Today in History: April 27, 1667
Sun Apr 27, 2008 at 03:29:01 PM PDT
It is 1667. England is 16 years past its civil war, in which Charles I was executed. Shakespeare has been dead 50 years, and no Englishman thinks anyone but him wrote those plays. (And nobody cares. Who wrote a play in England mattered none. Who had the manuscript mattered, and what mattered far more was who could see the play. But that is another diary entry.)
In 1664, a poet blinded by time (and possibly glaucoma) will realize the fruits of many nights writing by candlelight, then dictating to anyone who would listen once he could not see the words coming out of the pen. His blindness has probably saved his life, as he'd championed the execution of the previous king, justified divorce and argued for freedom of the press — any one of them a cardinal sin. As a university professor will put things 343 years later, "Oh, let us not execute [this author]; God has punished him by making him blind." But his blindness and his devotion to the losing side in the civil war have made his literary success rather ... difficult.
So today in history, poet John Milton sells Paradise Lost for 10 pounds.
The point of this diary is not for me to try my hand at writing the world's millionth Milton biography. Others have done it far better. I am much more entertained by the minutiae and interesting side notes I found while researching this diary (and other, largely unrelated material).
First off, 10 pounds in 1670s England is, let's say, $12,000 today. (Admission to a Shakespearean play was a shilling in the 1590s and 1600s. 100 shillings to the pound gives 1000 shillings for 10 pounds, and 1000 shillings times $8 — average price of a movie ticket — is $8,000. Multiply by 1.5, the exchange rate, to get $12,000.) [Update: This figure is a bit more difficult to be sure of than I thought. So consider a range of 10,000 to 20,000 pounds. My thanks to Its the Supreme Court Stupid and Lib Dem FoP for alerting me to my calculation errors.]
Sources on Milton disagree on if he was robbed. Certainly a reclusive poet with no hope for a royal anything (given his defenses against pro-monarchy treatises and his effectively anti-religion writing) has little in the way of bargaining power. So rather than give you a collection of links arguing one way, then some arguing the other way, a few points:
- Copyright law had just, ah, changed, thanks to the Licensing Act of 1662 (formatting change mine):
Whereas the well-government and regulating of printers and printing-presses is matter of public care and of great concernment — especially considering that by the general licentiousness of the late times many evil-disposed persons have been encouraged to print and sell heretical, schismatical, blasphemous, seditious, and treasonable books, pamphlets, and papers[...]
That might as well have said "Hey, John Milton, try to publish something now, you dick."
Whereas we have countless publishing houses in America these days, England had 20 master printers in the 1660s. (Nasty stuff. Picture walking into the office six days a week and working with cloth balls that soaked overnight in urine.) So having copyright — the right to copy a work — to something nice and fat, like Paradise Lost was a pretty convenient thing to have. You might compare it to the deal Jo Rowling had with her publisher.
At any rate, with the licensing act, Milton's work as a subversive (oh, how dangerous, that freedom of speech! Would that more people knew of Milton as a relatively modern man) was basically dead. That brings me to point No. 2:
- Most people who graduate from high school know of Milton and/or Paradise Lost. Almost nobody knows about his writings on subjects many people still consider pretty controversial. In terms of progressive thought, Milton was in the 1650s more advanced concerning divorce and freedom of expression than many Americans are today. He advocated divorce a full 340 years before Ireland granted its citizens that right. This man had the balls to write in defense of the English commoner (i.e., not in defense of the crown) knowing he was essentially dead if the crown ever righted its ship again. (It did, and he was spared.) Most college English students know as much about Milton's political leanings as they do of Noah Webster's religious nuttery: none.
While we're on the subject of things people don't know, point No. 3:
- There was no apple in Eve's hand. I have heard entirely too many people (most of them Christian) referring to the apple Eve ate. Apples originated at least 1,000 miles from anywhere scholars have credibly proposed as being Eden. (Genetic research suggests the apple dates back to the outskirts of China, for anyone who cares.) If Adam and Eve are meant to represent the very earliest homo sapiens sapiens, they predate apples in the Iraq area by at least 1500 years. Theories abound as to why the apple, of all fruits, was eventually introduced as the fruit of temptation, but it couldn't have been factually, and it's even less plausible that the original authors of the text (nomadic shepherds, for those keeping score at time) were out eating apples, notwithstanding the countless movies with big, fat apples being eaten by Centurions/Greek soldiers/Egyptians. (Any such apple being eaten would have more resembled a crab apple, and if you take a big bite out of that, you end up swallowing the thing whole.)
Why is it even less plausible that the authors would mention an apple specifically by name and mean it? Coupla reasons:
A) Genesis doesn't mention the hair color of Adam, Eve or much of anything else. Hell, we're not even told their race. Now, you can argue that's because there would be no reason to, given the primitive status of race dialogues in 2000 B.C.E. Or you can look at that decision from a literary standpoint, combined with the appearance of Jesus as black in Africa, dark-skinned in Greece and a white-faced cutie in England, and see that people filled in their own details when they were allowed to. To borrow from my Shakespeare professor, as readers of the Bible, we're invited to believe Adam and Eve (and so on and so forth until the weird names of people and peoples) are similar to us. This in turn invites us to be sympathetic to the story and to allow it to move us on the level on which religion and other nonfactual things work. (Argue with me all you like, but when your defense boils down to "Because that's what I believe," you're not working with facts. Note that this isn't specifically a bad thing.)
B) Thus, where grapes are some sort of context-rich fruit, you get the Tree of Knowledge producing something strangely grapy. Where pomegranates are evil, they're the fruit on the tree. Etc.
C) In England, up until a few decades after Milton stopped milting, apple was the name for "Just gimme some fruit," in the way coke is "Just gimme a soda" in Northern Virginia: "A generic term for all fruit, other than berries but including nuts, as late as 17c., hence its use for the unnamed 'fruit of the forbidden tree' in Genesis." (source) So saying Adam and Eve ate an apple from the tree is like saying they went to the store to get some coke. Except one culture's generic fruit reference becomes a giant marketing campaign, complete with state-sanctioned art depicting apples as the forbidden fruit, and the stained-glass windows don't hurt.
There's also an argument to be made, based on this, that there's an element of polysynthesis to Hebrew such that one could write "apple-[something]" and mean nothing overly close to an apple:
A similar method of word formation is the fusion of two words in one. Tapuakh-zhav (lit. "golden apple" - "orange") has become tapuz. There is also tapuakh-adama (lit. "ground-apple" a loan-translation of the German Erdapfel). These two have given rise to another compound tapuakh-etz (lit. "tree-apple") – a tautologous form, as in the Bible tapuakh plain and simple, means "apple." But in Israel a generation ago tapukhim were rare and expensive, while the other two varities were plentiful. So Hebrew speakers influenced by the tapukhei-zhav and tapukhei –adama coined tapukhei-etz to specify what they were referring to.
(Etymologists will note that the ground-apple construction is similar not only to the German but to the French, pomme de terre, or dirt apple. Ain't language fun?)
Donate.
[Update: Edited to add a link to another account of Milton's sale of his work. Further edited to reflect my lack of knowledge of English currency. Keep the corrections coming.]
Permalink | 21 comments