-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
David Hopkins, John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of ‘Paradise Lost’, 1667–1970., Notes and Queries, Volume 60, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 607–609, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjt181
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
FAITHFUL LABOURERS is one of the most sustainedly informative and carefully pondered single-authored academic books on Milton’s Paradise Lost ever to have been published. It may thus seem churlish and ungrateful to begin a review by pointing out what it doesn’t cover. But this is necessary, since the ‘reception history' of John Leonard’s subtitle might lead readers to expect an even more comprehensive account of responses to Milton’s epic than his book in fact contains. Faithful Labourers is avowedly and exclusively a study of discursive critical commentary on Paradise Lost. It thus contains no discussion of the reception of Milton’s poem embedded in later poetry—even in such direct adaptations as Dryden’s The State of Innocence (1677) or John Hopkins’s Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ Imitated in Rhyme (1699). Nor, apart from two brief discussions of illustrations by Gustave Doré, is there any treatment of the rich response of visual artists to Paradise Lost, or of the use of the poem in other kinds of artwork, such as Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation. For treatment of such material, therefore, readers will have to consult the published work of (among others) Marcia Pointon, Dustin Griffin, Christine Rees, Lucy Newlyn, and Erik Gray and the unpublished Cambridge thesis of J. R. Mason which contains by far the fullest account of the extensive use of Milton in the poetry of Dryden and Pope.
