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John Milton’s most famous statement about ‘the book’ is his assertion in Areopagitica (1644) that ‘Books are not absolutely dead things’ but rather ‘as active as that soule whose progeny they are.’ Recent re-discoveries of Milton’s annotated copies of the Shakespeare First Folio and Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) show him conversing with the printed text in the margins, as if the books were, indeed, capable of dialogue. This talk reads Milton’s description of books in Areopagitica as a declaration of a well-honed reading practice, not just part of a rhetorical project. So, too, Milton’s insistence a few pages later of ‘the benefit ... of books promiscously read’ reflects an active engagement with printed matter evident in the ten books to have been positively identified as his. Our increased access to Milton’s annotations in books produced on the English presses he was trying to defend shows that his assertions can be understood as corroborating evidence for the efficacious—and petulant—ways that he actually interfaced with his books.
Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, where she teaches courses on early modern literature, book history, and textual editing. She is author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England (OUP 2020); and editor of Shakespeare / Text (Bloomsbury 2021). She is currently editing Henry the Sixth, Part 1 for The Arden Shakespeare, Fourth Series, and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part 1 for the Oxford Marlowe: Complete Works. She also helped to authenticate John Milton’s annotated copies of the Shakespeare First Folio and Holinshed’s Chronicles and is working on a project called Milton’s Library that aims to reconstruct Milton’s book collection.