John Milton And His Reader

In Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (1994), Achinstein argues that John Milton (1608-1674) was a writer who, conscious that his audiences were the increasing targets of propaganda, aimed to ‘shape’ or ‘fashion’ his public into an inquisitive, resistant and ‘revolutionary’ readership. Both Lycidas (1637) and Areopagiticus (1644) were written in the context of recently passed laws that aimed to tighten licensing restrictions. In 1637, the Star Chamber sought to prevent further proliferation of libellous rebellion in light of the recent publications issued by Puritans Prynne, Bastwicke and Burton in 1637 against Laud’s policies, the Star Chamber introduced new licensing restrictions to remedy existing loopholes in the censorship laws. Although supposedly dedicated to the commemoration of the late Edward King, Lycidas highlights how the Protestant Reformation had provided an ethical ground for protecting the importance of public expression. Superficially, the poem is a pastoral elegy, with several references to Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calender, but Milton employs this commonly allegorical form to frame a fierce political polemic which exposes the cupidity of the episcopacy for the reader. Areopagitica (1644), in contrast, is an explicitly political tract condemning the licensing order of June 1643, which stipulated that all books had to be examined by a censor prior to publication. Milton’s argument is a direct address to parliament and consequently he is hardly hoping to fashion his audience into revolutionaries, but persuading these authorities to allow the British public to be involved in political dialogue. In writing, he casts himself as the spokesperson for an audience that he feels has the potential to be politically engaged if censorship laws do not succeed in patronising and limiting their participation. However, although Milton may have no hope of converting his parliamentarian addressees into a ‘revolutionary public’, he still attempts to ‘fashion’ them into ‘valuable participants’ in a flattering comparison to the Areopagus, the revered Athenian high court of justice. Paradoxically, Milton needs to fashion an audience while rejecting the idea that a reader should be ‘fashioned’ by controls imposed on the texts available to them.

In some ways, Milton’s relationship with the reader of Lycidas is that of teacher and pupil. Simplistically, the poem almost functions as an exercise book for the cultivation of discerning readers because it abruptly shifts between different voices or songs onto which the reader seems expected to pass value judgements. St. Peter’s voice, for one, detests the ‘lean and flashy songs’ of the cruelly depicted episcopacy in stark contrast with Lycidas’ gorgeous voice which used to ‘fan the joyous leaves to [his] soft lays.’. Whereas the pastoral notes seem to harmonise with nature in a gorgeous Orphic symphony, the sermons of St. Peter’s imagined bishop ‘grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw’ (l. 124). In Areopagiticus, Milton argues that it is preposterous for an institution to deem themselves sufficiently powerful to place themselves in charge of distinguishing ‘good’ texts from ‘bad’, but in his eagerness to deride Catholic sermons and preaching, he betrays the inherent hypocrisy in an argument that ultimately aims to collapse the notion of a damaging text by highlighting the faults in texts which he, Milton, alongside his Puritan supporters would have deemed damaging. Censorship was the government’s proposed attempt to ‘fashion’ its public into cohesive participants within English society. Milton then, as censorship’s enemy, should theoretically strive to avoid imposing any of his own attempts to ‘fashion’ the readers of his texts, but because he perceives the episcopacy to be such an incredible force of evil in seventeenth century Britain, feeding its followers, or ’hungry sheep’ (l. 125), on ‘rank mist’ (l. 126) rather than genuine spiritual nutrition, he cannot help but employ his own personal set of values on the texts they produce. In Areopagitica, he seems to hold enormous faith in the literate public:

To the pure all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but alle kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscious be not defil’d.

Here Milton argues that it is patronising to assume that a reader will be necessarily susceptible to the ideas proposed by any texts that it reads and is therefore vulnerable to being corrupted by ‘evill’ texts. However he seems not to attend his own philosophy, because both Lycidas and Areopagiticus betray an evident anxiety at the malignant powers of the Popery, which he explicitly excludes from his generally magnanimous endorsement of political and religious expression:

‘I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civill supremacies, so it self should be extirpat.’ (A, 565)

On the grounds that the papacy are a force of censorship, Milton sees no need to sympathise with their own entitlement to freedom of speech and publication. Therefore, in both Lycidas and Areopagiticus, Milton attempts to deconstruct a notion of ‘fashioning’ ethical quality, he has to impose his own equally subjective notions of ‘good’ and ‘evill’.

His choice of the pastoral genre for this poem is particularly notable, given that the anthology to which Milton was asked to contribute consisted mainly of metaphysical poetry that was then so fashionable among many of his contemporaries. Although its manuscri pt context compels a reader to expect an elegy, the digressions on Phoebus and Camus rupture the harmonious pastoral tone and reveal the poem to conceal a more topical and passionate critique on contemporary political and religious concerns. Norbrook argues that ‘the imagery of Arcadian pastoral can be “false” if it is used simply to aestheticize, to block out awareness of pressing political and religious concerns, but it can also provide a vision of an apocalyptically redeemed secular existence.’ The lengthy descri ption of flowers (ll. 140-50), for example, is a popular pastoral trope and exemplifies how the traditionally ‘enamelled’ (l. 139) language of a pastoral can charm the reader with enticing imagery, consequently running the risk of disengaging their intellectual faculties in aesthetic appreciation. In line 186 ‘thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills’, the narrator changes again, examining the primary narrator as if from a distance and deeming him somewhat inexperienced and undeveloped. The shift in narratorial voice at the end acts as a retrospectively patronising reflection on the poem’s adoption of pastoral song, emphasising the ‘uncouth’ and unsophisticated immaturity of the young man singing it his comical tendency to warble and lastly the dull and ‘Doric’ nature of his song. ‘Doric’ is used with similar derision in Areopagitica. In Milton’s attack on the practicality of censorship, he argues that a government fearing the transmission of evil via the dissemination of texts would logically have to progress to the banning of visual art, music and conversation too. In short, an effective silencing of potentially malignant influences is entirely impossible. However, even in this ghastly picture of a stifled state, Milton accedes that ‘no musick must be heard, no song be set or sung, but what is grave and Dorick’ (A, 116) Evidently, Milton held a laughably low estimation of music that pertained to Plato’s ‘doric’ genre and consequently reveals in these final lines his acute awareness of the numbing and lulling tendency for pastoral poetry. However Milton does not employ this doric drone to ‘block out’ a political message, on the contrary, the dramatic antithesis created between the pastoral strands of Lycidas and the vehement heat of Camus’ speech performs the shattering of a literary tradition and the subsequent eruption of truth.

Aschetin claims elsewhere in Milton and the Revolutionary Reader that ‘Milton’s task is that of the humanist, educating the people according to the classical model of exemplary learning’, but his slippery use of genre, songs and voices in Lycidas render it very difficult to pick the correct example out. The strategy of exemplary learning hardly works if the reader is presented with entirely contradictory modes of expression and sentiment: both a violent polemical outburst, the other a philosophical and romanticised disengagement. How this muddling of examples does work though is in shaping a more alert and perceptive reader, who Milton trains to interrogate the surface pastoral setting with an eye to the bubbling political argument. In Areopagiticus he writes ‘a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, then a fool will do of sacred scri pture’, emphasising that the ethical implications and ramifications of a published text lie not with who wrote it but who reads it and interprets it.

The question of who read Milton’s work is an important one. As a writer, the only ‘revolutionary public’ whom he could hope of communicating with is necessarily limited to those who are literate. Historians believe that thirty percent of adult males could read in England, and almost double that in London. These statistics were impressive in comparison to other nations at the time, but nevertheless, Milton’s relationship with readers cannot be all inclusive. The promiscuous manuscri pt culture during the seventeenth century dramatically spread the dissemination of texts but even then, it is arguable that Milton’s frequent reliance on intertextual and mythological references signal in both poetry and prose signal that his envisioned reader was confined to those privileged to a classical education. And therefore when he asserts to parliament in Areopagiticus, that they govern a nation ‘of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit’ (A, 549), it is unlikely that this is truly a nationally applicable claim.

Aschetin’s use of the word ‘fashion’ in reference to Milton seems a slightly awkward one. The verb means ‘to make into a particular form’ [CITE], implying an artificial fixity. ‘Revolution’, on the other hand, implies change. Milton’s texts aim to fashion their reader into a valuable participant in political discussion by encouraging them to discern the truth. Milton’s concept of Truth is not a static endpoint but a perpetual movement:

Truth is compar’d in scri pture to a streaming fountain if her waters flow not in a perpetuall progression, they sick’n into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.

(A, 543)

With this liquid imagery in mind, I propose that the word ‘waft’ as opposed to the word ‘fashion’ is a much more appropriate and productive evocation of how Milton interacts with his reader because its meaning simultaneously portrays agency and the limitations of that agency. ‘To waft’ is to compel movement in a particular direction but it is also only specifically applied to the kind of movement that pushes through unpredictable substances such as water or air, which are in turn subject to the erratic changes of wind or tide. Consequently, the extent of a ‘wafter’s’ influence on the object on which it acts is hindered by a natural susceptibility to deviation. In both Lycidas and Areopagiticus, the word ‘waft’ is used to portray the attempt of an authoritative agency to influence the direction of a subject. In the first example, the speaker invokes the dolphins featured in Arion’s myth to ‘waft the hapless youth’, our departed Lycidas, safely to shore. Up to now, Milton’s poetic language has been keeping Lycidas’ memory afloat on vocabulary from the semantic field of water images of Arethuse’ ‘fountain’ and his ‘flood’ (L, l. 85), images of the waves, the sea, floating, ‘the level brine’ (l. 98) infuse the poem with an overwhelming watery metaphor which simultaneously recalls the nature of Edward King’s death - he drowned - and serves as an allegory for the strength of poetry to convey expressive meaning. However, the absolute height of Milton’s authorial power is ‘to waft’ his reader in an intended direction, because as he so frequently argues in Areopagitica, it is ultimately the reader who has hermeneutic determination of the poem’s end. The word has a sense both of power and powerlessness and this I think suits Milton’s perception of his reader very accurately. He strived in his writing to have political influence while understanding the true illimitability of textual interpretation and consequently how naturally curtailed his influence on a reader is likely to be.

In Areopagiticus, the ‘wafting’ is applied to Milton’s imagined censorial authority a supernatural man possessing so judicious a character that he might conceivably be a reliable figure on whom to burden the task of deciding which texts deserve publication:

He who is made judge to sit upon the birth, or death or books whether they may be wafted into this world, or not, had need to be a man above the common measure

(A, 530)

Here again, the verb signals an act of compelled movement which is fundamentally impossible to have complete control over. All a politician or a poet or a polemicist can ever aim to do is ‘waft’ their audience towards a desired conclusion but the nature of communication and human nature means that the desire to completely ‘fashion’ the reader or hearer in their world views is rarely, if ever, satisfied. As a poet, Milton seems more comfortable with this multiplicity of meanings and interpretation, as his manipulation of genre portrays a playful interaction with a reader’s expectations and knowledge of the literary tradition. As a polemicist addressing parliament on the other hand, the notion of subjectivity is a more difficult one, because as a governing body, Parliament pretends at least to carry out objective and widely supported decisions and therefore a text intended for its perusal must employ a powerfully persuasive rhetoric. Consequently, Areopagitico is principally an argument of negatives, aiming to systematically shut down any opposition to Milton’s argument whereas Lycidas, as a less obviously politically weighted poem, can afford to revel in the subjectivity of its reader and elude any one interpretation on purpose. Rather than an assertive conclusion, we are vaguely gestured towards a vague but hopeful future ‘and pastures new’.