“Conceited portraiture before his Book … to catch fools and silly gazers”: Some Reflections on Paradise Lost and the Tradition of the Engraved Frontispiece

Summary

ANYONE who has examined the first edition of Paradise Lost knows that it is a disarmingly modest little book. Indeed, the disproportion between the physical object and the commentary it has generated is astonishing to contemplate. It is also true that the little book is the work of the same poet whose 1645 volume was issued by Humphrey Moseley with an engraved frontispiece and fulsome title page, thereby inviting readers to associate the author with some of Moseley's Cavalier poets and to view him as the handmaid of the muses, four of them at least. But when his great epic poem appeared, it was without such ornament.

There are a number of obvious explanations. The poet of 1645 still had his sight; the poet of 1667 was blind. Moreover, Milton had had his issues with William Marshall over the frontispiece to 1645, perhaps suggesting that artists were not to be trusted even with relatively simple tasks. Furthermore, the poem's otherworldly nature challenges visual conceptions and may easily make pictorial representations look silly, as a glance at some of the illustrations from later editions makes instantly clear. To the extent that Paradise Lost is a counterblast to Leviathan, the deliberate absence of a frontispiece might be taken as a gesture against Hobbes. Leviathan in its turn was a counterblast to Eikon Basilike, with its famous frontispiece of the royal martyr, and we should recall that Milton was the writer who in Eikonoklastes spoke mockingly of “quaint Emblems and devices begg'd from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall.” Perhaps most important of all, it is the Protestant emphasis on the Word that is crucial in Milton’s thinking.