David Urban

This essay discusses C. S. Lewis's influential and controversial chapter, within A Preface to "Paradise Lost" (1942), on Milton's Satan. Lewis's chapter presents itself as a response to what Lewis sees as the dominant Romantic understanding of Milton's Satan, but Lewis oversimplifies the critical landscape both by misrepresenting Shelley's discussion of Satan and by failing to acknowledge various post-Shelley challenges to Milton's Satan that had appeared before Lewis's book. Lewis's chapter elicited various sustained critical responses in the ensuing decade. This essay analyzes those responses—most of which seek to refute Lewis's presentation of Satan by reasserting a Romantic understanding of Satan, although one Lewis sympathizer actually sees similarities between Lewis and Shelley. Various critics object to Lewis's mockery of Satan, which is perceived as unfair or even unchristian. The essay addresses Lewis's neglect of Coleri...

In "Milton's Paradise Regain 'd and the Second Temptation/' John T. Shawcross engages Claude J. Summers's discussion of the " homosexual implications" of the "[t]all stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hew / Then Ganymed or Hylas" who attend the banquet with which Satan tempts Milton's Son in Book 2 of Paradise Regained. Shawcross states that "this sexual interruption subtly recalls the widespread rumor of Jesus' s homosexuality, which persisted into the seventeenth century, as Milton must have been aware" (35; Shawcross cites Paradise Regained 2.352-53). Shawcross's mention of this "widespread rumor" is made in a matter-of-fact manner, but his only evidence for this affirmation appears in an endnote that follows his statement: "Summers cites references to this allegation; see 60-61 [of Summers] and notes 10 and 11" (39). However, an investigation of Summers's article reveals two important probl...

This article examines the falls of Satan, Eve, and Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, arguing that these characters demonstrate neither sincere theology nor genuinely sincere behavior in their initial transgressions and continued unrepentant behavior. In analyzing matters of sincerity concerning these characters, this article interacts with numerous voices in the history of Paradise Lost criticism, particularly those critics who, advocating a Romantic understanding of sincerity against traditional Christianity, have defended the decisions of Satan, Eve, and Adam to transgress against God’s commands. This article also examines Adam and Eve’s sincere repentance later in Milton’s epic.

In this essay, I argue that Psalm 23 serves as a thematic rubric through which to understand how Prospero’s machinations affect the progress of the redemption of King Alonso throughout the play. At the same time, however, recognizing Prospero’s moral complexities and deficiencies, I also argue that Prospero’s mercy toward and reconciliation with Alonso ultimately demonstrates the sovereign influence of a Providence beyond Prospero’s control—a Providence that works through charity and grace beyond Prospero’s initial intentions. This higher providential power, therefore, ought rightly to be seen as the ultimate shepherd of the play—one who works to affect not only Alonso’s but also Prospero’s spiritual restoration.

Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence. Edited by Peter E. Medine, John T. Shawcross, and David V. Urban. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. Pp. xxv, 346. $60.00. This volume of new essays continues an ongoing discussion about how to read Milton in an age where ardent religious belief leading to action - especially violent action - seems highly problematic; it does this by engaging the work of Michael Lieb, who has wrestled with this question as insightfully and productively as anyone, as the various scholars respond in particular to Lieb's concept of the visionary mode in Milton. The book is divided into four parts: "Milton's Visionary Mode: Prophecy and Violence," "Milton's Visionary Mode: Contemporary and Later Contexts," "Milton's Visionary Mode and Paradise Regain'd," and a final part consisting of one essay, "Milton's Visionary Mode and the Last Poems." An introduction not only states the aims of the volume and of the four sections, but gives a succinct discussion of the massive oeuvre of Michael Lieb from his earliest to his latest work, particularly as his work develops an understanding of Milton's visionary mode. The citations are provided through endnotes for each essay, collected at the back of the book, where there is also an index and a comprehensive bibliography of Lieb's work. Part I defines the visionary mode. "Milton and the Visionary Mode: The Early Poems," by John T. Shawcross, synthesizes a great deal of work on Milton, including that of many of the present volume's contributors. Shawcross offers a careful definition of the function of the visionary in the role of the poet, the prophetic as a type of visionary - and Milton as the epitome of all three, a calling prepared for in his early work. Barbara K. Lewalski's "Milton and the Culture Wars" argues that Milton set about the project of reforming the English nation by presenting a virtuous poetry that would resist Restoration culture not only through its subject matter but also through its generic development and formal qualities. "Red Milton: Abraham Polonsky and You Are There (January 30, 1955)," by Sharon Achinstein, reviews the career of Polonsky, a blacklisted screenwriter who pseudonymously wrote an episode of an historical docudrama that portrayed Milton's flight from English authorities immediately following the Restoration. In this account, Milton's work and life provide a recurrent example for the persecuted intellectual who seeks to speak truth in the face of enormous cultural and political opposition. Part Il discusses the intellectual and cultural contexts necessary to comprehend Milton's visionary work. "How Hobbes Works," by Stanley Fish, argues for Hobbes as the thinker of the surface, for whom truth is bound up in the superficial connections of word and law that bind humans together, rather than in any transcendent force - in this way Hobbes serves as a foil to the internal Milton for whom answer only must be made to the inner light - and both of whom are opposed to simplifiers who make political answers easy. "God's 'Red Right Hand': Violence and Pain in Paradise Lost," by Diana Trevino Benet, discusses the presence of pain as an everyday and unavoidable part of seventeenth-century life, and reads Milton's depiction of a God who engages in corporal punishment in light of this fact. Joseph A. Wittreich's "A World with a Tomorrow: Paradise Regain 'd and Its Hermeneutic of Discovery," traces an historical shift in interpretations of the biblical story of Jesus in the wilderness - a shift from seeing the temptations as real to imagined - in the process seeing Paradise Regain'd as participant and, potentially, catalyst in an evolving understanding of this doctrine. "'Shifting Contexts': Artists'Agon with the Biblical and Miltonic Samson," by Wendy Furman-Adams and Virginia James Tufte, surveys visual depictions of the biblical Samson story from the thirteenth century to the present, as well as illustrations of Milton's Samson Agonistes from the eighteenth century to the present. …

Jonathan Shears. The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost: Reading against the Grain. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ix + 221 pp. 5 [pounds sterling] 5.00/$99.95. Review by DAVID V. URBAN, CALVIN COLLEGE. In this helpful book, Jonathan Shears focuses on "the relationship between Paradise Lost and Romantic literature" and "the legacy that Romantic readings of Paradise Lost have held, and still hold, on the critical consciousness" (1). Respecting but consciously setting his argument against Lucy Newlyn's Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (1993), Shears takes issue with the longstanding Romantic interpretation of Milton's epic that emphasizes ambiguity and contraction as central to Paradise Lost, instead arguing that Paradise Lost should be read as a unified whole, with the poem's component parts interpreted in light Milton's "great Argument." In the process, Shears contends that the Romantic reading of Milton's epic is "a misreading--an unsystematic imposition of meaning on to Milton's text" (6). Shears analyzes not only the Romantic tradition of reading Paradise Lost but also how the Romantics' reading of Milton manifested itself in the literature of six major Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Shears' introductory chapter effectively sets up the parameters of his larger study. Over and against the Romantic emphasis on ambiguity and contraction in Paradise Lost--an emphasis continued by twentieth century critics Denis Saurat, E. M. W. Tillyard, F. R. Leavis, A. J. A. Waldock, William Empson, Harold Bloom, Katherine Belsey, Stevie Davies, Newlyn, and, more recently, Gordon Teskey--Shears sees the poem as a unified whole that should be understood within the context of Milton's "great Argument" and the authorial intention behind it. Calling the "Romantic aesthetic" "notoriously fragmentary" (8), Shears asserts that the Romantic tendency to emphasize the part over the whole leads to misreading, or "reading against the grain" of Milton's intent. Shears sides with Barbara Lewalski in arguing that Milton's use of multiple genres makes his epic more complex, not indeterminate or inconclusive. Chapter 2, "Milton in the Eighteenth Century," argues that Romantic misreadings of Paradise Lost were preceded by similar misreadings by eighteenth-century authors. Shears contends that Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) anticipates Bloom, Davies, and Teskey in Burke's emphasis upon the reader's imagination's ability to recreate poetry even as Burke downplays the importance of Milton's argument. Burke also emphasizes the sublime magnificence of Satan's character in Book 1 while ignoring Paradise Lost's moral purpose. Shears even suggests that Burke ultimately conflates the reader and Satan. And Burke's emphasis on the Satanic sublime was anticipated by John Dennis in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). In contrast to Burke and Dennis was Joseph Addison who, in his 1712 Spectator essays on Paradise Lost, recognized that Satan's artistic grandeur was checked by the poem's larger moral purpose. Shears also sees Samuel Johnson's biography of Milton (1779) anticipating the Romantic view that Milton was of the Devil's party. Chapters 3 through 8 each devotes a chapter on one of the six major Romantic poets' reading of Paradise Lost and incorporation of it in his own writings. Shears portrays Blake as a forerunner to postmodern indeterminacy, one who avoids foreclosure. Shears cautions against reducing Blake's relationship to Milton to a simplistic understanding of the famous "enigmatic assertion" (60) in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell--spoken by the voice of the Devil--that "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Shears notes that for Blake, the notion of evil goes beyond the traditional understanding of Christian ethics and contains the "potential for imaginative growth" (61). …

... Hally's cavalierly offered misrepresentations—and Sam and Willie's acceptance of them—also parallel how Hally has uncritically imbibed the ... own account, ' “The Yasnya Polyana School', both in Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy's Educational Writings 1861–62, ed. Alan Pinch and ...

(and how I wish he hadn’t!) she “redeems nature from the general curse”; Cordelia’s death redeems nobody. WhenMarina tells Pericles her name, she is not echoing Jesus’s naming of Mary Magdalen in Gethsemane (p. 50); if she were, she would name her father, not herself. At such moments (and there are others) Boitani’s readings seem too strained. However, when he relaxes, allowing himself a freer play of response to what Shakespeare gives us, he produces pages full of insight. His chapter on The Tempest is a fine example. Working with scenes of epiphanic revelation rather than the scenes of recognition he had used in Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and setting his action on an island which is “a paradise that Eve has entered first” (p. 95), ruled by a magician who is also “both Neptune and Jupiter” (p. 109), Shakespeare explores the psychology of sin, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation. Much of Boitani’s discussion is acute, yet he almost sabotages it by asserting that Prospero’s acknowledgement of responsibility for Caliban “transcends human ethics, as if it were that of a Christ who takes upon himself the sin of the world” (p. 116)! “As if it were” is simply a verbal evasion. Prospero’s magic powers are not innate and therefore cannot be divine; we are dealing with analogy, not allegory. (Nor, come to that, is the island so paradisal; after all, everyone except Caliban cannot wait to leave it.) Accordingly, one’s endorsement of Boitani’s readings of particular passages is tempered by dissent from the extremes and rhetorical excesses to which his thesis has led him. Few would dispute that Shakespeare is a religious artist, but that he had a gospel to proclaim, in any formally credal sense, in his plays remains open to doubt.