Copyright by Olin Robert Bjork 2008 This Dissertation Committee for Olin Robert Bjork certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Interfacing Milton: The Supplementation of Paradise Lost Committee: ______________________________ John Rumrich, Supervisor ______________________________ Janine Barchas ______________________________ Jerome Bump ______________________________ Guy Raffa ______________________________ Margaret Syverson Interfacing Milton: The Supplementation of Paradise Lost by Olin Robert Bjork, B. A.; M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2008 For my parents, Professors Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, who immersed me in academia before I could read, and whose infectious love for learning led me down this path. Acknowledgements I wish to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor John Rumrich for his years of patient guidance and for his rewarding collaboration with me on the Paradise Lost audiotexts project. As my professor, he introduced me to textual studies and the work of his former student Stephen Dobranski, whose publications on Milton and print culture inspired me to move in a similar direction. I am also indebted to my other committee members. Janine Barchas pointed me to Genette’s Paratexts and provided copious and exacting commentary on my dissertation manuscript. She remained committed to my project even at those times when I failed to meet her expectations. Jerome Bump’s enthusiasm for a Web site on Dante’s Inferno that I created with another student in his seminar on literature and multimedia spurred my investment in literary interface design. He generously filled in for the late John Slatin, whose health did not permit him to remain on my committee but who taught me everything I know about Web accessibility. Guy Raffa sponsored my early work on Dante, and the vibrancy of his teaching style and Danteworlds project sometimes make me wish that I had been a graduate student in Italian. As my professor in three seminars and director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab, Peg Syverson instilled in me a scholarly approach to electronic pedagogy. I would also like to thank Coleman Hutchison, who helped me revise two chapters; Wayne Lesser, Kevin Carney, Patricia Schaub, and others in the English graduate office for their unwavering assistance, and my friends Matthew Dolloff, Arlen Nydam, Matthew Russell, and John Pedro Schwartz for their intellectual and moral support. v Interfacing Milton: The Supplementation of Paradise Lost Publication No. _______________ Olin Robert Bjork, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisor: John Rumrich Jacques Derrida argued that a supplement “adds only to replace.” Since the blind Milton dictated his epic to amanuenses, the text of Paradise Lost may be conceived as a supplement to an aural performance. This dissertation itself supplements another project, a digital “audiotext” or classroom edition of Paradise Lost on which I am collaborating with Professor John Rumrich and others. In the audiotext, we reassert the duality of the work as both a print text and an oral epic by integrating an audio recording with an electronic text of the poem. This pairing is informed by our own experiences teaching Paradise Lost as well as by cognitive research demonstrating that comprehension increases when students read and hear a text sequentially or simultaneously. As both a wellspring of the audiotext project and a meditation on its aims, this dissertation investigates the actual effects on readers of print and digital supplements putatively designed to enhance their appreciation or study of the work. The first two chapters examine the rationale and influence of the authorial and editorial matter added to early editions. The final two chapters explore the ways in which digital technology is changing vi how scholars and readers interact with Paradise Lost and other works of literature. I begin by examining why the first edition of Paradise Lost arrived in 1667 bearing no front matter other than a title page. In Chapter Two, I argue that critics have undervalued the interpretive significance of the prose summaries or Arguments that Milton appended to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Chapter Three relates the current emphasis on electronic textual encoding in editorial theory to the ideological dominance of Richard Bentley’s conjectural approach in the early seventeenth century and of Fredson Bowers’s copy-text approach in the 1960s and 70s. Chapter Four introduces the audiotext project and contrast its goals with those of other projects in the Digital Humanities. The audiotext’s interface offers multiple viewing modes, enabling the user to display the reading text alone or in parallel with annotations and other supplements. Unlike prior editions and archives, therefore, it accommodates both immersive and analytical reading modes. vii Table of Contents List of Figures ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1: “No Delay of Preface” 17 The Paratext of Paradise Lost 20 Paratextual Authority 40 From Paratext to Interface 44 Chapter 2: The Heresy of Argument 50 Arguments and the History of the Book 64 The Miltonic Arguments 78 State of the Argument 96 Chapter 3: From Apparatus to Argument 107 Clearing the Text 117 The Versioning Problem 124 A New Order 127 Chapter 4: Reinventing the Classroom Edition 143 The Modernization Dilemma 153 The Rationale of Audiotext 157 Is There a Class in This Audiotext? 164 Conclusion 168 Figures 172 Bibliography 197 Editions of John Milton’s Works 197 Works First Published in the Nineteenth Century or Later 200 Works First Published in the Eighteenth Century or Earlier 219 Vita 227 viii List of Figures Fig. 1. Title Page of First Edition, First Issue 172 Fig. 2. Title Page of First Edition, Second Issue 173 Fig. 3. Title Page of First Edition, Third Issue 174 Fig. 4-5. Essay on the Verse 175 Fig. 6. Title Page of Second Edition, First Issue 177 Fig. 7. Title Page of Paradise Regained-Samson Agonistes 178 Fig. 8-18. The Argument to Paradise Lost 179 Fig. 19. The Argument to Samson Agonistes 190 Fig. 20. Sample Page from Bentley’s Edition of Paradise Lost (1732) 191 Fig. 21. Sample Page from Newton’s Edition of Paradise Lost (1749) 192 Fig. 22. Screenshot of the Rossetti Archive 193 Fig. 23. Screenshot of The John Milton Reading Room 194 Fig. 24. Text-Only Mode of Audiotext Prototype 195 Fig. 25. Annotation Mode of Audiotext Prototype 195 Fig. 26. Comparison Mode of Audiotext Prototype 196 Fig. 27. Your Notes Mode of Audiotext Prototype 196 ix Introduction The earliest account of John Milton’s life relates that, several years after Paradise Lost was first published in 1667, the poet laureate John Dryden visited him and requested permission to adapt his blank-verse epic into a drama in heroic couplets. Milton reportedly gave Dryden “leave to tagge his verses.”1 An embellished version of this anecdote, published anonymously in The Monitor (6 April 1713), renders Milton’s phrase as “tagg my points,”2 which clarifies both the pronoun reference and the metaphor. “Points” were the ribbons or laces by which a seventeenth-century man fastened his breeches to his doublet or waistcoat. In Restoration culture, it was fashionable to “tag” matching ornaments to the ends of the points. Similarly, in a heroic couplet—the literary vogue established by Dryden—the end of each line is tagged with a rhyming syllable. Milton inclined to more intricate patterns of rhyme in his lyrics, especially as he grew older, and eschewed rhyme in his longer poems with the exception of a few passages. Furthermore, he had sided with his friend Sir Robert Howard in his battle against rhymed plays.3 It should not surprise us then that, if his leave was actually given at all, it came 1 John Aubrey, “John Milton,” in ‘Brief Lives,’ Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), 2:72. Aubrey’s manuscripts of biographical sketches on Milton and other figures were first published in 1813. 2 Helen Darbishire, The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable & Co., 1932), 335. The Monitor was a short-lived poetry journal maintained by the poet laureate Nahum Tate. 3 Howard co-authored with Dryden The Indian Queen (1664), a play in heroic couplets, but disparaged this form in the preface to Four New Plays (1665). In Of Dramatick Poesie (1667), Dryden assigned Howard’s arguments to Crites, a defeated interlocutor. See James A. Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 264-65. 1 with a metaphor intended as a witty jibe.4 According to The Monitor account, Milton added, “you have my leave to tagg ’em, but some of ’em are so Awkward and Old Fashion’d that I think you had as good leave ’em as you found ’em.” Milton probably meant that such lines should be omitted, but in Dryden’s unperformed dramatic adaptation, The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man (1677), some lines from Milton’s poem appear verbatim. Today, we can read the entirety of the poem at a variety of Web sites. Unlike Dryden, the designers of these sites never received even grudging permission from Milton to tag his verses—this time, with the “start” and “end” tags of HTML elements. Yet the poet’s words have never reached readers in an untagged state. They have been edited, illustrated, and annotated. Furthermore, for language theorists in the tradition of Baudouin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure, written words are merely the labels we attach to units of oral discourse, which are in turn manifestations of conceptual elements.5 Blind Milton dictated the poem to amanuenses; later, a fair copy of the manuscript was sent to the print-shop, where any number of transformative operations 4 There are a couple reasons to doubt that the encounter took place as described by Aubrey, much less The Monitor.