Abstract
Alison Chapman’s study of Paradise Lost has an engaging backstory in the form of the author’s work with prisoners in maximum-security prisons, exploring John Milton’s notions of radical inner liberty. It is first and last, however, a meticulous intellectual enquiry which draws on a wide range of related research for its detailed central argument. To understand the fundamental issues of crime, judgement and theodicy in Paradise Lost, Chapman argues, one needs a thorough understanding of early modern law and the revolutions it underwent in the period. The Legal Epic is part of an ongoing critical project (led by critics such as Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson) to develop the Foucauldian genealogy of discipline and power into an account of the interaction of law and art that responds to a specifically English context. As Chapman points out, however, much of this excellent work is focused on drama and theatres of power; even more significantly, little of it engages with the turbulent political period of the mid-seventeenth century. Moreover, while law and legality are normally examined in relation to political thought, this study examines them instead in relation to theology in Paradise Lost.
Chapman’s book opens with an exhaustive review of the extensive personal connections that Milton had with lawyers and the legal profession, and a persuasive appeal to the frequency and centrality of legal language and concepts in Paradise Lost. With the exception of Jason Rosenblatt’s Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (1994), in which the poem is read in the light of contemporary law, Chapman notes that it is often Milton’s prose that gains such attention from scholars. Yet with its account of the first human crime followed by divine judgement and then penalty, Paradise Lost also requires us to be attentive to legal issues. (The same was required in the theodical project of justifying the ways of God to humanity).
In the early chapters, Chapman situates Paradise Lost in an England that had a uniquely participatory criminal justice system; it required the ‘hue and cry’ of the neighbourhood and the detective work of the victim and family to apprehend criminals, as well as juries to assess the evidence and come to judgements. We learn that the English judicial system worked in three principle modes: Romano-canon law, practiced only in ecclesiastical courts in England; common law, which, as the best counter to Charles I’s use of prerogative courts, gradually became the dominant system in England; and equity, the most flexible system of the three. Based in the Court of Chancery, in which both parties would plead their cases in person, equity was a system to which Milton resorted many times over the years. These systems, as Chapman shows, were used and developed by people to whom theology and law were not separate in the way that they are for modern readers. The exposition of context illuminates a particularly English cultural identity that rested on Magna Carta, a burgeoning public recourse to legal resolution in the seventeenth century and the contemporary tendency in England to view human law as an attempt to fulfil religious or natural law instituted by God. This contrasts vividly with the later, post-Enlightenment secularised notion of objective, ideologically isolated law with its legal process, and Chapman steps into a void left by scholars such as Stanley Fish, who maintain a modern division between law and Law. In contrast, her argument is that Milton’s statements in his prose, and his use of language in Paradise Lost, in fact contribute to a wider contemporary appeal to the natural law, which functions as ‘nothing but that right reason derived from divine will’ (p. 38)
Chapman’s essential work on the context allows some significant re-readings of key aspects of Paradise Lost. The designation of both Satan and Adam as ‘traitors’ leads her to a fresh examination of treason, exploring the contemporary distinction between earlier notions of treason as an assault upon the monarch’s person (Satan’s modus operandi) and the newer, politically driven notion of treason as an assault upon the rule of law. The deft presentation of evidence demonstrates afresh that Heaven is a legally defined order rather than a divine dictatorship. Satan’s progress is reimagined as a series of escalating offenses (trespass, petty and grand larceny, burglary, poaching and murder), each of which had particular legal and social significance. This analysis provides a series of precise historical correctives to any reader tempted to romanticise robbery or poaching and casts new light on terminology such as the ‘purlieu’, in which Satan-as-tiger spots Adam and Eve as ‘gentle fauns’. We learn that the term indicates a highly contentious area of forest subject to enclosure, politicised attacks and organised crime against landowners. Yet more fascinating is the ‘criminal biography’ of Satan, which, Chapman shows, looks forward to and informs the eighteenth-century literary fascination with the rake’s progress, evident in Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743).
Later chapters rest on the premise that ideas of social contract were transformative for political thought in the seventeenth century and beyond. Chapters Five and Six offer elaborate readings of Adam and Eve’s relationship as it moves from an unfallen, equitable notion of marriage as the ‘sole propriety’ of Paradise (a reading built upon a thoroughly historicised understanding of ‘propriety’ and property law) to the development of a new and grasping impulse to ownership following the Fall. Eve, we learn, ‘Falls’ from being a full – if not entirely equal – participant in the ‘sole propriety’ of marriage to find herself inhabiting the early modern legal category of feme covert, in which married women lost the majority of their legal rights. This legal aspect of the Fall reveals again a prelapsarian legal order and a rationalist theology, since sin leads not to the creation of law, but to its misunderstanding and misuse. The final sections begin with the utilisation of assize sermons to demonstrate that the Son’s judgement of Adam and Eve provides a model of justice tempered with mercy. While these sections are convincing, they sometimes lack the finely detailed use of contemporary evidence that characterises most of the book. Chapter Eight, with its exploration of pardon – both that begged by Adam and Eve and that repudiated by Satan – returns to Chapman’s earlier mode of detailed examination of the use and misuse of contemporary legal practice. In this case, she illuminates and resolves a key theodical problem for readers: the difference in judicial treatment of Satan and God’s human creations. The arguments build adroitly to the paradoxical conclusion that Milton’s defence of rationalism and law contributed to precisely the secularising process that he would have deplored. Overall, the depth and subtlety of Chapman’s work offer a new light on a number of key interpretative problems in Paradise Lost, revitalising the critical argument in favour of the power of the poet’s theodicy.