The Life of the Author: John Milton. Richard Bradford

The Life of the Author: John Milton - Richard  Bradford


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his work, and the second follows the history of how commentators and critics have over the past three and a half centuries made him their own, reshaping him according to their contrasting opinions on who he ought to be, and more recently annihilating him as a real individual.

      Read the first part, see what you think of him as a man and a writer; then read the second and compare your impressions of him as a living man and writer with the ways in which what we know of him has, over the past three centuries been distorted and manipulated. Feminists, for example, have seen his treatment of Eve as symptomatic of the governing patriarchal ideology of his time and as a projection into his work of his own unsettled relationships with his wives. Marxists have regarded him as the foreseer both of revolution and bourgeois complacency.

      Compare the first and second parts of this book, read the poems and the prose, and decide for yourself.

Part One Life

      William Shakespeare and John Milton are the two most important poets in English. Shakespeare’s achievements are unchallengeable and secure. Milton can make a far more controversial claim to eminence. He wrote the only poem in English recognised as an epic, a poem moreover which challenged the beliefs and presuppositions of all of its readers. As a literary writer, his political and historical significance is unique; he was at the centre, involved in, the most traumatic period of modern British history, and this left an imprint on his writings.

      The family into which John Milton was born on Friday, 9 December 1608 exemplified the mutations and uncertainties of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. His paternal grandfather, Richard, had been a yeoman and worked a farm near Stanton St John, a village about four miles north of Oxford. Richard had initially occupied a position in the social hierarchy only just above that of the medieval serf but by means still undisclosed, ‘probably a good marriage’, he acquired an estate that in 1577 was recorded as providing the considerable income of £500 per year.

      Figure 1.1 City of London and original St Paul’s Cathedral before the Great Fire. Bread Street, where Milton grew up, would have been in the foreground between the Cathedral and the Thames.Source: Mayson Beeton Collection.

      John


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