Milton and the People. Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+271.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMilton and the People. Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. ix+271.Sharon AchinsteinSharon AchinsteinJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTasked with defending the actions of a small group of soldiers who purged Parliament and ousted the King, Milton radically redefined what was normally meant by the people. He explained that the people he championed were not, indeed, all the actual people (the plebs) but were those who had acted to preserve liberty, that is, the better sort. Such contradictions in Milton’s attitudes toward the people are the material on which Paul Hammond’s excellent book rests. Tracking Milton’s evocation of “the people” in the course of the life of the writer, from the early academic exercises through his political writings and culminating with the great poetry, Hammond delicately pries apart different senses of the concept. Avoiding the labeling of “republican” or “radical” and resisting the language of class (except where Milton lobs class insults at his enemies), as well as the nationalist or racialist contexts that might supply other accounts, Hammond paints a portrait of Milton who was no populist but who acted in the public sphere and on behalf of a nation of worthies he sought to bring into reality through his role and special abilities. Yet at the same time, Hammond brilliantly explains the despair, for example, in Milton’s translation of Psalm 81, “And yet my people would not hear / Nor hearken to my voice” (126). This pessimism about the fundamental character of the English people, argues Hammond, opened the door for a politics of retreat, which he reveals to be the dominant theme of the final great poetry.By investigating Milton’s terms including populus and vulgus, the people and the vulgar, the profanos and the elect, the paganos (read as “country folk”) and the upright city dwellers (cives), nation or remnant, fit and few, Hammond shows the author’s views of the English people were situated in his political contexts and paradigms of ethical and spiritual reform. Instead of considering Milton’s views of beloved English in distinction from other peoples—Irish or Eastern peoples, for instance, as in recent scholarship—the book thoughtfully reveals the writer’s changing emotions regarding the English public, from fear of the vulgar mob to hopes for a chosen English nation. He finds that Milton harbored no romantic illusions about the people; indeed the people often destroyed truth tellers, Orpheus being the most relevant instance. In A Maske, Milton even invents a new word to describe Comus and his bestial followers in their riotous crowd behavior, “The herds would over-multitude their Lords” (29).Thus Milton’s concepts of the people are brilliantly shown to slip about according to situation and teeter between the two poles of hope and mistrust. The concept is admittedly baggy: in the book, people might mean the English populace, or it might mean the learned throng, as it does when Milton imagines himself as a poet in Ad patrem. Milton believed in universal, sufficient grace but also in a concept of the spiritual elect and action by an elite cadre of “worthies,” as he put it in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Although from his reformist Christian vantage point Milton views all people as fit to interpret scripture, Milton is no democrat in politics. With careful work to place Milton’s texts in their communicative and local political contexts, Hammond captures the tensions present in the great writer’s attitudes, revealing the author’s ultimate parting with the multitude for a view of the solitary individual as repository of God’s purposes.If there is a Miltonic theory of the people, it is that, as Hammond argues, Milton maintained from very early on the view that the political form of a commonwealth was to be fit to the ethical qualities and disposition of its inhabitants; therefore, an unfit people deserved bad governments. Milton’s views on the English people were thus framed by judgment about their ethical qualities: the quality of virtue was what would distinguish a populace or a vulgus from a worthy people. Hammond is clear that Milton is not a systematic philosopher, starkly different from Hobbes, here given a chapter. That Milton was a writer engaged with the question of the people is shown across the whole of his writing career in this study that is persuasively argued and well grounded through a range of splendid readings, offering comparisons with Milton’s interlocutors: his contemporaries, recent predecessors, including especially Dryden and Hobbes, and the ancients. One lone chapter captures all three major poems, putting forward some of the most creative ideas to be found in the study and culminating the many strands of thought in the whole book. In this chapter, the people are figured in Paradise Lost through the Edenic couple, the fallen angels, and the ancient Israelites. Eve’s temptation becomes an allegory of the people; the fallen angels are described by words Milton used elsewhere derogatorily regarding the people; the Israelites’ defection from Solomon echoes Milton’s earlier condemnations of the people. A reading of glory in Paradise Regain’d reiterates the vocabulary of the prose works’ skepticism about the people. With the nine chapters arranged chronologically to survey Milton’s writing life, the story is one of Milton’s retreat from his reforming hopes for the people at large to a conception of liberty for an ever-narrower body of reformers, ultimately to a party of one. Thus the question “Who are the People in Milton’s writing?” asked on the first page of his sparkling study turns out to be a question of why the English people fell so short of their ideals to be God’s chosen people. This is very much a study of the language of politics, with the strengths of view to the lexical field of the contemporary as well as to the classical past. Hammond is prudently alert to classical echo in Milton from Virgil, Horace, and others, approaching Milton’s prolific Latin writings with unusual subtlety and grace, adding an often-missed but vital literary context for Milton’s political engagements. Written in a sprightly style, the book integrates well scholarship in Milton studies, and the format of the book is pleasing to the eye and hand and will provide a compact and indispensible guide to the question. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 4May 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/684799HistoryPublished online March 21, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.