“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642office of speaking bought, and begun with servitude and foreswearing. Howsoever
thus Church-outed by the Prelats, hence may appear the right I have to meddle in
these matters, as before, the necessity and constraint appear’d. (822–3)The mix and multiplicity of roles that Milton adopts in his five antiprelatical tracts
as a matter of rhetorical self-presentation also show him working through issues of
identity for himself. He has to confront several issues: How should he account to
himself and others for the fact that he is not moving ahead with the poetic career he
had committed himself to in his Italian travels? As a polemicist, can he realize a
prophetic calling outside the ministry? What weapons should he wield as satirist and
controversialist? And how does the polemicist’s role sort with that of scholar and
poet? He presents himself in these tracts as a learned scholar, a cosmopolitan man of
letters, an engaged patriot, a Christian warrior for truth, a satirist, a poet, and a
teacher of his countrymen in the mold of the good orator as defined by Cicero and
Quintilian,^106 and especially of Christ, who “came downe amongst us to bee a teacher”
(CPW I, 722). Milton links polemics and poetry closely and constantly, joining the
role of satirist to those of prophet and poet and all three with the destiny of England
as elect nation. That mix of roles indicates that he did not suppose he was making a
momentous choice between left hand and right, polemic and poetry, but rather, that
he was devoting his talents to an immediate goal: the removal of the bishops, as the
major obstacle to reform in church, state, and English culture.
In these first tracts Milton sets himelf in the line of satiric and prophetic poets
who promoted reform. In Of Reformation he quotes Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto
on the evils Constantine brought to the church and affirms from his own experi-
ence how much Italy glories in those “famousest men for wit and learning” (CPW
I, 558–60). He also cites approvingly the satires of “our Chaucer” against the “pop-
ish” ecclesiastics.^107 In other antiprelatical tracts as well, he places himself in the
tradition of English patriot–poets who were teachers and reformers: in Animadver-
sions he points to the pastoral satire of “our admired Spencer” against the prelates as
having “some presage of these reforming times” (CPW I, 722–3); and in the Apol-
ogy he cites “our old Poet Gower” against the bishops and the Donation of Constantine
(946–7). He develops in these pamphlets a poetics of satire, grounded in “lively
zeale,” that looks beyond the secular precedent of Juvenal’s angry man and Martin
Marprelate’s scornful insults^108 to the zealous Old Testament prophets (Elijah, Jer-
emiah, Isaiah) who denounced God’s enemies and called for reformation. In all
these tracts he claims a poet’s license to use a panoply of poetic resources: meta-
phor, imagery, allegory, fable, apostrophe, and a rich mix of figures and genres. He
envisions himself achieving his highest poetic flights in some millennial future, but
at this juncture he readily takes on the role of prophet–teacher, whose zealous,
poetic testimony to truth can advance reformation and so prepare for that future.