Customer Reviews

The Riverside Milton

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I find this edition impossible for classroom use and, after this semester, I will not use it again. I wish the venerable Hughes edition was available and affordable: somebody should reissue it if it is going out of print, as it remains the better textbook.

Here are my complaints:

*The prose is riddled with what seem to me to be small typos--I'm not talking about orginal spelling, but about things like "buy" for "but" (p. 937) and so on. There is one of these every 2-3 pages on average, and this is just too many.

*Some of the notes seem designed not to assist undergraduate readers but to demonstrate the editor's grasp of secondary scholarship. Why else would a note to _Comus_ direct readers to Leah Marcus and NOT also offer succinct remarks about the controversy surrounding Sports and mirth? What good is a note like that to the average undergraduate reader?

*The notes are so frequently about minor textual issues--the kind of thing that can go in an appendix and that undergrads are unlikely to care about--that students after a while stop looking at them altogether. That does not help anybody.

*The notes--especially to the prose--do not supply anything like the kind of necessary information that any classroom text should provide. This text does not identify the scriptural passages Milton cites, etc. For example, when Milton refers to a "covnant" in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and/or The Readie and Easie Way, students need a note about The Solemn League and Covenant, but there is no such thing.

This up-to-date edition of Milton's complete poetry and major prose fills the urgent need for a successor to the venerable student's edition Merritt Hughes prepared half a century ago (now, alas, out of print).

One outstanding virtue of the Riverside Milton is its editor, Roy Flannagan. Flannagan is remarkably responsive to readers' comments, which he promises to take into account in the preparation of future editions (the first of which is said to be in press as of this writing). Unfortunately, a revised edition of the book is instantly needed. In its first printing, the Riverside Milton is badly marred by the absence of a table of contents to the poems and of indices to titles and first lines. Without these helps, it is impossible to find the shorter pieces without a considerable amount of page-turning--and difficult to justify giving the book more than three stars.

Some will be delighted to find that Flannagan has mixed textual notes with substantive ones at the bottom of the page; others (including, I suspect, most undergraduates) will find the mixture irritating, and will resent all the extra head-bobbing between text and annotations. Unexceptionable, I believe, is Flannagan's decision to preserve Milton's 17th-century spelling and punctuation, which greatly facilitates scanning the lines and reading them aloud.

As for the substance of the substantive notes, I believe it generally to be sound, though a handful of glosses seem far fetched and little worth. For example, in commenting upon how "Smiles . . . love to live in dimple sleek" ("L'Allegro," lines 28-30), Flannagan tells us that "Smiles do live in dimples, and dimples live in smooth (youthful) or sleek and plump faces. Also, a personified Smile lives in a dimple the way that a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream may live in a flower."

As it now stands, the Riverside Milton is a work more of promise than of perfection. Those interested in purchasing the text should wait until the second printing is available, since it will contain the table of contents needed for the book to be truly usable.

I've read about 1000 pages of this text and feel qualified to judge it dispassionately.

Here's the deal with it. It has great advantages which other Milton anthologies do not (excellent textual scholarship--and most importantly, the original spelling). But it has deep flaws that irk and pain every student who has to use this book.

* One: as one student said, it feels and read like a science book (bad design, in other words: it has no aesthetic appeal).
* Two: the typescript and layout are just counterintuitive: the footnotes are so hard to read sometimes as they are usually crammed in on each page--the whole book looks crammed and makes the reader feel crammed.
* Three: but the kicker--the downright absurd footnotes.

Let me explain: _Comus_, for example, has over 1000 footnotes. Flannagan has never heard of making textual notes _end_notes and keeping interpretative, allusional, or historical notes as footnotes. The result? The reader getting stopped twice on every line not knowing whether to keep reading or whether to spend five minutes each time reading all the damn notes! But what really stinks is that you have no idea whether the note will tell you something really important, say about the English Civil War, differing traits Bacchus' "madness," the genealogy of some lot of gods, or a crucial Bible passage--or whether it will just be one of the absolutely endless and useless textual notes.

Want a good example? By far my favorite--in _Comus_, there is a footnote on the word "where." The footnote informs the reader that Milton originally spelt the word "were" in the manuscript, tried to insert the "h" in, but then decided that he might as well rewrite the word, so he crossed it out, and spelt it correctly.

Are you kidding me?! And these inundate the whole book.

Supposedly a new "original spelling" edition of Milton is coming out next Spring, so I'd wait for that one. If you must have this for some reason, use a library copy. You won't want to keep it.

Stop the complaining that the Hughes edition is out of print. It's back! (Yes, with its dated notes; but the table of contents and the editing more than make up for that.) Find it here. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose $48.00 new. My version's 30+ years old and I still lovingly consult it.

Flannagan's update of Hughes is a trailblazing piece of editorial history, one written, formatted, finalized, and agonized over almost exclusively by the author in his home study, and provided as camera-ready copy in short order to a publisher whose timelines were, to put it mildly, ambitious.

As such, it carries all of the idiosyncratic flaws of any new approach to an old methodology, but with a decidedly cutting-edge twist: Prof. Flannagan makes the first attempt I'm aware of in scholarly publication to engage the reader interactively in improvement of the product, in that the Introduction provides the editor's e-mail address, and asks the reader to submit questions/comments/suggestions directly to the source, as he or she sees fit.

Prof. Flannagan has as a result already made a number of positive changes to an edition whose aim is not to dazzle the accomplished Milton scholar with its editor's erudition (Fowler's achievement enjoys that reputation unchallenged), but to entice and intrigue and support and encourage the relative newcomer to Milton studies. I am aware that The Riverside Milton is evolving and growing and reaching an even greater level of refinement and usefulness even as I write this review, becoming, not all things to all people, but the teaching and learning tool of its audience's desire. I too have a 30-year old copy of Hughes (as do most competent Milton scholars "of a certain age"), well-worn and frequently consulted . . . with the Riverside Milton at its side.

Somewhere in the illegibly tiny notes to the Riverside Milton are some valuable bibliographic citations and other good information. So if you are a Milton scholar I'm afraid you can't make any excuse to avoid consulting this poorly designed doorstop. Also, if you need original spelling, Riverside is a convenient place to check.

If you are anything other than a Milton scholar who needs to check all the commentaries & annotations of all the editors -- if you are one of the rare persisting "general readers" curious to read everything -- then the Modern Library (henceforth ML) has published (in 2007) in "The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton" a much more usable and friendly answer to your needs than the Riverside.

ML's bigger and better font & less stark paper color make a real difference if you plan on reading literature as opposed to making use of a reference book. Both volumes offer extensive selections from Milton's prose; Riverside's best advantage is including Milton's "Treatise of Civil Power" (1659). (Riverside also has all the prolusions; ML just nos. 1 & 7. On the whole, the representation of Milton's prose oeuvre is a wash.) ML's best advantage in the prose, and it is a weighty one, is its treatment of the crucial "Christian Doctrine." Riverside's CD looks more complete than it is, because it widely (and inconsistently) fails to note where omissions have been made. Riverside omits passages of crucial interest to the reader of Paradise Lost. ML gives a very complete and thoughtful selection from CD (lightened by removing most series of proof texts), but its greatest advantage here is providing plentiful & good footnotes, including many references to Paradise Lost. Shockingly, and unconscionably, Riverside provides NO annotation to Christian Doctrine. In my mind, this clearly betrays an assumption that you, the reader, are not actually interested in reading this important work. Flannagan hollowly claims that the (overrated) authorship dispute has "forced" him to print the text without footnotes. (I suspect the fact that Merritt Hughes did not annotate CD--one of the few blemishes in that great edition--also has something to do with the omission.) All you have to do is browse through ML's excellent footnotes & selections to realize how much you're missing here.

Riverside's failure to cross-reference is a more general problem. For example, if you read Paradise Lost in the Riverside, when the footnotes refer you to "Areopagitica" or "The Reason of Church Government," you are only given page numbers in the Yale edition--even though the relevant passages are right there in the Riverside! In comparison, ML always provides its own page numbers, so that you can go read that passage from Areopagitica now, without a trip to the library.

As I said at the beginning of this review, I will not lie and deny that Flannagan's notes often go beyond what is available in ML. But it's hardly as if ML's scholarly notes are a subset of the good information in Riverside--ML has excellent notes on sources and allusions, so there are great references to Aristotle & Anselm, the Iliad, and so forth, that are not also found in Riverside. Sometimes Riverside's notes just try too hard, as when we get three verbose lines defining Aristotle's notion of form, with no attempt whatsoever to apply its meaning to the poem before us. ML is certainly better on glossing the difficulties of Milton's English, and in general ML tends to provide little nuggets of literary appreciation in its critical notes, rather than to try to sum up a status quaestionis.

Finally, a pet peeve: the Riverside misprints ghastly wrong Greek in places where ML has been more careful.

This is the edition that made me fall in love with Milton as a graduate student, and that's high praise indeed.

Most of the criticism of this volume is sound, but we must remember above all that this edition is the best single-volume edition we have, given that Merritt Hughes' edition is now out of print. Moreover, Hughes' notes are now out-of-date; the graduate student will still wish to consult them, but Flannagan's is a worthwhile successor.

Of particular note are the introductions to the texts, which not only frame each work historically but also in terms of its reception and themes -- the introduction to Paradise Lost is particularly masterful. For major works, the introductions include timely bibliographies and are an invaluable resource.

Flannagan's detractors ably point out that his notes mix objective commentary, such as historical references or textual variants, with more interpretive notes. We all may wish that certain notes were added, particularly referencing textual parallels, but what we have here is nonetheless spectacular. One must adopt a critical attitude, however: we are invited, implicitly, to argue with Flannagan -- and we must have enough accumen to distinguish between objective and interpretive notations.

Certainly, undergraduates may find this difficult -- but I've never shied away from challenging texts that I assign, and learning to do so is indeed part of what they ought to be learning. Moreover, while we might quibble about which notes Flannagan ought to add, I don't find his notes on minor textual variants at all distracting -- rather, they are crutial to such a one-volume work. And while some notes are particularly idiosyncratic, I rather like that: if anything, it makes Milton accessible and encourages the idea that readers need to think for themselves and engage in the give-and-take of ideas.

The size of the book is also an advantage: Hughes' was of smaller proportions, and I find Flannagan's an good distribution of text, notes, and white space convenient for notations. Less complete editions of Milton's work lack the overarching connections Flannagan achieves here. Hughes remains a titan, but is out-of-date as well as out-of-print. And the hardbound complete collections of Milton's work, while worth consulting in libraries for scholarship, are neither portable nor intellectually accessible in comparison to Flannagan's introductions and notes.

I agree, however, that a second edition is much needed. The table of contents does not list the titles of the shorter poems, and there are some bizarre elements, including a few times where the page breaks too early, leaving a strange amount of white space on the page. Typos do exist, but probably at a lower rate than most books.

That said, you needn't wait for the long-promised second edition: if you can by any means afford to do so financially, engage Milton today. Though annoying, the missing table of contents can easily be constructed by the reader -- or downloaded online. This first edition might be rough in spots, but that very roughness has a certain charm. All criticism taken into account, this remains a spectacular way of meeting Milton.

This is a solid and inclusive edition of Miltons poetry with some useful introductory materials. It lacks a useful table of contents, however, and individual poems are hard to find. The weight and quality of the book suggest quality, but the layout wastes a lot of real estate without being particularly more readable. The notes are at times informative, but at others partisan and opinionated. I've tried hard to like this book, but reach for my 30 yr old Hughes edition when I need to get something done and want to enjoy it.

Interest in Milton has waned in American universities, and I can't help but think that THE RIVERSIDE MILTON tossed him into an eternity more boring than anything his prose could have ever created.

I understand that this text is "academic" so its asinine price and density are justified. Yet Flannagan has taken scholasticism to the extreme, sacrificing all for footnotes in a mad zeal to, like the old Welsh poets, show off his research. Thus this book's perfect audience comprises graduate pedants lost in footnote fogs, loving every minute of brilliant insights like, "This comma was omitted in the 1676 Edition." A high disappointment, especially since THE RIVERSIDE CHAUCER is very, very strong. But still, THE RIVERSIDE MILTON'S not a total waste (the introductions are well written and often insightful).

Other reviewers have already identified the problems with so many footnotes, so I won't rehash. I'll just add my frown amongst many others and continue reading Milton elsewhere.

There is a major error in the 1998 edition of this volume. Three lines of Book VIII of Paradise Lost are omitted due to a typesetting misprint. Just thought everyone should be apprised. The lines are in Book VIII, lines 533-535.

Other than this glaring fault, I like this edition. It is not practical for class instruction, but it is thorough, though perhaps to a fault. 1/4 of the footnotes to Paradise Lost regard typographical variants of commas, periods, and semicolons. This would be useful information to a small subset of scholars.