Milton's Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden, and Literary Enthusiasm

Abstract

A s good almost kill a man as kill a good book, Milton had written 1644: the Restoration government saw fit to do both. Milton somehow escaped the death penalty after the Restoration, but his books did burn bonfires throughout the summer and into the fall of 1660-one of many rituals that were part of the exhilaration and vehemence of the festivities greeting the new king and that purged the previous period into oblivion. The author judiciously went into hiding, where he lay perhaps in darkness, and with dangers compast round, / And solitude, and he was finally sent to prison October.1 In the Restoration, Milton himself and even his name were no things indifferent to those power; on 13 August 1660 an official proclamation of the restored king condemned him for treasons and offenses.2 No matter that his objectionable books had appeared a decade earlier; they seemed very much alive to the shaky new regime, which sought to eradicate the literary output of the Interregnum years by removing books from the Bodleian library and by listing condemned titles.3 Moreover, Milton's name was still a