England's
seventeenth century included a prolonged parliamentary struggle, a
civil war, a period of republican experimentation, a restoration of
its monarchy, and a constitutional revolution that would keep intact
a Protestant state church. Centuries later, Christopher Hill famously
argued for a reading of these events as the unfolding of England's
"bourgeois revolution," the result of which was to
establish conditions that were increasingly favourable to capitalist
development. Alongside this socio-economic reorganization, liberal
political thought, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke,
posited a model of the individual as a self-possessed, autonomous
agent.
This
essay engages the correspondence of bourgeoning liberal and literary
histories in both the critical and contemporary reception of the
later works of John Milton and emphasizes the role of reading as a
crucial element in both histories. Through
its fixation on the act of reading, Milton's poetry and prose reveal
a link between the cause of self-possessive freedom and the hegemonic
interests of the emerging bourgeois subject. Areopagitica
(1645),
for example, articulates the close relationship between conditions of
reading and conditions of exchange within the marketplace, treating
the threat of censorship as a disastrous intervention that is
conceptually indebted to the threats of the Catholic institutionalism
on the one hand and state-sanctioned monopolies on the other. In this
case, reading becomes a constitutive activity of the Reformed English
subject who relies upon open access to a plurality of texts in order
to exercise individual choice and discernment.
This
essay argues that Milton's late poems install reading as an
overdetermined activity through which a modern, liberal subjectivity
aligns itself with literary discipline. The term "literary"
in this case refers to socially valued forms of writing that gain
their support not simply from material conditions but from a
historical network of circulation and reproduction; by literary
discipline, I mean a specific conception of reading that is both
represented and conditioned by Milton's late poetry, and by liberal
subjectivity, I point ahead to the bourgeois individual who today
remains a residual product of early modern England's socio-economic
upheaval.
Already
fraught with theological and economic significance, reading assumes
an intensified political significance in Milton’s post-Restoration
writing. Of
True Religion (1673),
his short essay on religious toleration, came late in the poet's
career, but its argument for a theory of religious freedom based on
"searching the scriptures" reveals the underlying logic of
reading set
out
in Paradise
Lost (1667),
Paradise
Regained (1671),
and Samson
Agonistes
(1671). For Milton, the act of reading is necessary for salvation,
not because reading somehow accomplishes God's work, but because
without textual engagement one cannot be prepared to recognize and
receive salvation as a free gift. To this end, Paradise
Lost
establishes interpretative activity as a prelapsarian, prehistorical
reality: it thus naturalizes a liberal paradigm of ambiguity,
competition, and discernment.
First
published together, Paradise
Regained and
Samson
Agonistes
further this project by directly addressing the material conditions
of reading in a hostile political climate. Through their joint
format, Milton’s final poems lock their audience into a posture of
reading that becomes tautological and, in this way, rehearses the
contradictions of liberal ideology. Rather than a stance of tolerance
and openness, Miltonic readers find themselves in an irreducibly
active space of interpretation. While some contemporary critics have
celebrated the activist content of Milton's poems, they have ignored
the way in which it functions ideologically within an emerging
capitalist environment.
Beginning
with a genealogy of reading in Milton's early writing, I locate
liberalism's ideological origins within a distinctly Protestant
approach to interpretation. By focusing on Milton's late poems, I
explore early modern reading as an active form of individual trial,
increasingly disconnected from its social surroundings. I suggest
that Milton's post-Restoration poetry develops a distinction between
"fixed" and "fit" forms of reading, which
corresponds to a capacity for individual and collective mobility
despite what Milton perceived as the closure of England's political
horizon. What first appears as a politically, theologically, and
ethically overdetermined site of struggle in Milton’s writing
returns as a versatile aspect of liberal ideology.
