THE BOOK
Paradise Lost was published in 1667 by the bookseller Samuel Simmons, whose London shop was near Aldersgate. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York possesses a manuscript of Book 1 of the poem in the hand of a copyist, and corrected by as many as five other hands, that was used to set the type for this edition (see Darbishire 1931 for a photographic facsimile). The contract stipulated that Milton was to be paid five pounds for the manuscript, another five pounds upon the sale of a first edition of thirteen hundred copies, and yet another five pounds upon the sale of a second edition of the same size. The earliest title page of the 1667 quarto identifies Paradise Lost as “A POEM Written in TEN BOOKS By JOHN MILTON. ” Sales were apparently sluggish. Through 1668 and 1669, the edition was issued with four more title pages, as Simmons added Milton’s note on unrhyming verse and his prose arguments summarizing the action of the poem book by book. When the first printing finally sold out in April 1669, Milton was paid a second five pounds.
It was perhaps Dryden’s announcement in April 1674 that he would transform Paradise Lost into a heroic opera (this “never acted” opera was published as The State of Innocence in 1677) that led Simmons to print a second and octavo edition of the epic in July 1674. This book contained prefatory poems by Samuel Barrow (in Latin) and Andrew Marvell (in English). The epic was “amended, enlarged, and differently disposed as to the number of books, by his own hand, that is by his own appointment [by someone acting as his agent]” (Edward Phillips in Darbishire, 1932, 75). The shift from ten to twelve books meant dividing the original Book 7 into the new Books 7 and 8, with the addition of four new lines at the beginning of Book 8; the long Book 10 of the first edition was divided into Books 11 and 12, with five new lines at the beginning of Book 12. There were four other major revisions (the reworking of 1. 5104–5, the expansion at 5. 636–41, the addition of 11. 485–87, the alteration of 11. 551). The authority of the second edition cannot be doubted in these matters. An unwell Milton made an oral will on or about July 20, 1674, two weeks after the second publication of Paradise Lost, and died on November 9, 1674. The second edition of Paradise Lost was the last printing over which he exerted control.
There are thirty-seven substantive differences between the two editions. In thirteen of these, the quarto text supplies the superior reading; in only eight is the octavo text superior; editors differ over the remaining sixteen (Moyles 22–26). It would seem from this evidence that editors should not, as many have claimed to do, adopt the 1674 octavo as a copy text and automatically follow it with regard to the accidentals of spelling and punctuation (Moyles 28). There are over eight hundred variants of this kind between the two editions. We have treated each as a separate case rather than defer to the rule of the copy text.
Simmons published a third edition in 1678. A printer named Brabazon Aylmer purchased the poem from Simmons in 1680, then sold half of it to a young entrepreneur named Jacob Tonson. He was Dryden’s chief publisher and would become known for his beautiful editions of Shakespeare and Spenser. But Milton was his great love and, happily enough for a businessman, his great moneymaker too. He and Aylmer printed a folio-size fourth edition of the epic in 1688, adding illustrations, a frontispiece portrait of Milton, and an epigram by Dryden in which Milton is said to be the union of Homer and Vergil. Tonson purchased Aylmer’s half of the poem in 1691. He also obtained from Aylmer the manuscript of Book 1 now owned by the Pierpont Morgan Library. For the sixth edition, of 1695, Tonson added 321 pages of explanatory notes by Patrick Hume; no other English poem had ever been so lavishly annotated. Tonson and his family would print Paradise Lost, and other works by Milton, in various configurations again and again throughout the eighteenth century. When asked which poet had brought him the greatest financial profit, Tonson without hesitation replied “Milton” (Lynch 126). He had his portrait painted holding a copy of Paradise Lost.