Notes to Chapter 1first three title pages list these three booksellers. Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the
Book Trade, 37–9, notes that variation in authors’ names on title pages was common and
often had more to do with printshop convenience than deliberate intent. Still, these
variations go well beyond the norm.
80 One state presents this note in six lines, the other reduces it to three lines, omitting the
reference to rhyme.
81 One issue omits the “Printer to the Reader.”
82 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesie, An Essay (London, 1668). The bookseller Herringman
registered the work with the Stationers on August 7, 1667; L’Estrange was the licenser.
The title page bears the date 1668, as was usual with late-year publications.
83 Crites was Sir Robert Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law; Eugenius was Charles Sackville,
Earl of Dorset; Lisideius was Sir Charles Sedley; and Neander, Dryden.
84 EL 185–6. Howard’s strictures against rhyme in drama first appeared in the preface to
his Four New Plays (London, 1665), sigs a 4v–b, which includes The Indian Queen
written with Dryden. It sets the topics for Dryden’s defense of rhyme in his Essay.
Howard excuses his own use of rhyme against his principles with the wry comment
that “it was the fashion,” and he thought best “as in all indifferent things, not to appear
singular.”
85 Eugenius specifies that “In the epique or lyrique way it will be hard for them to show us
one such amongst them, as we have many now living, or who lately were so. They can
produce nothing so courtly writ, or which expresses so much the Conversation of a
Gentleman, as Sir John Suckling; nothing so even, sweet, and flowing as Mr. Waller;
nothing so Majestique, so correct, as Sir John Denham; nothing so elevated, so copious
and full of spirit, as Mr. Cowley,” Dramatick Poesie, 7.
86 Ibid., 66–7.
87 Ibid., sig. A 3.
88 Stephen Zwicker, “Lines of Authority,” in Politics of Discourse, ed. Kevin Sharpe and
Stephen Zwicker (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 249.
89 Parker, II, 1,116.
90 BL, Ms Evelyn Papers, JE A 12, fol. 69 (Beale to Evelyn, November 11, 1667).
91 BL, Ms Evelyn Papers, JE A 12, fol. 68 (Beale to Evelyn, November 18, 1667). See von
Maltzahn, “Laureate, Republican, Calvinist”, 181–98.
92 BL, Ms Evelyn Papers, JE A 12, fol. 71. Somewhat ambiguously, he expresses his ap-
preciation to Evelyn in a letter of April 2, 1668, noting that he had received “a letter
from Mr. Milton by your Friendly conveyance,” but that his infirmities have kept him
from replying either to Evelyn or Milton. As he wrote readily to others, it seems that
either he had second thoughts about engaging Milton after studying his poem more
carefully, or that Milton was politely discouraging.
93 Von Maltzahn, “Laureate, Republican, Calvinist,” 187–94. BL Ms Evelyn Papers, JE A
12, fol. 93.1v (December 18, 1669); JE A 13, fol. 108.2 (December 24, 1670).
94 Bodleian Ms Tanner 45, fols 258, 271. Cf. von Maltzhan, “First Reception of Paradise
Lost,” 490–3.
95 This contradicts the dubious story reported by Richardson, that the poem was un-
known until 1669, when Lord Buckhurst discovered it and called it to Dryden’s atten-
tion, who reportedly exclaimed, “This Man... Cuts us All Out, and the Ancients too”
(EL 295–6). Dryden may have said something like this when he first read Paradise Lost,
Notes to Chapter 13