Abstract
Milton’s initial description of Adam atParadise Lost 4.288-303 exhibits three separate but concurrent tendencies: a commitment to depict Adam’s physical constitution as distinct from, but representative of, the divine image in which he has been made; a tendency to model Adam’s physical appearance upon Milton’s own; and a fondness for mythological references that place Adam’s appearance in a tradition of heroic beauty exemplified by his “Hyacinthin locks” (4.301). In concert, these tendencies associate Milton himself with the iconography of classical myth, while endowing the poet’s presentation of Adam with homoerotic overtones.
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Notes
Paradise Lost 4.288-94, in:The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). All references to Milton’s verse will be to this edition.
Philip C. Almond,Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. See Almond 9–11, for a summary of seventeenth-century responses to the notion that “man was made in the image of God and that therefore God was shaped in the form of a man” (9).
Arnold Williams,The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), 73.
Williams, 72.
The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, trans. Josua Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), vol. 1, Sixth Day of the First Week, 511–516. This passage, in turn, echoes a wide range of classical texts on the topics of “Rectus Status” and “Contemplatio Coeli,” for an overview of which see Antonie Wlosok,Laktanz und die philosophische Gnosis. Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Terminologie der gnostischen Erlösungsvorstellung, Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Jahrg. 1960, 2. Abhandlung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1960), 8–47.
Anthony Nixon,The Dignitie of Man (London: Printed by Edward Allde, 1612), 10.
This distinction, which is “most certainly the commonest explanation of the passage in question” (Claus Westermann,Genesis: A Commentary, vol. 1:Genesis 1-11, trans. John J. Scullion [Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984], 149; German original: Claus Westermann,Genesis, vol. 1:Genesis 1-11 [Biblischer Kommentar. Altes Testament 1.1] [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1974], 206), originates with Philo (DeOpificio Mundi 69). For a condensed account of the exegetical tradition relative to “image” and “likeness” in Genesis 1.26, see Westermann, 148–155 (= 204–214).
Philip J. Gallagher,Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 28.
Gallagher, 28.
Aristotle,De Partibus Animalium 656a;Historia Animalium 491b, inThe Works of Aristotle, translated into English, gen. eds. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1910–1931; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), vols. 5 (1912) and 4 (1910), respectively.
For early modern “self-congratulation” concerning the place of humanity in the universe, see Keith Thomas,Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 31 and following.
Thus John Leonard, ed.,John Milton: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 1998), 763 n. 300; Alastair Fowler, ed.,Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1971), 213 n. iv.300; Scott Elledge, ed.,Paradise Lost (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 86 n. 300, who glosses “large Front” as “broad forehead”; and Flannagan 451 n. 89.
Flannagan, 451 n. 89.
Thomas Hill,The contemplation of mankinde (London: William Seres, 1571), f. 32.
Bartolommeo della Rocca Codes,A brief and most pleasaunt epitomye of the whole art of phisiognomie, trans. Thomas Hill (London: lohn Waylande, [1556]), sig. A7v.
Physiognomica 811b, inThe Works of Aristotle (as above, n. 10), vol. 6 (1927).
Johannesab Indagine,Briefe introductions, both naturall, pleasaunte, and also delectable vnto the art of chiromancy, or manual diuination, and physiognomy (London: Apud Iohannis Day [for Richarde Iugge], 1558), sig. H7r.
Physiognomica 811b.
Roland Mushat Frye,Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 272.
Frye, 272.
For a detailed study of the Princeton portrait, making the case that it is the original drawing from which Faithorne engraved his frontispiece, see John Rupert Martin,The Portrait of John Milton at Princeton and its place in Milton Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1961). For a general discussion of the authenticity and relation between the major surviving portraits of Milton, see Leo Miller,Milton’s portraits: An Impartial Inquiry into their authentication, Milton Quarterly, special issue (Athens, OH: [s.n.], 1976).
Francis Blackburne,The Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (London: [s.n.], 1780), 620.
Frye, 271.
For the text of Vertue’s account, see Joseph Milton French,Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949–1958), 5. 314–315.
John Aubrey, “Mr. John Milton: Minutes,” in: Helen Darbishire, ed.,The Early Lives of Milton (London: Constable & Co., 1932; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 14.
Samuel Johnson,Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1925), 1.90.
Thomas Corns,Milton’s Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 97.
Homer,The Odyssey, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock, 2 vols., ser. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 6. 224–235 (vol. 1. 222).
Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott,A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 1270, s.v. “” (B) 1.
Alfred Heubeck, Stephanie West, and J. B. Hainsworth,A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988–1992), 1. 307–308.
Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth 1.307.
Homers Odysses. Translated according to ye Greeke by Geo. Chapman (London: By Rich. Field, for Nathaniell Butter, 1615), 94.
P[atrick] H[ume],Annotations on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1695), 145.
The Odyssey of Homer, 6.273-274, in:The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 10 vols. (London: Methuen, 1967), vol. 9.
Heubeck, West, and Hainsworth, 1.308.
Suidae Lexicon, ed. Ada Adler, 4 vols. (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1935), s.v. “ΏακίΝθλΝΟΝ”; Henri Estienne,Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, ed. C. B. Hase, W. Dindorf, and L. Dindorf, 9 vols. (Paris: A. Firmin Didot 1831–1865; rpt. Graz: Akademische Druckund Verlagsanstalt, 1954), s.v. “YακίΝθιΝΟΣ”
Liddell and Scott, s.v. “ΏάκιΝθΟΣ,” B. II (p. 1840).
See Theocritus 11.26 in:Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds, Loeb Classical Library 28 (London: Heinemann, 1919); Euripides,Iphigenia at Aulis 1298 in:Euripides, ed. and trans. David Kovacs, vol. 6, Loeb Classical Library 495 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Johnson 1.105; T. S. Eliot,On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), 162; Stanley Fish,Surprised By Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 22.
F. R. Leavis,Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936; rpt. New York: George H. Stewart, 1947), 47; Jean Hagstrum,The Sister Arts: The Traditions of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, rpt. 1987), 126.
W. J. T. Mitchell,Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 31.
Stephen Orgel, “The Authentic Shakespeare,”Representations 21 (Winter, 1988), 12.
Jean Seznec,The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara Sessions, Bollingen Series 38 (New York: Pantheon, 1953, rpt. 1981), 17 (French original:La survivance des dieux antiques: Essai sur le rÔle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la Renaissance, Studies of the Warburg Institute 11 [London: Warburg Institute, 1940, rpt. Paris: Flamarion, 1980], 20).
See, for instance, Tertullian,De Spectaculis, in: Jacques-Paul Migne, ed.,Patrologia Latina, 221 vols, in 222 (Paris, 1844–1903), 1.1.641, 643, and Saint Augustine,Enarratio in Psalmos, Psalm 96.5, inPatrologia Latina 36.1231-32.
See Leonard 712, n. 4; Merritt Y. Hughes, ed.,John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), 211, n. 1–4; Fowler 41, n. i.4-5.
Flannagan 451, n. 90; Fowler 213, n. iv.301-308.
Ovid,Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols., ser. Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann 1925), 10. 162–219 (vol. 2.74-79).
Pierre Bersuire,Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter… Explanata, [facs. rpt. with “Introductory Notes”] by Stephen Orgel, The Philosophy of Images 1 (New York: Garland, 1979), sigs. k2vk3r; my translation.
Alciati,Emblemata: cum commentariis per Claud. Minoem (Paris: F. Gueffier, 1618), 61; qtd. in Leonard Barkan,Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 26.
George Sandys, trans.,Ovid’s Metamorphoses Englished. Oxford 1632, ed. Stephen Orgel, The Renaissance and the Gods 27 (New York: Garland, 1976), 359 (italics as in Sandys).
Natale Conti [Natalis Comes],Mythologiae sive Explicationis Fabularum Libri X… [facs. rpt. with “Introductory Notes”] by Stephen Orgel, The Philosophy of Images 13 (New York: Garland, 1979), 182. Conti was one of the two major mythographic sources for Sandys’ translation of theMetamorphoses.
M. Antonio Tritonio,Mythologia [facs. rpt. with Natale Conti (see preceding note)], 26.
Tritonio, 27.
In my survey of commentary onParadise Lost 4.301, only Edward Le Comte has noted this possibility, remarking that “hyacinthine” may mean, “perhaps, as beautiful as HYACINTH, whom APOLLO loved” (Le C,A Milton Dictionary [New York: Philosophical Library, 1961], 152).
Tritonio, 22.
Sandys, 359 (italics as in Sandys).
Sandys, 359 (italics as in Sandys).
Colin Burrow,Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 28.
It is less probable that Homer’s ΏακίΝθλΝΟΝ άΝθΟΣ alludes to the Hyacinthus-myth. As Laurence and FranÇois Villard have noted, surviving literary references to the myth appear no earlier than Hesiod, and while the cult of Hyacinthus may be “d’origine… préhellénique” (546), its association with pederastic love appears to be of much later date (Laurence and FranÇois Villard, “Hyakinthos,”Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, ed. Hans Christoph Ackermann and Jean-Robert Gisler, 8 vols, in 16 [Zurich: Artemis, 1981–97], 5.1.546-550). What later readers may make of Homer’s phrase is, of course, a wholly different matter.
Fowler, 213 n. iv.301-8.
Stella P. Revard, “Milton, Homer, and the Anger of Adam,”Milton Studies 41 (2002), 18.
John Shawcross,John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 55. See 33–60 for the full argument.
Recent commentators on the history of homosexuality have adopted very different views of the historical association between same-sex love and effeminacy, with Randolph Trumbach, for one, arguing that “whenever homosexual behavior surfaced at the [English] royal courts, from the twelfth to the early seventeenth centuries, it was accompanied by what contemporaries viewed as markedly effeminate behavior” (“London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,”Journal of Social History 11 [Winter, 1977], 11) and Alan Bray replying that effeminacy was “associated with luxurious living and sexual vice in general” (Homosexuality in Renaissance England [London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 135). In the present instance, however, we are dealing with the more specific case of the child’s role in a man-boy relationship-a role whose gender ambiguities are arguablysui generis.
For the debt to sacred iconography, see Fowler 213, n. iv.303, who in turn cites Cartari and Panofsky to support the point.
Sandys, 359 (italics as in Sandys).
On this aspect of “Lycidas,” see Bruce Boehrer, “‘Lycidas’: The Pastoral Elegy as Same-Sex Epithalamium,”Transactions and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America 117.2 (March, 2002), 221–236; for the homoerotic character of “Epitaphium Damonis,” see Stephen Guy-Gray,Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 117–132.
Gregory W. Bredbeck,Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 197.
C. S. Lewis,A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 112–113.
See Bredbeck, 213–229.
Revard,34.
Claude J. Summers, “Milton, John,” in:The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Guide to the Writers and their Major Works, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 489.
Michel de Montaigne,The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 138; French original: Michel de Montaigne,Les Essais. Publiés d’après l’exemplaire de Bordeaux par Fortunat Strowski, vol. I (Bordeaux: Imprimerie Nouvelle F. Pech, 1906; rpt. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1981), 242–243.
Montaigne 138.
I argue this point a length in “Animal Love in Milton: The Case of the ‘Epitaphium Damonis’,”ELH 70 (2003), 787–811.
James M. Saslow,Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 23.
Francis Blessington,“Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 1.
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Boehrer, B.T. Milton, Homer, and Hyacinthus: Classical iconography and literary allusion inparadise lost 4.300-303. IJCT 13, 197–216 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02856293
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02856293