Milton’s Shakespeare: Gentle Will, Spare John, and Plump Jack

abstract:In the mid-twentieth century, a short but seminal article demonstrated that a volume of Pindar’s poetry long accepted as John Milton’s did not in fact fit his readerly profile. It thereby articulated fresh criteria for determining Miltonic provenance. These same criteria now allow us to accept with confidence that Milton did indeed annotate the copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio held at the Philadelphia Free Library. Milton’s editorial interventions and marginal notations reveal his persistent artistic engagement with metaphors by which Shakespeare registers spatial, chronological, and atmospheric setting. They also indicate Milton’s generic focus on songs and masque-like entertainments contained in the plays, which suggests the artistic pertinence of Shakespeare to Milton’s poetic development during the 1630s. Shakespeare’s Henry IV tetralogy may also have had personal resonance in that decade as Milton struggled to avoid a career in the Church of England and instead establish an independent poetic vocation.