The Riverside Milton

Rating:
Summary: I will not use this text again
Review: I find this edition impossible for classroom use and, after this semester, I will not use it again. I wish the venerable Hughes edition was available and affordable: somebody should reissue it if it is going out of print, as it remains the better textbook.

Here are my complaints:

*The prose is riddled with what seem to me to be small typos--I'm not talking about orginal spelling, but about things like "buy" for "but" (p. 937) and so on. There is one of these every 2-3 pages on average, and this is just too many.

*Some of the notes seem designed not to assist undergraduate readers but to demonstrate the editor's grasp of secondary scholarship. Why else would a note to _Comus_ direct readers to Leah Marcus and NOT also offer succinct remarks about the controversy surrounding Sports and mirth? What good is a note like that to the average undergraduate reader?

*The notes are so frequently about minor textual issues--the kind of thing that can go in an appendix and that undergrads are unlikely to care about--that students after a while stop looking at them altogether. That does not help anybody.

*The notes--especially to the prose--do not supply anything like the kind of necessary information that any classroom text should provide. This text does not identify the scriptural passages Milton cites, etc. For example, when Milton refers to a "covnant" in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and/or The Readie and Easie Way, students need a note about The Solemn League and Covenant, but there is no such thing.

Rating:
Summary: poor Milton
Review: Interest in Milton has waned in American universities, and I can't help but think that THE RIVERSIDE MILTON tossed him into an eternity more boring than anything his prose could have ever created.

I understand that this text is "academic" so its asinine price and density are justified. Yet Flannagan has taken scholasticism to the extreme, sacrificing all for footnotes in a mad zeal to, like the old Welsh poets, show off his research. Thus this book's perfect audience comprises graduate pedants lost in footnote fogs, loving every minute of brilliant insights like, "This comma was omitted in the 1676 Edition." A high disappointment, especially since THE RIVERSIDE CHAUCER is very, very strong. But still, THE RIVERSIDE MILTON'S not a total waste (the introductions are well written and often insightful).

Other reviewers have already identified the problems with so many footnotes, so I won't rehash. I'll just add my frown amongst many others and continue reading Milton elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Looking forward to second printing
Review: This up-to-date edition of Milton's complete poetry and major prose fills the urgent need for a successor to the venerable student's edition Merritt Hughes prepared half a century ago (now, alas, out of print).

One outstanding virtue of the Riverside Milton is its editor, Roy Flannagan. Flannagan is remarkably responsive to readers' comments, which he promises to take into account in the preparation of future editions (the first of which is said to be in press as of this writing). Unfortunately, a revised edition of the book is instantly needed. In its first printing, the Riverside Milton is badly marred by the absence of a table of contents to the poems and of indices to titles and first lines. Without these helps, it is impossible to find the shorter pieces without a considerable amount of page-turning--and difficult to justify giving the book more than three stars.

Some will be delighted to find that Flannagan has mixed textual notes with substantive ones at the bottom of the page; others (including, I suspect, most undergraduates) will find the mixture irritating, and will resent all the extra head-bobbing between text and annotations. Unexceptionable, I believe, is Flannagan's decision to preserve Milton's 17th-century spelling and punctuation, which greatly facilitates scanning the lines and reading them aloud.

As for the substance of the substantive notes, I believe it generally to be sound, though a handful of glosses seem far fetched and little worth. For example, in commenting upon how "Smiles . . . love to live in dimple sleek" ("L'Allegro," lines 28-30), Flannagan tells us that "Smiles do live in dimples, and dimples live in smooth (youthful) or sleek and plump faces. Also, a personified Smile lives in a dimple the way that a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream may live in a flower."

As it now stands, the Riverside Milton is a work more of promise than of perfection. Those interested in purchasing the text should wait until the second printing is available, since it will contain the table of contents needed for the book to be truly usable.