Campbell and Corns are two leading Milton specialists and the title of the book says that Milton's work and thought are going to be equal parts of its subject and so one can't complain if it becomes scholarly at times.
Their account of Milton is based much on his thinking in the very long-windedly titled treatises through which he argued his way to controversial stardom. Doctrine and Principles of Divorce was one such of his books but one which might have been motivated as much by his own first marriage than high-minded piety. And its full title did continue for 46 more words. The discussion concerns whether marriage is really about procreation or companionship. Milton is ahead of his time in many ways but a little way behind ours if he thought that surely if it was about companionship then men would prefer the company of other men.
But he is good at arguing his case, famed for it, and especially good on the Republican case in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and he reasons that it is tyranny that has a king rule over his people rather than their peers in turn because, well, they could easily be 'fools'.
Any reader of the book would do well to be well appraised of the religious movements of the time from Presbyterians to Laudists, Smectymnuans to Quakers as well as Puritans because it is a complicated situation and the finer points might be lost on those who thought it was just about Protestantism.
Campbell and Corns, or at least one of them, write with a donnish propensity for le mot juste and from time to time drop in a choice selection from their extensive vocabulary- not only, among many others, 'otiose' for speculation that is pointless, 'euphonious' for writing that sounds nice but 'unmysterious' for something that isn't difficult to deduce. Hardy and Larkin would have appreciated that negative but one begins to relish their verbal showmanship however naturally it might come to them.
But, more than that, another treat are the picturesque names that minor figures in the narrative had. Emery Bigot was a French humanist, 'wholly aware of (Milton's) blindness', who asked him to check certain readings; Brabazon Aylmer bought the rights to Paradise Lost; Praisegod Barbon and Sir Baptist Hicks were presumably named by god-fearing parents while Livewell Chapman was given a bit more leeway in the spiritual guidance offered by his christening.
And, so, what could have been a forbidding subject- and I have no intention of returning to Milton Studies any time soon- provided much entetainment along the way and I am the wiser for having added this volume to my collection of biographies of the English poets.
