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Автор Джон Мильтон

In 1732 a cantankerous, seventy-year-old academic named Richard Bentley, then England’s foremost classicist and a specialist in textual emendation, published a notorious edition of Paradise Lost. Believing that he had purified textual corruption in classical authors such as Manilius, Bentley brought the same methods to Milton’s modern epic. Blind, Milton was unable to correct wayward copyists. But Bentley, suspecting a more deliberate and insidious errancy, posited the existence of a “phantom” editor. Befuddled by Milton’s learning and linguistic precision, this unknown person rewrote the text to suit his own imbecility. Today the Bentley edition seems a work of glaring subjectivity. Truths about the epic, such as the immense thoughtfulness manifest in its details, do not break into the editor’s awareness because his attention is devoted wholly to his own theory and method. It was hardly a compliment to Milton to suppose that Paradise Lost as readers knew it was a work of genius systematically effaced by the work of a moron. But modern critics such as William Empson, Christopher Ricks, and John Leonard have been inspired by Bentley’s scrutiny of the minutiae of Milton’s style. Textual emendation became the rage in Shakespeare studies in the eighteenth century and is still widely practiced today. The aberration of Bentley’s Paradise Lost aside, it never caught on among Milton’s editors.

The next notable edition was Thomas Newton’s beautiful two-volume variorum of 1749. Its copious and often unequaled annotations were mostly reprinted, with the addition of many new ones, in the 1826 variorum of Milton’s entire poetic works assembled by Reverend Henry Todd. Anyone who becomes seriously curious about the meaning of a particular word or passage in Milton will want to go back to Todd and Newton, and behind them to the first of Milton’s annotators, Patrick Hume. They will also want to explore works such as Jonathan Richardson’s Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (1734) and James Paterson’s A Complete Commentary with Etymological, Explanatory, Critical and Classical Notes on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1744). There are many subtleties, exactitudes, and points of information in these notes for which we, like other modern editors, have simply found no room.

Among the editions of the last century or so, we were most surprised to discover the sustained elucidation of A. W. Verity, who is largely forgotten today; besides the excellence of their commentary, his notes teem with examples of Romantic and Victorian imitation of Milton and will prove useful in future studies of that subject. In working on this edition, we came to think of Verity as the unknown god of Milton annotation. We also paid especially close attention to the thoughtful notes of Alastair Fowler and John Leonard, and consulted Merritt Hughes, Douglas Bush, Scott Elledge, and Roy Flannagan, among others.

COSMOS

Heaven sits atop Milton’s cosmos. Beneath it lies Chaos. We sense that both of these realms have, so to speak, been around forever. It would be a nice point in Milton’s theology to ask whether Chaos precedes Heaven or vice versa, since the very existence of God seems to require an abode, and therefore a Heaven of some sort, while on the other hand Chaos appears to be the precondition of all creations, including those of the Son, the angels, and Heaven. As the poem begins, these two established cosmic areas have been joined by two new spaces. At the bottom of Chaos stands Hell, the elder of the new realms. Between Heaven and Chaos, suspended on a golden chain affixed to Heaven (2. 1004–6), lies the most recent of God’s creations: our Earth, including the planets and stars surrounding it.