The World Was All Before Them (Paradise Lost, Part 2)

In Part 2 of our discussion on John Milton's Paradise Lost, editor Stephen B. Dobranski returns to discuss his own first encounter with Milton in a high school classroom, the experience of editing the Norton Library edition from historical source texts, and how students should build up their Milton muscles by reading other poetry before turning to Paradise Lost. 

Stephen B. Dobranski is Distinguished University Professor of English at Georgia State University and the editor of the journal Milton Studies. He has published nine books including Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005); The Cambridge Introduction to Milton 2012); and Milton’s Visual Imagination: Imagery in “Paradise Lost” (2015).

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Paradise Lost, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/ParadiseLostNL.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today, we present the second of our two episodes devoted to John Milton's Paradise Lost as we interview its editor, Stephen B. Dobranski. In part one, we discussed Milton's life and times with a focus on his great masterpiece, Paradise Lost. In this second episode, we learn more about Stephen Dobranski's own history with Paradise Lost, how he came to Milton, his favorite line in the poem, his Paradise Lost playlist, and of course, his hot take. Stephen B. Dobranski is distinguished professor of English at Georgia State University and the editor of the journal Milton Studies. He has published nine books, including the Cambridge Introduction to Milton, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England, and Milton's Visual Imagination: Imagery in Paradise Lost. Stephen Dobranski, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Stephen:] Oh, I'm so pleased to be here, thank you so much for having me.

[Mark:] Oh, it's good to see you again! I'm looking at the Norton Library edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, which you edited. It’s a very striking edition, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the design. Does the cover design and the color combination have any import?

[Stephen:] It does. I can't take credit for it. This, I think, was the brainchild of the great Pete Simon and his team, but this alludes to a fresco by an Italian Renaissance artist Masaccio—if I'm saying it correctly. I am part Italian so I ought to try to give a little flare, but I shan't. And it's a picture, a painting of, um, in Carmen, of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. And the background is dominated by blue, as is the cover of the Norton Library Edition, and then the angel's robe is that same hue of reddish brickish orange. And what I really like about this choice, is that this painting depicts, in particular, the sorrow of Adam and Eve's face, and it's considered to be really influential in the realistic tradition of portraying Adam and Eve. And that goes back to what we were talking about last week—the psychological realism, or complexity, of these characters. And, um, I think, therefore, it's a fitting, admittedly furtive allusion with these colors. 

[Mark:] I'm glad I asked. That makes all the sense in the world. It's a striking cover—baby blue and, as you say, like a sienna or burnt orange.—[Stephen:] Sienna, that’s good.—[Mark:] Yeah, very nice. Stephen, do you remember the first time you ever encountered Milton as a student or a reader?

[Stephen:] I first encountered him in honors English in high school, and it was these—and this will speak, perhaps, to some of the older people listening—these were mimeograph pages. The type of pages that were purple. [Laughter] It wasn't included in the textbook, so the teacher had to bring in these mimeographs that smelled a little bit like cooked cabbage. You know, they were just terrible, and that's how I first encountered it. It was not an august introduction to this beautiful poem, and it was not until graduate school, in Austin, Texas, that—where they have a couple really treasured pieces of Miltonia. They have some of his handwritten corrections in an early version of his dramatic poem A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle that I mentioned last time, for example, and another Latin poem. Anyway, it was there, in part influenced by these original editions and getting to see them, that then my enthusiasm for him grew exponentially. And that was also under the great teaching there of a scholar, John Rumrich. I've often found in my own learning that I am attracted to teachers, and then once I am attracted to that teacher, I fall in love with the subject that they're pursuing.

[Mark:] Your pursuit of Milton as a scholar—was it universal in terms of what appealed to you about Milton, or are there particular subtopics that you really were fascinated by?

[Stephen:] There were two things that I was really interested in at the beginning, and they continued to fascinate me. One is his relationship to the history of the book. Milton, in 1644, publishes a treatise for freedom of the press—and this is years before John Stewart Mill, before the founding of the United States of America—this really influential tract where he argued about the free circulation of books. And that really appealed to me in his own interest in the physical presentation of his works and his own interest in the exact printing of his works and his willingness to participate in a collaborative process. I mentioned Pete Simon a moment ago, that when you're when you're editing a text, when you're writing a book, you're not doing it in isolation but you're working with a group of people and the person's name on the dust jacket or cover is just the figurehead for this project—as he understood it—this collaborative endeavor. The other thing that interested me was Milton's commitment to free will. And Milton thought that liberty was a right of the individual and a responsibility. And that, that second part of it, that sense of the hard work that's required—I mentioned in our last conversation about him writing a systematic theology. He says in there, “This is my”—I’m paraphrasing again—"these are my thoughts, you should do this yourself, reader. Don't take my word for it. You should come up with your own belief system.” And he was really open to—for all of his reputation as being maybe censorious or a bit pedantic, that's really a misrepresentation. That's really not borne out by his writings. And you see him, instead, inviting the reader to do the hard work, to live up to the responsibility of liberty as well as the right that is inherent.

[Mark:] You mentioned your experience looking at Miltonia and his manuscripts, and I wonder: As an editor of Paradise Lost, how does an editor of an edition of Paradise Lost go about it? What manuscript is surviving? What are you looking at? I know he published more than one edition, so how complicated is this challenge?

[Stephen:] It's not as complicated as, say, Hamlet or King Lear. It's not—it's not that bad if you're familiar with the textual history of those works. There are three primary sources. There is a surviving manuscript, but it's only of Book One, and it's a printer’s version. There—It is not in Milton's own hand. And it is, interestingly, housed in New York City at the Pierpont Museum and—or, the Morgan Library, as it's called today. It used to be called the Pierpont Morgan, but the Morgan Library. And there are photographic versions of that text that I had access to. I've seen it myself, but I didn't work with the original; I worked with photographic copies of it. Then, there's the 16[6]7 edition, the first edition, and then there's the 1674 edition, where he moves it from a 10-book version to a 12-book version. And, between those two editions, he adds eight lines in addition to changing the division. He divides the original Book Seven into Books Seven and Eight, and the original Book Ten into Eleven and Twelve. And then there are about 38 changes between those two that appear to be substantive—that appear to be meaningful. And then there are other changes that are open to interpretation. So, I worked with those three versions of the text in order to edit this copy, this edition for the Norton Library and try to, in the notes, acknowledge differences when it wouldn't distract. There's nothing more frustrating—well, there are many more things more frustrating, [Laughter] let me not overstate—but one frustrating thing as a reader of an edited text, is when you go to the notes and you put forth the effort to turn there and the note merely tells you, “In the earlier edition, that period was a comma.” [Laughter] You know, I didn't want to—I didn't want any of those kind of underwhelming notes, but I did also try to attend to differences that might affect meaning, so that readers could understand them. 

[Mark:] What would you say—I know you've taught Paradise Lost many times to many students—what have you found to be the common challenges to reading Paradise Lost?

[Stephen:] There's definitely a learning curve. And the challenge for students is to work hard on Milton's prose and early poetry—because he's written so many other great poems as well, although of course he's most famous for this, which some would argue is the greatest single poem ever written in English. I leave that for your consideration. But, to work hard on reading his other works, so that when you get to Paradise Lost, you—it's as if you've been to the gym for a few weeks, and you've been doing curls, and you've been doing extensions, and now you're ready to lift this book up and understand it and engage with it on its own terms. It requires a little bit more rhetorical pressure on students to get there, but they love Paradise Lost. If there's any resistance to it, it's that they have false assumptions about what it is: “Oh, he's going to be preaching.” He's not. “Oh, it's going to be boring.” Not at all. People are, you know, he does a great job—think about a horror movie, you know, where they bring—you know, they want to scare you at the start, and then they go to five years earlier or earlier that day or they jump to, you know, twenty years ago. Milton starts with the monster on stage, with Satan and all the bad angels right there. He grabs your attention at the start, and then he, by Book Three, he introduces God and the Son and the angels and allows for the backstory to unfold very gracefully. So, students love it, readers love it, but it does require a little patience to work up to being ready to read it. 

[Mark:] Does it also require a theological background of the religious characters and narratives that he is engaging with, or a historical background?

[Stephen:] The history can enrich it—starting with the second part of the question first—so that you can then look at it in the context of the British Civil Wars and the deposition and execution of the king and what—the way Milton shows rebellion in the poem. But that's not required. That just is another layer, or another avenue, depending on your metaphorical preference, for Paradise Lost. But as far as religion goes, or theology, it cuts both ways. The less you know, the more open you're going to be to Milton's heterodoxy. And the more you know, um, you will have some familiarity with Hebrew scriptures or Genesis as in the Old Testament. So, you have to go in with an open mind. And you have to maybe lean a little harder on the notes, maybe go back and read Genesis if you're unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve, but some of that is seeped into our culture that I think very little is required of you. And that, on the contrary, if you come from a strong religious, traditionally Christian or orthodox Christian background, you might have to recognize and say, “Well, wait a second. The Son is different from Jesus. I shouldn't call the Son ‘Jesus’,” or, “I'm assuming that Satan is Lucifer.” Milton never calls him “Lucifer” directly. Lucifer is just a metaphor he uses in Paradise Lost, or one of the angels uses. So, there are some assumptions that people might make that are not borne out. And the most notable one is, Milton does not accept the Trinity. Instead, he sees the God, he sees God and the Son, and the Holy Spirit as discrete, and that the Holy Spirit is God's creative power, and the Son is not co-eternal and not coexistent with God.

[Mark:] I think you've probably touched on this in your, in the answer you have just given about techniques of teaching Paradise Lost, but do you teach Paradise Lost in, let's say, different ways depending on if you are doing a Milton seminar or a broader survey? What would you say tends to really work? I understand that students do respond to Paradise Lost.

[Stephen:] One way that I find successful is I—especially with all the atrocities occurring around us—is I'll ask students, um, about a particular event, and nothing may be too raw or too recent, but there are, unfortunately, so from which to draw. And we'll talk about that event, and then I'll say, “Do you think the perpetrator of that event was a bad person?” And then I'll ask them, “Well, do you think that person was evil?” And then we'll devolve into, “Well, is evil something that exists or is it just a label we use? What is evil? Because Milton in Paradise Lost”—as I then gently steer the conversation—"is a person who believes that there is evil. He believes that there is something terrible. Now, that doesn't mean he necessarily believed in the devil, although many of his contemporaries would have thought that Satan and other bad angels and spirits were literally real. You sitting in this classroom, you opening this book might not think so, but how do you confront terrible things happening? How do you explain those, whether they're in nature or they're willed by individuals or they're willed by national governments?” And so that's one way into the text, regardless of whether you're encountering it in a survey or you're encountering it in a seminar focused on Milton or focused on epic.

[Mark:] And you're saying that Milton absolutely believed in the concept of evil?

[Stephen:] I think so. I think so. I think he looked in the world around him and saw terrible things. And, um, it is as a consequence of the fall of Adam and Eve that, for example, illness and sickness and various forms of aging are introduced in Paradise Lost, as we learn in Books Eleven and Twelve. And so, he traces all of these things that for another person they might describe as “bad” or “unfortunate” or “sad,” but he traces those all back to this act of disobedience. And so, he's trying to—as I mentioned last conversation—reconcile, “I believe in a God, but I see these terrible things around me. How do I reconcile those two things? And how do I explain why God would allow these things to happen?” And his answer, ultimately—this is not a spoiler because it's clear from early on—is that it comes from a fundamental free will. That God allows all of us to make choices. And, if we choose wrongly, then we have to suffer consequences.

[Mark:] Stephen, we also invite our Norton Library editors to offer a hot take about their book, something counterintuitive. Is there's something about Milton or Paradise Lost that you just disagree with the prevailing winds about?

[Stephen:] Well, there are controversies within the world of Milton studies, but that's some rarified air—speaking of winds. [Laughter] And there's a lot of hot air maybe circulated, and I am sometimes probably guilty, uh, just as much as my colleagues. I would say that the idea of Milton's heterodoxy and the, his idea that Milton was a materialist—that he thought everything came down to matter. That there was more rarified forms of it, but that he did not accept the division of, uh, soul and body. He instead saw them all as made of a fundamental material. This is all explained in his theological treatise, but it's also explained in Paradise Lost by this angel Raphael, who comes down to instruct Adam and Eve; this is in Book Five. But Milton's radical idea of existence is everything being material is something that's really striking about it. His radical commitment to free will, and I would say that it's his, also his opposition to, or not acceptance of, the Trinity are some of the hot takes on Paradise Lost. And more generally, if I can, it's this caricature of seventeenth-century literature or Milton as a Puritan, that has gotten in the way of people appreciating the complexity and richness of Paradise Lost. Uh, Puritan—There was no, was not an organized religion. It started out as an imprecation in the seventeenth century, where you would criticize someone as, “Oh, stop being such a Puritan.” You can think of how Malvolio is described as “something like a Puritan” in Twelfth Night by Shakespeare, but, uh, a fuddy-duddy, very fussy, overly precise. But Puritans were people who wanted to purify the Church of its Catholic leanings. And they shared, very broadly, a zealousness about religion. And Milton's allegiance to puritanism should not be conflated with The Scarlet Letter or the Eggers film The Witch. You know, you don't want to look at Milton as if he's, uh, puritanical, as we might apply that word in the United States. He had a religious zeal, but we don't even know that he fully subscribed to things that other people who might have been labeled as a Puritan at this time, um, believed it, such as an opposition to the theater, given Milton's own enthusiasm for Shakespeare and writing a courtly drama.

[Mark:] Has Paradise Lost been appropriated in other forms besides the book?

[Stephen:] I mean the most famous one is probably Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, where the epigraph is from Paradise Lost, where one of the three books that the creature reads, um, when he's living, you know, with the De Laceys. I don't know how well that is fresh in everyone's mind who might be listening, but it is Paradise Lost. And you can understand that as a retelling, a reinterpretation of Milton’s epic. And there are so many other examples. There has been a graphic novel of Paradise Lost. In 2008, if I'm getting the year right, um, there was a film version of Paradise Lost that was in production. That is when the economy tanked and given the demands of the special effects, the film was never, uh, made. Rumor has it that, I think it was Bradley Cooper who was going to play Satan. But artworks, sculptures, so many ways in which artists have been influenced by Milton's Paradise Lost. Um, William Blake wrote his own epic poem of sorts called Milton, that you might be—with which you might be familiar. There's so many writers. Wordsworth was fascinated with Milton. The Romantics more generally, uh uh, were enamored with Milton. But with Paradise Lost in particular, there's so many artworks and it seeped into various representations in so many interesting ways. Oh, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials—that those series of novels for young people —he has described that as “Paradise Lost for teenagers.” Um, I think there are three books in the original trilogy, but I'm not a Pullman expert or superfan. I think then he wrote a fourth book that was part of the same, um, series, so it was The Golden Compass, The Amber Spyglass, and…and now I can't remember the third. But in any case, that's another example of Paradise Lost being rewritten and adapted.

[Mark:] Stephen, this is kind of a related question, but what about Paradise Regained?

[Stephen:] Well, Paradise Regained is a fascinating poem in its own right. And Milton wrote it after Paradise Lost, and it is four books. It's much shorter. It's not a sequel as much as a complement to Paradise Lost, and it's very different from Paradise Lost in many ways. Not only its relative brevity, but this retells the story of Jesus's forty days in the wilderness and his temptation by Satan. And Milton extrapolates that from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, those three versions—all three of those gospels tell the story—and he takes it and turns it into, by my count, nine different ways that Satan tempts Jesus. And this is one of those works—I won't spoil it for you—but that the payoff is awesome. But you do have to go through multiple temptations, and it's a little Homer Simpson–like, you know, where he puts his hand on the burner, and he goes, “Ow! Ow!” He keeps putting his hand back and shouting “ow” as if he's not learning, because Satan tries to say to Jesus, “How about some bread?” He says, “No.” And then he says, “Well, how about this feast?” “No.” And so you have to watch Satan repeatedly fail, and then the clincher, in Book Four, at the end, is amazing. But you have to earn it by watching Satan repeatedly fail and trying to tempt the Son.

[Mark:] Okay, so, that was great to consider how Paradise Lost has been appropriated in other ways and how it has echoed through the years. You also mentioned in our first episode about Milton's musicality, and I wonder if Paradise Lost evokes music for you, if there's a Paradise Lost playlist you could propose.

[Stephen:] Oh, wow. You know, there is a band called Hüsker Dü, and I think it has an umlaut over the U, and the lead singer for that—whose name is escaping me—has produced an album that is his reinterpretation of Paradise Lost, and it came out in the 2000s, maybe since 2020. And for myself, in terms of a playlist, I don't have one. I don't associate—I don't read the poem—I hope it's okay to say—I don't read the poem influenced by a specific music or listening to a specific artist as influencing this passage or serving as a good soundtrack for that, for another passage. I think, though, that if this were a musical composition, it would be various artists, you know, like a soundtrack for a film instead of having just one person like Michael Gambino [KK1] write the whole score. No, you would want different artists, because you would want a different sound to even Adam's prayer in Book Four versus Satan's return to hell in Book Ten versus Michael's description of the Tower of Babel being built in Book Twelve and so on. It's so wide a range. The one thing about epic is there—well, one of the most important things about epic, I'll phrase it that way—is that they're encyclopedic, that they're so inclusive, and that's why Milton's audacity is so notable, in part because he was trying to write this work that was considered the greatest because it included all types of works.

[Mark:] That's a good way to think about it. Stephen, in your edition of Paradise Lost for the Norton Library you've included a very generous collection of endnotes that explicate various aspects of the text. There's one that I wanted to ask you about that, that really struck me, and it's from quite early in the poem where Milton writes that what he's about to write “intends to soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.” Does that—does he mean what I think he means by that statement? That kind of a bombastic proclamation about the importance and greatness, innovation of his own poem?

[Stephen:] I think he does! And I think he's right. [Laughter] And so I think he gets away with it. But what's really striking about this, is that in that moment when he says “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme”—is that he's borrowing that line from another writer. He's borrowing that line from Ariosto, an Italian poet. And so, he's making that claim but doing it in a way that acknowledges, for the most informed readers, that this has been said before. You know, so it's a wonderful undercutting of his own ambition and acknowledging—by making that claim through the mouth of another great writer he's, there's a little humility baked into it, I think. At the same time, as he's trying to “soar above th’ Aonian Mount,” he's trying to surpass his classical forebears. He's—The Aonian Mount is associated with the Muses, and he is trying to surpass what Virgil has done, what Homer has done. And it's striking, at the beginning of Paradise Lost, he configures his ambition in terms of mountains. He talks about the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments, and he talks about the Aonian Mount, and he is striving to surpass what's come before while al—in the pre-Christian literary tradition—while allying himself with Moses, this prophet who was getting the word of God to share with the people. And he then says, “But what God likes before all of these things is ‘th’ upright heart and pure,’” and he takes it back down a notch. And he says to the muse, “what in me is dark / Illumin, what is low raise and support.” And so, you see his sense of utter dependence on his inspiration. So, there's, there is hyperbolic ambition there but then there are gestures of humility. Um, and I don't mean to overstate one or understate the other. I think they're coexisting in a kind of wonderful cocktail.

[Mark:] Do you compare that to what Dante does at the beginning of Inferno? How he includes himself among the great poets but he's also very deferential as the poem goes along?

[Stephen:] I think that is a smart comparison—that Milton is trying to do that in a different way. So, when he begins Paradise Lost and says that he's going to write about “one greater Man,” I think he is trying to surpass Homer, who was writing about Odysseus, and Virgil, who is writing about Aeneas. And he is pointing to “one greater Man,” by which he is alluding to the sacrifice of the Son. But, um, he's—I think—also suggesting in a classical context that the humanity about which he's writing is greater than those in those classical works that came before him. 

[Mark:] I know this is the most unfair question I've asked you over both of these episodes, but from the entirety of Paradise Lost, do you have a favorite line?

[Stephen:] Oh, wow. I have so many, but I will say that there's a moment where we meet Adam and Eve, and we meet them over Satan's shoulder in Book Four. Satan arrives, and he sees Adam and Eve in the garden. We have this beautiful description of them and their physical appearance, and we get Satan's reaction and it's, “O Hell!” And those are his first two words. And I love that because Hell in Paradise Lost is a physical space, but it's also a point of view. It's a perspective. Satan is going to be in Heaven and find it hellish, and he's going to be in Hell and find it hellish, then he's going to go to paradise and find it hellish. [Laughter] But the line where we meet the son of Satan, who is Death, there's a scene of rich allegory as Satan is trying to leave Hell to go up to fly through the cosmos, find the world—or what we would maybe call our universe or multiverse or however you want to phrase it, our cosmos—and then within it to find his way to Earth, and then within it to find his way to paradise. And he meets Death, and he didn't even know he had a son because he raped his daughter Sin—I'm not going to go through all the details there. But Milton, in trying to describe Death, says, “The other shape”—to which he's referring to Death—"The other shape, / If shape it might be call’d that shape had none,” and that's beautiful. This amorphous, shapeless Death that can take any form, that can take you in any different way. And then I would go to the final two lines of the poem: “They hand in hand”—talking about Adam and Eve as they're expelled from paradise—“They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow, / through Eden took thir solitarie way.” Where Adam and Eve at the end of the epic are reconciled; they're holding on to each other; their way is solitary; there's no clear divine guidance for them; their steps are slow; there’s going to be missteps; but they're moving forward. They're still striving. They're still persisting as they go off to discover a new life.

[Mark:] Great way to end it. Stephen Dobranski, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

[Stephen:] Oh, thank you so much, Mark. It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost, edited by Steven B. Dobranski, is available now in paperback and eBook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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 [KK1]“Giacchino” makes more sense