Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style.

Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style. By John K. Hale.
Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1997.
xv +245 pp. [pound]35;$54.95.

Milton's Languages is a polyglot's study of a Renaissance polyglot, focusing on Milton as a linguist and on the various ways in which the interaction of his many languages may shed light on our understanding of the texture of text. Milton is proclaimed as one who knew ten languages, wrote in four, and translated from five. The study examines inter alia his early Latin exercises, representative Latin prose works, and Greek marginalia, and also assesses the influence of Latin and Milton's other languages upon his mature vernacular poetry.

Whether it is because much of this book reproduces some of Hale's separately published articles or simply because Latin outweighs all other Miltonic non-vernacular languages, the final impression is one of a rather unbalanced study, or at least that this is a book about Milton's Latinity rather that his multilingualism. And even as such, the author oversimplifies the issue. Although he acknowledges the intertextuality of neo-Latin literature (e.g. pp. 12, 118, 149), his analysis of Milton's Latinity fails to show this in practice, since it completely disregards this important neo-Latin context. And oversimplification can lead to misrepresentation. I take two cases in point: first, in his discussion (p. 53) ofAd Patrem (ll. 8-9), the positioning of the nouns munera and dona is seen as a 'striking departure' from normal word-order, in order, Hale states, 'to mimic the idea of reciprocity', an accurate observation as it stands, but Milton is echoing Hugo Grotius, who had done exactly the same thing in his In Natalem Patris 33-36 (Poemata Collecta (Leiden, 1617) pp. 286-88). Secondly, Hale dismisses Milton's In Quintum Novembris as 'intellectually null' (p. 39). This gross misreading ignores the poem's skilful reworking of aspects of the neo-Latin gunpowder epic tradition as represented by Francis Herring, Michael Wallace, and Phineas Fletcher (see, for example, E. Haan, 'Milton's In Quintum Novembris and the Anglo-Latin Gunpowder Epic', Humanistica Lovaniensia, 40 (1992), 221-50). The fact of the matter is that the whole question of Milton's Latinity is inextricably linked to his place within a neo-Latin or, more specifically, an Anglo-Latin tradition. Any assessment that fails to take account of this can be only partial at best. Unfortunately the author both here and elsewhere in the book has not updated his bibliography to include the ever-increasing corpus of recent scholarship on Milton's neo-Latin poetry.

Hale's discussion of Milton's multilingualism might have benefited from an examination of seicento academic practice. Although the minutes of some of the meetings of the Florentine Svogliati academy testify that he did indeed recite Latin verse, it is known that both the Svogliati and its sister academy, the Apatisi, actively encouraged multilingual performances. Moreover it was not just as a Latinist, but as a polyglot that he was celebrated by accademici in those encomia they composed in his honour. Hale assumes (pp. 5; 58) that is was only for his Latin verses that he received these tributes, but Milton does not actually say whether his contributions ('some trifles') were in Latin or vernacular (or indeed in any of the other languages he had acquired to date), nor does he tell us whether they were prose or verse. And what about Milton's Italian sonnets, surely worthy of a much lengthier examination in a work of this nature?

Finally, two methodological points: throughout the book the author uses a variety of translations by other scholars 'so that the varieties (and defects) of translating can be felt on the pulse' (p. xii). As if this methodology were not questionable enough, he then draws upon the very translators he had himself used, in an attempt to 'show that most available versions are into drab prose' (p. 203). Given Hale's obvious linguistic expertise, it is tempting to ask why he did not provide his own translations in all instances. His recommendation that translators should aim to 'give Milton's verse the kind of translation he himself gave to verse of all sorts' (p. 204) is not only unwise in itself, but surprising, given his earlier dismissal (p. 71) of Milton's translation of Horace, Odes, i.5: 'What inflection can clarify readily, English fails to: the syntax crumples into nonsense.' Further, the author's use of modern analogies and metaphors (e.g, pp. 12, 84, 120, 123, 202) is unhelpful.

As new light continues to be shed upon the early Milton (see John Carey's second edition of Milton, Complete Shorter Poems (London and New York: Longman, 1997) and Stella Revard's Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1997), scholars are realizing that not all roads must lead to Paradise Lost. One hopes this realization coupled with the rapid expansion of neo-Latin studies will herald new beginnings for Milton scholarship. And Milton's Languages, especially in the insight afforded by the philological expertise of its author, certainly makes a contribution towards those beginnings.