Abstract
Milton wrote in the two prose styles prevalent in his day: Ciceronian where lofty matters of highest political or intellectual principle are at issue (Areopagitica), and anti-Ciceronian where the ticktack of debate and where local, immediate, and practical matters are at issue (the divorce tracts). Critics have described the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way (April 1660) variously as Ciceronian or anti-Ciceronian, and even as a combination of both styles. Further, critics disagree over whether the tract is idealistic or practical. One must note, as well, that most critics who have studied this tract over the last century or so have a low opinion of it, or, more precisely, of Milton in it.1 In this chapter, I will show why the style of The Readie and Easie Way is anti-Ciceronian. But I will also show that what has not been seen is the location beyond anti-Ciceronian where witnessing is required to lofty principle but where practical proposals also seem necessary and yet virtually hopeless of adoption, a methodology similar to Jeremiah’s on the eve of the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Because Jeremiah knows his nation will fall to the Babylonians, because he knows the nation will not be redeemed in his own lifetime, because he knows, therefore, no one will listen to him and his preaching will fail, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah becomes for Milton an exemplary model for the justification of the ways of God to men during a time of national disaster.
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Notes
E. M. Clark also calls the tract Utopian, though replete with obvious “fundamental weaknesses” (Clark, ed., The Ready and Easy Way [New Haven: Yale UP, 1915], xxxix). Don M. Wolfe declares Milton a Fifth Monarchist (Milton in the Puritan Revolution [New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1941], 287). Perhaps more concerned with the politics of the period than Wolfe, Arthur Barker argues that the two sides of the Puritan faction, both having been held in balance by Cromwell, began to assert themselves after the death of the
Lord Protector (Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 1641–1660 [Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1942]). One group, the Levellers, were secularists who separated the natural and political from the spiritual and ecclesiastical, and believed in a democratic government based on the liberty and equality of all men. The other group did not separate natural and political from spiritual and ecclesiastical, and believed in a theocratic government ruled by regenerate saints. By 1659–60 the Levellers had ceased to exist, but were replaced by Harrington and his followers, who, like the Levellers, believed in a democratic form of government, with the proviso of a rotation system to prevent the corruption of government officials. According to Barker, Milton believed Harrington’s system resembled Hobbes’s mechanical system, Harrington’s system accorded privileges to those who did not deserve them, and Harrington’s system restricted liberty. Of the two groups, concludes Barker, Milton aligned himself with those who did not separate church and state. In other words, he was a Millenarian (280). This belief was echoed more recently by the editors of Milton and the Terms of Liberty, although they stipulate Milton was a Millenarian only in the 1640s
(Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds., Studies in Renaissance Literature: Milton and the Terms of Liberty [Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002], xii–xiii).
Joad Raymond, “The Cracking of the Republican Spokes,” Prose Studies 19, no. 3 (December 1996), 255–74.
R. V. Young and M. Thomas Hester, Justus Lipsius. Principles of Letter-Writing: A Bilingual Text of “Justi Lipsi Epistolica Institutio” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996), xxvii, xxx–xxxi.
Joan Webber, Contrary Music: The Prose Style of John Donne (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1963), 21–22.
For a discussion of how Milton combines two prose styles in one tract, see Keith W. Stavely, “The Style and Structure of Milton’s Readie and Easie Way,” Milton Studies 5 (1973), 269–87 For a discussion of how Donne combines two prose styles in one tract, see Reuben Sanchez, “”Menippean Satire and Competing Prose Styles in Ignatius His Conclave,’“ John Donne Journal 18 (1999), 83–99.
See William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1938);
John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), especially 121–41. A few examples of influential contemporary treatises would be the following: William Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying. Or a Treatise Concerning The Sacred And Onely True Manner And Methode Of Preaching (1609); John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, Or, A Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching as It Fals Under the Rules of Art (1617); and William Chappell, The Preacher, Or the Art & Method of Preaching (1656).
K. G. Hamilton, “The Structure of Milton’s Prose,” in Language and Style in Milton, ed. Ronald David Emma and John T. Shawcross (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967), 322.
For a discussion of Milton’s use of the euphuistic style in these two tracts, see Sanchez, Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997), 77–86 and 101–5.
Austin Woolrych, “Milton and Cromwell: ‘A Short But Scandalous Night of Interruption?’” in Achievements of the Left Hand, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1974), 185–218.
Blair Worden, “John Milton and Oliver Cromwell,” in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution, ed. Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 243–64.
Martin Dzelzainis, “Milton and the Protectorate in 1658,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 181–205.
Paul Stevens, “Milton’s ‘Renunciation’ of Cromwell: The Problem of Raleigh’s Cabinet Council” Modern Philology 98, no. 3 (February 2001), 363–92.
Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 64.
Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Late Political Prose,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 309–25.
Stanley Stewart, “Milton Revises The Readie And Easie Way,” Milton Studies 20 (1984), 205–24.
Laura Lunger Knoppers, “Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English jeremiad,” in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 213–25.
James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987), 260.
Barbara Keifer Lewalski, “Milton: Political Beliefs and Polemical Methods, 1659–60,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. lxxxiv, no. 3 (June 1959), 191–202. Woolrych, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 7:204–18.
Thomas Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Clarendon P, 1992), 269–93.
Hendrik Leene, “Blowing the Same Shofar: An Intertextual Comparison of Representations of the Prophetic Role in Jeremiah and Ezekiel,” in The Elusive Prophet: The Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character and Anonymous Artist, ed. Johannes C. De Moor (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 175–98.
Walter Brueggmann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), 12.
Walter Brueggmann, Like Eire in the Bones: Listening for the Prophetic Word in Jeremiah, ed. Patrick D. Miller (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 4. Brueggmann thus describes a “move, from personal history to theological model” (4).
Christoph Bultmann, “A Prophet in Desperation? The Confessions of Jeremiah,” in The Elusive Prophet as a Historical Person, Literary Character and Anonymous Artist, ed. Johannes C. De Moor (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 90.
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© 2014 Reuben Sánchez
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Sánchez, R. (2014). “And Had None to Cry to, but with the Prophet, O Earth, Earth, Earth!”: Style, Witnessing, and Mythmaking in Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way . In: Typology and Iconography in Donne, Herbert, and Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137397805_7
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