Anna Beer - Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot

POET, PAMPHLETEER, AND PATRIOT

Anna Beer

For my mother, Margaret Beer,
and in memory of my father,
John Beer, 19221989,
and my grandmother,
Anna Beer, 19011942

For the ease of the reader, spelling and punctuation have been modernised throughout, with two exceptions. Titles are given in their original spellings, and the verb ending -eth, as in God giveth grace to the lowly, has been retained. Contractions have been expanded in the prose quotations but left in the poetry, to enable the reader to appreciate Miltons scansion. Much is lost, however, by modernisation. For a taste of the original spelling and punctuation visit http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading room/ .

The majority of translations of the Latin and Italian poetry are taken from John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, second edn, Longman, London, 1997. The majority of translations of the Latin prose works are taken from Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 195382. Where other translations are used, the source is provided in the endnote. When first mentioned, the Latin title of a work by Milton will always be given, but subsequently the English translation of the title will be used.

John Milton is one of the worlds greatest poets and writers. Born into the London of Shakespeare and dying in the London of Pepys, he became a dominant influence in English literature for more than two hundred years. Yet for all his achievements, the myth of the puritanical ascetic who hated women and took it on himself to justify his God has displaced the complex, erudite man who wrote those influential works and earned his place in the canon.

At the quatercentenary of his birth, it is time for a re-assessment of John Miltons life, work and times. The young John, who was brought up on the politically charged, sexually explicit works of the Latin and Greek writers, used that education to engage in the lively, at times vulgar, debates of his time, whether at Cambridge University or in London. The slightly older Milton, hovering on the fringes of the royal court, sought patronage, produced aristocratic amusements, and kept one eye on the lavish entertainments being staged at Whitehall by King Charles I, another eye on his own more radical political and religious agenda.

To see the young John Milton most clearly, one must go to his Latin writings. In this language, he could explore areas of life that were impossible to approach, impossible even to describe in his mother tongue. To read Miltons early Latin is to explore an emotional hinterland that would inform his later writing as much as the turbulent public events of his era. Above all, Latin was the medium of possibly the most significant personal relationship in Miltons life, that with Charles Diodati. Their friendship provoked some of Johns most joyful writing and culminated in a superb, crisis-driven exploration of poetry and sexuality.

Much like English today, Latin served as the language of intellectual debate and international diplomacy in Miltons time. To appreciate his mastery of it, and its role in his writing, is to understand that Milton operated on an international stage. That stage was both a violent one this was the era of the Thirty Years War, fragile religious settlements, and Oliver Cromwells ruthless foreign policy and an immensely stimulating one. Miltons extended travels in Italy were packed with glorious and enlightening experiences (he was neither the first nor the last Englishman to dream of a life in Tuscany), and indeed his most eloquent prose works, including his defence of the new English republic, were written in Latin and intended for a European readership.

For all this international dimension to his work and his life, Milton was born, brought up and constantly drawn back to one small part of the City of London. Despite all his social, political and literary ambitions, despite those enraptured travels in Italy, Milton never moved far from Bread Street, in the shadow of St Pauls Cathedral, and the house where he had grown up over his fathers business. But London offered a vibrant, if often dangerous, forum for Milton the writer. It was the seat of government, the eye of the religious storm, a melting pot of nationalities, and, above all, the primary producer and consumer of the new media: cheap print. Milton wrote some of his finest works from the City when it was gripped by war and regime change, and in his old age he survived persecution and poverty to produce his masterpiece, Paradise Lost, in part because of his familiarity with the Citys underground print and political networks.

For Milton was no mere observer of the crises besetting his city, his country, his continent. Eloquent theorist though he was, Milton never remained merely in the realm of abstraction. Not only did he live and work in a culture in which reading was for action, not in place of action, but he, unlike most other writers, was involved, day-by-day, in matters of state. Whether government servant or political prisoner, advocate of religious freedom or critic of monarchy, Milton learnt, because he had to learn, how to deal with censorship and intolerance, how to make his voice heard in the clamorous debates of his time. He was immersed in, and exploited, the rapidly changing, edgy, disreputable public print culture that was growing up around him, just as Shakespeare had been immersed in, and exploited, the new theatre world of Elizabethan London. Hard-hitting and groundbreaking prose works such as his Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce made Milton notorious in his own time, whilst his Areopagitica remains one of the most eloquent defences of a free press ever written. And Miltons late, great achievements become even more remarkable in this context. Paradise Lost, for example, was written from a position of great practical disadvantage, but continued Miltons passionate debate with his nation and his God, a debate which produced a striking body of work that has done much to define the values of the English political nation, and which had no small influence on the Founding Fathers in America.

To write the life of John Milton is thus to survey a century of unprecedented religious, political, social and cultural struggles, and to consider a writer enmeshed in, and fascinated by, those conflicts. Miltons genius lies in the extraordinary power and beauty with which he wrote from within this turmoil, and indeed wrote out of his own personal struggles which include his blindness, endured in an unforgiving, pre-industrial society. Throughout his life, he used his astounding learning to articulate and explore with passion and eloquence the great questions that troubled him and his contemporaries: What constitutes human liberty and how can it best be supported? What is the nature of good government and how can it be sustained? How can we understand the divine and each other? How can we find the strength to bear suffering and death? In reading Milton, therefore, we not only journey to a troubled and exhilarating past, but are challenged, as Milton challenged his readers in his own century, to consider those questions, and to provide some answers of our own.

Anna Beer
Oxford
1 August 2007