Notes to Chapter 1kingdom twenty years later. Both explore rightful rule, the danger of rebellion, and the
consolidation of monarchical power. In his essay “Of Heroic Plays” prefixed to The
Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards (London, 1672), Dryden states that “an heroic play
ought to be an imitation, in little, of an heroic poem,” with love and valor as their
subject. These norms, he declared, “Sir William Davenant had begun to shadow” in
both genres.
18 Luis de Camõens, Os Lusiadas (Lisbon, 1572); The Lusiad, Or, Portugals Historicall Poem:
Written in the Portingall language by Luis de Camõens, and now newly put into English by
Richard Fanshaw (London, 1655).
19 [Samuel Butler], Hudibras. The First Part. Written in the time of the late Wars (London,
1663); it may have appeared in 1662. Hudibras. The Second Part (London, 1664). Part III
was published in 1678.
20 Paradise Lost: A Poem, in Twelve Books, ed. Thomas Newton, 2 vols (London, 1749), I,
lvi.
21 Abraham Cowley, Davideis, Or a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David, in Poems (London,
1656), sig. a 4.
22 Ibid., sig. b v.
23 Ibid., sigs b 2–b 2v.
24 Ibid., sigs b 4–b 4v.
25 Virgil claims that his second half will treat the grander theme of Aeneas’s wars to found
what will be the Roman empire of Augustus; Milton reverses that claim as he proposes
to turn from the grand affairs of Heaven and Hell to the less exalted, tragic subject of the
Fall and the loss of Eden. Also, Books VII and X, divided in the second edition, are
somewhat longer in the 1667 edition than the other books: Book VII has 1,290 lines
and Book X has 1,540, while the others range from 761 (Book III) to 1,190 lines (Book
VIII; in the twelve-book version Book IX).
26 John Denham, The Destruction of Troy (London, 1656), printed for the royalist publisher
Humphrey Moseley. Denham claims to have written this poem around 1636, but if so
he surely revised it after the regicide. In the preface (sig. A 3v) Denham explains his
theory of translation, an effort to make Virgil speak “not onely as a man of this Nation,
but as a man of this age.”
27 Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton (Athens, Ga., and London, 1994), 67–122.
28 John Dryden, Astraea Redux (London, 1660), ll. 320–1. The epigraph is from Virgil’s
Fourth Eclogue (l. 6): “Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna” (Now the Virgin
[Astraea] returns, and the reign of Saturn [the Golden Age] begins).
29 Quint, Epic and Empire, 131–57.
30 See David Norbrook, “Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary
Culture,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, eds. Kevin Sharpe and Peter
Lake (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 45–66. Lucan was associated with anticourt critique and
an aristocratic republicanism in an edition of the Pharsalia by Hugo Grotius (Leyden,
1614) and English translations by Arthur Gorges (1614) and Thomas Farnaby (1618).
31 Thomas May, Lucans Pharsalia: or The Civill Warres of Rome (London, 1627), sig. a 4.
May dedicates individual books of the Aeneid to noblemen, many of them associated
with the Leicester/Essex party of reformist opposition to royal policies. While May’s
subsequent versions and “continuations” of Lucan in Latin and English (1630, 1640)
waver in their ideological thrust and include panegyric dedications to Charles I, in The
Notes to Chapter 13