Staging criticism, staging Milton: John Dryden's<i>The State of Innocence</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1677 John Dryden published The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man , an operatic rewriting of John Milton's Paradise Lost that he had probably completed four years earlier. In his preface, “The Author's Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence,” Dryden indicates that criticism depends on the critic's identification with the writer he is examining. Milton, however, provides a particularly recalcitrant site for such an assumption: the only acceptable condition under which Dryden could identify with him would be if Milton's poem were no longer regarded as a vindication of revolution or regicide. Consequently, Dryden must produce a literary transformation of Milton, one that masks the political differences between them. Dryden's The State of Innocence accomplishes this goal, rewriting Milton in ways that explicitly contradict Milton's understanding of heroic poetry. By translating Milton's blank verse into rhyme and his epic narrative into dramatic form, Dryden separates both the man and his authoritative stylistic choices from the poem he wrote. Because Milton's choices make manifest his theological-political-literary authority, Dryden's revision of them necessarily reconstitutes that authority. He thereby makes discursively available Milton's work, divorced from his political beliefs, recasting it as a literary contribution to a native tradition. In “The Author's Apology,” and in Dryden's subsequent writings about Milton, he develops a set of critical terms that sustain the separation of Milton's poetic achievement from his politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".