Milton: Better than Shakespeare?

IS MILTON BETTER THAN SHAKESPEARE?

SHAKESPEARE?

By Nigel Smith

Harvard University Press, $22.95, 214 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES BOWMAN

The title of Nigel Smith’s book is a con, though the author calls it a “provocation.” Actually, it is a double con. Not only is its question never really answered, but there is next to nothing in the book about Shakespeare, either on his own or in comparison to Milton. The only purpose of the title is to serve as a lure to the curious, who might be tempted to buy the book - perhaps as a kind of provocation of their own. In explanation, Mr. Smith, who teaches at Princeton, has only this to say: “I am not suggesting that it makes sense to argue that Milton is better than Shakespeare in any absolute way, but I do maintain that there are certain ways in which Milton is more salient and important than Shakespeare because he is the poet who places liberty at the center of his vision.”

In other words, if you take — as most of the academic audience for whom the book is intended do take — the “progressive” view of history, Milton may not be better than Shakespeare, but he’s a lot more like us. Specifically, he’s a lot more like those of us who are progressives. This is a variation on what Sir Herbert Butterfield called “the Whig interpretation of history” by which the past, instead of being taken on its own terms, is seen in terms of the present. Therefore, the people and events and documents of the past that look like precursors of our splendid selves are regarded as “more salient and important” than the people and events and documents that merely look strange and old-fashioned.

It is perhaps one measure of the extremity to which progressivism has brought us that, as Milton has come to seem (at least to progressives) salient and important, Shakespeare has come to seem strange and old-fashioned. Anyone who has ever been moved by one of Shakespeare’s plays might want to think about that.

Anyway, the answer to the question of the title is, in the absence of any real defense of the contrary, a resounding no. Milton is most certainly not better than Shakespeare. Everybody pretty much knows that already, which is what makes asking the question provocative. But Mr. Smith has put it in such a way and in such a context that, within the narrow frame of reference of his book, it could be answered — indeed, must be answered — yes. To him, the terms better and worse indicate not an aesthetic but a political judgment. His view of English literary history is similar to that of Robert Browning in “The Lost Leader,” a slashing attack on Wordsworth for taking a small royal patronage appointment to help make ends meet:

“Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,

Burns, Shelley were with us, — they watch from their graves

He alone breaks with the van and the freemen;

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!”

“Us,” of course, means the politically progressive forces in Victorian Britain that Browning saw, romantically, as having been led by the country’s poets — whom one of those “with us,” Shelley, once called “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Actually, it was someone who wasn’t “with us” at all, Samuel Johnson, who said that first, but he meant something a little different by it, I think. Anyway, Browning might have agreed with Mr. Smith’s view of the relative merit of these two poets, at least insofar as it remained limited to political correctness — and if we take being “of us,” like Shakespeare, as a bit less progressive, perhaps even a bit uninvolved and noncommittal, when compared to Milton’s more gung ho “for us.”

That he really was proleptically “for” later generations of progressives is a problematical proposition, though Mr. Smith gives a spirited defense of it. His book is really yet another gloss on William Blake’s famous observation that, in “Paradise Lost,” Milton was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” Only Mr. Smith seems to think he did know it, at least at some level.

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