Notes to Chapter 196 CPW I, 827. Stanley Fish, “The Reason of Church Government:” Self-consuming Artifacts
(Berkeley, Calif., 1972), 265–362, argues that Milton promises and then intentionally
subverts rational discourse in this tract in order to throw the reader back on the sole
authority of scripture.
97 Extending this family metaphor he also insists that Christ as the church’s husband must
have prescribed “his own ways” to improve her health and beauty, since “of any age
or sex, most unfitly may a virgin be left to an uncertaine and arbitrary education...
expecially if bethroth’d” (755).
98 Egan, “Creator–Critic,” 49, notes that this portrait makes a deliberate contrast to the
pithy, sententious sketches Hall produced in his Characters of Vertues and Vices (Lon-
don, 1608). See also John F. Huntley, “The Images of Poet and Poetry in Milton’s The
Reason of Church-governement,” in Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, eds, Achieve-
ments of the Left Hand (Amherst, Mass., 1974), 83–120.
99 See chapter 3, pp. 60–1.
100 Pages 802–3. The first words of Isaiah in chapters 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 22, and 23 refer
to the prophet’s “burden.” See Reuben Sanchez, “From Polemic to Prophecy: Milton’s
Uses of Jeremiah in The Reason of Church-Government and The Readie and Easie Way,”
MS 30 (1993), 27–40.
101 “Time servs not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain ac-
count of what the mind at home in the spacious circuits of her musing hath liberty to
propose to her self, though of highest hope, and hardest attempting” (812–13).
102 Pages 813–15. He cites Origen as authority for the Song of Songs as pastoral drama,
“consisting of two persons and a double Chorus,” and David Pareus as authority for the
Book of Revelation as tragedy, “with a sevenfold Chorus of halleluja’s and harping
symphonies.” Pareus and others describe Revelation as tragedy, not only for its form
but also its subject matter. See Lewalski, “Samson Agonistes and the ‘Tragedy’ of the
Apocalypse,” PMLA 85 (1970), 1,050–62.
103 Pages 816–17.
104 See chapter 3, p. 56–8.
105 See p. 124.
106 See Joseph A. Wittreich, Jr., “The Crown of Eloquence: The Figure of the Orator in
Milton’s Prose Works,” in Lieb and Shawcross, Achievements of the Left Hand, 3–54.
107 Pages 560, 570, 579–80. Two of his three Chaucer references are to The Plowman’s
Tale, an anonymous work of Wycliffite tendencies which was commonly attached to
the Canterbury Tales in the sixteenth century. It redefines Chaucer’s idealized Plowman
character in the mold of Langland’s Piers Plowman, making him a proto-Protestant.
The third reference is to the description of the Friar in the “General Prologue.”
108 See Anselment, Betwixt Jest and Ernest, 61–93.
Chapter 6 “Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–16451 Ernest Sirluck, “Milton’s Idle Right Hand,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60
(1961), 749–85.
2 CPW II, 581, from Tetrachordon. Citations of the first edition of the Doctrine and Disci-
pline of Divorce are designated DDD 1 in text and notes, and refer to the edition inNotes to Chapter 5–6