Preface: John Milton, Mediated

In April 2023, a more than two-hundred-year-old, life-sized sculpture of the water nymph Sabrina—goddess of the River Severn and heroine of Milton's A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle—was defaced in Croome, Worcester. The perpetrators used bright blue crayons to scribble on the figure's face, arms, and torso. The statue, designed by British sculptor John Bacon, was (according to surviving records) installed some time before 1789, although the date 1802 on its base raises the possibility that the current statue is a replacement for an earlier one.1In Milton's courtly entertainment, the Attendant Spirit summons "Sabrina fair" to free the Lady, who has been captured by Comus (859).2 Sabrina rises from beneath "the smooth Severn stream" (825) where, according to the Spirit, she has been "knitting / The loose train" of her "amber-dropping hair" in "twisted braids of lilies" (862–63). The Sabrina in Croome, by comparison, wears a wreath of bulrushes and leans with her right elbow on an amphora from which spring-water originally fell onto two shells before descending to a nearby lake (fig. 1).Authorities in 2023 soon pieced together that the person or persons who crayoned over the Croome statue were not literary-minded vandals, objecting to, say, Sabrina's partial nudity—her breasts are uncovered—or her Tory provenance: the statue was originally commissioned by George Williams, Sixth Earl of Coventry. Instead, the malefactors were . . . children. They obtained the embellishing blue crayons in activity packs distributed to families visiting the park over the Easter weekend.3All of the crayon markings on the Croome Sabrina were soon removed with gentle detergent, and the statue was restored to its pre-paschal state. Yet this incident, though temporary, illustrates the way that readers or viewers can change or transform an artwork, sometimes in ways that the creator would never have approved or could not have anticipated. In the case of the Sabrina in Croome, the statue was already a reinterpretation of Milton's "Goddess of the silver lake" (865). The sculpture makes no mention of Milton, but the popularity of his masque throughout the nineteenth century suggests that Bacon was inspired at least indirectly by Milton. John Dalton's three-act English opera entitled Comus from 1738 and George Colman's subsequent, two-act opera of the same name were so popular that versions of them were still being performed almost one hundred years later.4Visitors to the park in Croome, however, were probably unaware of the statue's literary provenance, and some over the Easter weekend were surely disappointed with the children's blue scrawl. Yet other visitors, at least the children themselves, may have found the crayon an improvement, brightening and making new a weather-pocked stonework. A spokesperson for the National Trust, reacting to the decorative markings, unintentionally offered an apt Miltonic pun. The official said they were "dismayed," the same word that Sin in Paradise Lost uses when she is raped by Death and gives birth to a pack of "Hell-hounds."5 Sin in this moment is telling Satan that she was both distressed and ruined—"dis-maid"—by her rapacious son.This special issue of Milton Studies looks at the way that Milton's works have been alternatively re-made or dis-made in the centuries after his death. Few readers of this journal would probably challenge that Milton's works continue to influence other artists and writers. Some later authors have attempted to adapt his poetry to a new medium or form; others have fully reimagined one of his poems; and still others seem to have been unconsciously inspired by Milton's works. Compare Colman's Comus (1772) with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (1995–2000) and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman (1989–1996). The first is a formal adaptation, the second a wholesale revision, and the third borrows from and alters some of Milton's core ideas and images.Milton himself ranks among the most canonical adapters; all three of his long poems—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes—are adaptations of biblical stories, and even the figure of Sabrina was one he inherited from, among others, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Edmund Spenser, and Michael Drayton. Milton's own poetry was also being adapted while he was still alive. In the early 1670s, John Dryden visited the blind author in his home in Artillery Walk to ask permission to rewrite Paradise Lost in rhyme for the stage.6 The resulting play, The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man, was published in 1674 but not performed during Milton's or Dryden's lifetime. England's future Poet Laureate tried to distill the epic's more than 10,000 lines into five acts by focusing on the story of Adam and Eve, and removing whole episodes such as the war in heaven and Satan's journey to Earth.But the contributors to this issue are less interested in straightforward adaptations or deliberate attempts by artists to refashion Milton's poetry for a new audience or form.7 Instead, the five writers featured here are looking at works that have fully reimagined one of Milton's poems or seem to have been intentionally or unintentionally inspired by his writings. Paradise Lost in particular has become deeply ingrained in Western thought. While both Miltonic and Miltonian entered the English language by the early eighteenth century, these terms are not invoked today as frequently as other authorial eponyms such as Kafkaesque or Dickensian.8 Yet Milton's influence is arguably greater than other traditionally canonical writers; his works are so pervasive or inherent that Miltonic images, phrases, and qualities have seeped into people's thinking and now go unremarked. When today we try to envision the story of the Fall, we may unknowingly imagine Milton's version of Satan or Paradise.Writing about cinematic analogies of the plays of William Shakespeare, Eric Mallin has offered the playfully perceptive term "non-adaptations" to describe such reworkings. Mallin can help us see how films or other artworks unconsciously take up, rewrite, and update ideas from another artist—or, as Mallin describes films that are closely related to Shakespeare's plays, such later artworks can "illuminate core semantic issues" as they "perform narrative variations on and from" an earlier creation.9 As the writers in this issue demonstrate, two texts—separated by time, media, and/or circumstance—can share a meaningful relation without the constraints imposed by a strict adaptation. The differences between the works are as salutary as the commonalities; together they enable us to examine things we might have otherwise missed as the works provide a new perspective on each other.Each article in this special issue of Milton Studies thus analyzes a different text—a musical, a horror film, a satire, a police procedural, and a sonnet sequence—and addresses how knowledge of Milton contributes to these works and how, in turn, these works enhance our understanding of Milton. This dialectic is fundamental to adaptation studies. As Linda Hutcheon observes, "Multiple versions exist laterally, not vertically."10 Neither work is secondary or lesser; instead, each fosters new meanings for the other.Admittedly, in pursuing the ways that Milton's poetry converses with later films and writings, the authors of the following articles run the risk of alienating scholars in the disciplines that this issue attempts to bridge. The articles may include too much analysis of later texts for Miltonists and too little for scholars of film or later centuries. The hope is that the generic and temporal traverse that these articles negotiate will illustrate the value—and inspire readers to explore other instances—of textual and thematic engagements that unsettle expectations and defy traditional distinctions of genre and medium.11If we return to the Sabrina in Croome Park in Worcester, we can see how the statue—like the texts addressed in this special issue—is deeply but indirectly engaged with Milton. She helps to illustrate how in his masque he both limits and attempts to elevate the goddess. On the one hand, the sculpture's bared torso sexualizes the Croome Sabrina, which echoes the way that Milton binds up Sabrina's power with her sexual status. She is first and foremost a virgin. On the other hand, the Croome statue hints at Milton's attempt to ennoble Sabrina. The statue has a Latin inscription from—surprisingly—the Aeneid, a poem in which she never appears. Translated, it reads, "Look! A cave with overhanging rocks; inside, springs of sweet water and seats formed in the living stone. This is the home of nymphs!"12 This verse, describing Aeneas's arrival in Libya, seems an odd choice; it may have been chosen simply because it is old and refers to nymphs.But the verse is appropriate, if only obliquely, as it alludes to Sabrina's fabled parentage and thus highlights a crucial aspect from Milton's dramatic poem. Sabrina's father Locrine was the eldest son of Brutus, the mythic founder of Britain and great-grandson of Aeneas, something which Milton has his Spirit explain twice: he notes that Sabrina was "Sprung of old Anchises' line" (923) and that her father "Locrine, / . . . had the scepter from his father Brute" (827–28). The Croome statue—even though it does not refer directly to Milton—can thus help us appreciate Milton's Sabrina as a symbol of Britain's heroic past and an antidote or correction to the emphasis on patrilineal descent in both Virgil's epic and Milton's own drama. Aeneas's line does not culminate in Caesar Augustus, or in the founder of New Tory, but in—to use Milton's words—a "guiltless damsel" (829).Just as the Croome Sabrina sheds light on Milton's goddess, so the texts addressed in the following five articles offer insight into his writings. In A Mask, Sabrina drowns herself and is rescued by Nereus's daughters, which initiates a cycle of female survival and empowerment that she continues by helping other women in peril. Later renderings and "non-adaptations" of Milton's prose and poetry can, in turn, help us as readers, reminding us of his works' sometimes troubling implications, allowing us to see anew their most extraordinary qualities, and through a fresh orientation helping the works to abide.