John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought

Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008, 488 pp. This excellent biography will be standard Life of Milton for decades to come, so it is especially important to take due note of its weaknesses as well as its many great strengths. authors inform us that their account of factual record is first since Masson's to have been based on inspection of all available documents, (2) and array of archival evidence is indeed impressive. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought has advantages and disadvantages of historicist criticism. Its advantage is that it offers unrivaled insight into political complexities of Milton's time; its disadvantage is that these triumphs are sometimes won at expense of perfunctory treatment of poems (especially Lycidas and Lost). very title of chapter Plague, Fire, and reveals set of priorities that would have surprised earlier biographers. Even Christopher Hill (whose whole purpose was to root Milton in his historical and political context) devoted 100 pages of his 1977 biography to The Great Poems, and his chapter entitled Paradise hesitantly ventured the historical as title of but one of seven subsections. It is sign of how far context has prevailed over text in three decades since Hill's book appeared that title of Milton's most celebrated poem can now be appended as afterthought. But it would be churlish to be ungrateful for many riches that Campbell and Corns do offer. They are fascinating on plague and fire and much else besides, and it is appropriate for literary biography to prioritize people and events over poems. It is possible, nevertheless, to take good approach too far. Excessive contextualizing can become reductive, especially when applied to great poem like Lost which is too capacious to be contained by any one context. There are few (a very few) places where Campbell and Corns are reductive. One of most discussed and controversial episodes in Lost occurs when God tells angels that they will henceforth be ruled by his Son, mysterious figure who supposedly created them, but whose own existence was secret until God exalted him over his surprised subjects. Campbell and Corns suggest that this episode might contain some memory of charged moment in English history when dying Oliver Cromwell exhorted civilian republicans and senior officers in New Model Army to recognize succession of his son Richard, a figure hitherto virtually unknown. Campbell and Corns know better than to argue for topical allusion. They make more modest claim that this episode reveals an awareness of how political animal, in its hopes, fears, and longings, behaves (345). This is fascinating, and it offers possible answer to many critics who have objected to what they see as Milton's political naivete. But it matters that God Father is not on his deathbed, and it matters that he exalts his Son as King of kings, not Lord Protector of fledgling republic. I, for one, am not persuaded that Milton intended (consciously or otherwise) even remotest parallel between Son of God and Richard Cromwell, but Campbell and Corns are not critics to be dismissed lightly and readers should judge for themselves. If, in this instance, Campbell and Corns diminish Son (a parallel with Richard Cromwell brings him down through infinite descents), elsewhere in same chapter they overstate his powers when they assert that Milton carefully establishes that Father and Son both share characteristic of (338) . This statement surprised me, since Milton, in fifth chapter of De Doctrina Christiana, emphatically denies that Son shares Father's divinity, including (and especially) divine powers of omniscience and omnipotence. Campbell and Corns are, of course, aware of Milton's unorthodox views. …

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