Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery.

Robert Thomas Fallon. Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. xviii + 190 pp. $40. ISBN: 0-271-01460-1.

Milton, Samuel Johnson charged, "had read much, and knew what books could teach; but had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer." Following Christopher Hill, the current generation of Milton scholars has devoted much of its collective energy to disputing Johnson's pronouncement, and no one has pursued that agenda more deliberately than Robert Fallon. In Captain or Colonel: The Soldier in Milton's Life and Art (Columbia, MO, 1984), Fallon explored the impact on the poetry of the knowledge of military matters Milton acquired as a citizen of London during the Civil War and from first-hand accounts of distant battles and campaigns. His subsequent book, Milton in Government (University Park, PA, 1993), is more narrowly biographical, focusing on Milton's service to the Cromwell government as Secretary for Foreign Languages. Fallon describes the current study as a sequel to the two previous ones, and in particular the latter, extending into an examination of the three major poems his research into Milton's practical experience in politics.

As communities of intelligent beings, Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and Earth are all political in the broadest sense, and, Fallon argues, Milton's representation of them owes a profound debt to the experiences and insights he gained as an official in Cromwell's government. All four realms, despite the preeminence of one figure, are to a greater or lesser degree governed by co-rulers. Fallon traces this system of shared power to Milton's understanding of the French monarchy, which was nominally ruled in the 1650s by the child-king Louis XIV but whose real power had been delegated by the Queen Mother to Cardinal Mazarin. As a diplomatic correspondent, Milton recognized this arrangement, frequently dispatching official communiques to the king together with copies for the Cardinal. Similarly Fallon detects in the voyage of Satan from Hell through Chaos to Eden analogies to the dangers various of Cromwell's diplomatic envoys to the Continent faced and the duplicities they were obliged to practice in pursuit of their missions. The missions of Raphael and Michael, though neither dangerous nor deceptive, are likewise associated with Cromwellian diplomatic maneuvering, while the demonic plot against Adam and Eve is compared to the Western Design, Cromwell's plan to strike at Spain through her holdings in the New World.

If Fallon in many ways reflects the focus and interests of contemporary Milton scholarship, in other respects he stands apart from it. He is careful to avoid the pitfall, common to historical criticism, of identifying poetic episodes with real-world counterparts. He acknowledges that the analogies he locates are seldom exact, and that many of the passages he discusses have textual as well as experiential sources. More significantly, he resists the tendency to produce ideologically-driven allegories in place of a careful consideration of the details of the poetic narrative. While it has become fashionable, and often profitable, to read Milton's poetry as an encoded version of positions staked out either in his own prose or in that of his radical contemporaries - unproblematically identifying Satan with Charles I, for instance - Fallon offers a more complicated picture. Insisting that Milton allowed his imagination to play upon his experiences in the creation of his characters, Fallon shows that aspects of Cromwell no less than of Charles I find their way into Milton's Satan as well as his God. Thus the assumption that one can easily discern Milton's judgment of historical figures and events from his poetic representations is usefully called into question. Though one could wish for a fuller treatment of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes than is provided, Fallon has nonetheless given us an important study, one that enriches our sense of how historical experience is mediated by imagination even as it illuminates central passages of Milton's major poetry.

ROBERT L. ENTZMINGER Rhodes College