Blind Love 9 1 St Paul’s 15 2 Cambridge 21 3 Early Signs of Genius 29 4 Studious Retirement 36 5 Coping with Death:‘Lycidas’ 48 6 Foreign Parts 59 7 No Bishop, No King 67 8 Mary Powell 78 9 Civil War 84 10 New Houses, and a Family 95 11 Rudest Violence 101 12 Image Breaking 107 13 Blindness 115 14 Cromwell Protector 126 15 A Long Argument to Prove That God is Not the Devil 135 16 Expiring Liberty 142 17 With Dangers Compast Round 148 18 Plague, andParadise Lost 156 19 Fire and War 162 20 Adam, Eve – and Satan 168 21 Milton’s Womb: Chaos, Hell and the Ribs of Gold 179 22 Emptying the Desk 190 23Paradise Regained 201 24 Final Accomplishment 210 Epilogue 224 References 234 Index 245

Abbreviations

Campbell Gordon Campbell. A Milton Chronology. Basingstoke:  Macmillan, 1997. Carey John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey. London:  Longman, 1971; second ed. 1997. CM The ‘Columbia Milton’, i.e.The Works of John Milton, ed. F.  A Patterson, et al. 18 vols in 21. New York: Columbia University  Press, 193138. DDD 1 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. First edition. Quoted  from J. Max Patrick, ed.The Prose of John Milton. New York:  Doubleday Anchor, 1967. DDD 2 The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Second edition.  Quoted from YP. EL The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire. New York:  Barnes and Noble, 1965 Flannagan The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. Boston and New  York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Fowler John Milton: Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler. London:  Longman, 1971; second ed 1998 Lewalski Barbara Lewalski.The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell,  2003. Leonard John Milton:The Complete Poems, ed. John Leonard. London:  Penguin, 1998. LR Life Records of John Milton, ed. J.M. French, 5 vols. New  Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 194958. MQ Milton Quarterly PL Paradise Lost PMLA. Publications Of The Modern Language Association PR Paradise Regained SA Samson Agonistes YP ‘Yale Prose’, i.e. the Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Gen  ed. Don M.Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven:Yale University Press,  195380.

Preface

In the dream I am wearing white gloves, like Alice’s White Rabbit. I am touching a precious book.There is only one copy in existence of this book, which seems to be the first edition of Milton’s tribute to his beloved friend Charles Diodati. (The book is in the British Library in London, along with many other texts of which there is only one copy, such as Milton’s family Bible.) After some straightforward negotiations, I am allowed to see the book, though I have to wear the white gloves to avoid spoiling it with my sweaty hands. I am grateful for the staff ’s obvious care, and hope that it was not just my shifty eyes that kept a guardian present the whole time. In a variant of the same dream, it takes a good deal longer for me to be allowed to see the bound manuscript in which Milton kept a record of his earlier writings and projects. (This must be in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.) The staff are not really polite, merely haughty – something I learned to expect of officials during my undergraduate years at that university, which was also Milton’s. (He, too, did not like it much.) Before I can open the book or even touch the manuscript, I wake up. These are guilt dreams, I know. I have not done the proper legwork in order to write this book; I have not spent hours in the archives, crossing the Atlantic several times to view manuscripts and pictures (such as the lovely portrait of the tenyearold Milton in the Pierpoint Morgan Library in New York). It is at least temporarily reassuring that many such documents have been on view in the major exhibitions celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth, at the Bodleian in Oxford, at Milton’s college in Cambridge as well as at the University Library, and at the New York Public Library. This book is, as a former student told me in a kindly but firm tone, a work of ‘haute vulgarisation’.That is, I have tried to transmit to as wide a readership as possible the results of the scholarly researches of others, along with some of my own opinions. My task, as I saw it, was to write a biography of Milton that would excite readers who might be merely curious, and who would like to know why Milton is so widely loved and admired, and even, sometimes, detested. I hope you who are reading will begin to see why Wordsworth wrote a sonnet in 1802, at a moment of political turmoil, which begins:

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J o h n M i l t o n : A B i o g r a p hy

Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour England hath need of thee.

I must thank in particular Gordon Campbell, both for his 1996 reedition of William Riley Parker’s 1968 elegant and learnedMilton: A Biography, and for his painstaking and meticulous 1997Chronologyhave made especial. I use, as everybody should, of Barbara Lewalski’s recent and authoritativeLife of John Milton(2000, revised edition 2003). I feel rather nervous about the occasions I have found myself disagreeing with her (especially regarding how early Milton became a radical), and I know I have borrowed too much from her magisterial book. If you want to follow up anything from this book, go first to Lewalski or Campbell. Other accounts I have found stimulating in different ways include those by Anna Beer, Cedric Brown, Steven Fallon, Roy Flannagan, Peter Levi and Angus Wilson.The endnotes will sometimes give the necessary references, but I have tried to keep those to a minimum. For quotations from Milton’s poetry I have not been able to resist the old spelling texts of Roy Flannagan’s Riverside edition (or occasionally the texts available online at the Milton Reading Room).They may seem a little strange at first, but you soon get used to them, and they open the reading world of Milton’s contemporaries directly to our experience. I have sometimes used John Leonard’s translations of the Latin in the PenguinComplete Poems, and I have regularly consulted, and occasionally quoted, the richly annotated Longman editions of John Carey and Alastair Fowler. For the prose I use, as everybody now does, theWorksComplete Prose , published Universityby Yale Press. I also have to thank Princeton University Press for their habitual generosity in allowing me to rework several pages from my book onParadise Lost, entitledThe Satanic Epic. Good friends have been kind enough to read through earlier drafts of this book: Lukas Erne, Indira Ghose, Elizabeth Kaspar, John Leonard, Richard Waswo. Many changes have resulted from their suggestions and vigilance. I trust the reader will remember that the errors and infelicities that remain are all my own achievement. I am also happy to be able to thank the staff at Lion Hudson for the invitation to write this book, and for their helpful patience in seeing it to completion. Many other debts must go unrecorded.The community of Milton scholars lives in a world of constant exchange, and I hope my friends and colleagues in that world will forgive any unacknowledged thefts they recognize. For those of you who may be coming to Milton for the first time, I wish you as much pleasure in the reading of this book as I have had in the writing of it.

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Introduction:

Blind Love

It is customary these days to begin a biography not with the hero’s birth, indispensable as that event is, but with a revealing and typical incident, one which quickly opens a window onto the life, and into the psyche, of the subject. I here violate the custom only slightly, since the representative moment I have chosen is not quite an incident but two lines of poetry about a dream. At the end of a sonnet in which Milton recounts a dream of his dead wife, whom he had never seen because they were married after his blindness became total, he writes:

But O as to embrace me she enclin’d, I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.

The lines have moved me on every reading since the first, when I was a young student. All the harsh, negative and often foolish things that are said or believed about Milton evaporate next to the felt intensity of these words. Frustrated love, the inability to reach what one most desires, the slight and touching note of selfpity at the inevitability of forever waking to see nothing, all these and many other feelings are suggested.Yet the lines, intensely personal as they are, conceal a learned allusion to Aeneas’s vision of his wife Creusa in Virgil, and the poem begins with an explicit reference to Euripides’ tragedyAlcestiswhich the heroic bride is brought back, in to her undeserving husband from the dead. Not being able to have what one desires is a standard topic in Petrarchan sonnets. This combination of profound emotion and alignment with great predecessor poets to express that emotion is characteristic of Milton at his best. Those who already know something about Milton will recognize that in beginning my story at this point, I have stacked the deck. Milton’s feelings about women are a perennial topic of often vicious, but mostly intelligent and rewarding, conversation. Eve, Dalila and a bizarre invented female called

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