Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Perez Zagorin's Milton: Aristocrat and Rebel is a puzzling book. Zagorin is widely known for The Court and the Country, a work of political history that has been much criticized yet remains one of the classic interpretations of the British Civil War or Puritan Revolution. In his preface, Zagorin says that he wrote the new book because his major predecessors, whom he names as Don M. Wolfe, Arthur E. Barker, and Christopher Hill, are "by now rather outdated." Or at least, as he explains in more detail, Wolfe's book is dated, Barker's is too preoccupied with religion, and Hill's is flawed by "crude political decodings" of Milton's poetry and an "inability to provide any evidence to sustain its novel central thesis" (ix).

In the event, however, Zagorin's book appears to this reviewer to be even more outdated than those of his three elected predecessors. Although he cites some important recent critics of Milton's politics, he rarely engages with them even by disagreement. Rather Zagorin's habit is to proceed by fiat. Hill is wrong about history; Patterson is wrong about censorship; Wittreich is wrong about feminism; and so on. Of all these recent critics only Cedric Brown (on Comus as an aristocratic masque) is declared right. The problem is not that Zagorin disagrees with recent critics (this reviewer often does too) but that he never seriously tries to justify his views. No Milton scholar is likely to be converted by his arguments, since they are virtually unsupported by evidence or by close discussion of the points in question.

Although the two works Zagorin chiefly cites are Parker's Milton: A Life and the Yale Complete Prose Works, I was reminded most often while reading his book of Bush's little introductory study, John Milton (New York: Macmillan, 1964). Zagorin never mentions Bush (I think; critics' names are not indexed). But he treats the same materials in the same order and with roughly the same mixture of biography and criticism, except that he says more about the prose and less about the major poems. He repeats many of the same anecdotes, as if they had never been heard before. Zagorin differs from Bush in that he lacks his wonderful style, his humor, and his understanding of religion. He also lacks Bush's tact in dealing with materials that some readers may already know. Everything seems aimed at the tabulae rasae of students who have never seen Milton before. "Milton's life falls into three broadly defined periods"(2). "Lycidas, a pastoral elegy written in 1637, contains his most poignant reflections on fame and immortality. It was composed to honor the memory of Edward King, represented in the poem as the deceased shepherd Lycidas"(9-10). Bush erred, most critics now believe, in painting a Milton who is too moderate and irenic; Zagorin errs by painting a Milton for whom religion is unimportant This attitude is evidenced not only by Zagorin's repeated comments but by his failure to discuss the political implications of works, such as "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," which reveal views of history that are difficult to secularize. Thus, if anything, Zagorin is more old-fashioned than Bush - let alone Barker or Hill. His is the eighteenth-century Whig version of history redivivus. His Milton is old-fashioned too: sheltered, naive, aristocratic, moralistic, and republican only when it is no longer avoidable. "Milton was not an original thinker"(1). Or, "He treated [episcopacyl with the utmost prejudice, leveling unfounded accusations, caricaturing history and indulging in wild exaggerations, and insulting his opponents by rude personal attacks"(32).

Given his relentless rehearsal of every chestnut and his habit of paraphrasing in its chronological order every poem he discusses, only beginning students are likely to find Zagorin's book tolerable. Why not send such students to Bush or Hanford, with a dose of Catherine Belsey to bring them up to date, until something less old-fashioned arrives to give them the basics?

Leo Miller's book on Milton and the Anglo-Dutch negotiations is almost the opposite of Zagorin's. It does not review Milton's life and works or offer to interpret them, but focuses on the three-year period when Milton, as secretary for foreign correspondence, translated various letters and state documents concerned with the failed negotiations that preceded the Anglo-Dutch war. Miller's is a book for specialists, who should consult it. He has done remarkable work among the primary documents and unearthed important versions which scholars have never consulted. A number of items are published for the first time in his book; some two hundred pages are devoted to these documents and related translations. He has also studied Milton's habits as a Latin writer and - especially in the clash between Milton's urgent desire to write elegantly and correctly and his political masters' desire to stick to the accepted if barbarous terms of diplomacy - has provided future editors of all of the state papers with important new means of distinguishing which documents are Milton's and which are not. Unfortunately, after all the problems Yale has had in re-editing the prose works, they are unlikely to be done again in our time.

Miller has few axes to grind, except for his view that Milton was a low-level functionary who did what he was told without significant participation. That may be so, but Robert Fallon and others have presented some contrary evidence. Miller's discoveries (though genuine and important) do not fully resolve this matter.

As its preface notes, this book was posthumously published. The late Leo Miller was a scholar of non-academic background who, without the usual credentials or institutional support, managed gradually to win the confidence of the Milton community. He had formidable advantages, including a rare knack for turning up facts and making archival discoveries. He could read difficult manuscripts written in Latin, Dutch, German, and other languages. Few other modern scholars could match him. At an early stage (he once told me) he approached the editors of the Yale edition of Milton's prose works to inform them that their apparatus was full of errors. His advice was refused. As a result, although the Yale edition is still the best we have, it must be used with caution and supplemented, wherever relevant, by Miller's books and essays. For example, on the vexed question of which of the State Papers are attributable to Milton, there are no easy answers. Anyone seriously interested must consult (among other works) both the Columbia and Yale editions and this present book. Miller's special talent was for ferreting out facts and correcting errors. In the postmodern age, when everything dissolves into clashes of opinion, it is a pleasure to have a new work of scholarship, old-fashioned in the best sense - because its principal goal is to confirm, correct, and add new evidence to what is known by the earlier work of the scholarly community.

"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh," the Preacher says. Not the proliferation of books on Milton but the sense one has, in reading Richard F. Hardin's Civil Idolatry, of how one kind of learning drives out another recalls these words to mind. Must one point out, as Hardin does, that Christianity has taught from the first that Christ's "kingdom is not of this world," and that the continuing sense of that other kingdom - of what Augustine names the "city of God," leads Christians to question the pretensions of kingship and of earthly rule? As John Hales exclaims, in a formulation by no means new: "All this State and Magnificence used in the managing of them is nothing else but Secular Idolatry, used to gain veneration and reverence unto that, which in comparison of the Kingdom we speak of is mere vanity"(15). If anything, as Hardin shows, Protestants were more likely than their predecessors to confuse the kingdoms.

Any one of us can only read so much. New Historicism drives out old forms of historical consciousness and of literary interpretation. "Good riddance," the new historicist remarks. But, as Hardin points out, the rejection of "thematic" criticism and the "history of ideas" renders us less sensitive to the nuances of past political discourse. We refuse to take seriously that our ancestors had ideas. Attention to "theory" leaves less room for knowing how the Renaissance grew out of the Middle Ages; historical attention spans shrink in proportion to how firmly we insist that all writings are "productions" of material conditions in narrow time-slots. Forms of power and respect all look alike. Old Thomistic distinctions between latria and dulia, for example, or among the degrees of worship or respect we owe (in descending order) to God, our parents, our rulers, and our boss(21), are reduced (I paraphrase) to "that isn't the way we do things in California."

One of Hardin's main points is that the New Historicist version of Whig progress, which blames everything retrograde on an unholy alliance between kingship and religious superstition - that is, on Christianity - should be reconsidered. The figures of Pharaoh, Herod, and Satan in the Mystery and Morality Plays illustrate his point. There is, Hardin says, only one admirable king in all of these plays. When Milton, the seventeenth century's most important iconoclast, speaks out against the false idolatry and mystifications of kingship, he echoes the past as well as anticipates the future. It was never an English or a Christian habit to worship kings. As the old-fashioned historians used to say, James and Charles paid the penalty of imagining that they were gods.

Hardin's chapter on Shakespeare, which centers on Henry V, and on Richard II and Julius Caesar as negative exemplars, is his strongest and most original. The chapter on Spenser - which plausibly argues that Spenser did not mean to deify Elizabeth - is less effective in detail. Milton's views on the idolatry of kingship are already well known. Hardin adds, however, a suggestive section on Milton and patriarchal politics, which is very effective because it is more aware than much recent criticism what the phrase implied in Milton's time. If Milton cannot be absolved in our terms of all taint of patriarchy, he is demonstrably the enemy of seventeenth-century patriarchal theories of kingship. The fathers in his poems, as Hardin acutely remarks, are often figures of powerless sympathy and love, not founts of ultimate authority. Milton's true source of authority is always and only God.