areopagitica and liberty

CHAPTER 12

AREOPAGITICA ANDLIBERTY

BLAIR HOXBY

‘Nib title page of Areopagitica (23 November 1644) presents Lhe pamphlet as the sortof free political speech that was an integral part of Attic citizenship and liberty.Milton draws its epigram from a debate between Theseus and the Theban herald inEuripides’ The Suppliant Women. When the Theban herald asks who the tyrant of thecity is, Theseus retorts that there is none: Athens is a free republic. The herald isunimpressed. The common people cannot even speak properly, he says, much lessguide a city. There is nothing more hostile to a city than a tyrant responds Theseus.’He praises democracies in which laws are written down and citizens may expresstheir enfranchisement and freedom in political speech. ‘This is true Liberty run hiswords on the title page of Areopagitica,

when free born menHaving to advise the public may speak free,Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise,Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;What can be juster in a State Lhan this?

The copy of Euripides that Milton used glossed this passage in terms of parrhesia, aform of free and bold speech in which the speaker typically offered sincere criticism

I would like to thank all the members of the Northeast Milton Seminar, and in particular John Leonard,Thomas Luxon, laoo Rocnblatt, Elizabeth Sauer. William Shullenberger. Nigcl Smith, and Nicholas vonM altzhan. for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.

Euripide, The Sipplianc HJmen, I. 429, in Euripides, trans. David Kovacs, iii (Loeb Classical Library;Cambridge, Mass., and London. i8).

David Kovacs’s translation reads: Freedom consists in this: ‘Who has a good proposal and wants toset it before the city?’ He who wants to enjoys fame, while he who does not holds his peace. \\liat is fairerfor a city than this!’

AREOPAGITICA AND LIBERTY 219

of his audience at real risk to himself.3 Although a philosopher who censured a tyrantcould be said to use parrhesia, a speaker using it in democratic Athens wouldnormally be a distinguished citizen addressing the ecciesia, or public assembly, andbraving the disapproval of the majority. In The Phoenician Women, Euripides identifies the loss of this form of free and bold speech as the greatest sorrow of the exile.‘A slave’s lot this; says Jocasta, ‘not saying what you think.’ Polynices concurs,observing that a man exiled from his own polls must suppress his nature, endurethe follies of his ruler, and play the slave,4

In his exordium, Milton presents himself as a parrhesiastes who, impelled by a loveof liberty yet fearful of ‘what will be the censure’ (CPW l. 486), criticizes Parliamentin public. The earnest of his own sincerity is the courage that he displays inaddressing the assembly, and the evidence of his confidence in its members is histrust that they will play what Michel Foucault has described as the ‘parrhesiasticgame’ by listening to the frank speech of a citizen convinced of the truth of what hesays.5 For those ‘who wish and promote their Countries liberty Milton’s discoursemay serve as a ‘testimony’ of what has already been achieved. For no man can expectto be free from grievances in a Commonwealth, but he can hope that ‘complaints’will be ‘freely heard, deeply consider’d, and speedily reform’d That is the ‘utmostbound of civill liberty attain’d, that wise men looke for’ (CP14 l. 487).

One reason that Milton entitles his pamphlet Areopagitica is that he wants to recallone of the most famous examples of this sort of parrhesia. Holding up ‘the old andelegant humanity of Greece’ as a model for Parliament to follow in contrast to the‘barbarick pride of a Hunnish and Norwegian stateliness Milton reminds the assembly that Isocrates once ‘from his private house wrote that discours to the Parlamentof Athens, that perswades them to change the forme of Democraty which was thenestablisht’ (CPW ii. 489). The sort of free, bold speech that Isocrates exercised in hiswritten ‘oration’ and that Milton is exercising in the promulgation of his pamphletshould not be the exclusive privilege of Members of Parliament speaking in session. Ifit is in the interest of the ‘Realme’ and the ‘Royall Estate’ to permit every MP ‘todischarge his conscience and boldly in every thing incident among us to declare hisadvice as the Speaker of the Commons asserted at the opening of each session ofParliament when petitioning for free speech in the assembly, then surely, Miltonsuggests in his exordium, it would also be in their interest to hear from a countrymanwho can offer ‘the industry of a life wholly dedicated to studious labours’ (CPW ii.489_90).6 Free speech should be extended to the realm of print and enjoyed as one of

Euripides tragoediae, ed. Paulus Stephanus, a vols. (Geneva, iooa). ii, sig. PH’. David Norbrookmakes this point in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627—1660 (Cambridge,1999), 127.

See Euripides, The Phoenicia,, Women, II. 290—95, in Euripides, trans. David Kovacs, v (Loch ClassicalLibrary; Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2002).

See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, 200t).6 The Speaker reiterated language first used by Thomas More when he was Speaker; see William

Roper, The Miuour of in Worthy Greatnes. Or the Life of Syr Thomas More Knight, Sotriethne LaChancellour of England (Paris, 16:6), al—a.

220 BLAIR HOXY

the liberties of a people who are just as capable of directing their own affairs as theAthenians.

Milton’s advice is that ‘it would fare better with truth, with learning, and theCommonwealth’ if Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643, which re-erected a system ofpre-publication censorship that had effectively lapsed in 1640, ‘were call’d in’(ii. 488). Under the Tudors and Stuarts, the Stationers’ Company, the King’s Printer,and the university presses had helped to suppress the dissemination of any books thathad not received the approval of a licensor prior to publication because the maintenance of their lucrative exclusive privilege to print depended on their enforcement ofthese intellectual restrictions. Then in 1637 a Star Chamber decree had placed theArchbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London in charge of licensing the vastmajority of books published in London, ‘whether of Diuinity, Phisicke, Philosophie,Poetry, or whatsoever and had placed the chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge incharge of licensing books printed at the universities. The punishment of offenderswas to be determined by the Court of High Commission, the Court of Star Chamber,or the Privy Council.7 This decree associated licensing firmly with William Laud inthe popular imagination, for he was not only the Archbishop of Canterbury andChancellor of Oxford but a powerful member of all the courts and councils thatpunished offenders. Once his role in the suppression of religious works became acontentious issue in his impeachment before Parliament in December of 1640, theStationers’ Company hesitated to use its powers of search and seizure, which hadbeen authorized by the Crown and by Star Chamber, not by Parliament. Unlicensedpublications grew apace.

But the majority of MPs never really intended to dispense with licensing, and by1643 their alarm at the circulation of pamphlets written by both fervent royalists andradical reformers alike made them receptive to a petition from the Stationers’Company asking that licensing be reinstituted and their exclusive privileges upheld.Parliament duly passed an order ‘for suppressing the great late abuses and frequentdisorders in Printing many false forged, scandalous, seditious, libelous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion andgovernment’ (CPW ii. 797). Some of the assembly’s warmest supporters consideredthis order a betrayal. In his Liberty of Conscience (24 March 1644), Henry Robinsonargued that in religious controversies ‘neither side must expect to have greater libertyof speech, writing, Printing, or whatsoever else, then the other and in The 6’onlpas-sionate Sanzaritane (June—July? 1644), William Walwyn laid the blame on certainministers of the Westminster Assembly, who wanted to squelch religious debate: theeffect of the order would be to stop ‘the mouthes of good men, who must either notwrite at all, or no more then is sutable to the judgements and interests of theLicensers8

See A Decree of Starre—Cha,nber, Concerning Printing (1637); R S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press inEngland, 1476—1776 (Urbana, lH., 1952), 127—46.

Henry Robinson, Liberty of Conscience (1644), t7 \Villiain Waiwyn, Compassionate Samaritane(1644), sig. A4’. On Areopagiticds position amid other pleadings for free speech and liberty of conscience,


Milton entered the debate when the Stationers pursued him for the unlicensedpublication of his divorce tracts. His response was to issue yet another unlicensedpamphlet—this time with his name printed boldly on the title page.9 Like Walwynand Robinson, Milton feared that the Licensing Order might be just the first of manyefforts to restrict freedom of religion: soon the Westminster Assembly might become‘afraid of every conventicle and shortly thereafter it might ‘make a conventicle ofevery Christian meeting’ (CPW 541). But Areopagitica is not a narrow defence offree religion. It is a broad vindication of liberty in which Milton seeks to fit togetherdiscrete ‘liberties’ that he finds in the Bible, the ancients, and the common law into amore capacious ideal that will remain incomplete unless it comprises ‘the liberty toknow, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience’—the liberty that Miltonasks for ‘above all liberties’ (H. 560). It is Milton himself who offers us the best meansto think about the way these discrete liberties and distinct intellectual traditionsbuttress his overarching claims: ‘When every stone is laid artfully together, it cannotbe united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world; neither can everypeece of the building be of one form; nay rather the perfection consists in this, thatout of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastlydisproportional arises the goodly and the graceful symmetry that commends thewhole pile and structure’ (H. ss).

CHRISTIAN LIBERTY AND ROMAN MANHOOD

A central aim of Areopttgitica is to persuade Parliament to ‘foregoe this Prelaticalltradition of crowding free consciences and Christian liberties into canons andprecepts of men’ (CPW H. ss). It strives to expand the realm of ‘things indifferent’and to argue that subjects should be left to make choices in these matters, not madeto obey a particular protocol in the name of church discipline. Truth, Milton argues,may have more than one shape:

What else is all that rank of things indifferent, wherein Truth may be on this side, or on tileother, without making her unlike her self. What but a vain shadow else is the abolition of those

see Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution, ed. William HaIler, 3 vols. (New York, 1934); Ernest Sirluck,introduction and notes, in CPIi4 ii. 1—216, 480—570; Nigel Smith, ‘Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643—5

in David Lowenstein and lames Grantham Turner (ccli.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneurics in Milto&sProse (Cambridge, 1990), tn3—22; and Thomas Fulton, ‘Areopagitica and the Roots of LiberalEpistemology’, English Literary Renaissance, 34 (zoo), 42—82.

On the lost petition against Milton that the Stationers presented to the Commons, see Sirluck,introduction, in CPW ii. 142. The petition was preceded by Herbert Palmer’s sermon before Parliament(13 Aug. 1644), which attacked Milton. For Milton’s complaints against intellectual restrictions in thedivorce tracts, see the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (i Aug. 1643) and The lodgement ofMartin Bucer(i July 1644), in CPW ii. 223—6, 479.

222 BLAIR HOXBY

ordinances, that hand writing nayll to the crosse, what great purchase is this Christian libertywhich i’aul so often boasts of. His doctrine is, that he who eats or eats not, regards a days orregards it not, may doe either to the Lord. (CPI 563)

Paul developed this doctrine while intervening in the disputes of congregations inRome, Corinth, and Galana, where some Judaizing Christians were arguing thatcertain laws of the Jews such as circumcision ought to be observed by JewishChristians or even by all Christians)0 Paul countered that the time for the law hadexpired: it had been a ‘schoolmaster to bring us unto C/iris? (Gal. 3 24), but it couldnot bind the liberty olChristians. Yet the fact that all things were lawful for Christiansdid not mean they were all expedient (i Cor. jo: 23). ‘All things indeed are pure saidPaul, but we should follow after the things which make for peace, and thingswherewith one may edifle another.’ Therefore ‘it is good neither to eat flesh, nor todrink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is madeweak’ (Rom. 14: 19—21). Thus Paul taught a doctrine not only of liberty but offorbearance and charity in which Christians could respect what Milton describedas Lhe ‘neighboring differences, or rather indifferences’ of their brethren (CPW ii.565). For Milton, the lesson was not that a Christian staLe must Lake extraordinarycare to insulate its subjects from temptation or error—For God sure esteems thegrowth and compleating of one vertuous person, more than the restraint of tenvitious’ (ii. 528)—but that mans’ ‘things might be tolerated in peace, and left toconscience, had we but charity’ (ii. 563; cf. 554).

Milton tells the story ofan early bishop who ran afoul ofa judgemental hypocritewho did not demonstrate such charity. ‘A person of great name in the Church forpiety and learningc Dionysius Alexandrinus had been used to ‘avail himself muchagainst hereticks by being conversant in their Books; untill a certain Presbyter laid it

scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himselfe among those deWingvolumes’ (CPll H. 511). Dionysius was perplexed until ‘a vision sent from God -

coniirm’d him in these words: Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thouart sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter’ (ii. sit). The bishop‘assented’ to this revelation because it agreed with a biblical injunction, ‘Approveyourselves bankers of repute Perhaps because this text had since been relegated tothe apocrypha, Milton has the bishop remember another passage often cited byapologists for liberty of the press,i Thessalonians 5:21: ‘Prove all things, hold last thatwhich is good: And the bishop ‘might have added another remarkable saying’ olPaul, says Milton, referring to Titus i: a5: ‘lb the pure all things are pure Miltonmaintains that Paul’s apothegm applies not only to ‘meats and drinks’ but to ‘allkinde of knowledge whether of good or evil’ because ‘the knowledge cannot deflle,

‘° i’aul s atlitudi’ towards the law remains contested. I-or some represeiltative modern I rca mnents, see

E R Sanders, Pa if, rime La ms a imil the Jewish People (1985); Fl cikk R isa mien, P of ‘i’m’ I time La’’; :nd cdn‘Pob In gen, 1987); St eph en Westerhom, Israel Law mo/rh e Cu re/i’s Hi it/i: Pa II ,ot, I (mis kit Li t 10 tcrpri’tC’

Grand Rapids, 1990); and Kari Kuula, T1i’ Law, r/le Cat-eoimrmr, iitul Coil’s Plait,: “ols. (I elsi ib andGommingi-n, 1999—:{)113).

AREQEAGITJCA AND LIDERTY 223

nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil’d. For books are asmeats and viands’ (ii. ia)i’

According to the dietary laws of the Jews, of course, not all meats and drinks werepure. God had imposed such restrictions on his chosen people, said Aristeas in one ofthe most famous ancient justifications of the Jewish law, in order to protect themfrom pollution: ‘Therefore lest we should be corrupted by any abomination, or ourlives be perverted by evil communications, [God) hedged us round on all sides byrules of purity, affecting alike what we eat, or drink, or touch, or hear, or see.’’2 Suchstrict observances would naturally have proved an obstacle to the first Christians whowished to evangelize among the Gentiles.

But as Milton reminds us, Simon Peter had a vision that dispensed with thesedietary laws (CPW ii. 512). According to Acts io, Peter saw a vessel descend fromheaven filled with

foure footed beasts of the earth, and wilde beasts, and creeping things, and foules of the ayre.And there came a voyce to him, Rise, Peter: kill, and eate. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; forI haue neuer eaten any thing (hat is common or vndeane. And the voice spake vnto himagaine the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.

Peter wondered at this vision until some messengers arrived requesting that he visit avirtuous Roman named Cornelius. At the house of Cornelius, Peter said, ‘You knowhow that it is an vnlawfull thing for a man that is a lewe, to keepe company or comevnto one of another nation: but God hath shewed me, that I should not call any mancommon or vncleane lust as Peter made the logical inference from meats to men,Milton extends that progression from meats to men to ‘that season’d life of manpreserv’d and stor’d up in Books’ (H. 43). Stressing the ‘discretion’ that Godextended to each man in the matter of his diet, he concludes, ‘when God did enlargethe universall diet of mans body, saving ever the rules of temperance, he then also, asbefore, left arbitrary the dyeting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every matureman might have to exercise his own leading capacity’ (ii. 512—13).

The analogy between reading and eating makes profound sense ifwe consider theimportant role of diet and exercise in Galenic medicine.’3 Galenic physicians held

This passage is crucial to Stanley halt’s reading of Areopagirio; he argues that ‘the argument againstlicensing, wh,ch has always been read as an argument Ji,r books, is really an argument that renders booksbeside the point: books are no more going to save you than they are going to corrupt you; bydenying (heirpotency in uric direction, Milton necessarily denies their potency it the other’. See flow Milton Works(Cambridge, Mass,, zoo t 1. 187—214 at t95. Jason Rosenblatt observes usefully that ‘Pauline versesauthorized to abolish distinctions between forbidden and permitted foods and, more important, betweenlew and gentile are used by Reformers to abolish distinctions between clergy and laity and tn proclaimthroughout the land the liberty to search scriptures’; lie cc,ncludes that ‘Milton oses a doctrinallyunorthodox version of Chrtstian liberty prevalent in Reformation texts on the Holy Scriptures toobliterate der,eal privilege and to defend the universal rtght to read, a right that also exists under theMosaic law. The essence cif Christian liberty—rejection of the law of works and redemption in Christ—isalien to the echos cif this tract’ (Torn?, and the Law in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Princeton, 1994), I tj—az at t14, taa).

The Letter ofArisreits, trans. and ed. R. H. Charles (Oxford, t913), t42—3.‘ See Lawrence 1. Conrad, XI ichael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Por:er, and .kndrew Wear, The I tern

Medical Tradition Soo BC roAD :800 (Cambridge. t995), cbs. m—; Michael C. Schoenfeldr, Bodies and

224 BLAIR FIOXBY

that the physical health of the body was largely determined by the balance of the fourhumoral fluids that were produced by the body in the process of digesting food. The

natural, vital, and animal spirits, which served as liaisons between the body and

mind, were the results of further processes of refinement. Through these spirits, the

body could dispose the mind, and the mind could affect the body’. ‘As the body works

upon the mind by his bad humours, troubling the spirits, sending gross fumes into

the brain, and so per conseqnens disturbing the soul, and all the faculties of it..wrote Robert Burton, ‘so, on the other side, the mind most effectually works upon

the body producing by his passions and perturbations miraculous alterations, as

melancholy, despair, cruel diseases, and sometimes death itself:’4 Diet, exercise, andpurgation assumed great importance because they appeared to be means to ‘temper’

one’s ‘complexion’, or strike the right balance among one’s humours, and therefore to

maintain sound mental and physical health. Because such medical ‘temperance’

usually depended on eating and drinking in moderation, ‘temperance’ assumed the

moral valence of a virtue among Stoics and Christians. But because everyone started

out with a unique humoral disposition and was exposed to various airs, waters, andwinds, each man had to minister to himself. ‘Our owne experience is the bestPhysitian wrote Burton. ‘That diet which is most propitious to one, is often pernitious to another; such is the variety of palats, humors, and temperatures, let every manobserve, and be a law unto himself:’’ Just so, Milton wants to say, it is impossible forlicensors to formulate a diet of the mind that will be salutary for everyone: let each

man observe and be a law unto himself The virtue that he must exercise is the same,whether he be consuming meats or books: temperance. This is a ‘great’ virtue, saysMilton, ‘yet God committs the managing so great trust, without particular Law orprescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man’ (ii. 513).

A man can be temperate only if he knows his own body and mind, uses his reason,makes judicious choices, and maintains his self-control, lilton forgets or suppresses

the fact that Spenser’s model of ‘true temperance’ enters the Cave of Mammonwithout the Palmer, a figure of reason, because he wants to represent temperance

not as a mere habit but as the result of reason exercised in choice: Guyon must ‘seeand know, and yet abstain’ (CPW ii. 5I6)i Yet without self-control, reason would bepowerless to maintain a regimen of health. In i Corinthians : 25—7, Paul compareshimself to an athlete training for a foot race or a boxing match: ‘And every man thatstriveth for the mastery, is temperate in all things: Now they do it to obtain acorruptible crown, but we an incorruptible: Milton likes both the regime of trainingand self-denial that Paul’s image assumes and the agon that it anticipates. For Miltoncannot praise a virtue that is ‘unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees

Selves in Eurl;’ Ajo,ler,, England: Physiology ,,,d lr,w,,rd,Iess n Spenser, Shukespeare, Herbert, ,i,,eI Milton(Cambridge, 1999), 1—39 and (on Areopagitku) 132—5.

‘ Robert Burton, TheAnatoiny of Melancholy (1632), ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling, and

Rhonda Blair, 2 vols. (Oxford, 19S9), ii. 250.

‘‘ Anatomy of Melunchol,g ii. 27.II On Milton’s error, see Ernest Siduck, MIlton Revises The Faerie Q,eeneç Modern Philolog; 45

(1950), 90-6.

AREOPAGfTICA AND LIBERTY 225

her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for,not without dust and heat’ (ii. is).

To deny men the freedom and responsibility of being temperate is to ‘captivat’them ‘under a perpetuall childhood of prescription’ (CPW ii. 514). Galatians 4:1—5

attaches particular significance to such a childhood. There, Paul contrasts theservitude to the law that the Jews had to endure for a finite term with the state ofadult liberty that Christians may now enjoy. For ‘the heir says Paul, ‘as long as he is achild, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutorsand governors until the time appointed of the father With the fulness of time, ‘Godsent forth his son.. . to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receivethe adoption of sons’ and cease to be ‘servants

Like some biblical commentators, Milton appears to have interpreted this passagethrough the Roman law of persons.’7 In Milton’s day, this law could not be studied inthe Institutes of Gaius, which had yet to be rediscovered. But it could be found in thelater Institutes of Justinian, which Milton read in the 164os. This codification andsimplification of Roman law dating from the sixth century stated that all men wereeither free men or slaves. The former possessed a natural ability to do what theypleased uniess prohibited by law, while the latter lacked freedom regardless ofwhether their movements were restricted or their actions coerced, for they remained‘in the power of their masters’ (in potestate do;nznorutn) and therefore subject toviolence or death at any time. Yet even freeborn men and women could be placedunder the care of a guardian (in tzitela) until they reached puberty or, if they lackedthe mental capacity to look after themselves, could be designated wards (pupilli) of aguardian who would make decisions for them. Thus Roman law suggested that thosewho were not free men were slaves and that those who were nominally free yet notunder their own jurisdiction lacked the meaningful liberty of adult citizens. In hisDoctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton said that ‘the time of the Law is compar’dto youth, and pupillage’ because he read Galatians 4 1—5 through the lens of theI,istittttt’s.

Unlike some Reformation theologians, Milton is not at pains to draw a distinctionbetween Christian liberty and the ideal of civil liberty that he finds in the ancients.Commenting on Galatians :i, ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christhath made us free Martin Luther insists that Christ has freed us ‘not from an earthlybondage, or from the Babylonian captivity, or from the tyranny of the Turkes’ butfrom God’s wrath, so that Christian liberty rests ‘in the conscience’ only and goes ‘no

‘ On the invocation of the Roman law of persons in Galatians 4, see W. S. Muntz, Rome, St. Paul, andthe Earl)’ Church: The Influence of Roman Law on St. Fouls Teaching (1913), 71—2, ia6 if.

“ On Milton’s ‘neo-Roman’ conception of liberty, see Quentin Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politicsof Slavery’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds.), Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge,2002), 1—22. On Milton’s use of Justinian’s Institutes in Areopagitica, see Martin Dzehainis,‘Republicanism in Thomas N. Corns (ed,),A Companion to Alilton (Oxford, 2001), 294—308 at 301—4; andid., ‘Liberty and the Law in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth (edt.), Milton, Rights, and Liberties(Bern and New York, 2007), 57—68.

226 BLAIR HOXBY

further’: ‘Christ hath made us free, not civilly, nor carnally, but divinely: Milton, insharp contrast, would maintain in his later Defence of the People of Englond or First

Defence (24 February 1652) that in i Corinthians : 21—3 Paul ‘makes this assertion notof religious liberty alone, but also of political: “Are you called slave? Care not for that;but if you can become free, then use your freedom. You are bought for a price; be notthe slaves of men”’ (CPW iv. 374).

In Areopagitica Milton argues that the Licensing Order is an affront to Englishmenbecause it deprives them of their Christian and their civil liberty in one fell blow. Seenas an instrument of tyranny, it imposes a form of ‘bondage’ and ‘undeservedthralldom’ that threatens to deepen the slavish print’ that the ‘yoke of outwardconformity’ has already left on their necks (CPW ii. 568, 539, 564). It threatens, inother words, to turn them into a people with a servile disposition.2 Even if interpreted charitably as a form of guardianship, it denies them the rights and responsibilities of men of riper years. ‘What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy atschoolc asks Milton, if even the author of ‘serious and elaborat writings’ is to betreated as if he were ‘a Grammar lad under his Pedagogue’ (ii. 531). An author whomust be granted a ‘pedantick license’ is no true authority but a ‘pupil teacher’ whocomes to the reader ‘under the wardship of an overseeing fist’ (ii. 533). Such awardship treats authors and readers like fools or children,2’ To be sure, there maybe some ‘children and childish men, who have not the art to qualifie and prepare’ thetexts that Milton compares to ‘working mineralls’ but this is no reason to limit theaccess of more skilful adults to ‘usefull drugs and materialls, wherewith to temperand compose effective and strong med’cins, which mans life cannot want’ (ii. 521).

As if to prove that Englishmen do not deserve to be treated like children, Miltonrepresents them as mirrors of manhood—an image that assumes both a spiritual anda civil significance. Inexperienced observers might misinterpret the division ofthe English people into ‘parties and partitions’ as a sign of weakness, he says, butthe error would be theirs, for Englishmen are like the ‘small divided maniples’ of aRoman army—able to cut through ‘a united and unwieldy brigade’ at every angle(CPW ii. 556). Ifa ‘great and worthy stranger’ were to behold them, ‘he would cry outas Pirrhus did admiring the ‘docility and courage’ of the soldiers of Rome, ‘if suchwere my Epirots, I would not despair the greatest design that could be attempted tomake a Church or Kingdom happy’ (H. 555). Indeed, the ‘gallant bravery’ thatLondoners have shown as they dispute, reason, read, and invent despite rumoursof impending battle makes Milton think that no small number possess the spirit ofthe Roman who bought the very piece of ground on which Hannibal had camped hishostile regiments—and at no diminution of the price, such was his confidence in thefuture of Rome (ii. England is no land of children and punies but a ‘noble andpuissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking herinvincible locks’ (ii. 558). In Samson—warrior, freedom fighter, and hero of faith—

‘ .4 Commentarie ofMasrer Doctor M,,rrin Luther Vpon the Epistle of S. Paul to the G,,h,rhians, 4th edn.(i6), fo. 231’. -

On the psychology of slaven, see Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’.Dzelzainis, ‘Repubuicanism 303—4.


Milton finds the perfect image of an awakening, manly liberty that is both spiritualand civil, personal and national.

TYRANNY, MONOPOLY, AND THE LIBERTIES

OF ENGLISH SUBJECTS

If Areopagitica depicts England as a chosen nation struggling for liberty, it denouncesthe Licensing Order as ‘a servitude like that impos’d’ on the Israelites ‘by thePhilistims, not to be allow’d the sharpning of our own axes and coulters, but wemust repair from all quarters to twenty licensing forges’ (CPW ii. 536), By makingall Englishmen repair to these ‘forges the authorities are not simply limitingtheir ability to make the intellectual weapons with which they might win their ownspiritual and civil liberty, they are enforcing a monopoly.22 But ‘Truth and understanding are not such wares as to be monopoliz’d and traded in by tickets and statues,and standardsc says Milton. ‘We must not think to make a staple commodity of allthe knowledge in the Land, to mark and licence it like our broad cloath, and ourwooll packs’ (ii. 535—6). That, however, is precisely the way the Licensing Order treatstruth. It puts in place ‘an Oligarchy of twenty ingrossers’ (the licensors) and it

empowers ‘some old patentees and monopolizers in the trade of book-selling’ (theStationers). Whatever the Stationers may have said to the House of Commons, theirreal aim is ‘to exercise a superiority over their neighbours’ in the book trade, ‘menwho doe not therefore labour ill an honest profession to which learning is indetted,that they should be made other mens vassalls’ (ii. 558, 570).

A long history of legal argument and political complaint lies behind Milton’scontention that monopolists deprive men of their liberties and turn freemen intobondmen. In Darcy v. Allen (i6oz), which Sir Edward Coke dubbed ‘The Case ofMonopolies Nicholas Fuller successfully argued that when the queen granted exclusive manufacturing privileges to just one subject, she prevented others from workingin their calling and fulfilling their godly obligation to earn their daily bread.23

22 On Areopagitica’s attack on the Licensing Order as a monopoly, see lllair Hoxby, Mainnion’s Music:Literature unit Eco,,oinics in rite Age of Milton (New Haven and London, 2002), ch. i, and JosephLoewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago and London, 2002),

171—91. David Harris Sacks covers some of the same ground (without acknowledging Hoxby, Ma,,,mon’sMusic) in ‘Adam’s Curse and Adam’s Freedom: Milton’s Concept of Liberty in Thurnu and Forsyth(eds.), Milton, Rights, and Liberties, 69—98.

23 The case may be followed in English Reports, 178 volumes (repr. Edinburgh, 5900—3:); see u Co. Rep.s4b, Eng. Rep. 1260 (1603); Moore 671, 72 Eng. Rep. 830 (1603); and Noy 173, 74 Lag. Rep. 1131 (1603).For an analysis of the case, see Jacob I. Corrê, ‘The Argument, Decision, and Report of Darcy t AllenEmory Law Journal, 45 (1996), 1261—13:7; Hoxhy, Manimous Music, 27—31; and Loewenstein, Author’s Due,128—31.

228 BLAIR HOXBY

A ‘grant, ordinance, or law of any Christian king tending to prohibit some of hissubjects’ from labouring, Fuller said in Parliament when later summarizing thecourt’s finding, was unlawful’ and ‘absurd’ because it went ‘directly against the lawof God, which saith six days thou shall labor; so the grant and prohibition of any kingtending to prohibit any of his subjects to labor in his lawful calling or trade... iscontrary to the law of God and therefore.. .void’4 The monopolist was a vir

sanguinis, or man of blood, because anyone who took away another man’s meansof living effectively took his life.25

In the process, he violated the liberties of the English subject that were guaranteedby Magna Carta. Fuller based this claim on Davenant v. Hurdis (1599), in which thequeen’s bench judged that an ordinance of the Company of Merchant Taylorsrequiring its members to put half their cloths out to other members to be dressedviolated the twenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta, which guaranteed, in part, that‘NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, orLiberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyedFuller argued that Darcy’s monopoly similarly violated the Great Charter and tookaway what should have been the ‘surest’ form of subjects’ property, the ‘excellent skillin a trade’ that they had acquired by their ‘industry’.26 He later used Davenant v.Hurdis and Darcy v. Allen to argue against other infringements of the liberties ofEnglishmen, including the impositions of James land the power of the Church actingthrough High Commission to force men to testify truthfully without knowing whatcharge they faced. By arguing that the law of monopoly should be able to check theextension of prerogative powers, Fuller implied that there was an intimate connection between arbitrary will and monopoly power, and he cast both the king and theChurch as monopolists who would coerce men, if not checked by the common law,into giving up their proprietary claims not only to their possessions but to theirinmost thoughts.

The importance of these cases to the period’s broader conception of liberty canscarcely be overstated. When glossing the word Ithertares in his commentary on thetwenty-ninth chapter of Magna Carta—which had been suppressed by Charles landonly recently published by Parliamentary warrant in 1641—Coke cited only two casesto bolster his exposition, Das’enant v. H,irdis and Darcy v. Allen, both of whichconcerned the freedom of Englishmen to contract their labour and use their propertyas they would.’7 Thus the common law made labour a proclamation of liberty when

21 Proceedings in Parliament, i6io, ed. Elizabeth Reed Foster (New Haven, 1966), ii. ioo.Noy iBi, 74 Eng. Rep. 1138 (ion)); jiCo. Rep.Bob,n Eng. Rep. 1263 (1603). Sir Edward Cukeexplains

the logic of this claim in The Third Parr of the Institutes of the Low (1644): ‘And the law of the Realm in thispoint is grounded upon the law of God, which saith Non accipics (oco pignoria mfrriorem — superwrein

tuolam, quia anmianz siivn apposust rthi ( Deut. 24: 61. Thou shalt not take the nether or upper milstoneto pledge, for he taketh a mans life to pledge. Whereby it appeareth that a mans trade is accounted his life,because it maintaineth his life’ (p. ii).

26 Magna Carta (1297) C. y 25. Edw. i. cc. I. 9. 29; ii Co. Rep. Bob, 77 Eng. Rep. 1263 (1603); Noy 16(1,71Eng. Rep. 1t37 (1603).

27 This is a point that John Lilburne drew to the attention of readers in Innocency and 7 htt!i Justified(1645), 6i. On Coke’s citation of these cases, see David Harris Sacks, ‘Parliament, Liberty, and the


undertaken by freemen in a commonwealth and a confession of slavery whenperformed by subjects whose property in their persons, skills, and goods was notsecure.

In the decades after Darcy v. Allen, when some of their opponents labelledcompanies like the Merchant Adventurers ‘monopolies advocates of freer tradebegan to lay stress on the deleterious effects that monopoly power had on thecommonwealth. Whereas the companies maintained that their ‘politic Government,Laws, and Orders’ were the ‘root and spring’ of their ‘incredible trade and traffic’ andthat trade that was thrown open to all Englishmen would be ‘dispersed, straggling,and promiscuous those in favour of opening up foreign trade claimed that ‘if thenumber of traders were enlarged, trade itself would be enlarged?8 Whereas thecompanies attacked interloping merchants as ‘disorderly and unskillful traders’who possessed ‘neither skill nor patience their opponents rejected the idea thatskills were mysteries to be handed down within a secret society of merchants ratherthan acquired by ‘active and industrious spirits’ operating in the market place.29 Thebest way to make goods more plentiful and of superior quality, the opponents of theguilds and companies insisted, was to encourage the.emulation of craftsmen whowere left free to rival one another.

Not only were monopolies listed among the principal grievances of the realm bythe time the Long Parliament sat; the word ‘monopoly’ was a powerful term ofopprobrium that implied tyranny avarice, and the abuse of position and power.3°Even prelates, courtiers, and aldermen who did not have patents could be labelled‘Prerogative-?vlonopolizing arbitrary-men?’ It is not surprising, therefore, thatreformers opposed to the power of the prelates called, in Milton’s words, for‘unnionopolizing the rewards of learning and industry’ (CPW . 613). ‘Maintaineamongst us a free course of trading for eternall happinesse appealed Thomas Hillin a sermon to the House of Commons in 1642,

set and keepe open those shops, such Pulpits, such mouthes, as any Prelaticall usurpaionshave, or would have, shut up. Secure to us not onely liberty of person and estate, but alsoliberty of Conscience from Church tyranny, that we be not pinched with ensnaring oathes,clogged with mulciplyed subscriptions, or needlesse impositions.32

Such was the discursive atmosphere in which Henry Parker presented his petitionon behalf of the Stationers’ Company to the Long Parliament. While he had reason to

Commonwealth in I. H. Hexcer (ed), Parha,,jen, and Libenyfrorn the Reign of Elizabeth to the Civil Vir(Stanford, CaliE, 1992), 8—tzc at 95—6.

21 John Wheeler, A Treatise of Comn,ercc (1601), ed. with intro. George Bunon Hotchbss (New York,793!), 338, 3?; SeI’enteenth-Centur)’ Econo,nic Docinnents, ed. Joan Thirsk and). P. Cooper (Oxford, 7972),

20.

Seventeen:?, -Century Economic Documents, ed. Thirsk and Cooper, ; A Discourse Consisting ofMotives for the E;largement a,,? Freedome of Thcde (ii Apr. 1645), 27—8.

“ David Harris Sacks, ‘The Greed of Judas: Avarice, Monopoly, and the Moral Economy in England,c. 7350—c. i6oo Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28 (1998), 263—307.

John Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains discovered (7646), 40.32 Thomas Hill, The Trade of Truth Advanced (7642), 33; Hoxby, Ma;ntno&s Music, 31—5.

230 BLAIR HOXBY

hope for a receptive hearing, he had to argue plausibly that a new licensingorder would not erect a monopoly—either spiritual or economic. He contendedthat, because the Stationers’ privileges were enjoyed by a considerable body ofmen, they did not qualify as an instance of a public good being driven into privatehands. That the ‘Mystery and Art of Printing’ was of ‘publike and great Importance’was not a reason for throwing it open but a reason for regulating it. A regulatedpress would be ‘different in nature from the engrossing, or Monopolizing someother Commodities into the hands of a few, to the producing scarcity anddearth, amongst the generality?3 While Parker was acutely aware that some commodities like bread were thought to be too important to be monopolized, healso knew that the regulation of others like playing cards had been defendedbecause they were ‘not of any necessary use, but things of vanity?1 Parker consequently spoke of books as if they were playing cards: they were ‘not of suchgenerall use and necessity, as some staple Commodities are, which feed and cloathus... and many of them are rarities onely and usefull only to a very few, and of nonecessity to any Thus the Stationers’ privileges could not harm the public as theymight if they concerned ‘Commodities of more publike use and necessity?5

In Areopagitica, Milton insists, to the contrary, that this ‘plot of licensing’ causesthe commonwealth ‘incredible losse, and detrimentc for ‘more than if som enemy atsea should stop up all our hav’ns and ports, and creeks, it hinders and retards theimportation of our richest Marchandize, Truth’ and ‘bring[s] a famine upon ourminds’ (CPW ii. 54B, 559). The suppression of books became commonplace onlyafter the emperors of Rome became tyrants and the ‘Popes of Rome’ began ‘engrossing what they pleas’d of Politicall rule into their own hands’ (ii. 501—a). Licensingitself was invented by the Council of Trent and the Inquisition to suppress theProtestant Reformation. ‘And this says Milton, ‘was the rare morsell so officiouslysnatcht up, and so illfavourdedly imitated by our inquisiturient Bishops’ (ii. 507).

Licensing, in other words, is the means by which the Catholic Church has tried tomaintain its spiritual monopoly, and England’s prelates and presbyters have adoptedit with the dame intention.

Milton’s famous admonition, ‘as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book’(CPW ii. 492), and his extended imagery of book suppression as homicide is meantto identify the Stationers and licensors alike as men of blood because they aremonopolists:

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publickmen, how we spill that season’d life of man perserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see akinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to thewhole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an

I Henry Parkerl, Humble Rc,nu,,srru,icc, sigs. Air, Ae, Ai, A:’, A3’.miCo. Rep. Sb—S6a, 77 Eng. Rep. i:6i—a (1603).

[Parkeri, Humble Re,nu,isrrance, sig .A3’’.

ARE0PAG1TrcA AND LIBERTY 231

elementall life, but strikes at that ethereall and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaiesan immortality rather then a life. (ii. 493)

Milton identifies books as the ‘living labours’ of authors so that he may make hischarge of monopoly clear: licensors and Stationers attack the livings of men and indoing so become yin sanguinis.36 Yet to assert that the labour and the skill required toread and write need to be protected under the law as surely as any tradesman’slivelihood is a remarkable claim that goes beyond anything that Coke could haveanticipated in his report on ‘The Case of Monopolies Areopagitica thus extends aproject that Milton had already begun in OfReformation (May 1641) when he assertedthat ‘Liberty consists in manly and honest labours’ and cannot flourish whenmonopolists use their ‘cruel authority’ to oppress other men who are attemptingto ‘labour in the word’ (i. 588, 86; see also Nigel Smith’s essay, Ch. 8 above).

What it means to labour in the word Areopagitica vividly represents.37 Writersdisplay ‘industry’ and ‘diligence’ when they dedicate themselves to ‘studious labours’like the ‘labour of book-writing’ (CPW ii. 489—90, 532). To ‘seek for wisdom as forhiddn treasure? means to perform ‘the hardest labour in the deep mines of knowledge’ (ii. 562). It entails both ‘incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder’ goodfrom evil (p. 514) and a willingness to contribute to the larger public project ofbuilding the Temple, ‘some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing thecedar’ (p. It is precisely because books and pamphlets are ‘publisht labours’ and‘writt’n labours’ that attacks on them may be seen as efforts to restrain men fromundertaking their Godly duty to labour (pp. 493, 531). By insisting that reading andwriting are labour, Milton asserts that to prevent any man from using his skill,invention, and industry to produce or consume texts is to deprive him of hisfundamental liberties as a free Englishman.

Suspicious of any claim that the Crown, the Prelates, or even Parliament is skilfulenough to govern for the good of the people, Milton is attracted to the idea that skillis dispersed widely and must be exercised in commerce with other men. By transvaluing the epithet promiscuous, which company merchants had often used tostigmatize unregulated trade, Milton suggests the extreme importance that he attaches to a state of intellectual free trade in which books maybe ‘promiscuously read’(CPW 517). His text creates the illusion that we are experiencing just such a freecommerce in ideas by exposing us to such a bewildering variety of contradictoryopinions. We do not sense that Milton’s position is patently clear or indisputable, fortruth and falsehood are as difficult to sort out as Psyche’s seeds, but it seems toemerge from a multitude of alternatives as the best. We learn first hand that ‘fast

36 In her otherwise perceptive analysis of Areopagitica, Stevie Davies detects the extravagance ofMilton’s rhetoric in this passage without understanding its legal force: ‘The passage goes on to argue,preposterously, that censorship is a kind of “homicide:’ “manyrdomT and indeed “massacre”; Milton(New York, 1991), 30.

“ On the imagery of labour, see Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s Areopagitka: Liberty for the Sects inThomas N. Corns (ed), The Literature of Controversy (1987), 7—38 at 16—18; Hoxby, Mam,non’s Music,39—40.

232 BLAIR HOXBY

reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement’ is a

form of exercise and discipline that may be found in a vibrant market p]ace of ideas.

MILTON’S LIBERATING STYLE

That we are trucking and trading ideas even as we read is just one of the illusions that

Areopagitica generates. That is why we still read Milton’s tract—not because it was

the first or the most reasonable defence of free speech and liberty of conscience to

appear in England but because its style is liberating. Reading it makes us feel what it

means to be free; and it especially makes us mindftil of how central free speaking and

reading are to an active and manly life. One way it does so is by attributing all the

agency and personality normally reserved for men to books themselves:

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have avigilant eye how Bookes demeane themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to conhne,

imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malelactors: For Books are not absolutely

dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule waswhose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a viol] the purest efficacie and extraction of

that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as

those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armedmen.3t (CPW ii. 492)

If books may comport themselves like men, all the perceptions, encounters, and

experiences of our daily lives may likewise be compared to a book that we read as we

lead our lives: ‘what ever thing we hear or see, sitting, walking, travelling, or

conversing may be fitly call’d our book, and is of the same effect that writings are’

(ii. 528). By characterizing living as reading even while he describes reading and

writing as the most vital forms of labouring and struggling, Milton implicitly denies

the possibility that a meaningful agency could exist without the freedom of expres

sion.In certain passages, English words in all their Anglo-Saxon vigour assert them

selves as representatives of the active, manly enjoyment of liberty that Milton wishes

his readers to embrace as their birthright, while polysyllabic words of Latin extrac

tion behave like nuncios of the slavish conformity that he associates with Catholi

cism, the Laudian church, and the practice of licensing:

Sometimes Iriipruiiaturs are seen together dialogue-wise in the Piatza of one Title page)

complementing and ducking each to other with their shav’n reverences, whether the Author,who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his Epistle, shall to the Presse or to the spunge. These

3d Stevie Davies observes: ‘This act of blurring is a—perhaps, thmaior premislel of Arcopcigirini,

which brazenly insists that a book is a man, and that the same laws apply’ (Milton, 30).


are the pretty responsories, these arc the deare Antiphonies that so bewitcht of late our Prelats,and their Chaplaines with the goodly Eccho they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation ofa lordly Imprirnatur, one from Lambeth house, another from the West end of Paufr so apishlyRomanizing, that the word of command still was set downe in Latine; as if the learnedGrammaticall pen that wrote it, would cast no ink without Latine: or perhaps, as theythought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to expresse the pure conceit of an hnprirnatunbut rather, as I hope, for that our English, the language of men ever famous, and formost inthe atchievements of liberty, will not easily finde senile letters anow to spell such a dictatoriepresumption English. (CPW ii. 504—5)

This passage could serve as yet another example of Milton’s elision of the distinctionbetween books and life: it is hard to tell if we find ourselves on a title page or in apiazza, hedged in by the textual apparatus of licensing or surrounded by the servilechurchmen who sit in judgement on books. But as Stevie Davies has observed, thepassage also ‘sets off charges of derisive Anglo-Saxon’ by setting words like ducking,sIIav’n, and English ‘against the imperialist invasive Latin’ of complementing, reverences, and dictatorypresuniption, thus ‘arraying what it presents as the sturdy, sterlingdown-to-earth plainness of English root words against the Latinate mannerisms ofthe prelates, their mouths rudely inflated with polysyllabic hot air’.39 Milton’s verychoice of words seems to demonstrate the demysti’ing power of plain speech.

In contrast to the prelates, who occupy themselves with custom and the presen’ation of ceremonies, Milton drives his plough over the bones of the dead. He generatesmetaphors only to discard them. The sheer abandon with which he erects and topplesfigures may best be demonstrated by comparing the use that he and William Walwyn

make of the same image. ‘Truth was not used to feare, or to seeke shifts or stratagemsfor its advancement’ writes Wahyn. ‘I should rather thinke that they who areassured of her should desire that all mens mouthes should open, that so errourmay discover its foulness and trueth become more glorious by a victorious conquestafter a fight in open field; they shunne the battell that doubt their strength4° ForWahvyn, this is an isolated metaphor pressed into the service of a lucid and unadorned argument. For Milton, it is just one of the fleeting manifestations of Truth:‘And though all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truthbe in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt herstrength. Let her and Falshood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the wors, in afree and open encounter.’ Milton then imagines Truth as light shining through acasement window as gold extracted from the deep mines of knowledge, as a cause forwhich authors fight like soldiers, calling their adversaries into the open plain, andthen oiice again as a combatant who ‘needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licencings to make her victorious: Not content to have returned full-circle, he reimaginesher in new terms: ‘give her but room, & do not bind her when she sleeps, for thenshe speaks not true, as the old Proteus did who spake oracles only when hewas caught & bound, but then rather she turns herself into all shapes, except her

‘° Ibid.40 \Vakvyn, Cuiizpassiotuite S,,nontaric, 58—9.

234 BLAIR HOXBY

own, and perhaps tunes her voice according to the time, as Micaiah did before A/jab’

(CPW 561—3).

The resistless surge of Milton’s image-making has at least three effects. First, it

demonstrates that Truth may have more shapes than one, and in doing so it

implicitly argues for the expansion of ‘that rank of things indifferent, wherein

Truth may be on this side, or on the other, without being unlike herself’ (CPIV ii.

563). Second, it presents Milton’s prose as a performance of Christian liberty. The

dead letter kills. But, as Lana Cable argues, ‘Milton’s kinetic images bear witness to

something they themselves cannot contain3’ Finally, it suggests that we are living in

conditions of continuing revelation: we cannot ‘pitch our tent here and anyone who

believes we can ‘is yet farre short of Truth’ (ii. s).Some readers may doubt that Milton could really have intended his style to

demonstrate the virtues that Areopagirica asks its readers to embrace. They should

consider what the author says when he gets ahead of himselh ‘See the ingenuity of

Truth, who when she gets a free and willing hand, opens her self faster, then the pace

of method and discourse can overtake her’ (CPW ii. 521). Areopagitica is a rhetorical

performance of liberty, and Milton instructs us to read it as such.

LIBERTY, NOT LICENSE

Many critics have shared Ernest Sirluck’s puzzlement that Milton should entitle his

tract Areopaghica because his purpose seems to differ so strikingly from 1socrates The

irony, as they see it, is that Milton ‘nervously pleads with Parliament to lift controls’ in

an oration whose title invokes a famous attempt to increase the powers of the Court of

Areopagus over ‘the general censorship of manners’ and thus to diminish liberty.42 Yet

to frame the puzile in these terms is to ignore the fact that in Milton’s day Isocrates’

Areopagiricus was widely interpreted as an attempL to demonstrate how ‘true liberty’

might be preserved by avoiding the two plagues that always beset republics: tyranny,

when magistrates preyed on the weak and gave leash to their own lust, avarice, and

ambition; and anarchy, when the people, holding both the laws and the magistrates in

contempt, assumed complete licence of action and speech.43 Milton invokes Isocrates

in Areopagitica not just because he wants to announce that he is publishing a writtenoration but because he wishes to promote a ‘true liberty’ that will not degenerate intolicence. It is quite misguided to assert, as generations of Milton scholars have done,

that the force of Milton’s allusion to Isocrates is ironic.

‘ Lana Cable, Ctinuil Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconodasu, and the Poetics i/Desire (Durham, NC., t995), itS.

CPW ii. 486 n. 3; Joseph Wittreich,, ‘Milton’s Areopagnicr Its Isocralic and Ironic Coniexts Mi/tot,

Studies, 4 {i;), 304, 103.

‘ See Eric Nelson, “True Liberty”; Isocraws and Milton’s Areopighica’. A/i/to,, Studies, 40 (2001),

201—23.


Even in Areopagitica, Milton imagines that some form of censorship may benecessary to maintain true liberty. He notes that the Court of Areopagus probablycensored libellous books and certainly banished Protagoras and burned his booksbecause one of his discourses began ‘with his confessing not to know whether therewere gods, or whether ?Iot’ (ii. 494). As we have seen, he freely concedes that ‘it is ofgreatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye howBookes demeane themselves, as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, anddo sharpest justice on them as malefactors’ (p. 492). He simply insists, as he latersummarized the argument of Areopagitica in his Second Defence of the English People(30 May 1654), that ‘the judgment of truth and falsehood, what should be printed andwhat suppressed, ought not to be in the hands of a few men (and these mostlyignorant and of vulgar discernment) charged with the inspection of books, at whosewill or whim virtually everyone is prevented from publishing aught that surpassesthe understanding of the mob’ (CPW iv. 626). MI books should be published withthe author’s and publisher’s name, and if any book that is published anonymouslyis found to be ‘mischievous and libellous’ once it has been made public, it may becommitted to ‘the fire and the executioner’ (ii. 569). Given that the Court ofAreopagus could tolerate the writings of the epicureans, libertines, and cynics despitetheir opinions tending to ‘voluptuousnesse, and the denying of divine providence’(ii. 4945) Milton supposes that such suppressions will not often be necessary, but hedoes not decry them on principle.

The Court of Areopagus as Isocrates describes it depended less on laws or punitivemeasures than on the habits of everyday life to maintain the virtue of the citizenry, and it

believed that such habits could be formed most effectively by educating the youth of therepublic and channelling their high-spirited desires into noble pursuits and congeniallabour. Milton would likewise prefer to see ‘those unwritt’n, or at least unconstraininglaws of vertuous education, religious and civil nurture, which Plato there mentions,as the bonds and ligaments of the Commonwealth, the pillars and sustainers ofevery writt’n Statute perform the work that the Licensing Order aims to accomplish(ii. 526—7). His argument is not just that ‘preaching’ and ‘exhortation’, should besufficient to achieve what the Licensing Order would enforce by means of ‘law andcompulsion’ (p. 514) but that true virtue can only be achieved by men who activelyattempt to judge what is good and choose it, for the ‘knowledge and survay of viceis. . . necessary to the constituting of human vertue, and the scanning of error to theconfirmation of truth The advantage of books is that they permit young men to gainthat experience by ‘reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason’rather than by ‘scout[ing] into the regions of sin and falsity’ in person (pp. 516—17).

Milton is opposed to pre-publication censorship because it prevents future citizensfrom testing themselves in a wood of error and thus deprives the republic of virtuousadults who know what it means to exercise their reason, choice, and self-control. But hecertainly shares Isocrates’ view that the sagest and most virtuous members of therepublic ought to oversee the ‘education and morality of the young’ (iv. 679).

If Milton’s only interest in Isocrates’ Areopagiticus had been its formal status as apublished oration, he would not have returned to it on subsequent occasions when

236 BLAIR FIOXBY

the republic threatened to degenerate into tyranny or anarchy. Yet he did. After

Oliver Cromwell dismissed the Rump Parliament on zo April 1653 for instance,

Milton incorporated an address to his fellow countrymen in his Second Defence.44

Although he denounced the theft, favouritism, and oppressive conduct of some of

the Rump’s members or officers in his address (CPW iv. 680—i), he also justified the

disenfranchisement of the sort of citizens whom Isocrates faulted in his orations On

the Peace and Areopagiticus—those citizens who in deciding upon public affairs

preferred as being better friends of the people, those who are drunk to those who

are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the

public money to those who perform public service at their own expensec those

citizens, in short, who look ‘upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty,

impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they please as happiness’.45

The tumultuous decade from 1644 to 1654 had not convinced Milton that the

majorityof Englishmen really knew what it meant to fight the wars of peace by governing

themselves. ‘Unless you expel avarice, ambition, and luxury from your minds he

warned, ‘many tyrants, impossible to endure will from day to day hatch out from your

very vitals’ (CPIg h 680—1). Whereas Milton had bridled at the idea of being treated

like a pupil or ward in 1644, he was now prepared to concede that Englishmen might

have to endure a probationary period before they could earn the right of suffrage:

For why should anyone then claim for you freedom to vote or the power of sending to

Parliament whomever you prefer? So that each of you could elect in the cities men of his own

faction, or in the country towns choose that man, however unworthy, who has entertained

you more lavishly at banquets and supplied farmers and peasants with more abundant drink?

Under such circumstances, not wisdom or authority, but faction and gluttony would elect to

Parliament in our name either inn-keepers and hucksters of the state from city taverns or from

country districts ploughboys and veritable herdsmen... . Who could believe the masters and

patrons of such thieves to be fit guardians of liberty, or think his own liberty enlarged one iota

by such caretakers of the state (though the customary number of five hundred be thus elected

from all the towns), since there would then be so few among the guardians and watchdogs of

liberty who either knew how to enjoy, or deserved to possess, it? Who would now be willing

to fight, or even encounter the smallest danger, for the liberty of such men? It is not fitting, it is

not meet, for such men to be free. However loudly they shout and boast about liberty, slaves

they are at home and abroad, although they know it not. (iv. 682—3)

Rather than blame anyone else for their troubles, says Milton, the English should

realize that ‘to be free is precisely the same as to be pious, wise, just, and temperate,

careM of one’s property, aloof from another’s, and, thus finally to be magnanimous

and brave’; for ‘to be the opposite of all these is to be the same as a slave’ (iv. 684). If

Englishmen could not learn to master themselves, ‘then indeed, like a nation in

wardship, you would rather be in need of some tutor, some brave and faithful

For an attempt to date the composition of various sections of the Second Defense, see Blair Worden,

Literature and Politics in Cro,,meflian E’igla nil: Jo?,,, Milton, Andrew Marvel?, Ma rcha ,iio,,t Nedham

(Oxford, 2007), aaa—88.‘ On the Peace, 13, and Areopagiricus, 20, both in Isocrates, trans. George Norlin (Loch Classical

Library; Cambridge, Mass., 1929).

1


guardian of your affairs’ (ibid.). That Milton was already capable of such a sentimentin 1644 may be suggested by his translation of Theseus’ speech on the title page ofAreopagitica, for whereas Euripides’ Greek refers only to the desire to speak or remainsilent, Milton’s English implies that the speaker should not only desire to speak but bequalified to do so by his ability: ‘Which he who can, and will, descry’s high praise, IWho neither can nor will, may hold his peace: By 1654, Milton was preparedto contemplate the idea that his fellow citizens, who seemed to lack, as yet, theability to speak for themselves and govern themselves, should endure a period ofguardianship—provided that the state ‘take more thought for the education andmorality of the young than has yet been done’ and ‘permit those who wish to engagein free inquiry to publish their findings at their own perU without the privateinspection of any petty magistrate’ so that ‘truth’ might ‘especially flourish’ (iv. 679;

my emphasis).In The Ready and Easie Way (23—9 February 1660)—which he published when the

restoration of Charles II seemed all but inevitable—Milton proposed another way tosteer between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy in the republic. The popularclamour for elections could no longer be ignored, but Milton was still unwilling tosurrender his belief that true liberty could be achieved only through temperance: likeany Englishman who must be allowed to eat and read according to his conscience, todigest what he had consumed, and to purge himself, the body politic also had to beleft free to engage in nutrition, refinement, and purification. Milton proposed acomplex way to ‘wel-qualifie and refine elections’ so that the choice of senators neednot be committed ‘to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude’ but might beselected in multiple stages ‘till after a third or fourth sifting and refining of exactestchoice, they only be left chosen who are the due number, and seem by most voices theworthiest’ (CPW vii. 442—3). Milton’s electoral system was inspired in part byIsocrates’ qualms about the selection of leaders by means of lot or popular acclamation, in part by the balloting processes of the Venetian republic, and in part by amedical analogy; for the body was thought to transform crude matter into natural,vital, and animal spirits (each more pure than the last) only by means of a series ofrefinements. Milton’s goal was to return the body politic to the ‘good plight andconstitution’ that he thought it was attaining when he described its fresh blood and‘pure and vigorous’ spirits in Areopagitica, spirits that could support ‘the acutest,and the pertest operations of wit and suttlety’ (ii. 557).

From Areopagitka to The Rea,-iie and Easie Way, Milton never shrank from theidea that maintaining the health of the commonwealth might require carefulmanagement—and might even necessitate that a Protagoras be purged. Miltonopposes pre-publication censorship because it denies men the opportunity to cultivate their own virtue and liberty and thus will have a deadening effect on the bodypolitic, not because he thinks every citizen of a free republic can be preserved fromperil, punishment, or even expulsion as dross. A system of free speech that is not risk-free speech may take a personal toll on some citizens, but it also extends an ethicalbenefit: it offers those virtuous men who have the courage of their own convictionsthe psychic reward of speaking boldly.