Archipelagic Criticism and Its Limits: Milton, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Matter of England

Abstract

Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136) had an enormous impact on the young Milton, so much so that in his Latin poem Mansus he imagined re-writing it as an English national epic. The fact that he could identify with the Britons against the Saxons in this imagined poem has been taken by many to prove the instability or alterity of his Early Modern national identity. In demonstrating how early in its reception Geoffrey's history had become “Englished,” that is, how early it had come to articulate the matter of Britain as England writ large, I hope to indicate that even in his earliest works—especially the Maske at Ludlow Castle, Mansus, and Epitaphium Damonis— the Londoner Milton is not so much diffident about or unrecognizable in his understanding of national identity as party, however inadvertently, to a process of relentless Anglicization. And in this I hope not to refute but to suggest the limits of contemporary Archipelagic criticism.

Notes

1. F. E. Hutchinson, Milton and the English Mind (London: English Universities Press, 1949), 1.

2. G. Wilson Knight, Chariot of Wrath: John Milton's Message to Democracy at War (London: Faber & Faber, 1942), 20.

3. Hilaire Belloc, Milton (London: J. B. Lippincott, 1935), 22.

4. Hans Kohn, “The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1.1 (1940): 91, 82.

5. J. G. A Pocock's opening manifesto is articulated in his essay “British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 601–21, and his reflections on thirty years of the New British History are to be found in his recent book, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

6. Rees Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 24.

7. Cf. Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 240–44.

8. For a brief but eloquent account of Milton's singularity and Europeanness, see Thomas N. Corns, “Milton and the Limitations of Englishness,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton's England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 205–16.

9. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans, & Puritans (London: Fontana, 1987), 51.

10. Cicero is quoted from De Oratore (Loeb Classical Library, 1942; rpt., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). Although Skinner's acute perception in Liberty before Liberalism (1998; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) that early modern states acquire an idea of themselves as “the name of an artificial person whose representatives are authorized to bear the rights of sovereignty in its name” (109) is at the heart of the modern re-invention of the nation, he seems remarkably uninterested in the affective or patriotic implications of his perception. On Cicero's patriotism, see for instance, the thoughtful remarks of William Walker, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Republican Tradition from Aristotle to Machiavelli (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009): “Though Cicero does not identify patriotism as one of the four cardinal virtues, it clearly emerges in his writings as a crucial component of the virtuous citizen, one that in a sense gives direction to the virtues of wisdom, sociability, high spirit, and seemliness” (82).

11. Lucan is quoted from Lucan, De Bello Civili, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).

12. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.

13. The very real triumphs of archipelagic criticism are detailed in a fine recent essay by Willy Maley, “The English Renaissance, the British Problem, and the Early Modern Archipelago,” Critical Quarterly 52.4 (2010): 23–36.

14. See Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), esp. 147–78, and Anthony D. Smith's overview and critique of modernization theories in The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), esp. 27–51.

15. Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 9. Cf. Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–6, and my response to Kidd in “How Milton's Nationalism Works,” in Loewenstein and Stevens, Early Modern Nationalism, esp. 273–77, and “Milton and National Identity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 342–63.

16. John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.

17. That the completion of Geoffrey's manuscript seems to have coincided with the completion of Henry I's new Oxford palace of Beaumont a few streets north of St George's chapel suggests something of Geoffrey's proximity to the seat of royal power.

18. Translations of Geoffrey are quoted from Michael Reeve's English/Latin edition, The History of the Kings of Britain (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2007), or Lewis Thorpe's edition, The History of the Kings of Britain (London: Penguin, 1966), as indicated in the text. In one of the Historia's many manuscripts, Geoffrey does describe himself as a “bashful Briton,” but this, of course, could mean a Breton as much as a Welshman. See Ad Putter, “The Twelfth-century Arthur,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 39.

19. See J. S. P Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Histori Regum Britianniae and its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1950), esp. 440–41, Davies, Matter, esp. 9–11, and C. Warren Hollster, Henry I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 1–29.

20. See Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c.1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 20–31.

21. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 1–11.

22. See R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (1987; rpt., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 106–7.

23. See Davies, Conquest, 355.

24. See Marc Morris, “The Conquest of Wales,” History 12 (August 2011): 78–83, esp. 81.

25. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. Janet Cowen, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 1.9, 3.

26. See J.-P. Genet, “English Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Trent,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 38 (1984): 60–78, and Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 417–20.

27. Quoted in Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 158.

28. See Graham Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians in the Seventeenth Century (1995; rpt., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110–13.

29. See Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), esp. 356–59.

30. Quoted in William Poole, “Two Early Readers of John Milton: John Beale and Abraham Hill,” Milton Quarterly 38.2 (2004): 81.

31. Milton's prose is quoted from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), hereafter cited as CPW, and his poetry is quoted from John Milton, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

32. Spenser is quoted from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (1978; rpt., London: Penguin, 1987).

33. See CPW, 1.369 where she suggests that Milton probably read Geoffrey in Jerome Commelin's 1587 collection of British histories, Rerum Britannicarum.

34. See Alastair Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost, 2d ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998), 76, for some of the other sources the phrase echoes.

35. The plausibility of that historical inclination would have been intensified by the way Geoffrey's emphasis on the Britons’ love of liberty is confirmed in both Caesar's Gallic Wars and Tacitus's Agricola. See Warren Chernaik's suggestive discussion in The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), esp. 219–22.

36. See Stevens, “Milton and National Identity,” and Martin Dzelzainis, “Conquest and Slavery in Milton's History of Britain,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, esp. 413–16.

37. See, for instance, Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), esp. 112–13, and Campbell and Corns, John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought, esp. 126.

38. Orgel and Goldberg, John Milton, l.149. “iugera Cassibelauni?”

39. Orgel and Goldberg, John Milton, ll.162–68. “Ipse ego Dardanias Rutupina per aequora puppes / Dicam, ed Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae, / Brennumque Arviragumque duces, priscumque Belinum, / Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos; / Tum gravidum Arturo fatali fraude Iogernen, / Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorlois arma, / Merlini dolus.”

40. William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, ed. R. D. Dunn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 16.

41. Orgel and Goldberg, John Milton, ll.169–71. “Tu procul annosa pendebis, fistula, pinu / Multum oblita mihi, aut patriis mutata Camenis / Brittonicum stides! Quid enim?”

42. See Paul Stevens, “Pietas in Patriam: Milton's National Identity in the Context of European Humanism” (paper presented at the 9^th International Milton Symposium, University of London, July 2008).

43. “Ut mens, forma, décor, facies, mos, si pietas sic, / Non Anglus, verum hercle Angelus ipse fores,” quoted from the Poemata of Milton's Poems 1645, Facsimile (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).

44. Orgel and Goldberg, John Milton, ll.80–84. “Siquando indigenas revocabo in carmina reges, / Arturumque etiam sub terris bella moventem, / Aut dicam invictae sociali foedere mensae / Magnanimos Heroas, et … / Frangam Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges!”