A student points out a weakness in Stanley Fish ‘s reader-response treatment of Milton’s Satan, the notion that Milton deliberately makes Satan attractive and powerful not because Milton is of the devil’s party but because he is trying to run the reader through the same experience of temptation that Adam and Eve go through. Yet, this student suggests, Satan remains a powerful character, and his ultimate defeat and failure does not make him less attractive, any more than Hector’s defeat... Read more

A student points out a weakness in Stanley Fish ‘s reader-response treatment of Milton’s Satan, the notion that Milton deliberately makes Satan attractive and powerful not because Milton is of the devil’s party but because he is trying to run the reader through the same experience of temptation that Adam and Eve go through. Yet, this student suggests, Satan remains a powerful character, and his ultimate defeat and failure does not make him less attractive, any more than Hector’s defeat... Read more

I. Sir Reginald Piddleby-Squeak was in a pickle. The pickle he was in was no ordinary pickle, but a pickle of the most unusual size and sourness, a pickle from which he had no prospects of being rapidly extracted. He expected at any moment that he would begin turning green and breaking out in small garlicky lumps. It all started a week ago Monday, Monday of course being the day when Sir Reginald met at the golf club with his... Read more

Introduction Elizabethans viewed Rome through two historical lenses. On the one hand, Rome was for Elizabethans the great civilization of antiquity. They knew less of Greece than we do, and almost nothing of ancient Egypt or Babylon, much less China. When they traced their cultural genealogy, they traced it back to Rome rather than Athens. As Dartmouth scholar Peter Saccio has pointed out, Rome was more than a historical artefact for Englishmen. Ancient Roman history provided examples of morality and... Read more

Watching the closing courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice , I was struck by how allegorical it is. First, there’s Antonio, threatened with death for a debt that really was incurred by Bassanio. Second, he’s threatened by a Jew. Third, Shylock says something like “his blood be on my head,” the line that was deleted from the Passion. And the whole thing is in a setting where the issues are the conflict of justice/law and mercy, the outcome being... Read more

Further reflection on Scott: His anti-romanticism, as I suggested, is a common theme in early novel-writing. Defoe furnishes another example. Robinson Crusoe is warned by his father against running off to sea and seeking adventure, but Robin is unwilling to settle down to a boring middle-class life. Of course, when he gets to the island, he reproduces precisely the middle-class English life that he had been fleeing. And the whole book is a vindication of his father’s advice (though Robin... Read more