Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style

Milton's poetry is one of the glories of the English language, and yet it owes everything to Milton's widespread knowledge of other languages: he knew ten, wrote in four, and translated from five. In Milton's languages, John K. Hale first examines Milton's languagerelated arts in verse-composition, translations, annotations of Greek poets, Latin prose and political polemic, giving all relevant texts in the original and in translation. Hale then traces the impact of Milton's multilingualism on his major English poems. Many vexed questions of Milton studies are illuminated by this approach, including his sense of vocation, his attitude to print and publicity, the supposed blemish of Latinism in his poetry, and his response to his literary predecessors. Throughout this first full-length study of Milton's use of languages, Hale argues convincingly that it is only by understanding Milton's choice among languages that we can grasp where Milton's own unique English originated.

MILTON'S LANGUAGES

MILTON'S LANGUAGES The impact of multilingualism on style

JOHN K. HALE University of Otago

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521583534 © John K. Hale 1997 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1997 This digitally printed first paperback version 2005 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Hale, John K. Milton's languages: the impact of multilingualism on style / John K. Hale. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0 521 58353 5 (hardback) 1. Milton. John, 1608-1674 - Style. 2. Milton, John, 1608-1674 - Knowledge - Language and languages. 3. English language — Early modern, 1500—1700 Style. 4. Multilingualism — England. I. Title. PR3594.H35 1997 821'.4-dc20 96-44205 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-58353-4 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-58353-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-02237-8 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02237-1 paperback

For my family, with fondest love: Ken and Betty Hale (died iggo and Beatrice Hale Elizabeth Beatrice Rachel Hale Katharine Margaret Kenealey Hale and John David Francis Hale

Contents

Preface List of abbreviations

xi xiv

Introduction: Milton's languages in the context of renaissance multilingualism

i

P A R T ONE: M I L T O N ' S E X E R C I S I N G OF HIS LANGUAGES l

1

The multilingual self presented in Milton's Poems, 1645

9

2

The development and quality of Milton's multilingual verse

27

3

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language-choice

51

4

Milton's arts of language: translating and philology

67

5

Milton's Latin prose

82

Conclusion to part one: multilingualism in Milton's Latin prose

99

PART TWO: MULTILINGUALISM AND THE MAJOR ENGLISH POEMS

6

Latin and Milton's other languages in the style of Paradise Lost

105

7

Milton's languages and the voices of Paradise Lost

131

8 9

Multilingualism and epic Multilingualism and the style of temperance in Paradise Regained

10

Hebrew meets Greek in Samson Agonistes IX

146 165 180

x 11

Contents The impact of Milton's languages upon his mature English verse styles

Appendix: translating Milton's Latin poems into English Notes Bibliography General index Index ofpassages from Milton

194 203 208 236 242 244

Preface

The book's premises are threefold. First, because learning foreign languages is enjoyable, and Milton enjoyed doing so, my own enjoyment of language-learning gives a suitable angle of address to 'Milton's languages'. Secondly, while more languages are studied nowadays, Milton's ten included classical or extinct ones which are less studied in the English-speaking world; which means that readers of his English need help to recover what his mind was like in so far as it moved among his languages. Thus, thirdly, a study from the inside of its processes, rather than a mere assimilating of their product in the drab form of English footnotes, is timely. But what are my credentials for the undertaking, since nobody can know Milton's languages exactly to the same extent and in the same way as he did? My Greek and Latin are of long standing and reputable. My Italian is similar. Hebrew, I have had to learn for this project; which means a loss of disinterestedness, as well as the wine being new and raw. Is it only special pleading, nonetheless, to think my known incapacity equips me as well as competence would to enter into Milton's mental processes, the 'quick forge and working-house' of his polyglot versatility? One other credential should be mentioned. Like most students of Classics (Literae Humaniores) till this century, I was compelled to write Latin and Greek verses, in the manner of approved ancient models like Ovid or Euripides. I found this a barren exercise in itself. But it has left me with a vivid sense of how good Milton and a few others were in this arcane field of combat; and it has left me with a grateful willingness to explain what value can be found within the process of verse-composing. Composing is hard, for the remarkable reason that Virgil and Ovid and Horace purposely made it harder, by refining the norms of rhythm to reflect more clearly the underlying muscle of Latin in verse. Milton's success in these lists is not merely praiseworthy. It mattered so greatly in his milieu that it will be valued wrongly in ours unless emphasized. XI

xii

Preface

In a work on languages the problem of method, of how best to present them in translation, becomes acute. I give originals and translations, hoping that the reader will not plump for one or the other. I hope that instead the reader will move between the two. The translations of Milton are purposely drawn from several translators, including myself, so that the varieties (and defects) of translating can be felt on the pulse. An appendix illustrates the problem and my solution of it, for those who are interested. For the Bible, on the other hand, I keep to the King James Version. Modern versions may be more correct, but they are less resonant and less close to Milton's world and oracy. The Latin Bible poses a special problem: did Milton work exclusively from the Junius-Tremellius-Beza (Protestant) version, or did he move between that and a Vulgate? And in both cases, which printing did he favour? Even if this could be determined, I myself could not, through not having access to enough Bibles to decide the matter. Accordingly, I explain my choices at each point where they matter. The somewhat eclectic method of quotation, then, is meant to help readers stand away from any single version, so as to share my own excitement in following Milton's practice of the language-arts which he so esteemed, and applied to the needs of his many-sided life. With respect to languages he was both a theorist and a pragmatist. He was a user of them and a player amongst them. Because of this lifelong diversity of engagement with them, and because he played upon them as if they were musical instruments, we meet a Milton here who differs from current versions. The work harnesses most of the intellectual arts I have ever exercised. It seeks especially to combine the essentials of what I respect as enduring work on poetry, namely scholarship and criticism, together with a sufficiency of theory, inductively arrived at and pragmatically employed. The debts incurred in a work using many languages and many kinds of scholarship are likewise many, and I gladly acknowledge them. Outweighing even acknowledgement, though, is my gratitude to everyone who gave me time and help, and who implicitly or explicitly encouraged me. It has been a long road. Among them are: Agathe Thornton; Anthea Morrison and Ann Moss (Durham); Maurice Andrew and George Knight; Roger Collins; Robin Hankey, in fact the entire Classics Department of the University of Otago; the neo-Latin Seminars at Otago; my colleagues and pupils in

Preface

xiii

the English Department of Otago; Kevin Lee (Sydney); Frank Woodhouse, Philip J. Ford, Helena M. Shire, Ingrid Smets, Zweder von Martels and Philip Hardie (Cambridge); Gordon Campbell (Leicester); Jozef IJsewijn (Louvain); James Binns (York); Roy Flannagan (Ohio); John Carey, Dennis Burden, Don MacKenzie and Tony Nuttall (Oxford); Harold Jenkins; Tom Corns (North Wales); David Reid, Neil Keeble and Robin Sowerby (Stirling); Michael Spiller (Aberdeen); Roger Green (St Andrews); Stella Revard (Southern Illinois); Paul Stanwood (British Columbia); Stuart and Jean Strachan; Stuart Sellar; Leo Miller; my original teachers at Oxford, especially Eric Gray, John Gould, E. R. Dodds and Eduard Fraenkel; and many more. I thank conference and seminar audiences who helped me improve work in progress, in Dunedin, Christchurch, Perth, Delhi, Vallombrosa, London, Bangor, Stirling, Vancouver and San Diego. And I thank the editors and readers for the Cambridge University Press, especially Linda Bree. Not only did I receive help from these good and great people, but, as the formula rightly has it, the mistakes which remain are my very own. In a work covering several languages, centuries and fields of scholarship, there will surely be mistakes. I hope readers will alert me to such, perhaps privately however, rather than with a trumpet in the market-place. Some portions of the book have been printed in a fuller form by journals, especially Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies and Renaissance Studies. I

thank their editors for confidence and advice: nothing is perfect, especially first versions. Chapter 3 in particular is substantially the same as printed in Milton in Italy. Contexts, Imagesy Contradictions, edited by Mario Di Cesare for Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, and I thank MRTS

for permission to use the material here. I am grateful to the staff of libraries in which I have worked for book: especially the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; Cambridge University Library; the Bodleian Library; the British brary; the Library of the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Library of the University of Illinois.

the the Lithe

I dedicate the finished enterprise to my family, the dead as well as the living. One and all, in varied ways, they enabled me to conceive this work and finish it. Dunedin, University of Otago

Abbreviations

Gordon Campbell (ed.), John Milton. The Complete Poems (London: Everyman, 1980) Carey and Fowler John Carey and Alastair Fowler (ed.), The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968) The Works of John Milton, General editor Frank ColWorks Allen Patterson, The Columbia Edition, 18 vols. + 2 index vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-40) Darbishire Helen Darbishire (ed.), The Poetical Works ofJohn Milton, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1952) EpFam Epistolarum Familiarium, Milton's 'Familiar Letters', as printed in ColWorks vol. xn The Faerie Queene Merritt Y. Hughes (ed.), John Milton. Complete Poems Hughes and Major Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1957) A Greek-English Lexicon, Compiled by Henry George LSJ Liddell and Robert Scott, revised by Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, with a supplement (Oxford University Press, 1968) MacKellar Walter MacKellar (ed.), The Latin Poems of John Milton, Cornell Studies in English 15 (New Haven: Yale University Press for Cornell University, 1930) The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2 OED vols. (Oxford University Press, 1971) P. W. Glare (ed.), The Oxford Latin Dictionary (OxOxLD ford University Press, 1982) William Riley Parker, Milton. A Biography, 2 vols. Parker (Oxford University Press, 1968) Proceedings of the British Academy PBA Paradise Lost PL Campbell

List of abbreviations PR RES Samson Variorum

YPW

xv

Paradise Regained Review of English Studies Samson Agonistes Douglas Bush (ed.), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), vol. 1 Don M. Wolfe et al. (eds.), 8 vols., Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82)

INTRODUCTION

Milton's languages in the context of renaissance multilingualism

Multilingualism: the ability to use three or more languages, either separately or in various degrees of code-mixing . . . different languages are used for different purposes, competence in each varying according to such factors as register, occupation, and education.1 It is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton's formal education emphasized languages, especially Latin and Greek, and further that he practised and applied his languages (some ten of them) lifelong, in the course of reading or translating or composing. It is less often asked what exactly his possession of languages meant to him in the vicissitudes of a busy life, whether as ends in themselves or for access to texts in their original, and whether as means to thought or as resources of stylistic choice. These questions deserve a sustained exploration. To supply it, we should first see Milton in the most pertinent context, namely renaissance multilingualism. Here is a humanist who wrote poems in four languages (Latin, Greek and Italian as well as his mother-tongue) and whose voluminous prose is almost half in Latin; a lifelong polyglot whose writings evince knowledge of three Semitic languages and further modern languages. How far does Milton typify his milieu, how far does he transcend or ignore or flout it? A provisional sense can be gained by situating him in relation to a number of key linguistic or languages-related issues. These include: (a) the Questione della Lingua, the question whether (or when) to write in Latin or the mother-tongue; (b) languages as access to the springs of religion and thought for the Christian humanist; (c) the practice and norms of humanist education; (d) related broader questions of Imitatio2 and intertextuality. Imitatio, here, means 'emulation', not slavish copying. In order to emulate the exemplary poets and thinkers of the multilingual past, the renaissance humanist strove to use their thought as texture without perpetrating pastiche. The resulting intertextuality is the index of

2

Introduction

the emulation but also its criterion; that is to say, while the ancients are a felt presence, recognized in diction and allusion and much else, the humanist has failed utterly if the reader's attention is held by nothing but the debts. Afifthlanguage-issue is more speculative: (e) the question, was the past to which languages gave access more of a burden than an opportunity to the humanist, leading one home or into exile, and as double vision, was it a source of curse or blessing? Finally, (f) was Milton's attitude to languages typical or exceptional in his age, so that we may perceive the purposes for which he acquired and maintained them? LATIN AND THE VERNACULARS

Latin was the sine qua non of an educated person. It was a triple gateway: to preferment, to the intellectual life of antiquity, and to active membership of the European intelligentsia. Nonetheless, the grandeur of Rome's long history made its language potentially overwhelming. The dilemma of the renaissance humanist was, how to absorb and exploit antiquity through its languages without being dwarfed by these languages' axiomatic, definitive greatness. Would one succeed better by writing in Latin, the actual words of the ancients, or in the mothertongue? And if in Latin, which Latin? Cicero's alone, or something more mixed? Or if in the mother-tongue, how should one purge it of a grossness felt when comparing it with Roman exemplars? Moreover, which version of it was to be used, in times when regional variations stood out more than later when nation-states had made vernaculars more uniform? Since the issues impinged on different populations in different ways and at different epochs, I summarize the crucial developments chronologically so as to place Milton's individual resolution of the dilemma. This has to be done in a European as much as in an English context, for three reasons: internationalism inheres in language-study; it inheres peculiarly in the choices of a renaissance multilinguist; and certainly Milton himself saw the question in European terms. I begin my necessarily cursory account with Italy. Italy first confronted (and so named) the Questione della Lingua, the language-question. From 1300 to 1550, from Dante through Landino and Bembo to Ariosto, Italians argued whether or when to use their volgare. Italians spent time, talent and energy on the Questione. One should not oversimplify the range of their positions, nor ironize their choice of Latin prose to explain their choice of Italian for verse. What counts is,

Introduction

3

that despite renaissance Italy's having so many, vying vernaculars the vernacular was preferred, even as early as Dante. As for Milton, since in general he knew Italian literature and culture intimately, and Ariosto is the particular predecessor whom he cites3 in making his own declaration for the mother-tongue, he may have known more of the Italian debate. A modern analogy helps clarify the issue. It resembles that posed for postcolonial nation-states, of the 'cultural cringe', which is antipodeans' metaphor for the 'cultural inferiority complex' which they may feel towards the older and richer culture of Britain or Europe. Henry James felt a version of this, the complex fate of being an American drawn to Europe's older culture yet repelled by it. Similarly, the sheer dominance of Latin culture for many renaissance poets might arouse anxiety and a concern with positioning, to accept and exploit their complex fate. Every generation of the Renaissance had to think the Questione through, so gravitational did the pull of Latin remain till after Milton. It was Latin which enabled the humanist to study and teach anywhere; Erasmus in England, Buchanan in France. No humanist ever voted for the vernacular at the expense of Latin's portability, and we usually notice a sense of sacrifice or regret about the choice of one language over another for one's most important work. In Italy, at any rate, the struggle over the Questione was long and difficult, and even to some extent precarious. In France, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of the French language as not merely one possible and less esteemed option for poetic utterance. In a struggle that was shorter than that of Italian, but still an agonized one, French in the sixteenth century supplanted Latin for verse. Even though as in Italy the regional tongues were still far apart, the Pleiade movement centring on Dorat, Du Bellay and Ronsard achieved a French prose and verse which settled the Questione permanently in favour of a purified vernacular. Yet the supplanting was not done without loss and paradox. The loss and paradox may actually interest us more than the outcome. Because we know Latin died, there is the danger of becoming Whig historians intoning deterministically over its demise. Buchanan, who wrote in Latin and could not have joined in as francophone, worked amicably with the Pleiadistes. Du Bellay called French his wife and Latin his mistress. He says, 'The one is beautiful, the other pleases more', perhaps because he is less tied to Latin than to the mother-tongue. He expressed this, and many of his best thoughts on the topic, in Latin, no doubt to savour the paradoxes of interplay between the medium and

4

Introduction

message. One such paradox is that in representing themselves as the first champions of classical standards for literature in French the Pleiadistes belittled their own originality. Paradox itself pleases, and dignifies the linguistic self. And 'the rivalry of the two [languages] intensifies their linguistic and cultural interaction...' so that 'read from inside, as it were, the texts of the humanists and their vernacular counterparts seem to draw from their very uncertainties, from their protean shifts of style and intellectual context, an unfailing supply of colour and energy5.4 In other countries, there were other outcomes. In Germany, 'Latin was more easily accepted as the main language of culture and intellectual life. Many Germans, unlike the French, considered their native tongue to be barbarous.'5 In general, the smaller the country, or the less self-confident the language-community, the readier it was to talk and think in Latin and thus tap into wider resources. The English position was both more and less clear than the French. It had established its vernacular by 1500 as the language of law and government, and by 1540 of the church as well, supplanting both Latin and French. Yet if publishing in Latin be the yardstick, it was on the increase until the Civil War. Especially does this hold for the publishing of Latin verse, from the two university presses. J. W. Binns has shown6 how Latin verse was written at university not solely as an exercise but to gain attention and consequent preferment. Unlike his friend Charles Diodati, unlike his older friend Alexander Gil, unlike Herbert and Marvell and Crashaw and Cowley, Milton (though not averse to fame) wrote no Latin verse for the teeming anthologies on royal occasions. He seems to have rejected this, along with other career paths, in the 1630s. We can speak of 'rejection' because he wrote much Latin verse, and kept it, yet none was published though the means and fashion would prompt this. We cannot say for sure why this talent was not to be shown on a wider stage in those years, while his English verse was. But we may infer that it seemed not to belong to his search for his major vocation, and perhaps that he did not want the display of his Latin talent to serve Cambridge in the years of Archbishop Laud's predominance. (I return to this in chapter 2.) In 1628 at Cambridge, if not before, Milton addressed the Questione, 'At a vacation Exercise in the College'. As he put it in Poems, 1645, 'The Latin speeches ended, the English thus began: - Hail, native language . . .' (Hughes, p. 30). There follows a 54-line digression, or rather invocation, asking help from the personified mother-tongue. Although Latin is not criticized nor rejected, he is very explicitly turning away from

Introduction

5

Latin, towards English, for help with serious future subjects: 'some graver subject' (line 30), such as a glimpse of the gods in heaven (33-46) or 'heroes old5 (47). The fact that the passage is a digression, and is bilingual on the subject of a bilinguaPs choice, shows what is on his mind at the age of twenty-one. The moment is prophetic of Milton's eventual, mature choice of poetic tongue. Nonetheless, he continued to write in Latin verse after Cambridge. He experienced on his pulse the value of Latin for poetry and other purposes when he went to Italy in 1638. If he had been disposed to reject Latin as too Laudian a medium (contrast Crashaw), it opened different doors for him in Italy, such that he rapidly resurrected his poemata and composed more. But much latelier in the private academies of Italy, whither I was favoured to resort [I perceived] that some trifles I had in memory . .. met with acceptance above what was looked for, and other things which I had shifted in scarcity of books and conveniences to patch up amongst them, were received with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps . . .{Reason of Church Government, Hughes, pp. 668-9).

He says it was this encouragement, received for his Latin verses in Italy, which clarified if it did not engender his sense of vocation, and its sense of English as its direction and medium. It was in Italy that he finally gave up Latin for major verse, doing so from a position of strength. With the Italians' own example all round him it was one of the most deliberate and responsible choices even he ever made: he knows what he is giving up, namely the chance to speak in poetry to his Italian friends and to the intelligentsia of Europe, since English to them was the unknown tongue of a small offshore people. Paradox invigorates his Latin verse renunciation of Latin verse: Omnia non licet uni, Non sperasse uni licet omnia.7 (One person can't do everything, nor even hope to do everything.) Moreover, paradox is not all, because this is a counterfactual wish that one could do everything, and could in this case hold both native-language and international audiences rapt. The thought of doing something for his country merges with doing it for glory, which however is a circumscribed glory. The poem is a farewell to more than its subject, his closest friend: I shall argue later that he lays Latin verse-making itself in Diodati's grave.

6

Introduction

This process of choice during his twenties and thirties will be explored further in chapter 3. Already, though, we sense its dialectical quality, the twists and turns, the reassessment of pros and cons. Before leaving Italy Milton has chosen his medium by thinking what is his most-desired audience, and then the rest follows by decorum. He chose Latin or English accordingly thereafter: he chose Latin for European or pedagogic consumption, English for the History of Britain. The choice of tongue reveals fundamentals about the particular act of thought. Though that is obvious, in these days of reading-in-translation it is readily forgotten. Let me make it explicit. If choice was Milton's great theme, and 'reason was but choosing', it included language-choice. Languagechoice was both precondition and part of the utterance. Time and again, he makes a theme out of his language-choice. He does it for purposes which we can, for the moment, summarize as sense of occasion, mimesis and paradox. LANGUAGES FOR READING AND FOR OTHER USES

Granted then that renaissance humanists were ipso facto bilingual, and experienced the cognate tensions of choice when composing, in their reading most were in fact /m/Mingual. As my epigraph has it, they possessed the 'ability to use three or more languages, either separately or in various degrees of code-mixing . . . [so that] different languages are used for different purposes, competence in each varying according to such factors as register, occupation, and education'. Obviously Greek even more than Latin fed their obsession with classical antiquity, by giving direct (not shaky because derivative) access to the authors who had civilized Rome itself. Milton's Greek was very high-powered: witness that he made emendations in the text of Euripides which modern scholarship has confirmed and accepted. But Christian humanists, who sought pietas litterata ('learned piety' or 'educated faith')8 for themselves or influence on the Reformation at large, had to have equal access to the three 'sacred languages' - Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The first two of these were the languages of the two Testaments. Greek was furthermore the tongue of the Septuagint, and Latin of the Vulgate: both these translations had (and retain) special standing in biblical hermeneutics. Biblical scholars in large numbers, others in smaller numbers, acquired the three languages for use together on the Bible.

Introduction

7

Milton was among them, but acquired also Aramaic and Syriac. Aramaic is the original language of some later writings of the Old Testament, not very different from biblical Hebrew.9 Syriac is the language of an influential transmission of the New Testament.10 Here, Milton's language-acquisition exceeds the ordinary. His reading knowledge of the five classical languages was most purposive, pursuing alike the austerities of literary scholarship and the countless applications to religion (which in turn embraced both spirituality and controversy). More still, the languages of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem were not separate. Latin absorbed much Greek. Hebrew and Aramaic entered Greek in the Septuagint and (differently) in the New Testament. All march on into the Vulgate's Latin. The three languages interact, kaleidoscopic and specific in effect. Milton moves freely among the interactions, for example using Septuagint Greek within his own Greek psalm version. The wealth and complexity of interactions among these original tongues gives him powerful choice. Italian, to him the most interesting of the vernaculars, worked to similar effect but extended his choice still wider. Besides standing closest to Latin, for instance in pronunciation, Italian had most renewed its poetic and expressive resources from Latin. Milton not only wrote Italian sonnets, but learnt to impart a Latin density and gravitas to his English verse style from the work of Delia Casa and Tasso. Milton also went back to the first champion of the volgare, Dante, for intertextuality and architecture alike. Just as Dante had let Virgil and Latin shape his narrative and texture respectively, so did Milton, albeit differently (see chapters 6-8). Italian was thus fundamental to his vocation as a poet. Italian gave a rationale and confidence to this vocation. Beyond these tongues, Milton also read French.11 He may have spoken French on his travels through France, but the best visible evidence of his using French is provided by a number of entries from French historians which he made in his Commonplace Book. Spanish was attributed to him by an Italian friend, Francini.12 German or Dutch have been ascribed to him by modern writers, along with Old English. The last-named may well be wishful thinking. In principle, one might wish for the multilingual poet to have entered into his mother-tongue's earliest recorded form. In particular, too, Miltonists have wished to relate his Satan to that of the Genesis 'B'. Evidence is sparse, but there is some. In the History of Britain he misunderstands passages of Latin chroniclers which a knowledge of Old English would have clarified for him.13 As for German, there is only slight evidence for

8

Introduction

his knowing it. Better evidence records that he was read to in Dutch.14 His languages may, then, amount to ten: English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch. Impressed, as we should be, we should then ask: do his ten languages known, and four composed in, have any parallel in his world? They do. Language-acquisition and language-display both made part of that world. Witness the Oxbridge anthologies, honouring royalty with multilingual tributes. These centred on Latin with Greek, but further flaunted more outre accomplishments, like Turkish and Persian. Witness, too, such display-pieces as are found in the writings of the muchtravelled Thomas Coryat - Italian verses flattering James's queen. Precisely because these Englishmen's displays are gauche or fulsome or eccentric, if not all three, they make Milton look abstemious and judicious, in that for Poems, 1645 he prepares poems in only four of his languages, thoughtfully balanced into two pairings (see chapter 1). More serious multilinguists still found it worth writing in several different languages. Naturally enough, since continental multilinguists lived among overlapping language-areas, they were more numerous, and more serious about multilingual praxis than the English showmen and dilettantes. Thus when it is recorded of Elizabeth Jane Weston, who settled in Prague, that she was fluent in German, Czech and Italian as well as the more usual English, Latin and French, we would guess that she had occasion to use all of them, in life as in her poetry.15 The Dutch, then as now, excelled. Thus the poet P. C. Hooft brought together at meetings in his castle a distinguished company who composed each in a different preferred language. 'Barlaeus wrote almost exclusively in Latin; Hooft mainly in Dutch, but also . . . in Latin, French and Italian.' Constantijn Huygens 'wrote not only in Dutch but also in Latin, French and Italian and occasionally in Spanish, Greek, English and German'. A comparable German polyglot is Georg Rudolph Weckherlin: he wrote a cycle of poems in four languages- German, French, English and Latin.16 Moreover, we know the varied purposes for which some continental multilinguals used their languages. Forster (pp. 39—40) movingly describes how Hooft tried to express his grief for the death of Brechje Spiegels by writing her epitaph in six different languages; not satisfied with any, he reverted to Dutch, the mother-tongue for the simple essence of his praise for lost love. Equally, the seriousness of Huygens and Weckherlin is sensed in their self-restraint, their awareness that the many tongues are not of equal standing for the poet using them. Precisely this, again, emerges from the comparison of these notable

Introduction

9

continental polyglot poets with Milton. They are differently polyglot, and purposefully so. The multilingual reading or writing comes from within them, not from externalities of display or coterie. And just as the needs of his intellectual life had made Milton already of this serious, pragmatic class of multilinguist, so political need would have done so. It is symptomatic that Weckherlin's successor as Secretary for the Foreign Tongues in Whitehall was Milton himself. His activities as a translator or composer of state papers is not a focus of this study, but his readiness to do such things for the Parliament in his country's long crisis typifies - as much as his patriotism or ideology - his kind of multilingualism. THE PRACTICE AND NORMS OF HUMANIST EDUCATION

Humanist education was grounded in the ancient tongues but also in the principles and practice of ancient rhetoric. Because Latin was begun young, composition in particular would begin in Latin (and then Greek) as soon as in English. To compose Latin verse was second nature to such as Marvell and Milton. In the case of Marvell it is even possible that where his lines exist in both Latin and English he composed them in Latin first;17 and though we cannot check this for Milton, the education they underwent would make the budding humanist more at home in Latin for some purposes than in the mother-tongue. Latin was the medium of instruction as well as its content, and the work was oral as much as written - indeed increasingly so, as pupils progressed up the school and on to university. As formal education proceeded they did more and more discrete things with their Latin. The comparison today would be with a country such as India, where 'English-Medium5 on a school's front door is a great selling-point, and English is perceived as the avenue to almost every professional career. This Latin education was largely for the sake of developing proficiency in rhetoric. Rhetoric included both creative writing and dramatic performance in Latin, giving the pupil a command of topics, figures, levels of style, stances towards subject and audience, and a sense of audience, along with knowledge of a pantheon of exemplary ancient exponents. The lack of division (curricular or theoretical) between poetry and rhetoric, since both alike were persuasive eloquence, enabled poetic speech to be rhetorical and oratory to be poetic, at first in Latin but really in whatever language was being used. All this Milton absorbed - much like everyone who underwent the

io

Introduction

training. When later in life he conducted controversy, he used all the familiar methods in the familiar manner. I do not share modern misgivings about Milton's rhetoric as excessive, since polemic was (and is) polemical. The aim of lawyers, for example, is to win cases, and of politicians to win votes; and if personal abuse helps, so be it. Assuredly, the force of rhetoric was one of the most influential, if not the single most influential, part of the legacy of antiquity in the Renaissance. So when Milton waxed polemical, Latin became for him, not a musical instrument, but a cosh. Another emphasis of his language-learning needs to be recaptured here. To learn a language, the student was made not only to translate from original language to target language, and the reverse, but even to go round a circle of languages, finally back to the original.18 Such retranslating is hard but not stultifying (unless one is gifted or cursed with photographic memory): the pre-existence of an authoritative original provides a check and model for how one is to think one's way into the language, its thought-forms and idioms. The value of the 'circle' method is that where words and ornaments are bound to be left behind, the thought is seized, ready to be expressed in whatever tongue. Paradoxically, then, so verbal an exercise trains one in skills of thought, as much as skills of words. Certainly all Milton's psalm versions show his grasp of the thought, first and foremost. Then, as paraphrast, he incorporates words of other translators, or makes up his own expansions. These five-finger exercises gave to him the freedom of a great many ways of thinking and creating, albeit not more than to others who had had the same training. But as he outgrew such exercises of pedagogy he did not outgrow care for the words themselves; far from it, for his verse-translating moves towards literalism. He is not content after all with giving only the bald sense of a Psalm or a Horace ode: he presses English to a variously conceived maximum of fidelity. In this, whether we like the product or loathe it, he outgoes his contemporaries (see chapter 4). He is heeding Horace's topos of the 'fidus interpres', 'faithful interpreter', by coming to favour its 'fidus' element. This has a bearing on the text-studded texture of Paradise Lost it makes the poem sometimes odd, more often sublime, and always distinctive (see chapters 6 and 7). IMITATIO AND INTERTEXTUALITY

By practising Imitatio, the renaissance humanist sought to build something original and personal from inherited materials, and to do it by

Introduction

11

methods and in media which the prior tradition had refined. Even when inventing a new genre or approaching a totally new subject, one went back to the known and proven exemplars; for the Romans had done likewise, resorting to the Greeks and to earlier Romans. One 'stood on the shoulders of the giants'. Standing there, one was not dwarfed if the personal contribution was original enough and expressed with skill enough. After all, Horace's new genres owed much to his inheritance, and Horace was one of the giants. Milton never questioned this set of ideas, but perhaps the languageissue implicitly did. If the mother-tongues could achieve Imitatio, would they not achieve it actually better than Latin could, in that their very rawness or their impurities presented a challenge to a bold spirit? And did they not offer greater scope for originality, right down at the cellular level, of words, phrases, lines of verse - the levels where poetry is alive or most dead? Moreover, to do great things for the mother-tongue was to do them for the mother-land, wherever (as in Milton's case) language and nation coincided. Yet as we have seen, the humanists went on writing in Latin for some purposes. Imitatio worked variously. Though the vernaculars were increasingly favoured for the highest endeavours, like poetry, some ambivalence lingered. It can be seen in actions which have a dash of compensation to them. So, for example, Milton writing in Latin sometimes signed himself 'Of London' (not the expected patriotic 'Englishman'). This was either to parallel the local more than national affiliation of his Italian addressees (their campanilismo, attachment to their own bell-tower), or else to mimic 'Roman', the name of a city and empire but not country. Or perhaps he had both motives, but at any rate he used Latin to play an Italian role and aspiration. To give a later example, when he was in government employ, drafting and revising letters to foreign powers, he fought a lone battle for classical Latin phraseology (and lost it).19 We do not hear of him, as we do of Ariosto, that he tried to w/dearn his Latin verse skill. A clear pride in his Latin performances stands out in his publishing. Choice of languages for Imitatio resulted in complexities, paradoxes, changes and revisions of mind within the clear main current flowing away from Latin. 'The texts of the humanists and their vernacular counterparts seem to draw from their very uncertainties, from their protean shifts of style and intellectual context, an unfailing supply of colour and energy.'20 So it was with Milton also. The present study, by addressing all his languages rather than giving automatic primacy to his

12

Introduction

English, gives the inside story of his many-sided response to the challenges of Imitatio. For an example, let us take intertextuality. This is precisely the aspect of neo-Latin poetry which deters and baffles us, because the degree of verbal allusiveness to the ancients either seems servile or vanishes in translation. It is time that literary theory rescued it, as being the most intertextual poetry known to Europe. Intertextuality works at such a local level that it is the nuts and bolts of Imitatio: in the feeling of palimpsest in individual words, phrases and lines of verse, the poetic texture honours the ancient world and the post-Roman reception. One can create such palimpsest more readily in Latin, by using Virgil's own words, and phrases, or even whole lines.21 But therefore the task is harder in a romance vernacular, and still harder in English. Does one then do what is harder, or what can be more complete? It is not, or at least it was not, a foregone conclusion. Buchanan, as much as Milton, chose with integrity, when he continued to write (both prose and verse) in Latin. It was that integrity which enabled Milton to read and use Buchanan.22 From my own perspective I see Milton as choosing what gave him the more options. English gave him almost all the options which Latin gave, and some which Latin could not. As this is one of the main thrusts of the present study, I summarize and explain it straightaway. To summarize, first, imitating in Latin posed one dilemma, while imitating in English posed another. Using Latin words and metres to emulate Roman exemplars like Virgil, Ovid, Horace, he would so readily call into view their words that too much might show through the palimpsest; not necessarily dwarfing him, but obscuring his own sense or distracting from it (like a simile whose vehicle crushes its tenor). The challenge was to ensure that his thought commanded more attention than did the words or allusions. Theory, too, might cramp one's style. Latin composition was supposed to achieve copia (expressive abundance), by means of amplijicatio (apposite expansion of one's theme). Much neo-Latin verse, and Milton's own earlier specimens of it, moved sluggishly because - what with the aid of dictionaries, thesauri and vocabulary-books to facilitate the copia - it systematically repeated its thought in the name of elegant variation. Even Buchanan, whose Latin can be very succinct on occasion, prefers amplitude in his celebrated psalm versions. Reading a neo-Latin writer whose sole strength is copia is like eating a meal of marshmallows. Composing in English produced the reverse dilemma. In English, Milton could not summon up Virgil or others so easily or casually,

Introduction

13

because he could not use so many Latin-derived words within English. The task was apparently far harder than in Latin. Yet Milton gains the option to foreground the thought and not the words, or the interaction of thoughts with words, and both options enable an interaction of infinite variety. The more stringent needs of English Imitatio were, finally, more liberating. Moreover, whereas words may fail to evoke, names will probably do so. This is among the reasons why Milton's use of names for allusion, though splendid and apt in his Latin, carries greater weight in his English. Classical names in Lycidas simply stand out more than they can in the Epitaphium Damonis.

Milton is 'playing5 among his languages. He does it all the time, with increasing force and point. Latin is a palimpsest of Greek, but a vernacular may be one of both, to which may be added Hebrew and the romance vernaculars and whatever else English had then gone to for its wordstock (older English, Celtic). The same holds for names, allusions, thoughts and their interactions. It is in English that Milton can choose connotation most precisely and richly. Thereby he can direct the reader's attention with authority; that is, with a whole multilingual and multicultural cloud of witnesses, and yet without loss of clarity. It is a very purposeful playing; but still a spirit of play is felt. What every English writer does willy-nilly, Milton does to an extreme, the extreme of his mature high style. There, he works most significantly, yet not solely, by Latinism. MULTIPLE VISION AND THE SINGLE MIND

So far the Questione della Lingua has been discussed as if it were essentially similar for all within a time and place. In a paper to the Copenhagen Neo-Latin Congress, however, Ann Moss23 contested this, arguing that a deeply personal, sometimes anxious dimension was entailed by the fact of bilingualism. She supported this by the modern distinction between 'compound' and 'coordinate' bilingualism. In thefirst,the two languages are 'learnt in the same context and are more or less interdependent', while in the second they are 'learnt separately and are more or less independent'. She argued that Du Bellay's form of bilingualism was the second, and that it caused anxiety because he felt more gap between his two languages than was healthy. Further, she argued that because Montaigne as a child had been subjected by his father to the bizarre experiment of learning to speak Latin before French (with amazing

14

Introduction

subterfuges to prevent the boy acquiring French on the sly) Montaigne emerged with a double vision of everything under the sun. I find it implausible to think of any humanist, let alone a French one, as a 'coordinate' bilingual, and certainly not Milton, for whom his languages merged and meshed both when learning and then later when writing. Be all that as it may, I take from Moss's thesis the point that humanists differ at the core in terms of the Questione; and that they did not need to choose once and for all (especially as Latin was their 'mistress'!) Thus thoughts about the relations of self and other, and the possibility of separate linguistic selves or at least personae, are very usefully brought to focus by her hypothesis. Do Milton's languages suggest how he thought, how he viewed himself through languages, where he was at home, what humanist roles he felt equipped to play (or avoid)? He was, surely, in the main anyway, 'compound' and at-home. The latter finding makes Milton ordinary, not visionary or very modern; not very like Montaigne, but a citizen of multilingual sectarian Europe. But the idea of his being a compound multilingual needs probing. Precisely because he could think in Latin or English, or both or neither, he cared about their differences and limits, and about those of his other languages. He will emerge from a later chapter as a tireless experimenter with translation, seeking or pushing its limits. He asks, like the French humanists, what is a 'fidus interpres'? And no wonder. If the biblical part of his inheritance made him incline to prize the gist above the original styling (lumping), his humanism inclined him to prize difference (splitting again). A continual intimate dialectic is unfolded, corresponding to two cultural poles of his being. Languagequestions generally, as well as the Questione more acutely, represent Milton's address to the philosophical dilemma (part of the Fall perhaps) of the One and the Many. By now we are examining issues which involve more than languages. Here is another. Harold Bloom exempted Milton, alone, from the 'anxiety of influence'. Influences there were, but he coped with them or used them to advantage. Linguistically, however, Milton did evince some anxiety. He avoided French for some reason. He was anxious about language-choice, about the discourtesy of abusing the Pope in Latin to Italian friends, about the long delay in beginning the great promised poem, about the correctness of his own and others' Latin. I surmise he knew some of these were matters of fact not opinion, within his chosen professionalism. More important, I am led by studying his multilingualism to an

Introduction

15

increased sense of his emulation of one predecessor more than others, namely Dante. Dante came early in the history of the Questione and decided it for others than himself: Milton came late, and had it easier. Dante wrote in Latin about the Tightness of the volgare: so did Milton. Dante in his greatest poem included passages in other languages, and Milton wrote in four. In the Divina Commedia Dante Latinized his Italian poem from top to bottom - from the inclusion of Virgil as his guide and master, to the coining of words direct from Latin, to quotation of much liturgical and scriptural Latin, not to mention his infinite gradations of interaction, including coining. Milton Latinized in some of these and in many other ways. An austere playing among languages, and a strenuous desire thereby to teach about faith, morals and the cosmos itself, are fundamental to both poets and to few others. Among its other objectives, then, our study will argue that Dante as multilingual gave much to Milton. Almost anything about Dante's languages will suggest lines of enquiry into Milton's. Here is the equiponderant multilingual ego whom Milton, in his vernacular poems, is emulating. TYPICAL OR EXCEPTIONAL?

It emerges that in the main Milton was typical of his time, in the sense of being touched by widespread renaissance contentions. He responded to all the main themes and issues of that age, including the ones which centred on languages or related to them. At times, indeed, he was a quite ordinary man of his time, as with his controversializing or his Greek verses. Yet he was altogether extraordinary where the contentions touched 'a fine spirit to fine issues', and in concluding I shall dwell on that spirit as revealed in his language-arts and their uses. Languages grant access for their reader to intellectual and spiritual diversity. Milton seized his chances, in an all-round way worthy of humanist aspiration. Languages in use release the speaker or writer into new roles, and a modified self. Milton relished this release, at times for its own sake, often later to play a series of humanist roles. Surveying the number of his languages and of the genres in which he wrote (and not forgetting sub-genres like satire and insult within his major work), I infer that he relished the entering by his languages into as many personae as possible. They show he shared the renaissance eagerness for versatility. He was indefatigable and thrifty in his languages. He kept up his philology and languages and their arts, and applied them all somewhere

16

Introduction

in his life. Indeed, he did this to an exceptional extent, and with exceptional diversity and all-round competence. He stands out less in any one language-art than for the number of them and for the standard he maintained. When Milton first showed interest in language-options he invented a new version of language-choice, in a striking multilingual gesture. About 1628 he switched from performing his Latin prose oration for Christ's College (Prolusion VI) into English verse, moving from acceptance of an imposed tongue to explicit choosing of another.24 He thereby made a statement about his languages, and about himself; a statement about his range of choice, not to mention a prophetic juxtaposing of the two genres which would create his contemporary reputation — Latin oratorical prose and English verse. So it continued. Whenever afterwards he wrote a poem in one of his foreign languages, to the other things which decorum required him to match together, such as subject, style, occasion, audience and stance, he added the choice of tongue. He had permanently enlarged his repertoire of ways to achieve decorum. At least during his apprenticeship, he could get nearer to the exemplars by literally speaking their language. Later, his relationship to them and to his languages altered: rather than inhabiting their languages, he domiciled them in his own. They are what gives his English much of its distinction, in both senses of 'distinction'. So here is the further and final option for his decorum, adopted from a position of multilingual strength. Consequently, the study of his multilingualism and its associated language-arts initiates new enquiries for us. It provides fresh evidence on existing ones. By making us heed the multilingual voice in the three great English poems, it defamiliarizes them. The more aware one is of the variety of Milton's language-knowledge and language-skills, the more meaning one finds within his writings, in whichever language. There is little loss of existing meanings. But the ensuing enquiries should help to restore and uphold meanings which were more apparent to Milton's original readers than can be the case now. Whether or not the reader agrees with all the interpretations offered now, I offer them as the kind of meaning which can be retrieved by philological scholarship.

PART

ONE

Milton's exercising of his languages

CHAPTER I

The multilingual selfpresented in Milton's

Poems, 1645

In 1645 Milton had reached the notional 'mid-point5 of his life.1 A small tradition exists of poems describing- or composed a t - a poet's mid-point en route to the biblical lifespan of three score years and ten. Chief among these is Dante's beginning to the Divine Comedy. 6nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita', 'midway in the journey of our life'. This may have been in Milton's mind, as it certainly was for Longfellow and Updike later, in presenting himself for the first time to a general public by name as a poet. Hitherto, when he had published poems in print, they were mostly contributions to anthologies. In the case ofA Masque (1637) his name does not even appear in the credits. In the printing ofEpitaphiumDamonis (1640) his name remained thickly veiled, as 'I. M.'2 In 1645, previous named publication had been of prose only. What is the significance, then, of the mid-point 'statement' which he makes by putting his full name to these multilingual poems, in that form and at that time? Two views dominate the debate about Milton's action. Biographers see an intent to launder his public image, as if the 'presenting' mattered more than the 'self'.3 That is, to borrow Erving Goffman's terms, the 'impression' made was to outweigh any 'expression' of personality.4 Other writers, being more interested in the fully expressed Miltonic self and voice of Paradise Lost, see the Poems as premonitory.5 As for editors and general readers, they naturally assess the poems individually, in the context of their time of composition, not that of the time of first named printing. For present purposes, however, I have examined the 1645 volume page by page, to do justice to both aspects of the 'selfpresentation', to impression and expression alike and to their interactions. I find that Milton's languages provide energy and themes for both aspects. They give him much that is 'impressive' to present, thereby to 'express' an intelligent self. Furthermore, besides (obviously) employing his tongues to produce

20

Milton's exercising of his languages

the verse of twenty years which is gathered up in Poems, 1645, Milton as self-editor draws attention to the tongues. He does this in a complex, witty way which suggests how manifold was the resource of his multilingualism. Imaginative worlds, personae for writing, a cultivation of idealizing friendship - his languages made him free possessor of all these. He may even have worked out a rationale. For Aristotle in the Kicomachean Ethics theoretical wisdom and abstract contemplation were superior to practical wisdom and political science; yet the needs of the latter arena, that of humans living in society, must be met too. A similar balance is desiderated in the Roman and humanist debates between otium and negotium, between 'leisure5 and 'business5, between 'cultivated private life5 and 'responsible civic life5.6 Milton knew of the debate and the balance, and though he does not discuss it concerning his languages, I apply the distinction when appropriate. I consider first the issues of self-presentation as far as these involve languages. Then, passing over the merits or otherwise of the individual poems (as they are discussed in the next chapter), I illustrate from the collection as a whole how multilingualism made him free possessor, lifelong, of worlds and activities he never ceased to value. SELF-PRESENTATION THROUGH THE LANGUAGES OF POEMS, I 645

Self-presentation starts at once, on the title-page. By proclaiming the contents as 'Poems . . . both English and Latin5 (my emphases), the title-page alerts readers to the fact that the book is actually two books. Though the English poems are named first, the Latin ones have their own title-page and page-numbering. That makes a clear proclamation of language-flair; but is the conception of a bilingual book to be credited to Milton or to his publisher, Humphrey Moseley? And how unusual was the conception? As to the former point, Milton himself called the book a 'little twin volume, with twin frontage5 ('Ad Rousium5,1—2, of early 1647).7 His tone is of modest pride that hisfirstpoetic offspring is twins, namely bilingual. Indeed, there is some wit to the image of twinning: joy at a double safe birth must exceed the usual, and I would sooner suspect Milton of such wit. But whoever had the idea, the ode shows that Milton stands by it. It seems likeliest to be the author who conceives the volume as bilingual, since he had published anonymous verse in both languages before 1645 ('On Shakespeare5, A Masque, Lycidas and the Hobson poems in English,

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

21

the EpitaphiumDamonis in Latin) and had earned plaudits from friends for his accomplishment in both tongues. Self-belief, belief in the bilingual voice, is fundamental to the ode to Rouse. And why not be proud, if no one had offered such a volume before? To be precise, no individual had, and certainly not with this equal weighting between the mother-tongue and the tongue of civilized European discourse. Bilingual volumes by divers hands abounded, since Oxford and Cambridge burst into multilingual print with anthologies whenever princes were born or married, died or stubbed the royal toe. The balancing of English with ancient tongues is found in Justa Edovardo King (1638), to which Milton had of course contributed Lycidas, so that we might guess he drew thence the idea for his own bilingual volume. Nonetheless, volumes of verse composed by a single author and assembled into a book by the author remained rare in the England of 1645. Humphrey Moseley was encouraging such volumes, bringing out specimens by Quarles (1642) and Waller (1645). Milton's schoolfriend Alexander Gil published his Parerga (Latin with Greek) in 1632, which could further have prompted Milton for Poems, 1645. The climate of taste in England before the Civil War did favour the display in print of a writer's languages, witness the multilingual flourishes of Harington and Coryat. Yet not one of these volumes sustains the serious original verse in two languages, with the two balanced, that distinguishes Milton's self-collection in 1645. He does what the others only glimpse. Accordingly, it is again natural to credit to Milton himself the conception which makes an impression of cultivation and originality through a balanced bilingualism. Moreover, the bilingual impression created by the title-page has soon to be revised. The book is mwtolingual. The readerfindsItalian sonnets as a supporting sequence inside the sequence of English ones, and Greek poems similarly amid the Latin. The book thus declares an aptitude, and enthusiasm, for languages. It declares that this poet has unusual options. In case it is still doubted whether the declarations are Milton's own or Moseley's, I would answer 'Milton's' for these further reasons. He had kept these poems, for some years. In supplying them for the book he must have known he would be judged by them, for instance by their competence and aptness. Besides, the idea of including Italian sonnets within an English series - and within a continuous numbering - is unprecedented: it is a creatively daring idea unlikely to be conceived by Milton's publisher. Evidence and probability concur.

22

Milton's exercising of his languages

In that case, we can go on to observe that Milton has timed the changes of tongue with care, to apt effect. The Greek poems are placed immediately after 'Ad Patrem', 'To My Father', where he thanks his father for enabling him to learn languages, so that the placing confirms the gratitude.8 And when he moves into Italian for love sonnets, they hinge on the reminder that Italian is the 'language in which Love himself takes pride': 'Questa e lingua di cui si vanta Amore' (Canzone 15).9 That neatly reinforces the poems' message, that he speaks Italian because his lady is Italian: he explores medium and meaning together, in a play of multilingual wit.10 So far, the impression given is of a poet who takes pride in his linguistic accomplishments. They give him the freedom to express a multiple self, one that varies with the language-roles adopted for each occasion. The pride is justified by the quality of the expression: free self-expression, for a poet's first volume, is a natural, irreducible good. What else is a first volume for? The freedom which his languages give Milton, he passes on to his readers by the double structure, as the freedom to begin with either half. Cultivated humanist readers of the time might value Poemata above Poems, He was also giving readers the freedom to judge his languageperformances. When later the humanist Salmasius faulted some of his Latin expressions he took the attack seriously.11 He was risking loss of face. The frontispiece shows similar multilingual resource, but through a more combative wit. The sour-faced, elderly man depicted by the engraver William Marshall is said to be the poet 'at age 20'! Incensed, Milton got Marshall to add a Greek epigram composed especially. It said: 'Anyone would say this portrait was drawn by an ignorant engraver if you compared it with the face of the original; but you who are my friends and know me will not even recognize me here: so laugh to scorn this rotten portraitist.'12 So Marshall has been made to engrave his own condemnation. In other words, Milton converts the displeasing portrait into another act of multilingual wit. Only Greek would communicate it to the readers he wanted without alerting the engraver himself. Thus the self shown forth is ambitious and versatile. And since none of the accomplishments is faked, but all are truly there, we may question the need for any disjunction of self and image (expression and impression) in respect of the multilingual Milton in 1645. Should not a bird sing? His pride in competence is flanked by good editorial judgement. Out ofpoems which individually might often be paralleled in

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

2

3

other seventeenth-century poet-humanists, good judgement makes a collection without peer. This impact results from the number of the languages, and their discerning ordonnance. VALUES FOUND IN MULTILINGUAL PERFORMANCE

To move on from questions of self-presentation in Poems, 1645,1 ask what value we can infer he found in multilingual performance there. The first of the freedoms which languages gave Milton is the imaginative worlds ofpredecessors in other languages than English. The point would be trite except that even though he has by now decided to write henceforth in the mother-tongue13 he emulates authors who are not English: they are Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew. Thus in editing Poems, 1645 ^ ls Virgil he quotes on the title-page: Baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro, Virgil, Eclog. 7. (Circle the forehead with ivy lest an evil tongue harm the future poet [or less literally] let not the voice of envy ruin this hopeful early work.)14 Virgil provides the organizing theme of the 'rising poet' (Vati futuro5). Virgil, moreover, provides him with a second important freedom of access, namely to a persona or given role as poet. Both parts of the 'twin volume' shape to a climax with pastoral lament that is heavily indebted to Virgil: Lycidas, for the English half, Epitaphium Damonis for the Latin. The two pastorals are indebted not only to Virgil, though, but to all ancient pastoral lament, whether Latin or Greek. In fact, his access to classical antiquity through its languages enables him to imitate for purposes of occasion whichever ancient writers are most apt: Ovid for the Elegiae, Martial for the epigrams which follow them, the Silvae of Statius for his own Latin Sylvae. He is more exuberant outside the dignitas of Latin, blending the Italian of Dante and Petrarch (whom he revered as 'praisers of Beatrice and Laura') in his own Italian poems. More exuberantly still, he puts the Hebrew or Greek of Psalm 114 into Homeric Greek: this is a transcultural long-jump of a kind which (albeit sobered) anticipates his mature English style, as he detects points of intersection between Homer and King David. The instance of Statius helps us sense the spirit of this language-use, a spirit of identification and accurate recovery. Whereas 'Silvae' was a

24

Milton's exercising of his languages

common enough title for miscellanies in the Renaissance, Milton edits those Latin poems which are not in elegiac couplets into a group, Sylvae, that is made self-aware by the allusion to Statius at the fountainhead of this procedure. To Statius (45?~96?) the name 'Silvae' meant five things about the poems so designated: they were (a) written quickly and were (b) less polished than they might have been because (c) written for the needs of occasion, hence (d) varied in subject and (e) varied in metre. Milton strikes a similar note of deprecative virtuosity. This in turn makes any necessary apology for juvenilia. (Further apology is seen, as Milton includes a statement of his age when composing the poems which are more juvenile in theme or restricted in occasion.)15 More positively, he is using the date-protected juvenilia to confirm the theme of the rising- in this case, the improving-poet. The debts to Statius make a general point about Milton's multilingualism: the debts confirm its self-awareness, as inwardness with diverse culture and as editorial judgement. Another freedom is shown in evidence that looks at first like blatant self-congratulation, but viewed another way promotes understanding of what languages were to him, lifelong. The evidence comes from the numerous commendations which precede the poems in both halves of the collection. Every reader notices their number (eight), and their bulk (seven pages for each half). They certainly belong to the self-editing, for only Milton could have supplied the assorted tributes. What purpose do they serve? Blurbs were, and are, useful when written by influential people. The thinking is, presumably, that praise from discerning persons imputes discernment to the person praised. Yet this would only increase the disappointment if the thing praised did not measure up to the praise. Milton's performances do match the praise. More to the present point, they sometimes reciprocate it, when the performances address or allude to people whose commendations have been cited (Manso, Salsilli, Dati). Thus commenders and commended are integrated in an active relationship, which indeed becomes a theme. Furthermore, the poems vindicate the criteria of the praise because they bear witness to the same values. This is particularly so in their multilingual jaunting because that celebrates, just as it enables, humanist friendships. These cross the boundaries of culture and even religious allegiance. Not only did his Italian Catholic friends get him composing Latin verse again after a long lull. He missed their companionship, as a letter of 1647 attests: 'Very sad to me . . . was that departure [from Florence]. It planted stings in my heart which now rankle there deeper

The multilingual self in Milton's Poems, 1645

2

5

every time I think of departing from so many good friends, living so pleasantly with each other in one city; far off indeed, but to me most dear'.16 This is not a platitude of humanist amicitia, but the engaging reality. The commendations, then, suggest a reason for the existence of the Poems themselves. Whether or not many copies were sold, we do know that Milton made good use of his complimentaries. He sent them to libraries, in search (according to the 'Ode to Rouse') of fame with posterity. He sent others to friends, especially in Italy, in search of something else - not fame now, but friendship, appreciation, recognition. Though he came to regret abusing the Papacy in some of the poems, he sent the copies off to Italy anyway.17 Did he even go into print for the sake of the complimentaries?18 Was he among the first poets who extended courtesy, from gifting manuscript poems to exploiting print for the same purpose on a grander scale? Latin in particular counted here. He probably did not risk sending his Italian poems to Italian friends, but he did to his English friend with the Italian name, Diodati. Poems to Diodati in Latin are a feature of the Poemata, while there is nothing comparable in the English part of the volume. Though no equiponderant friendship ever came his way after Diodati died, a similar ease of companionship achieved across language as well as distance is sensed in the Latin letters and poems; through and because of the Latin. Last among the gifts or freedoms which languages bestow is the opportunity for strenuous play. In the Introduction I suggested that a vital part of Milton's emulation was of Dante, and that it included Dante's kind of austere multilingual playing. Dante is a felt presence in the Italian sonnets, naturally, but he contributes something more fundamental: a spirit of encounter, and sometimes of wrestling, not only with contemporary issues and persons but with the same issues, deepened, in dead exemplars. Thus Virgil is almost a character and certainly a guide in these Poems, as he was in the Divina Commedia. Statius, not a highly regarded author in general, is a model for Milton's Poemata just as he found his way into Dante's Purgatorio. So an ardour and a fervour pervade Milton's 'serious playing'. Throughout, he is heeding that humanist topos, serio ludere. It explains why the poet wears so many masks, for different occasions and genres, and equally why the number of languages displayed is large. This is fundamental to understanding Milton's life, as well as his voluminous work, for it explains why he is so contentious in religious debate, and

26

Milton's exercising of his languages

how. The humanist as scholar and linguist - as 'philologist', in the broader German sense of Philologie - must do each thing thoroughly. That includes doing it with a maximum of vigour and rigour, and rigour includes getting the minutiae right. Not to get them right is to forsake philaletheia, the love of truth. This of course explains the heat with which later classicists smelt out false quantities in his scansion: this was their philaletheia, mixed up as it had been for Milton himself with the delight of battle and the joy of knowing better. It was already motivating Salmasius, battling Milton in the 1650s. Childish as some manifestations of serio ludere and philological emulation do seem, they must be viewed in Milton's own way if he and his writings are to be understood. The Poems of 1645 gi ye a n instructive instance of such humanist role-playing because in them what is being expressed and conveyed is a pure joy in playing among the languages. Such playing is not less joyous because it is serious, emulative, and strenuous. Impression and expression serve each other.

CHAPTER 2

The development and quality of Milton's multilingual verse

Such being the multilingual self which Milton presented in his Poems, 1645, what had been the process of which this was the product? How did he come to this stature as a poet in several tongues? Indeed, how good are his best performances? The first two questions are answered most naturally from his Latin verses because these are most numerous and continue longest. Nonetheless, evaluation - the third question - should include his Greek and Italian verses. Conveniently, some of the principal criteria which emerge from discerning his development in Latin carry across to the other two languages. At the same time, though, differing language-choices reveal differing first principles as well as recurrent ones; for instance, the question of audiences differs for Italian, as a living not a classical tongue. In the end, the differences may count more, in that they lead beyond evaluating to the Questione della Lingua, subject of chapter 3. That question is not simple, because Latin as the language of international discourse and friendship possessed an inherent multilingual appeal: the power of that appeal is seen in all the chapters of part one, not only the present one. Latin supplied a continuing creative tension of choice. THE LATIN POEMS! CONTEXTS OF UNDERSTANDING

A dilemma besets neo-Latin poetry for modern readers. In so far as poets depart from Roman practice they look incorrect, either inauthentic or ignorant. Yet in so far as they keep to Roman practice they look servile. Thus both Latinists and non-Latinists, though for opposite reasons, may dismiss this body of verse. The problem is compounded by the decrease in the number of scholars who can read Latin at all, since this sort of verse depends on qualities like copia ('fullness5, 'plenitude') and amplificatio 27

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('apposite expansion' of one's theme) which translation dilutes, and betrays into understandable boredom. There is not much one can do about the last problem, an extreme case oftraduttore traditore (The translator is a traducer), except to urge that the Latin-less reader at least try out the sound of the original. The main dilemma is solved in principle by invoking Imitatio, as the personal extending of the ancients' legacy - neo-Latin verse being a signal example of 'standing on the shoulders of giants' like Ovid and Virgil. Yet I prefer here to resolve the dilemma by considering it in practice, Milton's developing practice of five main aspects of this Imitatio. In ascending order the five are: diction; prosody; eclecticism, of allusion and thought together; tone; and what I call a 'presumptive ground of approval' emerging from all this precriticism. 'Precriticism' means, the recovery of relevant conditions of understanding this type of verse, recovery which -just as when we approach a Roman poet, but in some ways more so — must precede evaluation. Even in a super-vivacious, super-confident piece like the 'Ode to Rouse', his last Latin poem,1 we collide with the dilemma of diction at its sixth word, 'fronde'. Milton, apostrophizing the copy of Poems, 1645 which was sent to Rouse but went astray, speaks of its 'double leaf, 'fronde gemina'. But, said Thomas Warton, who knew his Latin, the word should be 'fronte', the double 'edge' of a Roman papyrus-roll, not the double 'leaf of a printed book. He duly emended what he saw as incorrect Latin, if not anachronism into the bargain.2 Since both the printed text, and the manuscript copy sent to Rouse himself, read 'fronde' the error, if it is such, is Milton's responsibility. So why, we must ask, has he not said it as his exemplars would have? First of all, it was a book not a roll which went missing, and the book — Poems, 1645 - is the whole topic and ground of contact between the parties to this epistolary act. But Warton is being doubly obtuse, since the 'twin' leaf also alludes to the most original feature of the book's contents, its bilingualism proclaimed in twin title-pages. Yet he is not totally wrongheaded, since he raises the key issue: 'fronte' would have pictured Milton's work as papyrus, hence established the English subject as more fully Roman, so dignifying it further. Milton, however, must have felt his surrounding Latin did that enough, and wanted the reference more actual and pictorial. Just because the Latin starts offby establishing an English subject as Roman, it can afford next to display the subject as not solely similar but distinctive - as Milton proudly knew his volume to be. Besides, dignity is not precisely the tone Milton wants, in a partly playful

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poem. I shall come back to tone shortly. But for diction, fully half its pleasure lies in its playing upon sameness and difference; the Roman within the English, the English reality transformed or defamiliarized by Latin. The local effects please by the sheer variety of such interactions. A graver objection to neo-Latin diction is that in keeping to classical usage it puts the clock back. Moreover, to change the metaphor, the diction has gone slack because it imitates the lexis of too long a period some 150 years perhaps, therefore much too synchronously. No one in antiquity spoke, or wrote, like that. The only answers are the obvious ones, (a) The entire Renaissance wanted to 'put the clock back5, (b) The poet in particular sought to revive the utterance of the greatest exemplars in each kind, and primarily by their authoritative diction. And (c) people did write like that, in antiquity itself: later Latins went back to 'golden', normative periods for each genre, doing as Greeks before them had done, Greeks like Apollonius Rhodius reinventing Homeric diction. 'Vos exemplaria Graeca', said Horace to the young Roman; 'follow the Greek exemplars'. In turn following Horace, the renaissance tiro followed the best advice. 'Fronde' turns an old word into the new name, new image, of a new thing. Lastly, (d) no slackness is involved: poets made life, if anything, harder for themselves, because what they imitated was lexis within each genre. Prosody presents the same dilemma, in a tougher form because the purists have a still stronger case (while the outsider cannot care less). Though humanist poets modelled their scansion on their Roman exemplars', they could not do it with full accuracy; for since they could not reconstruct all Roman pronunciation, they could not hear the whole of the Romans' verse rhythms. Besides, again, they licensed for their own composing a wide range of usage, ignoring changes in pronunciation over the 150 years between (say) Lucretius and Martial. They are misconceivedly eclectic. Yet since every humanist did these things, can they be simply solecisms? As Philip Ford writes, of the exactly comparable instance of Buchanan: What is surprising is that scholars should continue to evaluate neo-Latin according to classical rules rather than according to its own, verifiable standards. It is as if one were to judge a Palladian villa according to the criteria of a classical temple; for Palladio, no less than the renaissance poet, based his works on classical precedent and theory.3 That is well said. It is liberating too, because so we may judge prosody on its merits, namely the sound of the verse itself and how sound supports

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sense. Prosodic rules cannot be greater than the sound-sense wholes from which they are an abstraction. To take a simple example, when Milton writes (Elegia iv. 25)* Quamque Stagirites generoso magnus alumno the final e would by the Roman rules be lengthened, by position before double consonant following, hence unmetrical (~ " w , not the required dactyl,- - - ) . True, Roman poets sometimes left such afinalopen vowel short in that situation; but humanists did it regularly, not sometimes. That shows they did not hear the words as Romans did. Yet our need, surely, is to hear the sounds as the humanists did.5 This line hinges, not on the insignificant e (of a humble suffix, '-que', 'and'), but on the resounding paired polysyllables, swelling up at the line's middle: 'Stagirites generoso', linking the great Aristotle with the great spirit of his pupil Alexander. Or take a subtler prosodic 'distortion', that of thefinal0 in verbs. CO' in Amo, Moneo, and so on, was normally long in Golden Latin, yet not always; but alas, humanists shorten this 0 more freely than Roman practice had done in the normative period. The answer, as before, is that humanists had their own practice, which if it works should not be blamed, not even though they thought their practice was right in theory too. It does work, because they shorten this 0 more in the lower genres than the high, thus heeding after all the Roman sensibility: such asperities are more frequent in humanist satire than in epic hexameter, and therefore the humanists preserve the required decorum, the spirit if not the letter of Roman prosody. We must take the humanist practitioners as wefindthem; and we shall find them eclectic. They combine things as a Roman did not, because the Roman could not: he was still living a development of Latin which the humanists loved in its completed form.6 And further, they join things of their own to these selections. Selection, indeed, is the key. I examine the Rouse ode, again, for Milton's eclectic way with allusion, and with the ideas which allusions together bring into view. In the ode, Milton's first strophe gives a rapid allusive sketch of his poetic life to date. It is rapid because ode requires that, and because allusion speeds it along: he says, for instance, that he performed songs for his neighbours 'with a Daunian quill' (line 10, 'pectine Daunio'). Why 'Daunian'? Doesn't the epithet slow down the line, more vapid than rapid? Editors gloss Daunia as south-east Italy, hence a synecdoche for 'Italian'. This misses the sharp exactitude of

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'Daunio'. It names the home region of the greatest exemplar of Latin ode, Horace.7 Although Horace's Daunia was poor and scruffy, it was his region and he was proud of it; proud, too, to have overcome its disadvantages. Milton aligns his ode, thus, with Horace's exemplary ones, glancing at his English provinciality (from a Roman standpoint). 'Daunio' provides not padding, but a sunburst of suggestion. And that is not all. Taken alone, 'Daunio' is eclectic in the literal, etymological sense of being 'selected' with care, from a rich armoury of poetry read by Milton. But it comes linked with Britain: he sings with Italian help 'to his neighbours [fellow-countrymen, 'vicinis' (line 12)]'. It comes in a metre which does not follow Horace, but the more corybantic Greek odist, Pindar. Milton's own note of explanation mentions the metrics of Catullus, who was freer in his odes than other Romans; but Milton outdoes Catullus too, and in a direction that is Greek. This is made plain in the next stanza, the antistrophe: the river Thames is first mythologized as a river-god (18-19), then linked with Oxford as a home of the Muses, and a 'sacred band' of dancerworshippers. The reference may not be to Oxford's scholars, dancing along the High Street in full academic fig to worship the Muses, though such a conceit is diverting, but to the more central idea of Bodley's Library keeping safe the best works of mind as a holy treasure belonging to the Muses. At all events, that is the idea which is driven home in the third strophe, by a fanfare of eklexis. Bodley's treasure excels that of Delphi which Ion guarded, because Rouse is 'quaestor gazae nobilioris' (55), 'custodian of a nobler treasure' than Ion had been. Now to be a 'quaestor' was to hold a Roman magistracy. But 'gazae' is an oriental loan-word into Latin: does it glance at the huge accession of oriental books to Bodley in the seventeenth century? As for Delphi, the other term of this extended comparison, it was the 'navel' of the Greek world (omphalos ges). All these cultural allusions, now assembled like the treasures themselves, are to be surpassed. Diction and allusion are deliberately eclectic in order to embody the point, the praise of Bodley as a holy treasure-house. But isn't this preposterous, or at least top-heavy? Doesn't the hyperbole collapse, and the tone falter? No, because of the context. The context is of a Greek ecstatic joy, expressing relief after a Roman confession: the second strophe has spoken of an 'expiation' needed by England, because not only the lost copy of Milton's poems but a great deal else, human lives included, in fact all civilitas - civility, in the broad sense of civilized life and value — has been at risk through 'civil' war.

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Allusions, to Horace's poems about the enormity of civil war, and to families sundered, engender a Roman abhorrence. Allusions do not merely reflect or support the thought. They are the thought. The eclectic allusions are syncretistic thought: what unites us (like books and the culture they access) outweighs what divides us. This idea well suits a librarian and his library, which had a sworn duty to carry on no matter who was ruling Oxford or England.8 It also suits the multilingual Milton, not jubilant as a partisan of the winning side in the First Civil War, but glad that it is over, and he can get back to his studies. Tone keeps coming into analyses of other, more particular features of style. Tone, though not comprehensively definable, is irreducible. It includes how one reads aloud for meaning and expression by responding to directives in the text - directives such as diction, rhythm and allusion, which together impel the voice towards description or feeling, where these are seen as two ends of a scale. Tone guides as to whether the poet seeks to surprise or fulfil expectation. Tone is carried by function-words as much as by magniloquence. It is easiest to know where it goes wrong, in the writing or the rendering. The more concentrated the poem is, the more tone matters, because it will alter - as in Horace's Odes - more nimbly, even within a single word. So much in general, but tone is not nimble for the most part, in Milton's Latin. (What he might have done, had he written Latin in his last great phase, who knows? Dramatic U-turns abound in Paradise Lost: 'Thus they relate / Erring...') Things move in general more slowly, and with a loving amplitude, in his Latin because he then still revered copia. But changes of tone do not have less importance just because we can sense their approach. Key transitions of tone are prepared for by diction with thoroughness - as consolation approaches through digression in the latter part of the Epitaphium Damonis (140-78, and again 180-97). The conviction gained by tonal transition is comparable towards the close of Lycidas. The twists and turns of tone between the parts of the Rouse ode are what make it ecstatic, yet keep it light; in the whole effect, so enthusiastic and engaging. If the reader wonders why praise keeps coming into 'precriticism', it is not so much clandestine as inherent. Precriticism entails seeing the artefact from the poet's standpoint, hence in the case of neo-Latin verse looking down his pen at its colossal intertextuality, and seeing it this way first. To do so identifies the features of a poem which most merit attention. Thence begins the implied value-judgement; yet that is still relative, namely relative to the worth of the whole. I certainly think it

Milton's multilingual verse

33

right to let this body of poetry put its best foot forward in the present study, having been ignored or abused for so long. In what follows, I am not claiming equal merit for each poem, far from it. As a chronological sketch shows, Milton's Latin moved from mechanical beginnings through many sorts of exercising, to just a few poems of distinctive conception. His extant Latin verses were composed in three quite separate periods of his life. More than half come from his school and Cambridge years, and in Poems, 1645 he dated many in partial excuse. But a second body of work received no excuse: the six poems composed under the stimulus of his reception - as a Latin poet - in Italy, 1638-40. A solitary last poem follows Poems, 1645, the extraordinary 'Ode to Rouse'. Consequently, most of thefirstgroup represent the learning of skills whose successes come later. Nonetheless, for the theme of the development in his knowledge and use of his languages, we need the full context. That is thefinalprecritical point, or condition of understanding. The Latin verses move him, from simpler to more compound acts of eclecticism; from set exercises in known patterns of Imitatio, to interlingual acts of appropriation, moments of self-discovering choice. THE LATIN POEMS! PLAYING WITH OVID 9

The process of self-discovery begins early, in the engagement with Ovid, in metre, manner and matter. Though one would not expect sober Milton to choose sexy Ovid as exemplar, he often does so. Indeed, the Ovidian Elegiae receive prominent placing in Poems, 1645. This whole paradox alerts us to something seminal in the choice. The engagement is no straight-line graph. It resembles zigzags, or probes from a moving centre. Throughout these (incompatible) acts of appropriation I see him as playing with Ovid. We must grasp all that is meant by saying Milton 'plays with' Ovid, because if the metaphor is to be properly heuristic it needs taking both seriously and diversely. We play games either strenuously or casually, with detachment or passion; hence self-expressively, provided we recognize that play can uncover new selves. I have seen pacifists play snowballs aggressively, bank managers shine at cheating-games. The younger Milton plays with Ovid in ways that are exploratory, eristic, unexpected. Ovid takes him to extremes, including incompatible ones. Each elegy is a new game, a new pushing of limits. I take them in order of writing (which is not quite their order in 1645), to show the development more clearly.

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To play any game, one learns its rules and develops the necessary skills. We can watch Milton, aged about 14, learning the arduous rules of elegiac couplets. 'Carmina Elegiaca' is a school exercise which survives in manuscript. It survives complete with scansion errors, corrected; and other errors, some caught, some not. The manuscript, which turned up with the Commonplace Book in 1874, started off ebulliently on the theme of 'getting up early5: Surge, age, surge, leves, iam convenit, arcere somnos ('Arise, haste, arise! Now that the time isright,arrest your gentle slumbers').10 However, subsequent thought revealed that 'arcere' was unmetrical (not being dactylic where a dactyl is required). So Milton substituted 'excute' ('shake off slumbers). It is pure exercise, for it says nothing and says it repetitously. The set theme hardly sounds Ovidian, either; but the metre is, and its rules are. 'Apologus de Rustico et Hero511 seems to be a slightly later exercise. It renders a familiar fable into elegiacs with no errors, some nice turns of phrase, but no surprises. It is in the manner yet not the metre of Phaedrus: the metrics, again, are Ovidian. Both exercises, then, imitate Ovid as to metre and diction, not ideas or spirit. The next known elegiacs engage with more of Ovid. They are Elegiae II and III from 1645™ composed at the age of seventeen to lament the deaths of two Cambridge worthies. These are probably set verses, for occasions which someone else decreed should be written upon, and to that extent they are again exercises. But now Milton rises to the occasion. For one thing, the two laments are distinct, in purport and tone as in length. The lament for the dead beadle (II, 'In Obitum Praeconis') says suitable things correctly, but also coolly. To say 'Death, the ultimate Beadle, cruelly hustles you along, fellow-beadle' has a touch of Ovid's detached, playful spirit, found especially in the frisky repetition mid-line: Ultima praeconum praeconem te quoque saeva Mors rapit . . . 13 The lament for Lancelot Andrewes (III, 'In Obitum Praesulis Wintoniensis') enlists Ovid's material and spirit more overtly. It ends in a blaze of glory: Milton wakes from a vision of another sort, the vision of Andrewes in bliss among saints - a decorous, pious thought. But last of all he wishes he could often dream like this. He echoes a prominent line of Ovid's:

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Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi (68) echoes Proveniant medii sic mihi saepe dies, in which Ovid wishes many more such midday sleeps befall him with Corinna. Respectively the lines say, 'May dreams like these often befall me!' and 'May middays often turn out like this for me!514 Whereas critics have worried, or scoffed, that Milton's heavenly bliss should be expressed in words shaped by pagan erotic bliss, erotic bliss is still bliss, and Ovid its outstanding celebrator. Milton contests with Ovid to propose, like Guyon to Mammon, 'another bliss'.15 What is more, even this early he draws on his other languages to do it, naming 'nablia' as the music of heaven just before the ending - the Hebrew name of a Hebrew harp, (nebel) one of very few Jewish imports to Rome and Latin at the time. Ovid makes a startling explicit entry to the final stage of the vision, only to find himself (like Shakespeare's Bottom) 'translated'. In Elegia I Milton responds to a chosen, not set occasion, being a verse-letter of news to his closest friend, Diodati. Since Ovid had written verse-letters in elegiacs from exile, Milton's poem is to be read as a comparison piece, of Ovid's literal and hated exile with Milton's metaphorical and delightful 'exile', from Cambridge to London. Yes, fate could be crueller than this. Just as he turned Ovid's levity to gravity in III, he now turns Ovid upside down the other way. The poem bubbles along describing the pleasures of London life, chiefly play-going and a sociable street-gazing. The plays sound less English than Roman (Plautus or Seneca), so Milton is Romanizing. But rather, he is combining Ovid and other Romans with his Englishness, to make a city which is an 'amalgam' of reality and literature. Thus a play-scene that sounds especially Ovidian could equally be Shakespearian, that of the girl who is in love without knowing it:16 Quid sit amor nescit, dum quoque nescit amat (36).17 (She knows not love, and while she knows not, loves)[my version]. Here is an appreciative Ovidian flourish, in the way syntax achieves chiasmus not despite but through the symmetry of the pentameter's prosody ('amor nescit'/'nescit amat'). The poem has brought up a fundamental principle of neo-Latin creativity, in that phrase the 'amalgam of reality and literature'. Imitatio, whether it be of Ovid or any other classical exemplar in Latin, empowers

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the neo-Latin poet, to create a landscape and characters and attitudes and themes which transfigure both the exemplar and the poet's own reality. They come from a world which never existed because instead it combines the worlds which existed through the whole of the classical tradition; what the Romans took over from the Greeks, together with the further legacy of Rome. When humanist poets bring in their own life too, they clothe it and enrich it with these colossal riches of experience. What Gordon Williams so aptly says of the Greco-Roman world of Roman comedy applies equally to the ambience of Ovidian elegy, and further to all neo-Latin poetry. What happens here - and elsewhere in Plautus - is that the dramatist transfers the action from a setting in a Greek city to a world that is neither Greek nor Roman, but both - a purely imaginary world . . . [He] made full use of the tension between the Greek milieu and the Roman audience.18 So in the quick sketches of plays seen in London Milton is not consulting his diary entries under Tlays Seen Whilst Rusticated', but creating a composite London from reading Plautus and Terence, and perhaps from seeing Latin college plays. More overtly Ovidian is the passage where Milton praises London for its beautiful women. Not only does Ovid release an unusual thought in Milton, Milton makes it his own. Ovid had written that 'Rome has as many nubile girls as the sky has stars', as an excited fornicative parenthesis; the tenor is the welcome number of the women. But Milton (as at the ending of III) appropriates the thought to alter the feeling, into a slower comparison of female beauty to that of the stars; the tenor has become panegyric of London. Without claiming that he surpasses Ovid here (since anyone in their right mind would prefer the latter's prodigal swiftness), Milton turns Ovid's indelicate thought to one almost transcendentally delicate. Moreover, he heads for the most challenging points of the Imitatio. Accordingly, out of Imitatio issues an individual, esemplastic, Latin voice. The remaining four Elegiae are more assured and ambitious in this appropriating of Ovid. In IV (aged 18) he writes another verse-letter about exile, this time to a friend, Thomas Young. Young is Milton's former tutor, and is now undergoing religious exile (though 'expatriation' would be a more accurate name for it) in Germany, and is at risk from the Thirty Years War: the Ovidian theme of exile emphasizes the contrast in gravity of the issues underlying the exile, which are Milton's own choice of issues. The contrast is handled adeptly. The poem starts in

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quiet Ovidian playfulness, addressing the letter as it sets off overseas, but builds to a prophetic comforting of Young. The prophetic element takes over from the Ovidian, citing biblical Yahweh-rescues in a Virgilian more than Ovidian sonority. The metre and diction remain Ovidian, nonetheless, making the poem a very striking and personal combining of exemplars, across genres and even cultures. In Elegia VII (age 19) Milton strives to outdo Ovid in a totally different way.19 He writes of being shot by Cupid's arrow, and describes the Cherubino-like erotic flutter which follows. He plays Ovid at his own game now. Although he loses, naturally, the point here is that he goes to another extreme in his playing with Ovid. A palinode is again written and placed just as Ovid did it. It rejects this erotic, in the name of academic (Platonic) austerity - Greek restoring the balance. In Elegia V (age 20) he goes in yet another direction, not that of witty reversals but to another extreme. The extreme is of pagan joy in nature naturing, nature seen as divine, with the help of a deity-crowded countryside.20 The poem plays with the spirit of Ovidian polytheism. In Elegia VI (age 21, and conscious of this age of maturity) he writes to Diodati again. Again he writes about how each spends his time, which brings out the contrast with the earlier letter; for Milton talks especially about poetry, both in general as a vocation with an associated austere regimen, and about recent poems in particular.21 A Roman type of conversation is conducted, with much of Horace now, yet it remains Ovidian in metre and diction. For good measure, though, it ranges back to Greece (Pindar, mentioned in lines 23-6); then sideways to the birth of Christ, subject of the poem he has just written (the Nativity Ode, on his 21st birthday). Finally, the 'conversation' with Diodati comes up to the European, multilingual present since its signing-off point is to mention he is sending Diodati his recent poems in Italian.22 In this whole sustained, extreme, wide-ranging playing with Ovid Milton is exploring himself and his languages. The playing encourages him to seek out points of contact. Connection underlines difference, yet here with a joy in the difference. The Latin of these Elegiae*3 shows a Milton more relaxed than elsewhere. They show a Milton who is ready to follow a genre and exemplar for not simply metre and diction but thought and attitude. Milton uses Ovid as a lever or hypothesis, a poetical weight-lifting sport.

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We cannot be sure that before he was twenty-one Milton's Latin composing inclined as heavily towards elegiacs as the selection and arrangement of 1645 suggest; but the existence of manuscript elegiacs, together with a further group of elegiac epigrams, does imply that he was most regular in practice of elegiacs. If so, it is easy to see why. They were beloved of teachers, and were the most exacting of metres; a tautology perhaps. Milton, nonetheless, went in search of other technical difficulties, and practised quite numerous other exercises, to judge by the poems he selected and how he arranged them for 1645. In this search he was obeying technical challenges, which appeal - as 'the fascination of what's difficult' - to multilingual poets who are worth their salt. He obeyed a more spiritual challenge, too: what did those Roman exemplars in each kind and metre have to say, to him and through him, and how might he reply to them? Is it merely fanciful to see in the succession of metres and masters within his Sylvae a sort of dead poets' society, a speaking for himself in answer to their best achievement? That achievement is assessed not dismissively, but from a base of understanding, of which Imitatio made a part. At any rate, their diversity and their sequence alike demand attention. I address diversity, first, and sequence in the next section. He wrote other elegiacs, but short ones, epigrams; having not Ovid only but Catullus or Martial as exemplar. The caustic invectiveepigrams are early, set-pieces on the Gunpowder Plot. Epigrams as praise-poetry, of the singer Leonora Baroni, come from his Italian journey. He is attempting most of the traditional uses of Latin elegiacs. Twice, though, he writes in the ode metres of Horace. The stanzaform is peculiarly demanding when he writes on the death of a Vice-Chancellor. Their stanza-form is Alcaics, beloved of Horace. (twice over) The first two lines combine iambic with dactylic, so that the line speeds up after the caesura. The third line slows things down, being mainly iambic throughout (two regulation metra); whereupon, in most elegant contrast, the fourth and final line is mainly dactylic, yet the close varies even that, into trochaic. The accomplishment, of getting Latin into such a metre, was considerable for Horace: because the metre is Greek, and suits Greek more easily, Horace had risen to the challenge.24

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I hope the reader can sense the firm beauty of this varied structure: it resembles the structures of Mozart or Beethoven for keyboard, because these too depend on pacing, entail rhythm, and encourage melody. So Milton girded up his loins. Just feel the zest as he rolls out the last fourth line, the resounding dactylic close for the vision of yet another Cambridge worthy gone to heaven, Interque felices perennis (steady and solemn, Elysio spatiere campo.25 (freer, -~~-ww-~- x)

~ - x)

This zest shows the love of difficulty, and helps explain the unprecedented pyrotechnical metres of the 'Ode to Rouse' at the end of this oeuvre. In opposite vein - perhaps ringing the changes - he imitates the hexameter of Juvenalian satire (harsh, not Horatian-kindly) in his longest Latin poem, In Quintum Novembris.26 Because its Satan-journey foreshadows that of Paradise Lost, this long and limp action has been overrated. In the present connection its interest lies rather in local, stylistic effects. To the manner and tone ofJuvenal Milton - unprecedentedly, I think — adds a neo-Latin exemplar, Buchanan: he owes words, subject, tone and scorn to that poet's attack on the Franciscan order.27 Beyond that, he coins more Latin words of his own in this poem than in all his other poems together.28 Despite or because the poem is intellectually null, Milton's creative talentsflowinto words and images of his own; 'Mavortigenae', 'Tricoronifer', 'panificos [deos]'29 and so on, almost all of them resounding epithets which match the tone perfectly grandiose but mocking, inflating the object in order to scorn it. He is unsubtle, but zestful: even if his Protestant sympathies are having a self-indulgent workout, the language enjoys a glorious freedom. So does the metre; not through invention, though, but through his most varying exploitation of antiquity-sanctioned hexameter practices. Examples include the spondaic Et mendicantum series longissima. fratrum

(58)

(stressing that the mendicants make a long crocodile) and the Greek clausula Orgia cantantes in Echionio Aracyntho.

(65)

Latin avoided four-syllable words at a line-end, excepttor Greek names. 30 These virtuosities must be recalled when we consider the development rather than diversity of his Imitatio in this arena; for he later restricts

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vocabulary and metrical virtuosity in moving closer to Virgil (and he will move from end-stopped lines to verse-paragraph). Here he avails himself of the freer Latinity practised by satire, to have fun. His next hexameters, nonetheless, are philosophical and Lucretian. Arguing that the universe does not decay though it will burn up in a final conflagration, Milton plunders Lucretius for words, phrases, ideas, cadences, thesis, indeed just about everything. How does it come about that the indignant Protestant of In Quintum Novembris takes up here with the atheistic Epicurean? Philip Hardie has shown how much Paradise Lost owes to Lucretius for its conception as an epic of knowledge;31 but the affinity begins much earlier, in this Latin poem of rational scorn. Some of the Latin well suits a poet who was of £a very satirical temper', and so trilled or growled his rs:32 hear them growl in Heu quam perpetuis erroribus acta fatiscit Avia mens hominum, tenebrisque immersa profundis . . . (Alas! how persistent are the errors by which the wandering mind of man is pursued and overwearied, and how profound is [his] darkness)33 Not only the topos, but the words, foreground Lucretius ('fatiscit/Avia'). Milton has struck gold here, and mines it throughout.34 I bypass the remaining metres and their exemplars. The metres include iambics, scazontes and so on; often as mediated through the ebullient, youthful exemplar Catullus. These are bypassed, because it should be clear by now that Milton went amongst his Latin and other authors to experiment; to try out sound and scope and tone and vision. He even - surprisingly for such a dogmatic and vocationally driven Protestant - experimented with other people's visions, by taking them over for the duration of a poem; and not in small doses or half-heartedly either, but to an extreme, in intensely imaged multicultural fusings of perception. Such experimentation is unique to his Latin poems. It gives them their unique importance to the reader who is mainly interested in this Milton for the sake of the later sage. Yet equally it guides those - fit audience though few indeed - who are prepared to read this body of poetry for its own merits. Milton is trying things out, in continual new combinations and tones, which leads him to his best moments; best in terms of Latin poetry and perception alike.

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THE LATIN EXEMPLARS! RISING TOWARDS VIRGIL, AND BEYOND

Within Milton's 'playing' with Ovid and the others, there is a hierarchy as well as a deliberately cultivated diversity. One cannot miss a gravitational pull within the second half of the Poemata, the iSylvae\ towards Virgil. First, we meet hexameters based on other exemplars. But then, 'Ad Patrem', written straight after Cambridge, begins a series of Virgilian hexameters. Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis close the whole collection with Virgilian hexameters. But indeed, Virgil is even more conscious to Milton's mind in the editing and self-presenting of the 1645 volume. A choice is being made. To understand that choice, we should remember certain things about Virgil's reputation and influence. For a thousand years he was regarded as a sage, prophet or magus. One of his eclogues was interpreted to foretell Messiah's birth. He appears in medieval romances as a wonder-worker. Dante chooses him as the best of the pagans to guide him in the afterlife. Still in the Renaissance his text was used for divination, in the sortes Virgilianae (fortune-telling by seeing where the text randomly opened). It is said that when Charles I opened up his copy of Virgil he read of a severed head, rolling. To renaissance poets, though they demythologized him, his life as a poet gave a normative shape to vocation. The aspiring poet should follow Virgil by starting with pastoral, and come to epic last; as Spenser therefore did.35 Milton cannot have been unaware of Virgil in writing smaller poems before his big pastorals in English then Latin. His hopes of attaining to epic or tragedy (equal highest genres since Aristotle linked them) were linked with his emulation of Virgil. So was his practice of referring within a poem to ones he had written before and to the higher ones he hopes to write. Though other ancients could have provided the same guidance, it was Virgil whose career was schematized in the Virgilian 'rota'. Virgil's sequence of genres had become a hierarchy and career-model for poets, with associated schemas of decorum and diction.36 It was natural for Milton so to edit his Latin poems in 1645 as to make a Virgilian gravitation appear towards its later groupings, and most strongly on the title-page and in the final poem. We see what he wants us to see. He wants that gravitation to be felt by us because he first felt it. But this gravitation can be felt in local details, too; in the detail we explained precritically (diction, prosody, allusion and eclecticism), and in tone as the oeuvre and its volume conclude on Epitaphium Damonis. I

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take these seriatim once more, to show how Milton's Latin poems grow towards Virgil, in the writing and the 1645 placement. Diction shows Milton's growing into Virgil both negatively and positively. Most of Milton's Latin coinages occur early: in his latest, most Virgilian poem I found no coinages. This restraint is matched by the increase in Virgilian diction and usage. Much of it comes from the choice of subject and model, for example from the use of a refrain like that of Eclogue VIII, but also in rephrased half-lines from Eclogues VII and VIII. Though these of course are not separable from the choice of model, the whole Imitatio, they are recognizedby the reader in this verbal detail.37 Prosody demonstrates more fully how Virgil was gaining possession of Milton's Latin ear. Consider, for example, the verse-paragraphing. It gains in shape and coherence by diminishing. The average length of a verse-paragraph moves from 25 lines (In Quintum Novembris) through 23 ('Ad Patrem') to 11*5 in the Epitaphium. Milton is learning to curb his copia. Moreover, the quality of the paragraphing improves in that epitaph; for now paragraphs are defined by the refrain, but also move from really short to long to longer as the passion rises; indeed finally it so rises that the refrain drops away. The verse-paragraphing has become onomatopoeic. Manifestly a debt is owed to Virgil here, because the poem's shape is based on Eclogue VIII. The case is similar with the development from more to fewer end-stopped verses. To identify mid-line pausing as larger than the habitual, required caesura-pause will involve subjectivity (nor can the punctuation 0^1645 be trusted far).38 Nevertheless, whether one relies on 1645 or on one's own sense of major pausing, thefiguresmove from fewer to more numerous. My counting showed a trend from seven in 225 lines of In Quintum Novembris to eighteen in 218 lines of the Epitaphium -

compare (and contrast) the ten in 70 lines of Virgil's Eclogue VII Verse-paragraphing, and mimetic suppleness within it, seem not to have come readily to Milton, or he saw little need for them; even so, he moves dramatically towards Virgilian practice in the Epitaphium. It is the same if we measure a subtler relationship of sound to rhythm, the degree of symmetry between accent (word-stress) and ictus (quantitative length of syllable) in the fourth foot of the hexameter. Milton moves towards a proportioning like Virgil's.39 Allusion tells the same story. Virgilian allusion stands out most in the Epitaphium, being foregrounded as the borrowing or adapting of whole phrases, even half-lines, from the Eclogues. And yet it is his best, and his most independent Latin poem to date: that is the paradox.

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Milton's development is towards Virgil and autonomy together. He does not emulate Virgil too early; he does it late, when ripe. No doubt the preexistent hierarchy (the rota) helped. Nonetheless, Milton enters into, and endorses, the general judgement of hierarchies. He does it without servility or haste. He does it more as he grows into it and appropriates it. Nor had he finished with Virgil as mentor. Virgil, whose influence is proclaimed from the title-page onwards in Poems, 1645, had been deeply absorbent of Homer yet changed him when composing the Aeneid. In doing this he was Milton's own best model of how to absorb both Virgil and Homer for his own epic. FROM LATIN TO GREEK

In many respects Milton's Greek poems work as his Latin ones do, or fail as they fail. He chooses an ancient exemplar and metre, and pours into that mould thoughts of his own. His conception of the required diction and prosody is again synchronous, and this time surely to excess. The diction, for instance, may range within one poem between Homer and Hesychius, approaching 1500 years of language-change!40 The charge of pastiche is more relevant to this dictionary-hunting than to the mere 150 years of synchronicity in his Latin verse. Even so, he captures selected portions of a Greek spirit, which not only enliven these few and simple pieces but point to a crucial interlingual development over the years to 1645. To call them Tew and simple pieces', and to recognize they contain more blunders than the whole of Milton's Latin, is to make their difference from his Latin plain enough. Some explanation of the fact is needed, since Milton's Greek scholarship (as we shall see) was extended and high-powered. The natural cause is the one which Milton implies when sending his Homeric version of Psalm 114 to his friend who had taught him Greek: 'since I left your school, this is thefirstand only thing I have composed in Greek'.41 He did much less of this kind of composing, and was usually rusty when he did. The reason he gives is lack of audience; 'in this a g e . . . Greek composition runs a risk of singing mostly to the deaf. It is an extreme instance of the fit-audience-though-few syndrome. It did not make him less of an occasional poet. Certainly if he had no occasions, he would write no poems. But twice out of three times he rose splendidly to a Greek occasion. One is for the Psalm mentioned. The other is beneath the botched portrait in Poems, 1645, where the Greek

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epigram engraved by the botcher conveyed self-ridicule to those, alone, who did read Greek. At the least, then, his interlingual wit stayed awake in his Greek. Accordingly, a more sympathetic precriticism than was needed for the Latin poems may uncover points of interest even in the worst of his published Greek ones.42 THE GREEK POEMS

The little poem about the philosopher's words to the king who was having him executed has a strong theme, and some strong things about its embodiment. The theme resembles the paradoxes of wisdom; of Socrates to the jury, or Christ before Pilate, or Diogenes speaking from his barrel to Alexander the Great: 'You need me more than I need you.' The young Milton thrilled to the heroic sang-froid just as the mature one did. And Greek, this sort of Greek, befits the thought. The diction and metre are Homeric, that is, they recall the acme of 'heroic' verse, songs about heroes heroically fashioned. There was a long tradition of writing in predominantly Homeric Greek, as did Parmenides or Apollonius Rhodius, a Greek which included later words and malformed Homeric. Milton certainly shared that last trait. Yet the emulation itself was sanctioned and high-aspiring. Some elements, moreover, win praise. Beginning 'O ana, ei oleseis me' he shows a good ear, for he is observing Homer's apparent hiatus between 'O' and 'ana'.43 He does it long before that was explained by Dr Bentley as the relic of a lost letter, digamma (re;, wau) - something observed by the oral composer and bards, but omitted in the written versions whose dialects lacked that sound. The third word, 'oleseis', is picked up in the poem's last word, 'olesas': if you 'destroy me' your city's best defence will have been 'destroyed'. It is a kind of pun, interlingually speaking: there is no word in English to cover the respective applications of this verb ollumi, first 'kill' then 'lose'. Throughout, he achieves a Homerical weight and swing in the metre; as in the closure, Toidnd' *ek pole'6snperi6num6n 'alkar o'lessas. (because you have made an end to so famous a protection of the city).44 His next Greek poem, of anything up to ten years later, is again Homeric, in metre and in other respects. But this time a covering letter explains the attempt quite fully. Though the poem is a Psalm version, he speaks of it as an 'Ode'. This may be simply a broad term for 'poem' as

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'song5; but it may rather be because if any genre is higher than epic it will be ode (as later in his Latin the Rouse ode has a higher style even than the Epitaphiurri). If so, he hedges his bets, in that the 'ode5 is in Homeric hexameters. The ode has joint authorship, he says, belonging not to himself only but 'also to the truly divine poet5, 'whose ode I was adapting to the rule of Greek heroic verse5 ('ad Graeci carminis Heroici legem . . . concinnabam5). The metaphors propose an interlingual enterprise, in fact; a finding of points shared between King David, Homer and himself, points not peripheral but fundamental to a vision. This process and its product are of course my own topic in little. Here is a signal example of both, the earliest perhaps where he became conscious of his own multilingual powers and chances. For the letter speaks of the combining as mysterious. It came 'with no deliberate intention, certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse before daybreak5 ('nescio quo impetu5). Milton's changes to the original tell us the most. They are most obviously expansions: the laconic parallelism of the Hebrew, reflected in the terse King James version, becomes a resonant Homeric, hinging rather on energetic verbs and amplitude of epithetizing. Epithets are a paramount feature of Homeric style, and Milton is enjoying himself. 'The mountains5 become 'boundless5 ('apeiresia5):45 what a fine adjective, since except when airborne you can not see the 'bounds5 of a mountain. (And contrast the epithetizing of his earlier English version a la Sylvester, whose 'froth-becurled5 waves are fancy not imagination.)46 More dynamically, Egypt5s 'strange people5 gets an interpretative supercharge, into 'a people hateful and barbarous of speech5, with all the Greek disdain for non-Greek-speakers in 'barbarophonon5, 'saying bar-bar, unintelligibly5.) Verbs are revised the most dynamically. God now 'thunders out greatness5, rocks 'weep5 with living water for Israel in the wilderness (lines 17, 22). Best of all, to mimic the universality of 'Judah was his Sanctuary5 (AV) he finds a special effect, the striking tmesis. En de theos laoisi mega kreion basileuen means literally, 'Among, God, the peoples, in great might, he ruled.5 The verb is the compound em-basileuein; but because the inflection of Greek preserves the interlaced figure from the ambiguity it would have in English, Milton can place the word 'God5 literally 'among5 the peoples of the earth. The splitting of the verb is most Homeric, and a similar effect occurs at Odyssey 15. 413.

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Milton has forged a splendid paradox. The idea of a sole God, dwelling among his chosen people on earth, and rescuing them by visionary wonders on their long pilgrimage to the land he promised them, could hardly be less like the anthropomorphic limitary godlings of Homer (whom Fate, moira, governs, not they it). The strange, exciting feature of line 4 - and by extension of the whole poem, mysteriously given to Milton - is this: the least Homeric of ideas rings out from the most Homeric expression. Yoking the sound of Homer to the vision of David, he has himself sung a new song to the Lord. He has also for the first time found how to fuse Hellenic with Hebraic, at points where both are themselves intensely. It happened first in late 1634 in Greek: it lies at the heart of Samson Agonistes (see chapter 10). The tone and level of occasion of the 1645 epigram (Hughes, p. 142) are very much lower. Iambics were the metre of spoken interchange, especially of insult. As something has been said of them already, I make only this point. The epigram has been faulted for not advancing in the second two lines beyond the punch of the first two; and for being anticlimactic, therefore. This is unfair. The second pair does advance, from saying that anyone would reject this rotten likeness to bidding 'you my friends', please laugh the artist to scorn; a different address, which is an imperative aimed at action. Thus in detail as well as in opportunism the lines perfectly suit their occasion, purpose, and twin audiences.

Whereas with the Latin and even the Greek poems we could discern development (and progress) over time, the Italian poems belong to one act of composing, at whose sequence we can only guess. They are as we read them in Poems, 1645:fivesonnets enfolding a canzone, the whole six in turn enfolded by the sequence of the English sonnets (of which they are numbered II-VI). I therefore consider their development in another sense, that of their development of a single central idea, the idea of language as love - a new form of playing. The Italian poems require different assessment here for the further reason that they are Milton's only known experiment in playing on a living language. He is playing tunes on a language whose criteria of performance do not come from codified or traditional rules but from the actual practice of its speechcommunity. The issue of audience, or rather audiences, bulks larger. I perceive at least five audiences, considered one by one here. A first audience is situated within the poems, as addressees or recipients or

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listeners (whether named or implied). Another is constituted by the language-community of Italian, from 1630 till now. A third is the languagecommunity of English. A fourth is Milton's friend with the Italian name and lineage, Charles Diodati. Last comes Milton himself, the experimental language-player of the 1630s who goes public in 1645. Of the five audiences, the second may hold the greatest interest, for it shows us Milton's emulation uniquely extended to a living language that is not his own. Nonetheless, the fourth and fifth hold as great a significance. Our sense of internal audience is being deliberately varied. Possibly because the love-situation stays much the same through the six poems, Milton varies his stance and means of address, foregrounding it to become a play of wit and virtual theme. Itfitswell with his overt theme, of the learning to love his Italian lady through the use of Italian itself. 'Donna leggiadra' concentrates at once on address to the lady. By these opening words, he praises her. Then he names her, but obliquely in the approved (witty, protective) way of such sonnet-cycles; she is 'Emilia' because her name honours Emilia the region of Reno and Rubicon.48 Finally he commits himself to a stance, pronominally, choosing the familiar or intimate ta-form (line 4). By exploiting these formulas of the Italian sonnet tradition he is amplifying his sense of the lady as audience, because he is always implying emotion and commitment. But the following sonnet so extends its simile and prosopopoeia, of his Italian as a fragile exotic plant lovingly nurtured by a shepherdess, that its address to the lady is barely noticed ('te', line 8). Greater heed is paid in the terzetti ('sestet') to those who listen in, his fellow countrymen who hear his Italian but do not understand it. Most heed is paid to personified Amor, subject of lines 11-12. The canzone, next, shows the compatriots more forcefully, as mocking his attempts at Italian, but surges past them, asking the canzone directly to answer for him. He speaks Italian because 'his lady says it is the language in which Amor takes pride'. That is a climax at mid-point of the sequence (of which it is the mid-line, too). Not only is she hinting encouragement: he is extending the sense of audience very widely, from this song (canzone) to all song. The last three sonnets pivot on further stances and directions of address to audience; for instance, we meet Diodati again, his Italian name giving a fine opening flourish to IV. By such means the sense of a varying audience becomes not simply a source of variation or continuity or entertainment but of thematic energy, for this risky performance. It really is risky, because he is experimenting with a medium and its possible voices whose standards are the birthright of other people, not his, nor equally shared.

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The Italian language-community, these poems5 second audience, outweighs the shadowy personages of the poems: what has it made of Milton's experimenting? Significantly, he did not seek to know. In Poems, 1645, his action of publishing these poems amidst his English sonnets set them in the half of the double volume which would not be sent to, and read by, Italian friends. He wanted English readers for them (see next paragraph). Italian appraisals all come later. By and large, they dislike V and enjoy VI49; V as a late and flaccid Petrarchanism (the conceit of the tale of the sigh), but VI as a strong thought, in the heroic mould of Horace and Tasso, and thus surpassing the usual 'gioco letterario' (literary sport oxjeu d'esprit) of Italian written by stranieri.50 For VI they are made to look through the Italian lens, whereas in V the slightness of content makes them stare at the dirt on it. I suggest, however, that Milton aimed steadily at a particular segment of this native-speaker audience; an ideal Italian audience, being his sense of what his greatest predecessors in the Italian love-idiom had achieved. He is trying out the voices of Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, by the very direct method of writing on subjects like theirs and using words and images like theirs. This not only explains his once-again synchronous diction (drawn this time from the 300 years of the greatest Italian love-poetry, a category embracing for him Dante's Divine Comedy). It also shows us where this experimentation was aiming, what it was emulating. No other contemporary poetry comes anywhere near the importance of these Italian poets for Milton as exemplar and antagonist in his best English poetry. To repeat by the converse, English poets come nowhere near the importance of these Italians for his own English poetry. The English language-community was aimed at in two main ways. As said above, the general public were targeted in 1645 to be impressed by this multilinguist, who switched without warning within an English sonnet-sequence, into Italian which strongly justified the purpose of doing so - to express love of the Italian lady. This could hardly fail to impress, either. Testimony is lacking, but the competition was not severe. Earlier printed poems in Italian by English writers are awkward, quaint or ridiculous.51 Another English audience was their first reader, the friend to whom they were sent; the same Diodati who is apostrophized nobly in one of them. Milton says in a verse-letter to Diodati that 'Tu mihi, cui recitem, judicis instar eris' (Elegia Sexta, 90).52 It is a fascinating remark in the present context: after sending Diodati the manuscript of the poems 'in your ancestral language', he says that Diodati, 'you to whom I am to

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recite them5, shall be 'like a judge' of them. The details need probing, more than anyone has done. Italian is Diodati's 'ancestral' tongue ('patriis'): how well does that mean he knows and speaks it? Elsewhere, Milton insists his friend is English, while stressing his Italian (Luccan) origins and European connection. I suggest that Diodati was born the cosmopolitan Milton himself became, but that his multilingualism was not so much of a goal for Milton, the better linguist. He would understand this Italian verse, but not from a base of threatening native-speaker fluency, nor from rivalry in versifying it. I take this view partly because of the next words, 'judicis instar\ The unusual word 'instar' intends some qualification - he is not simply and absolutely to be the judge - but what qualification is it? 'Instar' could mean 'equivalent to' a judge, or 'in effect' a judge. I take it to imply that his friend will be less than a hanging judge, anyway, and that Milton knows he will need mercy as well as justice. The reciting will in any case continue a longstanding multilingual friendship with a teasing rivalry to it. Lastly, note that sending the poems is not the part that matters to Milton, but the reciting. And 'cui recite' appears to mean, 'to whom I am to recite them' or 'intend to recite them': the subjunctive implies purpose and perhaps desire. Milton is keen to try them out on the fittest and trustiest audience he knows of. And as for the performing aloud, though he recited Latin verses too as a matter of course, the yardstick of oral performance of these concoctions in a living language implies a certain pride and confidence after all. (If only something more could be found out about Diodati, it might explain much about Milton's attitude to languages in the whole period up to Diodati's death, if not beyond.) The final audience is Milton himself, the multilingual performer. If I am right in arguing that the poems owe more to Dante even than to Petrarch, the risky emulation of such exemplars, in such a vernacular, may be the first signal that Milton knows where the best of all audiences and judges is; in that poet who wrote first and best about the Questione della Lingua, who wrote poems in several tongues, and who made Virgil a character and guide in his greatest poem. With suitable modesty, these six slight poems hold something prophetic, to which I return in chapter 8. CONCLUSION

Milton's verses in his other tongues demonstrate such qualities as skill, pride, and deference. They show such tendencies as experiment,

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improvization, revision and retention (both in memory and on paper). The languages and the periods of his earlier life receive each a different treatment, which results not just from varying competence but from personal and cultural factors. Distinctions notwithstanding, all alike show a youthful zeal for languages themselves, as instruments on which fine music has been played and he must make some too. 'Playing' is our best heuristic metaphor for what is going on: a playful, strenuous, competitive game, played with the living and the great dead alike.

CHAPTER 3

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language choice

In Italy Milton received acclaim for his poems in several languages, yet came back resolved to write in English for the English. Why should his enjoyment of Italy change a polyglot poet into a monoglot? The question can be restated in terms derived from Leonard Forster's study of multilingualism in literature.1 Forster distinguishes two kinds of polyglot, whom we may call 'occasional and 'romantics'. Whereas the first select the tongue most apposite to a poem's occasion, heeding decorum in the choice, the second select in such a way as to declare spiritual allegiance to a single or mother tongue. Occasionals predominate among the older polyglots, such writers as Huygens or Weckherlin, while romantics (as might be expected) cluster during and after the Romantics. Accordingly, Milton might be placed as an early-modern, transitional figure. One could hypothesize that the experience of Italy revealed to him his English identity and an allegiance to English; and that, just as Germany propelled Wordsworth to write of his native Cumbria, Italy turned an occasional polyglot into a romantic one. Yet the tempting hypothesis is over-schematic. Instead, though making use of Forster's distinction, I proceed more inductively, examining passages which illustrate the polyglot poet's choices - before, during, and in the wake of the Italian visit. There emerges a winding and individualistic 'journeying' among his languages, in which that metaphor of journeying explains more than is gained by the simple supposition that Italy triggered a doctrinaire patriotic monoglottism. In his moments of choice may be understood, not so much why he chose English, as how he chose it; with what elements of a maturing personality. But indeed, to answer questions about how he chose (questions on which his writings about the Italian experience tell us a good deal) may after all illuminate why.

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LANGUAGE-CHOICES BEFORE I 6 3 8 : LATIN, ITALIAN, GREEK

Three poems from before 16382 show Milton's awareness of choice of tongue, while also displaying his unusual range of choice. They are the poem to his father ('Ad Patrem'), Sonnet 4, and Psalm 114 - in Latin, Italian, and Greek respectively. Milton writes 'Ad Patrem' as his only possible, and fitting gift in return for his father's gifts:3 Hoc utcunque tibi gratum, pater optime, carmen Exiguum meditatur opus, nee novimus ipsi Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis Respondere tuis, quamvis nee maxima possint Respondere tuis . . .

(6-10)

(Whether you approve or not, best of fathers, [my Muse] is now engaged on this poem - this little offering - and I do not know what I may give you that can more fittingly repay your gifts to me. In fact, though, even my greatest gifts could never repay yours.)4 Then, after praising his father's negative gifts (his not forcing his son into a commercial or legal career (lines 68-75)), he moves over to the positive ones. At once, lightly leaping over the usual kindnesses of fathers to their sons, he dwells lovingly upon 'greater ones', 'maiora [officia]': Officium chari taceo commune parentis; Me poscunt maiora. Tuo, pater optime, sumptu Cum mihi Romuleae patuit facundia linguae, Et Latii veneres, et quae Iovis ora decebant Grandia magniloquis elata vocabula Graiis, Addere suasisti quos iactat Gallia flores, Et quam degeneri novus Italus ore loquelam Fundit, barbaricos testatus voce tumultus Quaeque Palaestinus loquitur mysteria vates.

(77-85)

(I will not mention the kindnesses which a loving father usually bestows upon his son: there are more considerable kindnesses5 which demand my attention. Best of fathers, when the eloquence of the Roman tongue had been made accessible to me, at your expense, the beauties of Latin and the high-sounding words of the sublime Greeks, words which graced the mighty lips ofJove himself, then you persuaded me to add to my stock those flowers which are the boast of France, and that language which the modern Italian pours from his degenerate mouth (his speech makes him a living proof of the barbarian invasions) and also those mysteries which the prophet of Palestine utters.) In other words, once his son had mastered Latin and Greek ('patuit facundia'), the father urged him to study French, Italian, and Hebrew

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('addere suasisti') and paid for the tutoring. Who would have supposed that the love of languages in Milton needed fatherly persuasion?! Whether or not the words are strategic exaggeration (to win continuance of subsidy) Milton binds together his language acquirements and his filial gratitude, to suggest that his love thereby becomes unusual, ergo heartfelt. In the two passages together there join the ideas of language endowment, poetic vocation and the love a son has for such a father. The poem glows with a sense of occasion, although we do not know what occasion. It enacts the gratitude it describes. Then what about the choice of medium for this occasion? Why should he choose Latin, and hexameters, and Virgil as exemplar? Latin is Milton's first foreign tongue, the tongue of humanist discourse and of commemorative permanence. Hexameters are the highest and gravest Latin metre. They are particularly the medium of Virgil in the Aeneid where he celebrates 'pietas', dutiful love.6 The poem teems with words of relationship, especially for the bonds and gifts between father and son: 'Aptius a nobis quae possint munera donis / Respondere tuis?' ('What may I give you that can more fittingly repay your gifts to me?'). The words I have Stressed are brought together and enjambed by hyperbaton, striking departures from ordinary word-order, to mime the idea of reciprocity. Such observations demonstrate how Latin makes part of the decorum, and equally of the subject. Through Latin, precisely, the poet glimpses a bond between love for a person and the love of languages, together with wider-reaching intimations of the nature of love. Such connections are sought differently, and more explicitly, in the Italian poems. The climax of the canzone is the declaration, 'Questa e lingua di cui si vanta Amore' ('This, Italian, is the language on which Love prides himself'(i5)). Though the idea has ample precedent,7 it has especial force here - the force of rightness of occasion, as he writes in Italian for an Italian lady whose worth includes her skill with languages (rv. 10). The truth and worth of his love are shown in his risking mockery to attempt the 'strange tongue' (in. 7, and Canzone passim). For 'Love has willed the attempt', 'Amor lo volse' (in. 11). That this is said not as a mere conceit but in earnest, is affirmed by the echo of Dante ('Amor lo strinse' at Inferno v. 129); for along with Dante's words Milton assimilates Dante's steady, idealizing tone.8 Sonnet 4 best shows the interlocking of choice of language with ideas about language and about the love-occasion:

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Diodati, e te'l diro con maraviglia, Quel ritroso io, ch'Amor spreggiar solea E de' suoi lacci spesso mi ridea Gia caddi, ov' uom dabben talor s'impiglia. Ne treccie d'oro, ne guancia vermiglia M5 abbaglian si, ma sotto nuova idea Pellegrina bellezza che'l cuor bea, Portamenti alti onesti, e nelle ciglia Quel sereno fulgor d' amabil nero, Parole adorne di lingua piu d'una, E '1 cantar che di mezzo 1' emisfero Traviar ben pud la faticosa Luna, E degli occhi suoi awenta si gran fuoco Che P incerar gli orecchi mi fia poco.9 (Diodati, I'll tell you something which absolutely amazes me: I, the coy creature who used to scorn love, I who made a habit of laughing at his snares, have now fallen into his trap (which sometimes does catch a good man). It is not golden tresses or rosy cheeks which have dazzled me like this, but a foreign beauty, modelled on a new idea of loveliness, which fills my heart with joy: a proud, yet modest bearing; and that calm radiance of lovely blackness in her eyes and lashes; her speech which is graced by more than one language, and her singing which might well draw down the labouring moon from mid-air. And such bright fire flashes from her eyes that it would not be much good for me to seal up my ears.) Much here is purely conventional of course, and modelled on Petrarch. Nevertheless, all hinges on the attraction of what is foreign, alien, different - a 'pellegrina bellezza', a 'foreign beauty'. Milton is extending the range of his admirations, to his own and other people's surprise. But the role of language and of language-choice is crucial. Behind the manifest influence of Petrarch are sensed those of Dante and Plato. Allusion to Dante, whom Milton preferred as a love poet along with Petrarch ('the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura'),10 is instrumental in creating a steady ideal ardour: 'sotto nova idea / Pellegrina bellezza che'l cuor bea! (rv. 6-7), 'modelled on a new idea of loveliness, which fills my heart with beatitude'. 'Idea' is convergent testimony to the hyperbole: both the Platonic absolute of beauty, eidos or idea in Greek, and the sonnet tradition's neoplatonizing of the particular lady as epitome or standard of all beauty. The rhyming of 'idea' with 'bea' sounds out strongly at the point where the sonnet turns from negation to affirmation. What is more, Milton is sharing the new love with his closest friend, Diodati, whose Italian name and understanding

The Italian journey (1638-g) and language choice of Italian launch the sonnet. The meeting of friendship and eros within the Italian hints at the Platonic belief that other loves contribute to perfect love - presumably because in loving persons for ideas seen embodied in them, and in loving an idea which is found in Italian, the speaker finds the persons and the language coalescing into a single life-expanding excitement. Since the lady's accomplishments include being multilingual, and he loves her for that, the love of languages is integral to this love. Italian itself resembles a ground where love can meet, a source upon which they draw. In his Greek version of Psalm 114 further loves meet.11 6T6 TTOCTSES, 6T* dyAaa cpOV 'IOKCO(3OU AiyuTTTiov A lire 5fj|jiov, &nv$kcx, (3appapo9covov, Ar| TOTE JJOOVOV ir|v oaiov ysvos vies 'Io08a. 'Ev 6e 8sds AaoTai \xkya Kpsicov (3C«TIAEU6V.

(When the children of Israel, when the glorious tribes of Jacob left the land of Egypt, hateful, barbarous in speech, then indeed were the sons of Judah the one devout race; and God ruled in great might among the peoples.)

The occasion now being the awed love of God, the tongue chosen has a different relation to the subject. One might expect no relation: what has Old Testament theophany to do with Homer's anthropomorphic polytheism? No doubt Milton chose Homer as a model so as to match elevated subject with elevated metre, but I see more of challenge: the challenge to find out whether two opposing loved grandeurs can enhance one another. At times they can. In thefirstline, the Greek preserves the parallelism which is so typical of the original, but reshapes it to the elegant asymmetry of the hexameter line, which hinges by caesura earlier than mid-line. A mingling of symmetry with asymmetry is gained by the joining of anaphora (on 'hote') with amplification (a three-word unit balancing one of two words): 'Israel hote paides, hot' aglaa phuP Iakobou' ('when the sons of Israel, the glorious tribes ofjacob ...'). The third line squeezes a most Hebraic thought, the exclusive holiness of Israel, into Homer's Greek. Whereupon, the fourth line does the same yet more strikingly. The very Homeric tmesis which divides the prefix 'em'- from its verb-root '-basileuen' mimics sense by syntax, because thanks to Greek's inflectedness and the hyperbaton together 'God' is positioned, literally, 'among the peoples'. 'Among, God, the peoples, reigned'. Milton weds the two loved languages. Nonetheless, the challenge which I have inferred was not so much

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conscious as mysterious to him, since he writes that 'with no deliberate intention certainly, but from I know not what sudden impulse before daybreak, I adapted... this ode of the truly divine poet, almost in bed, to the rule of Greek heroic verse' ('nullo certe animi proposito, sed subito nescio quo impetu ante lucis exortum').12 Now, this being the time of day at which he begins his Nativity Ode, and at which later he habitually composed for Paradise Lost, we should note that the Psalm, like those works, came to him unbidden: can we conclude that it came in answer to some hidden imperative, an imperative to combine Hebraic and Homeric by idealizing each? At all events, the combining was an act of obeying, of unwilled allegiance. BEFORE AND AFTER I 6 3 8

If we now refer the choices so far examined to our opening distinction between occasional and romantic polyglots, we find Milton to be both at once. The choice of tongue suits an occasion and declares an allegiance. The choosing becomes part of the subject. If so, however, why did Milton abandon his polyglot excellence to write in English for the English? At least from the present perspective it seems like voluntary self-diminution. Common-sense explanations have not been lacking. In thefirstplace, his decision has the normal fitness of occasion, because if his best work is to be a national epic for his own countrymen, and for as many as possible of them, he must address them in their mother-tongue. Secondly, it would be natural for him, given the changes wrought in him by extended European travel, to want to renew his sense of roots. Thirdly, he declares that during his visit to Italy he became preoccupied by the political crises back home.13 Yet even these truisms do not wholly suffice. The epic of England did not eventuate - not in the projected form of an Arthur-epic, nor in any epic of national history. Milton's subsequent poetry does not interweave the subject and the chosen tongue by the sense of occasion which we have come to expect. He does not renew that romantic allegiance to the mother-tongue which wefindin the early 'Hail native language...' 14 We expect self-sacrifice of Milton, but hardly self-diminution. Part of the conundrum remains. My own view is this: he did not give up his languages, and did not diminish himself; rather, the interinanimating of his languages increased through abrupt zigzags of development, in the course of the Italian visit

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and in its wake; until his languages came to intersect where they could best intersect, within his English. And this, I believe, is what my inductive method reveals, if it is applied to the crucial, albeit sparse, evidence of Milton's poetic development between 1638 and 1645. IN ITALY AND IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS

A striking, yet indecisive passage occurs in Mansus, written about January 1639 when Milton was leaving Naples to return north. In this familiar passage, weaving in a complimentary linking of his host Manso with his poetic aspirations, he adumbrates a poem on the kings of his native land, and singles out Arthur: O mihi si mea sors talem concedat amicum Phoebaeos decorasse viros qui tarn bene norit, Si quando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae Magnanimos Heroas, et - O modo spiritus adsit Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges! (78-84)15 (O may it be my good luck to find such a friend, who knows so well how to honour Phoebus' followers, if ever I bring back to life in my songs the kings of my native land and Arthur, who set wars raging even under the earth, or tell of the great-hearted heroes of the round table, which their fellowship made invincible, and - if only the inspiration would come - smash the Saxon phalanxes beneath the impact of the British charge.) Milton does not say what language the poem will be in. One could argue it either way; that he writes of Arthur in Latin here, and only in Latin could Manso and his ilk receive it; or that Italians like Manso would well understand that a national epic went best with the national vernacular. We simply cannot decide the question. What is clear, is the manner of the proposal: his eager enthusiasm for the subject of Arthur, the simple British (Celtic) patriotism which leads him to envisage joining Arthur in the Saxon-smashing. I infer he has just possessed the subject, or it has just possessed him. It has not struck him that Arthur may be a myth, nor that an English poet may owe more to the Saxons than to their British predecessors. 16 T h e key passage regarding the choice of English for his British epic is a long passage (lines 125-84) towards the end of Epitaphium Damonis17 which, in its eloquence and informativeness alike, best reveals the manner of his choosing of English.

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The context is quite complex. Milton is writing of his Italian experiences of 1638-9 from the perspective of England in 1640, that is, from the perspective of return. The reminiscences have a mixed value, for even while 'Thyrsis' (Milton) was enjoying Italy, his friend 'Damon' (Diodati, the addressee of Sonnet 4) was dead in England. Accordingly, it is pain to reminisce; yet not entirely so, for Italy was worthwhile, and good to recall; and indeed it has permanently enlarged his being. 'O ego quantus eram...' (129), 'how great I felt then' - and by extension still do, in recalling. Besides, since the dead friend came from Lucca (128), to visit Italy including Lucca was in a way to visit him; it was an act of pietas. So, indeed, is the entire reminiscence, and the poem itself. It is a gift: a conversation with the dead, and a praising of the dead. And thefitnessof Latin is therefore extraordinary. Latin was the language in which Milton had previously written letters to his friend,18 as well as the language in which Milton had composed the poems which won him reputation among the 'shepherd-poets' of Italy (132-8). This is an internal fitness, of Latin to occasion. The external, wider fitness is simply that Latin is the language of commemoration, be it on statues or on graves: it has the needed dignity and tradition, gravitas and permanence. The excellence of the Latin, then, adds worth to what is already the natural gift. More still, however, this most ambitious of Milton's Latin poems is also virtually his last.19 In view of the further fact that this poem announces his next major poem will be in the mother-tongue, not Latin, is Milton in some way laying Latin verse itself- his medium as well as his message - as a votive tribute in Damon's grave? Be that as it may, the sense of occasion in the using of Latin for this farewell is even richer than in our previous examples. To all this in the manner of Milton's choosing of Latin must be added the manner of the reminiscence itself. He says he felt excited and proud as he lay beside the Arno and listened to the 'singing contests' there (132). He made so bold as to compete himself ('Ipse', 133). He did well, moreover, for the Florentine poets (Tastores Thusci', 126 and 134) gave him gifts (134-5) - including poems recording his friendship with Damon (136-8). Still imagining himself back in that past, he had turned in thought to address Diodati in England, who he thought was enjoying an equivalent pastoral life but alas was already dead (142-54). He imagined Damon collecting healing herbs (150-2); and these jolt him back to the fact, that herbs could not heal the healer (153-4). A tumult of feelings is felt in the manner hereabouts - in the twofold 'Ah' (142, 153), or the imprecation upon medicine for failing (153).

The Italian journey (1638-9) and language choice Moved by grief and love together, he nevertheless continues the reminiscing (156).20 The time referred to is complex, because it is excited: two times have been conflated, the happy past and the wretched present. A third time is now introduced, antecedent to the first recollected time. 'Eleven days ago, my pipe was sounding out some grand song: I had just set my lips to a new set of pipes, but they fell apart, broken at the fastenings, and were unable to carry the deep sounds. I hesitate to appear a little puffed up, yet I shall tell the tale. Give place, you forests' (Vos cedite silvae'). His state of mind was (and remains) ambitious. The new, grand subject proves too much for his instruments, in spite or because of their newness. He remains proud of attempting. He must confide it, whether in the time recollected or the time of the memorial poem; he must, even at the risk of hubris. Let pastoral therefore stand aside: that is, the next passage will rise above the typical pastoral register (as do some parts ofLycidas); and the poem which he now describes will as a whole rise thus higher. The excitement is conveyed by the number of the times incorporated, and if these times coalesce, so much the better for the theme of friendship that mere clock-time can be thus transcended. The following paragraph,21 mainly given to summarizing of the British material of the new work, likewise conveys a mingling of concern with the medium and a sense of undergoing rapid (and multiple, hence undifferentiated and unclear) change. 'If I have any time left to live, you, my pipe [= 'fistula', at 169 as at 156], will hang far away on the branch of some old pine tree, utterly forgotten by me; or else, transformed by my [or, from your] native muses, you will whistle a British tune. But after all, one man cannot do everything, or even hope to do everything. I shall have ample reward, and shall think it great glory if, although the outside world does not read my English, all Britain does so. The passage is central to our topic, yet is not exactly transparent. Is he giving up pastoral, or Latin, or both, or what? Does he really know yet? My view is that he does not, and that that is the point. Let us consider the various ambiguities, one by one. Lines 155-60 clearly reject pastoral (the 'fistula' broke, therefore 'cedite silvae'). But from line 169 onwards, he states some alternative, since 'aut' is the conjunction of exclusive alternative (as distinct from VeP): either he will give up his pipe or else he will exchange muses, Roman for British. This latter option would leave him the possibility of a pastoral in English, since an epic in English is not the sole alternative to a pastoral in Latin. Moreover, giving up his pipe might be a rejection of the 'fistula' by synecdoche for all poetry. It is not simply that the rejection of pastoral glides somewhere into the rejection of Latin. The passage

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glides between at least four options. Thus C. S. Jerram took 'fistula5 to mean all poetry whatsoever (and Milton of course did write a prose history of England soon afterwards). But David Masson took 'fistula' to mean Latin poetry (embracing Latin pastoral, but not excluding Latin epic).22 We might conclude that 'fistula5 denotes the one at 156 but some wider class at 169. Yet to localize the shifts of meaning thus upon a glide within one word, albeit a repeated and emphatic one, seems mechanical. My sense of the entire passage is of excited, expansionist self-discovery: the more options, then, the better. Why should a poet know exactly in advance how he would treat material which is susceptible to varying treatment, and which in the event he does treat in more than one language and genre? Instead, the passage (partly because it incorporates three different times and states of thought) throbs with unseparated possibilities. A further reason for thinking so is that the passage depends on Virgil, in a way which may resolve the problem without being mechanical and reductive. Virgil explains that curiously specific 'eleven days ago5. His Eclogue viii. 39 says, 'Alter ab undecimo turn me iam acceperat annus5 ('My eleventh year being completed, the next had just received me5): compare Milton5s 'ab undecima iam lux est altera nocte5 (156). That eclogue, and the one before it, supply Milton with much of the verbal texture hereabouts. For instance, the idea that a poet5s limitations are a special instance of human ones comes from both eclogues (vn. 23 and VIII. 63). Both eclogues are singing contests, therefore are poems about poetry. In the second of them Virgil asks himself whether he will ever rise to higher genres (VIII. 7-13): so, too, does Milton. Milton places a tag from the other eclogue (vn. 27-8) on the title-page of his published first fruits, the Poemata of 1645. That same eclogue provides the allusion which I find decisive, where Corydon enters the singing contest with a 'do-or-die5 statement of exclusive alternatives: Nymphae, noster amor, Libethrides, aut mihi carmen quale meo Codro, concedite (proxima Phoebi versibus ille facit) out, si non possumus omnes, hie arguta sacra pendebitfistulapinu.

(vn. 21-4)

(You nymphs of Libethra, my delight, either grant me a song like the one you granted my Codrus - he makes songs which come closest to those of Phoebus or else, if we cannot all attain such heights, here on the sacred pine tree my clear-sounding pipe shall hang [henceforth].)23

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I have emphasized the words which Milton takes over, not so much to show how many words they are as to show that they are clearer than his. Corydon prays that the Muses will inspire him: if they will not, he vows to give up composing. In Milton, the alternatives are more numerous, and less clear-cut. But the feeling of standing at a cross-roads is transferred. So too is the atmosphere of do-or-die. Damon has died, and his friend voices the thought of himself dying before he has written the poetry which it is his vocation and desire to write: 'O, mihi turn si vita supersit' ('Oh, if I have any time left to live').24 In short, the passage is a Virgilian palimpsest. Latin, especially neo-Latin, adores the effect of palimpsest (signalled and reworked quotation), and hence a poetic meditation upon poetry emulating Virgil works best in Virgilian Latin. But it is palimpsest in subject as much as in verbal correspondence: the subject is poet-singers at their respective cross-roads. The question for Virgil had been how to rise above pastoral, and it was Milton's also at first; but soon, out of sight in the subtext, the question is becoming whether to do it in Virgil's tongue or some other. An answer lurks in the sequel, that resounding march-past of British place-names (never heard in Virgil). Usa, Alauni, Abra, Treantae, Thamesis,

Tamara and Orcades (175-8): Ouse, Alne, Humber, Trent, Thames, Tamar, the Orkneys. That British places are celebrated by the sound and sequence of their versified Latin names, in the moment of turning away from Latin, is a triumphant paradox. To summarize, Milton does not write informatively so much as excitedly. And some regret is intermingled, since he is forfeiting the European audience he has just found and gloried in. Self-discovery and self-assertion remain dominant, as seen in the threefold anaphora on 'ipse' (133,155,162): '/shall write all this', or 'To think of me doing it!' But another element is tension, the conflict between his languages. When for the first time a language choice means loss as well as gain, the poem weighs them. AFTER THE EPITAPHIUM

DAMONIS

Both excitement and uncertainty continued. In 164225 Milton expresses an obligation to his native language and native land together: like Ariosto, he would seek 'the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end . . . but to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect.' Zest and zeal are projected. But in the following

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sentences we find him undecided about everything else - the genre and the subject and whether it should be sacred or secular. Such uncertainty seems odd, in view of his two previous proclaimings of a British theme which should climax with Arthur. Likewise he plays down British (as distinct from Saxon) history in the Trinity Manuscript list of themes, made 1640-2. Arthur, in particular, is deafeningly absent. The usual explanation given is that an intensive study of his nation's history upon his return from Italy had exposed the British historiography of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his like as untrue; and if untrue, then unfit to be celebrated or serve for instruction. Roberta Brinkley26 argues that Milton may have found the Arthur story pre-empted, and contaminated, by the Stuarts, and certainly he becomes rather suddenly more interested in the Saxons than in the Britons (the reverse being true at the time of Mansus). At all events, Milton goes on at once to declare that 'England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics'. Thus we have the ironical situation that he abandoned Latin for Arthur's sake, and then Arthur for the sake of England and English. Where would he look next for his subject? And how secure was his grasp of its medium, too? Even where truth was not in doubt, he faced a dilemma. Should he honour England's history by seeing it under the eye of God, as history is seen in the Old Testament? Or by appropriating the history of Israel to England's destiny? Somewhere in the period of the Trinity Manuscript lists27 he cuts the knot, going beneath both fallen histories to the Fall itself. The manuscript has more entries on Adam than on any other subject, they are longer entries, and each of them is fuller than the one before it. The tide is turning towards 'Adam Unparadiz'd' as his epic subject. In Satan's address to the Sun, that early portion of Paradise Lost, he has found his medium also, has chosen his tongue. How early is that passage? As early as 1642-3, perhaps? Aubrey's Life of Milton dates it to 'about 15 or 16 years before ever his poem [Paradise Lost] was thought of'.28 The figures are not inherently absurd, nor their product unlikely: if we take 1658 as the time when Milton 'thought of his epic because by then he had retired as Secretary of the Foreign Tongues, then 1658 minus 15 on6 equals 1643 or 1642. Edward Phillips says only 'several years' before the poem was begun; but since he wrote that in old age and had talked with Aubrey much earlier, Aubrey's specific numbers may be more nearly right. Certainly Phillips connects them with the opening of a draft tragedy on the subject of Adam, such as figure in the Trinity MS, yet a

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draft later than the four sketches there (none of which begins with Satan and his address). But one hesitates to trust Aubrey on figures, despite the neatness of an inference that Milton searched for a subject and medium together. Assuredly, he had now found his voice and tongue. Though his choice still rests with English, it is an English made personal and multiple, and given a needed tension, by a domiciling of words and allusions and structures of words from his other tongues. I shall explore the 'hybridized5 character of this last of my proof-texts before advancing the hypothesis that its English differs from the style of his English, and his other tongues, of before 1641. O Thou that with surpassing Glory Crown'd! Look'st from thy sole Dominion, like the God Of this New World; at whose sight all the Stars Hide their diminish'd Heads; to thee I call, But with no friendly Voice; and add thy Name, 0 Sun! to tell thee how I hate thy Beams That bring to my remembrance, from what State 1 fell; how Glorious once above thy Sphere; Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down, Warring in Heaven, against Heaven's Glorious King.29 It has long been thought that the address to the Sun takes off from the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Although some scholarship has questioned the idea, it seems probable enough, because Milton knew that play, and to him Prometheus signified a principled, yet ambivalent rebellion.30 Satan, however, rejects the Sun as well as the ruling deity: the first, with rancour, because of the second. So there emerges in subtext a comprehensiveness and (so to speak) idealism in his hatred, but also there emerges the worth of what he contemns. Milton has made a stunning advance from the idealized loves of earlier poems we have examined. And yet the new idiom is related to them, because the tension between valuations of rebellion - Greek-heroic and Hebrew-diabolic - now proceeds within the English language itself. More than that, since the sun was a divine image in the Greek cosmologies, then in Plato and the Neoplatonic tradition through to Ficino, no fewer than four of his foreign cultures cohabit in his new-forged English. 'Sole dominion' is made of two words borrowed from Latin, and hints at a pun on Sol, the Latin for cSun\ In 'their diminished heads' we find the combining of Latin-derived with Anglo-Saxon words which works powerfully for English poets. By artful placing, too, 'diminished'

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becomes both attributive and predicative, as in Latin: heads which have been, and go on being, diminished. The density and emphasis of 'diminished' bring out Satan's obsession with status. Greek and Latin conjoin in the adjective-phrase 'no friendly' voice. As well as being the figure litotes - the negative not of absence but of understated oppositeness - the phrase is a litotes of idiom. Latin inimicus is the negating of amicus, friend, and the Greek aphilos works similarly. ('He who is not with me is against me'.) For good measure, the litotes glances at Hebrew 'Satan': the Opposer, the Accuser, the Adversary, he who exposes human offences at God's court. The word is verb, noun, then a title, then (as he becomes over-zealous at his work, and is poisoned by it) his individuating name.31 It becomes Milton's frequent practice in Paradise Lost thus to etymologize names, for the sake of explanation but further of a witty characterizing, of name and nature together. With the words 'I call' we have reached the main verb of this single-sentence utterance. But instead of moving forward smoothly henceforth, the syntax at once writhes more than ever: 'I call, / But. . . no friendly... and add... to tell... how... That bring... from what... how . . . till. . .' Of course the syntax by its twists and turns enacts the writhing increase of grudge, but we should remember as instigator of that mimesis the many patterns and hyperbatons by which Bembo and Delia Casa gave suspension, hence energy and distinction, to literary Italian.32 Nor does it qualify, but rather reinforces, the point about Milton's style being hybridized to remember further that his Latin authors practised the same sort of syntactical arts: presumably the Italians went back to source, too. After which Milton lets in a ray of New Testament light: 'O Sun . . . I hate thy beams' calls up St John's words, 'Everyone that doeth evil hateth the light', with their context.33 To hate the sun, the source of life on earth, is virtual blasphemy in most cultures: Milton had read it in Euripides, for instance.34 His cultures again corroborate one another as he draws them into his English. To engender such magnificent self-exposure as Satan's in English, then, no single cause sufficed. A prominent contributor, all the same, is the fertilizing interplay of Milton's languages with his native tongue. The forms of interplay fluctuate. We expect contact between his Latin and English. I myself notice the lively joining of Greek and Hebrew in his English, probably because those two languages stand further apart from each other and from English. But in truth, none of the possible conjunctions of his five major languages can be safely ignored. So whether in Italy or upon return, Milton took firmer grasp of

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something fundamental to English: not simply the fact that it had absorbed much from Latin and from other tongues, but that - in syntax as well as words - it could absorb more; in short, that absorption suited it. English itself has grown by being eclectic and assimilative, a cheerful borrower; hospitable to what is different, and thereby rendered creative. Milton's English in the early 1640s grew likewise: in its egotistically sublime way it drew other languages to itself. OBJECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

Three natural objections must be stated and given an answer. First, it is possible to agree that Milton's English of Satan's address is superior in its complexity and force to the foreign-language poems here considered, but also to find that there is far less difference between the English of the address and his English of the poems composed before Italy, for example Lycidas. I grant that Lycidas owes much to the eclogues of Virgil for its ideas and pastoral ambience, and that at times Milton approaches translation in his English.35 He deploys classical names, including the Latinized names of native entities. Less prominent in lycidas, however, is the etymologizing sense of the roots of words borrowed from other languages which is growing in Satan's address ('sole', cno friendly'), and which grows further in Paradise Lost as a whole. In fact, I notice in Lycidas some tendency to use native English words or things just where a Virgilian or classicizing flavour might have been added ('Or taint-worm to the weanling herds', line 46). Doubtless, though, the increase of etymologizing which I perceive is a matter of degree rather than of kind; and since too the question of Milton's Latinism is a vexed question, it is examined more fully later.36 As with diction, the choosing of words, so a second objection might be made regarding syntax, their ordering, namely that Italian influence predates his visit to Italy, and is seen in Lycidas. My reply is, first, that Milton's sonnets in Italian itself are a very important part of this poetic development; then, that the syntax of the English sonnets written after Italy is more Italianate than the syntax of their English predecessors. But, obviously enough, the influence of Italianate syntax will be different, perhaps greater, where it is not played off against rhyme: to my sense, Comus in A Masque does not do through syntax what Satan in his address does. We have still to explain the surge forward to the mature style of the satanic voice, and I propose that the Italian journey and its immediate sequel go some way to explaining it.

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To the third objection, that the present perspective makes Milton's growth too purely linguistic and too conscious, a similarly modest answer is appropriate. It is not my design to make the process of 'domiciling' foreign languages in his English a conscious, or deliberate one. Paradise Lost is not Finnegans Wake (though that comparison would bear some fruit). The choice of a second tongue to compose in does have conscious purpose, because the choice regularly becomes part of the sense of occasion. Yet equally regularly the occasional performance seeks an allegiance which eludes us - and eludes Milton. Whenever, too, he writes in a tongue that is not native to him it admits willy-nilly an English language part of his sensibility, be it the feeling for his father in 'Ad Patrem', or the sense of being an outsider to Italian in the Italian poems. For this very reason, however, the sensibility can make the leap forward (out of sight, so to speak) to Satan's 'multiple' English. For one thing, there is an element of impersonation in speaking any foreign language, some degree of role-playing and self-experimentation; and so to go playing among languages made Satan easier to impersonate, in a general if opaque way. More important, Satan's English is the reverse case of the process (whether of self-suspension or of self-inclusion) involved in composing in the other languages. It is the English with which his other tongues can most readily intersect. To return to our point of departure, finally: more can be learnt from tracing how Milton chose among his languages, than from conjecturing why. To trace how, reveals why we cannot know why; and why he himself may not have known, beyond a limited extent. Into several passages he writes a discussion with himself about the grounds of choice of tongue, and gives a sense that, as he begins to write, the choice of tongue has already been made. How does any poet begin to find a poem's words (as distinct from its subject, though subject and first words may in fact originate together)? Often enough it is from a phrase or rhythm found somewhere within the poet. Milton, then, having the wider resources of competence in his several languages, is a special case of what is very generally intriguing. His language choices obey personal imperatives which remain interestingly obscure. His uncertainty as to why Psalm 114 demanded to be written in Greek before that winter dawn shares something with the fact 'That his Vein never happily flow'd, but from the Autumnal Equinoctial to the Vernal...' Should we speak, not of Milton choosing a language, but rather of a language choosing him?

CHAPTER 4

Milton's arts of language: translating and philology

Besides theflairfor multilingual verse-composing which was displayed in Poems, 1645, Milton cultivated further arts of language. They included Latin prose composition, translating, philology, lexicography, and pedagogy with Latin as its medium. Of these, the first will receive attention in chapter 5. The present chapter will focus on translating and philological scholarship, with a glance at the remainder. His translating centres on rendering verse originals from four languages into English; yet it goes wider, for example when he translates prose, or verse into another language than English. I take translating first now because whenever it approaches autonomous verse-composing it extends the survey of his multilingual verse which has been the subject of chapters 2 and 3. And by closing with an account of his translating from Hebrew we move across to his philology; for whereas Hebrew was not a language in which he composed, it has a vital place in his philology, whether pursued for its own sake or applied to purposes of polemic. By 'philology51 mean, first, the more confined attention to linguistic matters which the word signifies in English. But then also I mean, built on that linguistic foundation, the access through languages to other cultures. This is the wider-than-linguistic scholarship, or Altertumswissenschqft, to which Greek and Latin lead in continental Philologie. It has its equivalent in Old Testament studies as entered through Hebrew, and the whole body of world-history which his classical languages and vernaculars opened up. This chapter will focus on his philology in the narrower sense, mainly textual criticism in fact, while the next will address the wider sense. His other language-arts, while not negligible, seem more routine activities or adequately served by existing scholarship.

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Milton's translating is unusual, full of invention and variety, as reference to his younger contemporary Dryden illustrates. Dryden distinguishes 'metaphrase', close to the original in words and word order, from 'paraphrase', where an author's words are followed less strictly than his sense, and both from 'imitation', freer still, verging on adaptation or recreating.1 Milton practises imitation in his two early Psalm versions, and experiments with metaphrase in his Horace ode version. And this, being 'rendered almost word for word . . . as near as the language will permit', shows him aware of the options and problems.2 More normally in his maturity, however, he favours a mixture of metaphrase with paraphrase, moving perpetually in the course of a version from the one to the other. I would term it 'appropriation', a series of moves from author's words and meaning into possessing that meaning as his own idea. The impact is that of a small epiphany, an apprehending - his then ours - of the point of the particular translating. Something out there, in the cultural past, has come to live down here, in Milton's working mind. We begin with his sole complete prose translation, because in it (besides illustrating his practice) he vents some feelings about translating. The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce (1644) shows Milton

shortening his author where Bucer is verbose or moves away from Milton's own interests; amplifying where explanation is needed for the 'mere English' (monolingual) reader; simplifying the diction; and avoiding Latinism of word or construction. In other words, Milton mixes Dryden's options, to achieve his goal of enlisting a favourable advocacy of divorce.3 He is explicit, italicizing his additions (as he would do later in some of his Psalm versions). The impression given is of a clear and confident linguist, appropriating through translation. Yet he does not, this time, rejoice in the process. It irks him: Others may read him [Bucer] in his own phrase on the first to the Corinthians, and ease me who never could delight in long citations, much less in whole traductions; Whether it be natural disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of what God made mine own, and not a translator.4 In short, he felt life had more to offer him than translating, especially at this length, on the subject of divorce. Elsewhere, accordingly, his translating is always briefer, always of verse, and always done into verse. He shows the zest which was lacking in the Bucer version. Thus even his three versions from Italian poets, which do no more in

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their published context than corroborate a polemical point about the Papacy, do it with a glad appropriation.5 Eagerly, he calls up Catholic witness to condemn the Papacy. Milton shifts Dante's lament over the 'Donations' of Constantine to the Papacy from 'dowry' ('dote') to 'rich domains', as the 'cause' not 'mother' ('matre') of evil: compounded by the loss of rhyme and of the maternal image, the change is from lament mingled with anger to plain denunciation. Similarly with Ariosto's allusion to the Donations: 'se pero dir lece' ('if one may be blunt') becomes 'if you the truth will have'. The tone is no longer Ariosto's sly deprecation but a challenge: 'do you want to have the truth?' Milton hammers where Ariosto insinuated. Through modals, Milton annexes. The modal additions perform a fuller appropriating on the title-page of Areopagitica (1644). Euripides' Theseus says liberty prevails in a state when any citizen who wants to advise the city does so; or if he doesn't, stays silent: what is juster than this? The verbs are straightforward indicatives, Theseus being very calm and regal. But Milton's English version rams in modal auxiliaries: 'He who can, and will. . .' and 'Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace' for 'What can ^juster.. .?'6 He is turning 'is' into 'ought', conveying the same enthusiastic urgency as throughout his 'Speech' to Parliament which follows. No mistranslating occurs, since what Theseus as king in a fiction declares to be the case is becoming advocacy, by a living citizen in a national crisis. The modals empower Milton to rise to the occasion. Appropriation animates the translations in another way, which we met in chapter 3; an interlingual, interactive way. Milton's tendency noted in Bucer to eliminate words from the English which would recall the wording of the Latin original, and to prefer Anglo-Saxon derivatives in his versions, is part of the prevalent appropriating. But for this very reason, when he does choose words which look outside the native resources in some way, the impact is of a special effect, an impact of concurrent testimony between languages, between their cultures. One striking instance comes from Horace.7 Horace describes a public man whose private life is squalid as 'introrsum turpem, speciosum pelle decora' ('disgraceful within, despite the fair-seeming skin'). Milton hits harder, starting with a verb and closing with a damning image: everyone close to him 'Sees his foul inside through his whited skin.' 'Whited' connotes concealment and leprosy, from Matthew 23. 27 (where Pharisees resemble 'whited sepulchres'); so that a Christian judgement enters the Roman thought through the English. Hypocrisy becomes more loathsome since Roman and Christian testimonies concur; Christ

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and Horace, meeting in Milton, make a devastating triad of witnesses. In these examples we discern a characteristic 'surge3, the moment when the demands of the original have received enough and Milton surges across to seize the whole at its close for himself, and English. The History of Britain shows a different, more intriguing example of interlingual sparking. The murder of the young king Kenelm is discovered miraculously when a messenger pigeon delivers a message in Early Middle English at the altar of St Peter's in Rome (!!!): 'In clenc cu beche Kenelm cunebearn lith under thorne haudes bereafte' ('In a cattle-meadow the king's child Kenelm lies under a thorn tree bereft of his head'). Milton's source, the Flores Historiarum, adds a translation into Latin hexameters: In clenc sub spina iacet in convalle bovina Vertice privatus, Kenelmus rege creatus. When Milton in turn renders the message, does he straightforwardly render the Latin, or go back to the EME, or mix both, or what? Is this example the sign we have been awaiting, that he did know Anglo-Saxon? He gives the sense as: Low in a mead of kine under a thorn, Of head bereft li'th poor Kenelm king-born.8 Milton removes the weird macaronic effect of including 'clenc' in the Latin. He uses no Latin-based words whatever, nor 'clenc'. He employs word-order, and sound, to retain the pre-Latin phrasing: 'of head bereft' ('haudes bereafed') and 'Kenelm king-born' ('Kenelm cunobearn'). So while he might be following the principle of his Bucer version, to avoid Latinism for the sake of 'mere English' readers, and he might have the the further motive of scorn for the credulity of its monkish chroniclers, the life of the rendering is aural, alliterative. We need not think he knew Old or Early Middle English, but he was captivated here by the music of an older English. A double purpose, of pity for 'poor' Kenelm and scorn for monks, is served by his interlingual palimpsest. To remove any remaining doubt about this intersectivity in translations, recall (from earlier chapters) his rendering of Psalm 114 into Homeric Greek hexameters. An entire poem is born from multilingual imitation, and operates where Homer and David intersect in heroic. A simple instance is the beginning. The Hebrew parallelism of 'When Israel went out of Egypt, the house ofJacob from a people of strange language' is rearranged:

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Israel hote paides, hot' aglaa phuP Iacobou Aiguption lipe demon, apechthea, barbarophonon . . . (When the sons of Israel, when the renowned tribes of Jacob left Egypt, that hateful nation, barbarous of speech . . .) Thereby Milton gets the effect of doubling within the single hexameter line, swelling finely from three words to four, a balancing of unequal metrical units at the caesura. Israel 5 and Jacob 5 enfold the meaning from their positions at the beginning and ending of the Homeric line. The majestic thought of the Exodus combines the strengths of Greek and Hebrew expression. A third tendency which stands out, after appropriation and interactivity, is experimentalism. While it can be felt everywhere in his emulations, it becomes overt in two of them: Horace's ode, Tyrrha 5 (date uncertain) and the Psalms 80-8 (dated very precisely to April 1648). He describes Horace's Odes 1. 5 as being 'Rendered almost word for word without rhyme according to the Latin measure, as near as the language will permit.' 9 Even if 'measure' refers only to the metre, 'language' must mean English, so he must be thinking wider, about what English will - and will not - 'permit'. It certainly permits the Latin words to show through, and on this occasion and for its special needs Milton carries over more Latin words than usual; single words like 'admire' for 'emirabitur', a phrase like 'liquid odours' for 'liquidis . . . odoribus', but even whole clauses: Qui nunc te fruitur credulus aurea; Qui semper vacuam, semper amabilem Sperat becomes Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who always vacant always amiable Hopes thee . . . [my emphases] But in fact this third stanza shows the limits all too well. English, forced into the Latin word-order, cannot make clear who is 'credulous' and who is 'amiable' nor what 'vacant' means. What inflection can clarify readily, English fails to: the syntax crumples into nonsense. Horace was a stiff test, of course, because the Latin of his odes is exceptionally compressed - compressed even more than Latin normally is, by metrical exigencies. Three of Milton's stanzas out of four pass the test; and in the other one, Milton found what he had sought, the limits, by exceeding

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them. If this version comes from after 1645 it comes from a time when he was experimenting equally with the hyperbatons of the beginnings of the grand style of Paradise Lost ('O thou, that with surpassing glory crown'd / Look'st. . .') Milton is overtly experimenting again in 'Nine of the psalms done into metre, wherein all but what is in a different character, are the very words of the text, translated from the original'.10 The nine are Psalms 80-8. 'Metre' means Common Metre, the fours and threes of ballads or of Psalms used liturgically by most churches; so were these versions, uniquely among his translations, aimed at public reading and even use? This natural assumption lacks supporting evidence. What we know is that the versions came out - complete with their 'different character' (italics, as in Bucer) and a few notes on the Hebrew - in 1673. And we know they seek to render the Very words' of the original. This they achieve, because the italicized words are never alterations or modifications but expansions made to explain the sense orfillout the metre (or both). Not that the experiment results in beauty: even Milton's fours and threes are doggerel, especially through the distortions of word-order. 'But now it is consumed with fire, / And cut with axes down...' (80.16) (Imagine singing this!) Still, experiments do not seek beauty but discovery. Milton is discovering a way to achieve absolute fidelity to a sacred text, in the literal sense of coverage; after which, to the devout maybe, incorporated exegesis is no detriment tofidelitybut a bonus. All the same, none of his departures from normal English syntax ever again sound so painful and gawky. By flouting its limits and by uniquely privileging the source language, he indeed finds out what English will not endure. Finally, because Milton translated Psalms more than he did other authors or texts, I survey this little group of verses, to bring out its experimental variety. In school exercises (1624) he freely adapted Psalms 114 and 136. In 1634 he rendered Psalm 114 again, into Homeric Greek, this time of his own volition or rather by some mysterious dawn impetus. In 1648 he rendered Psalms 80-8. In 1653 he rendered Psalms 1-8, into a different English for each (and no more fours and threes). Whatever the subjects and moods of these attempts, the recurring factor is variation in the medium and conception of translating - a process, or meditation, which becomes more not less self-conscious. It waxes multilingual at times, but only in 1648 does he explicitly and fully confront the Hebrew. I read that as meaning that he did not so confront it except when he said he did: 1648 is the exception not the norm. The subjects and moods of the Psalms seem to suggest an attitude

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behind each choice.11 This reasoning, however, can be overused. It must mean something that he returned to Psalm 114, 'When Israel came out of Egypt. . .' It must mean he then, even if briefly, shared the joy of the Exodus for Israel, and it may mean he felt such a hope for England. But as for Psalms 80-8, what they spell most clearly to me is experimentation; and all the more so because their subjects and moods are various. The common factor is only the cultic life, and Exodus-hope, of Israel. More still with the 1653 group, experimentation stands out. One might wish to emphasize the personal distress of Psalm 3 there. Yet confidence is present too (Psalm 1). Indeed, perhaps he was meditating the coronation of Messiah in Psalm 2 for the sake of Paradise Lost, Book III? It's anyone's guess. The common factors are: return to the songs of worshipping Israel (songs par excellence according to the Christ of Paradise Regained, iv. 347); and an appropriating of their devotion through one or another of his languages and their mediums. The range of his versions is marked by extremes: from the glorying in free Greek expansion in 114, to an ultimate of metaphrase in the annotated metrical English. The marginal notes to Psalms 80—8 have the special interest of being his only published philology; indeed, if they date from 1673 when he made additions to his collected poems, they are one of the latest of all his acts of scholarship. Like other printed marginalia from the Renaissance they can be located on William Slights's scale of interactions between an author's text and marginalia.12 Slights lists as examples of how margin may relate to text: amplification, annotation, appropriation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, exhortation, explication, justification, organization, parody, pre-emption, rhetorical gloss, simplification and translation (pp. 685-6). Thus clearly the purpose and effect of the interaction vary, modifying the reader's sense of authorial persona. Milton does not play Erasmian extravaganzas through marginalia, and certainly ridicules a theological opponent who overloaded his margins with biblical confirmations.13 But his usage still emerges as personal. For one thing it comes as a late afterthought within his translating, probably as part of the attempt at a more scrupulous fidelity in his psalmody. The Very words of the text' make up the substance of the first eighteen marginalia, being the Hebrew words hefindshardest to render precisely, transliterated according to his Sephardic pronunciation: C!lJehemajun', 'fjagnarimu', and '*Jithjagnatsu gnaP in 83. 2-3, where the thunderous 'gn' represents the guttural ayin.1* But then he alters course. His next note points out that the Hebrew 'bears both' of

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two senses, to explain why his English is giving both. His literal fidelity includes fullness this time (contrast his Horace ode), and marginalia help justify his procedure. The next six marginalia exemplify another of Slights's interactions, explication; for instead of simply annotating (citing) the Hebrew original he gives an English prose version of it. 'fHeb. The burning heat ofthy wrath' (85.3) explicates his verse rendering, 'thy ffiercewrath'; but it shows, too, that he has moved from literal Hebrew idiom to something nearer paraphrase (conveying thought not words). This example comes nearer to appropriation. Similarly, his last two notes explain that he has rendered both possibilities of a Hebrew ambiguity at 88.7; and has made an emendation to help himself understand some difficult Hebrew (88. 15).15 Consequently, while the versions remain predominantly literal, the notes move in the direction in which Milton's verse expansions move, namely explication. The notes latterly show Milton grappling with the complexities of Hebrew for their own or understanding's sake, as a philologist. That extends to the scholarly interaction par excellence, one not listed by Slights but paramount in the handwritten marginalia, namely emendation. Milton's printed marginalia thus, by their own change and impetus, move us forward from translating to scholarship. Even here, in ostensibly serviceable and humble print, his annotations share the experimentation and restlessness, the wish to appropriate, that distinguish his translating. The changes of direction, the inconsistencies, confirm his pride in not being born to be a translator (or philologist). Tensions add energy to his practice.

Whereas for Psalms 80-8 Milton practised philology for the sake of translating, he more often practised it for its own sake - to determine meaning, usually by rescuing it through emending a poorly printed text. I seek to show the spirit, competence and idiosyncrasies of this annotating practice. Though they were written for his own eyes only, it is a fact of the first importance that his Euripides marginalia entered the mainstream of philological scholarship. In view of current theoretic interest in marginalia, as intertextual dialogue, or interplay of personae, I first situate Milton's handwritten marginalia within that now-emergent genre.17 All marginal notes that a reader writes in beside a printed text are dialogic, personal, self-assertive

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and critical, as HeatherJackson claims. That is, by their nature they talk back to the print, are a person-to-person response, in which the reader becomes active, and interprets or re-interprets or criticizes the original or its print version. Most marginalia are economical, thus brusque or laconic, thus self-assertive again, because of space-constraints. Why worry? Annotators write to themselves only, or to the absent author. But Jackson goes too far for my annotator, Milton, when she claims that marginalia are by nature 'self-indulgent'. Not only do most readers deface their books' margins, but serious readers do it more. Such pavings aid precision of thought by being positioned exactly where the text prompts a response. They may accumulate (as with Richard Bentley) to the materials of an edition. Far from implying that the reader's ego outweighs the author's, marginal corrections of a bad printed text seek to remove an extrinsic obstacle to understanding the author, whose claims are in fact prime. This is perhaps why Jackson belittles 'professional' (study-aid) marginalia, as 'suppressing' the annotator's personality. Is this not over-severe, to reason that marginalia must be either selfindulgent or boring? I want to protest that scholarly annotation is neither impersonal nor an ego-trip, but personal in the way that emphasis and zeal for truth (philaletheia is allied to 'philology') are personal traits. In Milton's, at any rate, we see his personality exercised in philological annotation, through the Latin he writes alongside Greek texts. Among the handwritten marginalia the emphasis falls very heavily on Greek and on poets. In total contrast to all his other marginalia he writes numerous, searching, varied notes to his copies of the poets Lycophron, Aratus and Euripides. I therefore proceed from instances drawn out of these three books from his library.18 Lycophron (born c. 320 BG) was famously obscure even in antiquity, being known as ho skoteinos, the 'dark one'. He had some reason to be 'dark': he dramatizes Cassandra's raving, riddling prophecies, doomed to be disbelieved yet true. His obscure diction and allusion suit the character well enough. But there is a whiff of the imitative fallacy too, the mismatching of form to subject: just as characters who are bores must not be boring to read, so obscure tragic prophetesses should not be impenetrable either. Milton, at all events, read the book- wisely only the once, in the 1630s - to test and perfect his understanding of Greek. The reasoning is an a fortiori: Lycophron's sidelong way with meaning, and perpetual neologism, make most other Greek texts seem transparent. The result is a stream of notes, on textual or factual matters or matters of literary allusion. But whereas manuscripts of Lycophron show a

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winding causeway of obscure text surrounded by a sea of puzzled or hopeful commentary, Milton though thorough is brisk. After halfway, he begins to marginalize more thriftily: like any right-minded reader he decides that Lycophron is not absolutely worth the effort, and that the repetitions are decidedly not incremental. This needs saying here, because if the examples chosen seem disproportionate to the worth of the text and its human issues, well, Milton thought so too; but first he read it all, and so entitled himself to cut things short.19 Milton starts commenting as a literary not textual critic; he wishes that the adjective 'karkharos', 'jagged,' were the ampler, Homeric 'karkharodous', 'jagged-toothed', Tor this would be grander' ('hoc enim grandius').20 But he does not alter it, respecting the text where no reasons of sense or metrics or logic compel emendation. Soon enough, however, Milton has to make changes to secure sense or metre or both. An example of both at once is line 224.21 By changing the nonsensical and unmetrical 'homos' to 'houmos' he restores both metre and sense. 'I wish my father [houmospater] had not ignored the oracles of Aesacus, etc' There is great scope for this kind of emendation, since Milton is reading a bad printed text of a purposely obscure poet: Milton often rises to the occasion. At other times, he comments on the content or on the Latin translation which runs underneath his Greek text.22 An interesting note at line 43523 is also Milton's longest. It objects to a translation of Zeus's title 'muleus' ('guardian of mills') into 'Juppiter Pistor', on the grounds that Zeus the 'Baker' is too Roman a concept; it refers to a very particular, faintly comical rescue of Rome by Jupiter, as narrated in Ovid (Fasti vi. 353). Milton wants Lycophron to stay Greek, and to keep a sufficiently Greek decorum in Latin. A translator's appropriating, in this instance, must not flout an author's tone. Aratus (271-213 BC), writing didactically in hexameters on stars and weather-signs, was another Alexandrian but his was a more important text: important in itself as a guide to working life, and as an influence on Virgil's Georgics. Milton's annotations,24 accordingly, show increased interest and warmth. The interest appears in the fact of his annotating the text at least twice, his 1640s hand in some cases revising a 1630s note. The warmth, I come to in a moment. A word of cautious explanation is needed first, regarding the ascription to Milton of marginal notes in Aratus and Euripides. Without claiming much expertise in deciding the date and authenticity of Milton's handwriting in these Greek annotations, I have not yet found

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occasion to doubt the ascriptions and datings of Kelley and Atkins, in their essays on the Aratus and Euripides annotations. For present purposes I have kept to the fullest, therefore least disputatious instances. As a rule of thumb, the difference between Greek and Italian small V in Milton's Latin annotations suffices to distinguish 1630s from 1640s. In a sizable extract it is confirmed by smaller matters, grasped by feel.25 Milton's 'warmth', or even affection for Aratus, appears in the first two notes. On the title-page he adds - in his 1630s hand - Ovid's praise of Aratus as a poet who will endure as long as the sun and moon he wrote about: 'Cum sole et luna semper Aratus erit' ('Aratus will endure for ever, along with the sun and the moon [which he helps us understand]'). Ovid says this at the close of Amores I, dreaming of fame for himself: is Milton having his own dream of fame? Then - in his 1640s hand - he endorses the famous statement that 'we (humans) are all the children of God' ('tou gar genos esmen'); not as might be expected from Paul's reference to this sententia in Acts 17. 28, but from Lucretius — a reputed atheist, yet another didactic poet. sic Lucretius, denique celesti sumus omnes semine oriundi. omnibus ille idem pater est &c. lib. 2. p. 265 (So also says Lucretius. 'Finally, we are all heaven-born: we all have the same father, etc' Book II [of De Rerum Natura], p. 265) Milton is reading with attention, and with empathy. He mentions both poets again, but not Lycophron, in the educational syllabus of the treatise Of Education (1644). The bulk of his Aratus notes, nevertheless, are textual. As so often, early printed texts of ancient authors swarmed with typos, and especially Greek ones because of the intricacies of Greek diacritics and their unfamiliarity to printing-house workers. Consequently, much of the vigilance, issuing in penmanship, of readers like Milton who wanted to be reading the actual words of the author had to be spent on textual criticism. This art has been denigrated as 'glorified proof-reading', and in many cases for Milton it was. But sometimes the printers had preserved a manuscript error, or their own mistakes induced the serendipity of an inspired correction. In the Aratus these are few; yet a couple of Aratus examples will set the scene for Milton's more arduous and productive reading of Euripides. At line 74 his text had left four words out, thus making a hole in the sense and metre: Milton supplies the lack from other editions ('ex aliis

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editionibus supplemus'). Note the editorial 'we': sitting judicially or judiciously above the received text. Perhaps because his own copy was bad he read with other texts around him, collating into his own copy. That was in the 1630s. At line 100, however, hefirst(in the 1630s) changes an unmetrical verb-form from another edition (De Gabiano's); but then (1640s now) alters that editor's strained verb-form to a simpler solution from a better scholar, Stephanus; from 'edeixen' to 'edeixen' to Stephanus' 'eeiden'. So on this occasion he saw a need not only to correct the text but to go on thinking about the problems till he had recovered the pristine sense. This all-round strength and integrity of Milton's scholarship are best viewed in his Euripidean annotations. From the mass of material26 I select two views of Milton at work as a philological scholar. First, I examine which plays he annotated most, and for what reasons we can infer that he did so. Then I group (and illustrate) the main emphases in his annotations. The plays which are most annotated by Milton's undisputed hand, whether 1630s or 1640s, are: Hippolytus (Volume I); Supplices, Helena and Ion (Volume II).27 The Hippolytus contains unusually many of Milton's private attention-markings - * from the 1630s,x from the 1640s.28 As the play's themes include male purity, female lust, misogyny and theodicy, the markings have been linked to Milton's marital vicissitudes. But they show, if anything, that the themes attracted him long before his marriage (1642): they more certainly reflect his idealism and empathy (since Milton did not have to face Hippolytus' problems!) Still, if the incidence does support the idea of a temperamental interest in the Hippolytus, then the similar incidence of notes on the Ion supports the inference of a cognate identification with the trials of a young man self-dedicated to a divinely sanctioned vocation; for in this case we have the intense reliance on Ion in his Latin ode to Rouse. The Helena more certainly lies outside the range of his own life, and its unusually numerous annotations reflect interest and editorial need; empathy with a genre, tragicomedy, which he did not himself practise. The Supplices, different again, centres on a debate about a king's responsibilities to his people and to the laws. He quotes from this play several times in his prose works on government in the 1640s, for example on the title-page ofAreopagitica, and here is where I would see the most direct relation between this scholarship and his English writings.29 The 'most direct' remains not very direct. His annotations still aim chiefly at understanding Euripides' texts, all of them, on their own terms.

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The simple fact is, the demands of establishing text preponderate. Milton's emendations draw on diagnostic, etymological, metrical and dramaturgical skills. Thus his diagnoses extend to the process of transmission of the texts, the sort of errors common in the scribal process before the printing process added new sorts: a line's botched metre is because a word I n versum sequentem ex margine irrepsit' {Ion 1423, 'crept into the following verse from the margin'). He corrects the misprint 'agiatides' because he knows this title of Apollo as protector of streets relates to 'aguiai', 'streets' {Ion 186). Metrical error arouses him to something like irritation, as his comments escalate from 'restoring the integrity' of metre to saying metre 'demands' to be changed ('flagitat', Ion 408) or metre even 'spits out' the offending typo ('respuit', Ion 1360). His grasp of dramaturgy is more extensive than might be expected of one who wrote Samson Agonistes to be read, not performed. He aims for completeness of dramatis personae; he adds speech-entries everywhere they are missed; and he sorts out a huge tangle of muddled speechentries at Supplices 754-8. His supreme gift with regard to emendations is contextual. He has the good textual critic's comprehensive grasp of context, without which the diagnostic and other skills avail little.30 So at Bacchae 218 it is context characters, theme, the whole situation - which invalidates the received reading. For one old man to say to another 'Being old men we have forgotten what pleasures are like [hedeon, literally 'sweet things']' is not absurd, only flat, out of key with the context of Dionysus-worship as having rejuvenating power. Milton alters one letter, and the old man says, 'We have gladly \hedeos\ forgotten that we are old men.' From the tradition of Euripides editing ever since has come loud cheering and ready acceptance. Milton has his place in more than one Valhalla. And that is still only emendation. He attends, as a matter of course, to gaps or problems in the accompanying Latin translation - symptomatizing his determination to understand the text, down to its last minutiae (yes, he cleans up punctuation too, see Iphigenia in Tauris 1040). The thoroughness, absorption and sheer empathy are remarkable. Taken as a whole, these jottings represent the most eloquent of tacit tributes to a great author, by a scholar who thinks differently enough but suspends that sort of judgement for the sake of empathy, using judgement wholly to serve imagination. It is not ridiculous to think of Keats here: reading of 'the suffering of human hearts' Milton attains a version of 'negative capability', uninfluenced by any 'egotistical sublime'. Personal in a different way is the occasional note of commentary. At

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Heracleidae 822 should the text read 'bloody sacrifices' or 'human sacrifices' ('brotoenton' or 'broteion')? His text read 'human': he wants to read 'bloody'. Not beside the text but buried in the editor's endnotes Milton has a long debate with himself on whether Athens, his revered and freedom-loving Athens, practised human sacrifice. 'Only rarely, and then for strong reasons', he concludes. This hardly exculpates Athens, or makes its practice much different from human sacrifice elsewhere. Milton is not so much emending as wrestling with the profound cleavage, between the normal revered rationality of Greece and its moments of glaring cruel irrationality. The moment passes, and he goes on cheering for Greece; but the reflective moment in his study (1640s) may help explain why in Paradise Regained Christ rejects Greece for Israel: the Old Testament abominates human sacrifice, as Milton abominates Moloch worship, and as enlightened Greece - even Athens - did not. OTHER ARTS OF LANGUAGE

Besides translating and annotation, in which arts he excelled, Milton practised the more mundane ones: lexicography, teaching of and through languages, and what would nowadays be called study skills. He practised all of them lifelong and systematically. He compiled a Latin 'Thesaurus', a vocabulary book, amounting as it grew over time and reading to a dictionary. This is mentioned several times by pupils, and used by one of them (Edward Phillips) for his 1693 Dictionarium. It may have been absorbed into still later Latin dictionaries.31 He had kept it from an early date. Likewise, he kept a thesaurus of his Greek reading. If these ever turned up, they would not be enthralling to read; but they would hold great value for Milton studies, as a check on Leo Miller's research into the authorship of state papers, or to test the authorship of the De Doctrina Christiana?2

Of Education includes Milton's languages as part of the ideal curriculum he wrote up as a letter to Hartlib. The languages are valued educationally, not for themselves or even their literature so much as for access to useful thought, be that Varro's on farming or the Bible in its original tongues. The essay conveys Milton's own fluency with languages, not least by implication: witness the airy way in which he suggests the pupil can pick up Italian 'at any odd hour'. That phrase means 'at any time in the regular, working week that is not already occupied' (that is, still regularly, not as in the modern slang, to mean 'casually'); nonetheless, the implication remains that pupils can master this fourth or fifth foreign language without special effort, as a natural

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addition. Natural, indeed, to the language enthusiast! It shows, better than any earnest injunction on the subject would do, how at home Milton felt with languages. And he synthesized and systematized his reading onto paper lifelong — by a method based on Aristotle's topics, into sundry 'indexes', as the Commonplace Book especially demonstrates. This work too holds great interest for the intellectual biographer, since it shows his thought developing. He found arguments in favour of divorce and tyrannicide worth recording there before any need for them came up in his own life. More to the present point, it is written in several of Milton's languages Latin, Greek, French, Italian. To link or summarize such quoted material Milton writes in Latin, English or Italian. I take this to mean he felt more fluent and at ease in those tongues. The reasons are mainly self-evident. English was his mother-tongue, and Latin was the tongue of judicious or scholarly commentary (as in the case of the Lycophron and other annotations). However, the presence of Italian and the absence of French, must draw further enquiry. Is it some dislike of French, or rather a preference for Italian among vernaculars?33 The Commonplace Book itself is a normal not exceptional instance of its type. To keep one was natural to a life in which study was engrossing, yet was meant to be practical too. In otium, when available, the humanist studied to be ready for negotium.34 And even if some humanists in that posture seem pathetic or at any rate doomed to disappointment,35 Milton shared to the full the humanist aspiration to connect the life of studying 'sound authors' (pagan, biblical or humanist) with the whole life of his times. To repeat, these lesser arts were systematic and lifelong for Milton. He kept up his languages, in all sorts of ways. They were ready and organized. It is not just accident that when his Commonplace Book turned up it did so along with three school exercises - a Latin prose theme with Greek inclusion, and sets of Latin verses in different metres. He kept his papers, he kept them in order, and brought many if not most of them before the public in print towards the end of his life. He added some early Latin verses to the second edition of his poems (1673). He published textbooks written back in the 1640s for pupils of grammar and logic. He sought to be a complete humanist. Completeness, a formidable versatility, is what he proved to the European intelligentsia when the awaited opportunity did come. As chapter 5 will show, he attacked Salmasius with all the weapons of a redoutable humanist philology.

CHAPTER 5

Milton's Latin prose

The study of Milton's Latin prose works in their original tongue continues to languish. The three main monuments of his Latin prose are the three Defences of the 1650s. These are as important, and certainly as influential, as his English prose works; yet most Miltonists work on them from translations, translations which leave something to be desired. I dwell on this, to alert readers of those translations to what is being omitted or distorted. The Columbia translations (besides particular faults of rendering or tone) have a tendency to break up Milton's sentences, in a way which unduly differentiates his Latin prose from his equally periodic English prose. The different Columbia translators move different distances towards paraphrase, so that their reader gets different Miltons. As for Yale, the absence of any Latin text seems to me a terrible editorial blunder, preventing the reader of this series (which looks so authoritative) from seeing the words of Milton himself. Even the non-Latinist should be able to see them, because to see them suggests ideas and provides correctives. Naturally, too, the Latin text being absent, Yale's notes pay scant attention to matters of Latin tone or style. Irony, especially, works differently in the Defences from what the translation and commentary present. Furthermore, analysis languishes along with texts and versions. The increased interest in Milton's English prose,1 which has developed linguistic and statistical tools of analysis, must eventually apply them to his Latin prose, this being a corpus of bulk and importance. At present, nonetheless, this has not happened - not even though the lack prevents reliable authentication-tests being done on one crucial Latin text in particular, the De Doctrina Christiana.

In the hope, then, of calling attention to the Latinity of this oeuvre - as distinct from its ideas, or politics, or psychobiography, or whatever currently preoccupies Milton studies — I offer a simple chronological 82

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survey. It moves from a school exercise and a college prolusion, through the notes and letters of two decades, to his published Latin prose. The examples move gradually from private towards more public, until in February 1651 he went from obscurity to European fame in one leap. He did it thanks largely to the qualities of his Latin prose style. He could seize his chance because the Latin composing which I unfold had made him ready. By what method should it be unfolded? I attempt to describe Milton's composing from the inside, showing in examples why he did each the way he did. Discussion works from whatever features of style assume most prominence in the particular instance. Of necessity it works flexibly, since the chief constant of his Latin is its inventive variety; indeed, all that is meant by Latin humanism. I seek, by continuing to use Erving Goffinan's distinction between 'impression' and 'expression', to show what impression he sought to make on each of his audiences. Expression, however, matters equally with impression. His Latin style is equally revealing when directed to no outward audience, but to himself— in his own mind — as a striving with dead masters.

SCHOOL EXERCISE:

MANE CITUS LECTUM FUGE . . .

The little prolusion on the theme 'Early rising is best'2 gives a starting-point, by showing the skills he mastered in Latin composition before he had anything of his own to say. It begins: Tritum est vetustate proverbium. diliculo surgere saluberrimum est nee sane minus verum quam antiquum: etenim si ordine supputare conabor singulas hujus rei utilitates opus ardui laboris obire videbor: surge igitur, surge deses nee semper teneat lectus, nescis quot oblectamenta praebet aurora. Oculos delectare cupis? aspice solem purpureo colore orientem, coelum purum . . .3 The only advance which this makes on saying that early rising is a good thing, is to insist that getting up late is a bad thing. The emphasis therefore falls on the skills with which the meagre topic undergoes amplijicatio.

Consider, for example, the syntactical variation: simple sentence; then double affirmation; then a longer less simple one, which branches first left, then right.4 Or consider the rhetorical urgency injected, first, by repeated imperative ('surge igitur, surge': 'get up, therefore, get up!');5 then by question and answer. Or take the neat and idiomatic diction:

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'supputare conabor', literally to 'prune [a tree] underneath' but used figuratively by Ovid and Seneca to mean 'reckon up5. The persuasion continues into allusion, half a line of Greek from Theocritus, two from Homer. This displays skills of another language, and of apt allusion, and does it in the Roman way of enlisting Greek precedent where possible, for purposes of conviction and elegance alike. The relative lengths show taste, also: Homer, being the more normative author, gets more space. On the debit side, the composition ends some sentences with a rhythm which is that of a line of verse. Classical Latin prose avoided doing this, both in theory and practice, as if to preserve the boundaries between verse and prose. The dactylic clausula in Milton's 'obire videbor', and 'praebet aurora' offends against Roman taste. He is not yet hearing Latin prose with a Roman ear, or perhaps he has not yet read ancient authorities like Quintilian on the subject. In the main, nevertheless, the prolusion is a correct, even fluent, exercise; still an exercise, however, in the limited sense of a set task, in set form, on a trite theme. PROLUSION VI

Contrast a later, Cambridge 'exercise', the Latin speech which leads to the English verses At a Vacation Exercise. This exercising is splendid, being voluntary press-ups. He now chooses what to say, though genre and occasion govern some choices. Having done his part on a debate theme, which admittedly is almost as futile as the virtues of early rising,6 he introduces the pageant in his own way, fascinatingly half in and half out of the persona he will play there. As Ens, Father of the Aristotelean categories, he can choose to modulate between several registers, and tones, and apparently even languages. Thus in the prolusion he runs the gamut from tedium through vulgarity to a sonority of varying degrees of seriousness. Tedium threatens at first, as (228. 3-8) he tells his hearers to laugh by eight synonymous descriptions of laughter. It reads as if he had swallowed a thesaurus; and though it might be funny if acted portentously, the pacing is funereal. Vulgarity has more life, especially when helped by wit, usually puns. Thus he argues (228.13-16) that those who are not joining in the laughter must have indigestion, forcing them to speak with another orifice: 'aenigmata quaedam nolens efiutiat sua non Sphinx sed Sphincter anus', exploiting the homonymity of'anus' = old woman with 'anus' = anus.7

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As to sonority, it is never unalleviated: thus it is saved from bombast by its reductive application, to homely or silly things nearby. He calls two of the College dignitaries 'Vestal Virgins' (232. 12), surely a backhanded compliment. Likening another functionary to Cerberus, he pours a torrent of hellmouth cliches on him (230. 10-14). He overloads cboves' (oxen) with the epic epithet 'insigniter caudatos' ('extraordinarily tailed'). He mixes extremes, too, combining sonority with vulgarity when he claims that eating 'certain Irish birds' causes 'pediculos inguinales' (236. 15). The orotund polysyllables both excuse and emphasize the crudeness, these birds 'give you lice in the balls'. Both extremes of register, then, are guarded by playful irony. Midway, and on the serious side of halfway, he utters a digression very much of his own choosing - about his nickname, the 'Lady' of Christ's. Being dressed up as an aged Father, 'Ens' or Substance, he asks how can a 'Lady' have become a 'Father'? Because, as he lengthily (240. 1-242. 8) explains, he never was a Lady. Granted, he was not a stereotypical male; but does one have to prove one is stupid to prove one's manhood?8 He clinches his rebuttal stylistically as much as substantively: by the strong, one might almost say 'masculine' verb amolior, 'toss away' the insult (242. 6).9 The staple is a fluent urbanity, showing himself conversant with all the kinds of literature. This urbanity, besides being the norm, gives the performance its focus at points of undoubted good taste (images or phrases which anyone would be proud of): 'lepidulos nebulones', 'witty little rascals', said in his character of Ens about his Aristotelian offspring (242.14). This has just the right tone of dry affection, achieved by joining the deprecatory noun with the diminutive (coined?) adjective. Granted, then, that he manages the vulgar better than the elevated, he is playing a voluntary on the organ of the Latin language, and also scripting with zestful invention for a persona. One quality he does not display, however, is conciseness. This is the fault of amplijicatio and the humanist syllabus, I feel, since it likewise slows down his Latin verse. This sluggishness was certainly not the fault of Latin - of all languages! Latin's inflectedness and lack of articles let it say more by less, and without contortion. Where and when did he move away from this dangerously licensed fluency? I suggest it was in Horton, in his voluntary Lehrjahre, when he annotated Greek poems by marginalia in his copies or summarized readings by topic into his Commonplace Book.

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For his marginalia he appropriates the editorial brevity which prevailed before him among humanists, whether acting as editors into print or simply annotating their own copies. Thus in their apparatus criticus verbs of saying or being are omitted, because they are understood from the technical context: in 'sic Canterus', 'so Canter', supply 'dicit', 'says'. Milton follows this idiom so exactly that most of his emendations to Greek texts consist of a single Greek word or a meagre 'fortasse' ('perhaps'), itself shortened to 'f.' in his 1640s notes. Even his longer notes are usually still single sentences, which he keeps concise. Thus at Euripides Helena 1145 he comments, 'planior erit, ni fallor, sensus si pro hote legatur hoti. scil: ad Troiam strages et ad Euboeam naufragium nos exhausit quia tu Pari Helenam abduxisti, aut Helenae spectrum.' 'The meaning will be clearer, unless I am mistaken, if hoti is read in place of hote; understand, "Slaughter at Troy and shipwreck at Euboea have ruined us because [riot 'when'] you, Paris, stole away Helen, or her phantom."' Milton makes his point as succinctly as he can without surrendering to the sort of private abbreviations which lose clarity and accessibility. Although he writes for his own eyes only, he uses the language and register of a public community of scholarship, all those who care about such things. He plays the role of humanist editor, in and through his Latinity. In this little genre, it becomes a matter of personal pride to make one's point in as few words as possible. For the publishing commentator, pride in style continues to matter because in going public one seeks to impress others (or at any rate not alienate them by bad or flabby Latin). Further considerations are those of space (to say it shortly) and beauty (not allowing the page of the classic author to become usurped by editorial ancillarities). None of this concerned Milton in his private studies. He did it just the same. It was a point of honour.

FAMILIAR LETTERS TO 1647

Milton's 'Letters to Friends' (Epistolarium Familiarium Liber) was a very late publication, of May 1674. Its title encouraged comparison with the chief ancient exemplar, Cicero's Epistulae ad Familiares. We should therefore first ask, how far the selected letters are acts of Milton before 1647 and not rather the self-editings of the old man? And what is Milton's own, rather than Cicero's? On the first point, two letters which survive in

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handwritten form from 1639 and 1647 show that only few and minor changes were made editorially. For example, in the letter to Holstenius he toned down a few stylistic audacities and youthful jeux d'esprit.10 As to the second point, I focus on whatever Milton saw fit to make most salient, whether by repetition or placing or quality, because this will point to his chosen persona on each epistolary occasion. Ironically enough, Milton in many of his letters does not follow Cicero into brevity or density. Cicero, so orotund in his public speeches, sought an idiomatic brevity in letters; yet not so Milton, not at first. Amplitude continues in the two to Charles Diodati; not so much as neo-Latin copia or amplification, however, but in a slowness to emerge into specifics from the ponderous opening civilities. But he may have a reason. Both letters are written out of turn, begging Diodati to reply to a previous one sent him. Accordingly, though they maintain a teasing tone as between old friends, some embarrassment shows too — in tortuousflightsof fancy. He should not worry about balancing the numbers of letters, because 'Your probity writes for me in your stead, and inscribes letters on my inmost consciousness', 'scribit vicem tuam apud me tua probitas, verasque literas intimis sensibus meis exarat.' (24. 13-14) He has a neat idiom in 'scribit vicem' (perhaps 'writes out your role' = speaking part in a play), and again in 'exarat' (writes as on a wax tablet, so helping to Romanize the correspondence and the friendship). Yet the conceit remains frigid: does it evince anxiety? Milton was lonely in Hortoh, depended on letters, received not enough, and his own letters show it. Full and formal for quite different reasons, is Milton's letter written in Florence to Benedetto Bonmattei (1638). Here, he is repeating in written form, what he has said to Bonmattei in conversations (36. 18-22), in order to press the point of an earnest request on an issue of importance to him. That issue is the well-being of Italian (or Tuscan, rather), and how best can foreigners understand it, so as to love it more deeply; Milton urges Bonmattei to add to his book on Tuscan something on pronunciation and recommended authors for the benefit of stranieri, non-Italians. The formality and amplitude now assist the cause. So does the intelligent praise, of Bonmattei and his language. Beginning 'Quod novas patriae linguae Institutiones adornas (Benedicte Bonmathaee) jam jam operi fastigium impositurus . . .' n Milton honours the work which honours that native tongue ('adornas . . . patriae' both imply absolutes). He hints at blessing in the Latinized Christian name of the recipient ('blessed be the man who loves his native language so worthily'). He quickens into urgency and drama with the double 'jam', completion of

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the task being 'any day now'. In a vivid, apt metaphor Bonmattei is about to complete the 'fastigium' (roof or roof-ornament, the / PP- 15-16. 2 In the sense given by Gedric C. Brown, 'Horatian Signatures: Milton and Civilized Comunity', in Mario Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy. Contexts, Images, Contradictions (Binghamton: MRTS, 1991) pp. 329-44; hereafter 'Di Cesare, Milton in Italy\ 3 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford University Press, 1973). 6 LATIN AND MILTON'S OTHER LANGUAGES IN THE STYLE OF PARADISE LOST

1 Carey and Fowler, p. 433. See also Corns, Language, p. 95. 2 But 'duped' is too severe. The first 200-odd years of editing had no access to the OED, nor to a good dictionary of English on James Murray's all-important historical principles. After the OED was finished, too, the Variorum or snowball principle would be influential until noticed and arrested. We find Fowler and Corns themselves, when not contesting the principle, suggesting new instances of Latinism; and naturally and rightly too, for readers to assess and choose. 3 Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford University Press, 1963); hereafter 'Ricks, Grand Style'. 4 FQ11. xii. 63. Spenser is cited from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Annotated English Poets series (London: Longman, 1977), p. 2935 Elegia vn. 90, Hughes, p. 61. This coinage was criticized by Salmasius, but Milton retained it in his 1673 Poems. Milton is upheld by Dillon, cSurdeo\ 6 See Elegia vi, 10 and 85, Hughes, pp. 50 and 53. Salmasius again ridiculed 'stellipar', as unclassical usage or as too miraculous. Again Milton ignored him in 1673.1 discuss these and other Latin verse neologisms in 'Notes on Milton's Latin Word-formation in the Poemata of 1645', Humanistica LovanienJWI 43 (1994), 404-10; esp. 405, 408. 7 Epitaphium Damonis 61 (Hughes, p. 134). Hughes renders it, 'the restless twilight of the windswept trees'; Carey and Fowler, p. 280, 'the restless twilight of the windswept wood'; Campbell, p. 541, 'the restless twilight of the trembling forest', so illustrating how translators build on each others' efforts. 'Restless' is onomatopoeic in English, but none of these renderings allows the verb-force into English: 'to-and-jro-driven darknesses of the shattered trees'; a stronger pathetic fallacy, because it recognizes that high winds

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uproot old trees and break offbranches. So, if you are out there, darkness is not still but dangerously mobilized by uncontrollable unseen windpower like the speaker's contextual emotions. See also Appendix, below. Hughes, p. 398. Henceforth, I give references to the major English poems simply by book- and line-number, rather than footnoting the pages in Hughes every time. The best discussion is still that ofJ. H. Finley, 'Milton and Horace: A Study of Milton's Sonnets', in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 48 (1937), 29-73. 'I would love to live with you, gladly die with you' [Odes in. ix. 24, well discussed in Carey and Fowler, p. 905. As Hippolyte Taine remarked, Milton 'has celebrated God the way most people pray to him, "suivant une formule apprise, non par un tressaillement spontane" ' ('following a learnt formula, not through a spontaneous thrill or shudder'): see Harry F. Redman, Jr., Major French Milton Critics ofthe Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994), p. 247. Milton's 'formula' is not the usual one, but one sort of theologian's, a biblical pastiche. See the discussion in Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition. Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 160 and n. 70; hereafter 'Highet, Classical Tradition'. Campbell, p. 569. Perhaps another frigidity through Latinism is x. 95-6, '. . . when he from wrath more cool / Came the mild judge ...' Whether 'from' yields the sense 'because of (an icy anger) or 'so far from' or 'changing away from', excessive meaning is being placed on the preposition merely because in Latin 'from' can mean all these. Reason of Church-Government, Hughes, p. 668. Corns, Milton's Language, p. 89. See also Corns, Milton's Language, p. 90. Small wonder that Wordsworth in the Prelude, tracing himself as 'inmate of this active universe' (his italics), seeks to revive Milton's Latinate participles. And (again) Wordsworth's many imitations, for instance the spirit that 'rolls' through all things in 'Tintern Abbey'. Binns, Intellectual Culture, p. xvi. The origin of'Paradise' in a Persian then Greek word for 'garden' remained operative in usage for a very long time. One would expect him to use the Junius-Tremellius Latin version of the Bible, being echt-Protestant, but in the only copy of that version available to me the Hebrew names look as if spelt for pronunciation by German native speakers. Vulgates, too, spell according to country of publication and that country's pronunciation, in other words for liturgical use. Milton's preferences seem to me also aural, yet not automatically based on English ways with Hebrew. Hughes, p. 34: 'But the almighty Father, by founding the stars more strongly, has taken thought for the universe'.

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24 Another instance of self-quotation may be his 'labouring moon' {PL n. 665), from the 'faticosa luna' of Sonnet 4; but Juvenal (vi. 442) has 'luna laborans' for moon undergoing eclipse, which comes closer. 25 Similarly with 'know to know no more' at rv. 775. Carey and Fowler, p. 660 cite OED, s.v. 'know', sense iv. 12 to insist that the usage ('to be able') with bare infinitive is seventeenth-century English. The English usage of 'know how3 is commoner: to my way of thinking, Milton may well have meant the Greek usage (LSJ*eido, B. 2), which usefully embraces 'know how to' and 'be able to', though certainly the main point was to opt for the more compressed form. A similar instance is iv. 835-7, 'Think not, revolted spirit, thy shape the same, / Or undiminished brightness, to be known / As when thou stood'st...' Three different constructions follow the verb 'Think' - for compression and to express the forcefulness of the speaker (Gabriel). But an ad sensum fluidity is typical of Plato's Greek. Contextually, at this point of Book IV, Homer and Greek are being especially felt. 26 'Expert / When to advance, or stand, or turn the sway / Of battle, open when, and when to close / The ridges of grim war'. 'Ridges' and 'bridges' are equally hard to visualize, and to understand; but 'bridges' would at least sound Homeric. Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 79, urges that 'ridges' are 'dykes', 'open spaces on the battlefield'. The latter meaning is given by commentators on Iliad iv. 371 to explain Homer's 'bridges' too. The intriguing point is whether Milton would imitate Homer without a clear, visual sense of how the ridges, or bridges, would be 'opened' and 'closed'. In context, he is saying the angels fought expertly, each one like a commander: how could 'each warrior single', even angelic,fillup or clear the 'open spaces' in battle? Either this is bombast, or Milton means salients, or his meaning eludes us still. 27 Although LSJ lists the word as 'meteoros', short e long 0, Homer has it closer to Milton's sound, long e short 0. It means 'in mid-air' (rneta + aeiro, raise, with a glance at aer, air?) 28 The example of'expanse', discussed above, is revealing because Milton gets the Hebrew 'wrong' where he could have got it 'right'. 29 Respectively, an epitomizing genitive (like 'sons of iniquity', the 'spitting image' of it); and a personification of'voice sent from heaven' (as angels, too, are 'voices' of God in a religion where divine utterance is radically performative, and God is heard more than seen). 30 Satan quotes Isaiah 14. 13-14, the prophecy of his own downfall. 31 The Hebrew prophets especially like the clash of two forms of the same triliteral root, which in written (that is, consonantal) form stands out even more. 32 'Gabri-eP = 'strength of God', and many more. 33 His Hebrew name presumably resembled the other archangelic names, taking the form -el, after the name of some quality of God. Candidates include 'Satanail' from the Slavonic Book of Enoch, ch. 31, 'SatomaiP and

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'Sothanel' (J. Martin Evans, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition, (Oxford University Press, 1968), ch. 2. Luke 1. 35, 'the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee\ God creates by 'filling' at Genesis 1. 22, Exodus 28. 3. 'Infinitude' is rarer than 'infinity' in the seventeenth century, but closer to classical Latin. See, for example, for the cold Hell Inferno Cantos XXXII-XXXXIV, in Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, pp. 338-68; or Dantean pain at v. 120 (Francesca da Rimini, herself extending Virgil). See Prince, The Italian Element It is curious that in his Commonplace Book Milton summarizes Italian passages in Italian of his own, but not in French when summarizing French: see Shawcross, Self, Appendix A. The word's history links with Latin carmen and derivatives, but kept its Anglo-Saxon link with birdsong, either as charm or chirm. Since birds sang long before humans did, I find it 'charming' that Eve, here, uses the native word for aboriginal song. J- Weingreen, A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 136; hereafter 'Weingreen, Grammarfor Hebrew'. The context begins and ends biblically, from 'Messiah' (881) through the saints as a cloud of witnesses (883) to the reminders of Palm Sunday (885). To enrich this theophany, however, the narrative draws in more from Greek and Latin as it proceeds: what 'jubilee' begins 'triumph' follows up, and we note the line's zeugma (the 'joining' figure: 'Sung triumph and him . . .', a swift move from direct to indirect speech). 'He celebrated rode / Triumphant' keeps up the multilingual paean - as if making a convergent testimony. 7 MILTON'S LANGUAGES AND THE VOICES OF PARADISE LOST

1 Poetics, chs. 3, 5, 24; Classical Literary Criticism, pp. 34, 37-8 and 66-8. 2 R. O. A. M. Lyne, Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid (Oxford University Press, 1987); hereafter 'Lyne, Further Voices'. 3 Using William Ingram and Kathleen Swaim, A Concordance to Milton's English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1972). 4 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History. Essays in Statistics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), esp. pp. 1-40. 5 The figures are: I (3 occurrences), II (4), III (4), IV (3), V (4), VI (3), VII (7), VIII (3), DC (6), X (9), XI (1) and XII (2). 6 Cf. German gehorchen. 7 Exodus 15. 26, where the AV's 'diligently hearken' renders Hebrew's iterated 'Hear', shamodtishmd:the infinitive absolute expresses emphasis in this usage (Weingreen, Grammarfor Hebrew, p.79), and Israel is told, 'Really listen!', that is, totally obey. 8 Related words like 'talk', 'speak' and their derivatives are less frequent. However, it is noticeable that Book VIII shows a surge in the use of'speak', and Book IX in the use of 'talk' and 'speak' (also the first recorded use of

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21 22 23

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'speakable' in the active sense, 'able to speak5). VIII dwells on the power of speech in humans, for example to name, while once again the serpent's power of speech amazes Eve, for it contradicts the clear tenor of VIII. David Daiches felt the presence of merachepheth: see The Opening of PL, in The Living Milton: Essays by Various Hands, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 55-69. At Deuteronomy 32. 11, however, it means a parent bird hovering above its young, fluttering or hovering anxiously; this seems a little distant from the blunt English about a dove on the nest, hatching. The last book of the Bible is called 'Apocalypsis' in the Vulgate, though 'Revelation' in the AV. Both names had long standing in English, but Latin favoured 'Apocalypse'. See ch. 3: Hebrew satan means 'opposition', 'enmity', at its root. A tacit incentive to build Paradise Regained around some unfinished business of speech-duel, Satan at length speaking with God as well as Man in Messiah? Aeneid n. 274-5, 'Alas, to think how he once looked, how changed from that Hector who returned victorious, clad in the arms of Achilles!' This passage had been Milton's source for the climax of Epitaphium Damonis, 'O ego quantus eram' (129, Hughes, p. 136). Highet, Classical Tradition, p. 157. Carey and Fowler, p. 467; Capaneus at Inferno xrv. 63-6. Odyssey 1. 32-5, 'But they themselves [mortals] also by their own reckless sins have sufferings beyond their measure' tr. W. B. Stanford (ed.), The Odyssey of Homer, 2 vols. (London; Macmillan, 1947). The Odyssey begins, like the Aeneid and PL I and III, with theodicy. The Psalm is main source of the first part of the opening speech of the Father. Milton affects the letter r there, in Latinisms ('rage / Transports our adversary'), but the trick occurs also in the Hebrew. Carey and Fowler, pp. 774-5. William B. Hunter, The Descent of Urania. Studies in Milton, ig46-ig88 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), p. 23, argues that Eve is understating here; not God's express command, but some inferior, less authoritative mode of speaking. 'Sole', however, does not read like understatement or excuse. I prefer the sense of epitome or absolute: that 'voice' is feminized, by Eve, is a glance at the topic of this chapter. Genesis 3. 8, 'mithhalek' (hithpael participle, reflexive-iterative usage, 'walking oneself about' like 'se promener' in French). See Ronald J. Williams, Hebrew Syntax. An Outline, 2nd edn (University of Toronto Press, l 91§\ PP- 28-9. Matthew 25. 21 and 1 Timothy 6. 12. See William M. Porter, Reading the Classics and Paradise Lost (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). John Peter Rumrich, Matter of Glory (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987); hereafter 'Rumrich, Matter of Glory*.

228

Notes to pages 140-52

24 Soon Milton hymns 'wedded love5 similarly, in Christian terms with Roman help: 'saints' and 'patriarchs' consort with a personified, winged 'Love', whose 'golden shafts' come from Ovid (rv. 763). The immanence of God in marriage is expressed and emphasized by the multilingual lushness. 25 The angel host are 'saints' at vi. 47, but because of'Messiah' and 'palms' the talk of Apocalypse draws in humans too. 26 Ovid, Metamorphoses, in. 402-36. 27 'And her immortal hair breathed from her head a perfume that was divine.' The leading word ambrosiae comes out of Greek, am-brotos = 'immortal'. The other key word is divinum, placed so as to go both with the smell and its originator. 28 'Vehement' is 'usually regarded' as parallel with Latin vaecors, 'senseless', although OxLD disagrees with OED on this. (Similarly, when Eve proposes a suicide pact (x. 1007), 'She ended here, or vehement despair / Broke off the rest'. She follows Adam into vehemence, mindlessness.) 29 Translation by Lyne, Further Voices, p. 125; see also his discussion. 30 Ricks, Grand Style, p. no. 31 Aeneidi. 11, 'tantaene animis caelestibus irae?', PL vi. 788: 'In heav'nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell?'

8 MULTILINGUALISM AND EPIC

1 From the Psalms, 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani' ('My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?', Matthew 27.46); from Aramaic, 'Talitha cumi' ('damsel, arise', Mark 5. 41). 2 'Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison'. The preservation, and the A-B-Aform, answer to some need- aural, historical, emotional, musical, all four? 3 'Hosanna', 'Alleluia', 'Amen'. 4 This is the Bible's own method, to include etymological or aetiological glosses. The process can be seen clearly where it is not very plausible, as at Exodus 2.10 ('and she called his name Moses, and she said, Because I drew him out of the water'): it is less likely that 'Moses' comes from mashah, 'draw out' than that the name means 'born from' in Egyptian, as in 'Tut Moses', 'born from Thoth'. 5 In ' "PZ, A Poem in Twelve Books" or Ten?', Philological Quarterly 74 (1995), 131-491 argue that Milton's changes from the 1667 to the 1674 edition of PL are guided by a recognition of its Virgilian aims and standing. 6 R. D. Williams (ed.), The Aeneid of Virgil, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1972), 1, p. 157; hereafter 'Williams (ed.), Aendd. 7 If Milton's 'man' represents homo (human) not vir ('male'), it may be because he is echoing the homo of Ennius behind Virgil's masculine suffix ('-us'). 8 Williams (ed.), Aendd, 11, pp. 413-14. 9 Williams (ed.), Aendd, 11. pp 485-6. 10 'As massive as Mount Athos or Mount Eryx or Father Appenninus . . .'

Notes to pages 154-65

229

11 See Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 1. 1, p. 618, apropos of Inferno xxxm. 80: 'del bel paese la dove '1 si suona', 'of the fair land where the si is heard'. 12 Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 11. 2, p. 234. The line goes on to refer to Paris by the early, more Latinate form of the name, Parisi not Parigi: 'quell' arte / ch' alluminar chiamata e in Parisi'. 13 'Orribile' 10 times in Inferno, 3 in Purgatorio. 'Ruinare' 4 times, 'rovinare' once in the poem. Similar figures for 'livido'. 14 Verses appropriated in due time, in another way and for other purposes, by the other great English multilingual poet, T. S. Eliot: 'Ara vos prec... / Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina' (see The Waste Land, 427, and Eliot's note there.) 15 See Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, 1. 2, p. 476. Virgil has just been speaking in his native dialect: 'parlavi mo lombardo' ('just now spoke Lombard'). 16 The horse 'bursts out, either to go and bathe in the river where before capture he loved to bathe . . . with neck uplifted high he shakes himself, gamboling in all the pride of his strength' (my translation). 'Luxurians' used of an animal can mean simply 'frisk', 'act skittishly'; I have imputed a more human, moral emotion in the vehicle because of the tenor (Turnus charging into battle). 17 'Quis . . . posset lacrimis aequare labores?' ('Who could match our toils with tears?'). 18 The last of many comes in the poem's antepenultimate line: 'ma gia volgeva il mio disio e il velle3, 'but already my desire and my will were revolved...' (Parodiso, xxxm. 143: Singleton (ed.), Divine Comedy, in. 1. 380). 19 The error may be scribal, either in Dante or his source (Jerome). Or, whereas the plural of mamlekah requires doubled m, a form from meleketh would do. 20 'As the leaves fall away in autumn, one after another, till the bough sees all its spoils upon the ground, so there the evil seed of Adam [souls waiting to be ferried by Charon across the river Acheron]: one by one they cast themselves from that shore at signals, like a bird at its call'. 21 And like the parent image, Virgil Aeneid vi. 309-12; but in the points I mention Dante extends or changes, and Milton follows him in this. 22 Anecdotes talk of people in the streets seeing Dante and observing the marks of the fires of Hell on his grim face, 'for he has been there'. 9 MULTILINGUALISM AND THE STYLE OF TEMPERANCE IN PARADISE REGAINED

1 The three synoptic gospels for the story line, John as well for the idiom and personality of his Son of God. 2 The views of, respectively, Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton's Brief Epic (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966) and Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile, ch. 15. We do not know enough about 'brief epic' to say what its decorum or idiom might be. Didactic does impinge, moving the action far towards demonstration; yet PR is nothing like any other didactic, certainly being no

230

Notes to pages i66-y2 'Georgic'. Frye's opinion is cited from Walter MacKellar (ed.), A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. iv, PR, (London: Routledge, 1975),

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15

16 17 18

p. 10; hereafter 'MacKellar (ed.), PR. The work of Milton's own which it most resembles as 'brief epic' is the early In Quintum Novembris (Hughes, pp. 15-21). But although this shares the demonstrative tone, and a Satan who flies around and disguises to make mischief, the decorum is totally different. Its Latin is rich not temperate, indeed most of the excitement and passion reside in the violent juxtaposing of Virgilian dignitas with Juvenalian caustic. It is a satirical epic, using high and low registers together. It is only by contrast that this early experiment could explain the middle course followed in Milton's late one. Though the line is not by Virgil it had been traditionally thought his. See Williams (ed.), Aeneid, vol. 1., pp. 156-7. His translation is given above. Virgil means, 'after composing Eclogues I wrote Georgics; but now I move to epic'. I take it as read that the foremost allusion goes back to the start of PL ('Of man}sfirstdisobedience .. . till one greater man ...') My point is that in thus alluding to himself Milton also clarifies the Virgilian signature. 'Vanished into the thin breeze', Aeneid rv. 278. Aeneid win. 369. 'tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento / (hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem, / parcere subiectis et debellare superbos'. See Corns, Language, pp. 65-9. The value-loaded terms are traditional; after Golden (Cicero, Virgil, Horace) comes Silver (Seneca, Tacitus, Lucan). Corns, Language, p. 62. 'New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large' (Sonnet: 'On the New Forcers of Conscience', Hughes, p. 145) had already foregrounded etymology in order to denounce. Satan, here, impugns himself by choosing such discreditable company. We might recall the 'surge' by which some of his verse translations moved, late on, from literalness to appropriation. The connection is tenuous. Carey cites a sermon of John Donne's to the effect that Hebrew 'Miriam3 is related to marom, 'height', 'high ground', hence 'exaltation'. 'Exaltation' more straightforwardly alludes to the Magnificat. Horace, Odes iv. i. 30 and 1. v. 9. Lucretius De Rerum Natura iv. 580-1. The gorgeous images of futility of 'the kingdoms of this world' make up the second half of FQ11. vii, the 'delve' of Mammon. Like Spenser, Milton relies on speech and image. Unlike Spenser, he moves back and forth between them. As editors note: see for instance Carey and Fowler, p. 1118 on 111. 47-51. 'Glory' and derived forms occur some 32 times in PR III, oustripping other books of PR, or those of PL. No one, then or now, knows what they were or how they worked except that it was by divination on a binary principle, like heads-or-tails: see Roland De

Notes to pages 173-80

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

231

Vaux, Ancient Israel, tr. John McHugh (Darton: Longman & Todd, 1961). A further significance of the words as a pair was that, beginning respectively with the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph and tau, they express God's comprehensiveness, like 'alpha and omega'. Milton ignores all such nuances here. Using the same pun as Jonson's, see Carey and Fowler, p. 1131. Milton's pronunciation of Israel' shifts among * /, /* and * * / (see Concordance). If the last, anapaestic, may be heard here, that revives the true Hebrew pronunciation, echoing the idea of authenticity in 'true King'. The same idea is felt in the spondees on either side, and in 'so spake' ('thus saith the Lord'). For a cognate climactic effect, triple similes are placed in PL (1. 284-99), early, but late in Samson (1692-1707), the companion piece to PR. Iliad, 2. 469, 16. 641 and 17. 570; Orlando Furioso 14. 109; FQ11. ix. 51. Iliad 15. 618, Aeneid vn. 586. As Aristotle had said, after much emphasis on virtue as a 'mean' or 'middle state' with respect to its objects. It is not half-heartedness or compromise or bargaining, but an absolute with respect to itself. Found in Roman historians, see MacKellar (ed.), PR, p. 178. Aristophanes said Pericles, like a Zeus, 'thundered and confounded Greece' (Acharnians, 530). The same author may be the source of humanist knowledge about Socrates' 'low-roofed tenement'. 'But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these [Greek odists], not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable' (Reason of Church Government, Hughes, p. 669). 'For there [in Babylon] they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion' (Psalms 137. 3).

1 0 HEBREW MEETS GREEK IN SAMSON

AGONISTES

1 Reasons for thinking the date of composition close to the date of publication, 1671, rather than in the 1640s somewhere, include the following, (i) Samson was published with PR, as a diptych. They share the theme of temperance, go well together, and if Samson were the earlier work, why publish it as the back half of the diptych? (ii) If it were a much earlier work, when exactly was it written? Further disagreements, and speculations, break out, for example over the dating of Milton's total blindness, (iii) I dislike the linkage of composition with biographical factors, not because 'the author is dead', but because to link them without firm evidence produces confusion. If the work reflects the blindness, then it cannot reflect the defeat of the Good Old Cause. (The two speculations cancel each other.) (iv) As will emerge here, the interlingual side of Samson shows Milton experimenting in a way which accords well with a development from PL through PR to this dazzling finale.

232

Notes to pages 180-6

2 R. C. Jebb, 'Samson Agonistes and the Hellenic Drama', in PBA 3 (1907-8), 341-8. W. R. Parker, Milton's Debt to Greek Tragedy in Samson Agonistes (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1937). 3 The Trinity MS is quoted from John Milton. Poems, Reproduced in Facsimile from the Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Transcript (Menston: Scolar, I 97o)> PP- 34-94 'Hubristes' points to an Aeschylean or at least Sophoclean conception: hubris is central and abominable to the former, and problematized by the latter, but Euripides displaces it, to become an optional moral ingredient, not a religious centrality. 5 2 Kings 1. 9, 'he sat on the top of a hill' and brought down fire and death on the soldiers sent against him. 6 Similarly, the MS has Saul's suicide in the active epithet, 'Autodaictes' = 'self-slaying', whereas LSJgives the passive form, autodaictos, 'self-slain'. Milton inventedthis active, doing form, whose force is emphasized by the fact that suicide can be viewed either way, as done or suffered, being inherently both. 7 See F. M. Krouse, Milton's Samson and the Christian Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), whose 'lovely semantic excursion' is summarized by Hughes, p. 541. 'Agonize', the verb, occurs in Edward Phillips' New World of Words (1658 and 1663). More searching is the examination by P. R. Sellin, 'Milton's Epithet Agonistes', in SEL 4 (1964), 137-62, an essay which excellently tracks the blending of Hebrew with Greek in the Samson story, not least its languages. 8 Still more subtleties are suggested by Sellin, ibid., 144-50. 9 This small speculation is as far as I would go with the reasoning of F. M. Krouse that Samson is a Christ-figure. To go any further would mar the aptness of Samson for tragic hero of the Greek sort, Aristotle's person like ourselves or slightly above. 10 Milton's languages may have further contributed: 'Like whom' = 'Like he whom', whose condensation resembles Latin's 'quern' for 'is quern'; and the accusative + infinitive construction in 'whom . . . feign to bear'. 11 Louis Martz, for example, explains the passage by reasoning that it is meant to seem lame; a contrast is being 'enforced' by the verse between Samson's 'grandeur of despair' and 'the commonplace musing of the chorus' {Poet of Exile, p. 280, and cf. p. 284 on lines 1025-60). 12 The closing words of King Lear aim at a similar distinction. 13 Martz, Poet of Exile, pp. 284-5, thinks the verse deliberately weak: the 'loss of dignity' is a 'drastic lowering' of the tone and manner, 'to relieve the violent tension of the previous scene [Dalila with Samson] by a touch of satirical humor'. 14 The oikiai, royal houses or 'families'; 'nowadays the best tragedies are written about a [mere] handful of families', Aristotle, Poetics, ch. 13, see Classical Literary Criticism, p. 48. 15 See Carey and Fowler, p. 335:'... the ending is indeed morally disgusting'.

Notes to pages 186-92

16 17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31

233

Noam Flinker argued similarly in a paper to the Fourth International Milton Symposium, Vancouver (1991). Hughes, p. 549; my translation. One cannot be certain. Italian commentators on the Poetics had also used lusfratio to translate catharsis, not to mention purificatio and expiatio. See B. R. Rees, 'Aristotle's Theory and Milton's Practice: Samson Agonistes\ Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the University of Birmingham, 1971, p. 8. The fact remains that purgatio was available and normal, and that Milton, despite being a stickler for accuracy in many contexts, chose the less narrowly medical rendering here. In the preface as a whole he seems keen to heap up and mingle metaphors for catharsis. It is such a difficult question, and indeed tragedy itself is so varied, that an eclecticism like Milton's seems almost a duty. Greek medicine was religious anyway, in therapies of the temple cults: see E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), ch. 4.1 have discussed the mixed metaphors of Milton's preface in 'Milton's Preface to Samson Agonistes\ in The Explicator, 52. 2 (1994), pp. 73"5'Event' here includes the Latin sense, 'outcome'. On thought and feeling in this chorus I am extending a hint from Campbell, p. 604, note on line 657. Hughes, p. 550. Ars Poetica, 189, see Classical Literary Criticism, p. 85. Horace says a play 'should not be either shorter or longer than five acts'. And then add that all three tragic exemplars mould all three aspects. Reason of Church Government (1642), Hughes, p. 669. Milton takes care about this, using a distinction from Greek philosophy: his Argument says, 'what Samson had done to the Philistins, and by accident to himself, where 'by accident'= per accidens, 'incidentally' but not as intention or main thing. Odes 3. 24. 6 and 3. 24. 8; see Carey and Fowler, p. 399. This is hard to be sure of. The phrases and lines can be balanced in several ways, not all of them resembling the explicit paired two- or three-word groups of a verse of a Psalm. At any rate, a binarism is noticeable, which is at least compatible with psalmody, and further with Greek danced chorus measure. This idea was developed by Michael Lieb in a paper to the Fifth International Milton Symposium in Bangor, 1995. 'Whom a god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad'. The Latin tag translates a fragment of Euripides. Pindar's odes stay on the heights throughout, unlike Milton's. Cf. the Rouse ode, discussed in chapter 2. Milton likes his odes to rise and rise, starting them off more quietly (like raga) so that the rise is felt throughout. Coinage from Latin or Italian here, as a minor multilingualflourishnear the climax. Manoa's 'valiant youth' (1738) and 'the Virgins also' (1741) keep up the

234

Notes to pages 192-g

Horatian tone: 'Virginibus puerisque canto', 'I sing for virgins and boys' {Odes 3. 1. 4). 32 Repeating the idea from Williams, Roman Poetry, pp. 61-2, as used in ch. 2. 33 Mysteriously omitting Manoa, however. If it is acceptable to infer Milton's feelings about Parliament and Restoration from passages in Samson, or scrutinize the poem's references to blindness, or to women, or hair-length, should one not equally note how Manoa harps on Samson's marriage, and infer that Milton senior so harped on Milton's? All such digressions seem needless. 34 Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (London: Longman, 1973). A similar approach had been taken towards Oedipus by E. R. Dodds, in The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other essays on Greek Literature and

Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 35 'Passion' in the older sense of 'extended suffering', as in the Tassion' of Christ. 36 It may be worth adding that when Milton says the work was not intended for the stage, that entails no diminution in its tragic standing; for yet again he is following Aristotle, to whom reading a tragedy was valid equally with viewing it {Poetics, ch. 26). It is in the same spirit that Milton talks of the book of Revelation as 'the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy' (Hughes, p. 669). I I THE IMPACT OF MILTON'S LANGUAGES UPON HIS MATURE ENGLISH VERSE STYLES

1 Not far away is the New Testament thought of the 'talents' God gives, which must be rightly used: see Milton's Sonnets 7 and 20. 2 See Corns, Language, p. 59. 3 The first element 'du-' may have suggested duo, two, to give the usual romance-languages sense of'duelling', the ritualized and often representative fighting of one against one. 4 Other possible Latinisms include 'in fine' (702); the triple-adjective group at 827 ('Impartial, self-severe, inexorable'); 'inexpiable' (839), in fact a clustering in Samson's speeches to Dalila; 'aggravate' (1000). 5 Rumrich, Matter of Glory. It is one of the study's great merits that its theme illuminates much more than Rumrich explicitly undertakes. 6 For which see also Neil Forsyth,' "Of Man's First Dis"', in Di Cesare (ed.), Milton in Italy, pp. 345-69. 7 Phinehas' widow thus names his posthumous son because 'the ark of God is taken' in battle. Her husband has died there, and his father Eli has died of grief having 'judged Israel forty years' (1 Samuel 4. 18). Most of these elements belong also in Milton's story of Samson's 'judging', though rearranged, because they are a recurrent drama in the biblical history of Israel. 'Glory' is turned to 'grief, in a peripeteia of battle. 8 Milton wants the continuity of pentameter as well as iambic, even despite exemplars: Virgil's half-lines, imitated for special effect by Spenser.

Notes to pages 203-j

235

APPENDIX: TRANSLATING MILTON'S LATIN POEMS INTO ENGLISH

1 The likes of Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Day Lewis, Ciardi. 2 Hughes, p. 146, for text and translation; Carey and Fowler, p. 303.; Campbell, p. 545. 3 Robert Hodge (ed.), John Milton. Samson Agonistes, Sonnets, &c [sic], in The Cambridge Milton for Schools and Colleges, General Editor J. B. Broadbent (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 97. 4 Epitaphium Damonis, lines 198-200; Hodge, pp. 122-3. 5 Moseley, Poetic Birth, p. 221. Moseley does not translate the ode, as it is not in Poems, 1645. His stated policy is to make his (prose) translations 'as literal as is reasonably comfortable' (ibid.).

Bibliography

PRIMARY TEXTS

Aristotle, Poetics, ed. D. W. Lucas, Oxford University Press, 1968. Classical Literary Criticism [for Aristotle, Horace and Longinus], ed. T. S. Dorsch, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Dante, The Divine Comedy, ed. and tr. Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Bollingen Series LXXX, Princeton University Press, 1970-5. Dryden, John, 'Preface' to his translation of Ovid's Epistles, 1680. Euripides, Tragoediae, 2 vols., Geneva: Stephanus, 1602. Homer, The Odyssey, ed. W. B. Stanford, 2 vols., London: Macmillan, 1947-8. Marvell, Andrew, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1962. Vol. 1, Poems. Milton Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don. M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82. The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire, London: Constable, 1932. The Latin Poems of John Milton, ed. Walter MacKellar, Cornell Studies in English 15, New Haven: Yale University Press for Cornell University, 1930. The Life Records of John Milton, ed. J. Milton French, 5 vols., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949-58. John Milton. The Complete Poems, ed. Gordon Campbell, London: Dent, 1980. John Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt. Y. Hughes, New York: Macmillan, 1957. John Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, ed. Thomas Warton, second (revised)

edition, London: G. G. J. andj. Robinson, 1791. John Milton. Samson Agonistes, Sonnets &c, ed. Robert Hodge, in The Cambridge Milton for Schools and Colleges, Cambridge University Press, 1977. The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Annotated English Poets series, London: Longman, 1968. Toesie italiane di Milton', ed. Sergio Baldi, in Studi Secenteschi 7 (1966), 103-30. The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire, 2 vols., Oxford University Press, 1952. 236

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[The Trinity Manuscript]: John Milton. Poems, Reproduced in Facsimilefromthe Manuscript in Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Transcript, Menston: Scolar Press, 1970. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. 1, ed. Douglas Bush, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, vol. iv, Paradise Regained, ed. Walter MacKellar, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. The Works of John Milton, General Editor Frank Allen Patterson, The Columbia Edition, 18 vols., New York: Columbia University Press, 1931-8. Index (2 vols.) 1940. Shakespeare, William, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander, The Tudor Shakespeare, London and Glasgow: Collins, 1951. Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Annotated English Poets series, London: Longman, 1977. Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. R. D. Williams, 2 vols., London: Macmillan, 1972-3. P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. F. A. Hirtzel, Oxford University Press, 1900.

SECONDARY AND REFERENCE WORKS

Alston, Robin, 'On the Margin', Bulletin of the Society for Renaissance Studies 11. 1 (i993)> 6 ~ I 3Bailey, D. R. Shackleton, Profile of Horace, London: Duckworth, 1982. Binns, J. W., Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; The Latin Writings of the Age, Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990. Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence, Oxford University Press, 1973. Bolgar, R. R., The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, Cambridge University Press, 1954. Bottkol, J. McG., T h e Holograph of Milton's Letter to Holstenius', in PMLA 68 (1953), 617-27. Brinkley, Roberta F., Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century, Johns Hopkins Monographs in Literary History 3, repr. London: Frank Cass, 1967. Campbell, Gordon and Sebastian Brock, 'Milton's Syriac', in Milton Quarterly 27. 2 (i993)? 74-7Carey, John, 'The Date of Milton's Italian Poems', in RESn.s. 14 (1963), 383-6. Castor, Graham and Terence Cave (eds.), Mo-Latin and the Vernacular in Renaissance France, Oxford University Press, 1984. Clark, Donald h.,John Milton at St Paul's School, A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Corns, Thomas N., The Development of Milton's Prose Style, Oxford University Press, 1982. Milton's Language, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Curtius, E. R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper, 1953. Daiches, David, 'The Opening of Paradise Lost3, in The Living Milton: Essays by

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General index

Subjects mentioned too often to be usefully indexed include: Adam and names of all characters from poems; English (language); Greek; Hebrew; Italian; Language(s); Latin; Milton; Multilingualism. Aeschylus, 63, 99, 188, 216 n.30 agon (agonistes etc.), 181-2, 232 nn.7 and 8 amplificatio, 12, 27-8, 83, 85 Apollonius Rhodius, 29, 149, 150 Aramaic (language), 7, 148 Aratus, 76-8 Ariosto, 2, 61, 69 Aristophanes, 177, 202, 231 n.26 .Aristotle, 20, 30, 41, 81, 84, 85, 131, 132, 185, 186, 188-9, J 93J

2

3 J n-24, 233 nn.14

and

17, 234 n.36 Arthur (King), 56, 57, 62 Aubrey, John, 40, 62-3, 66, 213 n.32 Bentley, Dr Richard, 44, 75, 202, 219 n.30 Bible translations: Junius-Tremellius, xii, 225 n.22 King James Version (Authorized Version), xii, 45, 148 Septuagint, 7 Vulgate, xii, 6-7, 154, 225 n.22 Bible, books of: Job, 166, 168-9 Proverbs, 114 Psalms, 23, 43, 44-6, 70, 72-4, 138, 183, 232 n.28, 234 n.26 bilingualism, 13-14 Binns, J. W., 4, 117, 208 n.6, 225 n.20 Bloom, Harold, 14, 104 Bodleian Library, 31 see also Oxford University Bonmattei, Benedetto, 87-8 Bouhereau, Elie, 98, 102 Buchanan, George, 3, 12, 29, 39 Cambridge University, 4-5 see also Christ's College

campanilismo, 11

Castor, Graham, and Cave, Terence, 4, 11 catharsis, 186-8, 189, 192 Catullus, 31 Christ's College, Cambridge University, 4-5, 85

Cicero, 86, 87, 100, 101, 102, 222 n.8, 223 n.13 civilitas, 31

copia, 12, 27-8, 42 Corns, T. N., 82, 93, 105, 115, 167, 168, 230 n.8, 231 n.io Dante, 2-3, 7, 15, 19, 25, 48, 49, 53, 54, 69, 104, 138, 153-7, 200, 215 n.8 on volgare, 2-3

Dati, Carlo, 89-91, 92 Delia Casa, 7, 64 Diodati, Charles, 4, 5, 25, 35, 37, 47, 48, 49, 54, 58, 87, 91-3, 208 n.7 doctus poeta, 114, 115, 201

Dryden, John, 68, 97, 113 Du Bellay, Joachim, 3, 13 Dutch (language), 7, 8 Early Middle English: see Old English Eikon Basilike, 93, 95

Ennius, 151, 158 Euripides, 6, 69, 75, 77, 78-80, 86, 99, 186, 188, 196, 198, 234 n.28 Ford, Philip J., 29, 213 n.27 Forster, Leonard, 8, 51, 56 Fowler, Alastair, 105-7, IQ8> I09> I 2 9 French (language), 3-4, 7, 81, 226 n.37 German (language), 4, 7 242

General index Gil, Alexander, 4, 21 Goffinan, Erving, 19, 83 Holstenius, Lucas, 88-9 Homer, 43-6, 55-6, 70-1, 138, 139, 149, 152, 190, 198, 225 n.26 Hooft, P. C. 8 Horace, 10, 11, 29, 31, 32, 38, 39, 69, 71-2, 98, 109, 170, 233 n.21, 234 n.31 humanism, 1, 6, 202 Huygens, Constantijn, 8, 51 Imitatio, 1, 10-13, 28, 35-6, 39-40 intertextuality, 1-2, 10-13 Italian journey, Milton's, 5, 24-5, 56-61

Philologie, 26, 67

Pindar, and Pindaric, 31, 178, 189, 190, 191, 198, 206, 234 n.29 Pleiade, The, 3-4 polemic, 10, 93, 94-6, 97 precriticism, 28-32, 44, 192 Questione delta Lingua, 1, 2-6, 13-16, 49, 147,

200 Quintilian, 84 Ricks, Christopher, 106 Ronsard, Pierre de, 3

Jackson, Heather, 75

Sallust, 101, 222 n.6 Salmasius, 81, 93-8, 99, 224 n.6

Justa Edovardo King (1638), 21

serio ludere, 25-6

Lucretius, 40, 77, 118-19, 213 n.34 Lycophron, 75-6 Lyne, R. O. A. M., 132 Marshall, William, 22 Martial, 96, 99 Marvell, Andrew, 4, 209 n.17 Miller, Leo, 80, 209 n.19, 218 n.14, 219 n.32 Montaigne, Michel de, 13-14 Moseley, Humprey, 20-1 Moss, Ann, 13

243

Phillips, Edward, 62

Slights, W , 73, 74 Sophocles, 184, 185, 186, 188 Spanish (language), 7, 209 n.12 Spenser, Edmund, 41, 107-8, 171-2, 231 n.15 Spitzer, Leo, 133 Statius, 23-4, 25 Syriac (language), 7 Tacitus, 96, 167, 201, 222 n.6 Tasso, Torquato, 7, 48, 108, i n translating, xii, 10, 28, 67-74, 2O3~7> 2 2 4 n-7 see also Bible translations

negotium, 20, 81

OED, 106, 109, 209 n.13, 223 n.2, 226 n.38 Old English (and Early Middle English), 7, 70 otium, 20, 81 Ovid, 33-7, 97, 118-19 Oxford University and Bodleian Library, 31, 32 Petrarch, 23, 48, 54 philaletheia, 26, 75

Virgil, 23, 25, 41-3, 60-1, 114, 137-8, 143, 150, 150-3, 155, 158-9, 166-7, W i73> 203 the Virgilian rota, 41 Warton, Thomas, 28 Weckherlin, Georg Rudolph, 8, 51 Weston, Elizabeth, 8 Williams, Gordon, 36 Williams, R. D., 150, 151, 152 Wordsworth, William, 51, 225 nn.18 and 19

Index ofpassages from Milton

Ad Patrem, 22, 42, 52-3 Ad Rousium, 20-1, 28-9, 30-1, 203-6 Areopagitica, 69 At a Vacation Exercise, 4 - 5 , 16, 56, 84 Canzone: see Sonnets and Canzone (in Italian) Carmina Elegiaca, 34 Commonplace Book, 81, 85, 226 n.37 De Doctrina Christiana, 80, 82, 219 n.32 Defences: general, 82 Defensio Prirna, 93-8, 99-102 Elegiae: general, 38 Elegia I, 35 Elegia II, 34 Elegia III, 34-5 Elegia IV, 30, 36-7 Elegia V, 37 Elegia VI, 37 Elegia VII, 37 Epigrams (Latin), 38 Epistolarum Familianum Liber: general, 86-7 Letter VII, 87 Letter VIII, 87-8 Letter IX, 88-9 Letter X, 89-91 Epitaphium Damonis, 5, 19, 42, 57-61, 91-3 History of Britain, T h e , 6, 7, 70 In Ejfigiei Eius Sculptorem, 11, 46 In Obitum Procancellani Medici, 3 8 - 9 In Quintum Novembris, 39, 42, 108, 230 n.2 Judgement of Martin Bucer, The, 68, 69

Lycidas, 59, 65 Mane Citus Lectum Fuge, 8 3 - 4 Mansus, 57 Marginalia (in Milton's copies of Lycophron, Aratus and Euripides), 73-4, 74-80, 85, 86 Naturam JVon Pati Senium, 118 Of Education, 80 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, 37, 56 Paradise Lost: general, 66, 108, 198-202 (Book 1.1-6) 158; (1.12-13) 135; (1.20-2) 135; (1.84-7) 137; (1.141) 116; (1.202) 122; (1.300-4) 163; (1.451) 122 (Book 11.113-14) 144; (11.151-3) m ; (n-45) 123; (11.435) I255 (n.6oo) 126; (n.827) 126; (11.905) 116; (11.1049) n 6 (Book in. 3) 121; (111.7) 121, 127; (in. 84) 116; (in. 200) 124; (111.208) 116; (m. 352-3) 122; (111.380) 162; (in. 564) 127 (Book iv.1-12) 135-6; (iv. 32-41) 63-4, 136; (iv. 132) 118; (rv. 168) 124; (iv. 239-40) 144; (iv.246) 125; (iv.257) 125; (iv. 301) 122; (iv. 347) 123; (iv. 462-4) 142; (iv.506) 125; (iv. 642) 126; (rv. 651) 126; (iv. 705-19) 140, 141; (iv. 994-1004) 127 (Book v. 34) 142; (v.56-7) 142; (v. 623) 116; (v.766) 124; (v.86o) 121; (v. 890) 116 (Book vi. 25-8) 139; (vi.27) 125; (vi. 29) 124; (vi. 163) 121; (vi. 236) 122; (vi. 328) 116, 117; (vi. 355) 122; (vi.365) 124; (vi. 547) 121; (vl.587) 125; (vl.620) 117; (VI.623) 117; (vi. 669-77) 118-19; ( VL 77^) n 6 ; (vi.785) 116; (vi. 882-6) 141; (vi. 884) 128; (vi. 888-9) I 2 8

244

Index ofpassages from Milton (Book VII. 91) 124; (VII. 141-3) no; (vn. 162) 112-13; (VII. 168) 124; (VII. 168-9) I245 (VII. 216-17) 115; (VII. 263-70) 119-20; (VII. 325) 116; (VII. 438-40) 113; (VII. 462) 122; (VII. 482) 114; (VII. 619) 122; (Book VIII. 132) 128; (vm.157) 122; (vm.263) 143; (vm. 420) 116; (vm. 431) 116; (VIII. 525-6) 142-3; (vm. 533-4) 143; (VIII.576) I25; (VIII.577-8) III-I2, I44 (Book ix. 187) 121; (ix.510-30) 145; (ix. 532-3) 144; (ix. 547) 144; (ix. 644) 124; (ix. 653) 124, 138-9; (ix. 701) 144; (ix. 729-30) 144-5; (ix. 792) 121; (ix. 795) 127; (ix. 832-3) 109; (ix. 845-9) 109-10; (lx.901) 116, 116-17, 143 (Book x.97-8) 139; (x.210) 116; (x.294) 115; (X. 313-I4) II5; (X. 54O-1) 121 (Book xi.305-7) 121; (xi.487) 122; (xi.541) 116; (xi.562) 116; (xi.563) 125; (xi. 660) 122 (Book XII. 83) 143; (xii.205) 116; (xn.310) 124; (xn. 628-32) 162; (XII. 629) 123, 161; (xn. 633) (XII. 635) 116; (XII. 643) 161 Paradise Regained:

general, 80, 198, 201-2 (Book I) 166-9 (Book II) 169-71 (Book III) 171-3

245

(Book TV) 125, 174-8 Philosophus ad Regem, 44

Poems . . . 1645, 20, 28-9, 43-4 Prolusion VI, 84-5 Psalm 114 (in Greek), 43, 55-6, 70-1 Samson Agonistes:

general, 46, 180-2, 198-202 (line 31) 195; (65-7) 197; (147) 182-3; (J54) 195; (J79) 197; (200) 197; (291) 196-7; (312) 196; (318) 195; (334) 197; (354-5) 196; (437-9) 197; (453-5) 196; (442) 197; (533-8) 196; (667-70) 183; (702) 235 n.4; (827) 235 n.4; (839) 235 n.4; (855-6) 197; (1000) 235 n.4; (1010-17) 184; (1018-22) 182; (1091) 196; (1097) 197; (1102) 197; (1140) 196; (1150) 196; (1176) 196; (1354) J 95; to^-G) 195; (1619) 198-9; (1628) 199; (1638) 199; (1647-8) 199; (1660-1707) 189-92; (1673) I255 (J745-58) l 8 7 Sonnets and Canzone (in Italian), 22, 46-9, 53-5 Sonnets (in English), 235 n.i Thesaurus (Latin), 80, 219 n.31 Trinity Manuscript, 62, i n , 180, 181, 185, 216 n.27