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'Ranging across Milton's career in prose and verse, Prawdzik establishes the reasons why theatricality mattered, not only to the poet's understanding of authority, selfhood and the millennial triumph of a nation, but also to his understanding of human vulnerability and sinfulness.'
Reid Barbour, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Explains the presence of theatre in John Milton and its centrality to his politics and poetry
Theatrical Milton explores the longstanding problem of Milton's relationship to theatre. In the process, it provides compelling solutions to the cruces of major Miltonic texts - the Maske, Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes - while offering uniquely extensive treatments of The Vacation Exercise and Animadversions, bringing these into an untold narrative of Milton's career. The book attends to Milton's interest in the dramatic medium yet finds its most significant answers in the role of the body in rhetorical theory and religious politics. It extends its insights to characterise the Miltonic corpus as a systemic body that evolves through bounded indeterminacies.
Brendan Prawdzik is Lecturer in the English Department at Pennsylvania State University.
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN 978-1-4744-2101-0
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List of contents
Introduction - Theatrical Milton; 1. Speaking Body - The Vacation Exercise and Paradise Lost; 2. Printless Feet - Early Lyrics and the Maske; 3. Bending the Fool - Animadversions and the Early Prose; 4. Theatre of Vegetable Love - Paradise Lost; 5. Passion's Looking-Glass - Samson Agonistes; Epilogue - A Systemic Corpus.
About the author
Brendan Prawdzik is Asisstant Teaching Professor in English at Pennsylvania State University. He received his BA from Rutgers University in 2001 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. He has taught at UC Berkeley and the University of the Pacific and joined the faculty of Penn State in 2015. He has published on John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and early modern culture.
Summary
Theatrical Milton' brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, 'theatricality' identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre.
