Book chapter
To Secure Our Freedom
Milton in the Long Restoration
Oxford University Press
07/28/2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769774.003.0008
Abstract
This chapter explores the eighteenth-century afterlife of Milton’s Mask, as it was renamed Comus and reshaped into an expression of Protestant poetics and Whiggish political opposition. Music by Thomas Arne, new text by John Dalton, and branding by the publisher Robert Dodsley made Comus speak to its moment and helped define its critical legacy in ways that are not widely understood. In its altered form, Comus became one of Milton’s most popular, if partly apocryphal, works. By studying the publication and performance networks responsible for the text’s transformation, we gain insight not only into the text’s eighteenth-century reception, but also the more recent scholarly tendency to misread Milton’s early Mask as an expression of his later reformist zeal.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- To Secure Our Freedom
- Creators
- Blaine Greteman
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Milton in the Long Restoration
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press; Oxford
- DOI
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769774.003.0008
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/28/2016
- Academic Unit
- English; University College Courses
- Record Identifier
- 9984398811702771
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